Setting a Game in a Ghibli-esque Spirit World

How would you go about setting a game in the Spirit World depicted in Studio Ghibli's renowned "Spirited Away?"

A world connected to but separate from our own; bright, colorful and whimsical but also full of trials and dangers.

What sorts of locales and locations exist in such a Spirit World, waiting for the player characters to explore?

What sorts of ghosts, monsters and gods wait to trick or treat with the player characters as they travel the land?

What sorts of goals and quests and desires are the player characters trying to fulfill individually or together?

Locations:
>A mystical old railway station where the PCs wake up after falling asleep on the train home after a long night.

>An endless forest with trees that grow bigger and bigger, taller and taller the deeper the PCs push into it.

>A sunny stretch of road that seems to loop back on itself somehow, always returning to the same cafe.

Characters:
>A small god of mild misfortune that has taken to tagging along with the PCs, lightly vexing their travels.

>The cheerful shadow of a girl cast by the light of a magic lantern the PCs found left on the roadside.

>A large family of mercantile spirits that seem to sell whatever the PCs need, wherever thy need it, for a price.

Quests:
>One of the PCs' friends has gone missing and must be found before they can all return to the real world.

>A strange old man possessing strange powers has been roaming the land causing trouble for the spirits.

>A grumpy old god has demanded that the PCs offer him entertainment in the form of tall tales and stories.

Don't, you'll fuck it up.

The Whimsey of the spirit realms Ghibli conjures are all based on traditional folklore and hidden lore. The nature of their mystery is rooted in the obfuscation of the lore itself. You can't hope to have notes and write it out; by that very act you betray the nature of the realm.

Just for fun, find someone who's never seen Spirited Away, and describe the entire movie to them without showing them any images.

Do you think they'll be as enthralled with your description as you were by watching the film?

I suppose you all are right, and that trying to capture and adapt the mystique and mysticism of "Spirited Away" into a campaign setting is something akin to trying to catch lightning in a bottle.

>How would you go about setting a game in the Spirit World depicted in Studio Ghibli's renowned "Spirited Away?"
First of all, I would not because that is a far more difficult task than you probably think it is.

Second of all, if pressed, I'd start by studying Shinto and all it's strange folklore forms in great depths and details. Everything in Spirited Away is rooted in Shintoistic aesthetics and mythology, which is admitedly one of the most intriguing religions in the world.
I'd re-watch Mushi-Shi and Kamichu for further inspiration. Kamichu is shit, but it's treatment of the divine realm and its elements is at least on a theoretical levels similar.
One I'd felt confident enough in understanding of Shinto's aesthetical/religious interpretation of world, I would actually not put more emphasis on the setting being "Spirit Realm". Because that is not actually at all the point of Spirited Away. While it does take partially place in a different world, or perhaps more correctly, in a different layer of our world, it's actually it's connection to reality that makes it so appealing, not it's distinction. The fascinating aspect of Shinto, which bleeds into Spirited Away, is how closely it ties reality and magical world together, not in how it separates them.

Finally, and this may be most important: I would not do extensive world-building at all. Logic of Spirited Away, just like logic of fairytales and myths, is narrative and symbolism driven, not speculative. It's not about consistency (in fact it has very little of that), but it's about strength of symbolism and imagination - about how each individual element, scene, challenge or scenario further expands on the core theme of your story.
For that reason, I would do little world-building preparation, I would resign on pre-preparing lists of monsters or locations, but rather watch as much inspiration, and then improvise most of it.

Also, I would chose a VERY rule-light system.

More good advice to dissuade the attempt, though now I'm more interested in how it should be done theoretically rather than how it would be done practically.

I have spent some time in Japan and done some research into the Shinto faith, the myriad spirits and deities thought to animate and enliven the world. I could do with a great deal more study, however.

What you'd said about the Spirit World overlaying our own interests me a great deal, and makes me wonder where, why and how it might intersect with the mortal realm.

Look at this

Too visual, is right.

Yoi could probably put a Totoro "level" of things, especially with Golden Sky Stories, so to speak, but Sen to Chihiro is not something you could start off with, at the very least.
Maybe the full-fledeged world of the gods could be entered later

The funny thing is that the movie isn't even THAT outlandish. The eeriest part might be the village at the beginning, nothing particulary strange to describe. hell, possibly even less than the rest of the movie. But that's the problem: how do you really make that eerie without having pictures? Without resorting to phrases like "the sunset projects bizarre shadows on the buildings"?

It's not even like describing De Chirico's paintings, a whole lot of that is camerawork and THAT isn't really easy to do in RPGs.

>why and how it might intersect with the mortal realm.
That is kinda the thing: it should do so at every single concievable level, because in Shinto, material and spiritual are two sides of the same coin, not two fundamentally different principles. Shinto is a spiritual interpretation of material world, about finding sacred (or at least anthropomorphic, mystical or just flat out amusing) significance in the mundane physical reality.
Remember, in the movie, there is a god that is a river, and that enters a spa-house because he wishes to be cleaned because his body is literary physically full of physical junk that people throw into rivers. THAT is how the two worlds interact: they are two different ways of talking about the same thing: in one you describe a sentient once-beautiful dragon that is now foul and smells terrible, in the other you describe once a clean river that is now polluted: but you are talking essentially about one and the same thing. It's the same reason why later on, when Sen takes the ghost-train to swampville, the world she sees outside is just a shadowy more transparent vision or ordinary night-life Japan complete with those crazy neon signs and all.

The two, mundane and magical, are inseparable in Shinto, and I think they are inseparable in Spirited Away too: they are reflections of each other. Even if the movie uses the kind of "bubble" setup for the spa, the reason why it's so charming and powerful is precisely because it does not attempt to speculate up an entirely fictional new world, but because it offers a more magical interpretations of our own one.
Which coincidentally, is the exactly same distinction literary scientists use to differenciate between fantasy (genre fiction) and magical realism (classic fiction).

Ryuutama or Chuubo's Mavelous Wishing Engine.

I understand what you mean, and you do a fantastic job of explaining it, thank you.

I find it interesting that the spirits, ghosts and gods travel to the bathhouse and the pleasure town around it as a sort of constitutional or a vacation from their existences and their duties in our world.

What do you make of the bathhouse and town, specifically of the clock tower gate through which Chihiro and her parents entered and left the Spirit World? Would there be many such places where mortals can find their way to the "other side?" Was there once an amusement park there, as Chihiro's parents supposed, that still exists in a more fantastical form in the Spirit World?

The vocation thing might be japanese version of celestial bureaucracy. While i think the organisation of gods is generaly looser in japan there are some events like kami-ari-zuki in Izumo where all the kami come to Izumo for about a week. Repectively rest of japan is godless at this time.

>I find it interesting that the spirits, ghosts and gods travel to the bathhouse and the pleasure town around it as a sort of constitutional or a vacation from their existences and their duties in our world.
It's again a translation of a fairly mundane aspect of Japanese reality: the fact that spa trips are actually one of the most common and popular forms of vacation in their country.
Fun fact, in the anime Kamichu (which really isn't good, but it's quite interesting take on shinto), the main story revolves around a young girl becoming suddenly a goddess because the original god of the shrine decided (and I wish I was kidding) to join a divine punk rock band and tour both the realms of gods and real world.
It also has further sacred significance, as bathing in Japan is not only considered a hygienic necessity and a fun, pleasurable past time, but also a sacred act, as shinto literally views "sin" and "pollution" as one and the same thing: water and bath have a significant role in Japanese sacred shinto rituals.

>specifically of the clock tower gate
I think those serve mainly an aesthetic role. The whole bubble world of the town and the realm of Gods is there mainly because the moral story needs to isolate the heroine in order to create a pressure on her, as it's on the plot level, mainly a story about becoming emancipated and self-reliant (Miyazaki wrote the story because he was pissed off after meeting grand-daughters of his best friend and realizing they are passive, spoiled and disinterested brats, and eventually came to the conclusion that Japanese popculture in general teaches girls to be passive and disinterested, and lacking self-reliance).
In order to place the girl under pressure that would eventually make her more passionate and more self-reliant, he needed to largely isolate her from other people: hence the isolated, separate world in which the movie takes place.
(cont.)

Otherwise, Japan rarely views realms of the Gods and realms of material plane to be separate spaces. Kamichu does it, but I think that was more because they really wanted to cash in on Spirited Away and ripped it off sometimes verbatim.

However, places that can be identified as in some way more connected Gods - places where it's easier to communicate with them, but that could be also interpreted as gateways into their worlds - should be I think relatively frequent, considering how ubiquous the Gods are in Shinto. Sacred trees, rocks and waterfalls seem like the most likely spots. When you think about it, every Torii (the classical Japanese shinto gate) is basically a fucking gateway to the sacred realm - at least that is what it used to denote. Interestingly enough, sacred clensing ritual (usually in the form of washing hands and mouth) should be theoretically performed every time you pass one of those, though in reality, it's obviously not the case.

If you want to have a realm of gods like in Spirited Away, I think gateways to it should be fairly common, and found in most mundane of places. Boarding a specific train in a specific hour, passing a rarely used tunnel beneath a railway track, climbing into a hole in a hollowed out camphor tree - those kinds of mundane, slightly won-out places seem like the best gateways into realms of Gods, because that fits the "gods are all around us" aspect of it.

Japan was never big on the whole celestial bureocracy thing. It's not native to Shinto. That said, the Kannazuki myth of October is really damn funny and charming. They don't really imply an actual hiearchy during that event though: all gods gather as equal partners and debate, mostly on the subject of upcoming weddings and child births.

Read paranatural OP, it's a ghibli inspired shounen romp through a quaint American town

Yeah. I think there is some attempt of hierarcy in imperial cult, but the common shinto seems to generally lack it. Shinto does have some interesting ideas about borders though. The gates and the sacret ropes are couple of consequences of this. Things have gone bit muddy though with the syncretism with buddhism and confucianism though. And then there is the takamagahara and yomi when talking about spirit worlds but I guess those are more of an exception.

>Shinto does have some interesting ideas about borders though.
Yeah, Shinto and Japan have an obsession about spacial division and it's symbolic importance. It's quite heavily influencing shit like their basic architectural intuitions and I love it. It may be related to the problem of "wrapping", as described by Joy Hendry. If you haven't heard of that, I STRONGLY recommend it, it's a fantastic anthropological insight into Japanese culture on multiple levels: a book called "Wrapping Culture". It visits, among others, the problem or fascination with symbolic division and demarkation of space and the need for symbolic borders.

>takamagahara and yomi
Yomi is an underworld, a place for the dead, so it does not seem so relevant. Takamagahara is very relevant, but interestingly enough, outside of Kojiki and the old creation-related myths, it actually has very little reflection in Japanese common beliefs. Also, funny enough: it used to be actually identified with Izumo, or belived to be accessible from Shimane Izumo at least.
Takamagahara is a weird one though. The mythology suggest that most gods left it long time ago, and very rarely speaks about gods going in and out of it (Suzano-o is one of the exceptional cases of a god going back to it): it seems more like an ancient prototype of world, than a parallel space to it. It certainly isn't a place most "contemporary" gods have any connection to in modern forms of shinto.

If I remember correctly, there was a vague reference to the afterlife, or what some viewers believed to be one, in relation to the train that Chihiro and No-Face take to get to Zeniba's home. As I recall it, the train car was full of shades, and Kamaji said something along the lines of, "it used to run both ways, but lately it's a one-way trip," suggesting maybe that belief in reincarnation was ebbing, or that the realms of the living and the dead were more seperate now than they once were.

I have to look in to Wrapping Culture. Thanks for recommendation.

Yomi does show up occasionally but interactions with it never seem to be trivial as it is the real of the dead after all.

Takamagahara is indeed quite special. Methaphysically Takamagahara seems to be closer to western idea of heaven that doesn't interact with our world (well it does mean Plane of High Heaven apparently). Interestingly it might be connected to Korea as the origins of the ruling classes imigrating to japan (the kami). Not sure how much truth there is to that as it would be far in prehistorical period of japan.

I worry that might be over-interpretation, or at least a suggestion so small that I would not place too much emphasis on it. There is nothing anywhere else in the story that would suggest the theme of death being in any way relevant, neither is there any support for that in anything Miyazaki or his coworkers comment. It's an interesting interpretation, but I would not put too much credibility to it. It may be just that Miyazaki wanted to make the journey more perilous and threatening (again, to display Chihiro's will to overcome difficulties as she transforms into more likable character), and to suggest the isolation of Zeniba's dwelling place.

>Yomi does show up occasionally but interactions with it never seem to be trivial as it is the real of the dead after all.
Yomi eventually kinda merges with some Buddhist ideas of underworld and even hell. To be honest, Japanese ideas of underworld and afterlife have always been unclear as fuck to say the least: Shinto basically only offers the story of Izanami and Izanagi to mention it, and things got even more muddled with the multiple different buddhist views of the situation, which themselves were confusing and contradictory as fuck.
The analogy between Takamagahara with Indian real of Gods, or alternatively with the Chinese Heavenly Kingdom is quite accurate. But again: it's funny. According to some interpretations, Amaterasu's kingdom and her gardens (the one that Suzano-o literally shat all over before stuffing a dead horse into her sister's bedroom (through the roof)) has been traditionally place INTO Shimane province. Just as the entrance to Yomi is supposed to be in Shimane (despite the fact that the story of Izanami and Izanagi is supposedly taking place in Takamagahara, as the two of them created Japan, but never really left it.

All and all, Shimane (the province where Izumo lies) is the place where all divine shit always goes down in Japan.
(cont.)

To associate Takamagahara with Korea, however, always struck me as a bit odd for a simple reason: we have very good reasons to believe that most of the ancient mythology that describes creation of Japan, the stories of Gods in Takamagahara and so on are much, much older than the first big invasion of Korean scholars and elites happened. It could actually make more sense to think of it as a very ancient reflection of mainland (possibly Russia) from which first human populations arrived to Japan (though then we are speaking about very, VERY old history, as in Japan, the first human colonists are assumed to settle around 190 K years ago: first confirmed human settlements in Japan are - you guessed it: In Izumo, Shimane province.

I was thinking in late yayoi period. There apparently was some cultural crosspolination with korean penisula at the time. I'm quite hesitant though as it was ages ago since i last read about the topic and yayoi period is some 600 years long. Also i'm afraid i'm drifting away from the original topic.

It's been an interesting and enlightening conversation, and I wouldn't stop it just because it's strayed from the original topic.

It does make me wonder though, how you could incorporate Shinto mythology and beliefs into a setting in ways that are similar to "Spirited Away's" treatment if the subject rather than simply trying to take the movie's spirit world and transplant it whole-cloth into a game.

I very much liked your suggestion of different circumstances and locations through which mortal folk can experience the fantastical and the mystical.

Interesting indeed. I don't often get to talk about these things. Do you happen to know any good books or other sources about shinto and japanese religion?

When I use shinto (or mythology in general) in games it's usually more through narration than mechanics. I'm not very good ath game mechanics in general and mythological stuff is hard to codify to rules without it losing something in the process. The movie itself didn't go to too much details if i recall it correctly and when depicting that kind of things i guess it would be good aproach in game too. Maybe avoid naming the beings and instead depict their appearance and behavior instead is one thing i would do.

>I very much liked your suggestion of different circumstances and locations through which mortal folk can experience the fantastical and the mystical.
That was different user.

It's bit often that we get a group of knowledgeable and well-spoken Anons in one thread discussing head things, so it's hard sometimes to tell how many people are participating in the conversation.

As for resources, I'll have to look over my bookshelves once I get home. Its been something like ten years since I was last in Japan and most of my studies were from that time.

This thread has made me feel pleasantly outclassed.

...

>penis shadows

The basic plot of Spirited Away is based quite explicitly on Russian fairy tale "Vasilisa the Beautiful", where a girl is similarly forced to serve Baba Yaga. Laputa is based on Miyazaki's experience of Wales. The lesson here is that it's a huge mistake to concentrate on Japanese culture when trying to imitate Ghibli's works. They draw extensively from other cultures and make the stories Japanese.

His experience in Wales, plus "Gulliver's Travels" and perhaps the biblical story of the Tower of Babel.

>The basic plot of Spirited Away is based quite explicitly on Russian fairy tale "Vasilisa the Beautiful"
Nah, it really isn't. And trust me, I'm well familiar with that particular fairytale: the illustrations by Bilibin for that story are still haunting my dreams. The two stories, however, have virtually nothing in common except for the most fundamental, world-wide universal fairytale imagery such as "young girl has to work for somebody that she dislikes or be punished". Otherwise, there are absolutely zero thematical overlaps, not even the most fundamental themes of personal growth and abandonment of selfishness that are key to Spirited Away.
Miyazaki tended to draw a lot of inspiration from the west, there is no doubt about that, but not for this particular story. In fact, not for three stories he made: Totoro, Mononoke (though admitedly, Mononoke has drawn a little bit of inspiration from his own older tale, Shuna, which itself was inspired by certain Tibetian tale) and Spirited Away are really nearly purely Japanese in their sources of inspiration. His best movie, Wind Rises, is also mostly based on Japanese sources, though a bit of his fascination with first half 20th century west does seep in.

But Spirited Away has very little to do with western culture, and it has VERY little with that particular fairytale, I'm afraid.

If you really want to dissect fundamental inspirations for Laputa, then it would be:
A) Jules Verne
B) Karel Zeman (and Stolen Airship in particular)
C) general obsession with late 19th/early 20th century aviatics, especially in Italy)
D) Guilliver's Travels
E) his experience from Wales, particularly in relation to miner life
F) Ramayana

In that very much precise order.

>F) Ramayana

Tell me more.

>Mononoke
>purely Japanese in their sources of inspiration
Mononoke could be transported to Dark Ages Ireland and be perfectly consistent with the local culture and folklore.

No.
No.
NO.

Seriously, user. NO.

Cool reply.

Seriously, yes.

No.

Irish myths didn't have anything like not-speaking beast gods, taboo against the sacredness of natural places, nor a heavy man-vs-nature mindset.
Actual Ireland didn't have anything like the political/social landscape sketched in MH.

Hell, actually, there wasn't anymore anything similar to that forest in Ireland even back then, I think.

>Irish myths didn't have anything like not-speaking beast gods
They do, it the form of holy bulls.
>taboo against the sacredness of natural places
They do again, in the form of ancient tumuli and associated areas.
>nor a heavy man-vs-nature mindset
That's what the whole "races of Ireland" thing is about, with each group of invaders getting less primordial and more practical until we get modern people.
>there wasn't anymore anything similar to that forest in Ireland even back then, I think.
Ireland wasn't always like it is now. It was a land of forests.

True, most anons have knowledge only up to L5R, so their interpretation eventually ends up being a parody like RA3. They get combative when they're called out on making shoddy caricatures.

>Mononoke could be transported to Dark Ages Ireland and be perfectly consistent with the local culture and folklore.
Not, it really could not be. There are aspects of Japanese and Irish folklore and folk mythology that are very similar, not because Mononoke was not based nearly purely on Japanese sources, but mostly because general polytheists and animist cults tend to be very similar across the world. Speaking animals, sacred woods and trees, small woodland spirits are very much world universals.

I'm not aware that Irish dark age mythology, however, would invent gods turned into evil by being symbolically polluted by use of gunpowder, and provide a conclusion in a giant monster of pure filth attempts to destroy iron work city, and is only stopped by magical properties of water...

Different poster, maybe you're still here. It's about Indra's arrow.

...

While I think the setting is definitely japanese, the stories told in it' doesn't have to be so. If I were to run a game in this setting i would atleast use the gates like the tunnel and the bridge in the movie to some effect. Also the initial feel of normalness should be set somehow so the weird shit would have impact when it begins.