The Crossing of a Threshold: The Ontological Condition of Adventure

 

Doorways and thresholds do not exist in nature: it requires a human being to conceptualise even a cave opening as being an 'entrance' from one location to another. Animals may understand variations in temperature or light; they may understand comfort vs discomfort; ants may have a hormonal sense that they are within/without their nest. But it takes human intelligence to have a grasp on the concept of a space which itself constitutes an opening into or out of - a gap which is literally liminal. Not empty, because something is there even though it is not. 

Passing through thresholds has long been understood to be an ontological act - a way of going from a humdrum reality to one in which Adventure takes place. Sometimes the thresholds are literally doorways, though they might not be in places one would expect (The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe). Sometimes they are of a less obvious kind: think of Alice going through the looking glass, or down the rabbit hole (Lewis Carroll was obsessed with doors, and there are of course doorways-within-doorways-within-doorways in his work). Sometimes they are hidden or magical (as in Harry Potter); sometimes they feel as though they trade on being not quite literal or metaphorical but somehow both (as in The Secret Garden). Sometimes they are imbued with mythical or religious significance - Theseus going down into the caverns of Minos - while at others they are technological (think of Neo passing into and out of the Matrix through a cable jacked into his brain). Sometimes they signify adventure through passage outwards (like Bilbo going out of his front door); sometimes they signify it through passage within (like the crossing of the threshold into Moria). Thresholds, in speculative fiction, are everywhere.

And they are also everywhere in tabletop RPGs. There is something that we sense to be important about passing from one ontological condition, the condition of there being nothing particularly at stake (the tavern, the market, the village, etc.), to another - the condition of there being everything up for grabs. And the point of passage or embarkation from one to another strikes us as significant. We like the idea of transferring from one to another and back again.

Thresholds can appear, and operate, in three ways.

First, there is the threshold of the most obvious kind - that which signifies entry into adventure. The stereotypical example is the dungeon entrance, the tunnel, the cave, the crevasse, the descent into the Underdark. Here, the PCs are most in control of their fate. They know where they are going. They know that death awaits. 

Second, there is the type of threshold that signifies exit into adventure. Here, what is at stake is Out There in the big bad world, and the threshold is the city gate, the harbour, the bridge, the time machine, the transporter. The PCs start within a place where everything is understandable, manageable and graspable, and they go out through the threshold to something vast, open and chaotic. It has the feeling about if of unpredictability, much more so than going into, say, a dungeon. A feeling of an abandonment of control, 

Third, and least well understood, is the type of threshold that signifies intrusion. This type of threshold troubles us. We are more comfortable with the first two types of threshold because they are volitional. The adventurer, usually, makes a choice, or at least performs a positive act, to go through. But here, in this third category of threshold, things work the other way around. The adventurer does not cross a threshold, but adventure instead passes through to look for him. Demons, goblins, evil spirits, magical entities, pass from one place of being into ours and thereby threaten it.

The third type of threshold is most closely identified with horror because it signifies the potential for ontological disruption. Just as the presence of an unwanted person in one's home - whether a burglar or an unwelcome guest - seems to make it unstable, to make it no longer feel indeed as a home at all, so intrusion from 'out there' into 'in here' changes the fundamental nature of 'here' itself. 'Here' is transformed into something altogether different. And the quality of being itself thereby shifts. From safety, security and the known into danger, hostility and mystery. 

Thinking about the type of threshold that one wishes to deploy may therefore be a useful conceptual starting point when thinking about the style of campaign one would like to play and the mood one would like to facilitate. What is being crossed? How is it happening? And who is doing the crossing - the adventurers - or that which lies beyond? 

So, What Is So Bad About Space Knights?

One should never put one's faith in Google Gemini. (I learned this after discovering that searching for information about The Lord of the Flies resulted in the AI spitting out false information pruned from a wikipedia page about the Tongan Castaways.) But if you Google, 'Are the space marines the goodies?', you get an interesting response:

Unequivocally then, our tech overlords have spoken. The Space Marines are baddies. They are part of a tyrannical and oppressive regime and all is GRIMDARK.

This chimes with what I have heard from people much more deeply embedded in the world of Games Workshop than I am. I played a huge amount of Warhammer 40K when I was an adolescent, and what I remember was that in those days the Imperium generally and the space marines specifically were sort of implicitly the good guys in the Warhammer universe - and that was indeed what made them, to the eye of a teenage boy, a little bit boring and lacking in edginess. But it seems now times have changed and all the factions in 40K are supposed to be baddies in their own way - a war of the shits.

One could do a calm and considered sociological analysis of this and doubtless come to the conclusion that it says something important about our age's discomfort with the idea that something called an 'empire' could be good - and especially if it is vaguely coded with Roman imagery. And this seems linked to a problematisation in particular of the male hero who carefully calibrates the use of violence and force in the interests of a civilisation which is inherently better than others. We live in an age with quite a clear idea about what is right and wrong in some ways, but we have by and large become less and less comfortable with the idea that these things are inherent within a particular civilisation or other. In this respect, the old school interpretation of space marines as Goodies all feels a bit too cowboys-and-Indians. 

This is understandable to a certain respect. I'm not here to post a rant complaining about the purported wokeness of Games Workshop. But I do think there would be something genuinely refreshing, given our prevailing cultural mood, about making it explicit that there is something good about humanity as such and that, in a galaxy populated by orks, tyrannids, chaos mutants and eldar that there would be something to be said for actual heroes: defenders of humanity against enemies that are simply objectively worse. These heroes might have to do deeply undesirable things (the 40,000 AD equivalent of bombing Dresden or dropping the atom bomb on Hiroshima) but they would bite the bullet - and deal with the guilt - of doing so in the interests of what they would percieve rightly to be the greater good: the continuation of human civilisation per se.

In a world dominated by mean-spirited, bleakly nihilistic content I think there would be something rather interesting about more openly foregrounding a goodies-and-baddies narrative in 40K. Perhaps it does already and everything I have heard, including from the AI oracle, is simply wrong. I hope so.

The Posts That Never Were

Every so often I get an idea for something to write about and jot it down by creating a post and putting the idea in the title, and saving it to 'drafts'. 80-90% of the time these later get worked up into full posts, or else deleted. But there are some that hang about in the ether, always the bridesmaids and never the bride, until I forget entirely what they were originally supposed to be about. These lost souls sit forlornly as 'drafts' in perpetuity, hoping in vain for rescue. So I thought I would drag some out into the open to give them some fresh air and see if anybody can do anything with them. Your duty: pick a title, and then write a comment or post in your own blog to correspond to it.

Here are some that caught my eye:

• What Is So Bad About Space Knights?
• On Being Grateful
• Types of Campaign by PC Class
• The Appropriate Subject of Complaint
• Isekai/Other World PCs Must Be Special
• The Psychic Importance of Other Worlds
• Deep Wilderness
• Great Places
• Games Workshop Doesn't Like or Care About You [this possibly is a title that could in itself be an entire blog post]
• Slaad-punk
• Syphilis [I cannot now even begin to imagine where I was going with this...]
• Why These Treasures?
• The Philosophy of Elves
• The Importance of Adventure-Site Insularity
• Shitty Fairy Tales and the Importance of Death

Have at it - I hope these poor blighters can find a loving home.

The Lynchian Paladin

Regular readers will know that I harbour a long-simmering ambition to write up rules for running explicitly heroic campaigns oriented around the idea either that all PCs are of the paladin class or that all PCs are conceptually 'paladins' in the sense of fighting against evil.

A long series of irregular posts, which I really ought to assemble under their own tag, lays this out:

• Into the Abyss: More on Being the Good Guys
  
• Random Demonic Incursion Generator Test Case
  
• The Incursion Generator Expanded
  
• The Single Class Paladin Campaign
  
• Single Class Paladin Campaign Book - First Glimpse
  
• The Clan of Cain: Ogres, Elves, Evil Phantoms and Giants
  
• Feel like my soul is beginning to expand - look into my heart and you will sort of understand
  
• Space Paladins in the Demonic Future
  

As you will see if you carefully read these posts (as all true disciples of the Order of Noisms must do, and indeed must already have done dozens of times) I've suggested a variety of models of such campaigns, which ideally I would like to write up as a series of volumes the, if I have my druthers, would come out in a posh slip-case finely decorated:

• The traditional D&D paladin, a paragon of lawful good, who attempts to 'do good' within a typical TSRan type setting
• A more Arthurian, Pendragon-inspired 'knight of the round table' fighting for Christian order within a world imbued with ancient magical forces
• A pseudo-Japan in which mighty heroic samurai do battle against demons and evil spirits 
• A pseudo-Ancient Mesopotamia or Levant where Gilgameshian heroes or 'Book of Judges' style judges fight against primordial chaos embodied in monsters and devils
• A vaguely Iberian class of holy knights who do battle againts evil infidels
• A somewhat Warhammerian set of 'demon hunters' in a reformation-era Old World (with the serial numbers filed off)
• A group of dwarven warrior-priests in Lanthanum Chromate
• Space Paladines in the demonic future
• A Beowulf-inspired 'Clan of Cain' scenario

The main idea here is that each of these scenarios involves some systematised way (on which notes can be found in the pieces linked to above) through which incursions of evil find their way into the human world and have to be rooted out, uncovered, battled, etc., by said paladins.

A friend of mine recently raised the issue of David Lynch and his sad (fairly) recent death, and I immediately started to see a connection between this type of campaign and Lynch's approach to what we could call 'worldbuilding'. I am obviously here talking about Twin Peaks and Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me most of all, but I think across most of Lynch's ouevre we see a similar concern playing out - the idea that, lurking around every corner, behind every closed door, reflected in every mirror, hiding at the foot of each bed, waiting at the bottom of every car park, there might be something supernaturally and unspeakably awful. This is I think most readily 'gameable' in Twin Peaks, which in a way almost reads like the Actual Play Report to the world's greatest Unknown Armies campaign: evil entities from interdimensional 'lodges' come to the human world to do dastardly things and law enforcement tries to cope with the fallout. But in its own way Blue Velvet follows a similar pattern - and even A Straight Story has a very mild hint of that flavour, with the main character taking on the quality of a roving wizard casting spells to solve people's slightly otherworldly problems (like the woman who keeps mysteriously killing deer by accident). 

In this paradigm the PCs could take on something of a Kyle McLachlanian aspect as straight-jawed Philip Marlowe-investigator types, but this is by no means a pre-requisite and one could paint with a much broader brush than that. What is chiefly needed - and as I have begun to lay out - is a means by which to systematise the crucial mechanism of intrusion: how evil manifests itself in the setting through some at least partially random method, and how it is that the PCs encounter it. 

The Rule of Dice and the Resort to Chaos

'I've sometimes thought,' said the Head Man, 'it might be interesting if we didn't let chance decide the moves but thought them out for ourselves.'

'What an odd game,' said Great House. 'It wouldn't have any rules at all.'

-from The Scorpion God, by W. Golding

The connection between rules and dice is an unusual one.

Think of most of the situations you know which are governed heavily by rules: a sport, say, or a trial, or driving on the roads. What you will notice is that the rules are specifically designed to try to eliminate randomness. We would think there to be something deeply wrong with a trial process whose outcome was decided on the basis of rock, paper, scissors. (Though this would perhaps reduce costs.) And we would think it even worse if, say, drivers determined which side of the road to drive on through a coin toss.

The reason for this is, obviously, that rules are deliberately non-random - randomness and rules are indeed, in a way, opposites. The point about a rule is that you apply it as it is stated. If its effect is random it is not really a rule in any meaningful sense. It lacks the basic things a rule requires in order to possess 'ruliness' - i.e. being clear, being knowable in advance, being non-retrospective, being non-contradictory with other rules, and so forth. To enter the world of randomness is to be governed by chaos. 

Yet some board games and RPGs (#notallboardgamesandRPGs) are different - the rules do not just tolerate randomness but deliberately introduce it. The rules act as the confines within which randomness is controlled and directed. They, if you like, instrumentalise chaos. They tame it for useful purposes.

The reason they do this would seem to be to do with contentiousness and the presence of neutral arbitrators. In a trial, the two parties each make a separate argument as to how the rules should apply to the facts to achieve a particular result; a neutral arbitrator (the judge or jury) makes a determination. In a football match, it's the referee and his assistants who makes rulings on the fly. In the case of driving, there is no contention at all: if you are driving the wrong way, or driving faster than the speed limit, then you are breaking the rules and that is that. 

When it comes to an RPG, however, there is no neutral arbitrator. The DM is not 'objective' vis-a-vis whatever the players says the PCs do. Rather the opposite. When the PCs are fighting a band of orcs, he's the orcs. When they are trying to get past an obstacle, he is the one who placed it there. When they are trying to find secret doors, said secret doors are on his map. RPGs, in such circumstances, often make resort to chaos - in the form of dice - to resolve potentially otherwise irresolvable disputes. There is nobody to just apply 'the rules' and give 'the right' outcome. There is only the God of the small plastic or polyhedrals and what he will say about the matter.

This actually puts RPGs (at least insofar as they use dice) among very strange, unexpected bed fellows. The child's board game is the closest comparator. Think of Snakes and Ladders. Snakes and Ladders needs  dice because it's contentious - who wins, and who loses, being unpredictable in advance (or even during play) and being, more importantly, irresolvable by the participants themselves or a neutral umpire. If Snakes and Ladders did not resort to chaos through dice in order to determine how far the players can move each turn, each game would rapidly devolve into an argument over who gets to travel so far and at what speeds (because how else would it be determined?). And, importantly, this would be governed typically by 'might makes right' or superior abilities in persuasion - i.e. not rules at all - because it is through 'might makes right' and superior abilities in persuasion that people tend to win arguments.  RPGs are a bit like that: the dice help to decide the course of events simply by providing a means through which potential conflict is resolved in advance. If they did not exist there would only be argument and persuasion determining how a particular rule applies in a given circumstance - and that would be tantamount to saying there would be no rules at all. There would be only discussion and debate.

Chaos then, if you like, is a necessary element in the way RPGs work - because it is, almost literally, what makes rules themselves useful within that context. 

A Troubling Setting Riddled With Orientalist Tropes

 

[Click to enlarge]

This blog post is a warning. There is at loose in the world a nefarious RPG setting book with foul and malevolent contents. Going under the name of Yoon-Suin 2nd edition, it, at first glance, like a particularly successful mimic, appears to 'stand out' as a 'creative and ambitious work' with 'psychedelic art' and 'evocative writing'. 

But this is a masquerade - a sham to fool the unwary. Lurking beneath its surface there are dangers, there is gaslighting, and there is troublingness. The book is in fact so troubling that it is important to say how troubling it is twice. It is indeed positively troublingerous in its implications.

You see, the author (I can confirm the veracity of all of this, since the author is yours truly) does not possess creativity, collaborativeness, or openness-ness. Rather, he is a defensive gaslighter who has repeatedly shown his unwillingness to LEARN FROM CRITIQUE or ENGAGE IN MEANINGFUL COLLABORATION. He is - let me think of a suitable term - a troubling individual who makes troubling inferences. The things that he infers are indeed so troubling that they border on the unforgivable - he even infers things about opium and tea. He is a naughty boy. The OSR community would be better off without him.

I do not recommend you go within a 10' pole's length of a copy of Yoon-Suin 2nd edition. You will be in deep trouble if you do. You might even find yourself:

• Perpetuating harmful and dangerous stereotypes about slug-men, such as their great propensity for magic, their malign intelligence, their talent for trade and their love of fine fashion
• Participating in the othering of nasnas, ogre mages, rakhosh (both major and minor) and aphid-men, as well as dozens of other monsters, fully detailed in the bestiary
• Looking at illustrations which objectify the likes of crab-men, giant arowanas, barnaclids and rhinoceros demnos - penned by the truly remarkably talented maverick, Matt Adams
• Being gaslit about the real nature of the holes of Láhág, the crystal dragons of Upper Druk Yul, and the original inhabitants of the Old Town neighbourhoods of the Yellow City, as well as many other unsolved mysteries 
• Getting excited about running a game in a fully realised campaign setting which allows you, through the provision of vast quantities of finely detailed and nested random tables, to make your own unique version of an entire continent's worth of adventure (but in a troubling way)
• Becoming bewitched by the twelve fully playable adventure locales included in the book, beautifully mapped out by other noted defensive gaslighter, Tom Fitzgerald
• Being hoodwinked into orientalism by a product which eminent reviewers have said is 'not like anything anybody else could have made or will make', 'probably one of the most impressive gaming supplements (let alone campaign settings) I have ever come across', and 'a labour of wonder'

But don't worry - help is at hand. Having seen the error of my ways after seeing Yoon-Suin 2nd edition repeatedly review-bombed by creative, collaborative and open members of the OSR community, I am coming up with some supplementary products to increase your enjoyment of the book. These include:

• A new 5th level magic-user spell, Due Diligence, with which you can banish troubling inferences and all discussion of opium and most discussion of tea (tea is permitted a saving throw)
• A Helm of Being Critical and Engaging in Conversation, to protect readers from the most crass of inferences to real world cultures - and, possibly, to permit you to better understand what the word 'infer' actually means
• A Wand of One-Star Reviews of Infinite Charges, a Cloak of Anonymity and a Girdle of Cowardice and Snide to allow disappointed purchasers to safely punish the author for his lack of willingness to learn

Above all, though, be forewarned. A print edition is soon to be released and will shortly be available for pre-order! THIS MEANS TROUBLE.

Why Make Up Elfworlds?

I have a confession to make. I make it in the hopes that, out there in the world, there are other strange deviants such as me - who can perhaps help to form some sort of support group or, failing that, a terrorist organisation bent on world domination.

My confession is this: I love to play RPGs, but I often wonder if the hobby is just a vehicle for my chief obsession, which is imagining other worlds in fine detail. Since 'worldbuilding' itself isn't exactly a hobby as such - there are no magazines, no clubs, no organisations, no conventions - I attach myself limpet-like to D&D. But if it were socially acceptable to say at a party that in one's free time one enjoys 'building worlds' (can you imagine?), that is probably what I would say.

Where does the desire to build worlds come from?

I don't think it is entirely suppressed megalomania, though I do not dismiss the possibility that it partly is. It would make sense that people who have an urge to play God would find ways to do it in their spare time - making and destroying entire continents, peoples, civilisations and indeed worlds with the mere sweep of a pen. And those who know me personally will tell you that I do indeed have a certain amount of suppressed megalomania - I would make an extremely unenlightened despot if put in charge.

But that cannot hold true generally, I think, because when one thinks of the great worldbuilders - Tolkien, Le Guin, GRRM to a certain extent, CJ Cherryh, Gene Wolfe, etc. - one doesn't immediately reach for the word 'megalomania', at least in respect of their public personae. 

Certainly, creativity and imagination have a bearing, but that is too diffuse a statement: it doesn't explain why the creativity and imagination are in some people channelled into making up elfworlds where as for others it finds its way into, say, painting or sculpture or interpretive dance. 

And nor can it just be mimicry or mimesis, though no doubt world-builders tend to be influenced and inspired by what they read or encounter in the books (or RPG modules) they consume: how many people did Tolkien, for example, convert to the idea that it is possible in the first place to just sit down and make up languages and entire geographies for fun? I don't think this is the whole story, though, because it doesn't explain why some fantasy enthusiasts 'get the bug' while most simply don't.

I think, in truth, we have to get a little bit more phenomenological. What does it feel like to make up an elfworld? Speaking personally, it is almost ineluctable: I just get ideas. I can't control it. In idle moments, my mind produces them. Other people may sit staring out of the car window when stuck in traffic imagining what they are going to have for dinner, mentally undressing a co-worker, reminiscing about their childhoods or humming tunes; I, inordinately often, find myself thinking things like 'Yes, but what if there was a world in which the water cycle operated through the medium of blood??'

Why does this happen? Short of imagining myself to be an idiot savant blessed with insight into the existence of alternative realities, I can only speculate that it's a phenomenon with a momentum of its own - once you start, you find it difficult to stop, and that difficulty increases over time. It becomes a habit of thought that is self-cultivating - not, I suppose, all that unlike the compulsion Stephen King feels to write novels or Al Di Meola feels to play the guitar (though I wish it had something of the same level of financial rewards). The implication of this would be: all you need to do to end up as a complete weirdo is to start acting like it. What are you waiting for? 

Comfort Reading and the Escape to Fish Pie

As I get older I get increasingly po-faced and Spartan: I no longer believe in holidays, days off, video games, TV, leisure, smiling, friendship, politeness or sleep. My hero is, increasingly, Lieutenant Worf. I'm not great with a Bat'leth but, like any true Klingon, I choose to never laugh. 

Klingons probably don't re-read books either, and generally speaking I also prefer not to - there are too many books out there waiting to be read to spend too much time re-reading. There are, though, occasions when I allow myself to indulge - never for more than five pages at a time, you understand - in reading a book from the shelf I have dedicated* to 'comfort reading': those books which I have read and re-read and which now have the feeling of the literary equivalent of warm socks on a cold night; of a hot toddie and a blanket on the sofa; of a pint and game pie in front of a roaring fire in a country pub; of fish pie out fresh of the oven when you've come in from the winter night.

What is on your comfort reading list? What are those books into which you like to escape when you need a bit of verbal TLC?

My top five would be:

• Uncontroversially and unsurprisingly, The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. I've been reading those books since I was in the womb, or at least in primary school at any rate, and although I'm no Christopher Lee, who reportedly would re-read LOTR once a year, I've probably gone through the series approaching ten times in the course of my life. It never gets old, because it reminds me of being young - I can still remember the feeling of being nine or ten, reading those books, and thinking that they were the bee's knees and that I was incredibly grown-up for grappling with them.
• I love most of Jack Vance's main series but the sheer pleasure I get from losing myself in the Lyonesse books can't really be put into words; if you had a gun to my head I would say it's a bit like what it must feel like to snuggle under a warm duvet with Teri Hatcher from circa 1994 with snow falling outside and a nice bottle of single malt to keep you company. And also lemon meringue pie. And a cheeseboard. And a big bowl of chilli con carne sprinkled with jalapenos and grated cheese....
• I will confess it: I really, really do like the first three A Song of Ice and Fire books, before poor old George went off the deep end. The first two in particular are almost perfect realisations of the vision he was clearly aiming to achieve; the great problem from book four onwards was clearly that the vision of the TV series inveigled itself into his brain and made his original one go all fuzzy. But, like with the LOTR I remember the context in which I first encountered them so well, and I'll never shake that feeling I had as a teenager when first dipping into A Game of Thrones and discovering something totally unlike any other fantasy series I had read.
• The collected Viriconium books may seem like an odd choice, because they are not comforting at all - they are very unsettling - but I've never been able to shake the feeling that their specialness deserves repeated engagement. From time to time, I simply acquire the urge to get my omnibus edition out and re-immerse myself. I can't explain it; it's like the feeling one gets, maybe twice a year, that one just really, really wants to eat a Costco hotdog and doesn't know why. 
• The Voyage of the Dawn Treader is by no means perfect. But it remains the single Narnia book that I really enjoy going back to. It belongs to that strange genre of children's fiction which is both comforting and adventurous - a combination of warm Scandinavian hygge vibes combined with an exciting ocean voyage that no right-thinking child could possibly decline the opportunity to participate in. There are great scenes, great characters, and a great sensation of distance and exoticism in the journey it depicts. 

There is another interesting category of books, which I would call the Disappointment Comfort List - those books that one read and loved as a child or young adult but which one later re-reads as a mature adult, expecting to find comforting, and finds to translate badly. I would include in this the Redwall series, Nicobobinus, the Tad Williams Memory, Sorrow and Thorn books, maybe also anything by Peter F Hamilton. For bonus points, include your own 'disappointments', too. 

-

*This is not remotely true - as if I have space in amongst all the kids' books!

Cyberpunk in 2025: A Triptych

I used to play Cyberpunk 2020 and Shadowrun a lot in the mid-late 1990s, as well as Necromunda, which always felt cyberpunk-adjacent. To do so at that time was to engage in a pleasantly unlikely fantasy of dystopia: there was a big gap between the 'lived experience' of my friends and I and the worlds which these games depicted. When I first started playing Cyberpunk 2020, for instance, I surely had never once even used the internet, and had no real conception of what it was. My peers and I unconsciously felt ourselves to be essentially in the same era that in which our parents had grown up - we called each other on the phone, we walked around to each other's houses to ask 'Are you coming out?', we sent letters and thankyou cards, we went to our grandparents' houses on Sunday to have a roast dinner. The dystopian future which Cyberpunk 2020 and its brethren depicted felt impossibly distant (even though the milieu, Merseyside circa 1994, was hardly prosperous or indeed crime-free). 

Nowadays it seems as though the dystopia is basically here - it just, to coin a phrase, isn't evenly distributed. I don't have to go very far at all to see Cyberpunk 2020 in action before my eyes: any retail park on the outskirts of a down-at-heel area of town will do. There aren't any cybereyes or full-body mods in evidence yet, but most of the rest of the furniture is present (albeit in a slightly different way to how it was imagined by Mike Pondsmith) - along with exactly the right amount of alienating, atomising vibes.

This has given the cyberpunk genre a newfound subversiveness - the theme, to use Bruce Sterling's expression, of the 'victims of the new' has never seemed more apposite, or uncomfortable. We already have cyberpunks, in numerous different guises, and they have a way of scrambling our priors and problematising our assumptions in all manner of different ways. The big appeal of the cyberpunk genre, and cyberpunk games, was the way in which it used the antihero - the assassin, the Gordo Gecko-style corporate, the muckraker journalist, the dodgy medic, the hacker - to expose the dark underbelly of the developing future. And our era is increasingly defined by antiheroes: those who, in fighting for what they believe in, or pursuing their own self-interest, throw moral inconsistencies and confrontations into stark relief.

Three examples leap to mind of modern-day cyberpunks in this antiheroic vein. In each instance, what is interesting about them is the way in which they problematise some aspect of the future in which we have found ourselves. 

The first of these is what you might call the poverty-porn YouTuber - the category of person (often raking in kabillion-willions of views) who turns up in some godforsaken spot with a GoPro, engages with the locals with superficial and vaguely sociopathic charm, and then puts the results on YouTube with a title like 'I Visited the Poorest and Most Dangerous District of Tashkent'. In each case, a fine line is walked between exploiting other people's misery for views and hence cash on the one hand, and raising awareness on the other - a recent example I happened to watch concerned a visit to La Rinconada in Peru, which managed to hammer home the awfulness of the conditions which some people are forced to endure but which I also found to be an obnoxious 'Aren't I terribly adventurous?' exercise in self-centredness and self-promotion on the part of the narrator. But it what it mostly illustrated was the strangeness of the effects of easy global travel and the internet on geographical boundaries: it is now possible for us to sit at our desks in our lunch hours and watch what is going on in La Rinconada - ostensibly one of the most isolated places on Earth - over a bad cup of instant coffee and digestive biscuits. This is cyberpunk: a subversion and interrogation (albeit unconscious) of the 'the new' and its consequences. 

The second is the phenomenon of the Left-Right Climate Infrastructure Terrorist: the evolution of both pro- and anti- 'Net Zero' activism towards inchoately violent goals. On the one hand, trust-fund brats and Boomer activists reconnecting with the 'spirit of 68' to spraypaint Stonehenge, disrupt cultural events, attack paintings, and piss off commuters. On the other hand, largely working class 'Bladerunners' targeting the ULEZ cameras designed to levy fines on petrol and diesel vehicles travelling around London. Either way, a sense that ordinary political processes are not producing the correct results, and a resort to vandalism to in the name of political messaging - but also the deployment of technology to produce decentralised, networked threats that are almost impossible to police against. This is cyberpunk - the use of 'the new' to subvert the way in which the future itself is developing, either through resisting development itself or insisting on a reassessment of who should bear the costs.

And the third is the phenomenon of the Extreme Challenger - the person who engages in feats of physical achievement or endurance, often monitored in real time by vast numbers of followers. One interesting example I recently came across were the participants in the so-called Montane Winter Spine, a non-stop 268-mile ultramarathon going the length of the Pennines, from somewhere in Derbyshire to Kirk Yetholm on the Scottish Border. Taking place in January each year, the participants often go for days without sleeping - the winner this year did it in around 82 hours. My friend, who was describing it to me, said that runners will catch a nap here or there by lying down in a puddle or shallow flood - they will be so tired that they will fall asleep for 10-20 minutes, but will then be woken by the coldness of the water and will be thereby prevented from sleeping for too long and losing time. But there are many other variants on the theme of extreme challenges in many different spheres of human life, with a crucial factor - the Montane Winter Spine being a good illustration - being the fact that people can 'spectate' online in real time (in that case through a constantly updated GPS tracker on all the runners). Again, this is cyberpunk - the use of the 'new' to transform expectations of what human beings are capable of, through a strangely organic form of cybertech: ultrarunners (for instance) whose capacities are enhanced by the fact that technology facilitates competitiveness and status, rather than because it, for instance, gives them new 6-million-dollar legs.

Thinking about things in this way truly expands the remit of what a cyberpunk RPG campaign could consist of. The original 'tech noir' assumptions of Cyberpunk 2020 and Shadowrun, very much informed by Gibson's short stories and first trilogy of novels, produced excellent results. But here we can see other modalities emerging: the 'medias' going around warzones and extreme environments to please their YouTube following; the activists planning disruptive infrastructure attacks and evading the security response; the hard core 'challengers' trying to break world records in the most extreme ways. All there, and all I think readily 'gameable' with a little thought. 

Bad Things Happen: Unknown BFGs, Twits and Witches

As a father I have become reacquainted with the books of Roald Dahl, most of which I haven't read for well over thirty years. One of the things I have been struck by is that is ouevre, at least when it comes to the main big children's novels, can be thought of as a kind of worked example of what I have taken to calling Demonic Intrusion: in most of the books a child in 'ordinary' circumstances - though never that ordinary - finds his or her world subject to a rupture of the paranormal or weird which transforms everything. The main examples of this are I suppose the BFG, The Witches, Matilda and James and the Giant Peach; it is probably no coincidence that these are probably his best-loved books, though The Twits (my own favourite) does not fall under this category. (As an aside, I have never been a big fan of the two Charlie books - the sequel is just a bad book, but the first one is pretty boring and disjointed.) 

This is obviously by no means unique to Dahl - it's a trope of children's stories, of course, dating back at least as far as Alice in Wonderland and, from there, back to the fairy tales of yore. But what makes Dahl a particularly good, paradigmatic example is that in each case under discussion the setting is so recognisably 'real world' and the intrusion in question so recognisably 'not real world'. The child reader sees a set of surroundings that feel familiar and then experiences the interjection of the unfamiliar very starkly. In the very best examples - The Witches and Matilda (unlike, say, the Harry Potter books) the familiarity of the surroundings largely remains. The child is not transported to what is in effect a completely different world; he or she is still located in bucolic England - it is just one that happens to have witches or magic in.

This gives Dahl's books (you could include other authors like Dianne Wynne Jones in this) a feeling of a juvenile version of Unknown Armies. And it is a source of some surprise, when one reflects on this, that nobody has (at least as far as I am aware) come up with a Dahl-with-the-serial-numbers-filed-off game. I have from time to time heard about games in which the PCs are children. But I don't know that I've ever come across one which channels the atmosphere of a Dahl book exactly.

I think this is because when adults think to themselves 'RPG in which the PCs are children' they tend to immediately leap to the horror genre (no doubt thanks to the innumerable horror films that have been made with children either as chief protagonists or antagonists). But the crucial aspect of Dahl's tone in relation to his children's books is that they are not horror stories. Dahl is said to have had a memo on the wall of his writing shed which included the maxim: Bad Things Happen. But this is not the same as 'horrible things happen'. The books are better to be understood as adventure stories with a dark edge. Bad things happen but in the end good triumphs and the villains get their comeuppance. 

The Demonic Intrusion Generator would in any event be a good mechanism through which to operationalise this. Just draw up a random table designed to throw together 'weird' events, possibly in connection with fixed archetypal PCs (the headmistress turns out to be.....a medusa! the local used car salesman turns out to....have a time machine in the staff restroom! etc.), use a few of these to populate a small town, and have the PCs simply present as precocious children - perhaps with special abilities - who have heard some curious rumours.....