They're Eating the Apostrophes

Patrick Stuart has a new Kickstarter in the offing - and he has managed to reveal himself as having the testicular fortitude of a leviathan in the process: the new book will be a novel, not a game.

Why does this require special gumption? Because, as has long been my theory, the Truth That Dare Not Speak Its Name about RPG designers, and particularly OSR ones, is that they would dearly love to be fantasy novelists but: a) don't have the wherewithal; b) are scared to take the plunge; c) are put off by the gamekeepy nature of contemporary publishing.

Patrick is here making a sincere and concerted effort to show the way, and to reveal the rest of us to be cowards, charlatans and shams in the process. And he should be applauded as a visionary and pioneer.

With the compliments out of the way, though, let me make an additional comment: the title of Patrick's proposed book is nothing short of a travesty. He has called it Queen Mabs [sic] Palace. Not Queen Mab's Palace. But Mabs. Queen Mabs. 

He needs to be told that this is an insult to the English language. He needs to be told that if he doesn't like apostrophes he should go and live in Hungary or Finland or South Korea or some other lamentable place where apostrophes are not understood or known. He needs to be made aware that the Queen, the real queen, the forever queen, Elizabeth II - and probably Elizabeth I as well, not to mention Mary and Anne - is rolling in her grave at the thought that her rules of grammar should be traduced in this way. This is the language of Shakespeare, Patrick. The language of Spenser. The language of Chaucer. Of Eliot. Of Hardy. Of Fitzgerald. Of Hemingway. Of Proust. Well, not Proust. But all of the others, and more. All of those people saw fit to obey the rules of English grammar as they pertained to the apostrophe, Patrick. And you think you are above them. This is wrong. Repent. And hope that you will be forgiven.

Queen Mab's Palace will be backable from October 1st. Back it. But let its author know that apostrophes matter, and his wanton disregard for them is part of what is leading us into societal decline. 

A Simple Iterative Method for Module and Campaign Inspiration

Are you struggling with ideas for a module or campaign setting?

Struggle no longer. Here is a simple method:

1. Put a country, any country, into the wikipedia search box (for example, Sudan).

2. Now navigate to the section on geography (many countries have their own 'Geography of' page, as indeed does Sudan).

3. Choose somewhere which sounds interesting (for example, the Marrah Mountains, described as the highest mountains of Sudan: 'a small area of temperate climate with high rainfall and permanent springs of water amidst the dry savanna and scrub of the Sahel below').

4. Click around until you find somewhere beautiful, odd, spooky, dramatic, or otherwise inspirational (for example, the Deriba Caldera, a dormant volcano at the heart of the Marrah Mountains, notable for having two large lakes, one traditionally thought of as female and the other, male, in its crater).

5. Pick some nice images to fix the geographical mood in your mind:

6. Randomly generate a title using the aforementioned table which I will kindly replicate for you here:

D20	The	NOUN	of the	COMPLEMENT	NOUN
1	The	wrath	of the	red	queen
2	The	revenge	of the	two-headed	king
3	The	love	of the	mad	serpent
4	The	hatred	of the	unholy	phaoroh
5	The	city	of the	pale	prince
6	The	fortress	of the	ghost	dragon
7	The	tower	of the	dread	mage
8	The	lair	of the	dead	sorcerer
9	The	crown	of the	lost	knight
10	The	sword	of the	weeping	beast
11	The	spear	of the	purple	giant
12	The	tomb	of the	yellow	werewolf
13	The	lust	of the	cloud	wizard
14	The	death	of the	mountain	princess
15	The	return	of the	cave	assassin
16	The	sorrow	of the	invisible	khan
17	The	blood	of the	undersea	lord
18	The	slaves	of the	whispering	demigod
19	The	lover	of the	silent	demiurge
20	The	treasure	of the	iron	priest(ess)

7. Profit. Hence, for the dormant-volcano-with-temperate-climate-which-rises-up-from-the-semidesert-and-has-two-lakes-in-its-caldera, we get:

The Sorrow of the Ghost Pharoah

And from this we derive a module wherein the PCs are confronted with the opporunity to explore the ruins of the titular ghost pharoah, who was exiled to the volcano in ancient times from his lowland kingdom, and there with his court established a hidden fortress complete with treasure chambers, temples, etc., before eventually dying. The fortress consists of tunnels bored into the volcano itself, which can only be entered through caves or hidden entrances which are found in the sides of the caldera lakes and only readily accessble by boat or perhaps abseiling. Each lake is home to a demigod, one male and the other female, and hideous unknown aquatic beasts which moved into the area long after the pharoah's death. The ghost pharoah, naturally, still roams about his tunnels, filled with the traditional hatred of the living which one has come to expect in such entities. 

And there you have it. Go forth and multiply.

The City and the Forest: The Megadungeon, Urbanised

I blame Edmund. In Planet Narnia, I discover a hitherto-unknown (to me) theme of medieval thought which insisted on the primordial forest, Broceliande, as a source in itself of creation and goodness, and held this in opposition against the City, understood as an emanation of evil - as, for example, with Nineveh, 'the Great City' (not to be 'pitied' according to the book of Jonah).

This is deeply evocative and interesting and forces us to imagine the D&D wilderness in a totally different way: what if the PCs are born from the wilderness and adventure in the city, thus flipping the entire script when it comes to what 'overland' adventuring is thought to mean? 

Here, the city is transformed from a base of operations to a place of wickedness, strangeness and danger, which becomes thereby the locus for adventure as a kind of urbanisation of the megadungeon. Here, the wilderness - which could be a forest but could just as well be the desert, the mountains, the marsh, or even the sea - is home, and the urban landscape is the place that is raided for treasure and glory. 

Possibilities:

• The most obvious and I think easiest to conceptualise: the PCs are either wilderness-dwelling human types (either stereotypical 'noble savages' or druids) or else representatives of sylvan/'natural' races, whether they be elves, pixies, gnomes, whatever (or their equivalents in other biomes). They seek to infiltrate the City so as to steal its riches? 
• The more interesting (to me): the PCs are emanations of nature - nature spirits, if you will, or even fae beings - who intrude for purposes other than riches or magic as we would understand, but in the service of some other motive. Capturing dreams? Gaining the knowledge of 'science'? 
• The PCs as nature-terrorists: either of the above, but the motive for infiltration is, say, to free captive animals, or commit acts of sabotage and assassination against the literal or metaphorical machineries of the City, or maybe to subvert it by implanting seeds - again, literal or metaphorical - of the natural world within.

We have a wealth of material (I humbly draw attention to the Old Town sections of Yoon-Suin as an example) through which to create methods of procedural urban adventuring. But I also am on record as loving the obsessive detail that went into the City-State of the Invincible Overlord and I would strongly encourage anybody with the time and creativity to print out a map of their hometown and laboriously key every single building and room within it in order to make a vast canvas in which a group of wilderness-PCs could find adventure. Glory will be yours. 

A Blog 2,000 Posts Old

I have now written 2,000 posts here at Monsters & Manuals. I'll let that sink in for a moment: if you laid out all of these posts end to end they would stretch from here to the moon and back thirty-six times; if you put them all in a big pile and squashed them flat they would have a surface area thrice the size of Mauritania; there are as many words contained within them as there are grains of sand on a beach. 

This is very possibly the greatest blog in the history of the universe.

The question naturally arises: what are the posts I am proudest of? What are the real highlights? This is a bit like being asked which of your children is your favourite, and the answer has to really be: all of them, except the one with red hair who looks a bit like the milkman. On top of this, when you have 2,000 children it can be quite difficult to remember what all of their names are and what they look like (just ask Genghis Khan). So any 'best of' list would really automatically be a false premise from the outset. They are ALL THE BEST.

With that said, there are of course some posts that stick in the mind for one reason or another, as a separate category from those that are most popular in terms of page views. On the strict understanding that if you asked me again 30 minutes after writing this post I would likely come up with an entirely different list, here are Ten Favourites, in no particular order:

10. Beware the Were Stuff (November 2008), in which I came up with a method for randomly generating therianthropes, including were-snapping turtles, were-secretary birds, were-condors, and were-gila monsters.

9. Chaos Patrons (September 2008), in which I stole ideas from the Zangband roguelike game in order to systematise patronage of a PC by a chaos god.

8. Being an Illustration of the Contents of 1-Mile Hexes Through Examination of Divers Locations in the British Isles (March 2012), which more or less does what the title says, detailing just how much adventure can be found in a 1-Mile hex. There are similar ideas pursued in my Hexology posts (here, here and here), in which I delived into detail on exactly how much stuff there is in the world.

7. More Thoughts on a Cyberpunk Megadungeon (July 2013), regarding, well, a cyberpunk megadungeon idea. (The comments are well worth reading, too.)

6. The Importance of Shadowrun (January 2015), which concerns the woebefallen status of teenage boys and the possibility of aspiration.

5. Three linked posts on Faerie Knights, Fairie Nobles, and Faerie Commoners (January 2015), from a longrunning project called New Troy, now on the backburner.

4. A Historical Geography of RPG Playing (December 2016), in which I muse on the nature of progress; see also here.

3. The Pacification of the Nerd (May 2017), about how 'geekdom' has lost its subversive edge. 

2. Old Farts Solve Mysteries (September 2017), containg a pencil sketch for a group of PCs in a modern dark fantasy campaign.

1. The first six Tournament of the Gods posts (beginning in April 2021), found here, here, here, here, here, and here).

It is a great pleasure looking back at the archives and reminisce. This blog has been a wonderful creative outlet for me down the years, has really helped me hone my writing ability, and has I am sure developed my imaginative capacities too as I have been forced, several times a week, to come up with new and interesting material. As I once observed, the imagination must itself be trained - (I even came up with a method for doing so) - and this blog has given me a great workout. 

There is no question of stopping, so let's see how long it takes me to get to 3,000. In the meantime, I am going to put together a 'best of' book, compiling perhaps 100 or 200 posts, and put it out POD - watch out for that if you are one my ten thousand-strong legion of diehard fanatics. And I should probably also say: thanks for reading and commenting. Regular readers should not only congratulate themselves on their excellent taste. They should also take some of the glory for contributing to keeping the ball rolling  I would not have got to 100 posts if I'd ever felt nobody was reading. So, for that, thank you.

The Sun as an Evil God

I was recently listening to a podcast in which (to paraphrase) it was stated that CS Lewis had once said that he could not imagine there existing a human poet who could use the sun as an image of evil. 

Lewis was referring to the fact that sun gods are basically always benevolent and central in human mythology, for the obvious reason that human beings have always known themselves to be totally reliant on the sun. But this immediately got the cogs of my mind whirring in a 'challenge accepted' sort of way: what would a civilisation look like which understood the sun to be an evil god?

Well, what if that civilisation existed on the planet Mercury, where the sun's light and heat would be totally destructive of human life? This would, as it happens, chime very nicely with my recent thoughts about a fantasy version of Mercury as a D&D sword-and-planet setting, and its 'vanished moon'.

The central conceit: the sun is actually an evil god for the planet Mercury; the setting is also haunted by the existence of a vanished moon, which is understood by the different Mercurial cultures in various cadences as a mysterious symbol of goodness. 

General thoughts:

• This a sword-and-planet setting so there is no reason for it to incorporate any hard SF elements, but it is notable that Mercury in effect has a day lasting 88 earth days (and a night with the same corresponding length). The number 88 has a nice symmetry, obviously, but what I like about this is that implies the existence of nomadic surface-based civilisations which travel around in the cold night, permanently staying ahead of the sun and presumably herding all sorts of exotic alien migratory animals.
• It probably goes without saying that on the sunny side of Mercury there are continuously summoned into being various light-and-heat demons who sometimes stray into the dark side to run amok. Perhaps there are even entire evil nomadic civilisations which are the counterparts to those on the dark side.
• There would also likely be cultures which make their homes underground, so as to have some stability. Mercury also has permanent ice caps because there are large polar areas which are always shrouded in shadow due to cratering (one of these craters is even named after Tolkien), so one could envisage the existence of glacier-cities.
• The inhabitants would probably navigate by echolocation or perhaps just having the ability to see in the dark; maybe this indeed represents some fundamental division, with Mercurial dwarves and elves using innate magical sight, and humans navigating by sound. Althought a competing possibility would be that the human population navigates using sight and has to try to conjure or create light sources in order to survive. 
• Good is represented by the absent moon, but this reveals itself in many different ways in different cultural contexts - one culture might be ruled by a feudal network of 'moon knights' who purport to protect the people from the demons of light-and-heat, whereas another might have a traditional religion hinged around the veneration of (long disappeared) lycanthropes, and be characterised by its people taking on the aspect of a wolf, bear, etc. in imitation of lycanthropy. 
• It may also be the case that there are beings which are capable of surviving both Mercurial day and Mercurial night, or perhaps of living in the liminal space between the two, at Mercurial dawn and Mercurial dusk. Indeed, it is possible to imagine people being able to live in one of those crepuscular states, having enough light to live by, and continuously moving so as to stay one step ahead of the morning (or night). 

Top 10 Most Popular Posts - EVER! (so far)

[I am putting up a series of 'Top 10' posts in the lead up to my 2,000th post here at Monsters & Manuals. You can read the first post in the series here, the second here, and the third here.]

I am a British man of a certain age, so when I think 'Top 10', I still think of Bruno Brooks, Mark Goodier, Sunday afternoons, the feeling of having to go to school tomorrow, Led Zeppelin jingles, jumpers for goalposts, isn't it, hmm? - marvellous. Those who understand those references - my band of brothers - will appreciate the visceral wave of nostalgia that is now washing over them. Those who do not will be mystified. But nobody will be mystified at all by the basic premise of this post (see what I did there?): it lists the most popular posts EVER (so far) on the blog by page views.

Let me just make one thing clear, though, as an aside, before we commence - while there is a widespread perception that the OSR blogosphere is 'dying', I get more pageviews month-on-month these days than ever before - and indeed in both April and June this year I got twice as many pageviews as the previous most popular month in history. Monsters & Manuals is in rude health, god dammit - and you will prise this keyboard from my cold, dead hands.) 

Top 10 Most Popular Posts EVER (so far) by Views

I have been writing posts here since 2008 and over those 16 years have discovered some immutable laws of the universe with respect to blogging: there are important day-of-the-week effects when it comes to pageviews (Friday and Saturday are the worst days for posting, Sunday is next worst, then Monday; Tuesday-Thursday are optimal); nobody is really interested in 'creative' content and would much rather read rants; if a post has not received 1000 views within a week it probably never will, but if it gets more than that the sky is the limit and its views will gradually tick upwards forever and ever amen; if you post about Warhammer you get several times as many views as you otherwise would even though your blog is ostensibly about D&D; there is no better driver of engagement than explaining why you hate something; if you specifically solicit comments you are less likely to get them than if you did not; and so on. 

This will colour what follows, which I'm afraid is mostly controversial rants - which are not actually all that reflective of all the things that I have written about down the years. I must also make clear that I deliberately did not include some promos and things like that for Kickstarters, which would have been boring. 

But anyway, without further ado, in descending order:

10. Against TV (20th Feb 2023) - in which I explained, well, why I don't watch TV and don't think you should either.

9. Questions Nobody Asked Me (31st December 2022) - in which I responded innocently to a quiz and apparently pissed off some nerds with my answers (this is the only reason I can come up with as to why it got so many views). This post is notable to me as being one of the few I've written in which I can actually still remember the circumstances of writing it - at the kitchen table of my in-laws in rural Japan while I waited for New Year's Eve dinner to be served.

8. Faking It; or, you'd better be Al Pacino; or, stop rolling the fucking dice (16th September 2011) - in which I explained why fudging dice rolls is a fool's errand. 

7. Annoying Evil Idiot Fucks (27th December, 2021) - in which I encouraged Prince of Nothing and Patrick Stuart to stop fighting and be more like emperor penguins.

6. Would You Play D&D With Donald Trump? (19th March 2018) - in which I posted something which I thought would garner universal agreement, and discovered that it did not. Occasionally people still link to this post on Twitter or elsewhere as Exhibit A in my trial for being a negative influence on 'the hobby' etc.

5. Racism and Orcs (2nd February 2022) - in which I posted something about a controversial subject. I later semi-retracted it after giving the matter further thought.

4. Warhammer Goblins (28th February 2009) - in which I posted something about....Warhammer goblins. See what I mean about Warhammer?

3. Going is Easy but Returning is Not (17th October 2018) - in which I mused idly about competing translations of a famous Japanese children's song (I genuinely have no idea why this got, and continues to get, so many views). 

2. For Old Times' Sake: LotFP is Worth Saving (17th July 2020) - in which I 'did a solid', or something, for somebody. 

1. D&D Combat is More Abstract Than You Think (30th August 2013) - in which I said some vaguely defensible things about the nature of the combat round in D&D. It spawned a host of sequels, but the original still gets lots of hits and seems somehow to have taken on a life of its own (it has over twice as many pageviews as entry number 2 in the list). 

This is post number 1999 on the blog. I imagine that the list is therefore good as far as the first 2,000 posts go. Who knows what the list will look like when I have written 4,000? Join me in 2040 to find out.

On the Inspirational Power of Mercurial Place Names

Because I am a very busy, dedicated and hardworking employee and involved family man, I spend a lot of time dicking around on wikipedia, looking at articles about things like the geological features of the planet Mercury. (The genealogy of the thought process that got me there, since you asked, was that I was idly wondering whether anybody had ever speculated whether Mercury had any moons, on the basis that 'the vanished moon of Mercury' would be a cool idea for a campaign setting. It still would be, but, alas!, there was never a time when the ancient Greeks, Toltecs, Bugulmara astronomers at NASA peered at the heavens and imagined there to be a satellite of that sun-blasted rock.)

Anyway, Mercury has a lot of potential as a diamond-hard SF setting, of course (it has a shit-ton of ice, to use the technical term, concealed in permanently-shadowed craters on its poles - prime locations for human colonists to set up bases and thereby become targets for The Thing, Sam Neill, alien facehuggers, or a mad AI voiced by Kevin Spacey). But looking at the place names conjures entirely different images of planetary romance in the mind - more in keeping with E. R. Eddison's Worm Ouroboros, where Mercury is imagined to be something like a more vivid and dramatic version of Earth, filled with strange monsters, magnificent wilderness scenery, and declamatory speeches. From the wikipedia page in question:

Different types of features are named after different things: Mercurian ridges are called dorsa, and are named after astronomers who made detailed studies of the planet; valleys are called valles, and are named after ancient abandoned cities, towns, and settlements; crater chains are called catenae and are named after radio telescope facilities; plains are called planitiae, and most are named after mythological names associated with Mercury; escarpments are called rupes and are named after the ships of famous explorers; long, narrow depressions are called fossae and are named after works of architecture; bright spots are called faculae and are named after the word snake in various languages.

It is one thing for an alien planet to have mountains, valleys, craters, and plains. It is something else again for it to have dorsa, valles, catenae, planitiae, rupes, fossae and faculae. But the specific names are even better (the rupes, because they are named after ships, being probably my favourites). Gaze in wonder at the landscape that emerges in the mind's eye when imagining what it would be like to see, in the distance, the following:

• Adventure Rupes ('nuff said)
• Blossom Rupes (pseudo-Mercurial pseudo-Japan?)
• La Dauphine Rupes (pseudo-Mercurial pseudo-Sun King)
• Hero Rupes
• Paramour Rupes 
• Pourquoi-Pas Rupes (because, why not?)
• Terror Rupes
• Goldstone Catena (the chain of craters that sparked a gold rush)
• Haystack Catena
• Nzoka Facula (just because it sounds like something Eddison himself might have made up)
• Pantheon Fossae 
• Schiaparelli Dorsum
• Odin Planitia 

The Pourquoi-Pas Rupes is such a brilliant title for a D&D module that I can hardly stand not to begin writing it immediately, but you also have to love Terror Rupes and the sheer poetry of Schiaparelli Dorsum. What wonders would lie between the covers of these never-to-be-written modules, and in what kind of world would they be situated?

The theme of the solar system has appeared at various stages on the blog (in the early days, here, and later on here, here, here, and here, not to mention most recently here) and still think of it as an untapped imaginary resource - just as planetary romance is itself is a sadly neglected subgenre. Hard SF is one thing, but what I really long for is a version of Spelljammer done right, in which the entire solar system - planets, moons and all - is reimagined as a vast sequence of individualised, but interrelated, campaign settings across which a group of PCs could in theory range at will. Here, the emphasis would not be on realism but on capturing the character of the solar system's contents, as conjured by a cursory knowledge of what each planet or moon looks like, its name, and its symbolism in intellectual history or myth. Somebody with the time ought to try it; I'm too busy with aforementioned job and family, not to mention trawling around the internet for tidbits to sate my idle curiosity.

Top 10 Best Commercial OSR Products

[I am putting up a series of 'Top 10' posts in the lead up to my 2,000th post here at Monsters & Manuals. You can read the first post in the series here, and the second here.]

Since 2008 I have been a heady devourer of blogs, but - I will here confess to heresy and also out myself as a dilettante and ingenue - I tend not to buy a great deal of RPG books, back a lot of kickstarters, or download a lot of PDFs. This is for one simple reason: I am grumpy, stuck-up, and extremely hard to please. I am unimpressed by the things that most other people like. And as a result I only tend to buy things that I am very sure have a high likelihood of winning me over. 

With that said, there are certain products that I think of as, if not the 'essentials' (the only really essential thing is the core OD&D rules), then at least the highly recommended. These are the top 10, in no particular order - and here I should also make clear that I am limiting myself to actual commercial, for-sale things, rather than free material like, say, Philotomy's Musings. 

10. Misty Isle of the Eld. This is simply a great marriage of tone, art and content - a module that manages to be very playable while also creating a coherent, integrated mood and feel (in this case, roughly Flash Gordon meets David Bowie meets Michael Moorcock). It remains a high watermark in the peak of the OSR years (2016), when enthusiasm and competence had combined to maximal effect. 

9. Qelong. There are short modules whose brevity derives from laziness. There are others whose brevity derives from the author's incapacity to properly explain and elucidate. This is one which is brief because its author thought carefully about how to condense everything necessary into 48 pages. It is a finely distilled shot of RPG material, and also a beautiful example of how to make a 'high concept' module playable.

8. The original Lamentations of the Flame Princess core rules, in A5 format. I do not myself use LotFP (I exclusively use BECMI and have for years), but I recognise its original iteration to be the best that the OSR really had to offer in purely mechanical terms - and also respect the thematic coherence of its implied setting. I also loved the sheer at-the-table effectiveness of the old A5 basic rule books, which were eminently flippable and browsable - qualities that are severely underrated.

7. Pariah. As I wrote in a review long ago, 'This describes itself as "old school roleplaying when the world was young" - that's right, it is a stone age RPG, though one that is very carefully thought-out and (it seems to me at least) well-informed. Not so much 1 Million Years BC, or Stig of the Dump - more Lavondyss, the middle story of Fifth Head of Cerberus, Helliconia Spring, those novels about neanderthals whose name I forget. The PCs are exiles from their tribe(s); it has spirit realms and rituals; extensive rules for psychobotanicals; a random wilderness generation method; images of waif-like girls covered in face-paint and tattoos. I very much like it and would run it: this is high praise, because as a general rule I don't run anything written by anybody else.'

6. Punth: A Primer. Another book which I reviewed here at the blog, and of which I said, 'Punth approaches Tekumel, not in substance (although there is something of Tekumel's alien coldness in it), but in ambition. This is not a typical fantasy setting. It is an exploration of themes: the control of thought through language, the formation of state power, and the philosophy of law. If that sounds like a bit much, it is a cool ancient Near Eastern sandbox setting ruled by dictatorial multi-limbed aliens written by somebody who has really though things through. And it's a marvel of succinct, concentrated. distilled communication to boot.' It is the closest that I think the OSR-adjacent sphere has come to producing something that is actually philosophically interesting.

5. Veins of the Earth. You have almost certainly read it already. Suffice to say, it would probably be in everybody's top 10 list provided they weren't deliberately leaving it out for effect.

4. The Gardens of Ynn. This would have a strong claim on the number 1 spot if this list was an actual ranking order. Having looked at the reviews on DriveThruRPG it seems that recently a new version was created - I cannot speak to its quality, but certainly the original was a revelation: a brilliantly realised procedural-generation method with a beautiful skin wrapped around it.

3. Into the Odd. Is this an OSR product? It is certainly OSR-adjacent. I have ambivalent feelings about quite how rules-lite it is, but it is certainly the best rules-lite system that I know of, and is also probably the best not-D&D-but-still-recognisably-D&D-ish system that came out of the OSR. 

2. An Echo, Resounding. There have been more successful Crawford vehicles since, and no doubt material of higher quality, but An Echo, Resounding was truly pioneering work - Crawford went out into the Sandbox Hills with a pickaxe, shovel, and a few sticks of dynamite, and came back with jewels. Now the landscape has been picked clean and erosion has transformed it into a barren wasteland, but the valleys and chasms still echo with the sound of his footsteps, and the soil remembers him.

1. Carcosa. At the time Carcosa first came out I thought it was hubristic, and courting of controversy for the sake of it, but the fact remains that if Crawford was a pathfinder for sandbox settings, McKinney was a trailblazer for self-publication in general. Where most of us saw blogs and forums, he saw books; where most of us spewed ephemeral rants in to the ether, he created physical products for people to have and hold. Others saw the crescent, but he saw the whole of the moon - and set the pattern for everything that followed.

Late Summer Blog Competition: Describe and Stat this Location

Holidaying in Port Sunlight - a place which itself would make interesting inspirational material for a D&D module - I came across a mysterious architectural feature. It struck me as something that one might find in a dungeon, wizard's garden, courtyard of a school of magic, etc., and so I post it here so as to elicit suggestions as to what it might be. The best wins a prize: the choice of any one PDF from the noisms games storefront. 

Each entry must consist of a short description as though written for a dungeon key for the edition of your choice, with stats as necessary. The scope of each entry should include the design on the floor and the feature on the wall behind it, but the location could be anywhere: underground, on a boat, on an airship; anywhere you like. The numerals '2008' can be ignored or incorporated as desired.

Top 10 Influences on Play Style from Literature, Art and Cinema

[I am putting up a series of 'Top 10' posts in the lead up to my 2,000th post here at Monsters & Manuals. You can read the first post in the series here.]

We are, all of us, used to thinking about our influences in the sense of substance and the creation of mood and atmosphere. We are generally easily able to reel off lists of books, films, TV series, pictures and so on that we have tried to emulate in some way or which have exerted some effect on how we approach content creation in the context of DMing. 

But we do not tend to think very deeply about the way in which the things that we read, and watch, affect how we actually play the game. Is what happens 'at the table' influenced by the media we consume? I believe that it is. Here is my Top 10 of literary and cinematic influences on my DMing style:

10. Heat. Over the years, I have noticed that, during the sessions I run, the times when the players are most engaged, focused, and 'present' are - aside from combat - when they are actively engaged in planning out some wheeze or other, be it a heist, ambush, assassination attempt, etc. There is a conspiratorial mood that sets in when a group of PCs are supposed to be plotting something, and these are the moments when the identification of player with PC becomes most complete and the conversation which the players are having between themselves most closely reflects that which the PCs would surely themselves be having at that particular point in time. Lots of films capture the 'a tightly knit group of rogues put their heads together to plot something vaguely nefarious' vibe (everything from The Sting to the vastly underrated David Mamet masterpiece Heist), but Heat is one of my all-time favourite films and therefore gets the final nod.

9. Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves. I watched the absolute shit out of this film when I was a kid and it somehow seeped into my bones as a result - I don't think I am quite able to picture in my mind's eye a medieval fight scene without it somehow ending up looking like it involves Kevin Costner and Alan Rickman trading blows while Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio shrieks in the background. Whether this comes across to the players, I am not sure, but I strongly suspect that it colours how I describe a fight scene whenever called to do so.

8. Gladiator. Gladiator was released in the cinema when I was a student at university and I can still remember the day that I saw it very vividly. All of my friends had gone to see it the previous night and I for some reason hadn't gone with them (I presume because I was working), and they had come back from the cinema raving about it as the greatest film ever made in the history of cinema. So I went to see it in the middle of the afternoon by myself and loved it so much that I immediately went and bought another ticket so I could see it back-to-back. Obviously, Gladiator remains a ridiculously entertaining film full of great cinematography and beautifully choreographed fight scenes, but people don't comment enough on its exceptional script - the dialogue is marvellous, and the actors speak every line as though they are carving an epitaph on a headstone. I love the idea of fantasy characters talking as though they have just stepped off the set of Gladiator, and am always sad that I am never inventive enough to really pull off 'At my signal, unleash hell!'

7. The Fighting Fantasy books as a gestalt. Individual Fighting Fantasy books may have their moments of inspiration, and lots of them have wonderful art, but in terms of actual play, their strongest influence on me has been at the level of ambient mood. To play a Fighting Fantasy book straight (i.e., without the liberal use of fingers and bookmarks stuck between pages) is to confront random, blameless death, time and time again, until one achieves a zen-like state in which matters of life and death simply lose significance when set against the bigger project of working one's way to the end. The main character as such becomes an irrelevance, and his deaths take on the aspect of Bill Murray's suicides in Groundhog Day - they are just incidents that have to be accepted, and dealt with, so that that the show can go on. This is something that I am sure I have carried into my approach to DMing in terms of my attitude to PC death: so your PC has died - so fucking what? Roll a new one and let's get on with things. 

6. MR James' short stories. Almost ten years ago (ten years!) I wrote a post about MR James in which I compared him favourably to HP Lovecraft. I meant that in a conceptual sense, but actually MR James is also technically a much better writer, because he knows how to surprise the reader. He's just good at what you might call 'boo scenes', when the ghost reveals itself and the viewpoint character (inevitably) gets a horrible shock but somehow recovers. I always enjoy those moments in games when the players know something bad is about to happen, or likely to happen if they do X or Y, and are just waiting for the 'boo!' moment.

5. The Way of the Gun. This Christopher McQuarrie film is not an unqualified success, but the action sequences have always stuck with me - and are what I tend to aim for in particular when running a Cyberpunk 2020 game. There is a childish machismo about gun violence on display that, for all its superficiality, is nonetheless exciting. There is intelligence behind what the characters do, and I like that.

4. A Song of Ice and Fire. Yes, it's almost embarrassing to cite George RR Martin's books in any context nowadays, given the ubiquity of the Game of Thrones TV series (I'm happy to confirm I am yet to watch a single minute of it), but it is important to give George - before he became undisciplined - his due: he knows how to craft a compelling plot. And this is largely due to two things: making sure that all characters, even relatively minor ones, have motivations and goals of their own; and making sure that whenever one problem is solved by anybody, at least two new ones are created. Taking these principles too far is undoubtedly the reason why his books have become so sprawling, but there is no doubt that the result is a technique that really sweeps the reader along. 

3. John Howe's illustrations, particularly of the works of JRR Tolkien. There is no more inspiring artist working in fantasy illustration than John Howe, for the simple reason that he knows how to create, with his pen, the quality of vastness: the sense that a fantasy world is indeed a world, and not just a few lines and squiggles on a made-up map. Viz:

This is a feeling which I always try to communicate (however successfully I have no idea) - the idea of size, of scope, or scale, of the opening out of wide vistas and the beckoning to distant horizons, which is surely one of the things that is most compelling about the fantasy genre itself, and has been since its beginning.

2. The Planet of Adventure series. The books set on Tschai are among my favourites of Vance's work, not least because of the effortless way in which he manages to create the sense of a world which teams with different cultures, peoples, societies, languages, nations. Hence:

Coad was a busy town. Along the crooked streets, in and out of the ale-coloured sunlight, moved men and women of many castes and colours: Yellow Islanders and Black Islanders, Horasin bark-merchants muffled in grey robes; Caucasoids such as Traz from the Aman Steppe; Dirdirmen and Dirdir-men hybrids; dwarfish Sieps from the eastern slopes of the Ojzanalai who played music in the streets; a few flat-faced white men from the far south of Kislovan. The natives, the Tans, were an affable fox-faced people, with wide polished cheek bones, pointed chins, russet or dark brown hair cut in a ledge across the ears and foreheads. Their usual garments were knee-length breeches, embroidered vest, a round black pie-plate hat. Palanquins were numerous, carried by short gnarled men with oddly long noses and stringy black hair: apparently a race to themselves; Reith saw them in no other occupation. Later he learned them to be natives of Grenie at the head of the Dwan Zher.... Once Traz grabbed his elbow and pointed to a pair of thin men in loose black trousers, black capes with tall collars all but enveloping their faces, soft cylindrical black hats with wide brims: caricatures of mystery and intrigue. 'Pnumekin!' hissed Traz in something between shock and outrage. 'Look at them! They walk among other men without a look aside, and their minds full of strange thinking!'

I am endlessly fascinated by the sheer variety that exists on our own world, and I always aim where possible to try to conjure up a similarly plausible sensation of multifariousness in the way in which a setting is described, and imagined. Vance achieves this in part simply through the inventiveness of his descriptions, but also through having obviously thought carefully about detail: how one actually sketches out a person's features, attire, mannerisms, gait. This is something to emulate - the ability to make a world seem as though it is inhabited, rather than a piece of canvas on which are pencilled a few crude shapes and figures.

 

1. The Man Who Would Be King. Is there a more D&D film that has ever been made (I include actual D&D films) than this one? A platonic ideal of rogueishness, and in that sense absolutely ripe for mimicry and inspiration. 

As ever, feel free to make your own suggestions in the comments!