The Quiet Fuguelike Joy

In the comments on my previous post (about creating a 1-mile hex map of Japan with the help of Claude) somebody popped up to say: 

I don't understand how it scales up your ambitions for campaign settings - creating a map has never been the bottleneck. More hexes to fill means more human-work.

I found this interesting. Don't get me wrong - I understand the point being made. Laboriously filled in a 1-mile hex map of Japan does not on the face of it reflect a more ambitious campaign setting, which would require, if anything, the opposite (namely, big, sweeping, large-scale ideas and inventiveness). 

But I would like to stick up for this type of project, on the grounds that 'more human-work' is by no means necessarily a bad thing. I happen to think that keying a 1-mile per hex map of Japan would be a very pleasurable activity in its own right. It would be a life's work - if it took 5 minutes to key every single hex it would still take you decades, working at evenings and weekends. But would that be any more of a waste of time than doing jigsaw puzzles, playing video games, or watching TV?

Activitiy like this has its own pleasure. This is often misleadingly and ignorantly labelled 'mindfulness', although it's really the opposite of that. It is really more to be understood as the pleasure of being in a creative fugue-state, where the external world ceases to matter for a while and the conscious mind becomes absorbed in the completion of a focused task. This is the brain-state which we enter when drawing a picture, writing, practicing a musical instrument, and so on, and although it is not filled with intense pleasure it does produce a mild and continuous sense of tranquility, relaxation, and enjoyment.

A month or two ago I made a post advocating world building as a hobby in its own right, and this type of task - keying huge and detailed maps - is clearly a very concentrated and distilled version of that activity. Just now I asked Claude to make me a set of hex maps of Kyrgyzstan, at country, region, and district level. Tell me that the urge to get keying doesn't come over you when looking at this stuff:

Oh Satan, Is There Anything You Can't Do?

Drunk on power this afternoon, I commanded my demonic robot slave Claude to make some hexmaps. And I was impressed with what it came out with. I told it to produce a single 24-mile per hex hexmap of Japan for use in an OSR sandbox, then a 6-mile per hex map of each of Japan's regions (Kyushu, Shikoku, Chugoku, Kansai, etc.), and then 1-mile per hex maps of every prefecture. And it duly spat out amazingly detailed, usable, and - one must conceded - aesthetically pleasing stuff.

Here is the 24-mile per hex map of Japan (it even apologised that since some of the sea channels in Japan are less than 24 miles wide it was not able to map them accurately, and at its own initiative placed special sea borders between hexes at such locations):

Here are examples of two of the regional 6-mile hex maps (for Shikoku and Tohoku):

And here are two examples of individual prefectures (Kochi and Ishikawa) at the 1-mile hex level:

Now, you can tell these are AI-produced (note for example how the little insert map, showing where what is depicted fits into the bigger picture, just depicts a random, sliced-off corner of Asia and then sea all around - a human being would never do that). But still, you have to grant that, with about three simple prompts and 30 minutes it is a wonder that it was able to come up with all this. And it is incredibly useful; it would potentially completely revolutionise the way I prepare a campaign, and also scale-up my ambitions for what I could create in terms of campaign settings by several orders of magnitude. I would just love to get cracking keying in those hexes.

And yet, and yet, it is funny how something so marvellous can at the same time fail to satisfy. Last weekend, I happened to have created my own map of a campaign setting, the idea for which had popped into my mind almost fully formed. I won't talk about the substance here now, but here at any rate is the (unfinished and unlabelled) map I did on Worldographer:

It took me a good few hours across two evenings - let's say, at least 6 times as long as it took Claude to map out Japan in beautiful 1-mile hexes in painstaking detail. And it looks nothing like as nice as what Claude came out with. But I was much more pleased with it, because it was mine. OK, ok, so I used a software programme to do it - I didn't hand draw it. But it was my effort and labour that went into it. And doing the coastlines for those islands, not to mention the rivers (have you tried to draw rivers in Worldographer?) was fiddly and took some time to get right. I felt good about what I had done, and satisfied. It's not perfect, and it will take more work to fill everything in and get everything how I want it. But it - forgive me being pompous - feels good in my soul to have made it. 

I have over the years made a number of posts riffing on the fundamentally Satanic nature of AI art and writing. But here I come back to the main observation I made several years ago. Like the Angrborn in Gene Wolfe's The Wizard Knight, the problem, the real problem, with what Claude and its ilk produce is that, while technically incredible, lacks the capacity to be loved. As I put it back then:

We examine [what AI creates] as we would a constellation of stars - a thing that, however beautiful, is impenetrable to emotion. We do not love it in the same way that we can love a real painting by a real person, or at least recognise such a painting to be loveable in some sense to somebody even if it's not to our personal taste. We humans can love all manner of things - think of how deeply a child loves a stuffed toy, a hardworking parent loves his or her comfortable bed, a football fan loves his team, or a young person loves an item of clothing. But we do not love AI art. It is inert to our affection.

Saying that I love my own map would state the position too strongly, but I have an affection for it that no amount of highly functional and visually appealing Claude maps could possibly kindle in my heart. I want to make things, insofar as it is possible to do so, that are mine - or, with respect to things I cannot myself make, to obtain human-produced work that has the capacity to be loved. This is my position, which I find I have to stick to. 

Unicorns Are Not Just Rhinos

One of my children has a book - you will have seen the type of thing - called something like Amazing Facts About All Kinds of Things, or Isn't Science Amazing, Kids?, or Let's Be Amazed at How Amazing All the Amazing Things in the World Are. It's a big long list of questions, essentially, with 'expert' factoid responses. 'Does anything eat seagulls?'; 'What is the biggest number anybody has ever imagined?'; 'How do hovercraft hover?'; 'Why is Pluto no longer a planet?'; 'Why are plants green?'; 'Do pangolins poo?' etc.

Anyway, I was flicking through this book idly the other day and came across a question about unicorns - I think it was something along the lines of 'Where did the myth of the unicorn come from?' - and found myself becoming mildly irritated at the answer. What the book told me was that the myth of the unicorn most likely came from rumours about rhinos, which by a process of Chinese whispers (I don't think the book used that expression exactly) gave rise to the notion that there were horses running about with horns on their heads.

I always become mildly irritated when these sorts of explanations are offered for the origins of myths and legends - usually offered a la Michael Caine peering over his spectacles to announce that 'not many people know that', or Rafael Benitez insisting 'It's a fact'. The origin of dragons was people discovering old bones that belonged to dinosaurs. The origin of elves, dwarfs, fairies etc. was a cultural memory of other species of hominid. The origin of centaurs was the Greeks first encountering steppe nomads riding around on horseback. The origin of sea monsters was people seeing whales for the first time. And so on. 

I become mildly irritated on such occasions for two reasons. 

The first is that it denies to humanity its capacity to imagine, and to make up stories. Why on earth would anyone think that human beings would be incapable of dreaming up dragons, or unicorns, or centaurs, of their own accord, merely on the basis that they lived in the past? The impulse to explain mythic creatures in this way is curiously unimaginative - even imagination-denying. The entire premise seems to discount one of the most obvious features of the human intellect, which is that it can envisage things that are not real. 

The second is that it is so brutally prosaic and banalifying. Do we really think that the myth of a dragon, or a unicorn, was simply created on the basis of the existence of old bones in the ground, or rhinos, and had nothing to do with the symbolic, the expressionistic, the poetic, or even the spiritual themes with which those creatures are imbued? Is the reason why the dragon myth caught on that it explained bones in the ground, or is it rather that the idea and image of the monster resonates with us somehow at a level we are not quite consciously aware of?

The reduction of unicorns to rhinos is, in other words, precisely that - a reduction. We did not dream up a unicorn because somebody's uncle Alf talked to somebody's aunt Bessie who talked to somebody's cousin Fred who talked to his sister-in-law Harriet who talked to her friend Samantha who said she had seen something running around on four legs with a horn on its head. We dreamed them up, and continue to dream them up, because they were once imagined, and because once imagined they came to mean something. We consider them significant in semiotic terms and not because of an origin story that seems neatly tied together. And our ancestors created them not because they were stupidly trying to parse rumours of rhinos, but because they were imaginative, and creative, and liked stories. 

And the same is true across the piece. We do ourselves a disservice, and make the world and our place in it much less interesting, if we search for common sense or pseudo-historical explanations for why we possess the myths we possess. We possess them because creating myths is one of the things we do. 

Art You're Scared to Look At Directly

I have recently been going through a bit of a Fighting Fantasy trip, having found some old books in my attic roughly six months ago. I have all of the Sorcery! books on order from eBay (I only had The Shamutanti Hills in my possession) and plan to try to collect the initial run of 50. In my day it was a treat to be able to afford a book - most of my reading was taken from the shelves of the local library - so I had about ten in total. I'm hungry for more.

Anyway, one of the books I have is called The Talisman of Death, and last night I decided to page through it, not having enough time to give it a play through. And I was amazed to find an extremely powerful wave of nostalgia washing over me as I suddenly remembered its illustrations - pictures I had not looked at in at least thirty years and probably more, and which I had apparently totally forgotten about, all suddenly became as vivid and fresh to me as they had when I had first seen them all those decades ago.*

Is there a word for that feeling? I said 'nostalgia' but that is not quite right. What I mean is the feeling of suddenly encountering an artefact that triggers memories that had apparently been forgotten. I had not given a second's thought to these pictures for a considerable stretch of my life. But when I looked at them, I knew them - they felt as though they had been etched into my soul, and had just been waiting to be discovered.

A lot of the illustrations are just really great, in an extremely 80s sort of way:

But there is also among them a category of illustration that I vividly remember from my youth - art that was too scary to look at directly. You may know what I mean. You're nine years old. You have a vivid imagination. You're reading a book which has somewhat dark and 'grown-up' themes. And then you turn the page and see pictures like this:

These freaked me out as a young boy. It wasn't that they were particularly grotesque (although they are a bit). It is rather that they made me imagine things, and the things they made me imagine were terrifying. Looking at them made me afraid - not of what was in the pictures, but of what they made me imagine. I knew that to look at them would set my brain whirring, and that would set it off on a journey somewhere horrible indeed. 

Even the relatively non-grotesque art in this book has something of that quality. There is a generalised eeriness that is difficult to shake off. See, for instance, here:

To this day they give me a vague sense of unease. There is something horrible about them - 'horrible' I think being the appropriate term. They are not the stuff of conventional horror. But they are nasty. They make you feel uncomfortable and weird. You don't enjoy looking at them. They are creepy and odd.

Perhaps one has to be 9 years old to truly feel this way, and perhaps the reason I feel this way about them now is simply because I am channelling my 9 year old self. But perhaps I'm wrong. When was the last time you looked at art that scared you to look at it directly? Not because of what it depicted, but because of what it made you imagine? No adult-oriented recommendations, please - keep it clean.

*The illustrator for The Talisman of Death was called Bob Harvey. He died a few years ago, and it seems never had much of an internet presence, but he was apparently prolific. 

Big Good Guy Monsters Reviewed and Ranked

The D&D Silver Age (the period beginning at the end of the 80s and segueing into the mid-90s) were my formative years as far as the hobby goes. I was raised on 2nd edition, Dragonlance, Forgotten Realms, Dark Sun and Planescape. 

This was the era when narrative was everything and an RPG campaign was idealised as resembling a sort of interactive high fantasy novel. And as such, it created an implicit category of creature which I think of as the 'big good guy monster' - a sort of combination of Gandalf the Grey, the dragon from Neverending Story, and Yoda, who was supposed to exist to rescue the PCs from danger if a deus ex machina were required, give them quests, and/or dispense wisdom or plot advice. 

These guys are peppered throughout the AD&D 2nd edition Monstrous Manual. Generally they are of a similar type. They tend to be able to fly (so as to appear at a moment's notice); to be able to heal, dispense wishes, and things of that nature; and to be able to find or 'know' things as needed. They also tend to be powerful, so as to be able to act as an ally in a desparate battle against a red dragon (or whatever). 

Here, I review and rank them. My criteria are:

• The Big Good Guy Monster must have 7 or more HD
• The Big Good Guy Monster must be lawful good, neutral good or chaotic good (and not merely have a chance of having such an alignment)
• The Big Good Guy Monster must be L size or greater 
• The Big Good Guy Monster must not be a dragon (because otherwise the list would be dominated by dragons)

The creatures which meet these criteria, by my count, are: couatl, djinni, firbolg, reef giant, storm giant, ki-rin, lammasu (lesser and greater), werebear, guardian naga, phoenix, shedu (lesser and greater), androsphinx, titan, treant. I was in half a mind to discount treants arbitrarily because they didn't quite seem like a Big Good Guy Monster initially, but then I reflected on how ents treants appeared in The Two Towers to save the day in various guises, and changed my mind. 

They are here rated for interestingness, originality, and usefulness, with the latter defined on the basis of its usefulness for a typical Silver Age campaign, if one were of a mind to run such a thing (I emphasise I am not - this is just for fun):

Couatl - This is a vaguely central american monster that is supposed to put us mind of Quetzalcouatl and all that jazz. It inhabits jungles, deploys psionics, and is described as 'one of the most beautiful creatures in existence' (an assertion that is not exactly borne out by the illustration). It is a good place to start, as it is in many ways archetypal as a Big Good Guy Monster. It is powerful, super-intelligent, can fly, is telepathic, can go invisible, etc. It has all the characteristics one would want in a creature that you wish to use to deploy in a 'The eagles are coming!' moment, or as an otherwise powerful DM Mary Sue-style ally. It is a bit boring, though: all we're really told is it is intellectually curious, hates evil, and is generally left alone in its jungle home.

Interestingness: 2 bec de corbins; originality: 4 bec de corbins, usefulness: 4 bec de corbins

Djinni - We all know what a djinni is. This perhaps suffers from bearing the great weight of immense baggage - it either conjures images of the 1,001 Nights, or of Barbara Eden, or of Robin Williams, or perhaps of (boo, hiss!) Will Smith. In this respect it is a bit difficult to take it seriously. Boringly, there is nothing in the description about lamps or granting wishes. Rather, the djinni is described as a creature of elemental air which is able to perform various magical feats such as creating illusions or summoning whirlwinds. It does, however, have a suit of handy abilities when acting as a sidekick for the PCs, as would able to transport them around, create fake gold and treasure, and so on. 

Interestingness: 2 bec de corbins, originality: 2 bec de corbins, usefulness: 3 bec de corbins

Firbolg - This is a sort of giant hairy woodsman a little like Beorn but without the shapeshifting ability - or, perhaps, like the Ghost of Christmas Present from the Muppet Christmas Carol. I can't say it is particularly impressive or interesting. It can do various tricksy things like creating fools gold or altering itself, and is 'cautious and crafty'. One can imagine the PCs discovering a friendly firbolg village in the forest and relying on its inhabitants for age in a very generic Silver Age campaign. 

Interestingness: 1 bec de corbins, originality: 2 bec de corbins, usefulness: 2 bec de corbins

Reef Giant - This is one of the better of the giants, occupying both an interesting cultural niche (imagine a gigantic member of the front row from the Tongan rugby union side) and a useful in-game one (being the only Big Good Guy Monster suited for an aquatic or coastal campaign). Reading the description one imagines a kind of combination between said rugby player, thingy from Moana, and Ariel's dad from The Little Mermaid - a trident wielding solitary figure who inhabits a great underwater mansion. Reef giants lack many abilities though - they mostly create whirlpools.

Interestingness: 3 bec de corbins, originality: 3 bec de corbins, usefulness: 3 bec de corbins

Storm Giant - Storm giants are meant to invoke Zeus, but also - in common with many Big Good Guy Monsters, Gandalf. They are big blokes with big beards who live in castles in the clouds (or occasionally underwater) and have many weather- or lightning-related abilities. Again, one imagines that the position one would occupy in a campaign is a sort of free-standing powerful ally who the PCs might request to intervene in battles with Big Bad Evil Guys or, who, perhaps, commands them to do quests necessary for the saving of the world. The image of a cloud castle is itself a nice one, and I do quite like the idea of having a map with a Storm Giant palace on it somewhere. There is nothing wrong with Big Good Guy Monsters, even in an OSR campaign, if they are billed as stand-offish, mysterious, powerful entities one would do well not to cross. 

Interestingness: 3 bec de corbins, originality: 2 bec de corbins, usefulness: 3 bec de corbins

Ki-rin - The ki-rin is a kind of celestial Chinese reptilian unicorn with golden scales (fun fact: in Japanese kirin is also the word for a giraffe, presumably because of its resemblance to the mythological creature). Its D&D iteration, however, is one of the ultimate Mary Sues - it is a perfect flyer, telepathic, psionic, magical (as an 18th level magic-user) and extremely powerful in a fight. And it also possesses all sorts of other useful abilities, including being able to create magic items, go to the Ethereal and Astral planes at will, create perfect and near-permanent illusions, and so on. And they are more or less designed with the Silver Age model in mind. We are told in the description that 'Ki-rin come to the aid of humanoids if asked properly or if such beings are faced with a powerful, extremely evil being. Ki-rin believe in self-improvement, though, and do not casually come to a humanoid's aid except in the most dire of circumstances.' We are also told that 'Ki-rin spend most of their time pursuing their own affairs. They often monitor the activities of powerful evil creatures and beings. If such beings become too malevolent, the ki-rin act against them. Ki-rin may reward allies or needy individuals by creating food and valuables.' If that doesn't scream RECURRING PLOT DEVICE to you with the volume turned up to 11, you must be stone deaf. 

Interestingness: 3 bec de corbins, originality: 2 bec de corbins (it is really just a rehash of other similar beings), usefulness: 5 bec de corbins

Lammasu (lesser and greater) - The Lammasu is cursed with a faintly ridiculous-looking piece of art (how could they mess up such great source material as real-life pictures and statues of lammasu?) and, I have to say, a too-transparent shtick. Lammasu are more or less written into the game to provide the D&D with a Get Out of Jail Free card if he feels the PCs are in too much danger and their plot immunity is threatened.   Hence, 'Since lammasu are concerned for the welfare and safety of good beings, they almost always enter combat if they see good creatures being threatened, in the way least likely to cause harm to the good beings.' A lot more could have been done with the concept, frankly. They can heal people, fly, and do telepath....... zzzzz

Interestingness: 2 bec de corbins, originality: 1 bec de corbin, usefulness: 3 bec de corbins

Werebear - A bit of a change of pace. Werebears, controversially, do not fly and are not telepathic. They exist to perform a Beorn-function, or else possibly act as a powerful sidekick: 'Only the rare individual (usually young) can be coaxed into joining a band of adventurers. Werebears may join an adventuring group as guides, provided the money is right and the job is agreeable.' I'm sure that this device exists in ten thousand fantasy novels, though right now I can't quite think of one.

Interestingness: 2 bec de corbins, originality: 1 bec de corbin, usefulness: 3 bec de corbins

Guardian Naga: There are scholars and sages who may dispute whether the guardian naga qualifies as a Big Good Guy Monster. The description is terse: it guards the treasure of 'a like-aligned being's treasure or some evil'. But it does meet the criteria, so I shall include it. And it must be said that the idea of a lawful good guardian acting as sentinel over some ancient evil is an intriguing and highly evocative one. Again, I could see myself putting that in a dungeon or on a hexmap somewhere. 

Interestingness: 3 bec de corbins, originality: 3 bec de corbins, usefulness: 3 bec de corbins

Phoenix - Phoenixes er, fly and are telepathic. Other than that, they are almost unfairly powerful - 20 HD, many, many spell-like powers, etc. With all of that said, they are rescued from a by-the-numbers feel by two things: the self-immolating mechanic and rebirth, and also the fact that their feathers can be used to make magic items or sold for vast sums. Clearly the phoenix has a Mary Sue element to it, but it is intrinsically a much more interesting concept than, say, the ki-rin or coautl, especially given the somewhat melancholic, even tragic nature of its death-and-rebirth cycle.

Interestingness: 4 bec de corbins, originality: 3 bec de corbins, usefulness: 3 bec de corbins

Shedu (lesser and greater) - The Shedu is cursed with an even worse-looking piece of art than that for the lammasu. In fact it may be one of the worst pieces of D&D art in existence. Even the designers seem to have struggled with this one - almost the entire description consists of reams of psionic abilities. Shedu, wait for it, can also, er, fly and do telepath...zzzzz

Interestingness: 1 bec de corbin, originality: 1 bec de corbin, usefulness: 2 bec de corbins

Androsphinx - The androsphinx may not really be the best example of a Big Good Guy Monster, as their description reveals them to be, frankly, a bit twattish. They don't like female sphinxes because the latter are more intelligent, despise humans, hate riddles, and do little of note. They are like the Victor Meldrew of sphinxes. But they are Chaotic Good and satisfy the other criteria, so they have to be in the mix.

Interestingness: 2 bec de corbin, originality: 2 bec de corbin, usefulness: 1 bec de corbins

Titan - It is difficult to know exactly what to make of titans. They are, we are repeatedly told, 'godlike' and 'like gods', but 'not gods', albeit that they are 'in all ways godlike' and often 'mistake[n] for deities'. I'm glad to have cleared that up for you. They are like a giant 20th level fighter mixed with a giant 20th level cleric and a giant 20th level magic-user, with lots of other spell-like abilities thrown in, and especially deadly melee attacks. They each also have their own unique abilities, which the DM is presumably supposed to make up. They would be necessary to have in an Ancient Greece-themed campaign, I think. Otherwise, they fulfil a similar function to a storm giant, ancient gold dragon, and so on. 

Interestingness: 3 bec de corbin, originality: 2 bec de corbin, usefulness: 2 bec de corbins

Treant - You know what treants are. They're Treebeard. They are very powerful in a fight, and can control trees to aid them in battle. 'Treants (regardless of size) and treant-controlled trees can inflict structural damage when attacking a building or fortification.' So watch it, Saruman. 

Interestingness: 3 bec de corbins, originality: 1 bec de corbin, usefulness: 2 bec de corbins

THE RESULTS

The final ranking, averaging all of the marks across the three criteria for all Big Good Guy Monsters, is as follows. You may provide you own drum roll, possibly by tapping your fingers on the table in front of you:

1 = Couatl: 3.333 bec de corbins

1 = Ki-rin: 3.333 bec de corbins

1 = Phoenix: 3.333 bec de corbins

4 = Guardian Naga: 3 bec de corbins

4 = Reef Giant: 3 bec de corbins

6 = Storm Giant: 2.666 bec de corbins

7 = Djinni: 2.333 bec de corbins

7 = Titan: 2.333 bec de corbins

9 = Lammasu: 2 bec de corbins

9 = Werebear: 2 bec de corbins

9 = Treant: 2 bec de corbins 

12 = Androsphinx: 1.666 bec de corbins

12 = Firbolg: 1.666 bec de corbins

14 = Shedu: 1.333 bec de corbins

So there you have it. shedus are shit and should live in sheds. Couatls are cool, ki-rins kick ass, and phoenixes...er....pheel it. Here endeth the lesson, 

5e-splaining the OSR

I recently watched an interesting YouTube video in which Ben Milton and somebody I have not heard of before called Daði discuss, among other things, OSR lethality:

This apparently stems from another video which Daði, a 5e DM, made, in which he put forward some claims about OSR lethality and how it can lead to player disengagement. The thesis (which has some validity to it) is that high levels of PC turnover can make the entire exercise seem throwaway, and that also - I think this is just implied - there is a phoneybaloney 'I'm really tough because I play a form of elfgame in which characters die a lot' element to the OSR player base that gets very tiresome very quickly. 

In this conversation, Ben makes the useful claim that in the early levels (really just level 1) an OSR dungeon expedition is like a heist - the PCs are so fragile they are just trying to get in, get some treasure, and get out again. I had never heard of things put that way before, but it's really an excellent word for describing what an OSR campaign feels like at the table; the 'lived experience' of play at level 1 is, more or less, exactly that.

Ben goes on to point out, however, that as soon as PCs in an OSR game gain levels they become a lot less fragile. And the game indeed very rapidly moves through the gears. Being a murderhobo in Fantasy Fucking Vietnam is a very short phase. Once a PC is 4th level the campaign looks very different.

I think Milton is here hitting on a very important point which OSR enthusiasts tend to undersell. The reason why I like playing OSR D&D is not really because I'm METAL and like PCs dying. (Though I do really like the element of jeopardy that is present during the D&D-as-heist period of a campaign.) It is rather that, if anything, it gives the players a sense of achievement which games which presume plot-immunity cannot match. The feeling of having successfully navigated a level 1 PC to level 4 or so is truly satisfying because it is genuinely difficult and nothing is guaranteed. And this, if anything, I would suggest forges a greater and more geniune sense of connectedness to a PC than those generated by a more 'silver age' 5e playstyle.

That is, the central proposition - that 'your character doesn't matter' in an OSR game whereas it does in a 5e one - is, I think, based on a flawed premise that perhaps results from people not playing OSR campaigns of sufficient length. I have never found that characters 'don't matter' in OSR games. Rather, I have found that they start off by not mattering very much, but quickly become important by dint of how much energy and time and thought has been dedicated to trying to make sure they survive. They come to matter a great deal, and that is what the process of low-level play is really all about. 

There is a tendency, in other words, to slightly oversell the difference between people who like playing 'mainstream' D&D and those who prefer the OSR playstyle. No doubt there are important differences and we could, if we wanted to, spend a long time listing them all if it hadn't already been done to death in 2008. But the emphasis on the importance of character is not, I think, one of them. OSR players love their PCs too (once you get past the 'my veins are as cold as ice and I care nothing for your special snowflake character' shtick). It is just that the relationship between player and PC is forged during play rather than during the process of generating the character.

Get Busy Writing or Get Busy Dying

I have never read David Gemmell - his oeuvre somehow passed me by. But I have been inspired to do so by a recent article in the Telegraph which caught my eye. It is sadly paywalled, but here are the main bits:

David Gemmell is our greatest fantasy author since Tolkien – but is being written out of history

In 1976, journalist David Gemmell received the devastating news that, at age 27, he might be dying of cancer. “I felt ill. A lot of weight was gone. I was passing blood,” Gemmell would recall. “It’s not a nice thought, cancer of the kidneys.” 

There was a two-week wait until the tests came back. It was the longest fortnight of Gemmell’s life, during which he did not know whether he would live or die. But rather than brood, he sat at his typewriter and wrote what was to become one of the most important British fantasy novels of the Eighties, the gritty blockbuster eventually published as Legend. 

Gemmell did not, as it turned out, have cancer. Yet those two weeks of sheer, existential terror would be the furnace in which was forged one of the most distinctive fantasy voices of his generation. More than distinctive: his grim, cynical take on the JRR Tolkien school of heroic storytelling arguably influenced subsequent generations of authors, not least Game of Thrones’s George RR Martin, whose unflinching style echoed Gemmell’s stark world-view. 

But today, at a time when fantasy is dominated by the gooey milieu of “romantasy”, there is a case to be made that Gemmell – whose worth is now being celebrated with a new collection – is not nearly as well known as he deserves and has even been written out of history. He was absent from Time’s 2020 countdown to the 100 Best Fantasy Novels of All Time and was also missing from a similar list published by Penguin Random House. Shockingly, a David Gemmell forum on Reddit clocks up just 1,000 weekly visits, while that for the Dungeon Crawler Carl series – the hot new saga in fantasy – has 275,000. Gemmell is the incredible shrinking giant of 20th-century fantasy. 

 

That’s despite an origin story almost every bit as striking as Tolkien’s admission that the opening lines of The Hobbit came to him in a delirium of boredom whilst he was marking exam papers. In the shadow of his cancer scare, Gemmell had written the first draft of Legend in two weeks – but left the ending open-ended. The novel was a metaphor for his illness, with the flinty hero Druss (modelled on his stepfather Bill Woodford) and sidekick Rek (an insert for the author) defending the crumbling fortress of Dros Delnoch against invading hordes of the Nadir – who symbolised the cancer he believed was ravaging his body. 

“It was so terrifying at that period – the only thing I could do to take my mind off the fear of dying was to write. I created a decaying fortress under siege from a terrible enemy,” he later said. “The idea was I would write in the two weeks I was waiting for the tests. If I had cancer, the fortress would fall.”

...

He was in his way, as significant a figure as Tolkien, says fantasy author James Worrad... “Someone once called him ‘English fantasy’s second wind’ and there’s some truth to that,” he tells me. “If you stand back far enough away it’s Tolkien and Gemmell you can make out, jutting up from the genre’s landscape like two mountains.”

I am sure that Gemmell's original draft of Legend was far from perfect, full of holes and inconsistencies, and read badly. But still - the idea of just sitting down and writing out a whole novel in two weeks is both an intimidating and inspiring prospect. Anybody can write a novel. You just need to sit down and write a novel. So why don't people do it more? Why haven't I done it? Why haven't you?

These thoughts chime with others inspired by an interview with Steve Jackson, of UK Games Workshop/Fighting Fantasy fame, which I recently read. In it, he describes how the other Steve Jackson, the American Stave Jackson associated with GURPS and The Fantasy Trip and others, came to London and ended up writing a fighting fantasy book:

Steve had flown over to London from Texas to talk to Ian and I about Games Workshop distributing his games in Europe. We’d mentioned Fighting Fantasy and how well it was doing. We also mentioned that competing publishers were beginning to publish their own gamebooks and, in response to this, Puffin wanted to publish a new gamebook every month. There was no way Ian and I could write an adventure a month, so we’d decided to sign up other authors to create new FF books. Anyway, the business side of things was sorted quite quickly. So we then asked Steve if he’d like us to take him to Stonehenge, or the Tower of London – all the places Americans want to see in the UK. But no. He didn’t want to go anywhere. He just asked for a desk and a typewriter. And he spent the next 3 days writing a Fighting Fantasy book!

That book apparently became Scorpion Swamp, which came out not long after. I am not sure whether he wrote the whole thing in three days, of course. But still - he did write it. He just sat down and did it. Anybody, in other words, can write a gamebook. You just need to sit down and write a gamebook.

Let me repeat, for the avoidance of doubt: anybody can write anything they like. You just need to write it. So what are you waiting for? What am I waiting for? What's stopping me? What's stopping you?

Lego Faces and the Death of Freeform Play

 

One of the saddest and strangest developments of my lifetime has been the gradual replacement of the generic Lego smiley face with those displaying fixed cartoonish expressions of various kinds. OK, it's not quite the invasion of Iraq or the 2008 financial crisis or rising inflation. But you know what I mean.

Let's take a step back for a moment in order to explain. I would like to coin a new word for you now: the word I am going to coin is genericism.

genericism, n.

The favouring of the standard, or the general; the avoidance of the specific, or the varied. 

Genericism has its benefits and its pitfalls - it is not a virtue in itself. But when it comes to toys which are to be used in imaginative play, it is important, because it allows the child (or the grown man or woman, indeed) to project whatever he or she wants into the toy in question. If all Lego faces are blandly smiling, then that is tantamount to them having any facial expression whatsoever, or none at all. They can therefore be angry, sad, happy, upset, tired, or whatever, depending on how they are being imagined in the moment. The fact that they are all generically blandly smiling means they can all readily be something else in the mind's eye.

However, when some or all Lego faces have distinctive facial expressions - when genericism is repudiated - this has the effect, perversely, of making them harder to play with. It is not impossible, of course, to imagine that this Lego figure with the permanently angry/scared/tired face is not angry/scared/tired in any given moment within the context of imaginative play. But it nonetheless feels awkward. It requires more of an imaginative leap. Within the mind's eye, the angry-faced Lego figure is angry. And it is harder to picture them as being scared, tired, or anything else.

Another way of putting this is that while the Lego creators seem to have deliberately walked down a path towards what they think of as creative variance, what they have actually really done is blandify their product. They have stopped thinking about it as a toy and instead chosen to focus on what looks good. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that this is deliberate - that the 'faceification' of Lego figures, if I can call it that, is part of a wider shift away from imagining Lego as a toy and re-conceiving it as a collectable that mostly sits on shelves looking nice. If so, it is perhaps to be expected, but rather a shame. And it is connected to something that I think is rather sad about modern childhood itself: all around me I notice that children's opportunities to use their imaginations are being squeezed. Lego ought to be one at the forefront of the battle against this. But the company seems not particularly to care. 

The Revenant Lake

 

Looking around on wikipedia earlier today, as one does, I came across the entry for Tulare Lake. This is a lake in California which, although once the biggest lake by surface area west of the Mississippi, is now 'ephemeral'. It dried up in the second half of the 19th century but periodically reappears, for instance when there are high levels of snowmelt, or rain. The most recent such event was in 2023.

The photo above is from the wikipedia site and it has the arresting subtitle, 'Part of the revenant Tulare Lake near Alpaugh'. The revenant lake! God bless you, anonymous wikipedia uploader, for that turn of phrase and the image it conjures - a lake not just returned, but brought back in undeath to seek revenge on those who have wronged it.

I do not picture the revenant lake to be one from which a horde of zombies simply pours forth, although that might be a good premise for a film. Rather, what I imagine is that, long ago, there was a large lake (perhaps even a huge one like the now-almost-disappeared Aral Sea) which dried up for Wizard Reasons - probably because a powerful archmage needed to use all of the water for a spell or to power a mighty golem or something of that nature. It now lies bare and dry and salty, a little like modern day Moynaq without, of course, the Soviet-era fishing vessels:

But periodically, perhaps only every few centuries, the lake returns, bringing with it the ghosts of those who once lived in and around it (and in it!). For a year or so, a lost world is present. There are great fish, aquatic beasts and birds, serpents and water-dragons. And there are the people who long ago dwelt in and around the lake too - fishers, hunters, and also more organised groups whose civilisation was destroyed when the lake disappeared. 

The inhabitants of this lost world are, I think it is safe to say, hostile. When the lake disappeared their livelihoods and lives went with it. And so when the waters rise they emerge also, preparing to exact vengeance on the 'quick' for what their ancestors did long ago. But they had a civilisation of their own - old temples, palaces, and water-gardens - which they bring with them, and the trappings of this civilisation also return, ripe for exploration. 

When somewhere is ripe for exploration, what typically tends to happen in my experience is that D&D adventurers come and explore it. You may have found this too. When the revenant lake returns, the local people hide themselves away from its dangers. But PCs go where the locals fear to tread - and bring back with them whatever treasures, magicks, and ancient knowledge they can find...

The useful thing about this setting would be the opportunity to develop rules for underwater gaming, or even systematising a quasi-saltbox (freshbox?), both of which are in my list of 'incompletely systematised campaign types'. Anyonymous wikipedia uploader of photos - I salute you!

Why Nerd Games Matter

I was born in the opposite of a crossfire hurricane. My home town, New Brighton, lies at the end of a peninsula, and in the 1980s it felt like the end in every respect - the road to nowhere, literal and figurative. You may be familiar with Morrissey's song, 'Every day is like Sunday'? This is what it felt like to grow up where I grew up having been born in 1981:

Trudging slowly over wet sand 

Back to the bench where your clothes were stolen 

This is the coastal town 

That they forgot to close down 

Armageddon, come Armageddon 

Come, Armageddon, come

Things have revived now, as is the way of things, and the old place has become something of a hipster boomtown, full of AirBnBs and microbreweries. But back then it was just pubs, houses, and the faded trappings of a near-derelict resort town gone past tawdriness and into sadness. 

The photographer Martin Parr famously captured the New Brighton of that era in a book called The Last Resort. To look at its contents is almost unbearably nostalgic for me, now - this almost literally is my childhood. But at the same time, the nostalgia is leavened by memories of how small and tough life felt back then. The world was warmer, because it was a world of community and togetherness - a world of 'popping in for a cuppa', a world of neighbours chatting over back garden fences, a world of people sitting on their front doorsteps watching life go by, a world of whistled tunes and flirting and shared jokes with strangers - and things have got gradually colder in the time since. But horizons were narrow and aspiration and inspiration were hard to come by:

That world felt as though there was nothing really in it except us.

To an imaginative kid growing up in that world, books mattered. My family had nothing back then, but there was a library not far away, and the library had things in it there were not from my world. They were from different galaxies. They had pictures on them of things like dragons, swords, and mountains. And they told stories about things like empires, jungles, volcanoes, and epic journey. And to somebody like me, reading them didn't feel like escape - it felt like release. It felt like being given license to imagine that there was more. Not just more physically (more than litter, fish and chip shops, football and the promenade), but more emotionally and even spiritually: adventure was a thing - adventure was something that you could do.

The best of these books were Fighting Fantasy books, because they were not just books; they made you the adventurer, and the experience of reading them was more visceral than any novel. To a 45 year old writing in 2026 the flaws are visible everywhere, but to a 9 year old in 1990 they were a super-drug far more potent even than The Lord of the Rings. You were not just watching but partaking, and in the partaking you were learning, almost through praxis, that you could reach above, and beyond, and outwards. D&D of course, when that became an option, only concentrated and focused that feeling, 

Fans of Fighting Fantasy and other nerd games may enjoy some YouTube video series I've recently been enjoying, in which the series is reviewed.

This guy has been working his way through the Fighting Fantasy books, and the bulk of his reviews are of those, but he has reviewed some Lone Wolf volumes and others, too. His videos are pleasingly understated and genuine, with a very natural, conversational style.

This guy, on the other hand, is more polished and slick, and makes great use of visual aids; the downside is that he is taking his time getting from book to book, and has only so far covered the first half-dozen or so.

This guy, meanwhile, is short and to the point. English readers familiar with Match of the Day will see something of Martin Keown in him - he's intense, no-nonsense, makes everything sound important. Watching these videos is a bit like getting into a conversation with a passionate enthusiast in a pub. 

I sense kindred spirits in these fellas and give them plaudits and kudos. Maybe they were from places like New Brighton too.