Satan Helps Elucidate Skywalker's Rescue Plot

To cut a long story short, I was recently on a long-haul flight and ended up watching The Empire Strike Back and part of Return of the Jedi on the in-flight entertainment screen.

I haven't watched a Star Wars film since The Force Awakens came out at the cinema and I don't believe I had seen any for some time before that either. But there was nothing else on that I wanted to watch (apart from the surprisingly good Everything Everywhere All At Once) and 13 hours is a long time to sit and read without a break. So I watched Empire, was reminded that it is actually a genuinely good and accomplished film, and was enthused enough by the experience that I decided to just get straight into Jedi next.

I loved Return of the Jedi as a kid and was, in a way, childishly looking forward to a rewatch - after what must be approaching twenty years. I know it is maligned in certain circles as the place where the rot set in - and at times it does have the feeling of the prequels, as it were, avant la lettre. But the Jedi I remember from my childhood remains a fun, action-packed roller-coaster ride filled with excitement but leavened by sweet and even moving moments, as when Luke reveals to Leia he is her brother, or when Yoda dies. Yes the ewoks were, in my memory, a bit of an embarrassing misstep. But I also remembered loving the Endor battle when I was a boy and feeling my heart lift every time those furry underdogs destroyed an ATAT walker with a well-placed spitball or made a Stormtrooper slip over on a banana skin or catch his toe in a mouse trap or whatever. So I was up for it, big time. 

What I discovered was that Jedi is just a dreadful film for its first half - almost execrably bad. So bad indeed that I found it practically unwatchable. It is all over the place, filled with ill-judged humour (like the droid being tortured) and weird vignettes that spoil the pacing (like the dance sequence, made unnecessarily longer by Lucas's CGI meddling). And the plot to rescue Han, I thought, doesn't just make little sense, but is also internally inconsistent: I kept asking myself why on earth would Luke send R2D2 and C3PO as gifts to Jabba given that everything we know about Luke previously has indicated a total loyalty to his comrades? Why would Leia be there if Luke has a plan already hatched to free Han? Why doesn't Luke just go in first to negotiate? What is Lando supposed to be doing? 

I got as far as the speeders-in-redwoods bit and gave up. Later, after landing (I don't want to suggest it was the first thing I did when getting off the plane, but it may have been in the first ten things) I sent a message to some friends on WhatsApp observing that the plot to liberate Han made no sense, and wondering why I hadn't realised this as a kid. 

One friend messaged me back the following sequence of messages:

The plot makes perfect sense. It was all about lulling Jabba into a false sense of security. Lando is undercover. Chewie, Leia and the droids go in in such a way as to make Jabba think he is winning or more crafty than our heroes. 

(admittedly C-3PO doesn’t know he is going in but that adds to making Jabba and his cronies believe the story and underestimate Luke) 

In pre-Disney takeover canon, Bib Fortuna and Luke were meeting secretly beforehand; Luke was negotiating for Han’s release and Bib was trying to see if Luke was in some way useful to overthrowing Jabba and installing himself as leader 

Bib Fortuna survived the explosion on the sail barge and then promptly had his brain removed by the spidery monks that live in various parts of the palace (who are weird Force monks that can only commune fully when their brain is in a spider-walker)

Now, one of my biggest pet peeves in life is when the plot of a film can only be made to make sense by retrospectively making it canon that ackshually it was weird Force monks, or whatever (JJ Abrams is always guilty of this type of thing in his film-making); if a film can't make sense in its own right then it is QED a film that makes no sense. But I was amused by the fact that a big exercise had evidently taken place to give a post hoc justification for the Solo rescue and today, recalling the exchange, I decided to ask Satan about it. Here's what Claude's Opus 4.8 with 'extra thinking' and tweaked by my default instructions not to be an obsequious arsehole, came up with:

Short version: there isn't a single authoritative, Lucas-stated breakdown of "the plan." What gets called the canonical explanation is mostly a charitable post-hoc reconstruction that fans and tie-in writers built to make the sequence cohere, plus what's inferable from the film and a few Legends/reference sources. The film deliberately withholds the plan so the audience is as much in the dark as Jabba. With that caveat, here's the reconstruction that's become the accepted reading: 

The operation is a series of escalating contingencies, each a fallback for the one before, with a direct assault ruled out (in Legends, because the Empire had blockaded Tatooine to catch incoming Rebels).

Phase one is diplomacy and bribery. The droids arrive alone carrying Luke's holographic message: he asks Jabba to release Han and offers C-3PO and R2-D2 as a "gift." The critical detail is that R2 is carrying Luke's lightsaber. If Jabba takes the deal, Han walks free with no violence. Jabba refuses. 

Phase two is stealth. Leia, disguised as the bounty hunter Boushh, uses Chewbacca-as-captive as cover to get inside and collect the bounty, then thaws Han at night and tries to slip him out. Lando is already embedded among the guards as the inside man. If this works, they exfiltrate quietly. Jabba was awake; they're caught. 

Phase three is Luke himself as last resort. He walks in, reveals he's a Jedi, tries the mind trick, and is prepared to escalate. The lightsaber stashed with R2 is the ace in the hole — when everyone is condemned to the Sarlacc and concentrated on the sail barge, R2 launches it to Luke and the heroes turn the tables.

The load-bearing claim in the charitable reading is that the "failures" aren't failures: each blown phase still advances the board, getting all the players inside and ultimately out at the Pit of Carkoon, away from the fortified palace, with the weapon present. Some readings push this further and argue Luke needed Leia's capture. The supporting textual evidence people cite is that R2 holds the lightsaber back during the rancor fight and only deploys it at the barge — implying that moment, not the rancor, was always the intended endgame. 

Where I'd push back on calling any of this "canonical": the rancor was plainly not planned (Luke is just surviving), the mind trick failing on a Hutt is a genuine setback rather than a feint, and the layered-intent version requires assuming Luke foresaw specific failures the film never shows him anticipating. The most defensible statement is that Lucas intended to portray a now-confident Jedi running a graduated infiltration with a weapon pre-positioned via the droids — the precise "he planned every capture" choreography is fan apologetics, not established canon.

Get that, anonymous friend, who I am sure is reading this? It is fan apologetics, not established canon.

Intrigued by the role of Bib Fortuna, I asked it about that too:

Mostly real, with two embellishments and one outright error. The core comes from a genuine Legends source: "Of the Day's Annoyances: Bib Fortuna's Tale" by M. Shayne Bell, in the 1995 anthology Tales from Jabba's Palace. Going through the claim piece by piece: 

Bib survived the barge and got disembrained by the monks — accurate, but not "promptly." In Legends he escapes the sail barge explosion on a private skiff and returns to the palace. He then tries to seize Jabba's empire and actually wins a scuffle over the remaining possessions — he's the apparent victor for a stretch. Then the B'omarr monks emerge from the cellars and forcibly remove his brain. So there's a takeover-and-battle phase first; it isn't immediate. (In the X-Wing comic Battleground: Tatooine, his disembodied brain later gets subordinated to a rival Twi'lek, Firith Olan, and eventually transplanted into a fresh body.) 

Luke negotiating with Bib for Han — partly real, "secret meetings beforehand" is a stretch. The story does have Bib dealing with Luke, who wants to arrange Han's return. So a Luke–Bib negotiation exists in Legends. But "secret meetings beforehand" oversells it; the summary frames it as the business surrounding Luke's approach, not a clandestine pre-arranged back-channel. The kernel is true, the cloak-and-dagger framing is your friend's gloss. 

Bib using Luke to overthrow Jabba — grounded but extrapolated. Bib's overthrow motive is dead-on for Legends: he's characterized as the man with more plots against Jabba than anyone, "somehow involved in every plot against Jabba," positioned to inherit the empire no matter who lands the killing blow. So "Bib wanted to overthrow Jabba and install himself" is solid. The specific claim that he was sizing up Luke as the instrument for that coup is a reasonable inference but not something the text establishes — that's your friend connecting dots. 

"Weird Force monks that can only commune fully when their brain is in a spider-walker" — this is wrong. The B'omarr Order isn't a Force tradition. They're an ascetic religious order pursuing enlightenment through total separation from the material world — they remove their own members' brains and put them in nutrient jars so the mind can contemplate the cosmos undistracted by the body and senses. Nothing Force-based about it. And the mechanism is backwards: the enlightened state is the disembodied brain in the jar. The spider-walker (a BT-16 perimeter droid) is just a chassis that lets a brain-in-a-jar move around the physical world when it needs to — it's mobility hardware, not a communion-enabler. If anything, leaving the jar to ride a walker is a concession to the material plane, not the path to fuller communion. 

So your friend has the right story and most of the beats, invented a "Force monk / commune via walker" cosmology that isn't there, and slightly novelized the Luke angle.

Pro tip: it really helps if you say 'The B'omarr Order isn't a Force tradition' using the voice of the fellow in the Simpsons who tells Marge that 'Some guys at MIT are sending us a list of reasons why Captain Picard is better than Captain Kirk'.

Why, why, why, Delilah?

I recently recorded a podcast episode for higher-level backers of the Yoon-Suin 2nd edition kickstarter, in which I was subjected to some tough questions about certain aspects of the book. I liked the line of questioning, as I think it made the conversation much more interesting than a series of underarm throws ('Tell us exactly what else is brilliant about Chapter Four?'). But I wanted to expand in written form about an aspect of one question that particularly interested me.

The question was about what the interviewer called 'magical misandry', namely a theme which apparently (I hadn't realised this) crops up a few times in the book, and which I will describe as the 'Delilah motif'. This is the succubus-style female monster who uses magical or surreptitious means to deprive an, implicitly male, PC of his strength and vitality, or to kill or enslave him.

I name this the Delilah motif after the biblical character Delilah, who as you will know deprived Samson of his strength by cutting his hair while he lay across her thighs - it being strongly implied that this was after a bit of good old rumpy-pumpy. I am sure there are earlier examples if it in human myth, but this is familiar enough to have resonance.

The important thing about the Delilah motif is that, while we may disapprove of it or look askance at what it says about male-female relations, it also speaks in what I think is a very interesting way to a stereotyped feature of those relations which you can think of almost as the inverse, or evil twin, of the story of Beauty and the Beast. Why does Beauty and the Beast have particular power, such that it is basically the plot of almost every romance novel that has ever been written (woman meets strong, virile, wild male figure - vampire, pirate, werewolf, sadomasochist billionaire, etc. - and civilises him with her femininity)? It is because it speaks to a desire that appears to be deep-rooted in a great many people. The mythically or semiotically feminine transforms the mythically or semiotically masculine into something which can be good and productive in human society. Female love transforms the bad boy into a good man. And both women and men respond to that concept in fiction, at least in very large numbers.

(The list of confirmations of this truth are so many it is barely worth even beginning to start - I suppose we could write down 'Han Solo' and start from there.)

The Delilah motif interestingly and powefully inverts that notion by playing on the male fear of being civilised. Here I am drinking mead, eating syrup from the corpses of lions, swinging my dick in the wilderness and killing a thousand Philistines with the jawbone of a donkey, and it's great. And she wants me to settle down? Here feminine power is not portrayed as the redemptive power of love ('I've been saved by a woman...'), but as something which saps a man of his strength and vitality and ultimately weakens him to the point of incapacity. This is the stereotyped fear, familiar to us from sitcoms, soap operas and Hollywood movies, in the heart of the irresponsible male of being tied to a particular woman (it being no accident of course that Samson ends up being tied with rope after his seduction and impromptu short-back-and-sides). 

The Beauty and the Beast story and the Delilah motif exist in a state of productive tension in almost every romcom that ever was created, with the female character functioning as both transformative saviour and threat, and the male character functioning as both magnificent untamed beast and irresponsible fly-by-night, with the tension being finally resolved in balance of the former in both instances. And this is part of their charm and what (to a great many people) is part of the joy of male-female courtship rituals in their traditional form.

What monsters such as the succubus (and those of its ilk in Yoon-Suin) really do is simply trade on the Delilah motif in a way that, while it may not sit right in contemporary mores, strikes at the heart of that tension and essentially resolves it in the opposite direction to a romcom. You might even say that this is what the great many horror films that trade on that motif also do (whether as a minor incident, as in the opening to Phantasm, or as the whole plot of the film, as in Audition). They just tip the balance from Beauty and the Beast to Delilah.

And in that regard I don't think there is anything wrong with exploring that motif in D&D monster form. No, it isn't a healthy way to imagine male-female relationhips. But since when did any monster succeed by being a healthy reflection of anything? The point of a good monster is to disturb. And one way to effectively disturb people is to take a trope with which they are familiar - and which is extremely deep-rooted across cultures - and exploit it. So why not? 

And In My Last Hour I'm a Slave to the Power of Death

Apropos of nothing, here are eight ideas for megadungeons, each inspired by the title and lyrical themes of  the Iron Maiden album Powerslave (1984):

Aces High - A storm giant's tower, seated on a cloud; it is reached by climbing to a high mountain peak and then casting off by glider, which limits how much treasure can be taken back or forth (and from which some loot may simply fall off). The giant's goblin servants maintain a fleet of dirigibles, and use these to wage war on the aaracokra and sylphs who inhabit the region. Within the tower itself the giant slumbers, under a curse, and guarded by his silver dragon wife. His other servants include lightning mephits, automata and giff mercenaries - but entire floors have been taken over by interlopers in the master's de facto absence.

Two Minutes to Midnight - Down in the roots of the mountains mighty forces once arrayed against one another in a confrontation that could have spelled the end of space and time - at least within a continent. One was a great demon, another a mighty archmage, another an undead lord, the fourth a dragon queen. But in order to stave off the apocalyptic conflict that was sure to ensue, a demigod placed these four protagonists in time-freeze, together with their servants, in half-mile diameter sphere of stasis. They are frozen down there still, waiting to be released - along with their servants and treasures - but the roots of the mountain are deep, and over the eons many other threats and powers have populated the tunnels and caverns which lead to the stasis-sphere. The other snag is that the only way to get at the treasure held by the four is to bring the stasis-sphere to an end...and thus release them.

Losfer Words (Big 'Orra) - A monastery of monks who cut out their tongues to approach a god that cannot be named. Their home was under a spell of permanent silence and remains so, but the monks all long ago went mad and their god with them. Now many intruders have made their homes in the Labyrinth of Absolute Quiet - but some of the monks wander still, as undead, demonic, or both.

Flash of the Blade - The greatest swordsman who ever lived, wielding a possible sword, created for himself a fortress which he populated with many varieties of servitors and guardians, and then became a recluse. Rumour has it that he has died, or gone away, and that his 3,000 year-old sword - perhaps the most puissant artefact that exists - lies abandoned somewhere inside it.

The Duellists - Two demigods are locked in eternal conflict in the lost city of Tyre. Once the two were worshipped equally and shared the city between them; then a rivalry developed and the two fought each other until no inhabitants remained - and beyond. They still haunt the streets, ambushing, stalking, each sworn that it may not rest until the other is slain. They are watched over by a ghost who referees their struggle judging from an obscure rulebook. But meanwhile in the old sewers and tunnels and catacombs beneath the city life - and unlife - thrives, boiling up from the Underdark below.

Back in the Village - A reversal, natch. The PCs are dungeon-dwellers. The village is where the danger lies. They try to raid the human world for gold and glory.

Powerslave - A ruined pyramid where the god-kings once were resident in the months before their great sacrifice and the mantle was passed to the next god-king. This was until it so happened that one such god-king declared that he would not be a slave to death but would make death a slave of his own, and that he would live forever. And sure enough, he has, though he has grown decrepit and senile in the thousand years since. His servants are smorgasbord of ancient Egyptian-style creatures (including scarab-men, jackal-headed assassins, and so on) and those desert beings (trolls, blue dragons, manscorpions and the like) who have made parts of the pyramid their own.

Rime of the Ancient Mariner - It has to be a dungeon carved into the phantasmagorical, many-coloured glaciers and icebergs of a near-frozen sea, doesn't it? 

How to Semiotically Sex Up Your Campaign Setting With Celestial Symbolism

It's funny how you go down rabbit holes. Last week I happened to be in Lund, in southern Sweden, where there is a very grand and beautiful cathedral which is rightly famous. It contains a famous astronomical clock, first constructed some time around 1425, and which calls to mind CS Lewis's observation that the defining characteristic of the medieval mind was 'intricacy':

This is the clock's 'perpetual calendar'. Some more detail:

What you will notice about the calendar is that it is divided into four quadrants, each of which has a defining symbol. Going clockwise from the top, there is an eagle, a lion, an ox, and a man. Curious about what these referred to, I did a little research and discovered that these symbols are associated with the four evangelists, Matthew (man), Mark (lion), Luke (ox) and John (eagle). The first person to come up with this correspondence was apparently Jerome, writing in the 4th century, who derived the symbols from the first line of each gospel (Matthew's begins with Christ's genealogy; Mark's begins with a voice crying in the wilderness; Luke's begins with a sacrifice; John's begins with the eternal logos as an eagle flies to the sun). These in turn are supposed to also reflect aspects of Christ's character: as man, king, sacrifice, and son of God. 

It turns out, though, that Jerome himself borrowed the symbols from a passage in Ezekiel in which the man, lion, ox and eagle are decpicted as accompanying the divine chariot-throne of God. And this is further thought to be derived from the Babylonian 'fixed' signs of the zodiac, with Aquarius the man, Leo the lion, Taurus the ox and Scorpio the eagle (which was apparently the more usual depiction in the ancient world) ruling each of the cardinal points of the heavens.

I was fascinated by the concentric layers of symbolism here, like a nested table, and I was immediately drawn to a comparison with the Chinese 'four symbols' (which I wrote about long ago): the Azure Dragon of the East, the Vermilion Bird of the South, the White Tiger of the West, and the Black Turtle-Snake of the North. Here, the symbolism is again multi-layered; the different colours are supposed to represent the different hues of soil in the different regions of China, but they also map to the four seasons, four time of day, and so on.

I am sure that the two sets of symbols are unrelated, but I was struck by the odd commonality of investing four quadrants of the heavens, or four cardinal points, with symbolic meaning in this way. And it got me thinking about what might be called 'semiotic geographies' in RPG campaign settings - that is to say, making the terrain of a campaign world reflect or make reference to symbolic (or even real) figures or beings of some kind.

At the most extreme and hyper-fantastical, you could imagine a world in which each corner is literally ruled at its outermost extreme by a giant beast; I am picturing here a flat earth, where if you travel far enough from the centre you eventually reach one of four semi-mystical kingdoms whose ruler is an eternal demigod of some kind (dragon/bird/tiger/turtle-snake obviously works very nicely for a pseudo-Asian setting). 

At a slightly less fantastical level, it could just be that the entire world is divided ito four quadrants, each of which has its own flavour, flora and fauna, and so on. So you could have one quadrant ruled by 'Man' (which contains human civiliations), one ruled by the lion (filled with dangerous, belligerent creatures), one ruled by the ox (hulking gargantua) and one ruled by the eagle (flying creatures, obviously).

Or, at a slightly less fantastical level still, the four symbols of your choice could simply reflect something important about the nature of the campaign setting. Maybe each is a particular school of magic. Or character type. Or even pseudo-aligment. 

Or it could even be that each symbol represents a season, with very distinctive moods, dangers, and effects. Azure Dragon season is spring; it is when the world blooms into verdant life, but is correspondingly filled with aggression and danger; Vermilion Bird is summer, when there is intense heat and drought; White Tiger is autumn, when things slip into a kind of bacchanalian decay - rutting and 'tomorrow we may die' feasting being the order of the day; Black Turtle-Snake is winter, when come the snow and ice. Different types of magic are more or less powerful in the corresponding seasons, and different monsters come and go. 

You get the drift. Thinking up one's own four cardinal animals would be fun. Layering different variants of symbolism on them would be even more fun. You probably wouldn't want to have it permeate everything (I think probably deploying it as a subtle thematic motif in the background may be the best usage, keeping it largely implicit or unstated) as it would be easy to go overboard. But it is a way of giving a setting much greater depth than simply at the level of 'the orcs of mshjahsja live in the jungles of Ffnnnar and the dwarves of Eggegegg inhabit the Blood Mountains'. 

The Implied Setting of Mortal Kombat 2 Fighting Arena Backgrounds

Hear and attend and listen, O best beloved. Once there was a man who had two daughters. Each Saturday, the elder of the two daughters attended a dance school, O best beloved, around the corner from which was an emporium which sold coffee, and this was what befell and was befallen: the man would visit the emporium each Saturday to drink said coffee in the morning sun and entertain his daughters before, lo, the eldest's dance classes would begin. 

And in the corner of this emporium, about which I have told you, best beloved, it so became and was become that there was a row of arcade machines, which included among their number Pac-Man, Street Fighter II, and Mortal Kombat 2. And since these arcade machines were free to use, O best beloved, the man would play Mortal Kombat 2 with his daughters and they would woop and yell with glee at the sight of the great gouts of blood that sprayed forth across the screen in the games they played. And so it was that the man learned of the mysteries of babalities, friendships and special moves, though he was mostly reduced to operating the joystick while his youngest daughter pressed whatever buttons she so chose.

*

Yes, I have been playing a lot of Mortal Kombat 2 recently. And last week, while performing my allotted role of joystick-operator and trying to anticipate the quixotic button-pressing antics of a four-year-old, I began to study the backgrounds in the various arenas in which fights take place, noticing that they were absolutely redolent of a type of extreme sword-and-sorcery that I have written about before - an approach to fantasy art where

magic is everywhere and poorly understood, where monsters are mythic and better understood by Freud than Darwin, where there are no farmers or cities because everyone is either Conan or The Warlock of Firetop Mountain. Something illustrated by Frazetta, Brom, John Blanche, Dali and Brueghel the Elder, penned by Leiber and Vance, and printed in 1968.

I do not claim this is what the plot of Mortal Kombat is all about (I actually have no idea, and no great interest in finding out), and I have not watched any of its various dramatised iterations - it was only in doing some 'research' for this post that I discovered there is actually a Mortal Kombat II film that has recently been released. All I know is the characters and the arenas in which they duke it out. I am talking not about its actual or canonical setting, but about its implied one. I therefore base my comments on the images alone:

What we see here is a forest of living, demonic trees: not so much an entire forest of Old Man Willows, but an entire forest of Old Man Willow's psychotic nephews. These are not mysterious, brooding treants filled with resentment of the 'quick', as we find in Tolkien's ouevre. No: they are just gleeful, sadistic tormenters of those with legs. They like murder. Tolkien's Old Forest has a soundtrack written by Bruckner. The Mortal Kombat 2 forest has a soundtrack written by Wolves in the Throne Room.

Brutal weapons. Molten metal (or lava chanelled from a nearby volcano?). The people of this world are warriors, not soldiers - an important element of the sword-and-sorcery genre. Soldiers are citizens who defend their territory in organised armies. Warriors rely on their martial prowess and concern themselves with glory, not defence. Soldiers equip themselves like hoplites. Warriors equip themselves with big, scary weapons which accentuate their power and individual strength.

What more needs to be said about this other than, floating wizards, interdimensional portal, red planet? Here, magic is great and powerful. It is to be feared and misunderstood. It can change the metaphysical presuppositions on the basis of which we orient our lives. It can transcend the barriers between worlds. There is nothing ordinary about a reality in which this is possible. This world does not contain humdrum civilisations - it is not one in which there is a comfortable Hobbiton which can serve as the base for adventure. Everything is adventure because everything is Weird.

This is a world with conflicting motifs. Yin and yang: all is harmony. Yet all is also DEATH. And WINGED (I should probably say WINGÉD) BEASTS. There is not a philosophical or epistemological consistency to this world. Rather, there is a consistent mood. It is a mashup defined by aesthetic 'fit' rather than by any notion of thing having to make sense.

There may be peace in this world, but it is a peace that is contingent. One imagines a sultry night of lovemaking between a warrior and his woman under the stars and a clear moon, with incense in the air and the distant sound of croaking frogs and insects. And yet! In the background a duel commences between a man and fire demon. Because this is just the sort of thing that happens. 

It is a world where life is plentiful and cheap, for the masses, but not for the Heroic and Villainous, who are literally larger than life itself. I am reminded here of the sense one gets reading Lord of Light that there are untold numbers of ordinary people going about their business but whose concerns are completely meaningless when set against those of the Great. What defines individual importance is not the santity of life and the moral worth of the human person but what one Achieves. We are in the world of Nietzsche, not Jesus - Eddison, rather than Lewis. 

This is world in other words that has been washed in a purple glaze; a world in which whenever it is not the night time it is only ever dusk; a world in which the magical and martial are of equal but oppositional status; a world in which might makes right, and a world in which whatever peace and tranquility are found are momentary, fleeting, bittersweet - because death may strike at any moment. It is a world in which glory triumphs over good, and a world in which power stands astride virtue. It is a world of sword and sorcery's value writ large.

I rather like it.

The Great Nobility of Harry Potter

 

I am of the view that there is no pursuit that is more noble and no task that is more worth doing than writing novels. Call me romantic; call me deluded; call me a fuddy-duddy; call me a pseud. I will stand by this statement and only nuance it by adding that the most noble type of novel-writing is fantasy fiction. The real world will look after itself. Factories will be built, medicines will be administered, trucks will be driven. But the ability to complete a story in 400 pages which provides an avenue to escapism and wonder is something which we need great talents to provide for us. 

JK Rowling is not a great writer in the strict sense. But she is what I would call a brilliant one. She has not defined an era or created a distinctive style or influenced the way in which novels are written - she is not William Golding or JRR Tolkien or Marcel Proust. Yet she has done something equally as important and impressive: she has given people space to imagine and dream. 

One resorts to The Shawshank Redemption with great trepidation. But I will do it: the scene in that film in which Andy says to Red that people need to know that 'There are places in the world that aren't made out of stone' is I think, here, apt. People, in other words, need hope. And really good fiction provides that. It says: people can do great things, and don't have to be bound to the humdrum, the mundane, the quotidian. They can live beyond and above. 

It does this on two separate levels: in substance and in the proof of its own existence. A really good fantasy novel tells the reader two things. That great things are possible in the world of imagination (a hobbit really can bring down the Dark Lord; a boy from suburban England really can bring down the..er, Dark Lord). But also that great things are possible in the here and now (a woman writing in a cafe can produce something as good as this just by trying). There are two layers of inspiration nested together, and the result is powerfully explosive.

I am a latecomer to Harry Potter. The first books came out when I was about 15 of 16 and I was too old for them. I was also snooty about anything popular (a trait I still have). I have only read them all because my daughter was interested and it was something for me to read to her at bedtime. They are all flawed; the plots don't quite make sense; the writing can here and there be clunky. But it doesn't matter - the heart of the project is good. It is the right kind of story to be telling, and it is told well enough (and with wonderful charaterisation and dialogue) that it fits the bill for what brilliant fantasy fiction requires.

Earlier this week I was at the Warner Bros Studio Tour in Tokyo, which is dedicated to the Harry Potter film. And I was gratified on JK Rowling's behalf to see so many people from all around Asia (mostly Japanese, of course, but many from Thailand, the Phillippines, China, etc.) who were embracing her world and her creation. I found it very moving; what a thing it must be to write a story which transcends borders in that way and can unite people from across a vast continent in sheer pleasure. Good for her. 

I don't suspect that the great Crocodile Memory Palace novel will ever have its own Warner Bros Studio Tour in Tokyo - or Timbuktu. But one can nonetheless dream. Good luck to you, Ms Rowling. And thanks for the inspiration. 

But Where Is the Owner? Or, A Wizard's Garden; Or, Ged of the Golden Stars

The other day I took a walk with the kids to a plot of land, near my in-laws’ place in rural Japan, which is devoted to community use. There are some allotments, a little river walk area, a slide, and so forth. And, it being close to Children’s Day, there was a big display of koi nobori - the fish streamers that are hung up everywhere in Japan as part of the celebrations of spring. 

On a weekday in term-time it was deserted. The only sounds were the croaks of frogs from nearby rice fields, the occasional far-off call of a pheasant, and the sound of the breeze as it swept through the streamers, making them dance and flutter high above us. It was like a scene from a Ghibli film, accentuated by the inclusion of a free-standing pink door, situated as though at the gateway to play. This sensation was strengthened by the addition of a tiny shrine amongst some trees nearby.

It looked for all the world like a wizard or witch’s garden, the owner of which having gone off on an errand of some kind. To be there felt like trespassing. One half expected that at any moment the owner would suddenly walk out from behind a bush or rise up out of the ground or step through the pink doorway and demand, ‘What are you doing here? How dare you play on my slide?’

This is a trope of fantasy film and fiction, of course, and a great basis for an adventure site: the wizard's laboratory, garden, mansion house, etc., which the PCs can explore, but with a trigger or time limit that will activate guardians or the wizard's return itself (or both).

This garden I imagined to be owned by a wizard, who we'll call Ged in Golden Stars. He is a 12th level magic-user who is known by the glittering robe he wears, made from dark blue silk but covered in fist-sized stars made from golden thread. It is a Robe of Stars. Using it, Ged wanders the Astral Plane, which he accesses through the pink door in his garden; in an emergency, he can remove the stars and use them as throwing stars +5, which do 2d4 damage. There are 12 stars in total, and they replenish at midnight each night after use, unless all are used, in which case the robe is neutered and useless thereafter.

He also wears a ring of protection +5, a ring of shocking grasp, and carries a stave of thunder and withering, resembling a 7' long earthworm carved from teak. 

Ged in Golden Stars: HP 36, AC 4, #ATT1, DMG 1d4 (dagger), Move 120, ML 12, TT None

Spells Memorised: Magic Missile, Hold Portal, Hypnotism, Sleep, Detect Invisibility, Improved Phantasmal Force, Melf's Acid Arrow, Web, Clairaudience, Clairvoyance, Fireball, Suggestion, Dimension Door, Fire Trap, Polymorph Self, Rainbow Pattern, Chaos, Contact Other Plane, Distance Distortion, Teleport, Antimagic Shell, Demishadow Magic, Ensnarement, Permanent illusion, Prismatic Spray

Ged is normally in the Astral Plane. But he is alerted to the presence of intruders in his garden by four flower-shaped windmills place at its NW, NE, SW and SE corners. These begin to spin if a sentient being goes within 12'; Ged is then alerted and will appear in the doorway within 1d20 rounds. 

The garden has SEVEN GIANT BUMBLE BEES as guardians. These patrol the vicinity and will come to attack intruders within 1d12 rounds. 

Giant Bumble Bee: HD 6+4, AC 5, #ATT 1, DMG 1d6*, Move 60 (Fly 240), ML 9, TT None

*Sting causes additional 1d6 DMG on a failed save versus poison.

A line is strung up, 12' high, across the garden from roughly the centre of the N to S sides, from which hang 43 koi nobori. Within the lining of each of these banners is written a spell; these collectively function as Ged's spellbook. The spells are as follows

1st level: Audible Glamer, Cantrip, Magic Missile, Hold Portal, Taunt, Wall of Fog, Hypnotism, Sleep

2nd level: Alter Self, Blind, Detect Invisibility, Improved Phantasmal Force, Melf's Acid Arrow, Tasha's Uncontrollable Hideous Laughter, Web

3rd level: Clairaudience, Clairvoyance, Fireball, Gust of Wind, Lightning Bolt, Suggestion

4th level: Charm Monster, Dimension Door, Fire Trap, Polymorph Self, Rainbow Pattern, Rary's Mnemonic Enhancer

5th level: Chaos, Contact Other Plane, Distance Distortion, Major Creation, Teleport, Wall of Iron

6th level: Antimagic Shell, Demishadow Magic, Disintegrate, Ensnarement, Guards and Wards, Permanent Illusion, True Seeing

7th level: Limited Wish, Prismatic Spray, Vanish

The koi nobori catch the wind and hold it within their bodies. If one is removed from its position by any other than Ged, it immediately emits a blast of cursed magical wind akin to a death fog in a 10' cube. This will do 4hp damage to anybody in the area and also destroy the two koi nobori immediately to the left and right within 3 rounds. The koi nobori are lined up from S to N in ascending order of level/alphabet. 

To the rear of the garden is Ged's potting shed. This contains a 24' long potting table on which sit three rows of 10 plant plots each. His treasure is randomly distributed underneath these plant pots (one item beneath one plant pot): A black opal (1,000 gp), an emerald (5,000 gp), a topaz (500 gp), a fire opal (1,000 gp), an amethyst (500 gp), a peridot (500 gp), a gold snuff box decorated with flowers (500 gp), a pair of platinum chopsticks (750 gp), a porcelain blue rose (250 gp), a pair of 1" tall porcelain ducks (50 gp), a bracelet made of chunks of glass (10 gp), the feather of the down of a peacockatrice (50 gp), a catoblepas tooth carved to resemble a mountain peak (500 gp),  a potion of ESP, a philter of stammering and stuttering, a potion of undead control, a potion of vitality, an elixir of health, and an oil of timelessness.

It is watched over by a BLACK PUDDING which inhabits a 5' tall and 5' diameter clay pot decorated with a mosaic of tiny blue and orange square tiles. It emerges within 1d3 rounds of anybody entering the potting shed. 

Black Pudding: HD 10, AC 6, #ATT 1, DMG 3d8*, Move 60, ML 12, TT None

*Each successful hit dissolves armour - chain mail takes one hit to dissolve; plate mail takes two; any magical '+' takes an extra round

Happiness is a New Notepad

I'm sure you'll agree with me that there can be few pleasures greater in life than purchasing a new notepad.  You hand over the money and there it is: a hundred or more blank pages, waiting to be filled. With what? An infinity of options extends to the far horizon of your mind. Will it be the beginning of a novel-writing career that culminates in a Nobel prize? Will it be a book of poems that will win great plaudits and erudite reviews in the New Yorker and the London Review of Books? Will it be where you scrawl the screenplay for what will one day be a worldwide blockbuster movie? Will it provide the space for the initial sketches for great works of art that finally establish you as the greatest talent of your generation?

You have long suspected you had greatness in you. All it was waiting for was the right notepad. And now you have it in your hands! Feel it! Feel how the pages flip! Feel their delightful texture beneath your fingertips! Gaze on it in wonder! What was once a wonderful living tree that supported a miniature ecosystem of birds, caterpillars, lichen, ants and spiders has been reduced to this bundle of paper, all for you to transform into a work of power and beauty!

And then you go and put it in a drawer with the other thirty or forty blank notepads you own and half-forget about it. But at least you had the thought.

There is nowhere greater to buy stationery in all the world than Japan. I visit every 18 months or so to see family, and always come back with a few notepads when I do. Here is my latest purchase, perfect for dungeon design as I'm sure you'll agree:

It even has a beetle on the front!

Check out those numbers in the margins.

Check out those squares. Phwoar.

This type of squared notebook will be particularly prized by the aspiring DM for obvious reasons, but its original use is to help schoolchildren practice writing Japanese characters. You can order many like it Amazon. More expensive than you would be able to get them in Japan (this one set me back about 100 yen, or 50p), and nothing like as adventurous. But it will prove similarly inspirational.

Right now I am imagining using it to write 'the Kesennuma sessions' - thirty one-page dungeons inspired by the Sanriku coast. But then again it may end up in a drawer. We'll see. 

I Hate Myself and Want to Die (or, Frog-People World)

Not really.

But I did just spend an hour drafting a post only for it to disappear into the ether. All the way through, I noticed that the autosave function in Blogger was not working - presumably due to some sort of connection error. But I blithely carried on regardless, and these are the consequences. I hit 'post' and the carefully crafted post I had written simply disappeared. It is not in 'drafts'. It is not in 'posts'. It is gone for good.

To write the whole thing out again would be soul-destroying. So let's do something else instead.

I went to the zoo the other day, and took some photos. Perusing them later, I thought that, put together, they would make an interesting framework for a fantasy world along the lines of Pars Fortuna, which John Stater created by randomly generating an entirely fresh set of races-as-classes for a total revamp of B/X D&D. (I believe the full list he came up with is here.)

The idea here is simple. You know elves, dwarfs, half-orcs, halflings, kobolds, and whatnot? They're all gone. It's a blank canvas. There is going to be a totally new setting with totally new races as PC classes. Here they are:

Tolo-tolo (poison-arrow-frog people): These frog-like humanoids excrete poison, and are fearless, brazen and impetuous for all their halfling-type size. Have excellent saving throws and bonuses to AC and ranged weapons, but lack the intelligence or patience for magic.

Mbalam (lizard people): These are slow-moving unless provoked, resilient, but possessing deep knowledge of powerful forest magic. Something like a mixture of dwarf and magic-user - a tough spell-caster which advances in XP levels very slowly (or perhaps, like an OD&D elf or 2nd edition dual-class human, alternates between fighter/magic-user as it goes up through the levels). 

Ngulu (jungle hog people): These are cleric-types - useful in a fight, tough, but imbued with a spiritual strength and innate wisdom which allows them to tap into the spirit realm to commune with the Gods. 

Mbote (okapi people): Akin to an elf, these are somewhat slowly advancing, but potentially immensely powerful, fighter-mages - mysterious, stand-offish, and cruelly beautiful. 

Teenu (skink-people): Immensely fast and agile, the Teenu practice a kind of teleporting magic which allows them to perform blink-like leaps from one place to another without having to traverse physical space. They are fragile but deadly - expert backstabbers and ambushers but extremely delicate when forced into a corner.

Nioka (blue viper people): The Nioka are a race of cleric-assassins, followers of a pantheon of death gods who bestow on them great power in the practice of murder. They have very high INT and WIS bonuses, as well as saving throws, and access to various necromantic spells. But they have few HP and cannot survive for long in a fair fight.

Wolo (golden frog people): These are a blessed race, marked out by their gods with their golden-hued skin. Those who adventure are like paladins - powerful in combat, particularly against the undead, but slow to advance and rare in number. 

Mayele (green toad people): The Mayele are wise and ruminate over the deep insights which their ancestors had into the workings of the cosmos. They move slowly, eschew combat, and have few other talents, but possess vast psychic strength and many strange new spells.

Truche (cassowary people): These are strange, sad, and slow - but deadly fighters. Occupying a niche a little like a dwarf, they combine shyness and pessimism with mighty force.

It occurs to me, however, having written all of the above out, that what we are really looking at here is a world with frog-men at its centre. In this reading, frog-men are the default race, as are humans in B/X or BECMI, and therefore the Tolo-tolo are something like fighters, the Wolo are like clerics, and the Mayele are like magic-users. Then the other races are identified with a single race-as-class.

This obviously suggests a tropical, jungle/swamp environment. But it also suggests a civilisation built by different types of frog-person. This speaks to me of tree-cities, or perhaps floating swamp-cities, or even semi-under(fresh)water cities. It also speaks to me of lost ruins, jungle caves, and tiankeng sinkholes. I like it, and I recommend visiting a zoo near you with your phone and a working thumb in order to come up with something of your own. 

Say Goodbye to Felix - It's Dragon Talk

I was recently discussing with two friends, as one does, the important matter of whether a human being could communicate with a red dragon. Could a human learn a dragon's language? And could a red dragon learn a human's? More broadly, is cross-species communication in a fantasy world possible at all? 

This is both a more simple and a more complicated question than it appears. 

First, clearly cross-species communication is possible in the world which we live in. You communicate with your dog. You may even communicate with your cat - who the hell knows with them, though? Famers communicate with their cattle and sheep. Honeyguides communicate with hunter-gatherers in Africa. And so on. Clearly, the appropriate question is not whether some communication is possible between a human and a red dragon (or an orc and an elven cat, or a duergar and a desert troll, or an ogre mage and a tabaxi, or...), but whether and to what extent that communication can take place through speech.

Second, the issue may be an irrelevance if the setting operates on fairy tale logic. Nobody in a fairy tale fails to communicate with anybody else. Wherever they go, and whoever they encounter, the main character(s) can understand and be understood.

Third, there are lots of nuances. We might want to interrogate:

• The Chewbacca Problem. Chewbacca can understand what is said to him, and Han Solo can understand Chewbacca. But the two are not physically equipped to make the relevant sounds in each other's languages. That works in Star Wars, but is it plausible? Are we satisfied that it is possible to make sense of sounds linguistically if we are not able at least in theory to vocalise them? My feeling is that the answer to this question is yes, given enough time for the ear to become accustomed to those sounds, but I have no reason to assume this beyond gut feeling.
• The Conceptual Problem. Languages are not just made up of nouns. They are figurative and rooted in feelings and emotions. Consider: 'I hope it doesn't rain tomorrow.' Would that sentence make sense to a creature that does not have a concept of 'hope', such as an orc or kuo-toa may indeed not? What concepts to do orcs or kuo-toa have that we lack? 
• The Inferential Problem. Languages rely on inference, and cultural embeddedness, to work. Consider: 'I've been sitting around waiting for a response to my email for months.' Have you really been literally sitting around waiting for a response, or have you just been waiting? We all know that the turn of phrase is figurative. What about creatures which literally do not sit (because they have a snake tail, like a naga) or which do not sit when waiting? And what kind of inferences would be necessary to understand the speech of dragons, or bullywugs, or ixitxachitl? 
• The Embodiment Problem. Languages are spoken by physical beings with bodies, and this affects not just the act of speaking (we have mouths that can only produce a limited range of sounds) but also how we express ourselves. Consider 'I have a good grasp of X now.' To an animal which does grasp things, that makes sense. What about to one which doesn't? Does an elven cat understand 'grasping' and why that would mean 'understanding'? 

The interesting question for me is whether a 'common tongue' is a remotely plausible concept. Clearly, it is useful to make a game work. But how confident are we that humans, orcs, elves, dragons, giants, trolls, wraiths, demons and locathah would share enough thought processes to be able to come up with common language that contained anything other than simple nouns? It seems likely that all of those creatures could find agreement on things like what a rock is, what grass is, what death is, and so on. But would nuanced communication be achievable at all?