Ice, Jungle, Desert

Among my many sins, I once sat through the complete director's commentaries to the original Star Wars trilogy on DVD. In my defence, these are fascinating artefacts in their own right. Much of the commentary is, somewhat eccentrically, provided by the Ben Burtt - the sound engineer - and he goes into exquisite detail about how many of the sound effects were captured. In between George Lucas himself appears, to offer pearls of gnomic wisdom and litigate old disputes (for example: it was an outrage that they wouldn't accept Frank Oz as a nomination for Best Supporting Actor for his perfomance as Yoda in Empire), and every now and then up pops some other Star Wars luminary - Carrie Fisher, sounding like she's strung out on heroin; Lawrence Kasdan, hoping somebody realises who the fuck he is; Dennis Muren, talking about how it was that they made blaster shots look like they are moving; etc. The sheer amount of thought and effort that went into making the original Star Wars films is hereby revealed to have been extraordinary. It has been observed (I forget where) that the Big Hollywood Blockbuster circa 1980-2000 was a feat of human achievement akin to one of the ancient wonders of the world, marshalling huge amounts of energy, intelligence, craft and logistical energy over the course of years, and while this may be slightly hyperbolic, listening to Hollywood insiders talk about the process of film-making during that era makes you begin to see the point.

But I digress. What I wanted to talk about here was an observation George Lucas makes during the commentary on one of the films (possibly Return of the Jedi) in which he describes the trilogy as being dominated by three geographic themes - desert (Tattooine), forest (Endor), and ice (Hoth). I have always remembered this, as while it initially seemed a very banal point to make, its impact has grown on me. There is something archetypal about deserts, forests (particularly jungles) and icy wilderness. They function, at least to the civilised, developed-world mind, as exotic geographic 'others'. And we see them emerging a lot in fantasy literature and video games, where every setting seems to contain within it a deserty bit, a jungly bit, and an icy bit, alongside the typical, generic, bucolic temperate zone which tends to be where adventure begins.

(Indeed, while I can't think of an example right now, readers will be able to tell me about a raft of old platform games which even contained an 'ice level', a 'desert level', a 'jungle level', and so on.)

The OSR is quite light on straight up icy, deserty, or jungly settings. This is not to say that there are no products which are set in such environments, but they tend to be small-scale hexcrawls rather than deep, detailed settings-proper. 

I think this is for two key reasons. The first is practical difficulty. Arctic, rainforest and desert landscapes are unfamiliar and there is a sense with each that the environment ought itself to be a major driver of adventure and danger. This is difficult to systematise and make interesting (although there have been attempts to do it - The Bitter Reach being an example that pops to mind). 

The second is lack of familiarity. The Tolkienian tropes on which we still tend to rely do not seem to sit comfortably in non-Tolkienian environs. The furniture is just different. And therefore it feels as though the monsters, character classes, races, even magic systems ought to be different, too. This means extra work. 'My desert world is populated by desert orcs, desert dwarfs, desert elves and desert giants!' is boring - granted. So what is it populated by, then?

If I was to come up with such a setting, I think my approach would be to start with those issues in reverse order. What makes a setting really sing is its content, and the building blocks for that content would need to be gathered together first. 

And Step One in that process would I think be to get together the crew - who are going to be the main inhabitants of this world I am making up, and what is the relationship between them going to be?

An initial exercise here would just be coming up with some lists and seeing what fell together. And you could do a lot worse than just looking at what's already there. If one were to create a jungle setting, for instance, what might one jot down as likely inhabitants while flicking through the Monstrous Manual?

A trawl through the 2nd edition Monstrous Manual contains the following, what I would call, exclusively 'jungly' creatures (not including those which can be found 'anywhere', or bog standard things like giant insects and big cats): 

• Bullywug
• Catoblepas
• Coautl
• Black dragon
• Emerald dragon
• Ettercap
• Jungle giant
• Grippli
• Ixitxachitl
• Kirre
• Lizard man
• Locathah
• Weretiger
• Mold man
• Muckdweller
• Rakshasa
• Winged snake
• Tabaxi
• Tasloi
• Wyvern
• Yuan-ti
• Zaratan

Let's now thing about how we might use this list to inspire some setting ideas. I jot down these notes simply as I think of them, as it were in 'real time'; you can of course add your own.

1. Zaratans. Floating island turtles is too good an idea not to include in any tropical setting, and therefore my putative jungle setting would include them - probably within the context of a huge Amazon/Congo/Mekong-style river system which regularly floods. I would want these floating islands to be populated, maybe by Rakshasa sorcerer-lords who have a very decentralised, anarchic union, each family ruling one Zaratan together with their lizardman slaves. 

2. The Rakshasa sorcerer-lords probably I would make ape-like, rather than big cat-like. If they were big cat-like, this would clash with the flavour of tabaxi and weretigers.

3. Weretigers I would want to make more of than just occasional, werewolf-style individual 'baddies'. I would like there to be a weretiger polity in which the nobility can transform into tigers, and the hoi polloi - naturally, when you think about it - do their bidding. Would I reskin them as werejaguars? Very possibly. 

4. Any setting ought to have some region of the map which was once home to a great empire now ruined and debased, and populated by the degenerate former inhabitants. For some reason, I am struck by the idea that the setting once contained a tabaxi empire (think Maya temples and the like), but that this was conquered by a great grippli horde long ago, under the direction of a mighty couatl king. That conquest was short lived, however, as in the long-term the grippli could not be made to cohere into one whole, but split apart into many factions and minor kingdoms. Sooner or later bullywug warlords also moved in, and that entire region is now a very dangerous, chaotic jungle badland with no centralised authority. 

5. The Amazon/Congo/Mekong-style river system would also contain locathah and ixitxachitl polities, probably engaged in internecine warfare. Maybe the rakshasa sorcerer-lords use these aquatic beings as pawns in their own conflicts, playing them off against one another and deploying them where possible to make life difficult for rivals. 

6. Yuan-ti should clearly feature somewhere, but are such a distinctive concept that it almost seems pointless to fiddle with them. There is a Yuan-ti empire; it is hostile to all others. It exists in the background as a constant, looming threat, and it has agents throughout the rest of the setting.

7. Where do humans and jungle giants fit in? Some humans live in the weretiger policy I mentioned earlier. Many others are enslaved by the Yuan-ti. Others still live under the rakshasa. But perhaps also this setting contains a city-state (presumptively where adventurers start off) with a mostly human population but which is ruled by jungle giants. And perhaps the jungle giants are, in fact, akin to Amazons - tall, powerful, female rulers who hold sway over the humans but offer them protection. 

That would do for starters. I haven't really done anything with the tasloi or dragons, yet. Certainly, I could see space for an emerald dragon dwelling in a dormant volcano somewhere in the jungle. Perhaps he or she has a black dragon rival, too. But we see a setting take shape, and this would obviously be a productive way to approach designing icy/deserty settings too. 

'It Has Killing In It'

What was the first piece of media you consumed which 'had killing in it'? 

I ask because a certain girl I happen to know has recently been reading the Warriors or Warrior Cats series at bedtime. For those who don't know it - and I should stress I know almost nothing about it - it seems to be a sort of cross between Redwall, Harry Potter and Rainbow Magic. A coterie of authors writes the novels and they involve, well, warrior cats doing, er, warrior cat things. There are clans to which the characters all seem to belong, and the plot of the first book appears to involve a Muggle housecat who runs away from home and finds a new one with his wizard warrior compadres. There is not, I should make clear, a 'sorting collar' and the clans are not called Gryffinpuss, Slithermiaow, Hufflepurr, or Kittyclaw. 

Readers familiar with the books will be able to tell me if they are dreadful doggerel or surprisingly good, or somewhere in between. But what this post really occasioned was my daughter's remark, made to me last night, that she feels the books are very advanced because they 'have killing in them'.

I took this to mean that violent death is a feature of the books. And I reflected that she was probably right. There is 'killing' in Harry Potter. But most of the material she will have read up to this point, including things like Dork Diaries, Diary of a Wimpy Kid, Lottie Brooks etc., will have been fairly milquetoast. There won't have been a lot of jeopardy or high drama. 

This set me off reminiscing about being a child. I think I too had this conception in my mind that there was a distinction to be drawn between kids' entertainment and that for adults, with 'having killing in' being an important aspect of the difference. The type of books I was reading at the local library aged 7 or 8 or so would not I think have had killing in them. But then I got onto The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, the Fighting Fantasy books, and so on, and this felt like a major watershed moment. Suddenly I was reading books in which people killed each other. I was a big boy, now.

What is curious about this is that the young child appears to have in his or her mind, even from toddlership, an idea that 'having killing in it' is a distinct category from fairy tale death. Fairy tales have death in. Admittedly many fairy tales are Bowdlerised these days to an absurd degree - the three little pigs befriend the wolf and teach him how to be a vegetarian, etc. - but you can still find versions in which characters are eaten, drowned, burned and so on. Yet children appear to be able to separate fairy tale death from acts of actual killing in their minds. It is only when one graduates to books that have killing in them that one has move beyond the fairy tale, which concerns death and yet which at the same time somehow doesn't.

I can't remember the exact moment I first encountered a book with killing in it, but I am fairly sure that it was The Hobbit, and I can vaguely remember the thrill it gave me when I realised that the cartoon violence with which I was familiar had been superseded by something much more serious and grand. This the point in a life in which one puts away childish things and starts reading The Warlock of Firetop Mountain. A Rubicon has been crossed and there is no going back.

The River and the River

Near the Amazonian city of Manaus there is a place where the Amazon proper (the upper section of which in Brazil is called the Rio Solimões) meets the Rio Negro, which flows in to meet it from Colombia. The Amazon is cooler, faster, and carries sediment from the Andes; the Rio Negro is slower, warmer, and full of decaying plant life. For a period the two run alongside each other in contrast, until they gradually integrate:

This is one of those places in the world which screams 'Make me into a setting for an RPG, you fool! Do it at once!', and the setting indeed almost writes itself. Clearly, the two rivers bring with them two very different sets of fantasy furniture, and where they meet there is a great city which incorporates both. Perhaps, indeed, that city is even a kind of neutral zone where two otherwise hostile ways of life can live alongside one another in something approaching harmony. And naturally, there's a megadungeon underneath.

The Dark River is organic, magical, sensual, amoral, ritual-based, and fecund. But it also partly originates in, and incorporates, death and decay; many of its inhabitants are undead. It is powerful in the sense in which a jungle is full of green vibrancy and dangerous life. 

The Light River is inorganic, holy, rational, moralistic, honour-based, and productive. It ultimately comes from the mountains; it is imbued with elemental energy. It is rich in the sense that mountains bring forth the wealth that is buried beneath the earth. 

It is too easy to say that the Dark River is feminine and the Light River masculine, or that the Dark River is yin and the Light River is yang, or that the Dark River is right-hemisphere and the Light River is left-hemisphere. But it is hard to get away entirely from those binaries and they exist for a reason and are enjoyable to problematise and poke and prod at. I would want the setting to hint at and echo them without trading on the distinction too obviously. The contrast between jungle energy and mountain energy seems more 'right' to me somehow. 

The peoples who dwell along the two rivers are mutually antagonistic for all manner of reasons, but the city imposes order on them. It is a city which I think ought indeed to be ruled by a race of giant warrior-women, the Amazons of legend, who forge the two river-worlds into an uneasy but cohesive polity. Presuambly, that city is situated on a river island around which they both flow. Maybe it is even situated on a river island that lies in the middle of a delta: maybe these two rivers come together only at the very point at which they meet the ocean:

What lies beneath? What do PCs who come to the River and the River explore? The science fantasy impulse suggests that buried beneath the island is an alien space vessel; the straight fantasy impulse suggests the ruins of a lost civilization; the horror impulse suggests the corpse of a dead river god, filled with demonic entities. The PCs venture down to bring forth what treasures lie buried there.

These are the thoughts which occur to me sitting in my office idling away when I ought to be working. What are yours? 

Why Build Worlds?

 

The creation of a world - mapping it, populating it, chronicling its history - is in itself a hobby. I suspect for a lot of DMs it is indeed actually the main purpose of RPGs. The game is really just an excuse to indulge in Tolkienian sub-creation. 

There is nothing wrong with this: I consider it to be my hobby too. But I would like to use this post as an opportunity to probe into where its pleasure comes from.

The first is generic to all hobbies: when engaged in some aspect of world-creation it is easy to get caught up in the activity and enter a flow-state which is in itself pleasurable. This is something akin to what lay people sometimes refer to as 'mindulfness', but it is really the absolute opposite of that. It is a state of being in which one truly presences, reflecting neither on one's physical self nor on one's thoughts, but simply being in the activity itself. One is allowing oneself to be carried along by the act of doing, as  though on a river. This is enjoyable for its own sake. It is a retreat from intrusive thoughts and quotidian activities, to be sure, but it is not merely escapist. There is a kind of happiness (dare I even say 'joy'?) in the feeling that one's conscious, subconscious, and physical self are all bent towards the same goal.

The second is that it is escapist, and there is nothing wrong with that. Life can be solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short even when not in Hobbes' state of nature (Spinoza once said that we never leave the state of nature, anyway). And we therefore take what pleasures we can find. Drawing maps and thinking about elves is a lot more wholesome and worthwhile than watching TV, if retreat from the sheer banal horror of your humdrum existence is all that you are searching for. It is an opportunity to create something which, even if nobody else even looks at it or knows of its existence, can be pleasing to your eye, your mind, your soul. So why-ever not? 

The third is that it is a small act of rebellion against the inescapable and terrifying fact that there is only one world that you will ever live in. It is grotesquely unfair that, with an entire universe on our doorsteps, the best that any person can ever do is explore a small part of the surface area of one single planet. It is even more grotesquely unfair that there are many more universes that can be imagined and we will never be able to explore any of those. This - the fact that we are able to imagine places we can never go - is a monstrous constraint and one about which we should be outraged. Channel that rage into something useful: get as close as you can to possessing all of reality and all other realities as your oyster by, God-like, detailing your imagined corner of creation. 

The fourth is that it is also a small act of rebellion against the banality of small-mindedness. There are lots of people out there who not only want to stay swimming in their own tiny intellectual fishbowls and never go out into the ocean of the mind, but want everybody else to be the same way too. Well, remember Cinderalla's admonition - they can order you to do all kinds of things, but they can't order you to stop dreaming. 

And the fifth, related pleasure is that it is so liberating. Debbie Harry sang 'Dreaming is free'. I have always loved that line. Dreaming costs nothing. But it also frees us: in the world of dreams there are no constraints. It doesn't matter how poor you are, how crappy your home life is, how lonely you feel, how bored you are. You can get a piece of paper and a pencil and, within your relationship to those obejcts, make yourself free. 

The world needs a bit of subcreation here and there. So what, really, is stopping you?

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Setting I Created

 

When my first child was born, I had already been working on something called Behind Gently Smiling Jaws for a year. The first post I made about it can be found here.

That was more than ten years ago. The idea has never gone away and I have never stopped working on it. It is just that 'working' is being used here in a particular sense: I have not been working on it so much as working it over. It has been like a big lump of dough in my mind that I have been mentally pounding with my fists, or a big lump of chewing gum I have been slowly chewing into flavourlessness, or the hide of a beast I have been turning into leather; I have been worrying at it and squeezing it and tugging it and twisting it and gradually shaping it into something that is comprehensible and usable. 

That process is at an end and I can now earnestly say that I have worked it up something that may eventually be the framework within which a book can be written. As Woody Allen might have said, 'Right now it's only a notion, but I think I can get the money to make it into a concept, and later turn it into an idea.'

The problem that has posed the most difficulty is that the idea is complicated. I have not wanted to sacrifice that complicatedness, as it is important to me: it all makes sense to me. But it has made it a challenge to make it presentable. I now know how to do that. 

The principle is straightforward. An ancient, and immortal, crocodile, born at the dawn of time, created a memory palace within which to store everything it had witnessed in its long existence, and went into dormancy in a lake in what we call Papua New Guinea.

The Naacals, the ancient inhabitants of the continent of Mu, ancestors of the ancient Egyptians, Mayans and Harappans, found the crocodile, and discovered a way to live inside its memory palace. Aware that a cataclysmic event was in the offing (the sinking of Mu and the ruin of their civilisation) a number of them went to live in the memory palace permanently. 

Some Naacals remained on Earth and retreated into hermitude or stasis underground before the cataclysm. Others remained, and after Mu sank (roughly 10,000 BC) became debased, going on to fragment and form what became the Egyptian, Mayan, and Harappan civilisations. 

Meanwhile, those within the crocodile's mind founded a great city, called the Unremembered City, where they all lived among the crocodile's many memories. 

So things would have remained, but over the course of the centuries seven human beings (known ever since as 'the Seven') found their way too to the crocodile's memory palace, and merged with its consciousness, bringing with them their own memories, myths, and ideas. These were:

• Ebu Gogo, a homo floriensis woman from a remote Indonesian island where a remnant population survived until shortly before the time of Christ
• Xu Fu, a Chinese explorer who went in search of Mount Penglai
• Anak Wungsu, a Balinese trader-king
• Abu Yaqub Al-Sijistani, a neo-Platonic philosopher
• Jorge de Meneses, a Portugese conquistador
• Pape Jan, Ethiopian king who inspired the legend of Prester John
• Sese-Mahuru-Bau, a Papuan hunter who went in search of a lost lover

With Sese-Mahuru-Bau's coming, however, the crocodile's memory palace became too full, and it erupted - everything in it spilled out into the real world, in what we know of as the late 18th century. This brought 'ordinary' human history to an end, and the Crocodilian Era began.

The Crocodilian Era began with the complete shattering and destruction of pre-existing human civilisation. The Crocodile's memories included the dinosaurs, the other beasts of the prehistoric era, a race of aliens who had once lived on Earth, the ancient Atlanteans, and so on, and the Seven brought with them their own myths (Xu Fu brought Chinese dragons and ghosts; Anak Wungsu brought Garuda and the like, Jorge de Meneses brought Goetic demons, and so on and so forth) and the result was chaos. The human population of the Earth collapsed to a few thousand individuals. 

But, fast forward 10,000 years, and things look very different. 

The Naacals who lived in the crocodile's mind, called the Young Naacals, mostly live in the Unremembered City - a flying island-city, like Laputa, which floats about in the sky. The Young Naacals keep themselves to themselves for the most part.

The Naacals who remained hidded on Earth after Mu sank are called the Old Naacals. They live as hermits, scholars, and wanderers - dangerous and mad, for the most part.

The ordinary human population rebounded, over the centuries, and found ways to survive and even flourish amidst the wondrous beasts and strange creatures now populating the planet. 

And the Seven became Gods. Each made a home for him/herself in a certain spot on the globe, and created a realm to rule. These can be seen on the map, above:

1. The Kerguelen islands are ruled by Abu Yaqub Al-Sijistani, who has turned it into a single, vast university
2. Lake Issyk-Kul is the home of Pape Jan - a fortified inland sea from which he governs a slowly-expanding crusader empire
3. The mouth of the Congo river, where Jorge de Meneses has a pirate city whose ships go in search of plunder across the globe
4. Sardinia, where Anak Wungsu rules over a trading thalassacracy spanning the Mediterranean
5. Benbecula, in the Western Isles, home to Sese-Mahuru-Bau, who has turned all of the surrounding islands into a huge hunting reserve
6. What was once Sao Luis, in Brazil, ruled by Xu Fu - where there is now a sort of equatorial-cum-Chinese Mount Olympus, ruled by him as a sorcerer-king
7. The island of Chiloe, where Ebu Gogo births the bizarre spawn of humans and the amphibious beasts of the Carbinoferous world

In between all this are all manner of different civilisations and wildernesses - the Earth geographically is as it was, but it is an Earth roamed by dinosaurs, aliens, Atlanteans, and the like, mixed in with the human inhabitants and Old Naacals. And of course the agents of the Seven, who are all rivals, are everywhere, working to undermine each other and subvert each other's designs. It's a scene, in other words. And it can all be yours... when the book is written.

The Great North Title Opinion Forming Braintrust Assemble

Regular readers will know that I have a project, long in the pipeline, titled The Great North, that is now more or less complete and ready to be Kickstarted. Here is the cover:

And here is the intro text:

Once, there was an Emperor, who had already made half of the known world his own, yet grasped endlessly for the rest. At the zenith of his strength, when he was perhaps already sensing its impending failure, he reached out, straining in defiance of age and time, to clutch once more at conquests. The touch of his fingertips in one of those final desperate grabbings brushed against the shores of a distant, wild land of heather-moored hills and deep narrow valleys, wind-seared beaches and damp-cold forests, where magic was strong and there were powers that were old, and strange, and rooted in the ancient earth and rock on which they stood. The Emperor ruled parts of that land, here and there, but he could never fully tame it, and as he grew old and feeble and his Empire shrivelled back upon itself, it was the first of his provinces that he abandoned to its fate. 

The Great North has since lain free for long eons. None rule it. It was wild once, and so it remains. A frontier land where the tide of civilisation once washed before retreating, leaving fragments of flotsam behind it to lie where they may be found. A cold land. A fierce land. A debatable land. And a land of opportunity for those willing to grasp for it, much as the Emperor once tried in the faded past.

I am now going through the process of setting up the Kickstarter page for this. However, I have had a sudden stab of anxiety: having Googled it, there is already something called 'The Great North' in existence - an animated comedy to do with people in Alaska.

Tell me, oh great, esteemed and wise readers: will this be an issue? Is it sensible to do a last-minute name change? Should I just keep it? I AM INCAPABLE OF MAKING DECISIONS FOR MYSELF.

The Succinct History of the Crocodilian Apocalypse

 

250 million BC (approx) - The crocodile is born

131,000 BC (approx) - The crocodile begins creation of its memory palace

130,000 BC (approx) - The crocodile completes its memory palace and enters its final slumber

100,000 BC (approx) - The Naacal civilization arises on the continent of Mu

51, 547 BC - The crocodile is discovered by the Naacals; its memory palace is first entered 

49, 211 BC - The thesis becomes accepted that cataclysmic volcanic activity will cause the continent of Mu to sink by 49, 101 BC; preparations begin, with some groups settling other land masses, and others entering the memory palace 

49,101 BC - Mu begins to sink beneath the ocean and the Naacal Dark Age begins

49,100 BC - The Naacals in the memory palace begin construction of the Unremembered City

49,100 BC (approx) - The Naacal Dark Age commences in the world; survivors of the cataclysm begin to form polities in isolation from each other in what will become Mexico, Egypt, and India

12, 000 BC (approx) - Ebu Gogo, first of the Seven, enters the memory palace

210 BC - Xu Fu, second of the Seven, enters the memory palace

971 AD - Abu Yaqub Al-Sijistani, third of the Seven, enters the memory palace

1049 AD - Anak Wungsu, fourth of the Seven, enters the memory palace

1175 AD - Pape Jan, fifth of the Seven, enters the memory palace

1537 AD - Jorge de Meneses, sixth of the Seven, enters the memory palace

1687 AD - Sese-Mahuru-Bau, last of the Seven, enters the memory palace

1793 AD - The first figments begin to appear in the world; the Crocodilian Apocalypse begins

1796 AD - The Unremembered City emerges from the memory palace into the world; the Naacal Dark Ages come to an end

10,000 AD (approx) - The timeline of Behind Gently Smiling Jaws begins

Recommend a 'Read Everything By...' Project

Some years ago, I read more or less everything that HP Lovecraft wrote and blogged about it. 

Years later, I read more or less everything Jack Vance wrote and blogged about it twice. 

I have also, more recently, read almost everything that William Golding wrote, but I have not blogged about it on the basis that it may not be revelant to my readers' interests.

I have really enjoyed these projects - I have found that after a while they get a momentum of their own and motivate further reading, and there is something about getting to know an author's personal arc that itself almost functions as an overarching novel-within-a-novel: you read the fiction, but can also get an overview of the linkages between the works so as to provide a coherent whole.

I would like recommendations for other fantasy/SF/horror authors to get to grips with. Here are some baseline requirements that Must Not Be Violated:

1. The author should have published at least 7 novels. 

2. The author should not be JRR Tolkien, CS Lewis, George RR Martin, Brandon Sanderson, Steven Erikson, Julian May, David Eddings, China Mieville, or Gene Wolfe, because I have either read all or most of their stuff already, or know that I don't particularly like them.

RECOMMEND AWAY. And show your workings. Sell me on your recommendation!

Why Psionics Fails

It is often said that the world is divided into two classes of people: those who like Van Morrison, and those who have met him. 

Another such division that lies across the heart of humanity is those who can tolerate psionics in D&D and those who cannot. I wish to go out on a limb and say that most people who play D&D do not like psionics, and I will go even further out on said limb - indeed, to the point where it begins to bend so outrageously and strenuously that breakage becomes imminent - and say that this is even more true of grognards and those associated with the OSR. The chief complaint would be that AD&D psionics made things unnecessarily complicated, were overpowered, duplicated what magic-users or clerics could do, and ruined the tone of the game. 

The last of these complaints bites most forcefully. Ultimately, it is not beyond the wit of man to develop an elegant and interesting psionics system for D&D and related games. But it is the tone which is the real issue. And this is because the existence of psionics is predicated on a metaphysics which is fundamentally incompatible with those of the typical fantasy world.

What I mean by this is simpler than it sounds. The point of psionics is that mind triumphs over matter. The stuff of the universe can be bent, twisted, and otherwise manipulated by the latent power of the brain. And the psionicist therefore simply decide whether he wants to attempt to shape reality, and does so if he has sufficient puissance. The point of magic in a fantasy setting is that it is supernatural - it is a mysterious overarching force which can be channelled so as to supervene in the physical world. Obviously it requires intellect to learn spells, but spells themselves are not outgrowths of happenings within the brain. They are things written down and memorised, yes, but their origins are extrinsic to it. 

These different metaphysics tug in diametrically opposite directions. Does mind triumph over matter? Or is mind subordinate to supernature, which it taps into but never dominates? There is no right or wrong answer to these questions, but they tug themselves apart all the same. In practice, what I think this translates into is simply a sense that psionics 'feels wrong' in a high fantasy campaign setting. It discomobulates our sense of what 'fantasy' entails. This is not, though, due merely to genre expectation. It is a function of the fact that psionics and magic each require the individual to simultaneously adopt two, mutually contradictory, ideas about the nature of reality. Does it conform to (or can it be made to conform to) the mind? Or does the mind channel what is 'out there' in nature (magic) into real-world effects? 

Beautiful Sample Contents from The Great North

Once summer holidays are out of the way, I will be launching the Kickstarter for The Great North, described long ago as 'Yoon-Suin but in Northumberland'. All the text and art is finished, and layout is commencing. 

Here are some little fragments from the prototype of one of the chapters, mostly close-ups (i.e., not full pages or spreads) so you can see it in some of its final glory and get a feel for what the book will look like. Art by Tom Kilian, layout by Solomon VK.

I am very proud of this book, and can't wait to get it out there.