Jellyfish World

The other morning, I took a walk in the hot June sun along the sea wall by the Firth of Tay, close to where it meets the sea. The breeze smelled of salt and summer. The occasional jogger ran past, sweating and gasping under the deep blue sky; seals, out on the water, watched them go by with lazy curiosity. 

I looked out over the edge of the footpath into waters that were deep and calm. The surface of the Firth was placid, undulating softly, like that of a lake. But down below strong currents must have been moving, because I suddenly saw a long line of jellyfish, close to the surface, being rapidly swept downstream as though on an invisible highway. Each was no bigger than my hand, spread out from tip of thumb to tip of little finger - most were completely pale, though others were lurid blue or purple. At times they bobbed to the surface and breached it like little globules of shining resin or gel; at others they dipped down into the murk with wafted motions of their frilly skirts, like coquettish ghosts, or ghosts of coquettes. The only constancy to their movement was their passage ever onwards out to sea. 

Among these dainty jellies swam many thousands of tiny fish, coloured almost exactly like the surface of the water and at first visible only as many minute flickering motions that were too rapid and purposive to be ripples or eddies. But if one paused for a moment to observe from above, as though a bird, one soon saw them in their multitude - dancing among each other and their jellyfish consorts with effortless movements, and occasionally revealing their underbellies to the sun in sudden flashes of silver or pale blue. 

This procession passed by me for a mile or more, sweeping gracefully onwards, dancing by the grasping tendrils of the forest of seaweed that grew forth from the sea wall. And I was reminded again of the virtues of Small Worldism: the doctrine that entire campaign worlds can often be envisaged simply by carefully scrutinising the minutiae of the landscape around oneself. 

I imagined that these creatures were not floating on a mere firth but on a great ocean, and that the jellyfish were each miles wide. I imagined that each harboured a multitude of inhabitants - settlements, fortresses, citadels, palaces - and that among and between this dancing throng of mighty underwater demigod-islands there was trade, war, travel, adventure. 

I imagined that the dense thatching of sea weed that hung by the side of the sea wall was as commensurately large and dense as the jellyfish and the body of water they swam in, and that it harboured monsters, mystery, hidden wonders, entire civilisations of submarine beings. 

I imagined that the fish which swarmed about were themselves leviathans - sharks, whales, marlin, tuna, kingfish, flying fish, manta rays, sunfish, eels - and that their power and hunger could be harnessed by rare and gifted sorcerers or psionicists. 

And I imagined that all it would take to enter that world would be for a brave RPG designer to jump in, take the plunge, and report back with his findings. But then I remembered I had a train to catch, and a fry-up waiting for me at the hotel before I departed, so I turned back and went for breakfast and wrote this note on my phone, instead.

Ogres, Elves, Evil Phantoms or Giants: YOU DECIDE

A year and a half ago, I wrote a post reflecting on Seamus Heaney's Beowulf translation, and specifically the passage close to the start in which the author describes the emergence of the 'clan of Cain' in the aftermath of Abel's murder: 'Ogres, elves, evil phantoms and giants'. I thought these could serve as four archetypes for categories of monster in an 'everything is paladins' dark ages D&D campaign.

But yesterday while driving along the thought randomly occurred to me: wouldn't it be a fun blog post to categorise all of the monsters in the Monstrous Manual into one of these four groupings?

To set out the categories, then, as I had originally envisaged them:

• Ogres are anything that is notably and predominantly greedy, grasping, avaricious, cannibalistic or man-eating (deriving from the etymology of the Old English 'eotonas', deriving from a proto-Germanic word for eating or gluttony. 
• Elves are anything that is mysterious, magical, mystical
• Evil phantoms are malevolent spirits
• Giants are anything that is truly 'gigantic', again arising from the etymology of the Old English gigantas, or stereotypically 'monstrous', like a hydra or manticore

Now, clearly these are very broad categorisations and clearly there will be much overlap between them. Reasonable people can disagree. Here, though, are the rules:

1. Animals, humans, beasts, etc., are not to be categorised - they aren't 'monsters'. Nor are giant 'bog standard' animals like beetles or crabs.
2. Super-taxons of monsters (dragon, giant, beholder, etc.) can be categorised together if desired in the interests of saving time and space
3. Monsters cannot occupy more than one category

So, ok, here is my list:

Ogres

Aaracokra

Ankheg

Argos

Aurumvorax

Basilisk

Behir

Bugbear

Bulette

Bullywug

Carrion crawler

Cave fisher

Crabman

Dragon, firedrake

Dwarf

Derro

Duergar

Ghoul

Gibberling

Gnoll

Goblin

Gremlin

Grimlock

Grippli

Harpy

Hatori

Hobgoblin

Hook horror

Intellect devourer

Ixitxachitl

Kirre

Kobold

Kuo-toa

Leucrotta

Living wall

Lizard man

Man-scorpion

Minotaur

Muckdweller

Ogre

Ogre, half

Oozes, slimes, jellies

Orc

Otyugh

Peryton

Piercer

Pudding, deadly

Quaggoth

Remorhaz

Roper

Rust monster

Sahuagin

Sea lion

Stirge

Su-monster

Thought-eater

Thri-kreen

Troglodyte

Troll

Umber hulk

Wemic

Worm, purple

Xorn

Yeti

Elves

Aboleth

Arcane

Brain mole

Broken one

Brownie

Centaur

Cloaker

Couatl

Displacer beast

Moon dog

Dragon, faerie

Dragon, pseudodragon

Dryad

Elf

Ettercap

Galeb duhr

Giff

Gith

Githyanki

Githzerai

Gloomwing

Gnome

Gnome, spriggan

Golem

Gremlin, jermlaine

Halfling

Hippocampus

Homonculous

Imp, mephit

Jackalwere

Kenku

Leprechaun

Locathah

Lurker

Lycanthrope

Merman

Mimic

Mind flayer

Moldman

Mongrelman

Morkoth

Mudman

Myconid

Naga

Neogi

Nymph

Satyr

Selkie

Sirine

Sprite

Swanmay

Tabaxi

Tako

Tasloi

Triton

Yuan-ti

Evil phantoms

Baatezu/devils

Banshee

Beholders and beholder-kin

Crawling claw

Crypt thing

Death knight

Deepspawn

Doppelganger

Dracolich

Eyewing

Feyr

Gargoyle

Genie

Ghost

Grell

Hag

Haunt

Hell hound

Heucuva

Imp

Invisible stalker

Lich

Medusa

Mist, crimson death

Mist, vampiric

Mummy

Nightmare

Phantom

Poltergeist

Rakshasa

Revenant

Shadow

Skeleton

Slaad

Spectre

Tanar'ri/demon

Vampire

Wight

Will o'wisp

Wolfwere

Wraith

Yugoloth

Zombie

Giants

Catoblepas

Chimera

Cockatrice

Dragon

Dragon turtle

Dragonne

Elemental

Gargantua

Giant

Gorgon

Griffon

Hippogriff

Hydra

Kirin

Lamia

Lammasu

Manticore

Owlbear

Pegasus

Pheonix

Roc

Shedu

Sphinx

Tarrasque

Titan

Treant

Unicorn

Wyvern

Zaratan

So there you have it. It's official. Want to quibble? And want to hazard a guess which would win the ultimate battle royale? My money would be on the Evil Phantoms, I think.... 

DMing Styles: Beethoven to the Beatles

Speaking in very broad brushstrokes (where would the fun be otherwise?), there have been two different ways to approach making music in the time since it has been possible to issue recordings.

The first is that exemplified by classical artists, which is to utilise pre-existing pieces of music, written usually by other people (often long dead), and to become both exceptionally technically proficient at playing them and exceptionally expressive in interpreting them - such that one is able to combine one's own creativity with that of the original great genius who put the notes to paper.

Canadian pianist Glenn Gould would be a good example of this. Gould, like most classical musicians, devoted his career to playing pieces that had been written by other people (chiefly Bach and Beethoven) in order to use them as a vehicle for his own creativity. His recordings can therefore in most part be thought of as Gouldian elaborations or variations on pre-existing forms. When he was playing Bach, he was in effect using Bach's music to explore themes that he was interested in. 

The most famous and controversial illustration of this may be his recording of Beethoven's 23rd Piano Sonata, the 'Appassionata', which is normally played at a quick tempo, but which Gould played almost absurdly slowly - thereby transforming it into an altogether different listening experience. (He did the opposite with the 2nd Sonata, 'Moonlight', which he played at an unusually high tempo.) Whereas in the hands of, say, Daniel Barenboim, the Appassionata's second movement is stately, grand, filled with saudade, but then exploding into joy, in the hands of Gould it is tentative, hesitant, contemplative, and finally melancholic. The same notes are being played, and in the right order, but to very different and distinct effect.

(On YouTube there is a recording of Leonard Bernstein, shortly to conduct Glenn Gould playing Brahms' Concerto No. 1 in D Minor, giving a speech to the audience in which he disclaims any responsibility for what follows.) 

The important thing to note here is that the classical performer does not just 'play Beethoven'. He or she plays his or her interpretation of Beethoven. It is about putting one's own motifs, ideas, feelings and concepts into a familiar, accepted structure.

This can be compared with the approach taken in the world of pop music. Now, pop bands of course are known to play covers, and to play music written by other people. But since the 70s at least, the preference has increasingly turned towards newness. Yes, there is still the existence of form (some might even say formula) - verses, choruses, bridges, and so on - and still generally a recognisable pattern depending on the genre (the guitar four-piece, for example), and indeed genre itself imposes certain requirements. But all this is rather loose. The emphasis is really on creativity and innovation; the way to win status and admiration is to create new songs, not just rework old ones.

This is epitomised by the Beatles, obviously, who spent their (strikingly short) careers continually reinventing what they were doing - always writing new songs and always pushing beyond new musical frontiers. They are hardly alone in having done that, it goes without saying, but it is sometimes worth reflecting on the world of difference there is between a song written at the start of Paul McCartney's career ('Love Me Do', say) with one seven years later at the end of the Beatles' run (such as 'Golden Slumbers'). Here, the personal expressiveness comes not in the interpretation of pre-existing works, but in the creation of new works themselves - and indeed in re-interpreting the boundaries of what is thought possible within existing musical forms.

DMing styles are a lot like this. One the one hand there are the Glenn Goulds of the world. These are the people who dedicate themselves to the perfect technical execution of a particular campaign type (the megadungeon perhaps being the most obvious) and use the formal structure provided to channel their own personal creativity and ideas. And on the other there are the Paul McCartneys, who are always endlessly seeking to do new things - with their creativity being given much freer reign within a greatly looser set of parameters, ranging across genres, campaign styles and modes of play. Both are, needless to say, equally valid, and so is everything in between. Which are you? Gould or McCartney? 

The Great North - Colour Art

Some little visual treats from Tom Killian's work on The Great North, with extracts of accompanying text, forthcoming via Kickstarter later this year:

North of the Red River the land empties itself. The Road runs lonely up the coast, under cold, sun-faded and windswept skies. Standing tall over the wilderness as they have since the days of the Emperor are two great castles, Dolorous Garde and the Place of the Keepers - though nowadays these fortresses do not so much protect the land as turn their backs on all that would disturb their quietude. There is little that would threaten to do so in the thin forests and grey seas around them. But the names of these places are spoken of in hushed rumours which bring travellers from distant places all the same. For once they were the heart of Imperial rule in the north, and this is still remembered. 

The burgh still harbours a war fleet, nominally owned by the Emperor and awaiting the return of imperial rule. These old ships - sleek, oared things built for ramming - are meticulously repaired and maintained, though of course over time they have grown fewer, and the ones that remain inevitably show their great age in the vast encrustations of barnacles on their hulls and in their constantly expanding patchworks of repairs. Each ship by convention is given only a number and not a name, but they are treated as demigods or saints by the inhabitants of the burgh, who recite tales and legends (whether fanciful or true, none can say) about them from their many centuries of service, and insist that their captains and crews know them to be sentient - capable of communicating strange needs and desires through the dreams of those on board, and able at times to control the winds so as to avoid danger or change course to some unknown place. Each ship has its cult, whose members offer it prayer and sacrifice, and ask it to intercede on their behalf with the forgotten imperial gods - or even the soul of the Emperor Himself - whenever they are anxious, joyous, or otherwise in need of blessings. Whenever a ship of the fleet leaves the harbour, the words goes out (‘The IVth is on its way’; ‘Is that the XIXth? The repairs must have been finished’) and the members of that particular cult flock to the quayside to throw flowers, shower it with ale, or dive into the water to swim alongside it. In those moments of passion and excitement in the morning sun, it is easy for the participants to forget that the fleet has had no apparent purpose for many generations, and the voyages of its ships are as lacking in wider meaning as the blowing of the wind or the falling of the rain.

If one were to go West from Killers’ Way and the narrow band of civility which runs up and down that stretch of the Great North Road, one would find the land rapidly becoming empty and wild: an unconquered swathe of dense woods, low resentful hills, and lakes and bogs of brown peaty water. A great Broceliande - indeed, the Great Broceliande - which has never tolerated settlement and will not yet. 
 
Beyond it, and the Teaming River which runs quick and frigid from distant mountains, lies the forest of the Hardwater, growing thick and green. It is ancient, as ancient as the hills of the Great North, but it is also young; it pulsates with life. Time there means nothing. A mere cycle of death, rebirth, and growth - always growth. 
 
The trees there are mighty. Most were already old when the Empire came, though its power never touched them. But a tree does not age like a man, becoming withered and bent and weak; it gets only stronger. The trees of the Hardwater tower over the things below, and spread their branches so high and wide that their canopy extends above the forest floor unbroken like a sky of green. 
 
Beneath this sky, animal life throngs. And so do nature’s spirits. Fauns, capering in forest glades. Ettercaps, patient and quiet in nests of silk. Dryads, the wives of the trees. Woodwoses, forest slavers and erstwhile rulers who would make all their chattels if they could. Green men, dreaming of the passing seasons in hidden lairs. 
 
And elves, the Hardwater’s rulers. Distant, cold, magnificent and murderous; kings, hunters, architects and artists. The Hardwater and everything in it is theirs, and they carry its power beyond their borders  wherever and whenever it suits them.
 
At the heart of the forest lies the Hardwater itself. A great deep lake resting flat like a mirror, reflecting a sky that is not green but the purest blue. Few humans have seen it, and fewer still have lived to tell the tale. It is said that its waters give everlasting life - but that once a person drinks from it, one can never tolerate any other substance passing one’s lips again.

As one moves inland from the coast through thick woodland one suddenly finds the ground rising up into a shelf of crumpled hills, where the trees give way to heather and thick grass and the merciless wind. This land of low peaks, open moors and deep narrow gorges is known as the Hill of Wolves, which is the name of its highest peak - although here ‘wolves’ refers as much to intelligent inhabitants as it does to canine animals. The entire region is infamous for its centaur reivers - clans of thieves, kidnappers and cattle-rustlers, who lair in thick-walled bastle-houses with their own beasts and descend upon more settled lands throughout the year for pillage and sport. Imperial rule never bore heavily on them, though the remnants of the attempts are scattered around the hills - the broken ruins of small forts which failed to suppress them, and temples which failed to find converts. The reivers were both too proud and too bloodthirsty for the Emperor’s civilisation. 
 
Alongside the reivers there lurk other wild and malevolent beings: ettins dwelling in dark caves, redcaps scheming from stone towers, and other things more powerful yet, luxuriating in the isolation of the hills. But it is also rumoured that, somewhere deep within the heart of this bleak wilderness, there lies a verdant valley of thick forest thronged with game, kept by the elves of the Hardwater for hunting, which no human eye is permitted to see and return to let the mouth speak of. 
 
A narrow trail, the Sixthstreet, timidly skirts this wilderness, heading north-by-north-west from the Great North Road. On it lie human settlements which have managed to achieve a modus vivendi, through force or cunning, with the dangers which overlook them from the hills to their west. The former of these approaches is embodied in Drummond’s Quarter, the fourth-of-a-town,  whose people are enslaved by the warrior castes who rule and defend them. The latter is embodied by Hrotha’s Town, built from the stuff of illusion and hidden from view of all potential enemies by the great wizard Hrotha himself. The people of the smaller villages around them flock to these burghs when danger threatens - or mirror their tactics in miniature. 

Is It Possible to Make the Hobbyist to Professional Transition?

The Kickstarter for Yoon-Suin 2nd edition is finally coming to full fruition with the imminent printing and distribution of physical copies. I thought this might be a useful opportunity to reflect on the exercise itself, in the hopes that anybody considering entering the world of RPG-product self-publication and distribution finds it useful. 

My primary goal in creating and releasing Yoon-Suin 2nd edition was to get Yoon-Suin back out there in print form (it used to be available POD from lulu, but they stopped producing books in its format), with updated content, new art, and also additional content. But like anybody, I nurse wild fantasies of giving up the day job and focusing my energies entirely on transforming my hobby into a living, and in the back of my mind I had the idea of using the exercise as a test run to see if I could do this.

Let's, then, do a little bit of a breakdown of the profit & loss statement on Yoon-Suin 2nd edition as a way of opening up for reflection the broader question of the viability of RPG self-publishing as a Way of Life. All of the figures I am using are rough ones, for illustrative purposes, and no doubt there are savings that could have been made here and there. But looking at them is useful all the same.

First, then, the figures.

The Kickstarter itself raised roughly £78,000. Of this, Kickstarter takes 5% in fees, a 3% payment processing fee, and then £0.30 per backer. That works out at about £7,000, which once you deduct Stripe fees and so forth leaves us just north of £70,000.

From this, I paid contributors (all artists, mostly working for a percentage of total revenue after KS fees, Alec-Guiness-in-Star-Wars style) about £23,000. That takes us down to £47,000.

The cost of printing, warehousing, VAT registration, etc., along with Backerkit fees (which I used for pledge management) takes us to roughly £17,000. That takes the leftover revenue to £30,000. The cost of shipping, distribution and so forth is itself is paid for by backers, so that's a wash. 

Now deduct 40% tax (I am in the UK's 'higher rate' for income tax) and what's left is £18,000. Deduct a nice bottle of whisky or two as reasonable expenses and it's £17,800 left over for, off and on, four or five years of work. 

So that's the accounting 'on the books' profit. What though is the economic profit? God knows how many hours I put into rewriting the original text, adding new material (around 100 pages), and laying it all out - I wrote much of the new material across the course of 2020-21 during evenings and weekends, and then spent an inordinate amount of time across 2022-2024 editing it, proofreading it, and doing layout. Then there are all the hours spent on the administration of the endeavour, responding to emails, dealing with fulfilment, and so on and so forth. I can only guess at the number of hours spent, but I would say something like, on average, between 1-2 hours every day for three years. So I would say around 1600-1700 hours - rather more than a full-time job per annum if you take into consideration holidays and leave. 

The figures would of course be different if I was doing this full time - I would pay less tax, for one thing, and no doubt could use my time more effectively and efficiently. And I should also say that I do make roughly £100-£150 a month in sales of my existing products to add on top. But what we are in effect saying is that I would have to produce a Yoon-Suin 2nd edition each year in order to make what is probably rather less than the minimum wage level (£12.21 per hour) - and only just a little bit more than a quarter of what my actual day job delivers.

Could I quit the day job and produce the equivalent of fourYoon-Suin 2nd editions a year in order to live in the manner to which I have become accustomed, support a family, and so on and so forth?

No, I couldn't. I could certainly produce more products - maybe one a year. I could market more effectively, which would increase revenue. And I could generate more income through a 'long tail' of a back catalogue. But I do not think I could keep myself and my family from the bread line doing this alone. I could make retirement more comfortable, say, when it comes to that. But I could not live off RPG bread alone.

There are people who can. They lie, however, at the extremes. They are dedicated, talented, disciplined risk takers who I greatly admire. For me: I will reconcile myself to the life of a dedicated hobbyist who keeps himself in beer. 

Authentic Tribal Warfare on Film, and What It Means

YouTube's algorithm knows me spookily well. I mostly use the site to watch whisky reviews and Rick Beato interviews (as well as reaction videos to Rick Beato interviews - don't judge me). And yet somehow it knew that my absolute visual highlight of the year would be a 12 minute long clip titled West Papua Tribal War (Original Footage 1964) - a film consisting of...well....tribal war in West Papua, shot in cinéma vérité style with no soundtrack and minimal narration - and that it should make this video pop up on the home screen this lunch time when I visited for my daily fix. 

I strongly recommend you watch this. I will even go so far as to embed it for you here, so you can simply click on it and appreciate what an astonishing piece of footage it is:

The clip is from a film called Dead Birds, which is apparently well known among ethnographers, though I had never heard of it before. (This is the cue for a hundred people to pop up in the comments demanding to know how it is possible to be so ignorant as to not know of its existence until now.) The director's description adds powerful, and poetic, context:

“Dead Birds is a film about the Dani*, a people dwelling in the Grand Valley of the Baliem high in the mountains of West Irian. When I shot the film in 1961, the Dani had an almost classic Neolithic culture. They were exceptional in the way they focussed their energies and based their values on an elaborate system of intertribal warfare and revenge. Neighboring groups of Dani clans, separated by uncultivated strips of no man's land, engaged in frequent formal battles. 

"When a warrior was killed in battle or died from a wound and even when a woman or a child lost their life in an enemy raid, the victors celebrated and the victims mourned. Because each death had to be avenged, the balance was continually being adjusted with the spirits of the aggrieved lifted and the ghosts of slain comrades satisfied as soon as a compensating enemy life was taken. There was no thought in the Dani world of wars ever ending, unless it rained or became dark. Without war there would be no way to satisfy the ghosts. Wars were also the best way they knew to keep a terrible harmony in a life which would be, without the strife they invented, mostly hard and dull. 

"'Dead Birds' has a meaning which is both immediate and allegorical. In the Dani language it refers to the weapons and ornaments recovered in battle. Its other more poetic meaning comes from the Dani belief that people, because they are like birds, must die. In making Dead Birds certain kinds of behavior were followed, never directed. It was an attempt to see people from within and to wonder, when the selected fragments of that life were assembled, if they might speak not only of the Dani but also of ourselves.”

Images like this are about as close as a modern Westerner can get to a glimpse of a fantasy world. When I say this, I do not intend for one moment to dehumanise or belittle the subjects of the film. But short of Mars, this is about as distant a place, both geographically, temporally and conceptually, as it is possible for us to go. These are human beings who are under pressures that are as different to ours as can be imagined - though of course we share the same, underlying human condition. What can we say about what is depicted in this footage of them?

The first thing is the obvious: war is hell, but some wars are more hellish than others. War for people in a 'classic Neolithic culture' looks dangerous, but also kind of exhilerating and fun. At first glance the director's observation that the Dani invented strife to distract them from the dullness of their lives seems gratuitous. But after watching the full clip, you can readily believe it. I've known men over the years who have been perfectly happy to admit that they like a good fight on a Friday or Saturday night and that it livens up their lives. And in this respect, indeed, the Dani do not appear to be so different - is this not the 'classic Neolithic culture' equivalent of a good old street barnie after an Old Firm game? 

The second: note how careful everybody is. Initially one is tempted to caricature the apparent timidity of the participants as just a bit of handbags at dawn. But then you recall that these people live in a world without modern medicine, antibiotics, or painkillers, and where surgery is performed with teeth. You'd be pretty damn cautious too if it was you. But this also contributes to the slightly ritualistic, performative nature of the proceedings. Despite hundreds of men apparently having fought each other for most of the day, off and on, nobody appears to have been killed, and only one man on each side badly wounded. This is more or less the exact opposite to how things would go if this was D&D combat.

The third: there is a thesis, advanced by Victor Davis Hanson in the book Carnage and Culture, that there is something specifically bloody about the 'Western' way of war, dating back to ancient Greece. The suggestion here is not that only Westerners wage bloody war. Rather, it is that a specific form of exceptionally murderous warfare emerged in the West, and was exported from there to the rest of the world afterwards. A big element of this would appear to revolve around the willingness to 'die in place' - to stand one's ground and risk being killed in the service of a tactical or strategic objective, and typically to ensure that one's comrades get to slaughter as many of the enemy as possible. The men in this footage do not have that willingness, entirely understandably (I refer you to point 2, above), and the result is something radically different in emphasis to what one might have seen at, say Waterloo. The men in the battle depicted here chiefly appear to want to survive without looking too cowardly. At Waterloo the aim was to win. This distinction matters.

The fourth and final: I was struck once again, watching this film, that the real world is impossibly richer and more interesting than any fantasy world could ever be. Any fantasy author or DM could dream up the concept of 'classic Neolithic culture'. But could they dream up this? And bear in mind that on West Papua (itself only half of the island of New Guinea) there are perhaps 700 different languages and tribal groupings, all with their own related but distinct cultures, beliefs, and traditional practices. No imagined world could ever hope to compete.

Yoon-Suin 2nd edition print release PRE-ORDER

First there was Yoon-Suin, and it was good

The Gods of the God River saw it, and saw it was good

The Yali of the forest danced when they saw it

The nasnas of Syr Darya saw it, and saw it was good

The dragons of the high mountains saw it and wondered

The oligarchs of the mountains saw it, and saw it was good

In the kingdoms the rakhosh saw it and knew they should not touch it

The mighty chu-srin saw it, and saw it was good 

Then another Yoon-Suin came, and it was good

The readers of noisms' blog saw the pre-order store, and saw it was good

It has been a long time coming, but the print edition of Yoon-Suin 2nd edition is shortly to head off for printing and distribution. You can pre-order it here if you missed out on the Kickstarter.

Here is the marketing blurb from the store itself, if you are not sure what Yoon-Suin is:

First, there was Yoon-Suin. Now, there is Yoon-Suin 2nd edition - featuring NEW MONSTERS, NEW APPENDICES, NEW ART and, last but not least, 12 NEW MINI-ADVENTURE MODULES featuring nearly 100 pages of playable content!

Yoon-Suin is a campaign toolbox for fantasy games, giving you the equipment necessary to run a sandbox campaign in your own Yoon-Suin - a region of high adventure shrouded in ancient mysteries, opium smoke, great luxury and opulent cruelty.

Contains:

• A bestiary of unique monsters, including self-mummified monks, liquid golems, tiger-beetle men, aphid-men, figments, and dozens more
• A new character class, the Crab-man
• A chapter for each of the major regions of Yoon-Suin, filled with random generators to brainstorm map contents, social groups, and more
• Extended rules for poisons, tea, opium, trade, deities and so on
• Extended rules for exploring the Old Town of the Yellow City, and the haunted jungles of Lahag
• Many encounter tables
• Well over 100 pre-written adventure locales to populate a regional map
• 12 Mini-adventure modules, fully keyed and usable 'out of the box'
• Nearly 400 pages of content, indexed
• Purple prose

What people have said about Yoon-Suin:

"Yoon-Suin remains for me the original OSR setting and a huge inspiration." - Tom F

"It’s not like anything anybody else could have made or will make...On reading it I really wanted to go to Sughd and find out what the hell those Nasnas are up to, or take over an abandoned fortress by a river in Lahag, or hang out with boat people and get strange tattoos. And that’s exactly how it is meant to make you feel. I think people will be very impressed, I certainly hope they will be." - Patrick Stuart

"This is probably one of the most impressive gaming supplements (let alone campaign settings) that I’ve ever come across...I can’t recommend this enough: this is a must-have for any DM or game designer. It is a fantastic work." - Necrozius

"My mind is blown. This artifact...is a labour of wonder. It is as stepping into a very idosyncratic storybook, with step by step instructions on how to have a magical adventure within. It is 300 pages of love, allowing endless adventure." - Hack Slash Master

PLEASE NOTE: This is a HEAVY book, so shipping is on the expensive side. Reassure yourself that it contains 400 pages of densely usable content, commensurate with its heftiness!

Is it possible to be Lawful Evil?

Is it possible actually to be Lawful Evil? 

This question, oddly enough, gets us to the heart of the central conundrum of 20th century legal philosophy. After the Second World War, jurisprudential thought went through some soul-searching with regard to the relationship between law and morality. To oversimplify: does law have to have some sort of connection to morality in order to be valid law? 

This debate chiefly concerned the status of the law of the Nazi regime. The West German authorities were faced with a conundrum in the period after the war when their country was undergoing a complete institutional restructuring and denazification process. Should they behave as though the laws which the Nazis had made were valid? Or should they behave as though no Nazi-made laws had any effect, and simply act as though the civil and criminal codes of the German state as they had existed prior to 1933 had continued to be the really valid law all along? 

The best way to make this abstract-sounding debate concrete is to briefly described the 'Nazi informer' case, made famous by a debate between HLA Hart and Lon Fuller that is well-known to law students everywhere. To cut a long story short, this concerned a woman who had wanted to rid herself of her husband. In order to expeditiously get him out of the picture, she reported him to the authorities in 1944, accusing him of having made statements inimical to the welfare of the Third Reich (in this case, derogatory remarks about Hitler). This was a criminal offence at that time, punishable by death, although the husband was eventually sent to serve in the front (presumably because at that point the regime was fighting for its life and needed every able-bodied man it could get). 

After the war was over the wife was indicted for the offence of 'unlawful deprivation of liberty', which was listed in the German Criminal Code of 1871, and was found guilty. She may have been doing her 'lawful' duty in respect of the 'law' which had existed at the material time. But that was not valid law, because it had been an outrage 'to the sound conscience and sense of justice of all decent human beings'. She could not plead in her defence that in 1944 she had been acting lawfully, because she had not: the 'law' in question (regarding statements inimical to the welfare of the Third Reich) had not been law at all.

This might sound intuitively like the right outcome, but there is a strong rule-of-law argument from the other direction - namely, that this was a retrospective application of law. It isn't fair, or just, to punish somebody for doing something that at the material time had not been prima facie unlawful. The wife might have behaved immorally, but that's not the same thing as saying she had done something unlawful. The answer, as you will have noticed, really just hinges on what one thinks about the nature of law itself. If law is valid because it is validly made on its own terms, then the wife had done nothing legally wrong, because the Nazi law in question had indeed been validly made on its own terms. If, on the other hand, law is only valid if it accords with some underlying moral order, then she had committed the old 1871 offence, because that was valid in the moral sense, whereas the Nazi law that had appeared in the interim was not.

Put more straightforwardly: can law be evil, or is law only law if it has moral content or rests on moral norms?

For Hart (and the other legal positivists, of which he was one) law can indeed be 'evil' in the sense that law is law as long as it is recognised as such. This does not mean that law should not, ideally, reflect morality or that there is no underlying moral order. It just means that in identifying whether law is valid, what is relevant is whether it has been made in accordance with what is recognised to be the test for validity within the legal system itself. For Fuller, law cannot be 'evil' in the sense that law is connected with morality, and immoral law is an oxymoron; it law is not founded on morality then it is not law at all.

Fuller, though, did not base his reasoning on a substantive idea of morality, but rather a procedural one. Law, he said, was only law if it was made in accordance with law's 'inner morality'. This was not a matter of determining whether its rules were right or wrong. Rather, it was a matter of determining whether they had been made in the right way. This meant that law must be (1) of general application; (2) promulgated publicly; (3) prospective rather than retrospective in application; (4) intelligible to those addressed by it; (5) consistent; (6) practicably possible to comply with; (7) stable; and (8) ‘congruent’ (meaning that there should not be a gap between the law as it exists on paper and how it is applied in practice). 

These eight principles, Fuller suggested, were important because they were the means by which respect for the subject of law - the human individual - could be enshrined. If law possesses these qualities, it is predictable, stable, and clear, and people know where they stand with it. It gives its subjects a fair opportunity to know, in advance of doing something, whether or not it will be lawful. If, on the other hand, 'law' does not possess those qualities (i.e., if it is of selective application; if it is secret; if it applies retrospectively; if it is unintelligible; if it is inconsistent; etc.) then that is tantamount to saying that those making the 'law' are really just governing by whim, which is to say, not making law at all but ruling by fiat or decree. 

Fuller's test for whether something is really 'law' or not therefore rested on a connection to morality, but he was careful about how he framed what 'morality' meant. Law's morality was not substantive. It was only to do with how it was made. What makes law, law, is that it consists of rules which possess his eight characteristics. 

However, Fuller was also clearly of the view that if law is (1) of general application; (2) promulgated publicly; (3) prospective rather than retrospective in application; (4) intelligible to those addressed by it; (5) consistent; (6) practicably possible to comply with; (7) stable; and (8) ‘congruent’ - which is to say, if it is procedurally moral - then in practical terms the law that gets made will tend to be substantively moral as well. Tyrants and dictators do not make law possessing these characteristics, for the good reason that law in this sense will constrain their actions by forcing them to rule fairly and to account for themselves to the public. Law, in other words, will by default in practice end up being connected to an underlying 'external' morality simply because that is what procedurally correct law will ineluctably produce.

Ever since he was writing, though, his critics have argued against this conclusion, calling it naive. It is perfectly possible, in the eyes of these critics, for law to possess Fuller's eight ideal characteristics but for it still to produce immoral outcomes or even to be twisted for immoral ends. And, indeed, some would even argue that the eight characteristics in question themselves will tend to be a barrier to social justice because they prevent lawmakers acting flexibly and responsively in order to do what is right in the name of higher values - equality, fairness, etc. 

Is it, then, possible to be Lawful Evil? Is law valid law so long as it is validly made in terms which the legal system recognises? Or is law only valid if it aligns with what is morally right or just? If legal morality is merely procedural, is it possible for it to produce 'evil' effects, or will the laws that are produced end up being moral by dint of the process by which they were created?

To bring us back full circle: was the wife in the Nazi informer case, when she dobbed in her husband to the authorities, being Lawful Evil? Or something else?

Do You Remember the Time? The Pattern of a Hobby

Let's for a moment, talk about the pattern of hobby involvement throughout the course of a person's life.

Typically, as small children, we don't really choose our hobbies - they are chosen for us, by our parents. They take us to trombone lessons, play football with us, make us do Irish dancing, etc., and some of the time these activities 'stick' and some of the time they don't. When they do 'stick' it is partly to do with natural aptitude and partly to do with friendship groups, and partly to do with parental bloody-mindedness. For instance, when I look back at the childhood hobbies I participated in for any length of time, it occurs to me that some of them I really enjoyed (like cricket), some of them I was chiefly involved in just because my friends were too (like cubs and scouts), and some I hated but was forced to do by my mother (piano). 

Then, when we reach adolescence - say, by age 11 or so - we develop enough independence and wherewithal to choose hobbies of our own. Of course, sometimes what is chosen still reflects parental choice (an adolescent may discover that while he or she has been taken to, say, tennis lessons since the age of five and never really questioned it, at age eleven he or she actually really wants to continue of their own volition). But very often, what is chosen is something that parents find mystifying or troubling - like being in a heavy metal band, or boxing, or street dancing, or whatever. 

As adolescence transitions into late teenager-hood (say, age 15 or 16), there typically comes a fork in the road. At this age, hobbies either get abandoned - overwhelmingly the reason for this is becoming more heavily into girls/boys - or persisted with. There are lots of factors at play here. Often hobbies are persisted with if they are perceived as 'cooler' than others. People also tend to stick with their hobbies if they aren't in 'popular' cliques and don't have many options for hanging out, partying and so forth. Naturally, people tend to keep up hobbies if they are very good at them. (I know somebody, for instance, who grew up playing squash and discovered as a teenager that he was exceptionally good at it, kept it up, and got a scholarship to a university in the US off the back of his gift for hitting a ball against a wall really hard.) 

The fourth phase begins as people transition into being adults proper, at which point hobbies naturally tend to fall by the wayside (though this is obviously not universal) as attention shifts to work, dating, home life, and so on - and, in due course, often marriage and then children. Most people during this period become too busy to really sustain hobbies or at least to devote as much time to them as they would like to, and things become attenuated as a result. 

But this, in due course, leads to a fifth phase, usually when people have made it through the intensity of early adulthood, and have got to a fairly settled position in life. At this point, they start to take up hobbies again, finding they have time at evenings and weekends and perhaps want to make new friends (or meet new spouses and partners). Here they either develop new interests, or re-familiarise themselves with old ones.

The vast, vast, vast majority of RPG gamers are those who encountered the hobby during the second phase of adolescence. And whether or not they persist with the hobby through phases three, four and five, or else re-encounter it in phase five after a long hiatus, tends to result from how much magic was involved in that initial encounter. Was it love that struck them at age 11 when they first cracked open the AD&D DMG? Or was it just lust - or mere like?

For me, it was love - and I can still remember that era of my life, the period between roughly age 11 and 13, which seemed to be imbued with a kind of sorcery. Essentially all that my friends and I did, every day after school and on Saturdays and Sundays, was hang out and play D&D, Warhammer, Necromunda, Blood Bowl, Shadowrun, or Cyberpunk 2020 - or else go to a shop (Games Workshop or a Virgin Megastore) to gaze adoringly at figures or books we could never hope to afford. During that era, something was imprinted in my psyche, such that it would never quite be able to let me go - and it was this that ensured that, even though I abandoned my interest the hobby for some years in early adulthood, I was drawn back into it later on as I matured.

Looking back, I wonder what it was about that period that was so special. What was it that set the imprinting process in train? 

A combination of factors: the escapism that fantasy literature and gaming offered for a boy growing up in a boring town with no money; the fact that I was imaginative and bookish anyway; the fact that it was something that was mine and that my parents had absolutely no involvement in. 

But also the vignettes: buying Necromunda with leftover Christmas money from relatives one Saturday morning and bringing it home and playing it all weekend stowed away in the attic with a friend. The first time I opened the Planescape boxed set - I can still remember how my small brain exploded when I saw DiTerlizzi's art. Paging through the 2nd edition DMG on a bed in an Israeli hotel bedroom after having bought it earlier that day at a shop in Tel Aviv, with Offspring and Jeff Buckley videos on MTV in the background. Reading Lone Wolf books under the covers in bed each night with a torch. Ordering figures from Citadel Miniatures by post and frantically checking the post each morning before school. Buying fistfuls of cheap little gem dice and spending hour and hours rolling them just for fun. 

Being an 11-13 year old boy, not to put too fine a point on it, sucks. But this hobby made it suck a lot less. And that gives it enough credit, perhaps, for a life time. 

Elvenised Humans

It is a feature of human social history that empires rely on a construction of a Gramscian 'cultural hegemony', whereby elite culture distinguishes itself from the 'subaltern' by casting the latter as being of low status, irrational, morally deficient, and so forth. This helps to foster the sociological or even psychological conditions by which an empire sustains itself - those in charge reassure themselves that they are right and decent and good and therefore deserving to rule, and those who are not in charge are correspondingly depoliticised, disinherited, and demoralised. 

It follows that anybody who wants to get by, or rise to the top, in an imperial context has to look and sound as though they possess the cultural trappings, values and beliefs of the hegemon. And so it is, for example, that in Britain in 2025 social climbers make strenuous efforts to ape the mores of what they perceive to be the elite culture in their current imperial overlord, the USA - following its politics, learning its history and its slang words, even watching its sports, and so on, whereas 2000 years previously the same types of people would have been donning togas, developing an interest in mosaics, and swanning around saying things like 'disce ut semper victurus, vive ut cras moriturus'.

It seems to me that we can say that, were elves to exist in the real world in any real number, they would establish empires, whether territorial or cultural. Elves have superior intellects, skills and wisdom, if fantasy literature has taught me anything - so it stands to reason that they would be able to put their superiority to good use by creating regimes in which they rule and humans, whether through conquest or vassalage or else simply cultural forcefulness (as in the example of the USA), are rendered subaltern. 

And it follows from this that in societies where elves rule, whether directly, or indirectly from a distant capital through an envoy or consul, the human population - particularly amongst the social-climbing classes - would seek to 'elvenise' itself just as the ancient Britons Romanised themselves and just as the social climbers in any imperial context model themselves after those who rule. These elvenised humans would not be half-elves, because no interbreeding is implied. Rather, they would be ordinary humans who are drive to elvenise in order to distinguish themselves from their crude, low-status, fellows.

Whether the elvenisation process would extend to deliberately sharpening one's ears with careful pruning of the flesh with sharpened knives, or would consist merely of changes in dress, adoption of mannerisms, and the extensive use of elven loanwords in their daily conservation, is a subject for considered debate. So is what the elven overlords themselves would make of all of this. For the time being I leave you with the idea to do with it as you wish. 

More Beautiful Development Sketches for The Great North

Tom Kilian continues to excel himself with the artwork for The Great North, now heading towards completion. As an Easter present, here is a work-in-progress image for the cover:

And for full-page chapter titles for The Place of Keepers:

The Wild Coast:

The Great Broceliande:

The Hardwater:

The Hill of Wolves:

The Emperor's Meadow:

And the Dark River Dale:

These will all be full-colour illos in the final version of the book.

After the War: Thoughts on a Campaign Style

I recently read JG Ballard's autobiography, Miracles of Life, written in 2008 when he was already dying. The fact that he must have known this lends the book a poignancy, but also a disjointedness - it obviously wasn't in his power to really dedicate himself to realising the project fully. By far the most interesting sections are at the beginning, when Ballard reflects on his time in Shanghai and his famous internment at Lunghua by the Japanese occupying forces between 1942 and 1945. And the most interesting aspect of this story is the brief account of liberation and what followed - the orgy of random violence which the Japanese soldiers inflicted as they vacated Shanghai (he recounts some brutal examples) and the subsequent American takeover of the city.

Ballard asserts, and I have no reason to dispute this, that for months and months (perhaps years) after the end of the war some Japanese troops remained in Shanghai under American leadership, performing guard duties and the like. In the general atmosphere of destruction and chaos, this strange union of former enemies appeared perfectly natural. It reminded me of a film I saw nearly twenty years ago in Japan, called Ari no Heitai or 'Ant Soldiers', which told the story of the Japanese soldiers (some 30,000 of them) who remained in China, after the Second World War had ended, as mercenaries or volunteers fighting for either the Kuomintang or the Communists in the Chinese Civil War. 

It also reminded me of the strange fate of the Japanese soldiers captured by Soviet forces in the closing weeks of the war. In Embracing Defeat, John Dower puts the figure of these soldiers at 1.6 million - but nothing like as many were ever repatriated. Some 625,000 were officially returned to Japan by the USSR, and more arrived illegally or unofficially in dribs and drabs after that, but there are still thought to be anywhere between 250,000 and 500,000 who are unaccounted for. Presumably some of these will have died or ended up in gulags, but occasionally on Japanese TV documentaries will be aired about the discovery of the descendants of such soldiers in the far-flung corners of Siberia. 

Widening the focus, there is of course the famous story of the Czechoslovak Legion, a unit of the Imperial Russian Army comprising Czech and Slovak volunteers, who found themselves stranded in Russia in 1918 when the Bolsheviks, having recently seized power, negotiated the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk with Germany and ended the war. The Legion, its members desiring to travel to the Western Front to continue fighting the Central Powers, but unable to get there directly by land travelling westwards, decided to go eastwards instead and go all the way to Vladivostok, then catch a boat to France. They then became embroiled in the Russian Civil War on the side of the Whites, and at one point even participated in the seizure of the old Russian Imperial gold reserve. 

And widening it yet further to fiction, there are a few examples of books and films taking place in the immediate, and still often violent and chaotic, aftermath of a war. Gene Wolfe's Soldier of the Mist series is one of my favourite examples - the action takes place shortly after the climax of the failed invasion of Greece by Persia at Plataea in 479 BC, and the main character, Latro, it is assumed sustained his amnesia-inducing head injury during that battle. The detritus of war, and the confusion, with vast numbers of people (civilians and soldiers alike) going this way and that in search of home, whether the old home or a new one, is nicely described by Wolfe in that novel. A leftfield choice, but a very enjoyable flick, is Three Kings, in which three bored US soldiers with nothing to do at the end of the first Gulf War decide to go off on a heist and become embroiled in the general chaos and mayhem of post-war Iraq. You could probably also put Cold Mountain in this category; while I'm not sure whether the events depicted in it happen before or after the US Civil War ended, the depiction of a wandering soldier making his way home across a landscape torn and destabilised by conflict is truly compelling.

The beauty of the War Aftermath campaign mode is that it creates a landscape within which adventure and derring-do are pretty much assumed, but also that it creates the space within which a very wide breadth of choice opens up in respect of play style. The PCs might be purely self-interested rogues wandering here and there looting treasure. But they might equally be self-conscious 'good guys' trying to help the weak and unfortunate - or anything in between. 

And the generalised atmosphere of chaos and confusion can be highly conducive to creative DMing. Imagine a bucolic fantasy landscape such as the Shire in the aftermath of an invasion by an army of interlopers from the Abyss and the subsequent vanquishing of said Abyssal horde by an army of quasi-angelic high elves. What strange beings would be hidden in that landscape, wounded or hidden? What might have been left behind by way of loot by the retreating army? What wandering mercenaries, bands of prisoners and their guards, messengers and refugees would be coming and going, hurrying along or tarrying, behind the next hill or forest? What opportunities would like in store for a band of ex-soldiers now foot loose and fancy free? What would befall a group of ordinary peasants searching for a lost home or family? 

Ode on Discovering Oriental Adventures in the Used Book Giveaway Shelves at the Local Tesco

 

My life is brilliant

My love is pure

I saw a sourcebook

Of that I'm sure

It was sitting on a bookshelf

It was with some other books

And I didn't lose much money on it

'Cause it was going secondhand

You're overpowered and problematic

You're overpowered and problematic

You're overpowered and problematic, it's true

I saw your cover on an old bookcase

And I knew just what to do

'Cause I only had a copy of you on PDF

Yes it caught my eye

As I walked on by

Anyone could see from my face that I was 

Fucking overcome with the desire to roll some d20s

And I don't think that I will play it again

But I took it with me and put it in my study

You're overpowered and problematic

You're overpowered and problematic

You're overpowered and problematic, it's true

I saw your cover on an old bookcase

And I knew just what to do

'Cause I only had a copy of you on PDF

You're overpowered and problematic

You're overpowered and problematic

You're overpowered and problematic, it's true

Gary Gygax must be up there with a smile on his face

When he thought up your unnecessarily complicated rules

But it's time to face the truth

I will never play with you

Metaphysical Syphilis

Syphilis - although I understand there may be some debate about this - likely arose among North American native populations prior to European contact and was spread back to Europe (and to the rest of the world) after the Spanish first began to explore the continent.

Of course, this was far from one-way traffic: North America got off far worse by comparison with regard to the Eurasian diseases which came in their direction after first contact. (I've written about the apocalyptic consequences of this before.) But, separating the conceptual from the awfulness of the actuality for a moment, there is something compelling about the idea of explorers/adventurers being unwittingly exposed to some disease which has potentially history-defining consequences when taken back home.

Disease, though, is not a very interesting or appetising subject for a pen & paper RPG. What if instead we were to think about a metaphysical version of the phenomenon? What is metaphysical syphilis and how is it to be made gameable?

Metaphysical Syphilis: Definition and Examples

syphilis, metaphysical noun a condition of corruption, deterioration or confusion which typically accompanies transition through ontological gateways

A metaphysical syphilis would most commonly arise in the context of adventure. After the PCs have gone from the place of safety (the town, the tavern, the guild, etc.) to the place of danger (the dungeon, the wilderness, the underworld, etc.) there is a risk that they bring back with them an ontological disruptor that causes the place of safety to instead become itself dangerous, different, or discombobulated.

This could be as simple as a literal parasite (as in Alien) or a haunting (a poltergeist or somesuch which follows the PCs back home) that spreads when brought home. But there are other more creative examples in the literature.

One that springs to mind is from the Chronicles of Amber. I only recently re-read the Amber books (about 12 months ago) for literally about the fifth time, but I am now a forgetful old sausage and the exact details have already slipped from my mind - somebody will appear in the comments to tell me I am an IDIOT for getting it wrong - but the main superplot of the first five novels concerns the corruption by blood of the 'pattern' by which Amberites are able to transition between realities. This results in a 'black road' of chaos spreading across all known realities and bringing with it all kinds of ghoulies and ghastlies. This eventually comes to threaten 'home', Amber, itself. 

Another more leftfield and perhaps benign version is the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode 'Force of Nature', in which it is revealed that travelling by warp speed at too fast a speed (this was conveniently forgotten about the following week) actually causes reality itself to deteriorate. It is only a short step from there to 'causes reality itself to deteriorate and for demons to come through the gaps' (now that I think of it, this is I suppose the plot of Event Horizon), which would be a nice way to add complications to any campaign involving actual physical travel between two different planes of reality. (For example, each time one passes through a Planescape gate, there is a chance the gate loses coherence and opens a branch in a totally random other plane, creating a three-way juncture.)

Then there's magic. In MERP, it's the case that any use of magic might attract the attention of a 'shadow'. What if the use of magic may cause reality to decay in some way? Or may indeed cause magical entities to appear as byproducts? 

And, finally, there is the, if you like, biggest 'meta'-metaphysical syphilis of all, which is the PCs themselves. What are the PCs, in the end, other than syphilitic in the purest sense - travelling from one reality to another and, whichever way they go, bringing violence, magic, disruptions, and so on with them - and thereby subjecting it to fundamental change? How about that, eh? 

On Being Grateful

I am going to do something unexpected, unusual, uncharacteristic and even, dare I say it, unbecoming now.

I am going to do something sincere. I am going to say 'thank you'.

The first set of people I am going to say 'thank you' to are the regular readers and commenters on this blog, some of whom - these people, let me be clear, must be stark raving mad - have been consistently doing it literally for years, in some cases a decade or more. Others have come and gone; some have frenziedly commented on every post for a period of time and then disappeared; some pop up from time to time between gaps of many months; some appear with mysterious aliases that may or not shift from appearance to appearance; some are forever 'Anon'. 

The surprising thing about these people is that 99% of the time they are respectful, intelligent, creative, polite, and interesting. There is the occasional heaping of abuse, the occasional yelled slur from the sidelines, the occasional cowardly anonymous criticism. But those episodes are gratifyingly rare. I can honestly say that the people who comment here are a cut above: they contribute. You guys have made writing this blog a consistently rewarding experience over the years, and the periods of time when I have enjoyed writing it the most - the periods of time when I have really felt the process seem to sing - have been when a proper feedback mechanism develops and I am able to post in response to and in light of the creative comments that readers have offered. 

So - sincerely. Thanks.

But there is a second set of people I would like to say 'thank you' to - a more diffuse category, most of whom will not even be aware this blog exists, and some of whom are dead. These are the people who, down the years, have created the games, the settings, the books, the concepts that have enriched my life by making it possible to write this blog, and to provide me with the creative outlet it - and the spin-out products I've made - has been. Without this hobby my life would have lacked something important: the opportunity occasionally to escape the prison of the mundane, and to run scampering out across the meadows of the imagination. Those opportunities have become rarer as the prison guards have become more insistent, thorough and hard-working. But they still exist, here and there - with a little help from these friends I've mentioned. 

So thank you to them, too.

I have nothing else to add. I wanted to write something positive.

When the Clouds Come Down

 

On certain days, at twilight, the clouds gather themselves down along the horizon and become indistinguishable from hills. At such times, the onlooker imagines that the two phenomena - the clouds and the land itself - merge into one. If only he could get there quickly enough, before night descends, he feels, he could step up into the clouds and be borne away into the dusky sky.

What if the clouds did in fact one evening come and lay themselves down on the land to create a whole new range of far-off hills of solid earth? A distant Shangri-La perhaps - or a rugged badlands filled with terror? What would any self-respecting adventurer do, other than gather his belongings into a pack and strike off to explore the fresh new landscape? 

Where these hills loomed large such adventurers would congregate for mutual support and supply, and frontier villages or towns would spring up to serve their commercial needs and exploit whatever opportunities for plunder they unearthed. Life among these people would be short and cheap - it is hard to imagine that the New Hills would be a place of safety or ease, and it seems likely that whatever strange life the Hills brought with them would threaten constantly to escape beyond their confines. But still adventurers would come, certain that in their case skill or good fortune would see them through and make all the risks worth taking. 

Mappers. Traders. Pioneers. Magic-users searching for new knowledge; priests searching for new converts; heroes searching for monsters to slay and maidens to rescue; rogues in search of treasure. All would come and test their mettle in the New Hills' crucible. Would you?

The Most Difficult Single Class Campaign

I've long been interested - really since I was an adolescent reading the old 2nd edition 'brown book' Complete... series - in the idea of a single class campaign. There is something that is simply innately appealing about its combination of challenge (how would a party of 1st level Magic-Users navigate the problem of combat?) and possibility (what type of world, setting, scenario is appropriate for a party of Magic-Users to exist within?).

Some classes are, however, much easier to single-classify than others. Fighters, for example, seem ready made for it - a single class fighter campaign would correspond pretty closely with the presumptions of a traditional sword-and-sorcery setting of the Conan variety, not to mention of the Greek myths (what is the Odyssey or the legends of Theseus or Jason if not single-class fighter campaigns?). 

Thieves are another easy sell - the PCs are a gang of assassins, tomb-raiders or burglars; they are perhaps members of a guild....a single-class thief campaign almost writes itself and, like the single-class fighter campaign, has a ready-made implied setting (an archetypal Big Magical City).

Other, more specialist or optional classes, likewise seem tailor-made for 'Everything Is...' campaigns. Everything is druids = PCs are protectors of a pristine natural region against interlopers. Everything is paladins = PCs go around smiting evil or protecting against demonic or undead interlopers. Everything is rangers = PCs are responsible for the guardianship of a vast border region or badlands, etc.

The most difficult single class campaign to conceptualise and sell is, I think the single class cleric campaign. This is for two reasons. The first is that clerics are, stereotypically, like the goalies or bassists of D&D. They are necessary but their roles - protection and healing - are unglamorous and even dull. The second is that a single class cleric campaign is hard to envisage without too much of an overlap with other single-class campaign motifs. If the clerics are going around fighting demonic entities or the undead or whatever, how is that different to a single-class paladin (or fighter) campaign? If they are scouring the world for holy artefacts, how is that different to a single-class magic-user campaign? And so on.

The route forward for a single-class cleric campaign would be I think to focus on two things. First, it would be necessary to pay careful attention to the institutional environment in which clerics are situated. Whether the medieval warrior-priest of OD&D archetype or a heart-ripping Aztec thaumaturge or jungle witch-doctor or steppe shaman, a cleric is part of a broader religious infrastructure. A single-class cleric campaign would thus have to I think be centered around the furtherance of the ends of an order of some kind and may therefore concern, to a much greater extent, an idea about the systematisation of internal politicking and perhaps also the extent to which there are theological rights and wrongs. 

Second, it would be necessary to clarify what a gang of clerics would be motivated by. 'Quest-dispenser' campaigns are boring and railroady - I would not be an advocate of 'mission of the week' style adventuring in which a holy oracle of some kind simply declares tasks for the PCs to carry out. What then would clerics do?

Some possibilities:

• Pilgrimage - a long journey across a pre-defined and dangerous route.
• Protection of a religious minority - perhaps the PCs are clerics of a religion that a specific, relatively small group of people hold dear against a majority that is indifferent or vaguely hostile
• Roaming about applying holy law in a quasi-Dogs in the Vineyard format
• Tending to a flock of believers in far flung places scattered across a vast landscape filled with mystery and terror 
• Searching for sacrificial victims of a particular (rare) kind

The trick is pulling this off in such a way as to avoid 'quest-dispensation' and maintaining - and making maximum use of - the specific role of clerics as such. 

The Crossing of a Threshold: The Ontological Condition of Adventure

 

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

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

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

Thresholds can appear, and operate, in three ways.

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

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

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

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

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