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? 

So, What Is So Bad About Space Knights?

One should never put one's faith in Google Gemini. (I learned this after discovering that searching for information about The Lord of the Flies resulted in the AI spitting out false information pruned from a wikipedia page about the Tongan Castaways.) But if you Google, 'Are the space marines the goodies?', you get an interesting response:

Unequivocally then, our tech overlords have spoken. The Space Marines are baddies. They are part of a tyrannical and oppressive regime and all is GRIMDARK.

This chimes with what I have heard from people much more deeply embedded in the world of Games Workshop than I am. I played a huge amount of Warhammer 40K when I was an adolescent, and what I remember was that in those days the Imperium generally and the space marines specifically were sort of implicitly the good guys in the Warhammer universe - and that was indeed what made them, to the eye of a teenage boy, a little bit boring and lacking in edginess. But it seems now times have changed and all the factions in 40K are supposed to be baddies in their own way - a war of the shits.

One could do a calm and considered sociological analysis of this and doubtless come to the conclusion that it says something important about our age's discomfort with the idea that something called an 'empire' could be good - and especially if it is vaguely coded with Roman imagery. And this seems linked to a problematisation in particular of the male hero who carefully calibrates the use of violence and force in the interests of a civilisation which is inherently better than others. We live in an age with quite a clear idea about what is right and wrong in some ways, but we have by and large become less and less comfortable with the idea that these things are inherent within a particular civilisation or other. In this respect, the old school interpretation of space marines as Goodies all feels a bit too cowboys-and-Indians. 

This is understandable to a certain respect. I'm not here to post a rant complaining about the purported wokeness of Games Workshop. But I do think there would be something genuinely refreshing, given our prevailing cultural mood, about making it explicit that there is something good about humanity as such and that, in a galaxy populated by orks, tyrannids, chaos mutants and eldar that there would be something to be said for actual heroes: defenders of humanity against enemies that are simply objectively worse. These heroes might have to do deeply undesirable things (the 40,000 AD equivalent of bombing Dresden or dropping the atom bomb on Hiroshima) but they would bite the bullet - and deal with the guilt - of doing so in the interests of what they would percieve rightly to be the greater good: the continuation of human civilisation per se.

In a world dominated by mean-spirited, bleakly nihilistic content I think there would be something rather interesting about more openly foregrounding a goodies-and-baddies narrative in 40K. Perhaps it does already and everything I have heard, including from the AI oracle, is simply wrong. I hope so.

The Posts That Never Were

Every so often I get an idea for something to write about and jot it down by creating a post and putting the idea in the title, and saving it to 'drafts'. 80-90% of the time these later get worked up into full posts, or else deleted. But there are some that hang about in the ether, always the bridesmaids and never the bride, until I forget entirely what they were originally supposed to be about. These lost souls sit forlornly as 'drafts' in perpetuity, hoping in vain for rescue. So I thought I would drag some out into the open to give them some fresh air and see if anybody can do anything with them. Your duty: pick a title, and then write a comment or post in your own blog to correspond to it.

Here are some that caught my eye:

• What Is So Bad About Space Knights?
• On Being Grateful
• Types of Campaign by PC Class
• The Appropriate Subject of Complaint
• Isekai/Other World PCs Must Be Special
• The Psychic Importance of Other Worlds
• Deep Wilderness
• Great Places
• Games Workshop Doesn't Like or Care About You [this possibly is a title that could in itself be an entire blog post]
• Slaad-punk
• Syphilis [I cannot now even begin to imagine where I was going with this...]
• Why These Treasures?
• The Philosophy of Elves
• The Importance of Adventure-Site Insularity
• Shitty Fairy Tales and the Importance of Death

Have at it - I hope these poor blighters can find a loving home.

The Lynchian Paladin

Regular readers will know that I harbour a long-simmering ambition to write up rules for running explicitly heroic campaigns oriented around the idea either that all PCs are of the paladin class or that all PCs are conceptually 'paladins' in the sense of fighting against evil.

A long series of irregular posts, which I really ought to assemble under their own tag, lays this out:

• Into the Abyss: More on Being the Good Guys
  
• Random Demonic Incursion Generator Test Case
  
• The Incursion Generator Expanded
  
• The Single Class Paladin Campaign
  
• Single Class Paladin Campaign Book - First Glimpse
  
• The Clan of Cain: Ogres, Elves, Evil Phantoms and Giants
  
• Feel like my soul is beginning to expand - look into my heart and you will sort of understand
  
• Space Paladins in the Demonic Future
  

As you will see if you carefully read these posts (as all true disciples of the Order of Noisms must do, and indeed must already have done dozens of times) I've suggested a variety of models of such campaigns, which ideally I would like to write up as a series of volumes the, if I have my druthers, would come out in a posh slip-case finely decorated:

• The traditional D&D paladin, a paragon of lawful good, who attempts to 'do good' within a typical TSRan type setting
• A more Arthurian, Pendragon-inspired 'knight of the round table' fighting for Christian order within a world imbued with ancient magical forces
• A pseudo-Japan in which mighty heroic samurai do battle against demons and evil spirits 
• A pseudo-Ancient Mesopotamia or Levant where Gilgameshian heroes or 'Book of Judges' style judges fight against primordial chaos embodied in monsters and devils
• A vaguely Iberian class of holy knights who do battle againts evil infidels
• A somewhat Warhammerian set of 'demon hunters' in a reformation-era Old World (with the serial numbers filed off)
• A group of dwarven warrior-priests in Lanthanum Chromate
• Space Paladines in the demonic future
• A Beowulf-inspired 'Clan of Cain' scenario

The main idea here is that each of these scenarios involves some systematised way (on which notes can be found in the pieces linked to above) through which incursions of evil find their way into the human world and have to be rooted out, uncovered, battled, etc., by said paladins.

A friend of mine recently raised the issue of David Lynch and his sad (fairly) recent death, and I immediately started to see a connection between this type of campaign and Lynch's approach to what we could call 'worldbuilding'. I am obviously here talking about Twin Peaks and Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me most of all, but I think across most of Lynch's ouevre we see a similar concern playing out - the idea that, lurking around every corner, behind every closed door, reflected in every mirror, hiding at the foot of each bed, waiting at the bottom of every car park, there might be something supernaturally and unspeakably awful. This is I think most readily 'gameable' in Twin Peaks, which in a way almost reads like the Actual Play Report to the world's greatest Unknown Armies campaign: evil entities from interdimensional 'lodges' come to the human world to do dastardly things and law enforcement tries to cope with the fallout. But in its own way Blue Velvet follows a similar pattern - and even A Straight Story has a very mild hint of that flavour, with the main character taking on the quality of a roving wizard casting spells to solve people's slightly otherworldly problems (like the woman who keeps mysteriously killing deer by accident). 

In this paradigm the PCs could take on something of a Kyle McLachlanian aspect as straight-jawed Philip Marlowe-investigator types, but this is by no means a pre-requisite and one could paint with a much broader brush than that. What is chiefly needed - and as I have begun to lay out - is a means by which to systematise the crucial mechanism of intrusion: how evil manifests itself in the setting through some at least partially random method, and how it is that the PCs encounter it. 

The Rule of Dice and the Resort to Chaos

'I've sometimes thought,' said the Head Man, 'it might be interesting if we didn't let chance decide the moves but thought them out for ourselves.'

'What an odd game,' said Great House. 'It wouldn't have any rules at all.'

-from The Scorpion God, by W. Golding

The connection between rules and dice is an unusual one.

Think of most of the situations you know which are governed heavily by rules: a sport, say, or a trial, or driving on the roads. What you will notice is that the rules are specifically designed to try to eliminate randomness. We would think there to be something deeply wrong with a trial process whose outcome was decided on the basis of rock, paper, scissors. (Though this would perhaps reduce costs.) And we would think it even worse if, say, drivers determined which side of the road to drive on through a coin toss.

The reason for this is, obviously, that rules are deliberately non-random - randomness and rules are indeed, in a way, opposites. The point about a rule is that you apply it as it is stated. If its effect is random it is not really a rule in any meaningful sense. It lacks the basic things a rule requires in order to possess 'ruliness' - i.e. being clear, being knowable in advance, being non-retrospective, being non-contradictory with other rules, and so forth. To enter the world of randomness is to be governed by chaos. 

Yet some board games and RPGs (#notallboardgamesandRPGs) are different - the rules do not just tolerate randomness but deliberately introduce it. The rules act as the confines within which randomness is controlled and directed. They, if you like, instrumentalise chaos. They tame it for useful purposes.

The reason they do this would seem to be to do with contentiousness and the presence of neutral arbitrators. In a trial, the two parties each make a separate argument as to how the rules should apply to the facts to achieve a particular result; a neutral arbitrator (the judge or jury) makes a determination. In a football match, it's the referee and his assistants who makes rulings on the fly. In the case of driving, there is no contention at all: if you are driving the wrong way, or driving faster than the speed limit, then you are breaking the rules and that is that. 

When it comes to an RPG, however, there is no neutral arbitrator. The DM is not 'objective' vis-a-vis whatever the players says the PCs do. Rather the opposite. When the PCs are fighting a band of orcs, he's the orcs. When they are trying to get past an obstacle, he is the one who placed it there. When they are trying to find secret doors, said secret doors are on his map. RPGs, in such circumstances, often make resort to chaos - in the form of dice - to resolve potentially otherwise irresolvable disputes. There is nobody to just apply 'the rules' and give 'the right' outcome. There is only the God of the small plastic or polyhedrals and what he will say about the matter.

This actually puts RPGs (at least insofar as they use dice) among very strange, unexpected bed fellows. The child's board game is the closest comparator. Think of Snakes and Ladders. Snakes and Ladders needs  dice because it's contentious - who wins, and who loses, being unpredictable in advance (or even during play) and being, more importantly, irresolvable by the participants themselves or a neutral umpire. If Snakes and Ladders did not resort to chaos through dice in order to determine how far the players can move each turn, each game would rapidly devolve into an argument over who gets to travel so far and at what speeds (because how else would it be determined?). And, importantly, this would be governed typically by 'might makes right' or superior abilities in persuasion - i.e. not rules at all - because it is through 'might makes right' and superior abilities in persuasion that people tend to win arguments.  RPGs are a bit like that: the dice help to decide the course of events simply by providing a means through which potential conflict is resolved in advance. If they did not exist there would only be argument and persuasion determining how a particular rule applies in a given circumstance - and that would be tantamount to saying there would be no rules at all. There would be only discussion and debate.

Chaos then, if you like, is a necessary element in the way RPGs work - because it is, almost literally, what makes rules themselves useful within that context. 

A Troubling Setting Riddled With Orientalist Tropes

 

[Click to enlarge]

This blog post is a warning. There is at loose in the world a nefarious RPG setting book with foul and malevolent contents. Going under the name of Yoon-Suin 2nd edition, it, at first glance, like a particularly successful mimic, appears to 'stand out' as a 'creative and ambitious work' with 'psychedelic art' and 'evocative writing'. 

But this is a masquerade - a sham to fool the unwary. Lurking beneath its surface there are dangers, there is gaslighting, and there is troublingness. The book is in fact so troubling that it is important to say how troubling it is twice. It is indeed positively troublingerous in its implications.

You see, the author (I can confirm the veracity of all of this, since the author is yours truly) does not possess creativity, collaborativeness, or openness-ness. Rather, he is a defensive gaslighter who has repeatedly shown his unwillingness to LEARN FROM CRITIQUE or ENGAGE IN MEANINGFUL COLLABORATION. He is - let me think of a suitable term - a troubling individual who makes troubling inferences. The things that he infers are indeed so troubling that they border on the unforgivable - he even infers things about opium and tea. He is a naughty boy. The OSR community would be better off without him.

I do not recommend you go within a 10' pole's length of a copy of Yoon-Suin 2nd edition. You will be in deep trouble if you do. You might even find yourself:

• Perpetuating harmful and dangerous stereotypes about slug-men, such as their great propensity for magic, their malign intelligence, their talent for trade and their love of fine fashion
• Participating in the othering of nasnas, ogre mages, rakhosh (both major and minor) and aphid-men, as well as dozens of other monsters, fully detailed in the bestiary
• Looking at illustrations which objectify the likes of crab-men, giant arowanas, barnaclids and rhinoceros demnos - penned by the truly remarkably talented maverick, Matt Adams
• Being gaslit about the real nature of the holes of Láhág, the crystal dragons of Upper Druk Yul, and the original inhabitants of the Old Town neighbourhoods of the Yellow City, as well as many other unsolved mysteries 
• Getting excited about running a game in a fully realised campaign setting which allows you, through the provision of vast quantities of finely detailed and nested random tables, to make your own unique version of an entire continent's worth of adventure (but in a troubling way)
• Becoming bewitched by the twelve fully playable adventure locales included in the book, beautifully mapped out by other noted defensive gaslighter, Tom Fitzgerald
• Being hoodwinked into orientalism by a product which eminent reviewers have said is 'not like anything anybody else could have made or will make', 'probably one of the most impressive gaming supplements (let alone campaign settings) I have ever come across', and 'a labour of wonder'

But don't worry - help is at hand. Having seen the error of my ways after seeing Yoon-Suin 2nd edition repeatedly review-bombed by creative, collaborative and open members of the OSR community, I am coming up with some supplementary products to increase your enjoyment of the book. These include:

• A new 5th level magic-user spell, Due Diligence, with which you can banish troubling inferences and all discussion of opium and most discussion of tea (tea is permitted a saving throw)
• A Helm of Being Critical and Engaging in Conversation, to protect readers from the most crass of inferences to real world cultures - and, possibly, to permit you to better understand what the word 'infer' actually means
• A Wand of One-Star Reviews of Infinite Charges, a Cloak of Anonymity and a Girdle of Cowardice and Snide to allow disappointed purchasers to safely punish the author for his lack of willingness to learn

Above all, though, be forewarned. A print edition is soon to be released and will shortly be available for pre-order! THIS MEANS TROUBLE.

Why Make Up Elfworlds?

I have a confession to make. I make it in the hopes that, out there in the world, there are other strange deviants such as me - who can perhaps help to form some sort of support group or, failing that, a terrorist organisation bent on world domination.

My confession is this: I love to play RPGs, but I often wonder if the hobby is just a vehicle for my chief obsession, which is imagining other worlds in fine detail. Since 'worldbuilding' itself isn't exactly a hobby as such - there are no magazines, no clubs, no organisations, no conventions - I attach myself limpet-like to D&D. But if it were socially acceptable to say at a party that in one's free time one enjoys 'building worlds' (can you imagine?), that is probably what I would say.

Where does the desire to build worlds come from?

I don't think it is entirely suppressed megalomania, though I do not dismiss the possibility that it partly is. It would make sense that people who have an urge to play God would find ways to do it in their spare time - making and destroying entire continents, peoples, civilisations and indeed worlds with the mere sweep of a pen. And those who know me personally will tell you that I do indeed have a certain amount of suppressed megalomania - I would make an extremely unenlightened despot if put in charge.

But that cannot hold true generally, I think, because when one thinks of the great worldbuilders - Tolkien, Le Guin, GRRM to a certain extent, CJ Cherryh, Gene Wolfe, etc. - one doesn't immediately reach for the word 'megalomania', at least in respect of their public personae. 

Certainly, creativity and imagination have a bearing, but that is too diffuse a statement: it doesn't explain why the creativity and imagination are in some people channelled into making up elfworlds where as for others it finds its way into, say, painting or sculpture or interpretive dance. 

And nor can it just be mimicry or mimesis, though no doubt world-builders tend to be influenced and inspired by what they read or encounter in the books (or RPG modules) they consume: how many people did Tolkien, for example, convert to the idea that it is possible in the first place to just sit down and make up languages and entire geographies for fun? I don't think this is the whole story, though, because it doesn't explain why some fantasy enthusiasts 'get the bug' while most simply don't.

I think, in truth, we have to get a little bit more phenomenological. What does it feel like to make up an elfworld? Speaking personally, it is almost ineluctable: I just get ideas. I can't control it. In idle moments, my mind produces them. Other people may sit staring out of the car window when stuck in traffic imagining what they are going to have for dinner, mentally undressing a co-worker, reminiscing about their childhoods or humming tunes; I, inordinately often, find myself thinking things like 'Yes, but what if there was a world in which the water cycle operated through the medium of blood??'

Why does this happen? Short of imagining myself to be an idiot savant blessed with insight into the existence of alternative realities, I can only speculate that it's a phenomenon with a momentum of its own - once you start, you find it difficult to stop, and that difficulty increases over time. It becomes a habit of thought that is self-cultivating - not, I suppose, all that unlike the compulsion Stephen King feels to write novels or Al Di Meola feels to play the guitar (though I wish it had something of the same level of financial rewards). The implication of this would be: all you need to do to end up as a complete weirdo is to start acting like it. What are you waiting for? 

Comfort Reading and the Escape to Fish Pie

As I get older I get increasingly po-faced and Spartan: I no longer believe in holidays, days off, video games, TV, leisure, smiling, friendship, politeness or sleep. My hero is, increasingly, Lieutenant Worf. I'm not great with a Bat'leth but, like any true Klingon, I choose to never laugh. 

Klingons probably don't re-read books either, and generally speaking I also prefer not to - there are too many books out there waiting to be read to spend too much time re-reading. There are, though, occasions when I allow myself to indulge - never for more than five pages at a time, you understand - in reading a book from the shelf I have dedicated* to 'comfort reading': those books which I have read and re-read and which now have the feeling of the literary equivalent of warm socks on a cold night; of a hot toddie and a blanket on the sofa; of a pint and game pie in front of a roaring fire in a country pub; of fish pie out fresh of the oven when you've come in from the winter night.

What is on your comfort reading list? What are those books into which you like to escape when you need a bit of verbal TLC?

My top five would be:

• Uncontroversially and unsurprisingly, The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. I've been reading those books since I was in the womb, or at least in primary school at any rate, and although I'm no Christopher Lee, who reportedly would re-read LOTR once a year, I've probably gone through the series approaching ten times in the course of my life. It never gets old, because it reminds me of being young - I can still remember the feeling of being nine or ten, reading those books, and thinking that they were the bee's knees and that I was incredibly grown-up for grappling with them.
• I love most of Jack Vance's main series but the sheer pleasure I get from losing myself in the Lyonesse books can't really be put into words; if you had a gun to my head I would say it's a bit like what it must feel like to snuggle under a warm duvet with Teri Hatcher from circa 1994 with snow falling outside and a nice bottle of single malt to keep you company. And also lemon meringue pie. And a cheeseboard. And a big bowl of chilli con carne sprinkled with jalapenos and grated cheese....
• I will confess it: I really, really do like the first three A Song of Ice and Fire books, before poor old George went off the deep end. The first two in particular are almost perfect realisations of the vision he was clearly aiming to achieve; the great problem from book four onwards was clearly that the vision of the TV series inveigled itself into his brain and made his original one go all fuzzy. But, like with the LOTR I remember the context in which I first encountered them so well, and I'll never shake that feeling I had as a teenager when first dipping into A Game of Thrones and discovering something totally unlike any other fantasy series I had read.
• The collected Viriconium books may seem like an odd choice, because they are not comforting at all - they are very unsettling - but I've never been able to shake the feeling that their specialness deserves repeated engagement. From time to time, I simply acquire the urge to get my omnibus edition out and re-immerse myself. I can't explain it; it's like the feeling one gets, maybe twice a year, that one just really, really wants to eat a Costco hotdog and doesn't know why. 
• The Voyage of the Dawn Treader is by no means perfect. But it remains the single Narnia book that I really enjoy going back to. It belongs to that strange genre of children's fiction which is both comforting and adventurous - a combination of warm Scandinavian hygge vibes combined with an exciting ocean voyage that no right-thinking child could possibly decline the opportunity to participate in. There are great scenes, great characters, and a great sensation of distance and exoticism in the journey it depicts. 

There is another interesting category of books, which I would call the Disappointment Comfort List - those books that one read and loved as a child or young adult but which one later re-reads as a mature adult, expecting to find comforting, and finds to translate badly. I would include in this the Redwall series, Nicobobinus, the Tad Williams Memory, Sorrow and Thorn books, maybe also anything by Peter F Hamilton. For bonus points, include your own 'disappointments', too. 

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*This is not remotely true - as if I have space in amongst all the kids' books!

Cyberpunk in 2025: A Triptych

I used to play Cyberpunk 2020 and Shadowrun a lot in the mid-late 1990s, as well as Necromunda, which always felt cyberpunk-adjacent. To do so at that time was to engage in a pleasantly unlikely fantasy of dystopia: there was a big gap between the 'lived experience' of my friends and I and the worlds which these games depicted. When I first started playing Cyberpunk 2020, for instance, I surely had never once even used the internet, and had no real conception of what it was. My peers and I unconsciously felt ourselves to be essentially in the same era that in which our parents had grown up - we called each other on the phone, we walked around to each other's houses to ask 'Are you coming out?', we sent letters and thankyou cards, we went to our grandparents' houses on Sunday to have a roast dinner. The dystopian future which Cyberpunk 2020 and its brethren depicted felt impossibly distant (even though the milieu, Merseyside circa 1994, was hardly prosperous or indeed crime-free). 

Nowadays it seems as though the dystopia is basically here - it just, to coin a phrase, isn't evenly distributed. I don't have to go very far at all to see Cyberpunk 2020 in action before my eyes: any retail park on the outskirts of a down-at-heel area of town will do. There aren't any cybereyes or full-body mods in evidence yet, but most of the rest of the furniture is present (albeit in a slightly different way to how it was imagined by Mike Pondsmith) - along with exactly the right amount of alienating, atomising vibes.

This has given the cyberpunk genre a newfound subversiveness - the theme, to use Bruce Sterling's expression, of the 'victims of the new' has never seemed more apposite, or uncomfortable. We already have cyberpunks, in numerous different guises, and they have a way of scrambling our priors and problematising our assumptions in all manner of different ways. The big appeal of the cyberpunk genre, and cyberpunk games, was the way in which it used the antihero - the assassin, the Gordo Gecko-style corporate, the muckraker journalist, the dodgy medic, the hacker - to expose the dark underbelly of the developing future. And our era is increasingly defined by antiheroes: those who, in fighting for what they believe in, or pursuing their own self-interest, throw moral inconsistencies and confrontations into stark relief.

Three examples leap to mind of modern-day cyberpunks in this antiheroic vein. In each instance, what is interesting about them is the way in which they problematise some aspect of the future in which we have found ourselves. 

The first of these is what you might call the poverty-porn YouTuber - the category of person (often raking in kabillion-willions of views) who turns up in some godforsaken spot with a GoPro, engages with the locals with superficial and vaguely sociopathic charm, and then puts the results on YouTube with a title like 'I Visited the Poorest and Most Dangerous District of Tashkent'. In each case, a fine line is walked between exploiting other people's misery for views and hence cash on the one hand, and raising awareness on the other - a recent example I happened to watch concerned a visit to La Rinconada in Peru, which managed to hammer home the awfulness of the conditions which some people are forced to endure but which I also found to be an obnoxious 'Aren't I terribly adventurous?' exercise in self-centredness and self-promotion on the part of the narrator. But it what it mostly illustrated was the strangeness of the effects of easy global travel and the internet on geographical boundaries: it is now possible for us to sit at our desks in our lunch hours and watch what is going on in La Rinconada - ostensibly one of the most isolated places on Earth - over a bad cup of instant coffee and digestive biscuits. This is cyberpunk: a subversion and interrogation (albeit unconscious) of the 'the new' and its consequences. 

The second is the phenomenon of the Left-Right Climate Infrastructure Terrorist: the evolution of both pro- and anti- 'Net Zero' activism towards inchoately violent goals. On the one hand, trust-fund brats and Boomer activists reconnecting with the 'spirit of 68' to spraypaint Stonehenge, disrupt cultural events, attack paintings, and piss off commuters. On the other hand, largely working class 'Bladerunners' targeting the ULEZ cameras designed to levy fines on petrol and diesel vehicles travelling around London. Either way, a sense that ordinary political processes are not producing the correct results, and a resort to vandalism to in the name of political messaging - but also the deployment of technology to produce decentralised, networked threats that are almost impossible to police against. This is cyberpunk - the use of 'the new' to subvert the way in which the future itself is developing, either through resisting development itself or insisting on a reassessment of who should bear the costs.

And the third is the phenomenon of the Extreme Challenger - the person who engages in feats of physical achievement or endurance, often monitored in real time by vast numbers of followers. One interesting example I recently came across were the participants in the so-called Montane Winter Spine, a non-stop 268-mile ultramarathon going the length of the Pennines, from somewhere in Derbyshire to Kirk Yetholm on the Scottish Border. Taking place in January each year, the participants often go for days without sleeping - the winner this year did it in around 82 hours. My friend, who was describing it to me, said that runners will catch a nap here or there by lying down in a puddle or shallow flood - they will be so tired that they will fall asleep for 10-20 minutes, but will then be woken by the coldness of the water and will be thereby prevented from sleeping for too long and losing time. But there are many other variants on the theme of extreme challenges in many different spheres of human life, with a crucial factor - the Montane Winter Spine being a good illustration - being the fact that people can 'spectate' online in real time (in that case through a constantly updated GPS tracker on all the runners). Again, this is cyberpunk - the use of the 'new' to transform expectations of what human beings are capable of, through a strangely organic form of cybertech: ultrarunners (for instance) whose capacities are enhanced by the fact that technology facilitates competitiveness and status, rather than because it, for instance, gives them new 6-million-dollar legs.

Thinking about things in this way truly expands the remit of what a cyberpunk RPG campaign could consist of. The original 'tech noir' assumptions of Cyberpunk 2020 and Shadowrun, very much informed by Gibson's short stories and first trilogy of novels, produced excellent results. But here we can see other modalities emerging: the 'medias' going around warzones and extreme environments to please their YouTube following; the activists planning disruptive infrastructure attacks and evading the security response; the hard core 'challengers' trying to break world records in the most extreme ways. All there, and all I think readily 'gameable' with a little thought. 

Bad Things Happen: Unknown BFGs, Twits and Witches

As a father I have become reacquainted with the books of Roald Dahl, most of which I haven't read for well over thirty years. One of the things I have been struck by is that is ouevre, at least when it comes to the main big children's novels, can be thought of as a kind of worked example of what I have taken to calling Demonic Intrusion: in most of the books a child in 'ordinary' circumstances - though never that ordinary - finds his or her world subject to a rupture of the paranormal or weird which transforms everything. The main examples of this are I suppose the BFG, The Witches, Matilda and James and the Giant Peach; it is probably no coincidence that these are probably his best-loved books, though The Twits (my own favourite) does not fall under this category. (As an aside, I have never been a big fan of the two Charlie books - the sequel is just a bad book, but the first one is pretty boring and disjointed.) 

This is obviously by no means unique to Dahl - it's a trope of children's stories, of course, dating back at least as far as Alice in Wonderland and, from there, back to the fairy tales of yore. But what makes Dahl a particularly good, paradigmatic example is that in each case under discussion the setting is so recognisably 'real world' and the intrusion in question so recognisably 'not real world'. The child reader sees a set of surroundings that feel familiar and then experiences the interjection of the unfamiliar very starkly. In the very best examples - The Witches and Matilda (unlike, say, the Harry Potter books) the familiarity of the surroundings largely remains. The child is not transported to what is in effect a completely different world; he or she is still located in bucolic England - it is just one that happens to have witches or magic in.

This gives Dahl's books (you could include other authors like Dianne Wynne Jones in this) a feeling of a juvenile version of Unknown Armies. And it is a source of some surprise, when one reflects on this, that nobody has (at least as far as I am aware) come up with a Dahl-with-the-serial-numbers-filed-off game. I have from time to time heard about games in which the PCs are children. But I don't know that I've ever come across one which channels the atmosphere of a Dahl book exactly.

I think this is because when adults think to themselves 'RPG in which the PCs are children' they tend to immediately leap to the horror genre (no doubt thanks to the innumerable horror films that have been made with children either as chief protagonists or antagonists). But the crucial aspect of Dahl's tone in relation to his children's books is that they are not horror stories. Dahl is said to have had a memo on the wall of his writing shed which included the maxim: Bad Things Happen. But this is not the same as 'horrible things happen'. The books are better to be understood as adventure stories with a dark edge. Bad things happen but in the end good triumphs and the villains get their comeuppance. 

The Demonic Intrusion Generator would in any event be a good mechanism through which to operationalise this. Just draw up a random table designed to throw together 'weird' events, possibly in connection with fixed archetypal PCs (the headmistress turns out to be.....a medusa! the local used car salesman turns out to....have a time machine in the staff restroom! etc.), use a few of these to populate a small town, and have the PCs simply present as precocious children - perhaps with special abilities - who have heard some curious rumours..... 

Running a Kickstarter: Lessons Learned

I have run two Kickstarters. One was completed, done-and-dusted from launch to distribution, successfully. One is approaching that stage after many delays. I thought then it might be useful to put in one place some advice for people who are thinking about running one - consider it as a display of scars and old war wounds from somebody who has been under fire to those who are about to embark to the front lines.

I am going to divide this advice into practical tips and - to my eye in a way more important - emotional ones. Some will sound obvious. But a lot of it wasn't intuitively obvious to me before having had the experience.

Practical Tips

• The biggest and most important practical advice to be given is: get your ducks in order with respect to every stage of the process before launch. On the first Kickstarter I ran, In the Hall of the Third Blue Wizard, I factored in print costs and the costs of paying other contributors, as well as Kickstarter fees and taxes. But I, naively, didn't really think about the costs of packing and storage; my original plan was to do all the storage and packing in my cellar, but as it turned out there wasn't space to do this, so I had to spend a lot of money storing the books in a self-storage facility. This, once you factor in the cost of packing materials, in itself ended up eating up almost 10% of the total revenue from the Kickstarter itself. 
• This also includes the cost of your own time. If you are doing distribution yourself (as I did on In the Hall of the Third Blue Wizard), be prepared for lengthy ballache-inducing hassle that will eat into the time you have to spend on your day job, family commitments, and so on.
• It also includes distribution, if you are using a third party for that. On Yoon-Suin 2nd edition I made the foolish mistake of thinking that this would be easy to sort out once the print file was ready to be sent to the printer. I had no idea that the back-and-forth of choosing a distributor, figuring out costs, getting everything set up, etc., would take six months. In retrospect I would have got all that arranged in advance - something that now seems obvious, but which isn't actually obvious if nobody tells you. 
• When it comes to marketing and advertising, perhaps the most important aspect of a Kickstater launch is a beautiful, eye-catching cover or image. This appears to drive a huge proportion of interest and backing. 
• But it is also important to have a good pre-launch page and widely advertise it in advance. Kickstarter campaigns need momentum. If they fund rapidly, they will undergo explosive growth. If they don't, there is a danger of stagnation. This is presumably something to do with the algorithms that recommend and promote projects. So get lots of people signed up in advance of launching.
• Creative people are flaky. Without wishing to go full Jordan Peterson, people who are creative ('high in trait openness') don't appear to be very conscientious and are often neurotic. This will include basically everybody you work with on a project, and it will also almost certainly include you. I will come back to this point when discussing emotional issues, below, but it comes with a practical consideration: expect delays at every single step of the way. Sometime the delays will be long. There is no finger-pointing or blame associated with ackowledging this basic, apparently immutable feature of human creativity. 
• Tax is boring and irritating but you need to bone up on it, because it can end up making what looks like a profitable venture turn into a loss. This will, again, probably strike you as obvious, but it is important to be aware of it - it is easy to look at Kickstarter figures and congratulate yourself on how vastly wealthy you are, and put tax out of your mind.
• I strongly recommend against doing what I did on both of my Kickstarters, which was to have backers fund just the product and pay for shipping later. This adds an extra hurdle into the process where things can go wrong or become unpredictable. Better to just do an all inclusive price which factors in worldwide shipping. I will never not do that again.

In summary, then, the message is to frontload everything that you can possible think of: writing, art, layout, printing/manufacture, distribution. The less you frontload things, the more pain you will experience trying to complete the project. 

And this observation naturally flows through into the emotional tips that I would also give:

Emotional Tips

• Running a Kickstarter looks straightforward from the outside but it really is not. Especially if you have a busy day job (which I have) and a young family (which I also have), your time gets badly squeezed - and even the most concientious and determined person will find it hard to motivate themselves to open up an Excel spreadsheet and spend the evening figuring out the rates of VAT they need to add to products for each member state of the EU after the kids have gone to bed. Sacrificing time to do fun things you enjoy (like writing wonderful RPG materials) is fine; sacrificing it to do boring and difficult, soul-destroying things is a grind. Gird your loins for this!
• It follows from my comments about creative people being flaky (above) that this will also apply to you. Self-discipline can't really be taught - it has to be learned - but it is important nonetheless to learn it. I don't have an easy message in this respect: be strict with yourself, as strict as you can be.
• It is right and good that you feel a sense of pressure and duty to fufil your obligations to backers. Embrace this as an incentive to get done what needs to be done. 
• Excitement is your enemy. Getting excited about how many backers you have and how much money is rolling in gets in the way of making hardheaded decisions about what needs to be done and when. Don't get carried away. Numbers are just numbers. It's fulfilment that matters.
• Finally, remember that the world doesn't revolve around you. While you may feel yourself to be under intense pressure and while you may feel as though your backers are sitting at their computers relentlessly hitting 'refresh' on the Kickstarter page at all hours of the day and night, the fact of the matter is that 95% of backers understand things take time, largely put the fact that they have backed product X, Y or Z out of their minds, and only engage when they get the happy announcement that distribution is about to take place. This does not mean that backers never have legitimate complaints about delays and so on, but it does mean that you shouldn't beat yourself up too much about events that are beyond your control if you are genuinely trying your best.

I hope this is useful to readers who may be thinking about running Kickstarters of their own. It is not something to be done lightly, especially if you are not somebody who finds it easy to work with numbers or to organise themselves. To a degree, any creative person launching one will definitionally find that the logistical elements of the thing do not come naturally. But given that they are the most important stage of the process, it is vital that one goes in with one's eyes open. 

On Resurrection in D&D: The Pincher Martin Gambit

Why are D&D PCs resurrectable? 

We do not like to think about the metaphysics or theology of D&D settings, so it is generally a question that is left unresolved - and it is not, I think, the subject of much analysis within any particular iteration of the PHB or DMG. (The descriptions of the spells which might resurrect a person - Raise Dead and Resurrection - are entirely about the nuts and bolts of the matter in the 2nd edition version of those books, which are the only ones I have to hand right now.) Various possibilities suggest themselves: when somebody dies his or her soul remains in the body for a certain period of time and the connection between the two can be restored by magic; after death the soul goes into limbo or purgatory or wherever and magic can return it to the body; there is only a cold mechanistic soulless Sam Harris universe and magic can simply reanimate dead flesh; and so on.

One possibility that interests me stems from a recent reading of William Golding's Pincher Martin (spoilers follow, although to be honest the ending is not entirely difficult to see coming). In this book, a British naval officer, who is implied to embody the sin of greed (as well as being a rapist, psychopath, murderer and possibly child molester - it is not a nice book) drowns after having been washed overboard from his ship. But his will proves to be so strong that he creates for himself a sort of afterlife - a rock sticking up from the Atlantic where he can 'survive' and hope to be rescued. In an interesting twist, the rock's shape derives from that of one of his teeth, with whose contours he is of course intimately familiar. 

It's safe to say it doesn't end well for him. But I was struck by the concept of a short, time-limited afterlife being the result of an act of will on the part of the dying man or woman - as though human consciousness can linger on in its own reality after the body's death, not through the grace of God but through the refusal on the individual's part to accept dying. 

And I was also struck my the nice synergy between this concept and D&D's own, if I can put the matter this way, conceptual priors. Pincher Martin is an existentialist and thoroughly modernist novel in the tradition of Conrad, Melville, Poe, Hemingway - it depicts the human individual as irreducible, human consciousness as atomised and isolated, and the human will as eternally wrestling to create its own values and perhaps even impose them on existence itself. The titular character has his own morality, his own ideals, his own drive, and his own iron will, and at every stage he seeks to force reality to conform. 

Golding, a religious man, presents this in a bleak light, but there is no reason why it has to be, and there is something about its anthropology, so to speak, that fits nicely into D&D's own unstated assumptions about the nature of PCs. D&D PCs, at least in the stereotypical 'old school' framework are arch Conradians; while never quite as villainous as Pincher Martin, they are typically paragons of the modernist archetype - autonomous individuals, imbued with their own drives and impulses, with existences that precede essences. They exercise free choice. And because of this there is something appealing about the thought that they possess the ability, like Pincher Martin, to impose their own will on death itself and thereby transcend it - constructing a reality where that will can itself endure until a magic spell can recover it for the world of the living. 

The Adventurer's Vow

A long, long time ago, I can still remember when I wrote a blog post about the Book of Judges, reasoning that PCs-as-Biblical-Judges had an appealing Wild West, High Plains Drifter-but-with-smiting kind of feel to it. 

This has gradually transmogrified in my mind into a variant of what I called the Single Class Paladin Campaign, deploying something like my Random Demonic Incursion Generator to facilitate the creation of a 'virtuous sandbox'. Here, the PCs are heroic guardians of order against the ravages of (butchering the Biblical chronology somewhat) fallen angels and their sinister witch-wives and nephilim children, not to mention the monstrous progeny of the nephilim's sexual escapades with animals and their evil Elioud descendants. Throw in some Philistine, Moabite, Ammonite, Trilobite and various others sorts of -ites to deal with, and you have an impressive variety of threats and foes, not to mention a wide range of ideas for adventure locations such as giant nephilim ruins, witch-wife towers, ruined cities, and so forth.

This idea has legs, and came to the forefront of my consciousness again last night while reading a book of children's Bible stories to my eldest. We have got as far as Samson, and I was interested to discover (I must at one time have known this, but haven't really thought about the Samson story probably for 30+ years) that Samson was special because he took the 'Nazirite' vow - or at least had it bestowed upon him - and it was this which gave him his strength. 

The concept behind the nazirite vow is that the vow-maker declares that he will abstain from all grape-related products such as wine, vinegar, etc.; that he will not cut his hair; and that he will not come into contact with corpses or graves. At the end of a specified period the vow comes to an end (although Samson had nazirite status for his lifetime) with sacrifices and so on. And so blessings are thereby bestowed. 

The idea of the PCs in this sort of Old Testament/Apocrypha-inspired campaign being men (or women) who have taken the nazirite vow is something that intrigues me. One would have to incorporate a system of punishment for failing to live up the vow, but the quid pro quo would be that sticking to it is the means through which one gains super-duper paladin-style powers (perhaps the laying on of hands, but perhaps a range of others more aggressive or practically useful). And the nazirite requirements are just about onerous enough to be interesting - one would have to systematise what qualifies as contact with a corpse (would killing somebody be enough?), and it would be useful also to figure out what mechanical drawbacks might be associate with long hair and what ancillary disadvantages there would be in-game arising from not being able to drink wine. 

The question then becomes - what about in other settings or genres? What kind of vows might be open to PCs of various classes to perform, and how could the effects of such vows - positive and negative - be systematised? 

Mode, Not Genre or Type

We tend I think to classify or categorise campaigns into genres (fantasy, SF, horror) or sub-genres (high fantasy, sword and sandal); or into particular 'types' (hexcrawl, megadungeon, etc.). In a recent post, I suggested that there are a lot of 'types' of campaign that have not really been systematised in the same way that the OSR has managed over a course of decades to really finesse the matter of how to design and run a megadungeon-based, and to a lesser extent a hexcrawl-based, fantasy (more specifically, sword and sorcery) campaign.

It was suggested to me in the comments on that post that a better way of thinking about things is that there is out there a fairly limited number of campaign styles that might be said to function at a higher, transcendent level of abstraction and which each have a set of key principles that it would be worth elucidating. For example, the fantasy megadungeon campaign might be said to come under the umbrella of a larger campaign style that we could, putatively, call 'anchored raiding and looting'; the fantasy hexcrawl, on the other hand, might fall under 'roaming'. The advantage of thinking about campaign modes, as I will call them, in this way is that it allows us to come up with some principles for each which are transferrable between different genres or scenarios that fall under the larger mode.

Some suggestions for modes, and the principles governing them, would be:

• Anchored raiding and looting: a mode of campaign in which the PCs are self-directing rogues whose main aim is to amass wealth through plunder, and where the action circulates around an 'anchor' location. Key principles: biased sandbox (i.e. open-ended but with the assumption that a particular location is the focus initially); advancement chiefly through treasure accumulation; assumed high character fatality rate. Key tools: wandering monster tables; methods of stocking; location design principles; etc. 
• Roaming raiding and looting: a mode of campaign in which the PCs are self-directing adventurers whose main aim is to amass wealth through plunder, and the where the action is in an 'open world'. Key principles: genuine sandbox (open-ended wiith no anchoring location); advancement chiefly through treasure accumulation; assumed high character fatality rate. Key tools: random encounter tables; wilderness survival rules; travel rules; etc. 
• Merchanting: a mode of campaign in which the PCs are self-directing adventurers whose main aim is to amass wealth through trade, and where the action is in an open-world with a pre-defined or discoverable set of resources, trade-routes, and arbitrage opportunities. Key principles: genuine sandbox but with assumed relationships between geographical locations; advancement chiefly through profit; assumed low character fatality rate. Key tools: ways to calculate fluctuating prices for resources; rules for travel; ways for generating competitors; etc.
• Investigative: a mode of campaign in which the PCs are solve mysteries or unearth knowledge. Key principles: confined sandbox (in a well-defined geographical location or set of geographical locations); advancement chiefly through solving/unearthing; assumed low character fatality rate. Key tools: relationship mapping; ways to generate clues; etc.
• Exploration: a mode of campaign in which the PCs discover hitherto unknown (to them or to the world at large) places. Key principles: open sandbox; advancement chiefly through visiting new places; assumed low character fatality rate. Key tools: wilderness survival rules; detailed and exciting rules for climbing, swimming, etc.; random encounter tables; random map contents; etc.

And so on - there will be others. The idea here is that the key principles and tools are then elaborated and systematised in such a way as to be readily utilised. Each mode thereby becomes a kind of off-the-shelf set of principles that can be applied regardless of genre, or mood, or 'furniture'. Is it a sword-and-sorcery megadungeon or a campaign concerning cyberpunk PCs raiding a gigantic tower-block-cum-hive-cum-nuclear-reactor or one in which future space pirates raid a moon-sized space hulk? Well, these are all anchored raiding and looting campaigns, so the same principles can apply to each and the things that work in a fantasy megadungeon campaign can be ported into the others. On the other hand, is Call of Cthulhu, Unknown Armies, hard-boiled tech-noir, or something more like a Poirot novel? Well, these are all under the 'investigative' mode. And so on.

At present, I believe it to be the case that that the OSR has - to use a phrase from the dead world of corporate managementspeak - bottomed out the anchored raiding and looting campaign mode in such a way that its principles and tools can be used in any genre or setting. This is not as true of the other modes. And elaborating the key principles and tools for them might be an important project.

An Incomplete Theory of -Taurs

It is easy to 'grok' (sorry) centaurs. Half-human, half-horse, their behaviour and culture is obvious: they are souped-up raiders of the steppe - Scythians, Huns, Alans, Massagetae, Mongols, Comanches - who like to daub themselves in blood, drink from the hollowed-out skulls of their victims, and live a life of freedom and liberty under only the vastness of the sky.

The centaur model of 'human torso/something else hindquarters' is widely deployed (manscorpions, wemics, formians, bull centaurs, bariaurs, etc.), but rarely thought about. I would like to here postulate some important principles governing its optimal use.

First, it seems important that '-taurs', as I will call them, have to be based on an animal that has a roughly elongated, oblong torso in order that it can be easily imagined without giggles. Bull centaur works, because one can imagine a cow with a human torso coming out where the neck and head should be. Seagull -taur doesn't really work, because it conjures in the mind an image which is intrinsically a bit silly. Similarly, a -taur should not neuter the most interesting characteristic of the base animal. A crocodile -taur is a bad idea because it takes away the snappy jaws which are a crocodile's best feature.

Second, it is a worthwhile endeavour to think through what it is about a prospective -taur that makes it worth creating aside from the aesthetic. A bull centaur is a good concept because the thought of a thing that is half-human and half-bull in temperament as well as physique is both conceivable and cool, and because it suggests certain abilities (to 'charge', to get angry, etc.). What good, though, is a giraffe -taur or camel -taur? What are they bringing to the table in terms of flavour, basic concept, abilities, and so on?

Third, a good -taur has a suggestive role or culture that fits in with both halves. The centaur is a bit like a person and a bit like a horse not just in terms of how it looks or feels, but in terms of how it behaves and what it does. The same is true of a bull centaur - an aggressive, impetuous, single-minded, beast that entirely lives up to the stereotype of the angry bovine. What, though, about the bariaur - what would it mean for human beings to be more 'sheeplike' or 'goatlike'? What would the culture of the aforementioned giraffe -taur, or a rhino -taur, lion -taur, wolf-taur, etc., be?

Fourth, I will go out on a limb and say that I prefer the physical size of the real-world creature to be roughly commensurate with that of a human. One problem with bariaurs is that human beings are a bit too big to imagine sitting on the hindquarters of a sheep or goat - I know sheep and goats, and that would be ungainly. Don't get me started on formians or manscorpions. Part of the genius of the centaur is that it requires no shrinkage or giantism.

With all of that in mind, what are some suggestions for good -taur concepts, and how would you describe their character and culture?