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.