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? 

Distance and Vastness in Hexmaps

 

The world is extremely big. It's hard to appreciate how big it is without spending a lot of time of it on foot, and without making the effort to notice the bigness. But once one does, one cannot help but reflect on it. Landscapes contain, and conceal, great vastnesses of contents which the mind struggles to really grasp.

The photograph above was taken from the top of the highest hill in the town in which I live. It looks out over parts of the city of Newcastle upon Tyne, and to beyond. I would like you to notice two things about it.

The first is that the hills in the distance, the Cheviot Hills - where the red arrow is pointing - are about 40 miles away. The hill from which the picture was taken, Sheriff Hill, is only about 500 feet high. This is a simple but important thing to observe: from a mound of any sort of prominence, it is possible to see very far indeed across a roughly flat landscape. 

The second is that between the viewpoint in question and the hill pointed to by the red arrow there is a very great deal of content. There is an entire city in the way, for one thing, as well as one of the country's largest and longest rivers, not to mention a large number of villages, entire towns, many smaller hills that just look like low undulations from this distance, streams, ponds, lakes, marshes, forests, heaths, and fields. As well as this, there is a large number of ruins, castles, churches, monasteries, monoliths, caves, chasms, and other features which one might describe as 'interesting' in some way. The world is full of stuff to interact with, especially in a fairly crowded and historied place like England - to an almost self-parodying extent. It might not look like it, because so much of the contents of the world are coyly hidden when it is examined from a distance. But one need only roam around it to discover the extent to which this is true. 

I have written a lot about what you might call the DMing side of these phenomena - namely, the importance for a hexmap to have a proper density of contents. (See the loosely connected series here, here, here and here.) But it is also important for PCs to be given the sense that they are immersed in a landscape of the proper bigness - that, if they climb up a hill and take a look around they will see an awfully big world around them, and that they will also get the sense that it is filled with stuff to do and places to explore if only they are motivated to look. This - conjuring in the mind the awesome scale and fullness of what lies before them in confronting the abstraction of the hexmap - is of vital importance in conveying to the players the impression that a campaign setting is something that is going to be rewarding and exciting with which to interact. 

Authority at the Table

The start of an RPG campaign is always an interesting anthropological moment - particularly if, as is often the case with an online game, the players do not know each other very well or have never been in a campaign together before. Everybody starts out ostensibly as 'equals' in the sense that there is no pre-appointed hierarchy - the PCs do not arrive with a leader, second-in-command, quartermaster, etc. But gradually, in the first couple of sessions, a sort of hierarchy or assortment of roles develops. This is often left entirely implicit, but typically one PC will become the one who 'takes charge'; another will become the calm voice of reason; another will become the court jester; another will become the unpredictable nutjob; and so on. 

Intriguingly, this is one of those moments when what is happening both within the game and at the table coincides - it is a process that happens among the PCs 'in universe', as it were, and among the players themselves in the real world. Some strange alchemy of personality, context, and luck seems to determine it. 

I've been thinking about this issue a lot in the last month or so as a result of reading two books which, oddly, relate to the same theme. The first is The Lord of the Flies. I've embarked on a mission to read all of Golding's works (thanks in part to a long-ago recommendation from a commenter on here that I read The Inheritors) and have finally made my way to Flies after not having read it or thought much about it since I read it at school at the age of, I think, 12 or 13. I'm almost at the end, and I've found the experience surprisingly rewarding. Without having to read it for school, and without any pressure to discuss the contents in the light of the weary prodding of some jaded teacher, I've been able to simply enjoy its brilliance - and it is brilliant: a miracle of a book. 

As you may recall, authority and how it emerges is one of the main themes of The Lord of the Flies. The boys find themelves on an island in the absence of any pre-existing framework of authority - there are no adults, parents, teachers, policemen, and so on. They are thrust together as ostensible 'equals' (although some, the 'littluns', are exempt from this). And from that, a hierarchy emerges, as well as a set of vaguely defined but fairly fixed roles - the chief (Ralph), the head of the hunters (Jack), the voice of reason (Piggy), the visonary (Simon), the clown (Morris) and so on. It is an unstable structure, to be sure, but it remains in place for a long time - the narrative implies that the boys live in relative harmony for some months. 

What the book implies about the role of the leader is particularly interesting. At the beginning, indeed it is pretty much the first thing that happens, Piggy and Ralph find the conch, and Ralph uses it to summon the rest of the boys on the island. And he then provides them with a project: they are going to start a big fire and then be rescued. On this basis - the fact that he has a plan - he then becomes chief. Later - spoiler alert - the shift to the leadership of psychopathic Jack is accompanied by a similar assertion of a project: to hunt pigs and 'have fun'. 

This all makes visceral some remarks made by Alexandre Kojeve in The Notion of Authority. Here, Kojeve provides some brief notes of a theory of authority, and identifies a form of authority - that of the Leader - which emerges in this type of context. He puts before us the image of a group of children in a field. They are ostensibly in a position of atomised equality - each is a child the same as any other. But then one of them asserts a plan: he suggests going to raid the apple orchard next door to steal apples. Suddenly they are united - and he is the Leader.

He becomes the Leader, Kojeve elaborates, because he is the one who had a plan - he was able to envision a future (one in which the group gets the apples) and bring it into the present in the form of a project. He orients the group, as it were, towards the otherwise empty and contentless expanse of the future, and responds to it by imbuing it with content in the present. And everybody else goes along because of this claim to be able to see further; the others, recognising that they 'see less well and less for', willingly submit.

This obviously describes something of what goes on in the assertion of leadership by Ralph (and Jack) in The Lord of the Flies - and it is something that all of us remember from our playground days. The crudest and most immediate form of human authority is that in which a group of people are suddenly united (it can happen almost instantaneously) by one of them putting forward a project and orienting the others towards a future. And this is also something that all of us will recognise from playing RPGs, too. There, authority as such seems to emerge when one player (and one PC) shows himself willing to claim to see further than the others and lay out a project - and when the others, acccepting it, go along. It is not always necessarily the same person - authority in this context is very fluid - but it will tend to be the case that it most often is. There will be one person who the others tend to look towards for decisions. And this role will be taken on very early - usually in the first couple of sessions. In a brief moment, authority will be up for grabs, and seized, at the start.

What determines the identity of the person who will take on this role is mysterious - I earlier attributed it to an 'alchemy of personality, context, and luck' - and the process is, I think, inevitable. And it has its advantages and drawbacks. Without leaders, human beings are indecisive and vapid. But leaders can direct their charges into hideous mistakes. We will all be familiar with such scenarios. One way of shaking things up and experimenting in interesting ways might be to formalise roles and deliberately, before play starts, elect one person to be the leader - or even to circulate the leadership role each session. I would be curious to learn if anybody has ever tried such experiments, and what the results have been like. 

Repository of Incompletely Systematised Campaign Types

This post is a proposed Repository of Incompletely Systematised Campaign TYpes (or RISCTY - yes, I went there) for D&D and other fantasy tabletop RPGs. 

What is an incompletely systematised campaign type? In essence, it is a campaign type which OSR and wider nerd game blogosphere luminaries have not yet managed to exhaustively flesh-out through elucidating general principles, providing generalised or specific advice, coming up with iterative methods for generating content, producing substantive gameable material, and so on. In practice, it is probably best understood in opposition to the quintessential Completely Systematised Campaign Type - the megadungeon. Thanks to the hard work and applied wisdom of generations of deep and serious thinkers, nobody in 2024 who has access to the internet and knows what the acronym 'OSR' stands ought to have any difficulty setting up and running such a campaign, and will find a vast wealth of content that will help him to do so - indeed, scientists say that the number of blog entries dedicated to the matter of successful megadungeon campaigning would wrap around the Earth fifty-thousand times if printed out on postage stamps laid back to back.

Other more or less Completely Systematised Campaign Types would include the sandbox hexmap 'Western Marches' style campaign (even if I still think nobody has really come up with a way to make wilderness travel evocative and interesting) and perhaps the urban, city-based type. 

Incompletely Systematised Campaign Types that I think any sane person will at some point have entertained will include:

• The Lord of the Flies/Lost/Robinson Crusoe style campaign, in which the PCs are washed up ashore in some improbable spot without possessions of any kind.
• The underwater campaign, in which the PCs are inhabitants of an actual below-the-surface hexmapped region, or where most of the play takes place in such a setting.
• The saltbox campaign, in which sea travel, ship-to-ship combat, weather, trade, and so on are made the focus.
• The virtuous sandbox campaign, in which the PCs roam about doing good (although I have jotted down some ideas about this)
• The institutional campaign, in which the PCs have adventures in a narrowly-defined single location such as a monastery, university, cathedral, castle, etc.
• The murder-mystery investigation campaign, with bonus points if the mysteries involve the use of known D&D spells

Add your own in the comments!

Chaos: The Investigation Without End

Over the Christmas break, I caught up on a bit of reading for 'pleasure' with CHAOS, Tom O'Neill's account of his madcap 20-year effort to get to the heart of the Manson murders. I don't think this is a spoiler - the effort was fruitless. But the book does throw up a huge amount of fascinating speculation, and thereby succeeds in casting a lot of doubt on the 'official' story as to why the Tate-LaBianca killings happened. It may be the only book of its kind - devoted to debunking a widely accepted version of events and then, Rashomon-like, giving a smorgasbord of other options to believe in without itself committing to any of them. In the end, I don't think it quite works, but it is at least a riveting read. 

The experience of reading CHAOS, in any case, struck me as a good metaphor for a problem that has always made it difficult for me to conceive of running a genuine investigative 'mystery' game - namely, coming up with an Agatha Christie-level scenario that the players can solve, which doesn't feel too easy or too hard, and which doesn't rest on the tabletop RPG equivalent of pixel-bitching. That is to say, good mystery stories are like intricate faberge eggs in which every detail matters and the solution requires careful elucidation and focused awareness of all moving parts. And this isn't what tabletop RPGs excel at - RPG players are mainly good at causing, well, chaos, like a herd of bulls in a series of china shops. Coming up with a good, interconnected series of clues, NPCs, etc., in such a way that a group of players can figure out a way to the final mystery without getting sidetracked feels like a prohibitively difficult challenge.

RPG mysteries, in other words, strike me as being rather like O'Neill's frustrated attempts to uncover the truth about what really motivated Charles Manson. He starts off with a curious sequence of events - the murders themselves. And then he starts pulling at various threads which lead him to a haphazard collection of encounters with drug dealers, record producers, Beach Boys, former police officers, district attorneys, private investigators, washed up actors and has-beens, Hollywood stars and CIA spooks. He learns about elephants being dosed up with LSD, the infiltration of hippie-dom by the FBI, the corruption of the LA Sheriff's Office, possible murders incompetently disguised as suicides, free love gone wrong, torture and mayhem. It's very entertaining. But it goes nowhere.

It reads, in other words, rather like the 'Actual Play' from an RPG campaign (Unknown Armies, maybe?) in which the DM flung together an initial mysterious scenario and a big cast of NPCs, locations and events connected to it, without having a clear idea in his own mind what was really going on behind the scenes or what 'really happened' - and then just let the PCs have at it and see what they stumbled through. And whenever it seemed like they were about to exhaust a lead, he'd throw three more into the mix. It strikes me that somebody could easily run a campaign that way almost indefinitely, with the PCs going about ostensibly investigating something (a murder, a paranormal event, etc.) and from there simply uncovering yet more mysteries, going down rabbit hole after rabbit hole, having weird encounter after weird encounter, and never actually coming to an end. This would be a sort of open-ended investigation in which the journey was everything and the destination nonexistent.

This, I think, would at least be achievable and is, I suppose, what is really implied behind the classic idea of a Call of Cthulhu campaign - a sort of sandbox of plot hooks that the PCs pursue until death or insanity claims them. But would it be satisfactory to actually play?