All the Right Notes: On Notekeeping

As we all know, YOU CAN NOT HAVE A MEANINGFUL CAMPAIGN IF STRICT TIME RECORDS ARE NOT KEPT.

Since I think time records are really just an aspect of keeping notes, I would expand this maxim to YOU CAN NOT HAVE A MEANINGFUL CAMPAIGN IF NOTES ARE NOT KEPT. One of the most important things that a DM does is to keep notes during play and reflect on them in between sessions as a form of homework. Indeed, this may be the most important thing to do to keep a long-term campaign going, beyond the really basic stuff (like showing up).

I am curious about others' note-taking practices. For my own part I have never made a science out of it - my notes are just jotted down in a notepad whenever it feels like something is important to remember. This could be an NPC's name and motivation, a running tally of character XP and HP levels (I usually periodically note these down, perhaps once or twice a session), an event, a reminder to myself that such-and-such an ocurrence is happening 'off camera', the current date in-universe (I tend by default to start each campaign on 1st April and then keep a count, so that I know that at the moment it is Day 134, or whatever, and can extrapolate from there to an actual calendar date), occasionally something funny or remarkable which somebody has said. 

What I typically then do, in advance of each session, is review the notes from the previous week (sometimes of the couple of weeks before that) and refresh my memory, then add some supplementary notes about where things might go in the session that is upcoming. So I might recall that, oh yes, Baron Blueflame has decided he wants to kill one of the PCs and steal his magic battleaxe, and is plotting to do so with the Gurning Goblins of Mount Gababababab, and so I make some notes about how that plot is advancing.

This has the very important practical effect of helping my poor, tired, derelict shell of a mind to retain some thin fragments of information, as otherwise it could get rather messy. ('What? We're playing D&D? Is it time for tea yet? It's egg and chips on a Wednesday. What, today's Thursday??') 

But it also helps maintain the necessary fiction that the campaign is living and breathing and not merely set in aspic. What I have noticed is that, when I have properly done my homework, read through last week's notes, and put time and effort into thinking about what everything means, the next session starts with high levels of energy and focus, and goes well. If on the other hand I have not had much time and have just glanced at things 10 minutes before the session, there is more of a sense of slackness about things. 

Share your own note-taking practices in the comments!

Three Principles for the Post-Apocalypse

I went to the cinema on Friday to watch 28 Years Later: Bone Temple. Was it good? I no longer feel qualified to comment. Modern film alienates me. Nothing about it - character development and motives, narrative, dialogue, in-world physics, pacing - seems plausible to me. I've felt this way for so long I can't remember the last time I watched a new film and was genuinely immersed in it - maybe The Wolf of Wall Street? This is not to say I do not find them entertaining in their own way. But I find it impossible to unplug my brain and accept their aggressive stupidity.

28 Years Later: Bone Temple was not too bad in the aggressive stupidity stakes, although there was a lot about it that left me dissatisfied. And it was at least trying to do some interesting things with its completely incredible (in terms of human motivation) plot. In this regard, I would say - and this is high praise coming from me, let me make clear - if you go to see it you will probably say the experience was somewhat better than having your testicles flogged with a knotted rope. The experience may even be improved with the addition of a pint and some high quality salt and vinegar crisps.  

Anyway, three themes stood out for me in a kind of meta-analysis of the film and what it was trying to do, and these struck me as potentially being of broader significance - particularly for post-apocalypse RPG gaming (of which I am a fan). They are - NO SPOILERS - as follows:

1 - The mechanism of an apocalypse is the least interesting thing about it. I remember the original 28 Days Later. It was a bit of a tour de force directorally (I like Danny Boyle's approach to film-making) and its 'fast zombie' idea was no doubt rather revolutionary at the time. But ultimately the vector of apocalypse - whether it is zombies, a disease, nuclear war, whatever - is not the stuff of long-term interest. The makers of the 28 Periods of Time Later franchise seem to be aware of this. Hence, now that 28 Years Later: Bone Temple has rolled around, the zombies have become a rather minor sideshow; the interest revolves around the society and the human interactions that have evolved in the apocalypse's aftermath. This is an important lesson to learn, I think.

2 - The generational experience of the apocalypse is rarely adequately thought-through. If you were an adult when it happened, the before-time would remain vivid in your mind and would still be formative of your character. If you had been born after it happened, your entire experience of the world would be post-apocalyptic. Your motivations and values, then, would be extremely different. 28 Years Later: Bone Temple does play with this idea, but nowhere near adequately enough. If you had been born after the zombie apocalypse and had made it to the age of 25, your psyche would be utterly different to a person who had been 25 when it happened and could remember civilisation. In the same way that when you were growing up you heard adults going on about 'the 60s' or 'the war' and just let it wash over you because you had no experience of it, young people in the post-apocalypse just will not care about how the pre-deluvian world was except perhaps in a vaguely academic way. And their characters will have been forged on the crucible of hardcore 'fantasy fucking Vietnam' survival mode. The idea that they will be 'relatable' is therefore not, to my eye, very credible unless the apocalypse is so far in the past that a genuine fresh society or civilisation has been able to emerge. 

3 - At the end of the day nobody wants the apocalypse to be undone. The setting of 28 Periods of Time Later is atheistic; the zombie plague is caused by a virus. And one can clearly see that the arc of the series bends towards a final outcome in which They Discover A Cure. This, though, is not what the audience wants. The human drama of dealing with the fallout permanently is just way more interesting. If and when they make the third part in the series what we want to see is a grand thought experiment that plays out what kind of society would eventually emerge from the wreckage of the plague. What we don't want to see is 'They found a cure and then in a final coda we find out that everybody learned important lessons about love and kindness and caring for the natural world, and mourned the dead.' What I would want in fact is 28 Decades Later, when Scotland is ruled by various petty kings who have found ways to enslave zombies for deployment as warrior-slaves, and seek the help of Satanic druids to manufacture anti-psychotic potions to dispense to their followers to manage the effects of the disease - and nobody entertains the daft notion in their heads that any of this could possibly end. 

The Library of Lost Tangents

RPG campaigns throw out a lot of loose ends and tangents. 

Recently, I was thinking about this while listening to an old podcast episode about The Book of the New Sun. In it, at one stage, one of the participants describes the series as characterised by many loose ends, which Gene Wolfe never ultimately ties off in the various sequels. Indeed, each of the sequel series, ostensibly written to clarify the first set of books, just tend to spawn yet more unanswered questions.

This reminded me of pretty much every D&D campaign I have ever run or played in. As the PCs go about their business, they are constantly unearthing knowledge, hearing rumours, passing by locations or interacting with NPCs, but I would say the majority of what they uncover tends to get forgotten about or remains mysterious. There is too much to do, and a lot of what in another context might be called 'side quests' are therefore cast aside. (I do not like the phrase 'side quest' in this context as it implies there is a preordained 'main quest', which there is not; I will leave that subject for another post, though.) 

The reason for this is that, in order to create the sense that the PCs inhabit a living, breathing fantasy world, it is necessary to give it texture. And this means that every NPCs they meet, every random encounter they...er...encounter, every journey they take, every place they visit, ought to have a lot to it if the PCs chose to sniff around. It should in other words be possible for the PCs, if they so choose, to find out who is the grandmother of the maiden who serves them in the tavern. It should be possible for them to just knock on the door of a house at random and expect there to be occupants. It should be possible for them to ask a non-hostile monster they come across in a random wilderness encounter whether he has heard any interesting news recently, and to be told some rumours in response. It should be possible to learn the back stories of each individual member of a group of captives the PCs rescue from a wizard's dungeon. It should be possible to question the local pub bores when newly arrived in a town about who is worth getting to know and who it is important to avoid. And so on. These things may not happen, but it should in principle be possible for them to. 

The DM may very well not have the relevant information to hand, pre-prepared, for the most part - he will either make it up on the spot or have ways of generating it with some dice rolls. He may have to fly by the seat of his pants a bit, although if he has a good knowledge of his own campaign world he should not have too much trouble coming up with good ideas that flesh out the setting. And if he is at all sensible he will note down everything he says of this type, so that it can be remembered and referred to as required. 

Thus, a random encounter with some non-hostile bugbears (say) who the PCs interact with may get jotted down in the DM's notebook as something like 'Random encounter with bugbears, led by Chagaraz the Blind; not aggressive, but at war with the local high king over disruption of sacred practices due to increase road traffic in their territory, which have commenced as a result of the high king starting construction of new gold mine'. The DM may have come up with all this on the hoof. And he may think to himself, immediately afterwards, 'I'll do something with that.' And the PC's may also make mental notes of it even while proceeding with whatever they happen to be doing at the time. Yet it may very well be the case that events move on and Chagaraz the Blind is never seen or heard from again. There are just a lot of other things going on.

What I wish I had done is to keep better, more lasting records of these things. It is an important aspect of DMing practice, not very frequently remarked upon, to keep notes as a session goes on, and to revise them between sessions. I am good at keeping up with that habit. But what I am not good at is preserving the notes for very long after a campaign is over. This means that a huge amount of accumulated loose threads and tangents are lost to posterity. I am sure I am not the only one.

And the result of that is that a great library of such lost tangents goes unconstructed and unfilled. One can imagine, can one not, going strolling through a vast vault lined with varnished oak shelves, carved into all manner of images - dragons, nymphs, devils, imps - and divided into small pigeonholes, each containing a rolled-up sheaf of parchment on which are written two dozen loose ends? And one can imagine that these are all spun-out from the rumour mills of campaigns which drifted in different directions and never quite found use for them - but which have been carefully written down and stored and made available for public consumption. This would be a permanent resource for the world's DMs, continually being added to, even while continuously parchments are withdrawn to plunder for ideas. Whenever a new rumour, or a new location on a hexmap, or a new NPC or villain was required, it would be 'Off to the Loose End Library!' for a fresh idea. Of course, it would be necessary to return anything once used. And it would only be honourable to donate fresh loose ends whenever visiting, so as to repopulate and regenerate the museum's stock. 

The Library of Lost Tangents would be its official name. All that you would need is a member's card and a recommendation from a friend and the entire archive would be yours. Need a rumour about an umber hulk? Need an origin story for a creepy haunted treehouse? Need a list of local eccentrics, heard about on the grapevine at a local tavern? Need a list of 'things a captive goblin, randomly encountered, comes out with after interrogation? Well, the Library of Lost Tangents is the place. Somebody, somewhere, will have dreamed something up. And all you need to do is collect and utilise it, free of charge. 

Law, Chaos the Paladin PC and the Katechon

Regular readers will know that in the part of my brain labelled 'conceptual development' there is a box containing a lot of thoughts about an all-paladins campaign. This, I stress, would not be limited to campaigns in which all the PCs are paladins-proper in the stereotypical AD&D sense (though it could be that). It is a campaign in which the PCs are men and women for whom their honour is more important than their lives, and can therefore be of whatever class, background or type the DM and players desire. They are in other words best thought of as anti-rogues (if the Rogue is the basic OSR archetype):

Whether or not they gain power, fame and glory is immaterial to them; whether they accrue wealth is a matter beneath contempt. What matters to them is virtue: pursuing truthfulness, justice, protection of the weak. And in that pursuit they ask not the number or size of their enemies, the distance they must travel, or the hardships they must endure. They ask only what is right.

It is important to get away from too much pseudo-Christianity here: I would like the concept to be applicable in all kinds of settings and backgrounds. It is, however, hard to get away from the idea that it should be conneted to religious institutions of whatever kind - because I do think to make this kind of campaign work it is probably necessary for there to be some kind of institutional structure as such, and of which the PCs are members. This because they are precisely not rogues - they do not just gad about in the interests of wealth and fame. They are trying to protect something, and in a somewhat formalised way.

And in this respect there are some Christianised concepts which are helpful. One of them is the curious idea of the katechon (κατέχον), or 'he who restrains', mentioned in Paul's Second Letter to the Thessalonians, and often nowadays discussed in the context of the thought of Carl Schmitt. Schmitt, in The Nomos of the Earth, used this concept to describe the historical orientation of the medieval Christian empire. The katechon, as Paul describes it, is some power or person - his language is opaque because it seems he assumed the Thessalonians would already have known what he was talking about - who restrains the coming of the Antichrist and thus maintains the current historical epoch. Some day the katechon will disappear and the Antichrist, or 'lawlessness' will arrive. And this, for Schmitt, gave the Christian empire its orientation towards the idea of Rome as the katechon itself. Rome persists because it holds up the present eon. And as long as it does so, the Antichrist is at bay.

Stripped of its political theology and its explicit Christian furnishings, this is a great concept underpinning an everything-is-paladins campaign (and it of course informs, as you will have noticed, a huge amount of fantasy writings - everything from Tolkien's Gondor to GRRM's 'Wall' can be thought of as deriving by a long chain of Chinese whispers from the idea of the katechon) and presents us with a basic phenomenology (yes, I went there) of the anti-rogue campaign. In this phenomenology, we see:

A - The current epoch

B - The Antichrist

C - The katechon

And each is placed in relation to the others. B threatens to bring to an end A, but C intervenes. All you need to do, as the DM of your own campaign, is to decide what is A, what is B, and what is C.

Hence, A could be Hobbiton, B could be Sauron, and C could be the Dunedain. 

Or, A could be the Empire, B could be Chaos, and C could be Sigmar and his forces. 

Or, A could be the last city, B could be the su-monster hordes, and C could be the knights-protectors of the sacred dragon shield.

Or, A could be the university, B could be the demonic knowledge-devourers of old Cathay, and C could be the scholar-warriors of memasjkhajhjahas.

Or, A could be the utopia of Xanadu, B could be the crusading knights with their new religion, and C could be the shamanesses of the blue parrot.

And so on. The point here is that the threat which B poses ought to be epochal in nature and not just nasty or dangerous. It is not merely an evil power which raids, steals, or kills, but something which lurks just beyond the city wall or border, or just around the corner, or behind the reflection in the mirror, or whatever, and will Bring Everything To An End when it triumphs. And the PCs are likewise connected to a C which is not just 'the goodies' but some institution or set of institutions which are tied to the fate of the epoch as such. 

I think this would be fun to run and play and is deserving of further thought and systematisation.  

Games Workshop Against Satanism

An interesting theme is developing as the AI revolution unfolds: people don't have much of a problem with AI use in things they don't care about, but they hate it in anything they love. 

This I think explains why there is huge pushback against AI use in creative fields; ironically, despite having been told for a few years now that AI will replace human artists, novelists, film directors and so on, it seems more likely that these fields are among the few which are not going to be directly threatened. People can be entertained by slop, but people don't love slop, and when it comes to art, people want things they will love. This means they want things that other human beings have created.

It could just be the confirmation bias talking, but I was gladdened to read a number of articles last week (including in the mainstream press) about Games Workshop having banned its staff using AI in content generation or designs, and I see this as indicative of the direction in which we are travelling. Fans of Games Workshop products love them, and they don't want them to be AI-generated. These fans also particularly don't want to have to pay Games Workshop prices for AI content. And they will kick off good style if they discern AI content creeping in.

Games Workshop, like other outfits who want to build a reputation on the basis of quality, know this very well, and so I think do Wizards of the Coast - who have also taken a bold stance in public on this issue. This is not luddism; it is simply a feature of the human condition that most of us prefer things that other human beings have directly made, and in its own way no different from the market behaviour of wealthy people preferring handmade objects to those which are mass-produced. 

This all in any case gives a curious cast to the moral landscape of contemporary nerd commerce. Games Workshop is not our friend. But in this respect at least, it is an ally in the fight against Satan's forces. Much the same could be said about Wizards of the Coast. Not our friend. But, in this respect, an ally. All done out of self-centred motives, but nonetheless, not wrong. It's funny how things turn out.

When Did Action-Packed Prologues Begin?

Without further ado, let us commence the Great Monsters & Manuals Group Research Project 2026.

The 'prologue' as such is a concept that goes back at least to ancient Greece. But a fairly recent innovation in fantasy fiction has come in the form of the action-packed prologue chapter, often taking place in media res, which gets the reader hooked from the outset and tees up the narrative proper. I am not talking here about a framing device like the introductory sequence to The Worm Ouroboros, or a preliminary infodump like in The Fellowship of the Ring. I am talking about a teaser taking place 'before the opening credits', as it were, often filled with violence and derring-do and causing the pages to turn from the very outset.

The most famous and notable example nowadays may be the A Song of Ice and Fire books, which each begin in this way. Off the top of my head, others would include The Eye of the World, The Name of the Wind (which I confess I have not fully read), Gardens of the Moon, The Dragonbone Chair... if you have read a great deal of high fantasy fiction, you know the drill.

I have done some Googling, and even consulted Satan himself (in the form of Claude.AI for higher education, for which I have super-duper access through my day job) and have not been able to find a definitive starting point for this practice. I think it has to have become fashionable sometime between the publication of The Lord of the Rings and The Eye of the World. But when?

A datapoint: Pawn of Prophecy, the first volume in David Eddings's The Belgariad, includes a preliminary infodump prologue about the creation of the world. It was published in 1982, and it is safe to say that since Eddings was self-consciously trying to ape epic fantasy fiction, he can be used as a bellweather. This would indicate the action-packed prologue chapter was not in vogue at that time. The Eye of the World, which on the other hand definitively has what you would call an action-packed prologue chapter of the type I am describing, came out in 1990. This would narrow the search down to some point between 1982-1990. But I might be wrong.

Does anybody have any ideas? Fly, my pretties!