Recommend a 'Read Everything By...' Project

Some years ago, I read more or less everything that HP Lovecraft wrote and blogged about it. 

Years later, I read more or less everything Jack Vance wrote and blogged about it twice. 

I have also, more recently, read almost everything that William Golding wrote, but I have not blogged about it on the basis that it may not be revelant to my readers' interests.

I have really enjoyed these projects - I have found that after a while they get a momentum of their own and motivate further reading, and there is something about getting to know an author's personal arc that itself almost functions as an overarching novel-within-a-novel: you read the fiction, but can also get an overview of the linkages between the works so as to provide a coherent whole.

I would like recommendations for other fantasy/SF/horror authors to get to grips with. Here are some baseline requirements that Must Not Be Violated:

1. The author should have published at least 7 novels. 

2. The author should not be JRR Tolkien, CS Lewis, George RR Martin, Brandon Sanderson, Steven Erikson, Julian May, David Eddings, China Mieville, or Gene Wolfe, because I have either read all or most of their stuff already, or know that I don't particularly like them.

RECOMMEND AWAY. And show your workings. Sell me on your recommendation!

Why Psionics Fails

It is often said that the world is divided into two classes of people: those who like Van Morrison, and those who have met him. 

Another such division that lies across the heart of humanity is those who can tolerate psionics in D&D and those who cannot. I wish to go out on a limb and say that most people who play D&D do not like psionics, and I will go even further out on said limb - indeed, to the point where it begins to bend so outrageously and strenuously that breakage becomes imminent - and say that this is even more true of grognards and those associated with the OSR. The chief complaint would be that AD&D psionics made things unnecessarily complicated, were overpowered, duplicated what magic-users or clerics could do, and ruined the tone of the game. 

The last of these complaints bites most forcefully. Ultimately, it is not beyond the wit of man to develop an elegant and interesting psionics system for D&D and related games. But it is the tone which is the real issue. And this is because the existence of psionics is predicated on a metaphysics which is fundamentally incompatible with those of the typical fantasy world.

What I mean by this is simpler than it sounds. The point of psionics is that mind triumphs over matter. The stuff of the universe can be bent, twisted, and otherwise manipulated by the latent power of the brain. And the psionicist therefore simply decide whether he wants to attempt to shape reality, and does so if he has sufficient puissance. The point of magic in a fantasy setting is that it is supernatural - it is a mysterious overarching force which can be channelled so as to supervene in the physical world. Obviously it requires intellect to learn spells, but spells themselves are not outgrowths of happenings within the brain. They are things written down and memorised, yes, but their origins are extrinsic to it. 

These different metaphysics tug in diametrically opposite directions. Does mind triumph over matter? Or is mind subordinate to supernature, which it taps into but never dominates? There is no right or wrong answer to these questions, but they tug themselves apart all the same. In practice, what I think this translates into is simply a sense that psionics 'feels wrong' in a high fantasy campaign setting. It discomobulates our sense of what 'fantasy' entails. This is not, though, due merely to genre expectation. It is a function of the fact that psionics and magic each require the individual to simultaneously adopt two, mutually contradictory, ideas about the nature of reality. Does it conform to (or can it be made to conform to) the mind? Or does the mind channel what is 'out there' in nature (magic) into real-world effects? 

Beautiful Sample Contents from The Great North

Once summer holidays are out of the way, I will be launching the Kickstarter for The Great North, described long ago as 'Yoon-Suin but in Northumberland'. All the text and art is finished, and layout is commencing. 

Here are some little fragments from the prototype of one of the chapters, mostly close-ups (i.e., not full pages or spreads) so you can see it in some of its final glory and get a feel for what the book will look like. Art by Tom Kilian, layout by Solomon VK.

I am very proud of this book, and can't wait to get it out there.

The -Rider Gambit

An important and useful way to tease out weird new fantasy cultures or civilisations is what I am going to christen here the -Rider Gambit. The way this works is you imagine a race of people (or orcs, or elves, or whatever) and then find an unusual animal species for them to ride. And you then build a culture around that. 

We are familiar with human horse riders, goblin wolf riders, orc boar boyz, and so on. But what about elves who ride around on giraffes? Goblins who ride giant anteaters? Dwarfs who ride giant snakes? What would the cultures and geographies from which these mashups spring look like?

Here is a table to help:

1d12	Race	Rides
1	Human	Giraffe
2		Giant anteater
3		Rhino
4		Lion
5	Elf	Giant hyena
6	Dark elf	Gorilla or other giant ape
7	Goblin	Giant secretary bird, ostrich or emu
8	Dwarf	Okapi
9	Orc	Water buffalo
10	Kobold	Zebra
11	Halfling	Bison
12	Gnome	Giant tortoise

All you do is roll 2d12, and mash together what is in the two columns to come up with a culture of -riders. You could even do this to inspire the creation of part of a game world, because the combinations will tend to suggest particular aesthetics and landscapes. Hence, to quickly jot down three examples I have just generated:

Kobold bison-riders: Clearly, these inhabit a 'great plains' region; the kobolds here have figured out a way to domesticate bison to use as mounts, and this compensates for their own physical fragility, making them powerful in combat. The result is great confederacies of kobold tribes who rule the plains, sometimes in alliance with each other and sometimes at war.

Human giant tortoise-riders: These are a simple, clan-based culture of semi-nomadic pastoralists who guide flocks of tortoises around a grassy landscape, moving on from place to place as the available food stock depletes. In times of war the warriors ride their tortoises into battle, with often a dozen or so on each beast, firing arrows and flinging spears; the tortoises are trained for aggression against those owned by other clans. The ferocity of these clans spares them from outside domination, and they are fiercely autonomous from the rule of the large empire which abuts the region in which they dwell.

Elf lion-riders: I imagine a race of elves who use a special language they have developed to communicate with big cats. As a result of this they are able to enter into reciprocal relationships with, among others, lions, and indeed one way for an elf to achieve knighthood is to persuade a male lion to allow himself to be ridden as a mount. But the relationship between the elves and lions is based on equality, and lions are known to refuse cooperation if their own needs are not adequately met. 

You get the gist. As ever, a bigger table with more options would work better still. 

The Interdimensional Space Time Continuum Bait-and-Switch Ground Rules

One of the most perillous moments in any D&D campaign is the Interdimensional Space Time Continuum Bait-and-Switch. If you do not know what that is, let me explain:

It is when the players move into a different dimension and/or break in space-time such that things become Different to How They Were.

Two examples from my own life:

a - PCs are in a dungeon where they encounter a place where, due to a gigantic lightning strike, a rift has opened into the quasi-elemental plane of lightning and all sorts of entities from that plane have come pouring out. For reasons best ascribed to momentary insanity, the PCs go through the rift an emerge into the quasi-elemental plane.

b - There is a room in a dungeon which although only a dozen or or so yards in diameter contains, tardis-like, a region of desert dozens of miles wide, where a djinni is held captive in a certain hidden location.

Such moments are dangerous because they shift the tone of the campaign and may frustrate an expectation that has been allowed to build for weeks, months or years that things are a certain way. This may not manifest itself in howls of outrage, but it can feel like a clunky gear change, and it can all of a sudden make for a different 'feel' that results in verissimilitude-breaking incongruity. 

You may be familiar with the old Holodeck episodes of Next Gen, which had that kind of a quality to them. You were sitting down to watch regular Next Gen only to discover that, this week, the gang would be trapped in the Wild West/the 1920s/the 1800s/Sherwood Forest* chasing Moriarty. You had wanted phasers, tricorders, weird aliens and the Riker Maneuver. Instead you were getting silly costumes and an end-of-term, demob happy cast playing dress-up. There was a sense of vague deflation and discombobulation. And this can happen during Interdimensional Space-Time Continuum Bait-and-Switch moments, too.

This does not mean the Interdimensional Space-Time Continuum Bait-and-Switch should be avoided at all costs. There is nothing wrong with a shift in gears if you've been pootling along the M6 in fifth gear, stuck behind a lorry, and the fast lane opens up for you. My ground rules would run as follows:

1. Make sure an entrance to another dimension has a readily available exit. That way the players can explore if they want, but don't have to. ('You accidentally stepped through a doorway into another dimension and there is NO WAY BACK EXCEPT THROUGH SOME OBSCURE OR SECRET METHOD!' is, I think, screwing with the players unless it is the entire premise of the campaign from the outset.) 

2. Do not make the other dimension markedly more dangerous than the current dimension the PCs are in without hints that it will be so.

3. Rifts to other dimensions suck if they could be used to facilitate setting-destroying flows of technology, magic, and so on - again, unless it is the premise of the campaign. You are perhaps familiar with the Chronicles of Amber, specifically (I think, from memory) The Guns of Avalon, in which Corwin uses interdimensional hijinks to bring gunpowder weapons (from memory, assault rifles) into Amber to destroy his enemies by kitting out an army. That type of step-change is fine in a novel, but likely in a D&D campaign to just mess things up too much. 

*Yes, yes, okay, that was a Q episode, but you get my drift.

Intelligent Fighters, Charismatic Dwarfs, Strong Thieves, Oh My!

Sometimes, I like to post on this blog in a fashion that is more along the lines of thinking-out-loud than having a coherent message or purpose. This is one of those occasions. 

You may recall that long ago, when dinosaurs ruled the earth, The Simpsons was funny, and nobody had yet heard of Baby Shark, there was a thing called d20 Modern. It was not, I think, a great success - I played in a few games of it, but the marriage of D&D mechanics and modern/cyberpunk/superhero aesthetic didn't quite work. Hit points, which are ok in the context of a fantasy game, feel odd in a setting with guns, and I thought the way it handled wealth was plainly and simply loathsome badwrongfun. It certainly felt like a step backwards from, say, Cyberpunk 2020, which itself at that point was already very old and outmoded. 

But there was something that was interesting in the system, which was the idea of character class deriving directly from attributes. Those who played the game more extensively than me may remember this better, but the system was predicated on the existence not of fighters, thieves, or what have you, but Strong heroes, Intelligent heroes, Wise heroes, Charismatic heroes, and so on. The idea here I think was that it was less hide-bound. Instead of being tied to particular roles (a hit man, a scientist, a burglar, or whatever) you had freer rein: in a game set in the modern developed world, as an Intelligent hero you could be a scientist, or a computer programmer, or a businessperson, or even a hit-man for that matter depending on how you shaped the character; as a Tough hero you could be an MMA fighter, an endurance runner, or a scuba diver; etc. By defining roles very broadly, you gave the players room to get creative.

I am not sure if this would have any usefulness being directly translated into old school D&D. 'Fighter', 'Magic-User', 'Cleric', etc., are already loose enough concepts; D&D players have no problem with the idea that a 'Cleric' could look like a Knight Templar, Van Helsing, a Tengri shaman or a Zulu witch doctor and still be mechanically the same, or that a 'Fighter' could be a viking, samurai, conquistador or Sioux warrior or something else entirely. However, there is something interesting about making attributes more salient and more choice-bearing than simply being prime requisites that define what class you are.

Consider: imagine that instead of just picking a class (Fighter, Magic-User, Cleric, Dwarf, etc.) players also picked a prime requisite that had a mechanical consequence. So instead of just being a Fighter, you would be a Strong Fighter, an Intelligent Fighter, a Quick Fighter, and so on; instead of just being a Dwarf, you would be a Charismatic Dwarf, a Wise Dwarf, a Tough Dwarf; instead of just being a Magic-User you would be a Quick one or a Tough one; you get the drift. 

This would have an aesthetic impact, obviously, and would help add flavour to a character, even setting aside mechanical considerations. What does a Quick Dwarf look like? What about a Wise Fighter, or a Tough Elf? But the option to assign a highest score to a suboptimal attribute exists already, and most players already tend to visualise their PCs in accordance with whatever their stats are. The question is whether it coul be made to have an impact on the actual game itself without doing too much violence to the way old school D&D is played. 

One way of doing this might just be to free up prime requisites and separate them from class, so that any class could be given any prime requisite. Consider: you roll up a character, Simon the Sorcerer, and you parcel out his attributes as follows:

STR 9, INT 13, WIS 8, DEX 11, CHA 6, CON 16

You want him to be a Magic-User, but his highest stat is CON, so you make him a Tough Magic-User with CON as his prime requisite. Because his prime requisite is 16, he gets the 5% XP bonus (or whatever it is for the ruleset you are using). He also gets the relevant bonus to his hit points each time he levels up. Now, would this affect how he is played? Would you, consciously or subconsciously, steer him towards situations in which having a higher CON mattered? At the margins, it might make you less risk-averse than you would be playing a 'regular' Magic-User?

Consider: you roll up a different character. Pippy Longstockings, and you parcel out her attributes as:

STR 10, INT 9, WIS 17, DEX 12, CHA 10, CON 7

You decide she is going to be a Wise Thief. She, again, gets the XP bonus from a high attribute, and also perhaps magical resistance and better saving throws depending on the ruleset. Whether this would affect how she is played I am not sure - it probably would change how you would evisage her during play, which may itself have a certain impact on things. 

I'm not sure whether this tweak would make a huge amount of difference to the price of tea in China. You may have your own views. But it certainly would at least add some variety. I did warn you I was thinking out loud. What did you want, coherence?