The River and the River

Near the Amazonian city of Manaus there is a place where the Amazon proper (the upper section of which in Brazil is called the Rio Solimões) meets the Rio Negro, which flows in to meet it from Colombia. The Amazon is cooler, faster, and carries sediment from the Andes; the Rio Negro is slower, warmer, and full of decaying plant life. For a period the two run alongside each other in contrast, until they gradually integrate:

This is one of those places in the world which screams 'Make me into a setting for an RPG, you fool! Do it at once!', and the setting indeed almost writes itself. Clearly, the two rivers bring with them two very different sets of fantasy furniture, and where they meet there is a great city which incorporates both. Perhaps, indeed, that city is even a kind of neutral zone where two otherwise hostile ways of life can live alongside one another in something approaching harmony. And naturally, there's a megadungeon underneath.

The Dark River is organic, magical, sensual, amoral, ritual-based, and fecund. But it also partly originates in, and incorporates, death and decay; many of its inhabitants are undead. It is powerful in the sense in which a jungle is full of green vibrancy and dangerous life. 

The Light River is inorganic, holy, rational, moralistic, honour-based, and productive. It ultimately comes from the mountains; it is imbued with elemental energy. It is rich in the sense that mountains bring forth the wealth that is buried beneath the earth. 

It is too easy to say that the Dark River is feminine and the Light River masculine, or that the Dark River is yin and the Light River is yang, or that the Dark River is right-hemisphere and the Light River is left-hemisphere. But it is hard to get away entirely from those binaries and they exist for a reason and are enjoyable to problematise and poke and prod at. I would want the setting to hint at and echo them without trading on the distinction too obviously. The contrast between jungle energy and mountain energy seems more 'right' to me somehow. 

The peoples who dwell along the two rivers are mutually antagonistic for all manner of reasons, but the city imposes order on them. It is a city which I think ought indeed to be ruled by a race of giant warrior-women, the Amazons of legend, who forge the two river-worlds into an uneasy but cohesive polity. Presuambly, that city is situated on a river island around which they both flow. Maybe it is even situated on a river island that lies in the middle of a delta: maybe these two rivers come together only at the very point at which they meet the ocean:

What lies beneath? What do PCs who come to the River and the River explore? The science fantasy impulse suggests that buried beneath the island is an alien space vessel; the straight fantasy impulse suggests the ruins of a lost civilization; the horror impulse suggests the corpse of a dead river god, filled with demonic entities. The PCs venture down to bring forth what treasures lie buried there.

These are the thoughts which occur to me sitting in my office idling away when I ought to be working. What are yours? 

Why Build Worlds?

 

The creation of a world - mapping it, populating it, chronicling its history - is in itself a hobby. I suspect for a lot of DMs it is indeed actually the main purpose of RPGs. The game is really just an excuse to indulge in Tolkienian sub-creation. 

There is nothing wrong with this: I consider it to be my hobby too. But I would like to use this post as an opportunity to probe into where its pleasure comes from.

The first is generic to all hobbies: when engaged in some aspect of world-creation it is easy to get caught up in the activity and enter a flow-state which is in itself pleasurable. This is something akin to what lay people sometimes refer to as 'mindulfness', but it is really the absolute opposite of that. It is a state of being in which one truly presences, reflecting neither on one's physical self nor on one's thoughts, but simply being in the activity itself. One is allowing oneself to be carried along by the act of doing, as  though on a river. This is enjoyable for its own sake. It is a retreat from intrusive thoughts and quotidian activities, to be sure, but it is not merely escapist. There is a kind of happiness (dare I even say 'joy'?) in the feeling that one's conscious, subconscious, and physical self are all bent towards the same goal.

The second is that it is escapist, and there is nothing wrong with that. Life can be solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short even when not in Hobbes' state of nature (Spinoza once said that we never leave the state of nature, anyway). And we therefore take what pleasures we can find. Drawing maps and thinking about elves is a lot more wholesome and worthwhile than watching TV, if retreat from the sheer banal horror of your humdrum existence is all that you are searching for. It is an opportunity to create something which, even if nobody else even looks at it or knows of its existence, can be pleasing to your eye, your mind, your soul. So why-ever not? 

The third is that it is a small act of rebellion against the inescapable and terrifying fact that there is only one world that you will ever live in. It is grotesquely unfair that, with an entire universe on our doorsteps, the best that any person can ever do is explore a small part of the surface area of one single planet. It is even more grotesquely unfair that there are many more universes that can be imagined and we will never be able to explore any of those. This - the fact that we are able to imagine places we can never go - is a monstrous constraint and one about which we should be outraged. Channel that rage into something useful: get as close as you can to possessing all of reality and all other realities as your oyster by, God-like, detailing your imagined corner of creation. 

The fourth is that it is also a small act of rebellion against the banality of small-mindedness. There are lots of people out there who not only want to stay swimming in their own tiny intellectual fishbowls and never go out into the ocean of the mind, but want everybody else to be the same way too. Well, remember Cinderalla's admonition - they can order you to do all kinds of things, but they can't order you to stop dreaming. 

And the fifth, related pleasure is that it is so liberating. Debbie Harry sang 'Dreaming is free'. I have always loved that line. Dreaming costs nothing. But it also frees us: in the world of dreams there are no constraints. It doesn't matter how poor you are, how crappy your home life is, how lonely you feel, how bored you are. You can get a piece of paper and a pencil and, within your relationship to those obejcts, make yourself free. 

The world needs a bit of subcreation here and there. So what, really, is stopping you?

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Setting I Created

 

When my first child was born, I had already been working on something called Behind Gently Smiling Jaws for a year. The first post I made about it can be found here.

That was more than ten years ago. The idea has never gone away and I have never stopped working on it. It is just that 'working' is being used here in a particular sense: I have not been working on it so much as working it over. It has been like a big lump of dough in my mind that I have been mentally pounding with my fists, or a big lump of chewing gum I have been slowly chewing into flavourlessness, or the hide of a beast I have been turning into leather; I have been worrying at it and squeezing it and tugging it and twisting it and gradually shaping it into something that is comprehensible and usable. 

That process is at an end and I can now earnestly say that I have worked it up something that may eventually be the framework within which a book can be written. As Woody Allen might have said, 'Right now it's only a notion, but I think I can get the money to make it into a concept, and later turn it into an idea.'

The problem that has posed the most difficulty is that the idea is complicated. I have not wanted to sacrifice that complicatedness, as it is important to me: it all makes sense to me. But it has made it a challenge to make it presentable. I now know how to do that. 

The principle is straightforward. An ancient, and immortal, crocodile, born at the dawn of time, created a memory palace within which to store everything it had witnessed in its long existence, and went into dormancy in a lake in what we call Papua New Guinea.

The Naacals, the ancient inhabitants of the continent of Mu, ancestors of the ancient Egyptians, Mayans and Harappans, found the crocodile, and discovered a way to live inside its memory palace. Aware that a cataclysmic event was in the offing (the sinking of Mu and the ruin of their civilisation) a number of them went to live in the memory palace permanently. 

Some Naacals remained on Earth and retreated into hermitude or stasis underground before the cataclysm. Others remained, and after Mu sank (roughly 10,000 BC) became debased, going on to fragment and form what became the Egyptian, Mayan, and Harappan civilisations. 

Meanwhile, those within the crocodile's mind founded a great city, called the Unremembered City, where they all lived among the crocodile's many memories. 

So things would have remained, but over the course of the centuries seven human beings (known ever since as 'the Seven') found their way too to the crocodile's memory palace, and merged with its consciousness, bringing with them their own memories, myths, and ideas. These were:

• Ebu Gogo, a homo floriensis woman from a remote Indonesian island where a remnant population survived until shortly before the time of Christ
• Xu Fu, a Chinese explorer who went in search of Mount Penglai
• Anak Wungsu, a Balinese trader-king
• Abu Yaqub Al-Sijistani, a neo-Platonic philosopher
• Jorge de Meneses, a Portugese conquistador
• Pape Jan, Ethiopian king who inspired the legend of Prester John
• Sese-Mahuru-Bau, a Papuan hunter who went in search of a lost lover

With Sese-Mahuru-Bau's coming, however, the crocodile's memory palace became too full, and it erupted - everything in it spilled out into the real world, in what we know of as the late 18th century. This brought 'ordinary' human history to an end, and the Crocodilian Era began.

The Crocodilian Era began with the complete shattering and destruction of pre-existing human civilisation. The Crocodile's memories included the dinosaurs, the other beasts of the prehistoric era, a race of aliens who had once lived on Earth, the ancient Atlanteans, and so on, and the Seven brought with them their own myths (Xu Fu brought Chinese dragons and ghosts; Anak Wungsu brought Garuda and the like, Jorge de Meneses brought Goetic demons, and so on and so forth) and the result was chaos. The human population of the Earth collapsed to a few thousand individuals. 

But, fast forward 10,000 years, and things look very different. 

The Naacals who lived in the crocodile's mind, called the Young Naacals, mostly live in the Unremembered City - a flying island-city, like Laputa, which floats about in the sky. The Young Naacals keep themselves to themselves for the most part.

The Naacals who remained hidded on Earth after Mu sank are called the Old Naacals. They live as hermits, scholars, and wanderers - dangerous and mad, for the most part.

The ordinary human population rebounded, over the centuries, and found ways to survive and even flourish amidst the wondrous beasts and strange creatures now populating the planet. 

And the Seven became Gods. Each made a home for him/herself in a certain spot on the globe, and created a realm to rule. These can be seen on the map, above:

1. The Kerguelen islands are ruled by Abu Yaqub Al-Sijistani, who has turned it into a single, vast university
2. Lake Issyk-Kul is the home of Pape Jan - a fortified inland sea from which he governs a slowly-expanding crusader empire
3. The mouth of the Congo river, where Jorge de Meneses has a pirate city whose ships go in search of plunder across the globe
4. Sardinia, where Anak Wungsu rules over a trading thalassacracy spanning the Mediterranean
5. Benbecula, in the Western Isles, home to Sese-Mahuru-Bau, who has turned all of the surrounding islands into a huge hunting reserve
6. What was once Sao Luis, in Brazil, ruled by Xu Fu - where there is now a sort of equatorial-cum-Chinese Mount Olympus, ruled by him as a sorcerer-king
7. The island of Chiloe, where Ebu Gogo births the bizarre spawn of humans and the amphibious beasts of the Carbinoferous world

In between all this are all manner of different civilisations and wildernesses - the Earth geographically is as it was, but it is an Earth roamed by dinosaurs, aliens, Atlanteans, and the like, mixed in with the human inhabitants and Old Naacals. And of course the agents of the Seven, who are all rivals, are everywhere, working to undermine each other and subvert each other's designs. It's a scene, in other words. And it can all be yours... when the book is written.

The Great North Title Opinion Forming Braintrust Assemble

Regular readers will know that I have a project, long in the pipeline, titled The Great North, that is now more or less complete and ready to be Kickstarted. Here is the cover:

And here is the intro text:

Once, there was an Emperor, who had already made half of the known world his own, yet grasped endlessly for the rest. At the zenith of his strength, when he was perhaps already sensing its impending failure, he reached out, straining in defiance of age and time, to clutch once more at conquests. The touch of his fingertips in one of those final desperate grabbings brushed against the shores of a distant, wild land of heather-moored hills and deep narrow valleys, wind-seared beaches and damp-cold forests, where magic was strong and there were powers that were old, and strange, and rooted in the ancient earth and rock on which they stood. The Emperor ruled parts of that land, here and there, but he could never fully tame it, and as he grew old and feeble and his Empire shrivelled back upon itself, it was the first of his provinces that he abandoned to its fate. 

The Great North has since lain free for long eons. None rule it. It was wild once, and so it remains. A frontier land where the tide of civilisation once washed before retreating, leaving fragments of flotsam behind it to lie where they may be found. A cold land. A fierce land. A debatable land. And a land of opportunity for those willing to grasp for it, much as the Emperor once tried in the faded past.

I am now going through the process of setting up the Kickstarter page for this. However, I have had a sudden stab of anxiety: having Googled it, there is already something called 'The Great North' in existence - an animated comedy to do with people in Alaska.

Tell me, oh great, esteemed and wise readers: will this be an issue? Is it sensible to do a last-minute name change? Should I just keep it? I AM INCAPABLE OF MAKING DECISIONS FOR MYSELF.

The Succinct History of the Crocodilian Apocalypse

 

250 million BC (approx) - The crocodile is born

131,000 BC (approx) - The crocodile begins creation of its memory palace

130,000 BC (approx) - The crocodile completes its memory palace and enters its final slumber

100,000 BC (approx) - The Naacal civilization arises on the continent of Mu

51, 547 BC - The crocodile is discovered by the Naacals; its memory palace is first entered 

49, 211 BC - The thesis becomes accepted that cataclysmic volcanic activity will cause the continent of Mu to sink by 49, 101 BC; preparations begin, with some groups settling other land masses, and others entering the memory palace 

49,101 BC - Mu begins to sink beneath the ocean and the Naacal Dark Age begins

49,100 BC - The Naacals in the memory palace begin construction of the Unremembered City

49,100 BC (approx) - The Naacal Dark Age commences in the world; survivors of the cataclysm begin to form polities in isolation from each other in what will become Mexico, Egypt, and India

12, 000 BC (approx) - Ebu Gogo, first of the Seven, enters the memory palace

210 BC - Xu Fu, second of the Seven, enters the memory palace

971 AD - Abu Yaqub Al-Sijistani, third of the Seven, enters the memory palace

1049 AD - Anak Wungsu, fourth of the Seven, enters the memory palace

1175 AD - Pape Jan, fifth of the Seven, enters the memory palace

1537 AD - Jorge de Meneses, sixth of the Seven, enters the memory palace

1687 AD - Sese-Mahuru-Bau, last of the Seven, enters the memory palace

1793 AD - The first figments begin to appear in the world; the Crocodilian Apocalypse begins

1796 AD - The Unremembered City emerges from the memory palace into the world; the Naacal Dark Ages come to an end

10,000 AD (approx) - The timeline of Behind Gently Smiling Jaws begins