The Myth of Intrusive Worldbuilding

The view is sometimes expressed that, when a DM puts too much time and effort into creating his campaign setting, there is a danger that it will "not make for a good game" because there will be too much detail, too much change of the players doing something wrong and out of keeping with the flavour of the world, the DM will be too persnickety about how things work in his precious snowflake setting, etc.

I think this is largely a myth, provided of course that we caveat this with the proviso that you have to assume good faith on the part of the DM; he's not a dickhead. In fact, I think deep worldbuilding is often what elevates a game to the next level of interest, because it gives the players a feeling that their actions are taking place in a wider and bigger context - they can ask the DM questions about the wider world and their own place within it, and receive coherent responses. And they can feel and experience a sense of history, making the setting feel realer, more "lived in".

You only need to read The Lord of the Rings to see how that works. Tolkien doesn't beat the reader over the head with the history of Middle Earth. He's not pedantic - there are no lectures. Instead, as you read the plot hooks you in, and you come across little snippets of information (Aragorn's song about Beren and Luthien, the journey through the ancient realm of Hollin, the barrow wights and their rumours of ancient kingdoms, and so on) which give you a sense of something profoundly ancient and real - it makes you feel as if Middle Earth, and most importantly the characters, are something more than just a figment of the author's imagination. That this feeling is entirely illusory, and that you are aware of that fact, does not make it any less important.

On Shadowrun

It's often said that good science fiction is about taking an idea that is initially preposterous and playing it straight. For this reason Shadowrun should really work. The idea is as preposterous as you can get and therefore, you would assume, has the potential to be genuinely interesting if taken seriously. (I don't mean being played seriously in-game; I just mean the actual setting itself.)

Unfortunately it always came across to me as being cartoonish and frivolous, as if the designers knew, in their hearts of hearts, that what they were coming up with was really rather silly indeed - or else a rather cynical attempt to gain popularity through combining two contemporaneous fads (epic fantasy and cyberpunk). Then again, my perception of the game may have been skewed by the gaming group I was in when I was 15 and Shadowrun was at the height of its popularity - the main raison d'etre for the group was actually smoking weed, if anything, which as well as robbing you of your ambition does not generally make for good gaming. (Don't do drugs, kids.)

I think the most interesting take on Shadowrun would be to make it more fairy-tale and supernatural. It's the future, we all have BlackBerrys in our heads and submachineguns which fire cyanide-tipped bullets and the Chinese and Brazilians have taken over the world, and yet at the same time...there are fucking elves around. And not your D&D "Legolas from the LOTR films" elves - your actual sidhe of myth and legend, who steal babies in the night and replace them with changelings, who trick you of your money and sanity just for laughs, or spirit you away for what seems like hours but actually turns out to be years. Or redcaps who lurk in dark alleys waiting to let your blood so they can dye their hats. Or Gibson-esque Voodou Loa who gain actual spiritual form from the worship of their immigrant followers. Or Wiccan gangsters who use magick.

The key to all this would be the interplay between the fairy and the technological, and the failure of high-tech to deal with the fact that there are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy. You know like how, in a cyberpunk game, the black ops wing of a sinister corporation could hack into your personal emails to find out your movements, or wait for you to come online and then fry your brain with hunter-killer software? Well, what would they do if you never came online because you use magick to communicate with your cronies? Wouldn't that sinister corporation want magick users itself?

Played straight, it works, see?

In Which I Am A Hypocrite

Patrick, one of the players in my regular group, has posted an AP of sorts for the session we had on Tuesday. We decided to create a shared world with Microscope, in which we plan to share a rotating GMship and run different campaigns in different genres.

I think we all started off with good intentions to create a darkish, hard SF setting, but things got weird, silly and fucked up very quickly - it progressed from a reasonable beginning to a sprawling melange involving, amongst other things, war meetings between the President of Humanity and his Chief Warlock, "ontological warheads", and a not-Tyranid race called the HMBTs (Hideous Murdering Bug Things). It ended up with a genetically engineered Velociraptor called Spielberg tending a sculpture garden in which a murder was taking place, on a space station in the Oort Cloud with a pseudo-Byzantine culture featuring an AI who was basically a futuristic version of OK Cupid. (And this after I'd claimed hypocritically to prefer my settings to be not-so-gonzo literally the day before.)

You can read all about it here, if you're odd enough to be interested.

Authenticity and Gamability and Gonzo, Oh My!

In the comments to yesterday's post, richard asks:

I find my tastes changing over time - I used to want authentick flavours, it didn't matter of what, really, but I wanted my Japan to be "really Japanese" and my medieval Europe to be "really medieval." Nowadays I've slid some distance from that position toward Xena - I want gonzo mashup more and find authentick a bit of a bore. Where do you find yourself on that scale?

The answer is: it depends. Slightly more detailed: I'm somewhere in the middle. Slightly more detailed yet: I can find virtues at various points of the spectrum, although too much gonzo makes me want to run for the hills.

I used to be more serious about setting. I actually put this down to lack of face-to-face game time. I'm not sure if this observation holds for everybody, but I think obsession with setting design is a kind of warped outgrowth from the mind of DMs who don't get the chance to actually play much. It was certainly true for me: I wasn't doing any face-to-face gaming (just lacklustre PBEMing and PBPing, which is generally quite lacklustre) and yet I wanted to - and I still enjoyed thinking about campaign worlds, drawing maps, creating bestiaries and NPCs, imagining trade routes and where resources would be found, dreaming up languages, and so on.

This also caused me to spend a lot of time and energy pursuing "authenticity"; the more time you have to think, the more you do think. I often thought about how to create a "really Japanese" game, for instance, given my experience living in the country and my interest in its history, and my utter loathing and disdain for the way in which RPG geeks approach the subject (which is either "samurai and ninja, cool!" or "anime, cool!"; there is not enough space in my head for my eyes to roll sufficiently far back to communicate how much I despise both Western anime fandom and samurai-wankery). 

Now I'm gaming quite a lot, and I'm also really busy, so my thinking time has been drastically reduced. This has both removed the urge to pursue authenticity, and also the opportunity. So while my setting design does not lean so far to the gonzo, it certainly doesn't involve chasing after the pipe dream of realism either. My main priorities are, simply, "What will I actually use?" and "What will be good for the game?"

But that said, too much gonzo doesn't really do it for me either. At a certain stage, it all feels like trying too hard to be irreverant. This leads us back to a post about humour that I wrote a few weeks ago. There's a strand of geekdom that repels me really quite strongly, and which others seem to find unaccountably attractive; it is the kind of straining towards "gonzo" that leads to inquisitors in Warhammer 40,000 with names like "Obiwan Sherlock Clousseau" and religions surrounding vast floating puddings or called "The Church of the Lucid Shirt Button". That kind of thing is so unfunny and uninteresting to me that I can't put it into words: it makes me want to bite my own fist for want of punching it through the face of anybody who would suggest otherwise. If that's what "gonzo mashup" means then no, thankyou, you may keep it, and also please fuck off and die.

If, on the other hand, "gonzo mashup" stretches to "this is a pseudo-oriental setting so I am going to borrow heavily from Japanese, Chinese, Thai, Mongolian and whatever other mythology because hey, life's too short and really, who cares?", then I am all for it.

Pseudo-Orientalism Grab-Bag

One of my absolute favourite setting ideas in the OSR blogosphere is one that (to me) got surprisingly little mention on the other blogs - Mu-Pan, from the Land of NOD. This is a pseudo-oriental setting of the absolute highest quality, far better in my view that anything TSR came up with. Take for example this:

6038. Umborodom’s Abbey: There is an ancient fortress-monastery constructed here of red bricks and tall, peaked roofs of copper. The roof is covered with hundreds of tall, copper spires that attract lightning. The monastery is dedicated to Umborodom, whose hound was the thunder. The monastery is inhabited by 16 low-level sohei and their abbess, Deneg, a temperamental woman with blue-gray eyes and a powerful hatred of the Jade Empress, who quells her lovely storms and keeps her “hounds” hungry.

The “hounds” are three lightning elementals that dwell within a golden matrix that serves as the monastery’s idol. The monastery is surrounded by a village of red brick buildings inhabited by about 150 tin miners. The mines are of ancient vintage, but still producing tin and a few tourmalines and topaz each month. Tourmalines are claimed by the sohei and topaz by the empress.

The sohei of the monastery wear blue armor and carry large, steel-shod mallets.

This:

5140. Fey Samurai: A fairy knight in the trappings of a samurai has made camp here. He has been wandering the land searching for an honest man, for it is the kiss of an honest man that will awaken the Silver Maiden who sleeps beneath the mountains.

And this:

4921. Forest of Legs: The forest of trees in this hex gradually turns into a forest of giant, stone legs. The legs are limestone and carved from the “living rock” as some people say. They once held aloft a create limestone cavern that was apparently pulled apart in ancient times. The woodland of stone legs is inhabited by giant blue eagles and silver foxes, and a few of the legs serve as the roosts of hermits, devout wushen who seek enlightenment through the denial of comforts like regular meals and bathing.

It's to die for if pseudo-orientalism is your thing - which it is mine.

It's reminiscent to me of an old favourite of mine: Sword of the Samurai. This was a fantasy gamebook set in "Hachiman", the quasi-Japan of the Fighting Fantasy world - another setting which, like Matt's Mu-Pan, captures the atmosphere of a fae-tinged, delicate, misty, melancholic Eastern "other". Edward Said would not approve, but who gives a fuck what that old bore thinks?

Finally, to round off this rather incoherent and unstructured ramble of a blog entry, I would like to direct new readers to one of my all time favourite pieces of pseudo-orientalism: Borges' The Analytical Language of John Wilkins, in which he fabricates an ancient Chinese encyclopedia which categorises all the animals in the world into:

1. those that belong to the Emperor
2. the embalmed
3. the trained
4. piglets
5. sirens
6. the fabulous
7. stray dogs
8. those included in this classification
9. those that tremble as if they were mad
10. innumerables
11. those that are drawn with a very fine camelhair brush
12. et cetera
13. those that have just broken a flower vase
14. those that from a distance look like flies

If you don't find yourself wishing that this encyclopedia really existed, I don't know what's wrong with you.

Sabaw

So yesterday I generated some random races on which to hang a campaign setting. They were the Jackalwere, beaver, sirine, ankheg, wererat, and satyr. Here goes:

Jackalwere and Wererats
These are the females and males of the same race. Their society is matriarchal and dominated by the Jackalwere, who select mates from the wererat populace. In order to breed, both must assume human form, though generally they appear as hybrids. They live in cities of pyramids, surrounded by moats. The Jackalwere inhabit the pyramids and the wererats live in the subterranean moats around them.

Sirine and Satyrs
The sirine inhabit reefs and kelp forests in off shore shallows, and like the Jackalwere and Wererats form a symbiotic relationship with coastal communities of satyrs, who provide them with "companionship" and breeding. Neither sirine nor satyr forms organised societies, preferring to live in relative anarchy.

Ankheg
Intelligent Ankhegs live in huge underground kingdoms deep underneath the thickest forests. They war constantly with all other beings, seeing them merely as food, and they cannot be communicated with - their language is composed entirely of posture and the release of hormones, which other races cannot emulate. Their culture and society is largely unknown.

Beaver
Intelligent beavers inhabit lakes and rivers, creating huge riparian dam-cities. Surrounding these cities they tend huge areas of cultivated forest, so as to provide them with endless supplies of wood. This brings them into constant conflict with Ankheg interlopers who seek the loamy soil of these beaver-made forests.

I call this campaign setting "Symbiants and Also Beavers and Ankheg World". Or Sabaw for short.

Random Campaign Setting Major Races

Let's play a game. Take the 2nd edtion AD&D Monstrous Manual (or any bestiary of your choice), and randomly select 2d6 monsters from it using this.

For the Monstous Manual this is between 1 and 1,089 (the number of monsters in the book), or you could do it by page number if that's easier. 

If you get something unintelligent or of animal intelligence, imagine an intelligent version.

These selections are the dominant intelligent races of a campaign world. You now have to figure out how to build a setting around them.

I got 6:

Jackalwere, beaver, sirine, ankheg, wererat, satyr. I'll talk about a campaign world idea based on them tomorrow.

Utolso Varos, the Last City

If I were to run an Iron Heroes game for my next campaign, it would be set in Utolso Varos, the Last City. This, as the name suggests, is the last city on earth, and mankind has retreated to it as the world grows old and fades, and life for human beings becomes hostile.

Like Nessus or Viriconium, Utolso Varos is almost collapsing under the weight of its own history. It is many thousands of years old, and feels it - it is decadent, listless, and resigned, although it still possesses a faded and elegant sort of beauty. It is situated on an island in the middle of a great inland sea, and beyond that sea is the wild, dying earth, peopled by beings wondrous and alien, and scattered with the ruins and remnants of the civilizations of aeons past.

The earth has become so old that its very existence has become tattered and frayed. Time passes slowly, and the light of the sun has become flat and dull. Alien spirits and demonic things from other realities slip through the decaying fragmentary boundaries between their worlds and ours. Those who can practice magic hoard it, as if it might protect them from the inevitable end of all things. Gradually the human race dwindles, and history turns its face away.

And in this world we find the PCs: a bunch of guys with big swords raging against the dying of the light by killing things and taking their stuff.

The Magic Faraway Orient Express Sailing to Utopia

I've been doing some thinking recently about what game I'd like to run next, once All Zombies on the Eastern Front (which I expect to last five or six sessions) is done and dusted. What I have in mind is a campaign I call The Magic Faraway Orient Express Sailing to Utopia, which as the name suggests is a cross between The Magic Faraway Tree stories, tales featuring the Orient Express (like From Russia with Love and Murder on the Orient Express), and Michael Moorcock's Sailing to Utopia.

I have given this campaign the genre moniker "railroad which is literally on a train but with sandboxy knobs on". The core concept is as follows: the players are travellers on a stream train which is on a year-long journey between a great Bespin-like dystopic cloud city and a place known only as Utopia (left ill-defined; my idea is to let the players imagine what it's like for themselves). The train travels through the sky on an ancient railway, about whose builders legends abound but whose origins are essentially unknown. I imagine this being a little like the train in Spirited Away, which travels over the surface of the sea - except in the clouds. It stops every so often in a totally different reality a la The Magic Faraway Tree (although of course in this case the protagonists are arriving in new worlds, rather than having new worlds come to them) and in those different realities the players have to pursue some sort of task or other - I'm picturing something like a Holy Grail quest (they have to find a special magical artefact at each stop) or maybe an assassination.

Play would revolve as much around the other passengers as it would the "stops". I like the idea of the train being some sort of moving equivalent of Sigil or (spit) Babylon 5; a neutral zone in which violence is forbidden and everybody has to live in enforced harmony. This would make plenty of scope for cloak-and-dagger antics on board between the players and their enemies. I also like the idea of having a real-world time limit in each stop - maybe I'll buy a big egg timer that I'll turn over as the train arrives; when the sand runs out the train leaves, and if the players haven't made it back on board they're stuck...

History is indeed little more than the register of the crime, follies, and misfortune of mankind

The fate of these Japanese is a neglected chapter among the countless epic tragedies of World War Two.
- John Dower, from Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War Two

In the final weeks of World War II, the Soviet Union declared war on Japan and invaded Manchuria. The Japanese forces stationed there, mostly reserve units, were ill-equipped to fight against a Soviet behemoth honed by four years of war with the Nazis and possessing arguably the finest military hardware in the world. Within 11 days the Japanese Kwantung army had ceased to exist as a fighting force; 80,000 men had been killed and over 600,000 were taken prisoner. Along with civilians resident in Manchukuo who were also captured during the Soviet advance, the total Japanese captives amounted to 1.6 million people.

It is the fate of these 1.6 million people which Dower is referring to. By 1947 approximately 600,000 Japanese had been repatriated. More arrived illegally, smuggled from China in drips. But in 1949 there were still hundreds of thousands of people unaccounted for. From Embracing Defeat:

In the spring of 1949, after repeated prodding by occupation authorities, the USSR announced that only 95,000 prisoners remained, all of whom would be returned by the end of the year. According to Japanese and American calculations, the actual number should have been 400,000. Suddenly, more than 300,000 Japanese were unaccounted for...

...Over four decades later, the Soviet Union finally released the names of 46,000 Japanese known to be buried in Siberia. The overall numbers never jibed.

There has never been closure for the families of the approximately 250,000 people who are still missing. The issue has never been resolved, and the continuing poor relations betwen Japan and Russia (the two countries are still technically at war 65 years later) make it unlikely it will be for many years, if ever. Though this is only one of the countless crimes the Soviet Union committed, and ranks as one of the lesser of those in terms of numbers, and though the Japanese government of the pre-war era bears at least some of the responsibility for its soldiers being in China in the first place, it is impossible not to feel at least some sorrow for the victims and their families, who will never know what happened to their husband, father, uncle, brother, or friend.

In some respects it doesn't quite sit well to use this scenario as the basis for a campaign, but I can't help feeling that it would be a quite compelling concept - a small group of soldiers and/or civilians travelling across the vast expanse of Manchuria, heading in the direction they hope is home. Perfect for goal-oriented sandbox play in chaotic civil war China, where bandits, communists, mercenaries, deserters, and Soviet and Kuomintang military units are a constant threat, and the civil infrastructure has been degraded almost to nonexistence by decades of conflict and famine.

You would have to use something highly realistic to get the best out of it, I think - Twilight 2000 or GURPS, maybe. Then again the historically perverse aspect of my character wants to throw magical beings of Chinese myth into the mix too, awakened by all the blood and sorrow in the land...

Subway Station Campaign Settings

Faustusnotes may be utterly and obstinately wrong in every single opinion that he holds, and he may be a cry-me-a-river leftie of the most hideous kind, but he does make some interesting posts sometimes. (He's also managed to get into the Japanese gaming scene pretty well, which is something I never really did, although I mostly blame working weekends my entire working life for that.) Here's one, on using Osaka's subway station names as locations in a campaign world. I like this idea, although I don't like Osaka all that much as Japanese cities go (it has all the ugliness Tokyo has, but with almost none of the compensatory beauty that exists in Tokyo in pockets, although the people in Osaka are nice).

My stomping ground was always Yokohama, which in my opinion is the best city in the world in which to live. It's one of the few Japanese cities which has managed to reconcile itself with its post-1867 architectural heritage, so you get a feel for what the Japan of the 1920s and 30s would have looked like when you go there, and it has that friendly, relaxed, anything-can-happen sort of vibe that all proper big port cities have. It's also lacking in the sort of pretentious, arrogant wanker which really major world cities (Tokyo, Paris, New York, London) attract.

But the problem with Yokohama as a subway-station-name-setting is that it's a relatively new city, which has seen most of its growth very recently. This means its stations have the pretty banal, made-up sorts of names that most new, planned towns have. Sakuragicho (Cherry Tree Town), Bashamichi (Horse-drawn-cart Street), Chukagai (China Town), Fujigaoka (Wisteria Hill), Aobadai (Green Leaf Plaza)... these are not the stuff on which interesting campaign settings were built.

So there's little alternative than to look to Tokyo, which really hogs the limelight as far as interesting place names go (as in most other situations). Thus we have -

- Kasumigaseki, the "Misty Barrier"
- Toranomon, the "Tiger Gate"
- Karasuyama, the "Crow Mountain"
- Akasaka, the "Red Hill"
- Akihabara, the "Plain of Autumn Leaves"
- Sangenjaya, the "Three Tea Shops"
- Ochanomizu, "Tea Water"
- Kanda, "God Fields"
- Meguro, "Black Eye"
- Hiro-o, the "Wide Tail"

My favourite, obviously, is Yurakucho, literally "the town where there is enjoyment", which I think you'll agree is both intriguing and intruigingly vague.

Life Lessons from MAR Barker

I only briefly played in one Tekumel campaign. One thing I liked about it (and I'm talking the original Empire of the Petal Throne here) is that it assumed the player characters were foreign barbarians who knew next to nothing about the customs of the place they were going to be adventuring in. It was important for the DM to have read all the necessary fluff, but MAR Barker seemed to have learned at an early stage that a lot of players tend not to even give a millipede-sized shit about that sort of thing. (You can easily divide RPGers into two camps, I think - the ones who are into setting details and the ones who just want to kill orcs. These fairly accurately map to people who like to be the DM and people who want to play. As one of the former, I find the unwillingess to get into the details of a setting to be so odd as to verge on insanity. I suspect from the other side of the coin the reverse applies. But I digress.)

Tekumel teaches two valuable lessons. Namely, if you're creating a Setting Which Some People Might Think Is A Bit Weird, there always needs to be an option for people who want to be Bilbo the Hobbit or Legolas the Elf even if that doesn't fit the setting in the slightest, and there always needs to be a place where foreigners might "start off" and get eased into the setting while they find their feet.

(The third lesson is not to charge over 80 quid for a boxed set.)

The Duchy of Liverpool (I)

Following on from last night's post, I present the Duchy of Liverpool, a campaign location for Pendragon/Changeling. Today is the overview. Tomorrow I'll write up adventure locations, and the day after I'll produce a list of seeds of conflict.

The map above details the lands of Donnchad mac Briain, Duke of Liverpool and Earl of Lime Street, and those who owe him (and the hose of mac Briain) fealty - the Barons of Waterloo & Litherland, West Derby, Knotty Ash, Wavertree and Mossley Hill, and the Earls of Docklands and Bootle.

Also on this map is shown the independent County of Knowsley, and the Cantref of North Wirral, which is ruled by Lord Llywelyn ap Owain, mac Briain's great rival and oft-warred against foe.

Most of the nobility and knights and ladies in the area are of course Sidhe. Those in Liverpool trace their heritage to Irish Sidhe, while those on the Wirral side are of Brythonic origin. The exception is the Earl of Docklands, Ezekiel Blythe, a troll who was knighted and later granted the Docklands title by the King of Dublin.

All of the kiths are represented in the area, though nockers and eshu are particularly common thanks to the maritime flavour of the city. Redcaps and satyrs are everywhere in the streets around Concert Square, and in the sewers and old railway tunnels lurk Sluagh and much, much worse.

The Solar System

[Had a busy couple of weeks socially, academically and business-ily. (Can't think of an appropriate adverb to do with business for that sentence.) Will be back to daily updates from now on.]

From Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything:

Now, the first thing you are likely to realise is that space is extremely well named and rather dismayingly uneventful. Our solar system may be the liveliest thing for trillions of miles, but all the visible stuff in it - the Sun, the planets and their moons, the billion or so tumbling rocks of the asteroid belt, comets and other miscellaneos drifting detritus - fills less than a trillionth of the available space. You also quickly realise that none of the maps you have ever seen of the solar system was drawn remotely to scale. Most schoolroom charts show the planets coming one after the other at neighbourly intervals - the outer giants actually cast shadows over each other in many illustrations - but this is a necessary deceit to get them all on the same bit of paper. Neptune in reality isn't just a little bit beyond Jupiter, it's way beyond Jupiter - five times further than Jupiter is from us, so far out that it receives only 3 per cent as much sunlight as Jupiter.

Such are the distances, in fact, that it isn't possible, in any practical terms, to draw the solar system to scale. Even if you added lots of fold-out pages to your textbooks or used a really long sheet of poster paper, you wouldn't come close. On a diagram of the solar system to scale, with the Earth reduced to about the diameter of a pea, Jupiter would be over 300 metres away and Pluto would be about two and a half kilometres distant (and about the size of a bacterium, so you wouldn't be able to see it anyway). On the same scale, Proxima Centauri, our nearest star, would be 16,000 kilometres away. Even if you shrank down everything so that Jupiter was as small as the full stop at the end of this sentence, and Pluto was no bigger than a molecule, Pluto would still be over 10 metres away.

In light of that, and the fact that the solar system contains 8 planets, 5 dwarf planets, 335 moons and millions of asteroids, minor planets, comets, trojans, centaurs and the like, you really have to wonder why science fiction has obsessed for so long about interstellar and intergalactic empires. Isn't the solar system big enough?

One day I'd like to see a science fiction setting in which humans have colonised the solar system, but nowhere outside it - perhaps because travelling at the speed of light, or faster, simply hasn't been invented. This would be a fractured, multiethnic star system, where travel between planetary bodies takes weeks, months or years and communication is carried out by radio, and where military conflict is a projection of warfare on planet earth. In other words, a little like the era of European colonial expansion around the mid-18th century, except probably more likely dominated by countries such as China, India and Brazil.

Perhaps this setting already exists, and I just don't know about it. If so, its creators just haven't done a good enough job of getting it out there, dammit.

I talk to planets baby

I've been on a real Spelljammer kick recently ever since reading this entry. Spelljammer is one of those things that you tend to forget about for long stretches of your life, but comes back with a vengeance when you least expect it. Like a girl you went out with in school and who you always bump into when you go back to your home town. You don't often mention her and you can go for years without even thinking about her. Then there she is on the dance floor, bam. And you want to play with her.

Ahem. Anyway, yeah, Spelljammer.

There are three things that I find interesting about Spelljammer.

The Grand List of Things That Are Interesting about Spelljammer

1. It taps into that very compelling subgenre of fantasy that is sometimes called "Sword and Planet" ("Science fantasy" is both boring and inaccurate), and which swirls, vortex-like, around a certain Michael Moorcock. We all know about the connections between Hawkwind (the ur space rockers) and that author, but it goes much deeper than that - just about every Eternal Champion incarnation has some sort of space-going element to it. And since the Eternal Champion is just about the most interesting fantasy series ever written (if not the best, always the most interesting) that makes Spelljammer interesting too - brilliance through association. That's not even to mention Edgar Rice Burroughs.
2. Don't even get me started on the picaresque. The thesis that D&D is a picaresque seems compelling to me and you don't get a better setting for that than riding through the phlogiston on a star sailing ship, landing on random planets and meeting space orcs. You just don't.
3. There are not one, not two, but three subgenres of Spelljammer game which you can explore. (There are more than that actually, but let's look at the main three.

• Horror Spelljammer. In space no one can hear you scream. In the phlogiston, people might hear you scream as the pack of githyanki pirates begin to eviscerate you with astral cleavers, but seeing as those people are likely to be illithids and neogi, you can forget being home in time for dinner. Spelljammer has a potential like no other setting (except Planescape, natch) for existential terror: in the big bad prime material plane there is only murder and pain.
  
• Traveller Spelljammer. Roll up a sector of crystal spheres on a hex map and go off a-trading with the Zhodani scro in a combination of (arguably) the two greatest role playing games of all time. Just be careful of those space elves waiting in that asteroid belt.
• Trad Spelljammer. The background music is Hawkwind, The Mars Volta, Pink Floyd, Monster Magnet, Klaatu, Ziggy Stardust, and weird Daft-Punk-esque French synth pop; the flavour art is stills from Ulysses 31 and Thundercats, the illithids are dressed like Marc Bolan. It's so naff that it has gone beyond naff into cool again. It's Spelljammer how God intended it, and it is really, really great.

When people talk about imaginative 2nd edition era settings they tend to bring up Dark Sun and Planescape the most, but if you ask me Spelljammer gives them both a serious run for their money. Buy it, play it, love it.

Avarice is the Necessary Consequence of Old Age

Japan has a new government, a huge typhoon is on the way; chaos and madness are upon us. But never fear, here I am again, ready to ramble on and on about stuff tangentially related to role playing games. Today, Gulliver's Travels.

Gulliver's Travels is political/societal satire, this we know, but I'm sure you'll agree it's just as interesting and entertaining to envisage it as straight fantasy. One of my favourite episodes from the book is Gulliver's sinister encounter with the Struldbrugs, which is available online here. A Struldbrug is a rare citizen of Luggnagg who was born with eternal life, but not eternal youth, and is thus condemned to old age unto infinity:

[T]hey commonly acted like mortals till about thirty years old; after which, by degrees, they grew melancholy and dejected, increasing in both till they came to fourscore [...] When they came to fourscore years, which is reckoned the extremity of living in this country, they had not only all the follies and infirmities of other old men, but many more which arose from the dreadful prospect of never dying. They were not only opinionative, peevish, covetous, morose, vain, talkative, but incapable of friendship, and dead to all natural affection, which never descended below their grandchildren. Envy and impotent desires are their prevailing passions.

But those objects against which their envy seems principally directed, are the vices of the younger sort and the deaths of the old. By reflecting on the former, they find themselves cut off from all possibility of pleasure; and whenever they see a funeral, they lament and repine that others have gone to a harbour of rest to which they themselves never can hope to arrive. They have no remembrance of anything but what they learned and observed in their youth and middle-age, and even that is very imperfect; and for the truth or particulars of any fact, it is safer to depend on common tradition, than upon their best recollections. The least miserable among them appear to be those who turn to dotage, and entirely lose their memories; these meet with more pity and assistance, because they want many bad qualities which abound in others.

[...]

As soon as they have completed the term of eighty years, they are looked on as dead in law; their heirs immediately succeed to their estates; only a small pittance is reserved for their support; and the poor ones are maintained at the public charge. After that period, they are held incapable of any employment of trust or profit; they cannot purchase lands, or take leases; neither are they allowed to be witnesses in any cause, either civil or criminal, not even for the decision of meers and bounds.

At ninety, they lose their teeth and hair; they have at that age no distinction of taste, but eat and drink whatever they can get, without relish or appetite. The diseases they were subject to still continue, without increasing or diminishing. In talking, they forget the common appellation of things, and the names of persons, even of those who are their nearest friends and relations. For the same reason, they never can amuse themselves with reading, because their memory will not serve to carry them from the beginning of a sentence to the end; and by this defect, they are deprived of the only entertainment whereof they might otherwise be capable.

The most compelling and interesting of Gulliver's comments comes at the end of the chapter:

I could not but agree, that the laws of this kingdom relative to the STRULDBRUGS were founded upon the strongest reasons, and such as any other country would be under the necessity of enacting, in the like circumstances. Otherwise, as avarice is the necessary consequence of old age, those immortals would in time become proprietors of the whole nation, and engross the civil power, which, for want of abilities to manage, must end in the ruin of the public.

It makes me want to imagine a society in which Struldbrugs or those like them are indeed the rulers; without the laws which legally declare them to be dead at 80, they have gradually accrued the wealth of the entire nation and now use it only to dispose of their envious, avaricious and senile whims. You'd obviously have to tone down the effects of their malaise a little (for example, their short and long term memory loss) to make it at least vaguely believable that the Struldbrugs could have the wherewithal to do anything at all, no matter how capricious.

It sounds a bit like something that might be found in Planescape, somewhere in the Outlands maybe. This is reinforced by the fact that Planescape contains two sects who are a little like the Struldbrugs: the Incantifers, incredibly ancient and ever-living wanderers who exist only to accumulate all the magical knowledge of the multiverse; and the Prolongers, who steal the life-force of others to perpetuate their own. Perhaps the two could be merged into a society of venile old sages whose only aim is to accumulate magical power, and who in order to do so drain other peoples' life forces to prolong their own existence indefinitely. They are senile and governed almost entirely by whim, but have so much sheer magical might that they can never be supplanted.

Except maybe by a group of intrepid adventurers, of course.

Europe

Posting about John Howe, playing in Blizack's excellent Dragon Warriors game, and reading through my recently purchased Pendragon 5th Edition rules, has rekindled my love of proper European, more specifically British, folklore.

For some reason certain sections of the fantasy literature crowd (particularly those on the left) have looked down their noses at anything drawing on such fare, calling it derivative, conversative, pastoral and reactionary. (Mostly this is directed at Tolkien.) I say those people are agitprop-obsessed idiots. I have, however, fallen prey in recent years to a disdain for 'eurocentric' fantasy - it's partly what creating Yoon-Suin was motivated by. Now that I've scratched that itch, however, I think I'm ready to go back to the fold. I am after all a European, raised in England, of Scots-Irish parents. European mythology is my heritage, by God. Screw Sword & Sorcery and High Fantasy, I want Romance!

Here's a 25 word blurb for what I'd like to do:

Scotland, heaths, moors, meadows, celts, picts, redcaps, giants, knights, romanticism, chivalry, nockers, boggarts, Tolkien, Mallory, faeries, devils, enchantresses, dragons, castles, wizard-knight, Lewis, woodwoses, fauns, menhirs.

Sounds like either Pendragon or MERP, really.

Man Don't Give a F*ck

More zephyr hounds tomorrow, but I feel compelled to comment on the retreading of Dark Sun which is to be released for D&D 4e next year.

My comment: I don't give a shit and I feel bad about even saying as much, because even by spreading the news in my tiny corner of blogland, I am in some very small way contributing to the ridiculous atmosphere of giddy fanboyism surrounding WotC releases; it makes my skin crawl to read rpg.net threads and imagine grown men, grown men, typing things like "Hot Sex. Original boxed set timeline? Amazing win," and "Ohgodwantnow That is an amazingly hot and sexy cover," and not joking but actually being serious.

(I also feel a little bit bad about urinating like this over the genuine excitement of people who are probably very nice in real life. But, eh.)

Anyway. Dark Sun will be released for 4e. This is a little bit like somebody rushing up to tell me that the new Filtermeister(tm) pond filter Model FM 3000, specifically designed for koi carp enthusiasts, is about to come out. Which is to say, short of actually hitting me over the head with the campaign setting book, you couldn't do a whole lot to get me even slightly interested in its existence.

Of Testosterone, GURPS, and Liverpool

Two posts in one day! Blame the hot weather and being at a university campus where lots of attractive 18-21 year old women are out and about not wearing very much. Testosterone is a brain stimulant too, you know.

I just wanted to talk a little bit about GURPS. Last night I finally cracked open the 99p 3rd edition Basic Set I got last week, and a friend and I brainstormed for a campaign idea and came up with a character for him. We ended up with a pseudo-1920s Liverpool where WWI never happened, lots of people claim aristocratic heritage, technology is still kind of steam-age, and it's fairly usual to carry round a sabre. Cheesy, but good at the same time. We briefly flirted with the idea of zombies and Cthuloid entities, but settled on a "getting into scrapes and either solving or committing crimes" sort of game. We then did a little test of the combat system, in which an opium-addled hoodlum, bearing a strong resemblance to Jimmy McGovern, was thoroughly trounced.

I've already talked about setting a campaign in Liverpool, so it looks like it might finally happen. There are so many hooks for a Liverpool campaign, especially once you get into its history, it's ridiculous. It's like an embarrassment of riches of adventure ideas. Unfortunately I can't talk about any of them here because the friend in question will likely be reading this.

This is our first experience of GURPS and I have to say, I like it. There's something intoxicating about the fact that you can use it for literally anything, and it has a pretty intuitive and easy-to-grasp core mechanic. There are clear organisational issues, but listen - I cut my teeth on D&D and Cyberpunk 2020. I take your organisational issues and raise you organisational horrors.

Dance of the Hours

I'm not a huge Clive Barker fan - actually the only book of his I've read and thoroughly enjoyed was Galilee. But I do love his ideas. In this respect he's rather like China Mieville: the sheer creative brilliance of the concepts presented is hard to deny, and yet in the final analysis the books are merely okay, not great. Along with Mieville and perhaps John Courtenay Grimwood, you could put him into the category of authors who should really be designing RPG settings rather than writing novels... if only there was enough of a market and enough money to support that.

My favourite Barker idea is Abarat - a fantasy archipelago in which each island corresponds to a different hour of the day, where time never changes. The first island, corresponding to 1am, is the "Pyramids of Xuxux", where six pyramids rise up out of the sea; at 9am is "Qualm Hah", which is divided into two halves, one densely populated and the other empty; at 3pm is "The Nonce", an island of rainforests which induces immediately sleep in visitors. As you can probably already tell, Barker demonstrates in it a genius for names - other islands are entitled Yzil, Hobarookus, Yebba Dim Day and Ninnyhammer.

At the back of the first book is an appendix containing Klepp's Almanack, in which Samuel Klepp, a famous traveller, details his journeys through the archipelago. For Yoon-suin I'd already planned on having a similar device in the form of Laxmi Ghuptra Dahl, but flicking through Klepp's almanack has confirmed it in my mind. All fantasy campaign settings should have travelogues, I feel, if for no other reason than to give the DM and players an idea of what the world is like at the level of an individual adventurer. Thinking back over the D&D campaign settings I don't think any of them used such a device, which could be one of the reasons why I always felt them to be in the most part flat and lifeless.