Taishou Cthulhu

Call of Cthulu's default time setting is the 1920s, and for good reason (it's not just that the 20s happened to be when Lovecraft was writing, although of course that's a large part of it). It's because the 1920s was the era of modernism, when rationalism was usurping tradition and old sureties, and this was what Lovecraft's horror chiefly played on. As David Barr Kirtley put it in a recent GGTTG episode, Lovecraft's stories are not about things like vampires, werewolves, ghosts, and other beings of legend - the existence of which is patently false and hence not very scary - but about powerful beings from space whose existence is believed in by your neighbours, and your neighbours might very well decide to kill you in those beings' name. The fear is not based on complete irrationality, but on something which could actually be true. At the same time though, of course, there is fantasy and mysticism in there too: there is a constant tension between the old ways of thinking and the new.

Lovecraft, in other words, despite his love of the past, was in his own way a quintessentially modernist writer, just as much as his contemporaries like Hemingway, Dos Passoss, Stein, Williams, Stevens, and so on. So the 1920s are the perfect fit for a RPG based on his work.

This makes me think that it would be interesting to run a Call of Cthulu game set in the Taishou period in Japan (1912-1926). During this era, Japan underwent a transition to a democracy, continued its near-wholesale adoption of Western technologies, cultural artefacts, and political philosophies, and developed apace. It was a modernist society par excellence.

At the same time, the Lovecraftian requirements of alienness and indifference would be perfectly complemented by having the PCs as Westerners in this strange land, where everybody is suspicious and odd anyway so how do you know who worships Cthulhu and who doesn't? Moreover, like the Nazis, the Japanese extreme right groups embraced weird mysticism and hocus-pocus to the hilt - one of their main factions was called the Black Ocean Society, for heaven's sake.

(I hardly think I'm the first person to notice this, of course, and I'm sure Chaosium already have a Japan supplement out there. It doesn't stop me pondering it as an idea.)

Coincidentally, and as a sort of adjunct to this post, there is a whole coterie of Japanese horror authors engaged in Cthulhu mythos fiction: there are four anthologies of their work published in English in the Lairs of the Hidden Gods series. I've yet to read them, as they're difficult to track down, but the reviews I've seen are stellar.

Early Lovecraft

On my long train journeys to and from work I've started ploughing my way through the complete H P Lovecraft on my Kindle. I read his major, established stories way back when I was a teenager, and several times since, but there are plenty of obscure pieces I have never really come across before, so I am gradually fighting my way through in chronological order.

It's fair to say it's a bit of a struggle. It's also fair to say that while Lovecraft matured into a great horror writer, in his early years his works were only a few steps away from being utter tripe: imaginative, yes; good stories, no; frightening, not in the slightest; unintentionally humorous, often. They have intriguing ideas and set-ups, but the execution is often amusingly poor. (A particular favourite in this respect is "The Statement of Randolph Carter", which manages to build up a considerable head of eerie steam before flattening you with a final sentence that has you struggling to contain snorts of laughter.) And it is absolutely staggering to imagine that nobody could see his plot twists coming from a mile away - viz. "Old Bugs" and "Memory".

I'm also not fond of the sub-Dunsany dreamscape type of stories from his earlier years: curios like "The White Ship", "The Doom that Came to Sarnath", etc. (Although I'm not a huge fan of his later works in this so-called Dream Cycle, like "The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath", either.) They show a writer who was brimming with ideas but who still hadn't learned yet how to formulate them into a genuine story.

That said, there is something compelling about Lovecraft's vision even in his juvenilia. All the elements are there: the ancient mysteries, the sense of a vast body of knowledge existing somewhere that humans cannot comprehend, and above all the indifference of the universe to whether we live or die. That in itself makes it worth carrying on. It also made me fork out £21.99 on the Sixth Edition of Call of Cthulu yesterday in my FLGS, when another game I want to run is the last thing on earth I needed. 

Relevant to Your Interests

My friend Patrick, the "other DM" in my group, has announced the intention to publish a supplement for D&D, which he summarises as "Albino whales hunting phosphorescent shrimp in hidden oceans"; if that doesn't whet your appetite then quite frankly you ought to take a long, hard look at yourself and ask what you are doing with your life.

Also, Benoist, who is a difficult person to get along with and then some, has created a series of posts in which he builds his own megadungeon and describes the process. It is not just incredibly useful and detailed, but also - and this is very welcome after all of the idiotic controversy over rats and copper coins in recent weeks - genuinely inspirational: read it and rediscover your love for a good dungeon.

What Comes Next

My PhD is now (finally) written and submitted, and I have had the subsequent, obligatory three week period of doing fuck-all creative. My batteries are recharged. I have no other responsibilities except my day job. It's time to finish a publishable version of my Yoon-Suin campaign setting.

Don't worry - there'll be no Kickstarter.

My plan has increasingly moved towards a tool-kit rather than a fully-fleshed out campaign setting: the conceit that I am aiming for is that you, the Reader, will be able to Create and Run Your Own Yoon-Suin with the use of the tools provided (a shitload of random tables, setting fluff for inspiration, and sample maps, NPCs, and locations). Most of these tools already exist for some areas of the map - the Yellow City and surroundings, and Silaish Vo and the Mountains of the Moon. They don't exist for others, however, so I have some work to do on that front. But in its complete form, what I produce will, I hope, enable a willing DM to take an overview of the entirety of the Yoon-Suin map, pick a region he likes the look of, and create his own  version of it in which to run games - with a little bit of work and lots of dice rolling.

My thinking behind this has two strands. First, I want to steer away from the ridiculous obsession with setting canon which can overcome these sorts of endeavours. And second, I want to avoid "doing your imagining for you" while still providing inspiration, ideas, and useful things.

But there will also be ready-to-go hex maps and dungeons for those who are lazy.

So watch this space. I've been posting in this blog about Yoon-Suin for 3 years now, by my reckoning. That's altogether too long. It's time to get this thing done!

A Short History of a University of Magic

Founded in 1088, the University of Bologna is probably the oldest university in the world; it is certainly the one from which we get the word 'university', although nobody knows the date the University of Oxford was founded, so that might be more ancient still.

Bologna University was apparently established by its students. In the city at that time there were groups of foreign students who were scholars of Roman law, and they banded together in mutual aid societies (usually by nation; this was apparently necessary because the city authorities exercised collective punishment on the basis of national origin) and hired people to teach them. Over time, these groups amalgamated into one "universitas".

Let's imagine a University of Magic. There is a city in which there is a relatively large number of magical practitioners. Students come from all over the world to study with them on an ad hoc basis, banding together in small groups and combining their funds to pay local mages to teach them. Over time, these different groups - and their mages - come to associate for mutual protection and profit, on a temporary basis at first, but eventually uniting into one organisation with a chancellor, different schools of magic (probably each founded by one of the different groups) and a huge library.

Hooks abound in such a setting for an "everything is mages" game. Obviously the PCs, as students, have field research to do. But there are also inter-school rivalries within the university itself, not to mention wider political conflict (the university of magic would be an institution of huge power, likely to come into conflict with other power bases in the local area). And, naturally, they need to find ways to fund their study...

Truth is Stranger than Random Encounters

Last Saturday around noon I was walking through the city with this gobshite and we came across this guy, obviously homeless, standing by an alcove for bins behind a restaurant. There were two other men lying stone still, as if dead, in the alcove. The guy puts his hand out and says, "Hey fellas, give us a hand?"

I think we both immediately thought: he's going to ask us to get an ambulance or something.

But he didn't. What he said instead was (to my friend) "You're a big fella. Give these two a kick in the head, will you?"

We both laughed and moved on, so we didn't get the full story. But this little vignette made me think about random encounters; for this indisputably was a random encounter, if such a thing exists, yet such an episode would never actually happen in a game. Firstly, I don't think any DM would think of such a scenario for a random encounter - he just wouldn't dream it up. And second, if he did, he'd probably immediately dismiss it because it wouldn't really make any sense, and the players would be nonplussed by it. And thirdly, if it did happen, the players would probably be nonplussed by it.

This reveals that the truth is stranger than random encounter tables. But I'm going to interpret it as a serendipitous challenge to make my random encounter tables more creative and dynamic.

On Charisma

John has been talking about stats, and the last one in particular got me thinking about beautiful women Charisma. Let's talk about it. 

The most charismatic guy I ever knew was somebody I shared a flat with in Shonan, just along the coast from Yokohama; both of us had recently arrived in the country and were working together, and we ended up flat-sharing (with A N Other). I'll call him "N".

N was not particularly tall, fairly nondescript although with mildly boyish good looks, and kept himself moderately in shape - he certainly wasn't what you'd call drop-dead gorgeous; yet women loved him. Women like confidence, and N had that in spades - just a natural way of being himself, combined with a certain swagger, a feeling of arrogance. I like to think I do okay with girls, but N was something else; to go out on the pull in Tokyo with him was akin to stepping into a Lynx advert. He was the ultimate wingman too - he was so good with girls there wasn't even a need for him to be competitive. 

But he was a man's man as well. He was everybody's best friend in town, despite the fact he could barely speak a word of Japanese. There wasn't a party that went on that he wasn't invited to. When you walked through town with him every 50 yards or so somebody would stop to say 'hi' - people who you'd think "How the fuck does N know him?" There may - may - have been an element of Charisma Man about him (the noted phenomenon that white men in Asia, because of the exoticism, become more successful than they are "back home") but I don't think for him it made a great difference. He was just a charismatic guy, that's all there is to it.

Charisma isn't about looks. It's above all an issue of confidence, and intelligence too, of a kind: wit, sharpness, proficiency in conversation. Easy charm that lets you be familiar with others without becoming over-familiar. Self-deprecation. Teflon-like imperviousness to social mores which lets you get away with saying anything because you do it with an ironic smile. God knows where it comes from, but you either got it or you don't. 

In view of that, I'd say Charisma is probably the D&D stat which makes the most sense, especially in its modifiers (to number of hirelings, etc.). The other stats are mostly quite incoherent and vague, but charisma undoubtedly boils down to a certain personality trait which I'm sure I'm not the only one who has encountered. Interestingly, it is sometimes argued that charisma is synonymous with sociopathy - in order to be confident and possess that certain swagger, you need to not care about other people so much. I'm not sure how true that was of N, but I wonder if anyone's ever thought of correlating Charisma with alignment: the higher your CHR, the more you lean towards evil/chaotic? 

What is the Point in Published Adventures?

Sparked by the latest Dwimmermount brouhaha makes me wonder what the purpose of buying somebody else's dungeon, adventure or campaign setting is. I can think of three main ones:

1. Less prep. Obviously, it takes less time to buy somebody else's work and use it than do your own.

2. Pilfering it for ideas and inspiration to use in your game.

3. In the case of a campaign setting, you just really like it.

What I have to confess is that I don't really understand the value in playing somebody else's module straight from the page; it seems fundamentally inauthentic in the same way that cover versions or remakes of old films usually seem fundamentally inauthentic. Assuming a DM has a few scraps of sense and creativity about him, he can likely come up with material that will be as good as the stuff you find in a published module, with added spice coming from the fact that it is his own creation which he knows and loves and feels invested in.

People in the aforementioned Dwimmermount thread seem to be of the view that modules are useful because they can act as some sort of instructive tool: you run the published module and that teaches you how to create your own. I find myself wondering whether the effect might rather be to entrench standard practices, restrain innovation, and above all waste time: is trial and error creating your own material that much less effective than running through modules when it comes to learning how to DM? 

[Inspirational Pictures VIII]

Gerard Trignac is the perfect blend of Mervyn Peake and M. C. Escher:

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.