The Names of Places

I take great pleasure in looking at maps - particularly low-level highly-detailed local maps like Ordinance Survey ones and road atlases. I can get lost in an AA road map for hours. One of the things that keeps me going is the richness of the names. Earlier, sitting around bored with nothing much to do on a family visit, I picked up a road map and flicked through. I was struck, like I often am, at how much more imaginative the real world can be in comparison to the supposedly highly creative fantasy author.

For instance, lying before me is the page covering the SW corner of Dumfries & Galloway. Just scanning the page I see the following utterly fantastic names:

Gatehouse of Fleet
St John's Town of Dairy
Minnigaff
Tongland
Wigtown
Townhead of Greenlaw

This is not to mention the odd habit of giving things two names, so you get stuff like "Kippford or Scaur" and "Rhonehouse or Kelton Hill", suggesting possibly that the locals call their village one thing and outsiders call it something else (or, better, that the village is divided like the Sharks and the Jets, fighting a constant bloody civil war over whether their home should be known as Crocketford or Ninemile Bar).

For some reason Southern Scotland has a particular genius for this sort of thing. I suspect it might be something to do with Anglo-Saxon speakers transliterating Gaelic or Cumbric phonetically, plus of course the influence of Norse. So you get names like:

Town Yetholm
Oldhamstocks
Morebattle
Maxwellhaugh
Lilliesleaf
Coaltown of Wemyss
Burntisland (actually pronounced like "Burnt Island")

You also get some great ones in Lincolnshire and the Fens, often featuring saints' names in a quite specific and peculiar style. Viz:

Wainfleet All Saints
Leake Common Side
Leake Hurn's End
Bennington Sea End
Little Sleeping
Spilsby
Old Bolingbroke
Scrane End
Terrington St Clement
Walpole St Andrew
Walpole St Peter
Castle Rising
Burton Pedwardine
Kirkby Underwood
Covenham St Bartholomew

I'm going to publish a module set in a village called Burton Pedwardine next to a megadungeon called Lilliesleaf.

A Historical Geography of RPG Playing

When I was a lad, knee-high to a grasshopper, playing RPGs was a secret shameful activity one generally conducted in a darkened room - typically somebody or other's bedroom or attic, occasionally a living room. Usually this room was covered with posters of hot women (Louise from Eternal, now better known as Louise Redknapp, was a particular favourite) and there was Warhammer paraphernalia everywhere. As time went on, there would also be the stench of cheap pot, teenage male sweat and grease, and unwashed leather jackets. 

Many years later, playing RPGs was a slightly less secretive and shameful activity one conducted in a brightly lit (indeed starkly, fluorescently lit) basement of a backstreet restaurant one entered through a nondescript door in a piss-stinking alleyway. There were no posters of hot women anymore; instead there were wargames piled everywhere and huge battle-maps where matches of Squad Leader were being kept in stasis for the following weekend. It didn't stink of cheap pot, but IPA and older adult male sweat and grease. The carpet hadn't been cleaned in years and was covered in bits of things you simply didn't want to even contemplate, yet alone ever touch with anything but the soles of your shoes. On all the walls there were shelves full of tiny draws, each of which was filled with anything wargame-related, from tanks to little plastic trees and bushes to ruined buildings. In the toilet was a chart which allowed you to measure how dehydrated you were by assessing the colour of your urine. There was also Warhammer paraphernalia everywhere.

Some time after that, playing RPGs was a still-slightly less secretive and shameful activity one conducted in a large room in a bleak sidestreet full of abandoned buildings on the outskirts of one of the shabbier shopping areas of the city. Again, no posters of Louise Redknapp. Instead, a vast horde of obscenely nerdish people, mostly men, constantly playing Magic: The Gathering and Yu Gi Oh! - like a scene from a Ligotti story, you had the suspicion upon entering the room that these people weren't really people at all, but figments of a dream; either always there, playing their meaningless games whatever the time of day, or never there unless you were - a cast of extras who came into existence only to serve as a vaguely hostile backdrop to whatever you were doing. The place stank of grease because of the burger grill in one corner of the room; inadequately ventilated, the room and everything in it was coated in a thin nasty film of oil. You only had to step in the door for it to cover you, so that when you got home you'd have to put all your clothes in the laundry basket (or better, a furnace) and scrub yourself clean in the shower like a surgeon or nuclear physicist. There was always an unholy racket of people getting too excited about Yu Gi Oh!, and every so often the Verbeeg-esque owner would lurch to his feet to bellow something in a voice that was oddly reedy for a man so tall. Occasionally prostitutes would come in to shelter from the cold and buy Pepsi. There was also Warhammer paraphernalia everywhere. 

Some time after that, playing RPGs was a shameful but no longer secretive activity which one conducted, guerilla-like, in various normal locations: cafes, bars and restaurants where real people lived and worked. There was no Warhammer paraphernalia anywhere and for the first time there was civilized alcohol consumption. There was no stench of grease or oil - merely a stench of paranoiac dread hanging over you at the prospect of somebody you knew coming in. You felt a bit like a really bad performance artist doing something vaguely weird in the background of other people's lives. 

Nowadays, playing RPGs is a not all that shameful and no longer secretive activity that you can actually do in a rather basic but friendly board game cafe. There is pretty good food and a decent selection of drinks, and you can actually sit there and play D&D as though it's normal. 

That is what I call progress. 

You're the Captain of Your Soul...Know What I Mean?

Whether Sartre was right about the real world, in the world of D&D, existence precedes essence. Your character sheet is really just numbers. You are free to do with your character what you wish. You can choose to be good, bad, cruel, kind, friendly, cold, brave or cowardly. A D&D PC is defined by himself and his actions (well, those of the strange demigod, known as the "player", who inhabits him).

Do you want to be a reckless wizard? A cowardly fighter? A profane cleric? Do you want to kill orc babies or try to reform them? Do you want to amass personal wealth or give it all away? It's your decision. Nobody else's.

In this and many ways, RPGs are - perhaps uniquely among games - an exercise in freedom. In any other game you can think of, be it cricket or chess, your field of action is restricted and limited by rules. In an RPG there are really no such restrictions (or at least, there don't have to be). Your freedom is constrained by the other players and social convention, of course; you can't just sit at the table and openly masturbate, or eat the dice, or whatever, but that's true of all other games as well. Where it matters, in an RPG there are no constraints.

Does this mean anything? I'm not sure, but I'll hazard this: playing an RPG gives you an interesting insight into agency. It may be that we are all just bundles of neurons who go around reacting to things and then rationalising our decisions after the fact, as it now seems fashionable for neuroscientists to argue. But playing an RPG you get a relatively unfiltered understanding of what agency is and means: the power to make decisions and choices and then act on them. 

What Is A Bard?

I've just finished watching a documentary in which Nitin Sawhney composed a symphony for animals to listen to. It was successful for starlings, a parakeet, and a seal; dogs and wolves seemed nonplussed. Believe it or not this is actually a burgeoning field of study; it turns out all kinds of animals can and will respond to musical cues. Some of what is going on seems to concern teaching animals how to interact with music; some of it concerns finding out what kind of music animals naturally respond to.

I think there is something very moving about the former, but I find the latter more interesting. It turns out that we can figure out what kind of music monkeys like and compose it for them. (There is something Bartok-esque about it - I actually kind of enjoy it for that reason.) There are even people making music for cats (think Brian Eno doing something ambient).

Naturally enough, thinking about all of this my mind starts to wander: what if people in a fantasy world knew how to make music for dwarves or goblins or dragons?

Let's take that further. Imagine it was impossible to communicate through language with other races: humans, dwarves, elves and so on simply lack common key concepts which make true communication possible. But what if music - rhythm, tone, pitch - was something that all living things understood? You might not be able to really talk to a dwarf. But maybe through music you could find a way to share certain messages, emotions and so forth.

In this world, bards are essentially translators. The local dwarf citadel and human kingdom have been at war. As a peace overture, the humans send a bard to play certain melodies which communicate good faith and sincere intentions. Meanwhile a nearby orc tribe is gathering its warriors to take advantage of the human kingdom's weakness. A bard is sent with a group of drummers to beat out a rhythm from a mountaintop which will tell the orcs, "We're ready." The bard PC is like a snake charmer who gradually learns more and more specific ways to communicate with monsters and animals through music - and can improvise at a push.

The Personal RPG Coefficient

In "The Creative Act", Duchamp talks about something he called "the art coefficient":

[I]n the chain of reactions accompanying the creative act, a link is missing. This gap which represents the inability of the artist to fully express his intention; this difference between what he intended to realise and did realise, is the personal "art coefficient" contained in the work. 

In other words, the personal "art coefficient" is like an arithmetical relation between the unexpressed but intended and the unintentionally expressed."

In other words, a work of art is never what the artist fully intended. The difference between those two things - what he really wanted to create and what he in fact did create - is the personal "art coefficient".

RPG sessions are a bit like this, when you think about it. We are all nowadays, most of us, sandbox DMs, or non-railroading DMs, but still I think most DMs when planning a campaign have some ideas, however vague, about tone and quality and maybe certain key events and encounters. And this is also true on the microscale of individual aspects of a campaign, like NPCs, monsters and lairs: when planning or designing or thinking up such things, any DM has an idea in mind of how the PCs will interact with the NPC, defeat the monster, investigate the lair, etc.

We can therefore speak of such a thing as "the personal RPG coefficient". This is the difference between how the DM conceives of an in-game thing in the abstract, and how it actually turns out in practice. The clever and sarcastic NPC wizard does something stupid (the DM doesn't think things through). The sinister monster turns out to be really easy to defeat by the thoughtful players. The PCs discover the secret entrance to the lair before they come across the main entrance. And so forth.

Anybody who has DM'd a gaming session will be familiar with the personal RPG coefficient and its strange alchemy.

According to Duchamp the scale of the personal art coefficient didn't matter. All art is open to interpretation by the spectators. They are the ones who judge its success or failure. Not the artist. By implication, the artist may intend to do one thing, but utterly fail to achieve that in the final product. That doesn't matter, because those viewing it may judge it as good art and posterity may decide it is great art.

In the same way, it doesn't matter that the DM may have intended or predicted things will turn out one way, if they are different in the actual outcome. Those involved in the game may still judge it as good and fun.

One Page Risus Elementalists

For a long time, it's been one of my (many and unrealised) gaming ambitions to come up with a system for running a game which I call Risus Elementalists. The concept is simple: it's a very high fantasy "fantastical" sort of setting which is mostly based around this sort of tonal palette, and the PCs are elementalists. You get four magical stats. The magical stats have to be Earth, Air, Fire and Water.

What I have so far is as follows:

When you want to cast a spell, you roll the requisite number of dice and describe what you want to do. If you get one or more '4's or above, you succeed. The more '4's the better. You have to be able to describe what you are doing in a vaguely plausible way: "I summon forces of fire to blast my enemy" is fine. "I summon forces of fire to telekinetically move the object across the room" isn't really.

Combat between elementalists is like rock, paper, scissors. Fire beats earth because it can scorch and melt it. Earth beats air because earth is immovable. Air beats water because water is movable. Water beats fire because, duh. If magical combat occurs, both of the Elementalists note down on a scrap of paper what element they are using. On the count of three, they reveal it. If one has fire and the other earth, the one with fire wins automatically - and so on through the elemental "oppositions". If, however, the two of them have come up with non-opposed elements (for example, earth vs water) they roll their respective abilities and the one with the most successes wins.

Everything else is done through role playing.

[Actual Play] Behind Gently Smiling Jaws: Session 3

[Previous session report can be found here. I should briefly mention how I am dealing with having a rotating cast of PCs. Usually my games operate on a kind of implicit weird quantum space-time oddity: if a player is absent one week his PC is not there and never was. If he returns, his PC is there and always was. New PCs for new players, and replacement PCs for the dead, are generally introduced as quickly as possible if not immediately. However, since this is practically at the beginning of the campaign we just acted as though the new PC, Linga, had been there from the beginning, and didn't bother giving him an actual introduction.]

PCs present:

• "Bash" (real name unknown), a Danish mystic, played by C
• Raphael de Fonseca, a Jewish-Dutch scholar, played by M
• Linga, a Malabar specialist, played by P

Here is what the PCs managed to map out in this session:

The goby fish left the PCs alone at the spot marked with the red [x] near chamber 25 on the map, which was a boggy area leading out into a sunlit realm of jungle. While the walls here were icy rock as elsewhere, a large open space of apparently natural equatorial forest stretched out before them. High above the canopy they could just make out areas of blue sky and sun.

The party knew they had to head East in order to meet the wise woman the goby fish had told them about, so they went more or less due East through the hot, dense forest. Eventually they reached another wall that was perpendicular to their advance, so they decided that to follow it South. This lead them to map out some of the contours of this big jungle "cavern". They found some tunnel entrances leading off it at various points, before eventually finding themselves back in the boggy area where they had begun. They retraced their steps East and this time followed the wall North, hugging it all the way, until eventually they discovered it curved back on itself and they were heading South once more.

It wasn't long before a stone-tipped spear flew out of the forest and hit the wall in front of them. Appearing as if from thin air, a number of reptilian humanoids emerged to warn them that they were entering hunting grounds. These humanoid things could not speak Dutch, or any other language that the PCs understood, but nonetheless when they spoke their odd chittering tongue the meaning was clear. 

The PCs attempted to explain they were looking for a woman, a concept which these lizard men did not understand very well; eventually they were satisfied with the description of an "egg layer" and a rough description of the difference between a man and woman. They thought that she might be found if the PCs headed North and then East. The PCs duly turned around, not wishing to fight, and the lizard men disappeared back into thin air, like Cheshire cats.

After travelling North for some time the PCs came across another wall and traced it East. Here, they discovered three alcoves. One of these contained a carved wooden snake, around 5' long, with seven stripes on its back; its mouth was open and it appeared hollow. The others contained wooden bas-reliefs of a man and woman respectively, with exaggerated genitalia. All of these wooden idols gave off warmth of some kind, but did not react to offerings; however, lighting a fire before them seemed to bestow an air of sanctity on Linga.

Between these alcoves was a very narrow tunnel which gave off the smell of the sea. Bravely, Bash volunteered to crawl inside and soon came across a large number of spiny red sea urchins which covered the ceiling and walls. Using his shield as a protector he slowly but surely forced his way through and managed to do so without being stung; eventually he emerged into a cave in which he could stand and which was full of yellow-blue urchins. These urchins gave off a strange, urgent susurrus which seemed to him to suggest he should touch them. Aware that they were likely poisonous but also reminded that he had been perfectly happy to lick poisonous toads in order to enter the crocodile's dreams, Bash decided to go along with the urchins. Touching them and being stung then allowed his brain to become chemically attuned to the urchins' hormonal communication method. The urchins revealed that they had been in their cave since time immemorial and were desperately hungry. They promised Bash that if he brought them living meat they would provide guidance to him about the woman he sought.

The gang decided to press on and continue following the wall. It curved around to the South and soon they found themselves coming to the end of the jungle: they were back in an oceanic zone, walking on a sandy sea floor and looking at the surface far above them. They stayed here pondering what to do for some time. They had realised by now that it seemed everything in the crocodile's dreams was somehow sentient. They had also realised that all of these sentient things seemed rivalrous. They did not want to kill anything or bring it to the urchins, because that might result in them making enemies. They were also increasingly dubious about their mission to help the goby against his hairy foes. Nonetheless, they decided that it might be desirable, if they could find something that was not sentient but alive, and take it to the urchins to see what guidance they could offer about the "wise woman".

Shortly after entering the oceanic zone they were confronted by four man-sized sharks. They beat a hasty retreat to the border between the oceanic and jungle zones [marked with a green squiggle on the map], assuming that the sharks would not be able to cross into the forested area. The sharks seemed about to attack, but Bash put on a show of bravado and aggression, waving his machete around and implying that trying to fight him would be a big mistake. This at least encouraged the sharks to parlay. 

In this conversation, the PCs were able to understand a bit more about the nature of this place. The sharks revealed that ever since "the ruler" had arrived, everything had changed: forest was mixed up with sea, but also all living things had become hunters. This is because "the ruler" enjoys hunting so much: his spirit had touched everything and the desire to hunt had pervaded all life there. 

The PCs did not want to fight the sharks, so they decided to try to ally with them in finding food for the urchins, and asked what the most delicious thing was that lived in the sea. The sharks without hesitation said that it was a giant clam which lived nearby. The PCs hatched upon a plan: they would open the clam and give it to the sharks. In return, the three strongest sharks would give the PCs the weakest one, which they could then take to the sea urchins. The sharks, being sharks, and each thinking of him- or herself as the strongest, agreed to this.

The sharks led the PCs to a nearby chamber in which, sure enough, lay a giant clam. The PCs informed the clam that they were its doom: they were going to drag it away to be eaten. Bargaining for its life, it offered them a safe sanctuary in which to stay - no sea creature could enter its lair and cause harm, nor on its guests. If the PCs let it live, it would provide them a safe place in perpetuity. Linga agreed to this and got given a pearl into the bargain (the removal of which was a great relief to the clam). But he was quickly persuaded to go back on his word: Bash and Raphael both reasoned that this "sanctuary" was useless as coming and going would involve traversing a shark-infested sea each time. The clam wailed and moaned and complained, but was dragged away in short order. The PCs took it to the very boundary of the jungle and ocean zones, so that they could open it up, give it to the sharks, take their weakest member, and escape into the trees if it all went awry.

The sharks were good to their and bullied the weakest of their number out of the sea area to be caught in a net by the party. Raphael and Linga then hacked open the giant clam and gave the meat to the sharks, while Bash dragged away the still-living captive shark to give it to the urchins before it ran out of air.

The session ended with the sea urchins slowly eating the shark alive while telling Bash the following information:

1. The wise woman is actually the Aunt of "the ruler", and she lives on an island between two rivers. On no account must a visitor touch the water from either of those rivers with any part of his body, because if he does so, his essence will be drained away and dissipated and he will simply become part of the crocodile's dreams.

2. The Aunt will react favourably to anybody who professes to know her nephew, "the ruler", by name. And his name is Sese-Mahuru-Bau.

Big Spaces in Little Spaces

Parts of one of the different sub-settings within Behind Gently Smiling Jaws involve areas which appear small on the map but which are very large. So a chamber which appears to be 100 yards across on the dungeon map could actually be 100 miles across. If the PCs move around the walls the chamber has its "ordinary" map-based circumference. But if the PCs move across it, it might take them hours or days to do so, and it might contain entire countries.

I have been thinking about this off and on for a while - not just for this game but also because I nurture ambitions of one day running a Mythago Wood campaign. (The eponymous wood looks like an ordinary smallish English wood but is actually vast - potentially infinitely big - once you get inside it.) It would look a bit like this:

The players mosey on down the corridor in the ordinary way. If they move around the walls of the chamber they find its circumference what it appears to be on the map (say, 300 yards-ish, because the chamber looks about 100 yards in diameter on the map's scale) but if they were to move across it they would be in, basically, a hexmap.

I feel as though this ought to be more difficult than it appears. The main thing to keep track of is just what hex the players enter. (The hexes would need to be numbered in reality of course.) They would then move around the hexes as though in a hex map, say on a 1-mile per hex basis. Once they got to the edge of the hex map, they would find the cavern wall wherever they emerged.

FLY, MY PRETTIES. Tell me whether there is anything about this concept that would make things particularly difficult to use in actual play.

Iron Rations

The word "rations" gets bandied about quite a lot in D&D. A week's rations. Iron rations.

Here's an extract from The Worst Journey in the World, Apsley Cherry-Garrard's first hand re-telling of Scott's Terra Nova expedition to the South Pole. The book contains an account of Cherry-Garrard's "winter journey", with two companions, to try to discover a rookery of emperor penguins and bring back some of their eggs. This was a 6-week trip through near total darkness, in temperatures between -40 and -60 degrees centigrade, carrying two heavy sledges. It is possibly one of the most riveting passages ever written in the English language about the hardships of wilderness travel.

But it also contains plenty of interesting information about things like, well, rations. Here's what the three men arranged during the journey:

By taking individually different quantities of biscuit, pemmican and butter we were able roughly to test the proportions of proteids, fats and carbohydrates wanted by the human body under such extreme circumstances. Bill was all for fat, starting with 8 oz. butter, 12 oz. pemmican and only 12 oz. biscuit a day. Bowers told me he was going for proteids, 16 oz. pemmican and 16 oz. biscuit, and suggested I should go the whole hog on carbohydrates. I did not like this, since I knew I should want more fat, but the rations were to be altered as necessary during the journey, so there was no harm in trying. So I started with 20 oz. of biscuit and 12 oz. of pemmican a day. 

Bowers was all right (this was usual with him), but he did not eat all his extra pemmican. Bill could not eat all his extra butter, but was satisfied. I got hungry, certainly got more frost-bitten than the others, and wanted more fat. I also go heartburn. However, before taking more fat I increased my biscuits to 24 oz., but this did not satisfy me; I wanted fat. Bill and I now took the same diet, he giving me 4 oz. of butter which he could not eat, and I giving him 4 oz. of biscuit which did not satisfy my wants. We both therefore had 12 oz. pemmican, 16 oz. biscuit and 4 oz. butter a day, but we did not always finish our butter. This is an extremely good ration, and we had enough to eat during most of this journey. We certainly could not have faced the conditions without.

(Pemmican is mostly meat with fruit and berries. The "biscuits" used appear to have been high-energy sources of carbohydrate as Cherry-Garrard mentions sugar and oats a lot, but apparently the recipe was a trade secret and isn't disclosed.) So 12 oz. of meat and berries, 16 oz. of what one must envisage as a kind of flapjack, and 4 oz. of butter was enough to live on per day travelling through the Antarctic during winter carrying heavy sledges. That's around 350 grams / 450 grams / 120 grams, give or take, for metric fans. In other words, call it something in the region of a kilogram of weight per day.

Thinking Beyond Samurai: the Ryukyuan Paladin

An old theme on the blog is doing different things with Japanese or pseudo-Japanese settings: getting away from samurai and ninja and all that. 

Here's a continuation of a previous post from earlier this year. Have a look at this conditioning video. Uechi-ryu is one of the traditional Okinawan karate styles, and arguably is one of the "purest" in lineage to the Chinese Southern kung-fu origins of modern karate. All the Okinawan schools practice conditioning of the hands and forearms to make them extremely tough and strong. 

It gave me an idea for a character concept: the Ryukyuan paladin. This is a holy warrior who is specialised in defeating the undead: he conditions his fists until they are harder than stone, allowing him to smash the skeletal and brittle bodies of the evil dead with the sheer force of his punches. He would use the scaling damage of the monk, but when fighting against undead enemies would do maximum damage with each hit - ignoring requirements to  In return, he sacrifices the ability to cast spells and heal with his hands.