Patrick Stuart Interview about "In the Hall of the Third Blue Wizard"

Patrick Stuart, old friend (in every sense of the phrase) interviewed me earlier today. And YOU CAN WATCH IT.

You can find relevant links at Patrick's blog.

And find the Kickstarter here.

The Fifth Quarter

 

A long time ago, I posted this. The idea continues to percolate.

A city, divided into four by high walls patrolled by ancient servitors of the "geteit chemosit" type. The city itself gives the appearance of vast age, as though it was constructed long before any of its current inhabitants found it; it is a landscape not of individual houses, but of tenements, towers, spires and domes. 

In the First Quarter ("A"), it is always night and always spring; there is just enough warm for life to exist beneath its cold stars and moon-lit clouds. The buildings are mostly mere shells, nearly subsumed within the fungal forest which slowly creeps up from below; the fungus itself is food for the blind sverfneblin whose ancestors excavated a city of caves beneath the First Quarter's surface. What humans lurk in the ruins are outcasts only - lepers, vagrants, vagabonds and poets - who take advantage of the darkness to shelter from the eyes of the world. 

In the Second Quarter ("B"), it is always dawn and always spring; its piquant chill hints that a warm afternoon is coming - though the afternoon never quite arrives. Its rulers are vodyanoi boyars, an extended clan of which each inhabits a single dark pool; these are all connected by frigid canals filled with leeches, slithering eels, and gigantic slow-moving carp. The human population of this quarter form a society in parallel, traversing the waterways in high bridges and walkways, and warning their children to never descend to the ground lest the vodyanoi take them.

In the Third Quarter ("C"), it is always dawn and always winter; dew lies frosted on every surface, and the red sun smoulders in a pale blue sky without warmth. Its ruler is a wereraven pfalzgraf and his family and courtiers; the human inhabitants are serfs whose very fates he owns. They eke out a living from rooftop gardens and allotments on their tenement buildings, where plants can absorb enough light from the continual dawn-light to grow and nourish their growers. 

In the Fourth Quarter ("D") it is always night and always winter. The quarter is encased in ice that lies many metres thick; only the highest towers and spires penetrate its surface. What lies beneath the ice, burrowing through the frigid dark, few indeed can say; the towers are the home of mages, necromancers, witches and worse. 

The Fifth Quarter, not marked on the map, is an island in the middle of the river that lies - frozen for the most part - in the centre of the city, where each of the other four quarters meets. The island contains a single tall, square building that, it is said, used to serve as the citadel of the city's rulers when once it had them. The building itself is divided into four segments, one corresponding to each of the city's four parts, and beneath are the labyrinthine tombs which those ancient rulers constructed for themselves in the end times of their dominion...

[I am running a Kickstarter throughout April. You can read more about it, and back it, here.]

Do We Definitely Want This?

Recent comments on the blog, and Dan Sumption's tech-evangelism, have convinced me that this AI/machine learning thing is real. That cmrsalmon was able to put my monster descriptions and a few randomly-generated monster names into an AI and get it to come up with these is truly astounding to me:

Steamhand - "A fearsome warrior clad in steam-spewing, thick armour, brandishing a sword or hammer that leaves behind a hissing trail of vapour. HD 7, AC 4, #ATT 1 weapon, DMG By weapon+2, Move 120, ML 8, No. Appearing 1" 

Coffin Pest - "A small, dark, fast-moving insect that burrows into the wood of coffins and feeds on the dead. HD 1/8, AC 8, #ATT 1, DMG 1d3, Move 120, ML 2, No. Appearing Swarm (100-400)" 

Dreary Babbler - "A sad little figure, huddled in the dirt, who babbles endlessly in a voice just above a whisper. HD 1, AC 8, #ATT 1, DMG 1d4, Move 120, ML 6, No. Appearing 2d20 (*The cumulative droning of 6 or more dreary babblers within 30' feet causes listlessness and ennui; save vs magic or be inactive for d4 rounds)" 

Faint Ooze - "A barely sentient, jelly-like creature that wanders in search of food. HD 1, AC 10, #ATT 1, DMG 1d4, Move 10, ML 1, No. Appearing 2d6" 

Glowteeth - "A floating, vaguely shark-like creature composed of a maw full of needle-sharp teeth encircled by a nimbus of sickly green light. HD 3, AC 4, #ATT 1 bite, DMG 1d6+2, Move 120 (Fly), ML 8, No. Appearing 1d4" 

White Keeper - "A small, delicate creature that flits about in the shadows. It seems to be made of fine porcelain, and is beautiful in a eerie way. It has long, spider-like fingers, and large black eyes. It is said that if you catch a glimpse of it, you will be driven insane. HD 1, AC 8, #ATT 1, DMG 1d4, Move 120, ML 6, No. Appearing 1d4"

The Dreary Babbler is a straight rip-off of one of my monsters, and Faint Ooze is boring (and you can't actually have a ML of 1), but the others are all perfectly serviceable, and the White Keeper is fabulous. Let's be clear: this isn't an AI that is specifically designed to produce D&D monsters. This is just a general "language model" trained on a shit-ton (technical term) of words on the internet, which looked at my entry and somehow "knew" not only what it all meant, but how to make more of it. 

If this is what an AI can come up with from just being given a blog entry that took 30 minutes to write, what could it come up with if somebody actually really tried? I doubt very much that we are yet (or will ever be) in the territory of "HAL 9000 is my DM". But we could be on the cusp of not really needing human beings to create much RPG material any more. Why buy the Forgotten Realms if you can just put 1000 words of Ed Greenwood into something like GPT-3 and get 100 unique Forgotten Realms-esque settings of your own before breakfast?

(For that matter - why buy the next generic fantasy novel if you can just feed The Book of the New Sun into something liike GPT-3 and get 100 unique variants of that before breakfast?)

The question is not whether this is going to happen or not. It's whether the evolution of AI is in the same category as the invention of writing or the printing press, or in the same category as the discovery of tobacco, the refinement of sugar, or the invention of TV. In other words, is this something that will "level up" our capacity to communicate and create? Or is it something bad for us but so enjoyable that we will find it really, really difficult to resist? Do we fast-forward 100 years to find Star Trek: TNG, in other words, or Wall-E? 

We are coming perilously close to an inflection point at which our technological development will take on the characteristics of Soma. (Arguably, we're already there.) So while I am tantalised and intrigued by what AI/ML has to offer, I also find myself asking whether it is such a brilliant idea to pursue it. Oppenheimer worried, watching the first detonation of a nuclear bomb, whether it meant we had "become death, the destroyer of worlds". Are we on the verge of becoming lotus-eaters, the destroyers of souls? Genuine question. 

[I am running a Kickstarter throughout April. You can read more about it, and back it, here.]

Six More One Sentence Monsters

Hollowhood - A figure with an apparently corporeal form, its face hidden within the folds of a dark and heavy cloak and its body swathed in clothing; in death, it is revealed as having had no solidity at all, and its garments simply fall emptily to the ground. HD 2, AC 6, #ATT 2 fists, DMG 1d4+2/1d4+2, Move 120, ML 8, No. Appearing 3d6 (Is instantly killed if its cloak or hood is removed, requiring a successful grappling roll; its cloak, if worn, allows the wearer to see invisible, but causes a -6 penalty to reaction rolls and cannot be removed once worn except through a remove curse spell)

Cloud Hag - A gaunt and malevolent old woman, devourer of flesh, who appears on hilltops and isolated moors when the dank clouds lie low against the earth. HD 9, AC 4, #ATT 2 claws, DMG 2d4*/2d4*, Move 150, ML 10, No. Appearing 1 (*Claw attacks erase the personality and will of the victim on a failed save vs death magic, causing him or her to mindlessly follow the hag thereafter; can cast spells as an 11th level cleric)

The Jade Cat - A feline automaton forged from jade, whose padding presence enthrals and transfixes the viewer. HD 2, AC 4, #ATT 1, DMG 1d8*, Move 150, ML 7, No. Appearing 1 (*Attacks are of sharpness and can sever limbs accordingly; anybody seeing a jade cat at closer than 60' is paralysed for the duration it is within that range on a failed save vs magic)

The Bronze Demon - A wiry, twisted, faceless, horned thing that stalks spasmodically from here to there, often coming at night to isolated settlements to do the deadly will of its abyssal masters. HD 11, AC 2, #ATT 2 fists, 1 gore, DMG 2d6/2d6/1d10, Move 120, ML 12, No. Appearing 1 (*Suffers no damage from bludgeoning or piercing weapons; suffers no damage from fire or cold based attacks, but double damage from electricity)

Embermouth - A lazy, loathsome reptilian beast whose breath is belching smoke and whose tongue and teeth glow fiery red. HD 7, AC 1, #ATT 1 bite, 1 tail slap, DMG 2d6+2*/1d8, Move 150, ML 7, No. Appearing 1 (*Bites cause double damage to anything not resistant to fire, and ignite the clothing of the victim, causing 1d4 hp damage automatically the following round, 1d3 hp damage the round after that, and 1d2 hp damage the round after that, unless the victim can douse himself with water or receive aid from a comrade to put out the fire)

Spirit Golem - A golem forged from dead souls, entwined together to form a lumbering giant composed of many ghostly figures tangled up into a larger whole. HD 8, AC 4, #ATT 2, DMG Special, Move 150, ML 12, No. Appearing 1 (*Fist attacks drain energy as a spectre; cannot be harmed by non-magical weapons; non-corporeal and can pass through walls and other solid objects)

[I am running a Kickstarter throughout April. You can read more about it, and back it, here.]

Six One Sentence Monsters

Sadly, the Forge, a nice little online fantasy monster/spell name generator, is defunct and now appears to be something to do with NFTs. Luckily other name generators are available. Here are six monsters (six more to follow tomorrow, most likely), described in a single sentence, derived from randomly generated names:

Quiet Creeper - A slinking spy, soft-footed and slowly careful, endlessly stalking and never approaching. HD 2, AC 4, #ATT 1 bite, DMG 1d4*, Move 120, ML 6, No. Appearing 1 (*Bites to slow (save vs poison to avoid); never surprised and always surprises opponents)

Bewitched Presence - A lost fragment of the soul of one stricken by a curse, broken off by the shattering impact of the spell; it lingers now in dark corners, waiting for a passer-by on whom to visit its pain and sorrow. HD 4+1, AC 5, #ATT 1 freezing embrace, DMG 2d6*, Move 90, ML 12, No. Appearing 1 (*Attack ignores armour)

Dawnman  - The name given to those who come at dawn to dance on the dew and, when they know themselves to have been seen in performance of their ritual, pursue their observer to death. HD 2, AC 6, #ATT 1 weapon (spear, axe, sword, club, trident), DMG By weapon+1, Move 120, ML 8, No. Appearing 2d6+2 (One in 6 dawnmen is a magic-user with 3 HD)

Thin Face - A tall, gangly-limbed, grasping thing, hideously thin as though squashed and stretched by some malicious giant. HD 6, AC 4, #ATT 1 grab*, DMG 1d6*, Move 150, ML 7, No, Appearing 1 (*After grabbing successfully, will crush for 1d6 damage automatically each round thereafter until letting go; always surprises opponents; to look on its face causes stunning on a failed save vs magic due to its exquisite ugliness and melancholy)

Aromatic Guardian - A tall cylinder composed of flowers of many kinds, tightly furled around a column of wood or stone; when needed, it summons itself into jerking, writhing motion. HD 5, AC 5, #ATT 3, DMG 1d3x3, Special*, Move 120, ML 12, No. Appearing 2d4 (*Main attacks are whipping fronds, but it also emits a cloud of fragrance with a 12' radius, causing either sleep, confusion or blindness as the spell of the same name, 1/day)

Forsaken Mumbler - The mournfully babbling remnant of a being created to worship a demigod, who then tired of mindless supplication and cast its followers heartlessly adrift. HD 1, AC 8, #ATT 1, DMG By weapon (club or spear), Move 120, ML 6, No. Appearing 2d20 (*The collective droning nonsense-talk of 6 or more forsaken mumblers causes dehabilitating ennui to all within 30'; save vs magic or be inactive for d6 rounds)

[I am running a Kickstarter throughout April. You can read more about it, and back it, here.]

Towards a 'Good Guy' Campaign: XP for Rescue

The tone of the OSR is predominantly deadpan in terms of morality. Shit happens. (At times, it is simply outright dark; at others, 'weird-sad'.) 

That's all well and good; but what about those times we want to try to be the good guys? (And here, I don't mean wanting to be heroes and acting out power fantasies; I mean a campaign based around trying to make a positive difference in the game world.) 

This ground has been covered many times, but it bears repeating: the problem here is XP for gold. 

I love the XP for gold system. It is in many ways the key to all of the doors - 'old school' play will emerge almost inevitably if it that system is used. But it has to be acknowledged that it is orthogonal to the kind of campaign I am describing. Incentives matter, and XP for gold primarily incentivises theft and looting.

XP for killing monsters is the obvious replacement, but would need tweaking to really incentivise a 'demon hunter' or 'monster hunter' campaign. Here, I picture a campaign world plagued by interlopers that are powerful but relatively rare; the PCs are a wandering band of do-gooders who try to track them down and do away with them. No moral ambiguity - these vrocks/hezrou/nalfeshnee have to go.

An alternative though, might be 'XP for rescue'. For every NPC rescued from a dangerous or horrible fate (capture, or a nearby threat, a raid, an impending disaster, etc.), the PCs win XP. 

Picture the scene: the PCs foray into the abyss. In a dark chamber whose walls, floor and ceiling resemble a night sky filled with strange stars and heavenly bodies, they find three innocent people being tormented by manes. Dispatching the manes, they receive 150XP for rescuing the captives (if they can get them back to their home in the prime material plane).

Or: the PCs come to a village that is plagued by a medusa. Tracking down the monster and dispatching it and its maedar paramour, they earn 2000XP for the population of the village they have saved (400 people, multiplied by 5XP each).

The trick is simply to come up with the appropriate formula: how much XP; ought it to be based on the victims' level/HD; does one receive more for the former type of scenario (rescuing captives) or the latter (freeing a settlement from a threat)?

[I am running a Kickstarter throughout April. You can read more about it, and back it, here.]

On the Sullying of Legacies

 As you've probably heard, it was recently revealed that MAR Barker, the creator of the setting Tekumel and one of the earliest roleplaying games, Empire of the Petal Throne, happened to have also written a tract of neo-Nazi doggerel titled Serpent's Walk, under the pseudonym Randolph D Calverhall. (You can read some some rather eye-opening reviews of it on Goodreads. Suffice to say, this is not one of those things which you can equivocate about - the man was an honest-to-goodness racist and a crackpot.) 

Most of the online commentary on this revelation has, as one might expect, focused on the hoary old chestnut of whether one can "separate the art from the artist" as with other writers with odious political views and/or dark backgrounds, such as HP Lovecraft, Marion Zimmer Bradley, Paul Gaugin, and so on. 

My own view is that, like everything in life, it's complicated, and while I generally think that one should try not to let an artist's background or views influence one's perception of their art, it is inevitable that it will - and in some cases it probably should. It's really hard, for instance, to look at Gaugin's pictures of South Pacific life and not feel tainted when you know what he was getting up to behind closed doors. Art is not like philosophy; the ideas of deeply unpleasant characters such as Carl Schmitt or Michel Foucault can be analysed objectively, on their own merits, but the whole point of art is that it's personal, and has part of the creator in it. To use a deeply technical term, it will quite naturally in some circumstances make one feel icky to discover that whoever came up with the thing you enjoy had something profoundly wrong with them, and to no longer enjoy that thing as a result.

But what I really feel about MAR Barker, and something which seems to be totally absent from the debate about Serpent's Walk and how it affects his legacy, is how completely ridiculous the man now appears, how childish and absurd, and how that acts as a kind of solvent, rendering everything else he created appear frivolous and laughable as a consequence. I mean, just look at him:

This man wrote a neo-Nazi propaganda novel about former SS members getting revenge for having lost WWII. This purported paragon of Aryan beauty, it turns out, was a white supremacist. This man, at roughly the age of 60, wrote an adolescent wankfest about "the baddies" that an attention-seeking 13 year old would consider beneath him. This is not, we now see in stark relief, a serious person. This is somebody whose views a pub boor would be embarrassed to voice in public. This is somebody whose opinions are about on the level with the kind of stuff you would expect to hear in the context of a park bench and a brown paper bag. This tale is not the stuff of tragedy. This tale, gentle reader, is the stuff of farce. 

Which is not, of course, to make light of Nazism (indeed, painting Nazism to be a clownish or mad form of politics is deeply foolish and wrong). Nazism is no laughing matter. Pompous, overweight, elderly windbags who publish Nazi wet dreams under pseudonyms alluding to blood ties to medieval English nobility on the other hand, are.

The question for me therefore is not whether I feel shocked and betrayed by the creator of Tekumel. It is whether I could possibly ever take that setting seriously again. It has gone from beautiful, mysterious and inspiring to outright sniggerfest in one fell swoop - not because of its own content, but because of the profound ludicrousness of the person who made it. 

[I am running a Kickstarter throughout April. You can read more about it, and back it, here.]

RPGs as Sense Making

One of the worst aspects of modern life - and a tendency which I very often find myself displaying to my own immsense chagrin - is the way in which the ubiquity of information gives rise to epistemic arrogance. We are such immense know-alls. We drown ourselves in podcasts, op-ed pieces, tweets and blog posts, and convince ourselves that this gives us any sort of expertise in how the world "really is". What's worse is that (as we all probably know somewhere in our psyches), so much of this material - indeed, almost all of it - is produced by pseuds like ourselves; journalists who just happen to be really good at gathering bits and pieces of information like magpies and then spinning them into narratives that conveniently confirm perfectly the biases of the reader. 

This is driving us all mad (again, as I think all of us know); it makes us angry, fragmented, polarised and insufferably sure about how brilliantly correct our opinions are. Worse, though, it means we actually understand the underlying reality even less. 

It's always difficult to discuss Iain McGilchrist, because his work defies easy summary and is so straightforwardly misrepresented. This interview, though, is a good primer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U99dQrZdVTg. One of the many important themes in McGilchrist's work is that reality is really only rendered knowable through attending to context and contingency, in the widest scope: any "thing" exists within the context of literally everything else, and therefore one can only really know it by seeing it in its relationship to all other things. One does not understand anything by extricating it from context - one understands through context. 

This means that understanding is not an act of superficial reasoning or abstract study, but rather has to be embodied, intuited, concrete. One does not really get at the underlying reality by thinking about it explicitly. One gets at it through intuition born of experience. And by emphasising the former (abstract reason) and dismissing the latter (tacit knowledge), we actually understand the world much less. 

This is why I think the humanities are so important: they situate knowledge within something (a book, a poem, a piece of music, a work of art) that can only be experienced, being embodied, and which can only be understood tacitly, being opaque to rational explanation. It is through our experience of the arts that we really come to know what this business of being a human being is really all about. It expresses truths not through logic but by making us inhabit them, and thus helps us to truly see something like the whole.

RPGs are not an exception to this. Reading and playing them literally helps us to understand the world, in the truest sense, better. And this in turn means that those of us who are engaged in the hobby, as with all hobbies, are engaged in a pursuit of "sense making" that is much more significant - and useful - than a million Sam Harris podcasts or Substack newsletters (and which is all the more profound for the fact that it is entirely implicit and unintentional). 

Put that in your pipe and smoke it.

[I am running a Kickstarter throughout April. You can read more about it, and back it, here.]

In the Hall of the Third Blue Wizard - KickStarter Launch

Noble Reader,

I humbly inform you that the KickStarter for my zine, In the Hall of the Third Blue Wizard, is now live. 

Do you want a zine packed with nigh on 55,000 words of gaming material (hexmaps and dungeons) and short fiction, not to mention lots of pretty art? Then back it.

Do you want to support creators by funding a publication that pays fair prices for contributions? Then back it.

Do you like blue wizards? Then back it.

Do you hate blue wizards? Then back it as well.

Do you like wells at the end of the world, offspring of siphoned demons, cerulean valleys, moonrhythm mires, hollow tombs, black pyramids, and marvellous births? Then back it.

Do you believe flumphs are sadly forgotten and in need of some TLC in game form? Then back it.

Do you like Matt Adam's art and want to see his Top Secret back cover? Then back it.

Do you want all of your wildest dreams to come true? Then back it.

Do you want good karma? Then back it and also share the link.

You can find the link here: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/thirdbluewizard/in-the-hall-of-the-third-blue-wizard

Yours Sincerely,

Noisms 

"There Are No Other Countries Like Spain," Robert Jordan said

 

Of all the countries I have visited, Spain is the one that most fascinates, that most excites, that most seduces, that most appals - and that best avoids easy description. A country in love like no other with both beauty and death, and which marries them both. Not a country, but a continent in miniature, where one can go from lust celtic green to a desert of vultures in a journey of a day. A land of hunters, conquistadors, and artists. Of chivalry and machismo and delicate manners. Of Roman ruins and Moorish palaces. Of ancient languages still living; of white churches dark and cool and empty on blisteringly hot days; of snow-capped mountains and orange trees; of songs sung in minor keys; of memories of priests and treasure fleets and crusades. Of Don Quixote and Cortes, Jan Potocki and Joaquin Rodrigo, Jose Ortega y Gasset and Salvador Dali. The word "stereotype" does not fit the images it conjures; one feels history there layered upon itself, over and over, like a great blanket folded one way and another and back again in an endlessly accumulating pile. 

The roots of Spanish history run so deep and draw on layers of earth so rich that one wonders why it is that they have never nourished RPG settings. We have pseudo-Japans, pseudo-Chinas, pseudo-Romes and pseudo-Germanys by the bucketload, but where are the pseudo-Spains? Where are the pre-Roman Spains, the Carthaginian Spains, the Moorish Spains, the Spains of the Reconquista or the high middle ages or the Age of Exploration? Where are the Spains of the Golden Age - or of the Wars of Religion? Above all, where are you Spanish RPG enthusiasts, of whom I know there are many, and why are you not squeezing your wonderful country's history and culture(s) for all the inspiration they are worth?