Are we Human, or are we Dancer?

I'm a big fan of humans, and not just in the sense that I like the female variety rather a lot. I also think homo sapiens has a big part to play in fantasy role playing, especially if pulp and Sword & Sorcery are your thang. You won't find orcs, kobolds and ogres fighting Conan or Elric. For Sword & Sorcery it's pretty much humans or Freakish Things, all the way.

What I like about humans and fantasy role playing is that they can mess with the players' thoughts and feelings in ways that demihuman races often can't. The average D&D gamer isn't much concerned about the mass slaughter of orc children or the murder of kobold pensioners, but give them human foes and they often start to think in more moral terms (albeit only very slightly) about the consequences of what they do. Villains who the players can empathise with are always more interesting than those with whom they can't.

Humans are also scarier than orcs or trolls, say. Players know what orcs are: they're evil and they want to kill you. Maybe torture you and eat you alive. But that attitude is expected and the response is obvious - total war. Kill or be killed. Humans on the other hand have nuance, and when dealing with them the only expectation can be that something unexpected will happen. This can be frightening, especially if you know that humans are just as capable of evil as orcs are - just in less predictable ways.

For that reason I always wanted a bestiary for a fantasy role playing game given over entirely to varieties of human. It could contain everything from Inca priests to Danish stevedores. Cultists, pirates, brigands, priests, labourers, butchers, the lot. Crazed wizards and brain-eating cannibals. That I never found such a bestiary is a source of great regret to me.

Maybe I'll make one some day.

A female human. [With apologies to the female readership.]

So it looks like we might have made it, yes it looks like we made it to the end...

I think role playing games are all about the adventures. You can call adventures different things depending on the genre - missions, runs, whatever - but that's just nomenclature. All you're doing, at the end of the day, is heading off into the unknown and seeing what happens.

This makes role playing games and 'story' a bad fit, in my book. Good stories and heading off into the unknown only rarely go well together: for every Stephen King who just sits down with an idea and sees where it goes during the writing progress, there are 10 million frustrated authors writing utter bollocks with the same method. Unplanned story requires a lot of talent to make it work. And this goes for role playing adventures too: for every unplanned campaign that you can look back on and say "that could be a novel", there are 10 million which were a lot of fun but which you know could never mean anything to anybody who wasn't directly involved. Try telling somebody about your gaming session last Sunday; they'll get the same look in their eyes that you get when somebody starts telling you about the dream they had last night, or when somebody at work is going on about how many shots he did at the club on Saturday. The last thing they'll say is, "Ooh, tell me more!" Unless they're very polite. That doesn't mean it was a bad session - it's just, really, who gives one about what Gwenda the Paladin said to the white dragon if they weren't there?

I was thinking about this last night when I sat down to watch No Country for Old Men. In many ways, it reminded me of a Cyberpunk 2020, Shadowrun, Deadlands or Unknown Armies game: there was a lot of tension, a nice set up planned by a good DM, some interesting characters, and a good mixture of violence, action and role playing. But in the end the whole thing kind of stumbled out of rhythm when it came to the narrative. People died due to unfortunate dice rolls when it would have been better if they hadn't, some random encounter checks came up with crazy results and the DM didn't quite know how to deal with them, and in the end as a 'story' it just didn't work out. I'm sure it was a lot of fun for the players, but to a neutral observer it seemed fundamentally unsatisfactory. A lot of the Cyberpunk or Shadowrun games I've been involved with could be described like that.

Those games weren't any the worse for it, of course. I don't play for the story; I play for the adventure - because that's where the fun is.

On Steampunk

I've always loved the aesthetic of Steampunk. The problem is that I've never really been sure what the genre is supposed to be about.

Let me expand on that: Science Fiction is, for me, about examining issues of humanity, politics, sexuality etc. by taking them out of our context and placing them in another, very realistic and plausible one. Fantasy is about escapism - getting out of this world and exploring a better and more interesting one. Horror is about "the oldest and strongest emotion" and the adrenaline kick it gives you. But what is steampunk about, other than the certain visual style with which it is associated? Is it just a sub-genre of Fantasy or Science Fiction, or is it there to explore something else?


One idea is that Steampunk is about the fraught and nervous relationship between mankind and technology. New things are being created, but their very production and maintenance - the coal it wastes and pollution it produces - is debilitating for society as much as it works for the good. This neatly reflects our uncomfortable relationship with scientific progress, wherein new technologies create further problems for our culture and the environment.

In that respect Steampunk should be the genre of choice for a new supplement for 'legacy' games: as Gamma World was a way to play around with the world's crisis of the day (nuclear war), so a Steampunk game would be ideal for tapping into some form of zeitgeist or contemporary angst about environmental catastrophe. I can envisage a world in which the Industrial Revolution never stopped, and pollution-belching factories and vehicles ruined the atmosphere to such an extent that global warming has become frightening reality, with sea levels rising, desertification increasing and disappearance of animals. As land becomes scarcer wars and famine ravage the nations and societies collapse. And hey presto, Steampunk post-apocalypse is the result.

You could call it, "Carbon World".

[Alignment Breakdown VII] Lawful Evil

These characters believe in using society and its laws to benefit themselves. Structure and organization elevate those who deserve to rule as well as provide a clearly defined hierarchy between master and servant. To this end, lawful evil characters support laws and societies that protect their own concerns. If someone is hurt or suffers because of a law that benefits lawful evil characters, too bad. Lawful evil characters obey laws out of fear of punishment. Because they may be forced to honor an unfavorable contract or oath they have made, lawful evil characters are usually very careful about giving their word. Once given, they break their word only if they can find a way to do it legally, within the laws of the society. An iron-fisted tyrant and a devious, greedy merchant are examples of lawful evil beings.

2nd Edition Player's Handbook

It is often said that Lawful Evil is the alignment of tyrants and dictators - Mussolini, Hitler and Stalin. That seems persuasive, inasmuch as those individuals used the law as a weapon with which to crush opponents (real or imagined) and perverted it to their own ends.

However, there's something a little unsatisfactory about that label when it is applied to player characters. Don't get me wrong: I don't have a problem per se with player characters attaining power and then abusing it in egregious ways. It's part of what role playing is all about, and I don't believe I'd ever game with anybody who I thought would support iron fisted tyrants in real life. But at the same time are budding Hitlers and Pol Pots all that Lawful Evil characters can be?

This is where we see a disconnect between what D&D always could have been, but never was, and was never likely to become. Lawful Evil is a perfect alignment for a 'devious, greedy merchant', an amoral lawyer, a scheming lower-rank politician, a sophist philosopher, or a con man. But the trouble is that none of those archetypes are viable in a game whose rules are fundamentally about killing things in dungeons. And unless you have a group of very like-minded friends, using that game about killing things in dungeons to play something else can be tough.

That isn't a complaint, of course. I would love to play D&D games involing amoral lawyers or sophist philosophers, but I recognise that such campaigns would have to be achieved in spite of, not through, the rules. They just aren't D&D. You might as well play a free-form game instead, for all the support the rules will offer you. Such is life.

The existence of Lawful Evil shows how fundamentally odd aligment is - a system which categorises all of human life into 10 sections, and which allows a very slender sub-section of society (adventurers) to choose from all 10. It shouldn't be surprising that there are some alignments which fit the adventuring lifestyle less well than others. The fact that the designers did not seem to have considered this is an indication of the amazing scope of their ambition: D&D was a game whose rules were for killing things in dungeons, but which reached for something far greater than that - literally, to be anything its players wanted to use it for. That the rules didn't always jibe with this ambition is obvious, and it stands in sharp contrast to the very narrowly defined games which the modern 'indie' movement produces - where every rule is there to serve a specific goal and any superfluity is ruthlessly severed. I know which I prefer.

Fantastical Fantasy Art

I've just made my way back over to the opposite side of Eurasia and am suffering from the old bone ache again. So all I have for you is a content-light post of pretty pictures.

There have been a few recent posts in the blogosphere singing the praises of two sub-genres of fantasy art: Fantastic Realism and Extraordinary Ordinariness - both which I love in their own right, but neither of which are my absolute preference. I always liked best what we'll call Fantastical Fantasy: the strand of art which runs from Fuseli to Brom, via Blake, Diterlizzi and Alan Lee, and which creates pieces which are notable for how different they look from our reality. This sub-genre is all about worlds which Could Not Be; what distinguishes it from Fantastic Realism and Extaordinary Ordinariness is that it postulates a fantastic universe which looks nothing like our own. Whereas in other sub-genres of fantasy the dragons, elves (and whatever else) seem real and the artists imagine how they would look in a world like ours, Fantastical fantasy throws reality out of the window and focuses on the gothic, the dream-like, and the unnatural.


There is something genuinely creepy about this Brom piece - I can't work out whether it's the androgyny, the rictus grin, or the hint of Jame Gumb. Perhaps it's all three. In any case, not somebody you would want to run into on a dark night. Or in any other situation you can name.


Take a look at this fellow, penned by Dom Maitz. It isn't enough to have a gigantic spellbook which is probably made from human skin and written in blood - and you can see in the wizard's eyes and the way his fingers flourish as he starts to turn the page how much he relishes reading it. You also have to be able to levitate, and the experience just wouldn't be the same without a hookah to puff. He is clearly relaxing on a Sunday evening, enjoying perusing his collection while he searches for the perfect curse with which to smite his rival.


One of Fuseli's elves. Imagine if Gygax and Arneson had taken this for their inspiration, rather than Tolkien's idea. It's doubtful we'd ever have seen drow, that's for sure. This piece was drawn in 1790; Fantastical Fantasy has the edge over other sub-genres in terms of its age.


The forest is dark, and things which live in it are watching you from the shadows. Is the figure in the background a comrade or an enemy waiting to strike? Like Brom, Diterlizzi was one of the major 'Silver Age' TSR artists who bucked the Fantastic Realist trend, to create art that was Fantastical in the term's purest sense.

Whither now Fantastical Fantasy? WotC have discarded Fantastic Realism, but their art now takes comic books (from the US, Europe and Japan) as its major inspiration. These things go in cycles; by the time D&D 5th edition comes around the wheel will undoubtedly turn once again.

[Inspirational Pictures V] Planetary Cartography

Mars, I'm sure you'll agree, is a bit of an attention-seeking bastard when it comes to sci-fi and space opera. The red planet gets all the terraforming and colonisation while the other planets just have to watch from the sidelines. This is a great injustice that must be rectified.


A topography of Venus, complete with a handy colour scheme to make it easy to envisage seas and oceans. From this distance it almost looks like a pleasant place to pay a visit - though of course you can't see the clouds of sulphuric acid howling around its surface.


Titan's gigantic sea. Not composed of water, but of liquid methane. What form of life has it given rise to?


Nobody can see much of Pluto's surface. This is an imaginary map, based on that of Jupiter's moon Ganymede. I love the icy feeling of this image. Like Great Old Ones could be slumbering beneath its translucent surface, or The Thing - waiting for milennia after milennia for a host to inhabit.

The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien

I've just finished this book, a collection of Tolkien's correspondence spanning the years 1914-1973 and concentrated on the years spent writing The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion. I'm a great fan of collections of letters, perhaps mainly because I never manage to write letters myself and see the process as a dying art. But they also provide fascinating insights into how authors viewed their own work. Raymond Barthes might protest all he likes, but I still find that worth investigating.

What I think is most interesting about Tolkien's thoughts on The Lord of the Rings is his idea of the trilogy's main theme. It surprised me to learn that he didn't consider it to be friendship, adventure, exploration, the triumph of good over evil, or hope - which are the things that come to my mind when I think about the books. In fact, he states on several occasions and to several different correspondents that the trilogy is at root about Death. That strikes me as highly unusual, and isn't very well explained. Next time I read the books (which I do about once a year), I'll have to give it some thought.

Another example: Tolkien seemed to consider Frodo to be a rather boring cipher and in the final analysis a failure. He believed strongly that the true hero of the piece was in fact Sam. This is something that I had felt was true for years, and it was both pleasant and surprising to find that the man himself had the same idea. It was Sam, after all, who managed to resist the temptation to take the ring for himself, who saw Gollum for what he was, and who saved the day (and the world) when the entire quest was at its bleakest moment. All Frodo did was carry the ring - and then, crucially, give in at the last minute.

Tolkien also felt that he had made a crucial mistake in making The Hobbit too childish. He regretted that it became relegated to a "children's book", and only originally submitted it as such because he wasn't sure what other category it could go into - given that "fantasy" as a genre barely existed at the time. This wasn't due to churlishness about children - he even notes on a few occasions that children often wrote to him to complain about the book's most 'childish' aspects - but because all the stuff about Bullroarer Took inventing golf etc. clashed with the verisimilitudinous nature of The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion.

These days it's often said that The Lord of the Rings wasn't nearly as much an influence on the development of fantasy role playing as were the writings of Howard, Moorcock or Leiber. This may be the case. But where I think Tolkien directly influenced play was in his love of world building and tinkering with races, geography, language and history - and his absolute denial of allegory. D&D and its like draw a direct bead from that; the creation of a consistent reality different from our own. Even if he is not the spiritual father of The Game as he is with fantasy fiction, he's certainly the one who made it all possible.

Roleplaying Myth Number 1 - Roleplaying = Acting

One of the controversies that rages between RPG enthusiasts of various stripes is the awarding of bonuses (usually experience points or whatever the equivalent method of advancement is in that particular game) for 'good roleplaying'. On one side there are the Patronising Overbearing Paternalists, who see it as the GM's job to reward good play and, in particular, good roleplaying (since that is the purpose of the Game). Arrayed against them are the Limp Wristed Pseudointellectual Pansies, who argue that, hang on, just because somebody isn't great in the amateur dramatics department or suffers from a crippling lack of social skills, they shouldn't be penalised or discriminated against for their 'bad role playing' (which should be read: bad acting/lack of confidence).

These days the views of the Limp Wristed Pseudointellectual Pansies tend to win out over those of the Patronising Overbearing Paternalists, and role playing XP awards no longer seem to be de riguer. But I think both sides are really arguing over the wrong thing: the Limp Wristed Pseudointellctual Pansies seem to believe that the Patronising Overbearing Paternalists are too deferential to the GM and too into "acting", while the Patronising Overbearing Paternalists see the Limp Wristed Pseudointellectual Pansies as a gang of weak-willed, callow quislings without backbone and a pathological fear of competition. Neither of those is actually the case.

Let me make one thing clear, first of all: I don't see role playing as amateur dramatics. As a player or GM you'll never find me "doing a voice", delivering tedious tortured monologues, or otherwise inflicting my akting skillz on the other players. When all's said and done role playing games are games, not theatre, and if I wanted to humiliate myself and irritate others I'd play a LARP.


But it is indisputable that role playing games involve playing a role. It's right there in the title. So what does 'playing a role' mean, if it isn't amateur dramatics?

What it means, quite obviously, is taking on the persona of somebody who isn't you, and behaving in the way in which they would behave in a given situation. That doesn't involve pretending to be them. It merely involves taking the decisions, in-game, that they as the character would take - not what you as the player think is best. This could mean doing stupid or irresponsible things if the character has low Wisdom or Intelligence, running away from a fight if you've established that they are a coward, or doing something callous if you've established that they're a sociopath. That is what good role playing is, in my opinion: playing the character as a character, not as a mere cypher or mouthpiece for you as a player. Acting skills are irrelevant; it's about the characterisation.

And there is nothing wrong with the GM awarding experience points for players who are doing this well. It isn't about rewarding good actors or those who are socially confident - it's about rewarding people who play the game the best, i.e. those who play their roles in a consistent and believable way.

[Alignment Breakdown VI] Neutral Good

These characters believe that a balance of forces is important, but that the concerns of law and chaos do not moderate the need for good. Since the universe is vast and contains many creatures striving for different goals, a determined pursuit of good will not upset the balance; it may even maintain it. If fostering good means supporting organized society, then that is what must be done. If good can only come about through the overthrow of existing social order, so be it. Social structure itself has no innate value to them. A baron who violates the orders of his king to destroy something he sees as evil is an example of a neutral good character.

- 2nd Edition Player's Handbook

As with True Neutral, Neutral Good is hobbled as an alignment by the weird Moorcockian/Weiss-Hickmanian 'balance' baggage. Rather than being about pursuit of 'good' objectives for their own sake, it turns into an attempt to "maintain the balance" in a "vast universe", and again we are forced to ask: Who thinks about reality in those terms, and why would Balance be the concern of an ordinary adventurer?

Neutral Good characters, I think, should be idealists (more idealist than the straight-as-an-arrow Lawful Good types) - people who have Dreams, who want to achieve Peace on Earth and Goodwill To All Mankind, and who will stop at nothing in the pursuit of What's Best. In a modern context they would be animal rights campaigners, peace activists, international volunteers and freedom fighters. In the medieval high fantasy settings typical of AD&D, they might be Knights Errant, undertaking quests for the betterment of mankind, peasant heroes standing up for the underclass, or wandering healers. The do-gooders and starry-eyed of whatever world in which the game is taking place.

Unlike True Neutral types, Neutral Good characters make natural adventurers, especially if reasons are contrived: Bob the Knight Errant goes on adventures to raise money which he can distrubute to the poor; Gwenda the Healer enters the dungeon to try to find artifacts to make her work more effective; Job the Cleric goes to the goblin lair to end their privations on the poor people in the valley.

Once again, I find myself wondering whether 'Neutral' is the best choice of term for the diametric system. The alignments make more sense when they are thought of as Lawful Good, Lawful and Lawful Evil; Good, Neutral and Evil; Chaotic Good, Chaotic and Chaotic Evil. Thus the idea about Balance can be left to the philosophers and the DM where it belongs, and characters can just have personal motivations, as we would expect them to. But such are the rules that were given.

The City, it's The City y'all.... The City

Giant fantasy megalopolii, how do I love thee, let me count the ways.

1. Sigil, City of Doors. I've said it before, and I'll say it again, but the 2nd edition AD&D designers collectively created some of the most innovative fantasy settings not just in the history of D&D or even fantasy role playing, but in the genre itself. Even I, compulsive homebrewer, couldn't resist their allure.

The crowning jewel of the 2nd edition campaign settings was Planescape, and its crowning jewel was Sigil: a giant city built on the inside of a horizontal hoop, floating above the peak of an infinitely tall mountain. It never made sense, but it didn't matter with an idea that freakishly good. The Rule of Cool, indeed.

What made Sigil really special, though, were the trappings: the Lady of Pain, silent ruler and talisman; the Dabus, civil servants who speak in images; the Mazes, dungeon-like labyrinths which grow out of the city's very passageways; and the factions, "philosophers with clubs", who each keep one aspect of Sigil running and thus save the city from utter disintegration.


2. Armada. China Mieville might have one of the worst cases of mouthpiece-itis when it comes to characterisation, but boy can he come up with some imaginative goodness. Armada, the city where the main action takes place in The Scar. It's a giant floating city made entirely of boats, strung together by a nation of pirates, which roams the world's oceans like a rumour or a legend.

As with Sigil it's the details as much as the concept which make it what it is. Armada's leaders are a pair of lovers who may or may not be twins and who are covered in tiny scars. Their allies include a vampire and a man armed with a sword which can kill thousands of times a second. Its citizens include a race of people whose blood coagulates and hardens into rock as soon as it leaves the body. And it has a mission, too, although you have to read the book to find out what it is.


3. Viriconium, the Pastel City. The Viriconium books are my absolute favourites, and the eponymous city is among the strangest in fantasy, though it doesn't flaunt its weirdness in the way that Sigil or Armada does. It is the last city left on earth after many millions of years have passed; it has existed for so long that its very reality has begun to fray from overuse, so that time itself has ceased to have meaning. Over the course of the novels the city transforms from a far-future metropolis to a pseudo-Dickensian London to a weird amalgamation of the Parisian Left Bank and Wolfeian fantasy/horror. Its rulers morph from a god-princess to a fat fortune teller and finally to a psychotic dwarf in league with two mad deities.


4. Khare, Cityport of Traps. It isn't entirely nostalgia which puts this city in the list, as the first fantasy metropolis I think I ever encountered in a novel or otherwise. The centrepiece for the Fighting Fantasy book Khare: Cityport of Traps (from the Sorcery! sequence), the settlement began as a camp for river pirates and grew into a mighty city - with streets so violent and dangerous that every dweller fortifies his or her house with one or more traps of some kind. It is ruled by as many as seven Nobles, one of whom is an anonymous beggar and another a vampire, who are the only citizens who know the magic which will unlock its North Gate.


5. Indigo, the Vertical Seaside Metropolis. Described by its creator as an attempt "to envision what a huge -vertical- seaside city would look like in a world where dry land is very precious", it was linked to in a recent rpg site thread, and I fell in love with the idea right away. Essentially a city built way below sea level but situated on the tiniest of islands, it takes the appearance of a sort of reverse Sigil, as if built around the outside of a vertical tube. Take a look at the link to see some beautiful fantasy art by Jesse van Dijk and proper explanation for how the whole thing works.