Let's Discover: The Nicobobinus Gambit

"This is the story of the most extraordinary child who ever stuck his tongue out at the Prime Minister. His name was Nicobobinus. He lived a long time ago, in a city called Venice, and he could do anything.
"Of course, not everyone knew he could do anything. In fact, only his best friend, Rosie, knew, and nobody took any notice of anything Rosie said, because she was always having wild ideas anyway.
"One day, for example, Rosie said to Nicobobinus, 'Let's pull up every weed on your doorstep.'
"'Let's not,' said Nicobobinus (which is what Rosie thought he would say).
"'In that case,' replied Rosie, 'Let's discover the Land of Dragons!'
"'Don't be daft,' said Nicobobinus, 'How can we do that?'
"'Because you can do anything,' said Rosie."

I recently came across a copy of Nicobobinus in a second-hand book shop and snatched it up. It was a vague memory from my childhood, which I probably read when I was about 8 or 9 years old. But something of it had always stuck with me - nothing much more than an evocative mood, really, most likely thanks to Michael Foreman's wonderful illustrations (which were always a winning combination with Terry Jones - see this old post for more on this), but one powerful enough to have never quite been forgotten.

The concept of somebody who can "do anything" deliberately going to discover a place which does not exist, and in doing so thereby calling it into existence, is fairy tale logic at its finest. But something like this also happens a lot in games, whether by design or otherwise. No, one doesn't tend to begin a campaign with the PCs announcing they want to discover a place one of them has plucked from thin air. (Although you certainly could.) But one does tend as the DM to create people, places and things on the fly as the players ask questions either in- or out-of-character. Hence:

Player: "I ask NPC X where he's from."
DM [who has just invented NPC X because the situation has called for it, perhaps because the players are in a tavern and asked something like "Who is sitting next to us?" and has given his background no thought]: "Er, he says he's from the land behind the mountain."
Player: "Ooh, I wonder what that's like..."

And suddenly there's a land behind the mountain where there was none before. One which the PCs might well end up visiting and which the DM is going to have to detail when all it was originally was a phrase which popped into his head in the heat of the moment.

I intend to call this form of knock-on creation the Nicobobinus Gambit from now on. The DM in the mini-scenario I just described deployed the Nicobobinus Gambit as an emergency measure. (It was an Emergency Nicobobinus Gambit, if you will.) But it is entirely possible to use the Gambit in a pre-planned way. The most obvious example I can think of is that DM beginning his campaign by sitting down the players and asking them, "So, where is your PC from? Make something up."

Are We Stupider or More Discerning?

Layout has moved on a lot. Take a look at these spreads:

The first is from Cyberspace, the little-mentioned ICE cyberpunk Rolemaster variant from 1989. The second is from Judge Dredd: The Roleplaying Game, from 1985, by Games Workshop (and authored by Rick Priestley and Marc Gascoigne, no less).

Notice anything? Christ, that's a lot of text, isn't it? And, to the modern eye, isn't it presented in an almost aggressively unapproachable way? It's not just boring. It's also unintuitive - to get the hang of the rules you would have to devote careful study, almost as a separate project, making your own notes and staying up all night to revise before each session. They look like law textbooks with a few more interesting pictures.

I got these two games, along with quite a few others, secondhand over the course of a number of years from various physical shops, with the idea of reviewing them for the blog. (These two cost £3 and £5 respectively, since you're asking.) But each time I have sat down to begin this task, I have failed miserably. I just can't be bothered. Whatever initial enthusiasm I have drains out of me like air from a rapidly deflating bouncy castle, leaving me a flacid floppy mound of rubber - the party long gone and not even a doggy bag left.

What's wrong with me? At the age of 14 I would have lapped all this stuff up. The impenetrability wouldn't have bothered me one jot. Partly this is age, and lack of time, and better things to do, and fewer brain cells. But also I think it's because when I was 14 basically all RPG books looked pretty much like this (the text might have had nicer backgrounds in the mid-90s and the internal illos were usually in colour by then, but that's about all that would have changed). And I hadn't experienced "good" information design - I hadn't grown up in a world in which you had to do anything other than just sit down and digest a massive shitload of infodump text if you wanted to know how to play an RPG. I hadn't been molly-coddled, in other words. I was a better and more focused reader.

All of that is to ask: am I just old and stupid now? Or is it the case that getting used to information being presented in an accessible format has made me less able to actually just sit down and do some proper reading and retain the information I've read?

Ex-Pat Rogues

For the first time in quite a while I heard Warren Zevon's "Lawyers, Guns and Money" today. This song speaks to ex-pats, or people who have been ex-pats, quite profoundly. This is because it manages in its light-hearted way to communicate two indelible truths that anybody who has lived in a foreign country will know. First, when you are a foreigner you have license to live outside conventional social mores, which is very enjoyable. But second, and because of this, it's easy to get into crazy hijinks, and when you do, you might get into "shit hitting the fan" territory very quickly - indeed before you even know it.

Ex-pats (and here I am talking really about young ex-pats, and mostly male ones) are basically D&D PCs. They generally have no family or responsibilities in the country in which they live; they usually have a fairly high disposable income because they have no real financial commitments beyond paying rent; they are treated as exotic outsiders by the mainstream culture; and they often also have the unconscious arrogance that comes from being "young, dumb and full of cum" in an exciting location far from home. The sense of freedom one gets is intoxicating. Everything feels like an adventure.

While they might not be going around slaying orcs and pillaging dragons' treasure hordes, they do find themselves getting into all manner of scrapes, both good and bad. I moved to Japan when I was 21 1/2. Before I was 22 I had broken my toes diving off a sea cliff, had numerous fights, dated and broken up with a stripper, befriended a Peruvian drug dealer, fallen asleep on at least three or four 5am trains after nights out on a Sunday mornings and woken up at strange railway stations with no idea how to get home, had flings with several married women, and imbibed about three times more alcohol than I had in my entire life prior to that point.

And I was by far and away the most sensible of my friends. One of my housemates was robbed of all his possessions by associates of said Peruvian drug dealer after a party; another fled Japan for Australia after having apparently taken something or other that disagreed with him and descending into serious paranoid delusions about being pursued everywhere by an old woman on a bike with a camera. I knew a number of people who did prison time for various offences concerning drug possession, theft and/or violence, several of whom were subsequently deported. Like me, I am sure that they all left their home countries as sensible young men imbued only with a spirit of adventure.* Being at large in foreign climes with no roots or ties or social constraints turned them into rogues. Not quite murderhoboes. But possibly getting there.

I would not like to go back to those days. But I would like to run a sort of ur-cyberpunk campaign set among petty ex-pat criminals in an exotic location. Picture it as an Elmore Leonard novel taking place in a non-existent simulacrum of a Havana, Shanghai, Zanzibar or Adelaide, but with cyberarms and Johnny Silverhand songs on the radio. That I could get behind.

-

*That's not to mention the people who go to live overseas because they are fleeing the law in their home country, quite a number of whom I have met, nor those who are just crazy, weird, or psychopathic to begin with; it's possible of course that I fall into that latter category somewhere without me knowing it.

Don't Fall in Love

Thomas Harris's Hannibal Lecter novels are a case study in what goes wrong when a creator falls in love with a main character. In Red Dragon, Lecter is a sinister and inexplicably malicious psychopath who seems to be a minor plot point until he becomes the joker in the pack right at the end. His presence is a tour de force. In The Silence of the Lambs, he is a mysterious and compelling anti-hero, brilliantly rendered. But something happened to Harris in the course of writing that book. He started to get carried away with this Hannibal Lecter fellow. By the time Hannibal is completed Lecter is practically a demigod and his every word and action has turned into high camp. He's impossible to take seriously. With Hannibal Rising we get a descent into farce with a laughable origin story complete with Nazis (of course), a ludicrous, sexy suicidal Japanese femme fatale, and, well, an explanation for Lecter's descent into psychopathy that it is charitable to describe as implausible.

Harris's love for Lecter became his downfall. Not in terms of his bank balance, I'm sure. But as a serious author his reputation is forever shot.

Something similar happened to George Lucas. George just couldn't let Darth Vader be. Pause at the end of The Return of the Jedi and we have a highly satisfying resolution of that character's "arc", as I believe the cool kids call it nowadays (and of the entire trilogy itself for that matter). But George was a fool in love. He couldn't leave well alone. Like an over-eager suitor, he came on too strong. Incapable of having a good first date and then giving the girl some space, he had to call. And call. And call. The inevitable result then followed. 

Origin stories are bad news. They sell tickets. But they disappoint. There was never any way for Harris to provide a reason for Lecter being what he is which would have been anything other than an anticlimax. It's the same with Darth Vader: no explanation for why Anakin turned to the dark side could possibly have matched the audience's expectations. Not because the audience would have had a good explanation themselves - it's not that good characters are mysteries who call on the viewer or reader to try to fill in the blanks. It's that good characters are mysterious in such a way that their "blanks" appear so deep, complex or terrifying that their existence alone is a thrill. We didn't like the Hannibal Lecter of Red Dragon or The Silence of the Lambs because we wanted to speculate about what turned him into a cannibalistic serial killer. We liked him because he appeared to us to be inexplicable, and thus made us shiver deliciously at the prospect that evil is out there and cannot possibly be rendered banal by being understood. 

Virtuosity and Practicing RPGs

Practice makes you a better DM and a better player. But it's not something you can practice on your own. This is significant.

When a human is able to practice a skill on his or her own, it can result in a level of accomplishment that seems to the untrained eye to be practically superhuman - a point at which the practitioner's technical ability is such that his or her movements manage to be both so effortless and yet so full of energy and precision that it does not seem possible for something to be so simultaneously relaxed and powerful. Check out Paco de Lucia here, for instance - there is more strength and volume in his index finger naturally strumming than I could muster with a plectrum and a full arm swing:

Or the performance of this Okinawan master karateka, so gentle and soft, almost, and yet done with such strength:

Or the way Jimmy Chamberlin drumming live somehow looks like he is both pre-programmed (so precise) and yet also hitting the drums at random:

The only way to approach these levels of skill is to practice. A lot. On your own. Single-mindedly. Al di Meola once said in an interview that he basically played the guitar 8 hours a day, every day, when he was growing up. This is how you get this kind of result:

And to put a stop to all this YouTube stuff, here's Keith Brymer Jones speaking quite nicely and simply about certain elements of all this:

Being a DM or an RPG player is not a skill anybody can practice for 8 hours a day - unless you have really available friends, or slaves, or something. And it's not something you can just sit down and do because you "have to". That's because you can't do it on your own. But that's only if you take a narrow view of what constitutes practice. Think about how much time each day you spend:

-Talking to people (telling them what to do; making them laugh; arguing with them, whatever)
-Listening to people
-Daydreaming
-Making decisions
-Pretending to be somebody you are not (you do it all the time - admit it)

And consider that reflecting on those activities and making efforts to improve them will also make you a better RPGer.

Booze as Treasure

Alcohol is important. 13,000 years ago people were using it to honour their dead (and presumably also to get pissed). More recently, it has had great commercial significance. I was reminded of this by the news that the US is putting a 25% import duty on whisky among other things produced in the EU in retaliation for subsidies given to Airbus. Apparently over £1 billion worth of whisky was exported from Scotland to the US last year. Next year we can presume it will be less. But it matters.

It mattered even more during the Middle Ages in Europe, when practically everybody drank only alcoholic drinks, and alcohol was the only way to ensure an unspoiled supply of hydration for sailors on long voyages. It was also in itself a powerful motivator to engage in trade and exploration overseas. Later, it became a luxury: I was going to say that Poet Laureates of England were originally paid with a butt of sherry or "sack" (I heard that this was worth in the region of £25,000 in today's money) but apparently they still are - 720 bottles' worth.

Alcohol has throughout our history been a safe way to hydrate oneself, a social glue, a religiously sacred substance (think of the Eucharist; think of the Incas drinking chicha at festivals to honour their gods), and a valuable commodity. We humans also just really like it.

Yet it does not generally appear in D&D treasure tables. Is this the result of a vestigal suspicion of alcohol in certain sections of the American midwestern culture that served as the crucible for the game? Is it because D&D has to appeal to "kids"? Is it just because "my character gets drunk" is one of the most annoying things that a player can do at the table and must be stamped out with extreme prejudice?

The logistics of transportation are what interest me the most. A butt of "sack" would weigh something like 500 kg. Smaller barrels like hogsheads are about 250 kg. They may be worth moving if they are going to be worth, say, £25,000 gold pieces. But the extraction of a 500 kg barrel from a dungeon is an adventure in itself.

But that's not to mention the other possibilities. What do the contents of a mighty wizard's wine cellar look like? What rarities are found within? More to the point: what do elves drink? What about orcs?

(Further reading: https://monstersandmanuals.blogspot.com/2016/08/the-oenophile-campaign.html)

Connoisseurs and Cost: A Compromise?

I wrote a slightly crotchety post about the cost of RPG books, particularly OSR ones, a while back, and then followed it up with another. Perhaps this one will reframe things in a slightly more positive light.

My other hobby after RPGs is drinking. That sounds worse than it is. Basically, I like good beer, fine spirits and dessert wines and I enjoy exploring the sensory experiences they offer - not drinking to get drunk but drinking for the palate.

You can think of me as a much less well-off and much less intelligent version of Fraiser Crane with a different job, who likes RPGs and doesn't live with his father and doesn't have a brother or a housekeeper. And isn't American.

The thing about liking fine spirits is - they're expensive. An entry level, probably-not-even-decent single malt is about as expensive as a hardback mainstream WotC book (say, £30).* A decent single malt will be closer to £40. You really have to spend £50 a bottle to get to the good stuff. And I have bought bottles of whisky for £70, £80, £100 in the past. (Of course, there are people who will pay much more than that.)

I am prepared to pay such amounts because, well, I like whisky and hence I think it's worth it. That's because (and I don't meant to sound like a complete twat here, although I'm aware that it's impossible for me not to do so given what I am about to say) I am a connoisseur, albeit of a very minor variety. I am in a position to know what I like, and I have drunk enough whisky to know what won't interest me. Buying two £30 entry-level single malts is therefore probably going to give me less pleasure than a single £50 or £60 bottle; once you can appreciate quality in something you like, quantity ceases to be a relevant measure. So does cost - although of course only within the limits of what you can actually afford.

I was reminded of this recently by doing something I never normally do - posting a comment on Reddit. I subscribe to various drinks-related reddits, including a cocktail one. I am not a massive cocktail fan but I do dabble here and there. Seeing a post by another user, who was using what I consider to be a rather nice single malt to make a cocktail with, I couldn't help myself suggesting that he use something a bit cheaper and a bit less nice with a similar flavour profile, so as not to waste the good stuff.

I should have known better. I was dealing with a cocktail buff, and hence (like me with whiskies) somebody who appreciates quality within the bounds of his hobby. For him, the better the ingredients, the better the cocktail. He's not bothered about being wasteful or spending money - except in the sense that he can obviously only spend what he can afford. What he's interested in is quality. Which is completely fair, and I was completely stupid to poke my nose in to suggest he do otherwise.

You can probably see where I am going with this. For people who are really into RPGs, and who have played a lot and read a lot about the subject - connoisseurs, if you will - price ceases to be an important consideration within the bounds of what they can afford. They want quality. And if that means spending a lot of money on something, on an artisan product like a Veins of the Earth or Stars Without Number, I think that is completely fine and, in its own way, laudable. And it would certainly be hypocritical of me to criticise it.

Where I worry is the occasions when I have sensed that people are not actually buying things because they want quality, but because they feel a compulsion to do it through the fear of missing out, a desire to be in with the in-crowd, or just sheer acquisitiveness and showing-off. I used to see that quite a bit on G+. There is a strand of modern geek culture which has embraced consumerism so wholeheartedly that it has almost come to associate the mere act of spending lots of money on nerd-artefacts as being in some sense sacramental. Clearly one has to be a bit judgmental to feel that way - but I still feel it.

(*You can get great deals which complicate this a bit. 12 year old Highland Park is available in my local supermarket for about £25 often on sale, and it's a perfectly nice whisky. The same is true of the 10 year old Glenmorangie, available in my local Costco at ridiculously low prices.)

On Redwall and the Flexible Imagination; Or, How Big is a Badger?

Because I have been reading some fairly heavy-density stuff lately during the day, at night for bed time reading I decided to revisit Redwall. 

I can't have read Redwall in getting on for 30 years, and I've been surprised to rediscover how good it is. Later books in the series are soured in my memory slightly by repetition of plots and themes (and also, let's face it, the fact that your patience for talking-animal series wanes slightly as you age beyond 13 or so). But the first book is expertly paced, exciting, and very charming - even if the main character's overnight transformation from bumbling adolescent into heroic warrior is a bit far-fetched. 

What is unusual about the Redwall books (well, one of many things that's unusual about them) is that its characters are of species ranging in size from shrews all the way up to wildcats and badgers, but their size in relation to one another is not defined. 

On the one hand, these creatures are all part of the same society and inhabit them same buildings and use the same weapons and tools. While you do get a sense that a wildcat is bigger than a mouse, for example, it's still possible for a mouse to fight one with a sword on a roughly equal footing. So, at times, the different species seem more like simply different humanoid races of basically similar size, each of which is based cosmetically on a type of animal found in the British Isles.

On the other hand, though, when it suits the author, "big" animals (wild cats, badgers, otters, etc.) are suddenly a lot bigger than "small" ones (mice, rats and so on) despite the fact they're all in the same social milieu. You get a badger character all of a sudden being able to pull a cart around for passengers in a way that implies it's as big to them as a horse is to us, for example. You also get predatory creatures like pikes and snakes being portrayed as being roughly as big as you would expect them to be in proportion to a human-sized mouse. 

The experience of reading Redwall at a phenomenological level, then, is an odd one. Your brain has to constantly conjure and then re-conjure mental images that are forever changing. On one page, it seems as though everybody's roughly the same size. On the next, suddenly things can only make sense if one character is much bigger (or smaller) than the others. Then on the page after that you're back to having to assume they're about as big as each other. And so on, endlessly. 

Strangely, this doesn't affect the entertainment value of the book, and I think this is evidence for the argument that text provides much more imaginative flexibility than art. If Redwall was a picture book, an artist would have to make decisions about how big the different animal species are in relation to one another, and the reader would from that point onwards inevitably adopt that framework in his or her imagination. Because it's not a picture book, we can read it as taking place in a kind of liminal space in which things are as big as they need to be on one page and then as big as they need to be on the other. The visual imagery your own mind comes up with is consequentially contingent and subject to never-ending revision and reassessment and review. And that's okay. 

Yoon-Suin Hardback Version: Errata Help

I am thinking of putting out the much-requested hardback version of Yoon-Suin.

This will not be an all-singing, all-dancing fancy 2nd edition kickstarter, or anything like that, but just a hardback option available alongside the paperback version on Lulu for those who want it.

That said, while the substance of the text won't change, it will be an opportunity to tidy up the layout a bit and also fix ideally all the errata in the existing version. (I'll also update the PDF and paperback versions accordingly and, if I can think of any efficient and easy way to do it, offer a method for getting the updated PDF to existing purchasers for free.)

To that end, can you let me know what errors or inconsistencies you have found in the text of Yoon-Suin? Whether it's just one thing or a billion. Obviously I will be going through the text myself with a fine-toothed comb, but one pair of eyes is never enough for these things.

Either post here or contact me directly if you know how. Thanks!

Villainous Animals

Certain animal species are often encountered as the model for villains or evil races in D&D and in fantasy books in general. Off the top of my head, these species are wolves, snakes and spiders. I suppose if an alien from Mars or elsewhere in the universe was asked to pick the most likely three animal species to be selected by human beings as representing evil and/or danger, those would all be pretty high up the list - the alien would just have to ask himself which animals have been most likely to be dangerous to humans over the course of our evolutionary past (and recent history too, of course).

Some distance behind these - the best of the rest, just about picking up the last Champions' League spot - is the ape, specifically the chimpanzee. Chimpanzees make great villains not because they are our Species Enemies like the other three mentioned above, but because they are in a kind of uncanny valley. They look and act rather like us - or, I should say, rather like our children. But they do so in a way that disturbs us. When we see them flinging shit or publicly masturbating or eating people's noses and hands while they're still alive, they look too close to us for comfort. They appear to be telling us, even as they engage in these acts of degradation and savagery: "Look upon us, you who think you are so advanced, and see your TRUE NATURE REVEALED. Only a thin veneer of civilisation separates you from acts like this, and it can be torn asunder AT ANY MOMENT".

That's what the chimps at the zoo seem to be telling me whenever I see them, anyway. I have mentioned it to a succession of therapists. 

Other apes are less effective in this role than chimps. Where a gorilla appears as a villain it arouses our sympathy because of its inherent nobility; King Kong is of course the prime example of this. Gorillas are just far enough away from us to be outside of the uncanny valley and in the territory of awe and majesty. I was going to say that the same is probably true for orangutans, although of course King Louie and Dr Zaius both stand out as radical exceptions to this. 

Next are the kind of animals that monster-creators cast around for when wolves, bears, snakes, spiders and apes have become boring. These are the animals that would be dangerous to us if only they were really big. Lizards, crabs, eagles and most types of insect are the chief examples that spring to mind. Despite the fact that a giant eagle would in reality, I am sure, be terrifying, it is hard in the abstract to get excited by a giant eagle monster because eagles themselves are not dangerous to humans. The eagle simply doesn't strike a chord of danger on the strings of the human psyche. (Or something.) 

Behind these are animals that certainly are dangerous to humans, but which we probably didn't encounter very frequently, if at all, during the course of our evolution, and which have been done to death so frequently in cinema that they now seem like very, very old hat. Sharks and crocodiles comprise the bulk of this category. It also includes bears.  

And bringing up the rear is literally everything else. Seagulls. Porcupines. Mongooses. Camels. Giraffes. Bandicoots. 

It follows that if you want to make a really interesting animal-based monster or "bad guy" race, a seagull or porcupine is the way to go, because if you can pull it off and really make it scary you'll definitely have it made.