For theDead-Eyed Dwarves have many magics; cloaks which make the wearer invisible,clicking rings which make their owner large or small, strange insect-lenseswhich pick up every drop of light and ever stranger eye-wear; pearl-palecyclopean masks which perceive the flow of ‘dark’ itself and twin-cone faceswhich turn rebounding clicks and whines into images in the air. Beneath these,often, grills or tubes, breathing apparatus or voice amplifiers, who knows.Beneath those; beards.

Their lamp areharsh, actinic and directional; itself a near-aggressive act within the Veins.The blinding sharp-edged light turns the Dwarves behind them into silhouettes. Thetramping, trudging, armoured and indifferent Dwarves. Few cultures of the Veinsdare to wear full-armour underground; none but the Dead-Eyes possess the craftto endlessly clean, amend and fix their metal shell, the brutal endurance tocarry metal weight, nor the size-shifting techno-magic which lets them shrinkand grow, giving them access to shafts and warrens which others attempt only inextremity.

They can passinvisibly, but they are loud. Stomp, stomp, stomp. Too big, too small. Disappearingin the blink of an eye. Hooded, armoured, masked, with wild prickling beards.Lights powered by crackling batteries which drip toxic alkali slime. Loadedwith crossbow, axe and pick, careful maps and guidance dials, grappling hooksand superlight chains. Walking and moving in unison, grunting to each other in mutteredsubsonic; a guttural under-speech, as if they resented even, the need to speak,even to each other.

The most likelyencounter is that you are simply ignored. The cost/benefit assessment ofenslaving you simply doesn't move the dial.

The Dead Eyes

Things don’t getbetter when the masks come off. There is just something missing in there; thestrange, deep-time, assessing gaze of a Dwarf, but with the humour, honour,boldness; gone, washed away, leaving what? Eyes pale as slate, empty as theletter O.

They eat,breathe, smell, move like living things, more than many in the Veins, yet avampire, or a crazed patchwork Gilgamash, can have more 'anima', moreindividuality, vitality and humour than a Dead-Eye Dwarf.

They are notpleasant to deal with, but they are reliable, practical and rational, andthey think long-term, which makes them an incredible stabilising force. Yetno-one, and nothing 'likes' the Dead-Eyed Dwarves.

AbilitiesPowerful LightsBright whitespheres, hanging lanterns and lances of burning white light. Used to blind ordisorder seeing foes, or simply to pick out blind enemies.

Invisibility CloaksHeavy toxic thingswith pointed hoods, less useful in the Veins than you might think, these areused mainly in raiding other lands. When wrapped around and buttoned up,everything they cover turns translucent. Complex physical movements, like mostforms of attack, will make the wearer visible, at least for a moment.

Size-Control RingsHeavyclick-clacking bracelets which turn like locks or rings of code. Rapid tactilecodes are needed to make use of one, and once that code is known, each ring isstill is different, tuned for a particular Dwarf. Worn, usually on the left arm.Move the right hand over and quickly, and loudly, click through the code beforecarefully carefully carefully clicking through the size-set sequence.

When a Dead-EyedDwarf shrinks or grows, its not a smooth transition. Its as if they were animage and each heavy CLACK spun some fresh lens in front of them so that theyseemed smaller or larger by leaps. CLACK CLACK CLACK and big, big BIG, as ifthey were projections, with the ‘real’ dwarf somewhere else.

It takes time andtraining to accustom oneself to getting bigger and smaller on the regular.

Seeing LensesThey like these,though its questionable how useful they are. Varied masks and lenses, the mostcommon are Light-enhancing eyes, heat-trace Snake-Pit lenses and Sonic Lenses.More rare are the special ‘Dark Vision Lenses’ which literally treat darknessas a substance.

Each Dwarf willonly have one set of Lenses, if they have any, and few groups will have morethan one set of each kind. They are hard to make, maintain and repair and eachDwarf makes their own.

Mouth MasksThe Dead-EyedDwarves don’t even use gas that much, purchasing it from the RayMen occasionally,but they like to wear the masks. Some protect from gas, some change the voiceto a harsh bark, others alter voices to simulate those heard, still othersprovide air should the Dwarf go underwater, or into airless spaces.

Again, each Dwarfonly has one set and the whole group rarely has more than one of each. Its nota systematised technology.

Combat Encounters MoraleMorale plays nopart in the decisions of the Dead-Eyed Dwarves

Everything is basedon their immediate objectives. If violence is required, and they think theywill win, it starts at once, without warning.

If victory becomesimpossible, or if the situation changes, so that violence no longer serves,they simply stop, again, without warning, usually turning invisible and simplywalking away.

If there is no wayout, they fight, bitterly, to the emotionless end

Combat TacticsArmoured;the Dwarves can weather most projectiles, and most blows.

BrightDirectional Lights; these can be used to blind many Veins inhabitants.Activating then turning off the lights can be more effective than actualinvisibility.

InvisibilityCloaks; if out-ranged, bottled up or boxed in, a combat team can use theirinvisibility to close with the enemy, or to escape if needed.

Size-Change =BIG; The Dwarves can ‘click-click-click’ up to Ogre size. This always takesan action and is loud. All of their equipment changes with them, as if it, toowas being projected from somewhere else. A Dwarf might turn huge and fireballista-sized crossbow bolts, or get close before turning massive and layinginto a party from behind its lines.

Size-Change =small; mainly used for escaping should a situation turn bad, especially byaccessing crawl-spaces or similar. Combining this with Invisibility makes themnear-impossible to catch.

The enormouspower of their techno-magical abilities, combined with their utter ruthlessnessand invincible will, means the Dead-Eyed Dwarves don't need fancy 'tricks',though like many Veins cultures, though they have an expertise in Poison (towhich they have a meaningful resistance), and sometimes use various forms ofGas.

Chameleon/Tarantula CavalryMainly used inand around their settlements, due to the enormous costs of keeping them fed,but the Dead-Eyed Dwarves do often use ‘Cavalry’ formations; their favouritesare a very chunky form of huge Tarantula, and kind of sticky lizard with someChameleonic abilities.

They willusually change size to something smaller in order to comfortably ride thesethings. The combination of activating their toxic invisibility cloaks, thegiant animals, and the glaring lights they carry, creates a truly bizarreappearance.

Non-Combat EncountersNo Pride, No ShameThe Dead-EyedDwarves don’t carry resentments around, if they beat you before, or were beatenby you, their attitude will be what it always is - relentlessly practical.

This makesconflict with them a troubling experience; they will not try violence unlessthey believe they will win, and they are rarely wrong.

Non-Combat Encountersthe Dead-EyedDwarves will pass invisibly, except for their lanterns. They seem like trudgingshadows passing underneath an actinic light which glows like a willow the whisp.

Did they justwalk right past?

Whatever theyare doing, they are doing it. They have a purpose and if the PCs cannot help

or impede them,what do they care?

Goals of the Dead-Eyed Dwarves[THIS NEEDS WORKBUT HERE IS THE BASIC IDEA

A simple way todo this might be for there to be three goals;

One BIG THINGthat the whole of local Dead-Eye Dwarf culture is currently aiming towards. Youroll for this when you are generating the Veins and it remains the samethroughout the Campaign.

Two –a mediumscale political or large structural goal that will help them towards the MAINTHING. This can change from session to session and can differ from settlementto settlement. (But it doesn’t have to change). You can roll for thison-encounter, or during the session or just keep it from previous sessions ifthat make sense.

Three - acurrent goal for this particular group, the mission or thing they arecurrently trying to fulfil, which will lead towards the second, which will leadtowards the third. You roll for this when you encounter these guys.

Do, whenever youare dealing with Dead-Eyes, just look at this list; they are doing A, toachieve B, to finally achieve C. And all you need to think about, as it is allthe Dead-Eyes are thinking about, is ‘how do I achieve the next goal and makesure it connects to the main goal’. ]

They must alwaysbe working

Simple Behaviours For Encounters LiteralThey do not likemetaphor. Things mean one thing. If a thing tries to mean two things then itbecomes nothing.

LITERAL DOESN'TMEAN STUPID - they do not like metaphors,but they understand them. They know that you or other characters, arenot being literal, and they can understand that, but they themselves will doeverything they can to avoid it.

Taciturn, Concrete, Direct Get to thepoint, get there now and be explicit about what it is.

Use the minimalnumber of words to make things clear.

Do not 'chat'. Everyconversation has a clear and concise point towards which they are going.

Dead-Eye CultureLong ago thefirst of them emerged from a distant primal core. He made himself. That workgoes on. They believe they are improving. It is their mission to do so.

Their familytrees spring up, not down. Each generation more focused and efficient than thelast. This is the Ascent. Dead-Eye heredity. A machine of blood and bone,carrying them into the pre-remembered future. One of only two things in whichthey truly believe.

They havestatistics, and the graphs all show a clear upward trend. Production,efficiency and development, all increase.

They imagine thefuture and the things they will build there. It belongs to them. They want itmore. They understand it more. They will become what the future needs them tobe. The future is a god to them. A god-above-gods. They know it to be true.

Even as the raceslowly winds itself deeper and deeper into the earth, passing through frettedvalves and carved abandoned chambers they have made, falling in its orbit ofstone, they map their continual advance.

Each thing mustbe built upon another thing. A word, a deed, a thought, each must have itsfoundation. Arguments over the Ascent are arguments over reality itself.Without its sustaining foundation, the word becomes a gabble of sound, the deedan accident, the thought a dream, the existence a lie.

Dull One of the mostpowerful, wide-ranging and transformative of all the cultures of the Veins, theDead-Eyed Dwarves are dishwater-dull, to deal with. Utterly reliable and quiteinsane, they are a power second only to the Aelf-Adal, to whom they are almost immune,and with whom they enter irregular war.

Makers Of RuinThe totality oftheir physical effect on the Veins of the Earth is enormous. Dead-Eyesnever stop working, mining, carving, delving. They are always building,cutting, shaping, and thence always moving.

They cannot stopworking, ever.

This makes a Dead-Eyecity or settlement, more like the cast of a worm than a singular place. Theymine and carve EVERYWHERE, continually, they do not stop to inhabit very long. ADead-Eye settlement is like a time-worm; it’s not located in any particularplace but is continually being delved, leaving the carved and developed volumesbehind it, like the cast of a worm.

The Dead-Eyestherefore make the Veins more ‘ruined’ and more ‘empty’ than they wouldotherwise be, for an empty building can be empty in ways a cave cannot.

Dead-Eyes dostill consider that they 'own' anything that they have worked on, (that theyhaven't formally agreed to sell or exchange), which means these vastPiranesi-ruins that plunge through the Veins are technically 'theirs'.

Neutral, Practical EvilDead-Eyes do nottorture or psychologically destroy their slaves. Not deliberately at least.They simply kill them when they fail.

Skilled slavescan appear to rise far in Dead-Eye ownership, and will (any skill at work mustbe nurtured and sustained so that better work may be done). But it is not theindividual that is respected. It is the work. The work passing through thealien flesh.

They do notreally hate their slaves. They do not realise that they are beings at all. Onlyvectors for work.

They do notreally hate anyone. Because they really don’t know there is anyone there tohate.

Neutral, ultra-reliable,non-bigoted, they may be the sanest (?) culture in the Veins.

They arehonestly quite boring to encounter and maybe that's ok. Remember it’s not aboutoffending them, it’s unlikely you even could offend them, it’s aboutgetting in their way, and if you do get in their way, they will grind throughyou and over you with utter ruthless indifference. It’s almost like fightinggolem.

Skill Is MeaningThey respectskill. But it is the skill itself they respect, which is work movingthrough the body, not the body or the person itself, which are just bearers ofthe skill.

Work Is MeaningThe only otherthing they understand is work.

A body and amind are only useful because of the work they can together do. The soul is thework passing through the flesh.

No other racegrasps this. They might ask “What are the Dead-Eyes working towards? What istheir plan?”

They are workingto be working. Work is the plan. Work is the point.

They will neverstop. They can never stop.

They will cutcities from bare stone, tear up every vein, embellish every surface, then, whenthere is no unworked spot or unplanned gap, when every single piece and thinghas become a channel for planned creation, when even the pebbles stare up fromthe floor with idly-carved eyes, then they move on.

Gems meannothing to them except that they can be cut, or have been cut.

If one loses theability to work and if they cannot further the ascent, they simply walk intothe dark. Or sit where they are, staring at nothing, waiting to starve.

if a Dead-Eye iscrippled or otherwise prevented from working, they lose any will to live. They mustwork, they must proceed towards the goal. It is all they are. It iseverything they are.

JealousYes, ok, perhapsthey can be a little irrational. They are still Dwarves after all. Theycan be jealous of craft and ownership, especially of unique objects andmaterials. The RayMen and their wonderous tech inspire some of this, but manyethnogroups have a little this or that which really, really, should thatnot truly belong to the Dwarves?

No DreamsThey do notdream, rather they experience a lucid ebony. Its possible they are not even reallyunconscious, just ‘shut down’. What are the Nightmare-Men going to do? Givethem a spook?

Fidget SpinnersSince theyliterally can't stop working, they tend to have a lot of ... odd things they dowhen they can't physically work, like knitting. If they are waiting, they carvestones or rock where-ever they sit down, leaving tiny faces in pebbles or mapson flat slate. (Although you never actually see them 'waiting’.)

DON'T FORGET;The False Machine sale is STILL ON (I may or may not change it at the end of this Quarter, still thinking about that).

https://falseparcels.bigcartel.com/A Night at the Golden Duck = £5Deep-Carbon Observatory = £30 (-£10)Demon-Bone Sarcophagus = £20 (-£20)Gackling Moon = £25 (-£5)Gawain and the Green Knight = £15 (-£20)Silent Titans = £40Speak, False Machine = £30 (-£20)AND! - A FREE HEIST PLAN FOR EVERY (UK-BASED) ORDER - WHETHER YOU WANT IT OR NOT!!!! ALSO;FALSE MACHINE WHOLESALING!False Machine is now available for wholesale!If you are interested contact me anywhere to find out more!

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The paper was flayed skin. Around its borders were these words; “A map of Signs, like those which show the way to Grace or Down to Damnation, through good deeds or bad.” I studied thus and decided that the Great Signs must be the Saints, but of the lesser Signs and lines I knew not, but went in search of one who would speak to me of such, for ‘Five-Times-Five’ had gone.”

I mean how good a map do you expect to get for one tooth?

.....

In this opening part of 'Queen Mab's Palace', our Narrator, the Scribe, has arrived in the Crypt of her Palace, in the shadow of Saint Seven, the Time Saint, and fortunately, on that Saints Holy Day, meaning they arrive in the middle of a Market, and that it would be illegal to hunt and eat them, (at least within the bounds of the Market itself, and at least till the end of this Saints Day).

In attempting to learn more about the strange, dank Fairyland in which they find themselves, they (somehow) end up in position of (someone's) teeth, one of which they trade to 'Five-Times-Five' for a map of the crypt in which they now are set.

This is that map;

What we know but they do not, is that the 'Crypt' is the broken, de-powered and/or industrial sections of a gigantic space ship. If you could see ‘the crypt’ in a 3D image of the real-life ‘Queen Mab’, it would be like dark sections, occupying most of the shitty parts of the ship, the stuff around recycling, the ‘lower decks’ main cargo bay etc.

Seen like this, the ‘Crypt’ isn’t just a single blob of contiguous space, it would weave its way through and into the ‘Courts’, like a black dirty Octopus spreading tendrils everywhere.

The division between the ‘Crypt’ and the ‘Courts’ is as much social, political and religious, as it is material and practical. The ‘Crypt’ is dark, often wet, full of naked industrial machinery, often hot, or maybe far too cold. Its population are the ‘Dwellers’ a peasant/untouchable class.

To make some sense of this, consider a Medieval Map like the Hereford ‘Mappa Mundi’, the religious centrality of things is important. Here is a medieval map of the whole world;

As you can see, the whole world is represented. In the middle is Jerusalem, the holy city, and below it is the Mediterranean. I think the UK is bottom left.

The thing in the middle of the Crypt Map is the Court of Melinoe, Queen of the Underworld and beloved by all who Dwell Below.

The Flow

The ‘Flow’ is anything the Courts (above) flush or throw away. This stuff enters pipes, (praise the pipes), unless its isolated and trapped, in which case the Gongfarmers go get it.

Then it flows down the pipes, which merge like the streams leading to a river. All joining together. Then these streams meet at a Saint.

There are Seven Saints, as you know, and these are arranged on the map, each at the centre of their own drainage network.

Finding Your Way in the Crypt

What’s on the map has absolutely no real relationship to actual distances, but does have a good rough representation of relationships, especially the Flow. (The Flow is sacred).

How you might verbally describe a location is based on the Saint, first, then the direction uses the closest other saints as compass points, to tell which way someone is meant to orientate.

The spaces between the ‘flows’ are deserts, unusually dry and sometimes warm. The more ‘flow’ there is, the more likely it is to be wet, and perhaps cold, until you get real close to the Saint the flow is flowing to, when it may warm up again. There are also more people and stuf happening generally ‘downflow’ (which may be dangerous).

‘Five Turns Sixwards of Five’ is a pretty simple instruction for someone around Saint Five; just turn ‘Sixwards’ (people nearby will probably have a good general idea of which direction ‘Five’ is), and then take five major turns in that direction.

In ‘reality’ any guidance would be way more full of oddness and cryptic stuff that only makes sense when you do it, when you already know about it or just doesn’t make sense. Like;

’when five red gates do pass,
Courtwards of the merry lass,
Venomwards of Young do mark your measure,
Riddles be sung and drips be treasure’

What the fuck does this even mean? Presumably five rusted (red) gates or portals, then moving ‘Courtwards’, so usually upflow of ‘the merry lass’, whatever the fuck that is, maybe it makes sense when you get there. Then Venomwards (direction of saint Six), of ‘Young’ (Saint five), then riddles be sung, so maybe there is something stopping you, like one of the Pythians Sons (an insane uplifted automatic door), and then ‘drips be treasure’, its really dry and you will need to conserve liquids? But you get the general vibe.

.......................

To explain a little more about the Crypt and the Saints, here is a fragment from one of the several appendicies of 'Queen Mab's Palace' where one of the Endothermic Knights describes the Seven Saints of the Crypt

SAINT ONE - THE RAIN SAINT

"Whose day is called ‘Rainsday’ and who hangs upright in a mighty vault. The Market lies beneath, where the dribs of flow trickle down the great saints side and drip a soft pattering rain. Any drop may be the Vile Flow, or the Pure, and the Many turn upwards, bare their tongues, and risk the Vile that they might taste a Pure Tear of the Rain Saint.

SAINT TWO - THE CHAIN SAINT

The second Saint is mighty, though He sleeps. He is the Chain Saint and Chainsday his day. The pipes of the Flow are fed and laced in below the holy carapace. Flakes of this are treasured. Mab herself is pleased by their colour. (You must never cut or strike them from His shell, for this is Heresy most Foul.) The Market is atop his back and each great chain around him has a small shrine at its base, past which the people climb.

SAINT THREE - THE PILGRIM SAINT

The third is the Pilgrim Saint, for the many which attend him. He is a saint-vertical and clings to His shroud of iron as a maggot clings to flesh. Blessed with a ripeness and roundness, yet also a longness and a greatness of legs, and with Hairs, and the sides of the Saint are marked with gods-eyes. Huge seeds float out from His holy Pores and gust about. They are of worth if caught, and his shed Hairs are of facility. On Pilgrimsday the Market is before his eyes, on a great bridge which crosses a rumbling and jumbling torrent of the impure flow. This he gnaws and makes into bricks of safe, pure flow-stuff which pile beneath him in a spoil, amongst which scavengers reign. Above them, on the bridges edge, Hydraulic Monks meditate by looking into his faceted black eyes.

SAINT FOUR - THE SAINT OF BLOOD

The fourth Saint is the Saint of Blood and stirs, half-sleeping in a chamber of strange waters. Soft and tasty, glossy, pulsing black, fat with blood, with a great ringed maw of infinite teeth which pulses open and closed as if dreaming of a feast. He is like a great raw steak. Rafts set out into the Blood Saints lake and carve off hunks of His rich meat. Thrice-purified blood-pipers drain thick life from within, selling it cold or warmed, by pint and vat. The Bloodsday market lies around the blood-lake rim. ‘Tis deadly land. We walk the circle round to harrow Crimes, but ill is often done, for the market shares a border with the unlit dark and the fat iron reek makes it easy to hide murder thereabout.

SAINT FIVE - THE YOUNG SAINT

The fifth day is Birthsday and is the Young Saints time. They are propped up as if sitting, with an archway set about them. Less pipemartyred than others, the Young Saint supports Theyself. The Young Saint glows a cool, bright, moonlike light. This blessed luminescence enlightens all who see it. They wriggle freely and are soothed and polished, and anointed with oils, by Hydraulic Monks, collecting Orbs of luminescent liquid pearl which hold the sacred gleam of Their dripping innards. They love the Young Saint, as do we all!

SAINT SIX - THE VENOM SAINT

The Sixth day is Venomsday and their market is set within the circle of the Saints body with great limbs spread about like the spars of wrecked ships, and we walk along the Saints flank, keeping watch. This very deadly and wonderous saint is curled in a great circle, alike unto a centipede with his martyr-pipes set into his back. The Venom Saint is wrathful and half-sleeps. He dreams of violence! Sacred lances pierce its small mind. When He twitches, the Monks cry out “more power!” and rush to huge wheels which they run inside, which thereby spark the lance of mercy. It is a safe day for all must pass the Toxic Gates, where the Monks collect the Holy Venom, and if the Saint smells blood on any man, He begins to twitch and wake, therefore none dare blood to spill. Even the Drinker of Poison cannot transform all and so deadly poison drips continually from his forcipules. At times toxic fumes mist up from the venom wells and drift across the market.”

SAINT SEVEN - THE TIME SAINT

Here is where we begin, and if you wish to know more, you must wait till the book is ready.

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A Nut is an hospitable object - a surprisingly useful thing for those who make their concourse in the Veins of the Earth.

First; it keeps for a long time, is singular, storable, divisible and portable.

Second it comes from Above; few nuts grow below, (except perhaps for the equally-distant Isles of the Imprisoned Moon), and therefore it is rare.

Third; it’s hard to adulterate a nut. They can be cursed or poisoned, but that takes a meaningful investment of rare resources. A nut has good security to it.

Fourth; it is a neat compressed source of calories. Not so much as to place a painful debt on the receiver, but more than, for instance, a seed.

Fifth, finally and most important; it is a thing never before seen and which will never be seen again, lending it a certain poetic aspect in the cultures of the Veins, where secrets are adored.

| | | Clara Peeters, Still life with nuts candy and flowers 1611 |

Rituals of GreetingThis makes a nut a quite generous (but not too generous) gift with which to open negotiations.

Such is the theatre of the Nut; two groups meet beneath the earth. First they scent or hear each other, then see each others light. Each makes signs of peace and the factions approach slowly until the boundary of their lamplight (roughly 30ft) meets.

One from each company is sent forth, each standing directly beneath the lamp-light of the other, proving no ill intent on either side.

Then the lamps are brought together, making a pool of shared and intensified light where the leaders of each group may sit.

Here comes the nut, (if you have one).

"Allow me please, to give a thing never before seen, and once seen, never to be seen again."

Here one displays the nut upon an open palm. The recipient gently takes the nut. Rolls it between their palms, smells it, examines its texture with hand and eye.

"Truly beautiful, a rare and unique gift."

Then the recipient may break open the nut themselves, or hand it over to one stronger of their own side, (which means something, everything said and done in the nut ceremony means something), who breaks it open for them.

The 'secret' is revealed. All present admire this heretofore unseen thing.

The recipient consumes the nut.

It’s a handshake, but a firm one. Those in poverty might offer, at least, a seed. The wealthy might offer meat, (but to offer too much would be to create a debt, almost an aggressive act). An Aelf-Adal Lord might offer a terrifyingly expensive, unique and impractical gift, this is an act of chaotic and charismatic dominance, which creates a link of fealty. Of course you cannot say “no”. A Knotsman might offer exactly what you need, with no immediate price. This is a trap and an attack on you which it may be hard to resist.

A Nut is a pleasingly minor but substantial, yet elegant, gift. It’s hard not to negotiate reasonably and in good faith with someone who has presented you with a nut.

Corporatism and Hospitality In Veins Of The EarthThe Veins could not exist and if they did you certainly could not easily 'adventure' through them.

Therefore, in the imagined world, the small cultures of the Veins; tribes, villages and pilgrims, are calmer and more corporate than many of their real-world equivalents might have been. Here are some examples of how this works in play and both diegetic and game-design reasons why this is so.

Broad Non-AggressionIt’s a war of all against all but not a lawless war of all against all.

There are 'Civilisations' in the volumes, and though their grip is tenuous and vague, it becomes more vital the slighter it becomes. The signs and symbols of power mean less, the closer to its centre one is. Out in the margins, where the power may or may not exist, its signs, symbols and promises become much more important. Exactly which Lord is everyone in fealty too, and which Coagulation do they serve?

People really do not like or want chaos or disorder. It makes it hard to live.

So there are 'Civilised' people who exist largely or nominally under the 'protection' of say a City or a Group, like perhaps they have a Knotsman Contract, and above them perhaps an Aelf-Adal Terror-Lord who rules maybe thousands of nearly-impenetrable kilometres away.

Let’s say the PCs Murder-Hobo a community, take everything they have, then roll into the next Coagulation, or into a Pilgrim People.

These new-encountered people will almost certainly know exactly what the PCs have done. Resources don't come from anywhere and they will recognise whatever has been taken. They were probably well aware of the Group the PCs murderised. They may have even been in conflict with the same group at points.

They will happily trade for these resources, (keeping a close eye and guard on the PCs this whole time). That's just being practical. If there is a real 'evil' in the Veins, it is; wasting resources.

Nevertheless, word will get back. Via Bat and trader, by psychic dream-signal or forgotten hypertechnology, first one group, then another, will discover the PCs reputation. Word will get back to the City, to the Lord, and the Lord must have Order, of a sort, in their realm.

It’s a war of all against all but it can never be allowed to blossom into chaos. There must be some form of retribution, recompense, penance, punishment or service.

The reach of the Lord is long, slow and inconsistent, but memories last down here and nothing the PCs do will be forgotten. And if the Lord is an Aelf-Adal, then their reach pierces darkness, flesh and stone. There is no escape, ever, anywhere.

Hospitality“I let you share my light.”

No-one has any duty to keep you alive or give you resources.

However, if a deal is to be made, they should at least offer you an acorn of something drinkable, a few seeds worth of food, some light and warmth, at least until you have talked things out.

Of course you will be expected to return this in kind, even if an agreement is not reached.

In 'ideal' circumstances this leads to a cycle of functional giving, starting with letting someone into your circle of light, and ending with a handshake deal for resource exchange.

Even if things don't work out, its considered civilised to give minor gifts equivalent to the cost of the negotiation before you nope out of there.

Just leaving with no exchange at all, really fucks up your reputation.

Equivalent ExchangeIf you stay with a Tribe, Coagulation or Group, for a period, benefitting from their light, their warmth, their food and presumably their ears listening for you in the dark, it’s a nearly iron law that you exchange with them resources at least equivalent to the cost of keeping you.

This can lead to different groups, say a Tribe of Once-Men and the travel caravan of a RayMan trader, occupying different sides of a river or cavern, their lights kept separate with a measurable stretch of darkness between.

They are not dicking each other over, just being very very careful about not implying any obligation or debt between them. It’s a way of keeping the peace.

Likewise, if one of these groups is attacked in the night, the other may refuse to intervene, and this would not necessarily be taken as an insult or aggressive action. Intervening in someone else’s battle creates a debt and that debt may be hard to carry.

Waiting for a group to nearly-win a fight, then charging in to help them finish it off, will not be taken as a positive helpful act. They had nearly won anyway and your intervention has created a debt they cannot deny but do not wish to suffer. Assume malicious compliance hereafter.

Game Design TermsIn terms of actually gaming this means Veins populations are actually more 'corporate' minded than many actual populations encountered during, for example, the European Age of Exploration.

A main problem for a Pith-Helmeted European explorer, apart from the environment and massive cultural differences, is simply the number of tribes you have to deal with. Each of these groups will have its own politics, its own relationships with adjacent groups, its own leaders, mood, attitude to foreigners etc etc. Thats twenty, thirty, fifty individual encounters with fifty different tribes with essentially a random generation engine whirring in the background each time, and you (the explorer) can't afford to be taxed that much with each group, and you can't afford for things to spiral out of control even once, or you die.

Empires solve this problem by simply murdering anyone who disagrees and telling whoever is left that yes actually you all live under the same rules now and no you don't get to take individual taxes or even fight each other without permission.

It was easier for a European traveller to move across the whole expanse of Eurasian Islam, (provided they could match the behavioural codes), or across the gigantic steppe empire of the Khans (provided they had the right disc from the Great Khan), than across much of Central Africa (fifty tribes again).

So the Veins are a 'bit' more 'Imperial' than they could reasonably be expected to be. Simply to make it possible to move through them. Though, there are vast areas of 'wilderness stone' where who knows what might happen, as well as disputed areas, actions and polities, reaving borderlands, unexpectedly desperate or shifty populations, general monsters, Olm, and god knows what else.

'Adventure' like 'Exploration' fundamentally requires a boundary between the more-known, more organised, and the lawless unknown. To 'Adventure' is to move back and forth across these zones, usually from a place of law and organisation, into a place with no, or unrecognised law. Resources are gathered from the margins, but they only become resources if there is somewhere else you can take them where their value is renegotiated.

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(My friend and I did a multi-hour podcast on this. You can listen to it here.)A slender and capacious book, like the shadow of a flame on sunlit marble.In the years around the Second World War, Margurite Yourcenar found, through study, obsession and spiritual refinement, a method to travel through time. Thus the book; the mirror of a shadowless man and his true love, and of an Empire, and an Age.Yourcenars OdysseyThe final part of 'Memoirs of Hadrian', contains a compressed chapter of notes Yourcenar made about, and during, its creation. This alone would make a grand saga, (which is probably why she included it). Here are some very extremely compressed and cut-down highlights;1924 - Yourcenar concieves of 'Memoirs', gets some way along, then burns the pages as the work isn't good enough. (The first of many such forgettings)..Next- Flauberts quote is discovered;

"The melancholy of the antique world seems to me more profound than that of the moderns, all of whom more or less imply that beyond the dark void lies immortality. But for the ancients that “black hole” was infinity itself; their dreams loom and vanish against a background of immutable ebony. No crying out, no convulsions — nothing but the fixity of a pensive gaze. With the gods gone, and Christ not yet come, there was a unique moment, from Cicero to Marcus Aurelius, when man stood alone."

Probably not entirely true but sounds cool as shit. Its curious that Flaubert is also someone who re-wrote the same book many many times. He re-did his 'Temptation of St Anthony' before every other major work. .1934 to 1936 - Yourcenar re-starts and abandons the project again and again. Only one sentance was retained of the 1934 edition..1939 - Project abandoned. Despair. Off to America..1947 - In the U.S.. Burn the notes again..1948 - a trunk of old possessions and letters arrives from Switzerland. While going through them, Yourcenar runs into a letter; "My dear Mark...." Who is this 'Mark'? Wait! its the Hadrian book!. Re-commits to writing it (again)..1848 to 1951 - re-making the book, but also writing vast sections every night 'in almost automatic fashion' and

"the result of those long self-induced visions whereby I could place myself intimately within another period of time. The merest word, the slightest gesture, the least perceptible implications were noted down; scenes now summed up in a line or two, in the book as it is, passed before me in the fullest detail, and as if in slow motion. Added all together, these accounts would have afforded material for a volume of several thousand pages, but each morning I would burn all the work of the night before."

.1951 - 'Memoirs of Hadrian' are published..There is much more, in detail, depth, and philosophy, than I have sketched out above. The book that finally was born, is a crystallisation, combination and perhaps last cannibal embryo, of a book that was being researched, written, burnt, re-written, burnt a bit more, forgotten, remembered, re-made, for about 26 years. Consequential years; 1924 to 1951, from the death of an old world through utter catastrophe, to the birth of a new. Triply consequential for Yourcenar; she changed a lot.This might be what makes 'Memoirs' feel more like a mirror into a living time, and a living soul, than any other book I have read. I feel like I met Hadrian.(And yes Yourcenar may well have, accidentally or deliberately, crossed paths with those other pre-and-during WWII female historical writers; Rebecca West, (Black Lamb, Grey Falcon), and Naomi Mitcheson, (Corn King and Spring Queen), who were also writing increadible defining works about the same time - what the _hell_ was going on with women in the pre-war world? Was there really such an explosion of talent as it seems to me?)HadrianHe is the flame and the shadow of the flame; a god of 'civitas', a bringer of peace, defender of civilisation, reformer, liberaliser, a man who set a boundary to eternal expansion. A compelling, brilliant, charming, dark and self-deceiving man.So much of what happens around him takes place in a gilded shadow which is in part, simply the darkness of the Ancient world, particularly its sexual politics, and is in much of the rest, the necessary darkness of Imperial power. A truly decent kind, compassionate and forgiving man would not have survived for long as Emperor. You must be half a cunt to do the job.Really, if you are going to be ruled by a sexually predatory, occasionally mass-murdering (when necessary), assassinating, (minimally, probably), occasionally vindictive, (now and then), terrifying, (in the most gentle, kind and _civilised_ way), highly-intelligent, hyper-manipulative, high-arts loving general (for a Roman Emperor) peacenick, you would really want to be ruled by Hadrian. (At least by this Hadrian). He is sane, rational, reasonable, almost never makes political mistakes, reforms and repairs things everywhere he goes, fixes systems, ensures stability and growth, builds cities, loves poetry and the arts, governs without terror; he is a chill Napoleon.And yet. The most beautiful darkness wavers around him. He is probably lying to us about at least some things; either as a consequence of lying to himself, or a more simple deception. (Yourcenar claims in her notes that there were moments when she 'allowed' the Emperor to lie to her.) A few necessary assassinations here and there, perhaps some intrigue with the late Emperors wife.It would be wonderful and frightening to meet Hadrian in person, here is a fascinating man who focuses on you utterly, disarms you, charms you, subtly excavates you, makes what use of you he can, gently amends you problems and sets you aside, He has the legal and material power to kill you and everyone you love, and everyone they love, and honestly, you can burn the city too.He swims in liquid power like a shark in saltwater, but, even for this sensitive and self-aware genius, that power alters him and warps his world, his reality, in ways even the master cannot see.Its the subtlety of his mind that attracts. A different story would be a more classic, punchy, and obvious fall into decadence, then rage and paranoia, of a man made, (or who made himself), Emperor of the known world. What we get with Hadrian is not that, but an alteration, a shift, as if through a lens warping. The subtlety of the mind experiencing that shift, and the fact that he may be unconsciously and directly lying both to us, but first, himself, is what makes it tantalising. Because, if he were sitting next to you, Hadrian could explain and excuse everything he does, and you would believe him.What is Reality to such a mind, on such a throne?The Murder of a HawkT.H. White, the writer of 'The Sword in the Stone', wrote a book in which he tries to raise and train an hawk in the medieval style, using the methods of a medieval hawk-raising manual. Its something of a horror story. He has no metis, no actual practical experience of the animal he is trying to train, and day by day, piece by piece, things go horribly, utterly wrong - he accidentally destroys the animal behaviourally, creating something that cannot be used for hawking, but that cannot perhaps live in the wild. Even his constant petting of the hawks head rubs away its natural feather-oil and produces an unpleasant mess. The end is a screeching prisoner that must be murdered or kept forever.
The core of the book, and of Hadrians story, is his relationship with Antinous, a greek, boy really, who he meets on the cusp of manhood, and essentially takes, keeping him until Antinous commits suicide before the age of 20.Hadraian’s relationship with Antinous, the love of his life, reminded me a lot of this book by T.H.White

This gets more and more discomforting the more you think about the actual ages of Antinous and Hadrian when they first met, and about the fact that this is Hadrians One True Love. Truly, this exquisitely controlled and comprehensive man, allows no chaos in his life, almost never loses control, except for this one soul, and the event of his death. Here, for the first, last and only time, Hadrian utterly loses his shit, and loses himself. Being the Emperor Hadrian, his vast exhalation of grief also takes the form of building an entirely new city named after his beloved where his beloved will be worshipped as a god, creating a Cult of Antinous, a new religion, or aspect of one, in which the deified boy will be worshipped across the empire, ordering statues and presumably paintings of Antinous, making more statues of Antinous, making more statues of Antinous and having those hollowed out so they can be carried around with Hadrian and set up wherever he currently is (the guy travels a lot). Also; more statues of Antinous, maybe some songs and a poem cycle as well.

| | | there’s always room for another statue of Antinous |

What is love then? If the vastness of grief is a true indicator of the depth of love, then Hadrian was certainly in love.Still, he destroyed that boy. Picked up around 12 or 13 by the ruler of the known world. Carted around with him. Adored. Not that smart, but with a near-religious devotion to his Emperor. His final suicide comes in the form of a magical ritual which, the story suggests, was meant to be a gift of life to the man-god Hadrian. Antinous had no way out and perhaps couldn't imagine or conceive of wanting a way out. The psychological, political, intellectual and even spiritual, (Hadrian is a god*), domination of the Emperor is so total that he warps reality around him. But it seems not everything can be so warped without breaking. Even if Antinous is not precisely a victim in the 21C Western sense, he is certainly a sacrifice.

(Hadrian; “Of course I’m not actually a god.. (I kind of am though).

Such men we cannot strongly judge, (though I just did). The gap between us, in power, psychology and distant time, is just too great. But aren't those gaps exactly what Yourcanar was trying to leap across? She worked 25 years to put is in that room. Why then, if not to judge? Perhaps simply to see, to know. An advanced, expansive, slave-empire, bound, (which may have killed it), a high culture of subtlety and luxury described. Just as the Emperor can never know what a slave knows every day, (Hadrian himself tells us this), there must be sights that can only be seen from the pinnacle. (The next time someone asks me for my religious/philosophical affiliation I will just say that 'my dreams loom and vanish against a background of immutable ebony').

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A book of monsters, of visions. A 102-page pure art book with “12 iconic monsters from the pastiche swirl of d&d's fantasy pool ….

“Gnome, Nereid, Salamander, Sylph. Ogres, Hags, Dragons, Basilisk/Cockatrice, Orc, Manticore. And two Very Much d&d , the Catawhere and Eye Tyrant.";

Art, and Expressionist art in particular, is hard to review and think about, so instead I forced the artist to do that, by interviewing them! What follows is a pretty wide-ranging interview gathered roughly into the following general subjects;* Texture * Colour * Composition * Form * Orcs * Big Ideas There are lots of close-ups of fragments of the pages, used when talking about specific elements, and because I didn’t want to try replicating any of the full illustrations other than those already included in the promotional text. I wouldn’t want you to take the impression of these fragments as the impression of the works as a whole, let along when held in hand, which creates a much stronger impression.Texture

pjamesstuart; ok so a huge amount of the book seems to be its textures. Are these different on every single page?SCRAP_ULTRA_WORLD; Yup different on every page, each was hand layed (with the cut out images on top) out on a piece of real estate sign for ease in scanning. This actually turned out to have some problems later because I didn't cut the real estate signage to consistent size.pjamesstuart; Did you have any particular plan for these?SCRAP_ULTRA_WORLD; That each monster section should have its own unique background texture. That's about it

this is printed on the paper (my photo isn’t very good)

pjamesstuart; They seem to be made up of complex layers of actual physical materials treated in various ways, and maybe of some deliberate use of digital scanning errors? What else went into these?SCRAP_ULTRA_WORLD; I'm not sure about deliberate scanning errors..oh wait no yeah the Catawhere has some . Oh and the Orc and Eye Tyrant chapter heads.Done by dragging or moving an image while it was mid-scan.One of the Catawhere was done with photocopy fuckery.Some of the process for the textures involved digging through a box of ink and texture experiments and seeing if anything was suitable.Or just messing around with whatever paints/oils/spraypaint/ink/paper I had lying around and then letting it dry outside, and then sometimes using it but often reworking it or not using it at all.90% blind experimentation and then selective curating the results.Though wanting each chapter texture to have its own feel meant sometimes I went "okay no more ink shennigans , going to have find something else"

| | | John Blanche once said that with a really good picture, even the smallest part of it, when examined in isolation, should be interesting to look at, which I think is true of this book. |

pjamesstuart; How did working on the textures intermix with choosing and making the figures? Did it happen in parallel? In Sequence?SCRAP_ULTRA_WORLD; For the vast bulk of it the pictures were done first, then textures created and pictures arranged as the textures were done.However the decision to create a chapter head meant needing to create a extra page (as to keep the page count divisible by 4) , and sometimes that meant creating more drawings for the extra texture page.pjamesstuart; Whats a 'standard' (if any could be), workflow for making a page of Malustrious Brood?SCRAP_ULTRA_WORLD; Um.. once the drawings were "done" (i.e I thought I had roughly enough be doing a crude layout) , I'd dig through my old projects and experiments and see if there was something. If nothing , try and think of something I hadn't messed around before with and if it felt appropriate to the vibe of the creature.Then once this , sometimes considerably back and forth, process had created a use texture page , I'd then try and arrange some of the drawings on it.This usually resulted in frustrations that I was going to have to cover up the most interesting bits of the texture, as none of the texture pages were created with that much considerable with where anything would go on top.Sometimes the drawings would get swapped between pages as space and overall context demanded. I tried to get all the loose sketches together and also give the more developed ones space to breathe (often giving them their own page just for them)So yeah it was a whole process of curation , reacting and adjustment , to get the drawings to work with each textured page, there wasn't just in the way of a deliberate plan.

The Orc probably had the most planning as I wanted to have them "echo" through the background of subsquent Orc pages by photocopying and repeating some of the drawings (sometimes on transparency film).Plus trying to get a "very angry school boy creating a scrap book of murderers , weapons and world war 2 facts" feel to itA quick video of the boards;

SCRAP_ULTRA_WORLD; Incomplete list of things used in the textures:Rags, stained rags, old singlet, old t-shirt, design on old singlet blown up with photocopier to giant size, lace, glue, grease, baking soda, rust, blood, ink , spraypaint, butchers paper, vinegar, pva, spray varnish , water colour, ohp transparency , sewing diagrams, house paint, translucent paper, real estate sign imagery

Colour

pjamesstuart; There are many colours in this book. Did you have any kind of conscious plan or intended method, or did you just do everything based on VIBES?

| | | Many forms are almost like beer tankards filled with a thick cloudy brew slowly mixing into something else |

SCRAP_ULTRA_WORLD; Nothing super conscious , other than seeking a more diverse palette as the project went onIf I had planned it out more , I would of made more an effort to have the Nerieds be more greens and the Sylphs be more blues. As it was they ended up blending into each a little too much.As a fix for that I post scan adjusted the Nereids colours a little and arranged the elementals by the name Elemental so the Sylph and Nereid wouldn't be right beside each other.pjamesstuart; Most creature-types have a main dominant colour that appears in a variety of forms, and maybe one or two other spot colours. What tells you what colours something is meant to be?SCRAP_ULTRA_WORLD; Again just vibes. Some got a bigger range of colour experimentation (ogres) , others arguable got too little (Salamander, Gnome) . I think the monsters that already had a strong consistent design, that I myself wanted to redefine (Orcs, the Elemental Spirits) , I ended up sticking to a narrow focused palette , while the ones were it was already wide open (dragon , ogre) I just went with whatever. I'm not 100% sure why though(Eye Tyrant might be an exception here)Basilisks got a lot sickly colours , and I wanted to really have some jaundice yellows, bruise purples , infected pus greens in there. Anything to make this thing look dangerous.

| | | closeup of a highly polychromatic beast |

pjamesstuart; What did you use? I see pens like biros, felt tip pens? Some things look like watercolours but could be created some other way.SCRAP_ULTRA_WORLD; Yeah good old biros, felt tip pens of a variety of quality , ethanol to bleed inks out, water colours, water colour crayons, regular crayons, twink, charcoal , ink , acrylic paint, house paint, pencils, photocopy toner

pjamesstuart; Some colouring follows the shading a form might have, other colouring is more like you poured thick liquid into a glass the shape of the creature and shined light through it. Other is like lines of energy within a beast. Do you know when you start out what you are going to do?SCRAP_ULTRA_WORLD; I think I always start with the "line" and add lines until it's done or it needs something else , then hit it with colour using whatever medium.Then it's a case of adding more colour or line to fix whatever just went wrong and it either working out or turning shit , in which case start again.I heavily favour mediums that can put on top of each in any order , as I don't think I've ever successfully done the old "little pencil, colour blocking, final inking" method. I've tried it , but it looks so lobotomized when I do it, I've all but abandoned that approach.Crayons are a pain as you can't really go over them that well but can successfully go pretty much anything else, and allow colours that lack innate opacity to go over darks.Back to the question: I have "hunches" and "itches" but every step is a surprise and something like a friendly but heated argument .I've got a maxim about "an Okay drawing is useless" , so if a drawing feels like it's "okay" (as in I can reliably create something with that amount of Good) , I'll keep experimenting until it hits a "high tide mark" or otherwise rare quality I'm not sure I could get again. (this might not mean it's a final drawing, it might instead be saved to serve as guidance )Or it's completely destroyed , but valuable data and inspiration is generated.I think of this as sacrifices to Tiamat; and sometimes you just lose a drawing that seemed to have potential , and sometimes you get a happy accident.Speaking of which:pjamesstuart; This isn't really about colour but; some places monster faces & other things are scratched through, or blasted over, so it feels like the page was a screen and was glitching or a photograph that was overexposed. How did you do this?

SCRAP_ULTRA_WORLD; This is the whole "keeping going until the drawing is destroyed or brilliant" thing. Sometimes the page actually rips , requiring sticking additional paper underneath. Actually sometimes something on the other side ends perfectly fitting and getting used. The eye on the Antiphoenix from Veins of The Earth is actually a mark on a piece of paper that was beneath the initial drawing . It was revealed when a hole was torn from working on too wet ink and then permanent attached to the drawing when it perfectly fit.This is Tiamat throwing me the occasional blessing for everything in art and life that I've inadvertently sacrificed on her altar .One of the Manticore's has a similar effect , but I think it was me scrapping back layered crayon to rework something and the underlying effect was really good so kept it. I think I added a pupil though?

Composition

pjamesstuart; Thanks for the responses! Next I want to talk about COMPOSITION, (after that will be 'form' which will be the last one).Do you know there is a kind of natural curl to a lot of your single-page compositions? Especially for the more lithe & loopy monsters? I will try to make a little image of this.

It begins at the top left, curves into the centre or lower right, forms a pool there and spirals out into the lower left again, often as a tail or limbOther compositions are 'blot' or 'block' monsters which are placed like they were poured into the belly of the page and then slowly spread out.The 'loop' in particular reminds me a lot of the Z shape Frazetta often worked into his painting.Did you have any particular plan for composing the one page and two page images, or any effect you wanted to achieve?What was the methodology?How do you know if a page 'looks wrong' or 'feels wrong'?SCRAP_ULTRA_WORLD; HUHI did not know there was this SECRET SIGILOut of all the haphazard intuitive processes that went into this book, composition is probably the most haphazard of all.The considerations are mainly so each drawing gets enough "space" and doesn't too greatly mirror or be similar to the surrounding drawings (including any on a opposite page)EXCEPT when its a collection of "concept" drawings, where I thought it grand to show or suggestion the developing of the process and the various alternative possibilities that rapidly fire off in my brainOther considerations is to with the gutter and place the monsters, were possible , so they don't look like they are running away into the gutter (so heads to the edge, tails to the spine)

Form

pjamesstuart; Edge Detection - does your brain have this? Because the vision of the world one often gets from your work is that things often just don't have boundaries, but kind of vibrate like quantum particles, or blur like a time-lapse map of the borders of eastern europe. I mean, are edges a thing in your reality?SCRAP_ULTRA_WORLD; Yes But No. Like there's this deep deep deep contrary instinct in me that always seeks out contradictions, exceptions, inconsistencies, stray threads and just Points Them Out. I think it manifests in art (somewhat) by a resistance to going "yes this definitely the Limits Of This Things" , and a desire to portray the buzzing border of potential movement, past movement, spiritual intensity, failure of perception, stink, noise, unclaritySo it's like Post Modernism going "look at all these things obstacles that prevent us from seeing truth"but unlike.. whatever strain of post-modernism is that kinda goes "so..guess truth isn't really thing", instead we must see The Noise as well as The Signallike understanding the limits of truth should make us appreciate the effort for truth and not dismiss it to seek solipsismpjamesstuart; dang you actually have a philosophy behind thisSCRAP_ULTRA_WORLD; It's more I getting philosophy from it if I look at it and think about Why, but ultimately I do it because it's my nature

pjamesstuart; Is a body for you just a carrier for eyes and teeth? The toothed grin is like a signature for your work. (Also, did you know in miniature painting some painters emphasise 'eyes and teeth', because they seem to play some dominant role in helping people perceive and organise a facial form?) If you have EYES plus TEETH, what is the third or fourth thing you need to show what something is?SCRAP_ULTRA_WORLD; I think they are just really good at giving a coherence to something incoherent and because my drawings risk/are total incoherent explosion , slapping the teeth and eyes in there really gives it a hook.The spine or jawline tends to be the first thing I draw

pjamesstuart; Do you study anatomy? Some images strongly suggest yes, but it is as if there are two spirits fighting inside much of your art, one trying to locate actual things in space, with muscles and gravity and skin and stuff, and the other being more like 'wait what if there was none of that and things were basically energy and not 'things' at all'

SCRAP_ULTRA_WORLD; yeah but badly? I'm terrible at drawing things in front of me , I don't have very clear "mental images" , drawing almost feels like sculpting with twitchy ambulatory wire to me? Like the pen starts making marks and I battle with it to get it to do something I want.But spending frustrating time trying to draw accurate from a reference does help inform this "sculpting". To that end , I've attended life drawing books, have several (Probably over half a dozen?) anatomy books (human and other animals) and spend time and effort learning about the muscles and the bones etc.I also find it really interesting because I Too Have Bones and Muscles and The Desire To Improve Them.But I think it's know how impactful departure from plausibility is when it comes to monster designpjamesstuart; Do you have preferred shapes? (A slight teardrop shape seems to come up quite a bit in a lot of your art.)SCRAP_ULTRA_WORLD; I try and avoid falling into patterns too much , but the most consistent shapes that show up when I start scribbling are:Long shapes like snakes, eels, sharksBeaked shapes or triangle head shapesAmbiguous quadrupedsHunched over big limbed bipedspjamesstuart; Do you know when a form is right? How do you know?SCRAP_ULTRA_WORLD; It's like.. when someone tells a joke and the when you realize that you think its funny? In fact laughter is sometimes my reaction to when I get a form or expression right. There's a sense of both surprise and recognition ?When a form is wrong.. it's either because it's obvious and absent of energy (something can be obvious and Have Energy though) or like something about it interferes with its own dynamic and needs The Energy Bolded or The Blockage Destroyed . Or I guess it's just gone completely wrong and its not even recognizable.

Orcs

pjamesstuart — How on earth did you come up with so many good pictures of fucking Salamanders? 😂 There's like three bangers in a row here.SCRAP_ULTRA_WORLD — Lizards is a good shapeThink the palette there is a bit monotonous but the expressions are really goodConceptual I'm most pleased with my riff on the orc

pjamesstuart — Tell me what you like about the Orc concept you came up with.

SCRAP_ULTRA_WORLD — That it riffs off the old use of it meaning "spirits of the dead", Tolkiens use of as the spectre of industrialized warfare, and dehumanization monstrosity cycles.Plus having a fancy angle in suggesting they are a memetic virus that co-opts the " immunisation" response ( the fear of the enemy becoming or being orcs is a vector for infection as people justify their increase in brutality and ruthlessness)But also can work as a pure game utility "it's okay to kill these guys because they are distilled war criminals"Visually I tried to get some of the Orcs to have this ambiguous mix of panic, hate , anger, fearWhile others are pure hell bastards

But yeah one of the nasty things about war propaganda that is tapping into the legimately fear that any human population has a capacity for brutality, and that brutality is easily expressed on outsider groupsAnd by exploiting that fear , it then feeds and utilizies that capacityTo be honest my original motivation for putting design notes in between the chapters was do a bit how fucking weird dominant voices solution to "fixing" orcs was to lean hard for into "we are 1000% here all our fans making their sexy noble savage baddie OC 😍😍😍"But nah didn't think it was worth the page space doing a The Kids Aren't Right bitThe only bit I left in like that was mentioning the extra limbs on the CatawhereI also had a bit about manticores getting wings from Gygaxian shenanigans idk just seems like fillerDitto some early waffle about the origins of some of these, like fuck I just wikipediaring, people can do that themselves

Big Ideas

pjamesstuart; That was all I could think of to ask about the art in a 'pure art' sense, like about the acts of creation and construction, but I haven't asked any like 'meta level' questions, (which I tend to avoid), but you did have a fair amount of complex ideas about Orcs, so; Are there any 'big ideas' you had about the monsters? * Anything you discovered or thought you understood more? * Anything you were trying to get across? * Is there..... a SUBTEXTS???? or like a metaphor or meaning or whatever, in these images? SCRAP_ULTRA_WORLD*; Yeah any "big ideas" I tried to include in the chapter heads.While the initial idea was "do a bunch of versions of that monster" , the process involved exploring both what is the essence of that monster both visually and conceptually/psychologically.With both very intertwined and probably inseparable, but still distinct somehow.think exploring the concept-essence of each monster was far more of a reductive process; like is a hag a hag because she lives in a hut in the wilderness? Or is a hag likely to be in the wilderness because she's feared ? And then why is she feared? It's her power, and what are her powers etc?Compare a manticore being in the wilderness , to me you start losing something of the manticore if you take it out of the wilderness, there's something about the manticore that is a manifestation of an unknown wilderness and the wild stories that start coming from it.Actually as an aside here these are actually different wildernesses. A wilderness with a hag in it , is the wilderness "beyond the hedge" , a wildness just outside your lights and most tread paths. (so could be remote villages, sewers , slums, ruins, back roads, islands etc).While manticore wilderness is "here be dragons" wilderness; blasted nigh untamable terrains and desolate vistas.Having a "here be hags" on very remote area of the map or a manticore living in a forest a hour away from a city , creates interesting questions but I think both are subversions or deconstructions.As in doing something interesting with a disconnection or conceptual jolt, which only happens if something about it doesn't quite make sense.While exploring the visual essence of each monster was (mainly) and expansive process; seeing how far I could push it basically.But note when I talk about any of this I want to be clear it's not the "ideas, theory, then art" that art academic likes to present as The Only True Path. All this is stuff I think about in retrospect or sometimes as a weird chattering aside in my brain as I work on something; it's commentary but it's not the navigator or captainI think ultimately art is the space the between words, if its completely reducible in words then you should just use wordsGood art often makes you be able to think about stuff and come up with big strings of words and ideas , but it's a terrible mistake to think that's ultimately Is The Work

SCRAP_ULTRA_WORLD; To use a tree metaphor , it's like a fruit tree. The art is both the tree and the soil and the mycoline web and whatever else . The words you can say about it is the fruit. Fruit is portable, countable, immediately digestible and a trade good. But to think only of the fruit and the not the tree (and everything connected to the tree) is a deep and profound foolishness .As is dismissing any fruit tree not currently having pickable fruit as basically not existingEDIT: Though this metaphor suggests as we only plant fruit trees for fruit , we only should create art to talk about it, but I reject both of these concepts, but must acknowledge that people could think that a) That's the only reason to plant fruit trees therefore the metaphor says..SCRAP_ULTRA_WORLD; Wait one more thing and jumping back , with a couple of the monsters (gnomes, orcs) there's like a cluster of different big tangled concepts and my reduction process would be a deliberate rejection of basically alot of the most popular , but arguably essential concepts, that exist in current culture.Orcs I guess digs deeper into the psychological underpinnings of the "barbarians at the gates" and brings in some of the Tolkien fear of industrialization, so that's still engaging with the popular view.While gnomes basically rejects everything anyone has done in the last 100 years and tries to include knockers and kobold mythology as gnomishiness

FINAL STATEMENT

pjamesstuart; Excellent. Finally, would you like to end the interview by saying anything grand, insane, overwrought and/or megalomaniacal? (Purely in order to maintain SCRAP WORLD brand coherence.)SCRAP_ULTRA_WORLD; THERE'S ALWAYS FREE CHEDDAR IN A MOUSETRAP BABY

Behold; monstrumA book of Others. A book of visions. A book where every night for a month, or a year, someone slept and deliberately had nightmares, or at least, deeply hallucinations, and each morning they woke up and drew pictures of those nightmares. (And then narrowed them down to the best.)Every sophont dwells within a necessary cage of thought, one concept piled upon another, growing in slurries and small leaps, but only ever from one central point. Yet, in every case, the boundaries of expansion, of what can be comprehended, and of what can be imagined as comprehended, must be challenged; such is the flame of life and mind.Thence; the Other, the known but un-known, a beast woven from what is and what may be.The meaning of this is always discussed; mapped one way, the book of Others is just a map of self, for where else can the Other be conceived, so that, in roving further and imagining deeper, seen as a whole, the conception of self becomes more clear.Others say 'no shut up this is actually a book of monsters' - a searchlight pointing outwards, illuminating the storm-wracked unknown, and the metaphor of a searchlight is perhaps the best; for those at one end, an honest attempt to pierce the dark, attention pointing out, but for those watching from the silence, a statement saying 'here am I'.As critiques of course, we consider both at once.All I dislike about it is the glued spine but book production and distribution from New Zealand is fucking nutty so take what you can get frankly.You can buy ‘Malustrious Brood’HERE

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“The Condottieri Stella What defined them, more than any single quality wastheir ever-burning humanity. Strangers to fanaticism and despair, theContottieri, or ‘Sky Corsairs’ were engaged fully in every aspect of humanlife.

These were no bare-hulled mercenaries or joylessMalmukes, nor the more-human, but shaped and regulated, citizen-soldiers of ademocratic polity, who might carry sharp personal hearts, yet beneath serial-numbereduniform kit. Call them pirates if you will, and some were purely that, organgsters, of which; not a few. But they were poets, artists, creatures of business(all), technicians, explorers, adventurers, lovers, highly aggressive assaulttroops, brave as Lions, as neurotic as cats. Cunning mercenaries all and men ofArt.

Let none say they were not principled men! Only thattheir principals differed, even within themselves, and were always in directcontact with an immediate material world of staggering danger and opportunity.And how else may a principal be measured, questioned, sharpened or lived with,than through, and by, holding palm-to-palm, the mutable hand of Fate?” –Francis Malledini, ‘Wars of the Centaurus Arm; the Condottieri Stella.

| | | |

Models, Painting and Aesthetic The core idea that began this was; what if Mechwarriorwasn't fucking ugly?

The Mechs of Mechwarrior have a battered Ford-Factoryboxy midwestern aesthetic which; fine if you like that sort of thing but I havenever once fantasised about getting into one, any more than I have wonderedwhat it would be like to get into a bus.

Added to that was my recent experience with applyingdecals to miniatures, for the first time, using Microset and Microsol.

For those unfamiliar with the irregularly curved pauldronsof Space Marines - that is where the symbols go. For which; either git realgood at freehand or use decals. And if you do use decals, get ready to suffer,for the decal is small and wants to lie flat, and the surface it goes on to isirregular and curved. And small.

Various Mythradic mysteries attend this process - thesecret of making very fine and small cuts around the radial edge of the decal,avoiding the symbol in its centre, the careful applications of light varnishbeforehand, of clear paint solution afterwards to equalise the surface sheen,of very careful staining and weathering to help disguise seams and failures,(without also obscuring the symbol on the decal itself of course). Such labyrinthsof near-alchemical fury.

All, or most, of these were abraded, and in some cases,vanished, by careful applications of micro-set, (which prepares the surface andallows the decal to 'melt' onto it). and Micro-sol, (which does more forciblemutual adhering later). Suddenly my transfers were going on easy, and theylooked good!

This lead me to a thought; what if you designed, orbrought into being, a model line, specifically based around the use ofdecals. The models, and the background, would all be designed for transfersto be applied.

What transfers though?

My mind turned immediately to the High Middle Ages/earlyModern period. To the Italian Wars, and to the glories ofpattern-on-pattern-in-pattern heraldry. Of stripes and stars, heraldic beasts,coats of arms, cheques, dags, trinary hanging ballsacks and geese-rampant, andalso a little of the Formula-One ultra-capitalised high-speed racer, their carblazoned with signs and adverts, of that one boxer who took money from a sponsorto have their branding on the bottom of his shoes, so they would bephotographed if he was knocked out, and somewhat of Games Workshops post-futureheraldry where the iconography of trans-stellar hyper-corps and meta-statesmelts into a dream of symbols.

Above all I dreamed of actually-attractive mechs, thingsdesigned by Italians rather than by Midwesterners; absolutely slathered inbright, confident, blazing heraldry, of bobbaunce and a vision of outgoingprideful masculinity taken from before the Great Renunciation and thedemocratic business jacket.

These machines would be battered and weathered by war,but their flags and pennants would flutter proudly, even if they have to be madeof electrostatic material to make them fly when there is no wind, or no air.

The patterns, signs and symbols on a mechs chassis wouldbe the record of its actions, of allegiances so old the current pilot doesn'tknow them, of contracts taken, deeds done, of heroism and shame. As inheraldry, each sign or pattern would have some meaning, either obvious orhidden.

And all of this to be personal; no uniforms, noregulation, instead a culture of fantastic mercenaries, perhaps bandingtogether in 'Companies' long enough to wear similar heraldry, or at leastwearing the sign of their current company, but perhaps moving on from that,fighting alone or in loose associations of 'free lances'.

Mercenaries, but not without honour. That takes us backto the Condottieri Stella.

| | | Tomy Zoids Zeeva Zevle battle vehicle ostrich type NIB 1992 |

The ‘Cultures’ Don't call them 'Empires', they wouldn't like that. Thinkof them as tendencies, or smears of interstellar power. Each powerful enough,in its own way, to provide a sincere threat to the others, and each alsodesperately vulnerable.

The Cultures are what might be called transhuman. Atleast for any that once were human, they are no longer so. Others may be alien,though it’s hard to tell for all seem alien now. Cybernetic hive minds,thinking world-spanning biological substrate, carefully genetically engineeredBrave New World Climax Societies, perhaps mildly extra-causal semi-sublimedpolities, extradimensional half-gods, swarms.

None of the 'Cultures' are 'evil', at least in theWarhammer sense. At least no more evil than any other Empire. Sure they mighthave done a war crime here and there but that is in the past. Nor will theycompulsively eat your brain, or turn you into one of them. Though they may makesome strong arguments that you should join. They can negotiate. They pay well.

They have reason to fear each other for each Culture isso different that the magisterium of the others makes them a potential strong,strange and unpredictable threat. Probably the galaxy belongs to one of thembut none are eager to start the world-burning hyperwar that might complete that praxis. They are old. They are maybe abit too comfortable. They are willing to wait.

But the Centaurus Arm remains unclaimed, and it is hometo strange wonders, secret histories and relics of forgotten time, to theresidue of ancient climax-species and the mathematics of unknown philosophies,and the wild evolved residuum of their existence, not to mention all theextremely valuable basic resources that any 'Culture' needs; water,heavy metals, rare materials and so on.

Each Culture would quite like the Centaurus Arm.They each edge closer, unwilling to commit, fearing the apocalypse. Far fromhere, across arms of the galaxy, each faces the other, quietly, across ahundred thousand minor volumes. No-one wants it to all kick off. Even the bigcomputers can't predict how it might end.

Hence; proxies. Fractured tribes of tech-denying humansare moving through the Centaurus Arm at a glacially slow pace, aboard massivegeneration ships and hollowed out moons jammed with crude fusion drives. Theyare even fighting each other occasionally, and they have a particularritualised form of warfare which limits the long-term damage of theirconflicts. They don't use nukes, complex A.I. or bioweapons, let alone ontologicalor reality-scarring weaponry. It’s basically monkeys fistfighting each other incrude machines.

So use them, employ the humans to stake claims,gain resources, control paths and vectors. They are a deniable, (thougheveryone knows everyone else is doing it), cats-paw, and they respond well topayment in gold, (as well as other resources). You can buy them off with minortoys. They even set up complex social and economic organisations to arrangetheir own exploitation! You don't even need to send in agents to hire this orthat warband or kin group, instead they self-organise into 'Companies' and evenpitch for 'Contracts'! You can just pull them off the shelf.

From the perspective of the 'Cultures' this has only beengoing on for half a millennia, so early days yet. As the humans see it, theirwhole sprawling culture has adapted to one of mercenary service, and manyCompanies and Capitanos, have grown ridiculously wealthy doing it. Some haveeven become rulers of moons. This has shaped the whole of human culture intoone where the flaws and virtues of the crafty mercenary philosopher king arethe dominant ethos of the whole race. In a way they are all CondottieriStella now, for, though they don't always wield institutional power, these arethe heroes and leaders of Man.

| | | Moebus I think |

Humanity and Humanism Neither bigots nor fanatics, but not necessarily 'good'.Who are they? They spend their money on libraries and art, on music and display;the culture of the Condottieri Stella is a savage high culture, not a milkydemocratic one. Pride anneals all, the pride of men and women ready to risktheir lives, and combined with this; a love of all that is human; of love,friendship, loyalty and affection, and of human culture and human lives.

I see them like Renaissance Princes, or at least, aimingto become such; gold gathered from the battlefield spent in the courts of man, ownersof libraries, sponsors of artists, of painters, sculptors, musicians, engineers,where the sponsorship of technical art and useful science, goes alongside withthat of the fine arts, where corporate power is unsteady, due to the chaos ofwar and vast distances involved, where the power of science and technology islikewise, potent, but shattered and hard to scale.

In part because the culture of the Condottieri Stellarefuses full submission to the machine, in other, the irregular supply ofstrange resources. In part because the Cultures, the likely-alienbackers of the Condottieri, for whom they fight their proxy wars, specificallydon't want them to progress past the singularity; that might transform theminto a possible competitor, such a powerful agent would require an equivalentresponse from an opposing 'Culture', which would quickly spiral the CentaurusArm into the destructive and unpredictable hyperwar the 'Cultures' were tryingto avoid.

So Humanity remains, retained as a useful and limitedtool by the Cultures, and by the deliberate refusal of the Condottieri, andtheir specific orientation of their own piratical high culture around theproducts of unaltered humanity.

Since the Condottieri Stella are the highest-statusfigures in their own societies, and since they are a source of irregularfunding, resources, and of martial interest, they shape the ethos of thosecultures.

That the Condottieri Stella have no single fanaticalgoal, or single grand opposition which justifies and unites them, does not meanthey do not have ideals, or dreams of past and future, or questionsabout the meaning of their lives.

They have lots of ideas, they throng with them, for aCondottieri Stella is also, as well as being a mercenary, a bandit, a captain,a C.E.O., a Patron of arts, a friend and ally to some and foe to others, isalso a philosopher, or at least they read philosophy. They may have writtenbooks, or at least hired others to do so.

While other wargames might dispose the profits of a successfulcampaign into materiél, or raw status, the Captain of a Condottieri StellaCompany, leaves behind them, a trail of books, paintings, sculptures,performances, music, films and poetry, a kind of living library which serves torepresent them, their company, and their ethos or philosophy.

True some Captains might be interested only in propaganda,in forms and stories sufficient to push up their payments and burnish theirreputations, but as others would point out, this also is an ethos, though itdoes not call itself such.

Others; many, have dreams; ideas about what humanity isor should be, of mans relation to the immensity of time, of the Cultures, ofthe Centaurus Arm, of God and sorrow. Some are tragic, some positive, someempirical, others abstract. Some tell their story in the blazing of pennants,others speak like funerals, guarding their poems and philosophy like grievingturtles.

What matters is that their ideas are human and that theyhave them, and that they matter. Fighters argue over these things, they mighteven come to blows. Friends might be divided by philosophy, or art, while long-timefoes might find themselves united by a common theme, a mutual appreciation ofthe meaning of a life, or by love for an aesthetic, though they must battlenone the less.

That these are battles of ideas does not mean they arebattles of extinction, but arguments via arms. Always the Man has the Idea, notthe other way round. Always there is consideration, mulling over of concepts orideals, thoughts of process and precedence, of final ends against currentmeans. Always questions of virtue and expediency, honour and survival. The verywrestling with these questions is the animating spirit of the game. TwoCapitano's might battle on the field of war, then agree in the opera house, twoco-philosophers could end a battle with a chess game, or a debate. You might beable to talk them out of it. A man might weep for his enemy and deride hisfriend.

What I describe here is an annealing of a culture of deephumanism with one of controlled and ritualised violence. The personal,political, religious and ideal interwoven through the core humanexperience sharpened and made vivid by the extremity of war, of life and death.

That such figures care about money is no confirmation of hypocrisy,for money is never, or rarely, all they care about. Always they balancethe needs of the day against those of the morrow, the passions of the idealagainst survival. A miser might fight to bitter ends if well-resourced andrightly motivated, while an honour-bound hero might retreat, thinking only ofthe survival of their company and soldiers, unwilling to expend their lives,this time, in too straight and narrow a combat.

The intermixing and continual balancing of complexmulti-layered motivations does not corrode the ideal or produce a scene ofgold-gathering hypocrites, but exposes and enlightens humanity by placingcontroversies of the ideal in the only place they ever really exist; in thehands and hearts of living souls, bound by material condition and limitedcircumstance.

In the world-view of this game, high ideals in the handsof those who have only such ideals, who are driven only and entirelyby the ideal, are worthless, and would be seen, (by the characters inthis game at least*), as a moronic bashing together of toys.

To risk a final glorious charge, in order to stand by aprincipal, or hold to ones honour, might be very glorious, but if that chargerisks the whole life and future of a company, where then does virtue lie? Instanding by principal, or taking a practical path, for the lives one wagerswith are not one’s own. Sane people may disagree on this, and even soulsdisagree within themselves, and that is the kind of choice and turmoil thatSong of Audacity is made to express, for the turning over of virtues and decidingof fates, not just once, but over time and long campaigns, and the interweavingof the wisdom of the moment with the wisdom of time, that whole process, is thehumanism I am talking about.

It's not interesting if they are shit people. They mightbe 'bad'; manipulative, acquisitive, back-stabbing, but such a character can be'good', to those they ride with; a provider of futures, a shaper of fates, anda magnificent patron of arts which may burn through time, (think the Borgias).Likewise a soul may be craven, calculating, willing to retreat, but shouldnever be a coward exactly, for in this careful weighing of the moment againstthe future, they preserve not only themselves but their Company, theircompanies families and futures, as well as the wishes of their patrons.

| | | ELF 2 500 1984 |

The Game Itself A 28mm wargame based around mechs, and maybe a handful oftroops. No more than 30 models per side. The high-status leaders are always inthe best mechs. These would be scaled at about the size of the ImperialSentinel, with some a little bigger and some a little smaller.

There are only humans in this game and they arealways fighting each other for money. This is explicitly a game of contractsand resources, and the contracts are dietetically directly from the Cultureswhich have hired each side in this battle to do particular things.

Mission objectives would be largely asymmetric and blind.Each side might be there to do a quite different particular thing, and wouldn'timmediately know what the other side was there to do. It might be possible forboth sides to win, or for both to lose, monetarily at least.

A Company can 'break contract', going off the books,perhaps to escape what they see as a losing situation, or even imbued with thespirit of Ares, swearing vendetta against a rival company, though that may nothave been in the contract.

To avoid a 3rd party playing DM, this would be mediatedthrough smartphone. You would have all your rules online, and a living list ofyour Company, with its current state and resources. Then you and the friend youwant to fight would go to the app, sign in and confirm some rough details ofthe battlefield, and the app would act as each of your 'contractors', sendingmission objectives to each players phone separately. At the end of each turnyou would update basic details of what objectives and damage you have taken,and confirm the other players losses and objectives. There may be 'turnarounds'where, in the middle of a battle, your 'Contractor' suddenly changes what theywant you to do, and why, perhaps offering increased payment for certain goals.

The record of your Company would be held online and ifpeople wanted to team up together in larger narrative battles, you could scaneach others phones to join an alliance for the day.

As in Necromunda and Mordheim, the presence of cashearned from battles, and of damage taken, troops lost, repairs made, alliancesbroken or stood by, disasters, successes, friends and enemies, would make the'Company' a character of its own.

The cash sponge that stops super-successful Companiesfrom running away with everything is the funding of arts, artists, libraries,philosophies, music, culture, technology, etc etc. Naturally as a Capitanobecomes more and more respected, they become more like a Prince, and as aPrince, they lead not just a warband but a collection of aesthetics and ideas,leaving their print on human culture across the Centaurus Arm. This 'CulturalVictory' effect is the true status symbol for Captain and Player alike; thosewho are most successful and leave the greatest mark are written into theofficial history of the game, their aesthetic and ideas becoming a strand ofhumanities great over-culture, which others may align with, copy or defy in thefuture.

| | | Andrew Stewart Jamieson |

The Modelling and Roleplaying You would have to do this yourself, off the books, but asthe game manufacturer, False Machine would sell transfers and symbols forvarious Contractors, tendencies, alliances, battlefields, achievements, ideas,principals etc, and you would be able to apply these to your mechs to showwhere they have fought, what for and why.

Or you could just assemble your mechs and decal them withwhatever you think best, and base your Companies philosophy and history onthat.

The subtlety of owning and developing your philosophy islikely too complex for Wargame mechanics, we would have to rely on gamers tothink about them and roleplay them, (we could include it in the RPG). The gamecould provide potential reading lists for people beginning their philosophy.

| | | Kallamity 135 scale HDM-07 BRIEGEL I master, 2005 |

Mech Design Anything, just not ugly, and it must have wideflat surfaces for decals.

I dream of mechs influenced by, designers likeKallamity. (But not copying; Kallamaty’s designs are precisely arrangedfor the scale they are at), and also by early race cars, the more vibrant endof the Japanese robot market, mixed with the neo-industrial style of 40K,especially the Ad Mech, Imperial Guard and, Tau and of course, Knights.

No antigrav, and a healthy dose ofanthropomorphism.

Kitbashing would be fine and dandy I think. We could evenstart of selling 3d printed kits to alter or amend GW kits and other intosomething more ‘Song of Audacity’

I am not against this in other fictions but it isspecifically not what this one is about.

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Big lie – agriculture is impossible underground. But ofcourse that makes the whole setting a lie, which it is. Since VotE wasoriginally a ‘more-pseudo-naturalistic’ view of an underground world, acceptingand systematising that pseudo-reality just takes me closer and closer to thepoint of; “this wouldn’t actually work”.

You could never have enough rope. Never carry enoughlight. Never find enough to eat. Never stay warm enough. Likewise, you couldn’tgrow things underground. In a way it would be more honourable to accept a morehighly fictionalised Underverse with lots of light giving mushrooms,flat-floored caves and convenient cities harvesting something or other.

Still, we have come this far and perhaps it might beinteresting to consider possibilities, even just for their own sake. So;

Who Needs to Eat? Largely mortals, and those who feed upon them.

‘Mortal Feeder’ in these terms includes anything broadlylike a man which feeds on the kinds of food men need, and also those who feedupon such men.

Omnivores like Humans, Cambrimen, Chaos Goblins, Dvargir,Knotsmen, Funginids (usually), Olm (though they are Uncivilised), RayMen, andTrilobite Knights.

Rare obligate civilised predators like Opal-WingedChiropterae, Soft-Heads, and Vampires. In particular there will usually only beone Soft-Head or Vampire in even a large city.

‘Non-Mortal’ in this sense means less ‘immortals’, butthose who are not part of an easily comprehensible food chain, or who simplyrequire no sustenance, like Golems (many Vizier of Deep Janeen), Aelf-Adal,Archeans, Silichominids, Substratals and the Dead. Though each or all of thesemay require abstruse or specialised sustenance, for which a complex mortalpopulation is usually a boon.

Populations This is the most made-up part of everything. Citiesdefinitely couldn’t exist underground but we must build an illusory scaffoldingto make it feel as if they could. I base my estimations on a veryshallow understanding of desert-cities during the vague-medieval world andancient world. If I want to come up with figures about how many of such andsuch there should be, then I begin with the idea of places in a vastdesert, and with a culture like that of a desert people.

Proportionate Food Needs High – 20,000+ mortal feeders This many mortal feeders with attract, sustain and besustained by, complex systems of power which will almost guarantee asubstantial non-mortal population. The functional population could be 40or 50 thousand.

Likely the seat of an Aelf-Adal Terror-Lord, or a Capitalfor some more-mortal power, such as Knotsmen or Dvargir. Should be thecentrepiece of a Campaign and/or the only or dominating major polity in a largeVolume.

· Roll two, three or four times on three or fourtime on ‘Common Systems’

· Roll once or twice on ‘Rare or Singular’ list.

Medium – 7,000+ mortal feeders A small town with a 100% mortal population.

A medium-sized City (10k to 12k) with a large majority-mortalpopulation.

A large city(20k or more with a majority non-mortalpopulation.

· Roll once on ‘Rare & Singular’

· Roll twice on ‘Common Systems’

· Or; ignore ‘Rare & Singular’ and three timeson ‘Common Systems’

Low – 500 to 5,000 mortal feeders A 100% mortal village or small town.

A large Town (5k to 10k) with a low, (10 to 30%) mortalpopulation.

A City (up to 50k) with a very low (1% to 3%) mortalpopulation.

· Roll twice on ‘Common Systems’

Experimental Agriculture Table Common Systems (d10) 1: Natural boon, Vulcanism

2: Natural Boon, Radiation

3: Natural Boon, Migration Route

4: Immaterial Exchange, Gheistoculture

5: Immaterial Exchange, Mnemoculture

6: Immaterial Exchange, Psychoculture

7: Immaterial Exchange, Umbraculture

8: Immaterial Exchange, Somnoculture

9: Dumping Ground

10: Food-Malmukes

Rare & Singular Systems (d8) 1: Autophagic Urbanism, Heads = Ourouboros, Tails =Looper City

2: Elemental Citizens

3: False Sun

4: Inwardly-Infinite Ontological Harvest

5: Kaiju-Mine

6: ‘Kite’ Nation

7: Predatory Urbanism, Heads = Fisher-City, Tails =Psychic Projecton

8: Stable Gateway, 1 in 6 chance of Sky Hunters

Common Systems Natural Boons(Or quasi-natural. At least these are not specificallysupernatural systems and are usually related to the environment.)

Vulcanism May be no more common in the Veins than on the surface,and much more dangerous, as the gasses produced will have nowhere to go.

Nevertheless the HEAT would be incredibly useful, feedingall kinds of life, fungal forests indeed. If the runoff could be managed somehow (elemental or magical aid?) it might form the base of a valuable nitratesource.

Radiation Plutos realm. A long-standing eruption of radioactivebasalt, or some strange and complex xenolith still humming with radioactivity.This could even be an Archean or Substratal Keep or Embassy, forming a kind ofculture-within-a-culture, or a quarter, while also generating energy for therest of the settlement.

Citizens farm black radiation-eating fungi like the massinside the Chernobyl reactor.

Migration Route A huge and regular migration of flying beasts likeLamenters, Micro-Bats, Mega-Moths or some other stranger species that may livelargely on the surface, or even exist between realities, but which passesthrough this chokepoint at predictable and regular intervals.

Could be something as simple as airborne spores orfloating plankton from some higher realm.

Immaterial Exchange Environments Rare Energy Exchanges can be the basis of an Underworldfood chain; entities that can convert something usually inaccessible to our realityinto real and consumable flesh.

(This helps get rid of all the ghosts and dreams fromthose endlessly compacted worlds, of which there are simply too many, too much.See Design Commentary below.)

Gheistoculture Bee-sized bats with lucent wings, small enough to feaston the ghosts of insects. Perhaps these bats themselves are ‘harvested’ bysubtle nets, or perhaps the exploitation of their guano is a saner long-termpolicy.

This City then, must lie at some crossroads betweenafterlives, or be present at the vortex point of some long, slow, maelstrom ofsouls.

Mnemoculture Snails which eat memory. Difficult to harvest or feed,but in theory, a renewable resource.

Harvesting directly via the individual would bedifficult, instead let each pay a memory tax, one teased from their skulls inthe manner of Severus Snape, then decanted and mixed into fertiliser and spreadinto the terraced gardens of Snails, which sustain in their turn, true gardensof fungi.

Psychoculture From Above City feeds on literalised psychic emanations from above -depends on angst and trouble of surface cultures and works to ensure continuityof supply. May instrumentalise abandoned dErO tech, or similar, to producecrude psycho-slop for the masses and gardens.

From Below City feeds on literalised psychic emanations from below -likely eating the dreams of a mad god or chthulu-esque entity. Reliable supplybut drives everyone even more insane than usual.

(Rare) Autophagy City feeds on own literalised psychic emanations. Ownculture tuned for maximum sensation & experience to ensure continuity ofsupply but they must feel or starve and jadedness-famine is an inevitableconsequence of high-intensity feeling.

Umbraculture Darkness moves through the underworld like semi-sentientweather, harvested by wind-traps woven by hyperdimensional limbs, condensing,perhaps to lucent black mana, scraped and harvested from traps by guilds orbloodlines.

The pollutant in this case would be Eigengrau. Not thepredatory Caterpillar thing, but the colourless ‘back ground grey’ hanging overthe city like smog. (Though likely nearby volumes are infested withEigengrau-the-monster, drawn by the Un-Smog).

Somnoculture The devouring of dreams sounds almost too-gentle amethod. But of course we don’t even know what dreams do, and so cannotunderstand their loss. Need the dreams come right from the head? Or could theybe harvested from ambient air in the manner of Gheists?

Passive Somnoculture An Aelf-Adal Terror-Lord, (Tyranofictor? Tyranosomnia?),being composed party of dreams, might have a clear idea on the weather of suchdreams and where they might go, and might locate their Coagulation-City in justsuch a place.

The method might be via fields of pale gape-mouthedorchids like unreal pitcher plants. Harvested they deliver only a queerpoisonous sap which must be treated before it becomes a waxy tofu. Anothermight be the construction of ‘Dream Traps’ in the classical hippy style, butwoven by intelligent spiders imbued with a dangerous magical sentience, andemployed on an industrial scale.

Active Somnoculture Psycho-Serf Agriculture; City farms in dreams - orforces others to do so - usually children as they have the most fertile dreamsand are easy to terrify and control. Generations of surface children secretlymade slaves in their own unconscious until they fear to sleep

Mass Pscho-Raiding; City simply steals food frompeoples dreams. If you dream of having a feast, suddenly someone withnegative-image black skin or some hideous dwarf/gnome things are stealing yourfood and won't let you have any.

Dumping Grounds Something dumps food, or nitrates, onto the city, eitheras a direct trade for worship or just by accident.

Sewage End Point; either hyperdimensionally, orthrough very long term ad careful engineering, the City has located itself atthe outflow for one or more surface-level cultures. Or at the end point for a‘magical disposal’ mouth, or inescapable maelstrom of some kind. This stuff maywash up in vast beaches of rubbish and shit, along with disposed-of people, tobe harvested and picked over by the City Below.

Offal-God; A divinity of some kind gains worshipabove, , for ‘consuming’ and disposing of such unpleasantness, and another formof worship below, for delivering mana.

Food-Malmuke Class Slave Clerics; raised without eyes, sometimeswithout tongues or even fingers. Brought up in total ignorance of everythingexcept the one thing they are meant to believe. Ignorant, lobotomisedmass-produced holy fools. Cast Food and Water spells en-masse. Like parasiteson the love of a merciful God.

Indentured Mages; created like slave clerics,though more difficult to manage as some intellectual capacity is required. Druguse and superficially high status can be more effective means of soft control.They cast 'Create Light' and Summon creatures regularly, to be eaten. May bedepopulating ecologies of some unknown plane like bodiless buffalo hunters,before invisibly moving their attention elsewhere.

Rare, Singular Systems Things where, there really shouldn’t be more than one inany particular setting, or it will get boring.

Autophagic Urbanism Ouroboros City City feed offtheir own past, sending forces back along their own loop to take resources andslaves.

They must keep growing more powerful so they can defeattheir own past but the cultural and physical destruction of their own historyforms unstable paradoxes and cripples them in many ways. They live in fear asthey never know when their own future will arrive to consume them.

'Looper' city Sends forces into their own distant future to do thesame. They practice forced cultural decline, creating their own 'Dark Age' sotheir future selves are not strong enough to defeat their current-selves.Result is more stable and predictable as fewer paradoxes result, but the citiesfuture raiding-point and its current-self are continually creeping closer andcloser to each other until inevitable moment of mutual annihilation.

Elemental Citizens Elemental citizens create energy just by living there.Like a resort feeding off a high-status 'Tourist' class. Could be Archeans,Silichominids, Substratals or others.

Stone-eating bacteria or Archea common here, farmed overcycles of millennia with herds of nomadic sonic pigs and cave crickets guidedthrough the volume of the cities agriculture.

False Sun A favourite of Aelf-Adal Terror-Lords

Usually based around a large, open central area withagriculture of some kind taking place on every surface, floor, walls and roof.Golems or slave spider-castes farming the upside-down area above the city. TheFalse Sun held in suspensions of mighty chain in the centre.

1-3. A 'Ghost Sun' made from the dead souls of deceasedcitizens. Pale light and you can see the individual souls trapped inside. Allcitizens must give their soul to the Ghost Sun on death.

4-5. Imprisoned being - chained light elemental, fireelemental, angel or devil. Held in spiderworks of eternal iron.

Mechanical Sun - rare, often using hyper-dimensionalmechanics. Gnonmen Capital has a Futurist Clockwork Uranium Sun fed by rareheavy metals.

Inwardly-infinite Ontological Harvest City is inwardly ontologically shattered like aschizophrenics dream. Golems and child slaves sent into its fractured core toscavenge food appearing from 'nowhere' i.e. dropped or created by people whodon't exist.

This has a substantial effect on the cities layout,making it in, effect a ‘ring’ around an infinite inner core, which is treatedas a private reaving and pillaging area. (Although, being infinite, may also besupremely dangerous).

May be related, connected to, or built upon a foundationtaken from, the ‘City of Infinite Ruin’, or the ‘Incoherent Isles’.

Kaiju-Mine The City is build on, over, under or inside someHyper-Being, either its corpse, or one somehow still-living.

This might be some ancient Titan, Arch-Angel or God, or amore prosaic Kaiju. Could even be an Elder-God equivalent.

The nature of the ‘substrate’ will likely have asignificant effect on the character of the city. If people are eatingAngel-Jerky, or God-Stew, or gnawing on Shub-Nigguraths bones, it will effectthe psyche, culture, rituals, even the religion and behaviour of the citizens.

This is also a massive singular source of food and willlikely be carefully and relentlessly defended from the many raiders andscavengers who would also feed upon it.

'Kite' Nation Far, far, up above, a polity which exists purely in orderto service the City.

This polity may drop down food directly, send it by riveror via more abstruse magical means. They may send tribute, and/or even theirsewage and cast-offs.

A common method is a culture hidden in high valleys orinaccessible mountaintops, almost impossible to reach from the outside worldand live in either terror and/or worship of their underground rulers. They maysee the City Below as the afterlife, Dreamland, or simply a source offrightening and/or magical power and authority.

In essence this would be a little exo-nationalinterruption of the culture of the Veins into the surface world. It would besecret. Its defences would be strange and dangerous; the City Below, would takea deep interest in maintaining their ‘Kite’. Though they could not send largeamounts of troops or material ‘Up’, and whatever they did send would functionlikely only at night, their forces would be potent, magical, unearthly andstrange. A good origin for a Lovecraftian story or an entry-point to the Underworld.

Fisher-City The City controls a ‘Bermuda Triangle’ type zone ofDisappearances. Perhaps related to a storm, a strange moving forest of shadowsor similar. Ships, armies, pilgrimages, small towns, caravans and more are knowto irregularly disappear in relation to this phenomena, which may be boundedpartially or totally by area or circumstance, (only beneath certain stars, orwhen the moon is thus, or once a decade between the mountains or so-on).

These things or people may be transported by magic, oreven charmed or mind-controlled into feeding themselves into something like theDeep Carbon Observatory.

(Another Dero favourite as their mind control machinesallow them to create powerful giga-conspiracies on the surface.)

This might be another good entry to a VotE Campaign.

Samaris Economy The Lords of the City either project, or have actuallybuilt, (i.e. ‘Samaris’), another city above ground.

Goods consumed by the ‘Samaris’ are simply dropped ortransported down to the ‘real’ city.

Though expensive, and rarely enough for survival on itsown, this is actually a relatively fair and sane method of sustainment. TheUnder-City isn’t supressing, subverting or dominating anyone, their economicexchange is quite real, simply executed through a ‘front’.

Stable Gateway Light Well (Another favourite of Aelf-Adal; they like ‘light’ abovetheir dreamlike towers.)

Often above the city like a false sky, or a moon shiningdown, this is your classic stable large-scale warp gate to some other plane ordimension. Of course it might be a portal to somewhere no-one wants to go, likeone of the Hells. However, many Hells have quite a lot of Firey energy and somelight, as well as interesting sulphurous weather that can come through. Itcould also be to some Realm of Chaos, casting a warping light over the City.

In most cases the ‘end point’ of the Gateway is eitherinaccessible or carefully hidden in the other Realm. Sometimes somewherefortified or simply hanging high up in the air.

The culture of the City will likely have some kind ofexo-settlement in the other realm, and may even have diplomatic relationsthere.

(Rare) Sky-Hunters The City goes full Whale-Hunter via its stable gateway,using complex airships, they rove the skies of the Other Realm, (probably atnight, if they have night wherever ‘there’ is), and hunt whatever Megafaunathey find.

These may be asuras, angels, devas, devils or demons.They drag back the corpses and feast.

Design Commentary Multidimensional 'Compacting' The ontological compost heap of all realties, wheredreams and depth interweave. There are many worlds but one deep dark beneaththem all, all Veins of the Earth being an expression of that fundamentaldarkness.

Increasingly I have turned to the concept of the Veinsbeing, in a dim and wavy way, multidimensional. Not in a cool sharp-edgedwarp-portal way, but in a soft, dreamy and edgeless manner, in that PCs mightwalk between the underworld of one particular world, and into another, withoutever realising. For, everything being so strange, alien and beyondunderstanding

and the mentality of the veins being timeless, dreamlike;how would you know or understand that what you were seeing derived from someutterly Other world?

It makes sense that things combine, merge and overlay,the deeper and the darker you get. Maybe on level one things derive almostentirely from the world you know and understand, but as you go deeper anddeeper in, you descend not just into physical depth but an eternal metaphysicaldarkness, and it makes sense that the darkness is larger than the light, orseems so, that the Veins just goes on and on and on more than should bephysically possible for a series of tunnels held in the non-basalt continentalcrust of an ordinary sized standard-physical planet, where really, once you getfive or ten miles down, it’s just too hot for anything to really do anything.

Yet in the Veins we find oceans, literal hells, fallensuper-scientific mega-races, time travel, dream engineering, creatures from inthe psychoverse ruling over mortal, and once-mortal, souls; for there is toomuch 'stuff' in reality, in all the realities, too many ideas, too manyparadigms and dreams, too many heavens and hells. It overlays itself, it pilesupon itself in shimmering argosies. It is overwhelming, confusing, evencorruptive of itself.

Too many things, too much. Things must fade, must sinkand pale away, not just to death, where everything goes, but further, deeper,sinking out of memory, out even of conception, or of conception-of-conception,beyond the boundary of unimaginability.

Where then, can they go? To a place that is not a place.

Like compost they accumulate, moulder, and transform intonew life, rich and compacted; thus the Veins, a place that is the inexorableend point of all places, a gathered and unifying darkness, a place oftransformation.

And this helps with the physical imagination of theagricultural organisation of the Veins. For here cities can feed on layers ofreality, on ghosts and dreams from many lands, and so become 'viable'.

Concepts for Further Development Construction Materials - carving everything from raw stone is not enough, boring and will bepretty cold in many cases.

Security – for villages and small settlements, stealthand secrecy might be viable methods, for cities it will be based more on thepower structure of the city itself.

Light Control – more important for small settlements whowill be careful about guarding their presence.

Warmth-to-Water – I have a whole chart of ‘water sources’in development, likewise sources of warmth.

Wind & Weather – less central to settlementdevelopment but should be considered.

Pollutants – important, but boring, but very importantfor campaign play as it embodies cities into their environment and gives themcomplex knock-on effects, (also explains why the Olm keep raiding), VeinsSettlements and cultures will tend to be obsessive recyclers; it’s a closedsystem after all.

FALSE MACHINE NEWSThe Price Drop is is still on!

https://falseparcels.bigcartel.com/

A Night at the Golden Duck = £5
Deep-Carbon Observatory = £30 (-£10)
Demon-Bone Sarcophagus = £20 (-£20)
Gackling Moon = £25 (-£5)
Gawain and the Green Knight = £15 (-£20)
Silent Titans = £40
Speak, False Machine = £40 (-£20)

LEICESTER 17TH MAY - ANOTHER 3D APPEARANCE!!Dying Earth Catalogue, the people behind my recent adventure to Nottingham, have invited me to another thing

Called Campaign, the day-long event consisting of talks, live game play sessions and stalls will run from 11am - 9pm at Leicester Gallery and Leicester Castle, on Saturday 17th May 2025, with 250 people expected to attend.

I will be there, running a False Machine stall, selling signing and singing, until 6pm at least.

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Ordinary humans have literally zero idea of what it takes to develop and create an image, meaning they treat it as a kind of magic, and adopt towards it the same attitude they would have towards superior magicians, one of envy and disdain, (A WISE POLICY), but, what if an Artist (traditionally entirely mute beasts) could be trained somehow to take, to explicate and take apart its art, showing its as a product of effort, concentration, iteration and time? Could this possibly lead ordinary decent humans to have more sympathy both with this art and its creator?

Consider then the following words, from the artist of ‘Queen Mab’s Palace’ (due hopefully at the end of the year), the often-storied August Lake Cartland, or ‘Alcopopstar’;

………………

“Hello humble and beloved benefactors,

Today I have an update for you, not slope for swine but delicately prepared delicacies for the petite porcine prince/esse/s among us, for all of us to enjoy.

So, ART.

I have been working hard on new illustrations. I thought today, to waste the wanting hours, I might describe to you the process of bringing about an illustration for the book to full fruition.

The first step for me is to take myself to some pleasant place (usually a cafe) with a sketchbook or notepad and actually read what Patrick has written, which to my pleasant surprise, is actually quite good! At this point I start to sketch..

For this example we are using the section of the book on the Hydraulic Monks.

At this stage of image making I am only trying to draw out concepts from words and get a general idea of what things could look like. The sketch itself here is not meant to look pretty! it's very utilitarian in fact. I just put down basic information that I can pick up at a later stage so there is less cognitive load happening all at once.

After this stage is complete I amble blindly home and, within a day or two of that first sketch usually put down some rough lines as shown below.

Once again, not designed yet to look pretty, the aim at this moment is to architect an image based off of information in the first sketch. I often take a few attempts at this stage, as we can see with the kneeling figure. In this Image I resolve that I would like the front of the altar visible to give it its due reverence, and so turn the monks to face it.

Finally with this done I begin the fun part of adding and retracting blacks. Which I can only describe a little like pushing and pulling. I tend to work only on one layer and so work the white and black back and forth until content.

As this is happening I usually grab the picture, or work in progress, and send it off to my partner; the oil painter who will be doing our lovely cover, who tells me everything is wrong and how to fix it.

After a bit more back and forth the final image appears!

I try to leave things a little loose to let a slight sketchy feeling through, as I don't want to compete too much with interpretation of the lovely words Patrick has put down on the page.

There is one more secret stage after this fact, where I neurotically edit the image with minor invisible changes that only I can see and never hand anything back to Patrick like a dragon hoarding treasure. But eventually, presumably, the system works :).

I hope that little art morsel has been interesting! I prepared it just for you.. and maybe nourished us all enough for the long wait until October. Wish me luck!"

False Machine News! In Three Parts!ONE - MALUSTRIOUS BROOD - from Scrap PrincessLong-term art-brute of the False Machine nobility, Scrap Princess has released an entirely self-produced monster art book; Malustrious Brood!

https://monstermanualsewnfrompants.blogspot.com/p/malustrious-brood.html

"I've been meaning to have a print on demand book available of original drawings of mine and now this deed is done!

MALUSTRIOUS BROOD!!!

In this 102 page tome I have taken 12 iconic monsters from the pastiche swirl of d&d's fantasy pool and done a bunch of takes of them. Each monster gets 7 pages , and a range of approaches.

The monsters being : The classic elemental spirits of Gnome, Nereid, Salamander, Sylph. Ogres, Hags, Dragons, Basilisk/Cockatrice, Orc, Manticore. And two Very Much d&d , the Catawhere and Eye Tyrant."

https://www.peecho.com/print/en/1750387

TWO - FALSE MACHINE WHOLESALING!False Machine is now available for wholesale!

Held in the U.S.A.* Silent Titans

Held in the U.K.* Deep-Carbon Observatory * Demon-Bone Sarcophagus * Gackling Moon * Gawain and the Green Knight * Speak, False Machine

Contact me if you want to know more!

THREE - FALSE MACHINE PRICE DROP! THIS ISN'T REALLY NEWS!This is still on!

https://falseparcels.bigcartel.com/

A Night at the Golden Duck = £5
Deep-Carbon Observatory = £30 (-£10)
Demon-Bone Sarcophagus = £20 (-£20)
Gackling Moon = £25 (-£5)
Gawain and the Green Knight = £15 (-£20)
Silent Titans = £40
Speak, False Machine = £40 (-£20)

AND! - A FREE HEIST PLAN FOR EVERY (UK-BASED) ORDER - WHETHER YOU WANT IT OR NOT!!!!

FOUR YES THERE WERE ACTUALLY FOUR I JUST FORGOT THIS ONE! - ANOTHER 3D APPEARANCE! - LEICESTER 17TH MAY!Dying Earth Catalogue, the people behind my recent adventure to Nottingham, have invited me to another thing

I will be there, running a False Machine stall, selling signing and singing, until 6pm at least.

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| | | the mysterious Stephan Poag did a comic about them! |

The dErO Do Not Exist You do not believe in dErO. The Player Characters cannotbelieve in dErO.

If the PCs act, or talk, or behave as if theybelieve dErO - DIRECTLY CONTRADICT THEM. Warp reality around them.

……

If they converse with others, alter their words;

PC - “I ask the NPC for any evidence of technologicalmind-controlling monsters.”

DM - "You agree with the NPC that there is noevidence for such monsters and that they are merely a rumour of the Veins.”

PC – “No, I directly ask about them. I’m standing rightthere!”

DM – “After a fulfilling conversation you go about yourbusiness. Its now several hours later.”

….

If they take actions, re-write those actions;

PC - "I scry for the dErO"

(Ask for no roll, no further decisions or any otherinvestigation).

DM - "Your scrying goes well, a complete success,and after a gruelling but certain search you end your session utterly convincedthat the dErO are simply a fictional construct of the Chaos Goblins."

….

While the dErO ability to alter memory, perception andreality, is active, you, the DM, are an agent of that power.

The Dero do have limits on their ability to dothis. Some of these are discussed below, but, to sum up, some PCs and NPCs (Resistants)can believe in them, some unusual minds, (Golems, some Paladins, Aelf-Adal) canas well, and the Air looms by which they maintain this power, can break, or a dErOcan be betrayed in using them.

The party, and the players, and the PCs can have utterlydifferent beliefs and perceptions of the dErO, depending on circumstance, whichmeans you, the DM, speak to and about them utterly differently.

If one PC is 'Resistant' - talk to that player, and thatPC ONLY, directly and truthfully – “Yes the dErO are real, they have mindcontrolling machines, you have seen evidence of them. It all seems so obviousnow.”

Likewise, if the PC's have, or use, a golem mind, or havea strong paladin, do the same for those points of view.

But for everyone else, speak to them as if the dErO arenot real, are utterly fictional, in game and out, and acknowledge no differencebetween the two kinds of statement you are making; the true, and the false.

Detrimental Robots Ruined remnant of an ancient race, or perhaps, revoltedservitors. Or degenerate descendants of survivors of a psychic war. Or men-from-Qlipoth;creatures of a spiritual antiverse, transplanted into this one. Ancient aliens,inbred monsters, castoffs of spiralling post-apocalyptic eugenics, foul tulpa, Fomorianinvaders. Imaginary beings. Of course, they are not real. No-one can rememberthem. No-one believes.

| | | a Fomorian from 5e |

Appearance Something like a man. Near ogre-sized, but withered,twisted. Skinny-fat, without a hearty butchers solid bulge, or a workers firmcore. Always asymmetric, never clean. Manky fat things, stained and dribbling,grimy prints left on everything. Eczema, dandruff, scabies; wrinkled andflaking, red rashed-skin runs down their face like tears and collects roundtheir mouths.

Bale-Eyed; one eye bulges big. Milky and piercing. Fromhere they emanate psychic violations.

Even crippled, distorted as they are, dErO are as strongas a strong man. They can pick up others, slam and squash them. Theirproportions hint they were perhaps meant to be something else. Echoes of lostnobility, Vitruvian creatures.

Half-born Siamese-twins are common, reaching out throughdErO flesh. If intelligent, these are usually trepanned and lobotomised, (nodErO would trust even their flesh-twin). Twitching open teratomas dot the body,hair and teeth within.

This often (thankfully), hidden by a Mu-Mu, tent-dress,or a crackpot simulation of a Priests or Wizards robe, (they like long whitecoats). Under that, most dErO wear dirty stained undergarments like jockeypants. Perhaps a belt or something with pockets to carry patched-up tools ofpsychic warfare. They rarely wear much else; dErO don’t get out much. (Don’tleave the cave.)

Posh dErO float like Baron Harkonnen; bits of tech jammedinto their meat and bones to make it happen. These form pussy never-healingsores.

| | | One of Shavers ‘Rock Books’. Only he could reveal their messages. |

Culture dErO live through mass mind-control and the farming of ShaChi, Anti-Orgone, Xenu-Viril, in a word, negative energy. They condense thispsychic field to ‘globs’; spheroids of physicalised psychic potentia whichfuels all dErO tech. The dErO have incredible technology, though they did notcreate it, and, perhaps, do not understand it.

The purpose of the dErO is to discover the conspiracy.

Their very existence is a conspiracy against all sentientlife and they are all utterly insane, (if there is even more than one dErO). Thisleads inevitably to the concept of a of a meta-mega super conspiracy, aconspiracy against the dErO themselves. Once a dErO conceives of this idea, theycannot stop; any failure in the idea is evidence for it. Just ad dErO removeall thought of their existence from the minds of lesser beings, so the Ultra-Conspiratorstry to suppress knowledge of the Meta-Conspiracy. Yes, it’s all a tricksomehow, all a game, a game played against them by some ever-hidden hand.

Such is life for the dErO.

Drinkers of Tears The dErO command vast psychic devices; the Air Looms,with which they harvest negative energy from the surface world, (or worlds).

The dErO cannot make anything, but they can make anythingworse. They foment war, corruption, moral and cultural decay. The power oftheir Air Looms stretches over multiple realities. They play the souls ofcivilisations like choirs of pain.

Some theorists imagine (briefly before the Dero alterthem), that Civilisations have no natural cycle and would naturally form asingle 'climax civilisation' covering the whole world, and all realities - ifnot for the dErO carefully ruining everything all of the time.

Leaders in the meta-real economy of pain, the dErO are inconflict, (and co-operation) with various entities; Demons, Devils,Aelf-Adal and debatable Aberrant things. All have an interest in thepsyche and the soul, though rarely the same interest. Together they makea kind of Cartel. There are agreements in place. They even have meetingsabout it, though they do not get on at all.

Violators Clever hikikomori (don’t leave the cave), the dErO haveeliminated the female gender from their species. Perhaps they never had it, andhave always reproduced through dark and unknown methods. They have no positiveinstinct to create more of themselves but do so out of necessity. Evenreluctantly.

They Violate.

Via their Bale-Eye, the dErO puts themselves insidethe target. This feels physically intimate, overwhelming, tactile, disgusting.At the same time, they enter mentally, gaining control over, in this sequence;simple physical acts, immediate senses, short term memory, complex physicalacts, long term memory and finally meta-personality aspects.

They can them damage, alter, mutate and in some cases,re-make the target. Who or whatever comes out of this process will bear thetaint of the dErO, though they may not know it; the dErO can remove anyconscious memory of the event. (But the soul remembers).

The strength of this ability depends on age, distance andfamiliarity. (If,indeed, there is more than one dErO). Most dErO can only do itin direct line of sight of their Bale Eye, and they need you to meet its gaze.

Older, stronger dErO can violate those they can imagineprecisely or even those they are familiar with, at a distance, and perhaps at anyrange.

Intra-dErO hierarchies, government and culture, (such asit is), is made up of these violations. Whichever dErO can violatethe other is superior, and must be obeyed. The greatest dErO of a clade, (orperhaps of all dErO, even they do not know how many dErO there are), is the GrandViolator.

They barely even talk to each other, issuing commandsthrough, screens, messages and violation – psychically raping the necessaryknowledge into each other’s brains. And yes, this does do damage, as it wouldfor any being. The dErO are not immune to the horrible psychic trauma theyhappily inflict on others, in fact it’s the substance of their culture.

They actively enjoy it too. Or at least they enjoy doingit to others.

Only One? Every dErO lives in the midst of a hierarchy of other,brutal dErO, who they may never have seen directly, or know personally. Theytrade amongst themselves in Globs, technology, information, coverage,slaves and anything else useful, though usually at a remove. Their ‘society’ has few rules outside domination,submission, maintaining the Air Looms and other machines, and the core rule ofalways maintaining the non-existence of dErO in as many minds as possible.

Because they hate and fear each other, communicating viaglowing screens, cryptic codes and psychic mind rape, because they, in a sense,have no true society, its hard to know how many dErO thereactually are.

There are stronger dErO they fear, who command them to dothings under threat of instant horrific psychic assault, and other dErO, whomthey themselves can violate at will, (if they stay stronger).

But are these dErO actually real? It is possiblethey are simulations? Fantasies? Disassociated personality fragments? Couldthere, actually, be only one, single, dErO, in the whole of all possibleworlds? Is it actually just them, alone?

No. Impossible.

The Air Looms

| | | from our correspondent Mr Matthews |

Huge machines with the power to alter minds. Even toremove the very knowledge of their own existence. (Of course, all this isfiction).

Where did they come from? Who made them and why? Not thedErO; the Air-Looms are cavern-filling complexes, not single things. Like greatrotted pipe organs, metropolis megastructures, once of gleaming metal and palelucent ceramic. Now fractured, melted, ruined in a thousand places in anhundred ways.

Where things are broken, the re-engineered sections areof a very different character; bizarre rube-Goldberg coagulations of wheezinggaskets, crude plumbing, clicking engines and buzzing cables, drugged-spiderbasket-weaves of schizophrenic scrap-work clearly doing badly what a single componentused to do well. So many additions and replacements, and then, perhaps ahundred, or a thousand years later, replacements for thosereplacements, until the coagulationserupt and surround the original devices like teratoma erupting from a body,fungi bursting the chitin of an infected ant.

The dErO cannot make them. There will be no moreAir-Looms.

Slow and limited, they swing in their targets like RadioTelescopes. Can be set to play over Empires, Nations, Cities or singleindividual lonely souls. The Air Loom can have a powerful effect on smallgroups, even fully change perceived reality for a single target, or can havevague less-specific effects on larger groups.

Of course, all this is variable, these things are morecraft than science, more art than craft. There are settings within settings,waves and counter-points, hidden programmes within the programmes. Everythingis always being re-set, re-tasked, and they are always breaking down. Thedegenerate dErO all(?) fear each other and find it hard to co-operate. Theironly willing servants are Chaos Goblins, who are already utterly insane, orcreatures they have re-written for the purpose, making them, inevitably, eitherrebellious, or just a bit shit; end results of too many Violations and Air Loomchoirs.

dErO servants start to look and act quite dErOthemselves after a while… They may even start having ideas. Ideas aboutreplacing the true, real, dErO, and taking over the Air-Loom. (Couldthis have already happened? No, impossible.)

dErO Items

| | | Beyond Lemuria by Poke Runyon |

Most dErO tools and weapons are of malignant psychic kind. Manymight be Air-Loom parts; either based on their technology, or just pieces dErOhave ripped off and re-engineered. Some may be waste products of the Air-Looms;its not clear that ‘globs’ are meant to exist, to be either products or,or fuel for, technology, but that’s what dErO use them for.

Congruity KnotsAdded directly to sentient brains, Congruity Knots changeminds, making them more sympathetic, and useful, to dErO uses and ideas.

They might be a bit too useful. Escaped humanoids withpartial congruity knots have exhibited dErO qualities and tried to build theirown Influencing Machines. It might even be that the Knots are part of how dErOmake more dErO. It is possible these ultra-humanoid escapees act now from thesurface to Influence dErO culture. Is possible they Influence dErO to makegreater use of Congruity Knots. They must be destroyed. More humanoids must beKnotted and sent above to destroy the ultra-humanoids.

Conspiracy PillsConspiracy pills allow the user to hear the voices of theplayers (not the characters) as they speak round the table. Any directacknowledgment of this results in death. THE VOICES MUST NOT HEAR YOU HEARINGTHEM.

GlobsA damp, oblate spheroid of greasy nicotine, or sick eggyolk colour. A glob of condensed suffering. dErO form and harvest these,snort, inject, eat, insert them. Trade in Globs, and use them to powertechnology. A Glob can lie in your palm like a big marble, or quiverdelectably in both hands. Any larger and the surface tension might burst.

Globs can be as common or rare as coins, asspecific as specific wines. All dErO have some Globs on them somewhere. Touchingone makes mortals very sad. Eating one would kill via grief and despair.Throwing them like grenades can disrupt, and sometimes kill and injure foes(psychically, though they could always fall off a wall while experiencing adark night of the soul.)

Great Glass ElevatorsdErO reach the surface, (surfaces?), in these. The‘glass’ is horribly pitted and stained to a greased opacity. Like great tubesor shafts, but where they go, and how, is hard to see. Some plunge into thestone, but in vast dErO caves they rise into the dark and dingy air, theirpaths warping, waving and twisting like melted corkscrew straws. Where are theygoing? Where do they come out? The dErO bring people back down thesestained shafts; often very normal people. They even send some back up – nowagents for the dErO. Seeking the conspiracy.

HooksNothing special. Like any good Knotsman, the dErO justlike grabbing and hurting people. Hooks are good for this and that is where thedErO get theirs; bought, bartered or just taken from the Knotsman stores.

Insanity GunsDirty, ancient tea-stained ceramic weapons, (in fact 'teastained' pretty much defines the dErO). Once cranked up and loaded with hotGlobs, they vomit adhesive veils of corrosive madness like Greek Fire.

Kyro-CondensersGloomed, chundering vaguely-placental mega milkers summoningfouled Orgone energy from the crackling air and condensing it to crude-glob,later to be refined into useable Globs. Reality nearby is manic andbipolar as winds of condensing negativity drain such emotion from nearby zonesin elaborate three dimensional spirals of corruptive mood-weather.

Lighting SpearsSpark-spitting lances. Old dErO tech. Good for herdinghuman cattle and jabbing animals.

MoulderspheresA kind of don’t-see-me exception-field. Looks like a hugecompacted ball of dirty veils or old rags, all slowly rotting and revealingonly more within. dErO forced to move between caves oft use moulderspheres, butare as likely to put them aside to chase conspirators as they are to flee fromthem if frightened.

Revelation EnginesTruth-devouring hyper-computers, (now much altered bydErO tech). Engines made to unearth secrets and discover lies. Their use isaddictive and corruptive. Displacement in the Logosphere forces the user tocreate secret plans and hidden structures of power. Meaning more secrets resultafter use than existed before. Using a Revelation Engine to analyse aRevelation Engine results in FEEDBACK LOOP.

Suspicion WandsTransmit suspicion through solid rock to affectunsuspecting minds. Suspicion machines sometimes backfire and infect the userwith unlikely suspicions. It is impossible to know that this has happened. Itis impossible to know that this has not happened.

Thought ExplodersDeliver a blast which substantially increases operativeintelligence, at the expense of increasing paranoia and conspiratorialbehaviour to the same degree. Often results in the unwitting germination of‘hidden selves’ which plot and scheme against the ‘main self’ and each other. dErOuse these to gain the intelligence repair and maintain their Air-Looms andother technology, and whenever they run into a challenging problem.

dErO vulnerabilities Resistants A rare proportion of moral souls are 'Resistants' with aninnate or developed, resistance to dErO tech. Unfortunately, this ‘resistance’often goes along with substantial mental damage, making ‘resistants’ seeminglychaotic, dangerous and unreliable.

Resistants can sense the Violations and realityalterations and will try to protect and warn others. dErO-controlled systemswill try to isolate and destroy them. They are often imprisoned as lunatics orlive as exiles in hidden corners of the world.

In some cases the overuse of dErO tech and Air-Loom wavesprovokes a natural ‘resistant’ development in the target psyche, making themnot only less vulnerable to dErO tech and methods, but more and more resistantwith each attempt to suborn them.

(dErO are fascinated by, but terrified of, ‘Resistants’.)

Some unusual beings are either immune to dErO effects, orhave methods of subverting or altering them. dErO will often avoid and evadesuch creatures;

· Golem or non-sentient minds.

· Some Paladins.

· Chaos Goblins, and some general Goblins.

· Aelf-Adal.

· High-ranking angelic forms.

Cowardice While superficially, manically, confident dErO are utterpersonal and physical cowards.

If they get hurt they will shit themselves, (literally),and run, or float, away, getting to an Air Loom as quickly as possible and thenwiping any memory of the encounter from the minds of those present.

While they will resent anyone capable of hurting them,they will also fear such individuals.

Betrayal and Incompetence dErO betray each other, (if there is really more thanone), constantly and their unstable patchwork technology fails unpredictably.Neither can all of the interlayered realities, or the whole of the Veins, befully covered by Air-Looms all of the time. Coverage fluctuates, and oftendrops out at the worst possible time for a particular dErO.

If dErO 'coverage' goes down (their local Air Looms havebroken or shut down), tell the truth to all the players and PCs - at leastabout what they can see, what they can think about, and any evidence that mightlead them to the dErO. Even admit you were lying before - "I was probablyunder Dero control"

If dErO 'coverage' is returned (the Air Loom goes backon, or another is tasked), begin lying again, and acknowledge no difference inwhat you said before and are saying now (except to any Resistant PC’s).

Staffing Issues dErO are singular. They don’t like each other. Their onlyservants are mortal souls who have been specifically Congruity Knotted,Violated and re-written to be so. The dErO cannot make anything, they can onlymake things worse. Anyone they have ‘worked over’ for a long period of time,will have adopted many dErO characteristics, especially a tendency topower-hunger, conspiracy and betrayal.

So, in a sense, the dErO have no ‘loyal’ andcompetent servants Its one or the other, and usually not much of either.

The only other beings who will willingly spendtime around the dErO, are the Chaos Goblins, who are utterly mental and don’tcare about anything.

dErO Encounters They do not like to leave the Caves. It’s more likelythey will send out dErO-ified servants and Chaos Goblins to do things,especially to investigate the numerous, complex, multileveled, and perhaps.. singular,(is it all just one great scheme?) conspiracies against them.

But they do need to leave sometimes.

Travel Methods Some travel in closed howdahs or huge sedan chairscarried by chaos goblins. The goblins are not really 'carrying' the chair,which is actually a Mouldersphere with sticks sticking out. Instead the dErOantigrav carries the weight and the Chaos Goblins hands are glued or nailed, tothe arms of the ‘chair’ . (There might be a dead goblin or two being carriedalong). The orb can move by itself, the sticks are attached to the orb, and thegoblins attached to the sticks, as camouflage.

Others go on their own, on foot, if poor. All that reallymatters is that they have 'coverage' from an Air-Loom - if they do, they willnot even be perceived, but might fall prey to mindless foes. If they need aidthey may use their mental technology or Violations to compel others to assistthem.

Coverage if a dErO can afford it or is powerful enough, (and theyusually won't travel without it), they will be tracked in their movements by anair-loom operated by another dErO (if there is another dErO).

This can make the experiential reality of all sentientthings in the right area broadly whatever the operator wants them to be. So -usually locals won't even perceive the dErO, at all, they are invisible in away more powerful than the spell Invisibility can provide, sentientminds will work themselves to excuse explain or ignore away any evidence of thedErO’s presence.

Or the dErO’s procession can appear as nearly anythingelse; a high status Knotsmen, an Aelf-Adal procession (which none would dare tofuck with), some unknown hyper-predator moving through the volume, or simply adeep sense of formless terror.

Unfortunately (or fortunately), - dErO are nasty, lazy,don't like each other , betray each other and fuck things up. (Assuming there aremultiple dErO). The machine may go wrong, or service cut out, or a deliberatemistake!

Suddenly the nature of reality shifts again. What youbelieved ten seconds ago, that there was a 'cave dragon' or something moving,or that you saw a Terror-Lord palanquin, or that someone told you or youlearned, why did you think that? you can't imagine why...

Theres a bunch of chaos goblins hopping and a hugemouldering half-sphere. Are those rags? Or rips and tears in something else?

Design CommentaryNeeds work. Especially on how to actually 'run anencounter' or incorporate them into a campaign. Comment below if you wish.

Modernist Monster A pleasing concept but a difficult monster to run. Ineeded to give dErO something actually interesting to make them unique in aworld filled with pale, sick, cave-dwelling weirdos. And I wanted to avoid the'Pathfinder Dero' who have a sick look but are basically just crazy Gnomes.

The nascent rules on reality and description via the Dmwere inspired partly by 'There is no Antimemetics Division' and certainly by;

https://wardagainstevil.com/2025/03/07/treat-illusions-as-you-would-any-other-lie-no-rolls/

Which I found through Bens Glatisnat newsletter [https://questingbeast.substack.com/

It’s easy to imagine these methods, and especially mymanic intensification and complexification of them here, going horribly wrong.Deliberately describing different 'layers' of the imagined reality to differentplayers/PCs, and holding to it with a straight face, could be very fun andinteresting; if the players are into it. So, if you are a good DM withfamiliar players who are down to roll with something very strange.

In effect you are inviting the Players to collaboratewith each other and with you in their own bemusement and derangement.

Enough Crazy Characters In this way, it might be better to wait to introduce dErOin-person, until there are enough 'crazy' possibly-resistant PCs for theplaythrough of the encounter to be interesting and fun. (Most Veins PCs willand up some kind of crazy over a long enough time).

Weaknesses Because the dErO mind-alteration power is sooverwhelming, I tried to fill the dErO themselves with as many weaknesses as Ipossibly could. In no particular order they are;

Fucking crazy

Utter cowards

Alone (possibly)

Poorly served

Have deeply unreliable technology

If a party, (or most of them), can realise for longenough that the dErO are 'real', it shouldn't be too hard to 'defeat' them.

Campaign Play How this works out in a campaign, I do not know. Perhapsthe party defeats one particular dErO, escapes the Goon Cave, but then otherAir-Looms controlled by other dErO , are tasked to the area, and most or manyof the PCs simply 'forget' that anything ever happened.

it might be impossible to either use the dErOsystematically and seriously in a campaign without them becoming the sole andonly focus of it.

In that case they become a kind of scary entertainmentinterlude monster. Well, there are worse things to be.

The X-Card The 'real' Dero as imagined by Richard Shaver, are veryextremely rapey, pornographic and monstrous, with a ninsidious interest invulnerable human bodies common to the visions of schizophrenics.

I toned them down a lot, but definitely not enough formost players.

Probably 99% of DMs will never use the 'Violations'. Ifthat aspect even survives till the book it will probably have a red boundaryaround it or something telling people to 'think before you act'.

Starting An Encounter Something else I didn't get into. Ideally I suppose the'presence' of the dErO would be suggested more and more as either the PCsintersected with their schemes or the dErO themselves began to take aninterest. (Too many 'resistant' personalities acting together?).

When a full mixed reality breakdown occurs and half theparty are seeing one thing and arguing with the other half who are seeingeither nothing, or something else, while dErO 'coverage' is fluctuating,hopefully this is something the players at least saw coming.

Servants I also didn't really get into what dErO servants arelike. Or how on earth they work with Chaos Goblins (another utterlyDM-maddening semi-metatextual monster), god what a mess that could be.

Apologia Well, if you want normal simple-to-run monsters that donormal things then probably you are reading else where. Someone has to do theodd stuff and that someone is me.

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Wraiths with opal wings. Messengers, dipolmats and chatterers. Navigators of realities. Hunters, predators. Gas-addicts and maximal guano-pollutors. The Bat-Men, or Opal Winged Chiropterae. Subtle, vulnerable, savage and discursive creatures.

The White-Winged Bat-Men hunt the grand vaults of the Veins; supermassive chasms or oceanic holes in the stone. Think the Grand Canyon, with a roof. Only here can their inherent advantage of natural flight be exploited to the full. If brought to ground, or confined above, they are slight creatures, their slender wingfingers simple to snap, and when that happens its over for a Chiropterae, dying by their own hand, or ritually un-personed and extinguished by their kin.

When Opal-Winged Chiropterae hunt for food, they focus first on small, airborne prey, which they catch in-flight. With ground animals they focus on smaller creatures which can bring down in a group and cut to pieces before winging away with the nutritious bits. A second tactic is to parasitise titanic beasts, creatures large enough for the Chiropterae to nestle into, latching to their flanks in groups, subtly sucking the Titans blood while it carries them along.

They rarely hunt anything man-sized and simple combat encounters with the Chiropterae are rare; they are more likely to descend in on travellers in packs demanding newspapers, but they do happen. Chiropterae may be starving from one of their transversal migrations, might be carrying out some complex black-operation, could be criminals exiled from their Cauldron, or low-status males acting outside cultural norms.

The Chiropterae hunt Olm, and are hunted in return, for the peoples loathe each other, though they find it hard to actually get at one another, each occupying realms near-intangible to the other, the one water, the other, air.

A (Rare) Feral Chiropterean AttackWind on wings. Shifts in the piling mass of air above. The gentle taps of phalange-tips meeting as wings beat. A little keening. Up in the far reaches of the lanterns light; flitting glimpses of a white-winged bat. It’s not small, just far away. Focus closer on that momentary glimpse; it carries javelins in its gnarled dexterous feet. It may be wearing spectacles. Is that a pipe?

| | | Smithsonian |

Dropping Scorpions, Dousing LightsChiropterae can see, though not exceptionally well. In darkness they echolocate. If they hunt a sighted group, the Chiropterae will begin combat by flinging Scorpions amongst their foe, making sure they are seen before the lights go out, to ensure the greatest confusion. Then they shit on lanterns from above, squirting Alkali guano from a great hight, with surprising accuracy.

The Bone Flutes PlayFrom their perspective, sound is a form of sight, and their magic is all done by a musician/hunter class, who play their ultrasonic spells through pipes of slender bone. (Often made by the femurs of Olm). A Chiropterean Piper will need to perch or land to cast a complex spell, making them the only member of their group not a-wing, (and therefore easier to target).

A Piper can only cast a single effect at a time;

Hyperborean-OwlCreates the vivid sense that in the air above the targets, of a gigantic, even demonic, prehistoric Owl. Though most targets are not especially afraid of Owls, Chiropterae are, and this fear will communicate itself to their targets in a rough equivalence to the spell 'Fear'. This will drive off and scatter any beasts of burden, uncertain allies, or weak group members.

False WallCreates the tactile illusion of a stone wall which cuts off roughly a third of the battlefield. This can divide groups or bottle them in. If perceived by the eyes, the illusion disappears.

Hail Spears.A rain of spears over the battlefield. Not especially accurate but can sometimes kill, and supress groups if not. This effect works only in the dark, if perceived by sight, it disappears.

ShatterIf concentrated upon a single, drawn weapon which is exposed to the air, and is made of a brittle material, over two rounds this will shatter that weapon. The vibrations in the blade build over the first round and if the weapons is stowed, dampened, or otherwise hidden, the effect will end.

Armour of Smoke, Knives like Leaves

| | | Rick the Demogorgon |

Hunting Chiropterae are armoured in marvellous kind. Like no other craft known below, this armour is made from the lightest substances imaginable; from spiderwebs linked by mist, or feathers bound by smoke*. This armour is always fitted to the Bat in question. It can be removed and crudely adapted to some uses, but it will not fit a non-Bat frame.

Once the foe are divided and demoralised, the Chiropterae will use their flight and mobility to focus on one target after another, beginning with spellcasters, healers or the most vulnerable. They hurl light javelins from the air. But each Chiropterae only has one or two of these, and a hit is not guaranteed.

If they think they have downed or suppressed a target, they will descend to finish the job with flint and obsidian blades of incredible sharpness, slenderness and workmanship. As sharp as scalpels and nearly as light as paper, they are honed and polished till the light, (if there were any), glows through them like leaves. With these they descend to earth and, hopping closer, try to cut the throat, or to hamstring or finish prey

Vulnerable
Chiropterae are about the size of twelve year-olds, with slender limbs. They have only wings and dexterous feet, with no third set of limbs. Knife-Killing is done with a foot-hand while they hop closer on the other, balancing and supporting themselves with their marvellous wings.But they are light creatures, and their wing-bones are horrifically vulnerable, easily snapped by simple blows, after which a still-living Chiropterae will often fall into despair and kill themselves. They will no longer be considered a 'true' member of their species and may be killed on sight if they encounter a non-related Cauldron of their kin, or even by their own immediate family.

Therefore they are careful, for the careless do not live long. This attitude to risk carries over to their culture which, despite its apparent verbosity, is calculating, observant and never commits everything. The Bat-Men are no fanatics.

Their Opal Wings
The Opal Wings of the Bat-Men reflect magic and fly upon dimensional winds.

Spells fired directly at Chiropterae will usually bounce off their wings. Area-effect spells might refract, depending on their nature. Those that produce a clearly physical second order effect, (i.e. a blast of rock chips from a concussive spell), will usually have some result.

They are hunted for them. Olm braves claim cloaks of Opal wing, just as Chiropterae make their greatest pipes and flutes from an Olms femurs and ribs. Lords of the Aelf-Adal wear beautiful capes of layered opal wings. They wear them even in front of their Chiropterean heralds and messengers. It’s not even clear that they are trying to frighten them, that’s just how the Aelf-Adal roll.

Theory; because the wings feel extra-natural force, this allows the Chiropterae to 'fly twice', using the resistance of both ordinary air, and also whatever winds of magic may be blowing in the local zone.

Their opal wings protect them from abyssal and aberrant effects, from the winds of chaos and the storms of heaven, from demonic glance and magicians orb. By these they fly the winds empyric, heralds of strangeness and woe that pass between real and unreal realms. Near these gates they roost their Cauldrons; protected by the gift of flight, but also because most creatures from both sides of such marginal zones can't live there - the emissions and reality of one place being lethal to the creatures of the other, except for the bats, who hang happily wrapped in opal cloaks, dwellers in polluted zones.

Roosts

| | | Scientific American Vampire Bats |

High up in the stone sky hang the lamplit multicoloured tents of the Chiropterean Cauldron. Wreathed in smoke they are, and surrounded by spiderwebs. The greatest hang the lowest and irritate their kin with the smoke which rises upward from their pipes. Nearby may be a hell-gate, or something similar. The Bats always know where they are.Not that you will have much time to look, as, right under the roost, you will be up to your knees, maybe even your waist, in brutal acrid alkali batshit. The wet layers sticking to you, the composted underlayer sending up puffs of horrifically infectious dust and spores, the whole thing riddled with violent myconids and poisonous scorpions.

Guano Pollution'The gift of life', as the Bat-Men would put it, and also the gift of polluting runoff, as many others would.

Fertiliser is rare in the Veins and many Coagulations (Townships and Villages), benefit from regular access to batshit, which fuels their fungal farms. On this basis the Chiropterae regard themselves as gift-givers, bringers of life, and make their guano deposition part of their negotiations for roosting rights in volumes near Coagulations and farms.

Yet the Veins are curiously environmentalist. At least, cultures tend to loathe 'mess' and adulteration. Active weather underground is rare and environmental systems are closely interrelated. It’s a zero-sum kind of place. What is left behind remains in place - not washed or worn away. If it is washed away, the river-dwellers and water-drinkers will soon know about it. Which usually means the Olm.

The Chiropterae themselves are eternal migrants, only staying in one roost for a certain time before the Cauldron moves on. Or, in the opinion of the Olm, until they have totally fucked up the local volume with Guano and Smoke emissions, making it un-liveable, when they then escape into holes in the air.

Web Dogs
The Bats have a cultivated relationship with specialised semi-tame, co-evolved spiderkin. The Web-Dogs build fences, or gardens, of web on the cavern roof around the Cauldrons Roost. There is no 'way in', the Bats fly in and out and the webs exist to stop, or impede, spider-climbing roof-raiders from clambering inverse and upside-down to invade and murder the otherwise ill-defended bats. Successfully performing such a raid can catapult an Olm into high status within their tribe.

The Web Dogs are fed directly by the Bats and feed also on the insects which rise from the Guano pile below. Each settlements sub-species is a bit different; they are often altered and mutated by the energies of strange realities which the Chiropterae fly through and over in their great migrations, carrying the next generation of Web Dogs as eggs in their armpits. Some may be a little bit intelligent, others a little demonic, or a little whatever.

(Feral populations of Web-Dogs left behind by the Cauldron as they migrate are another reason the Chiropterae are despised by many. Of course the Bat-Men only carry eggs between realms. They have to travel light.)

Cauldron and Moieties
They move and migrate in 'Cauldrons', extended semi-tribal mixed-kin groups made up of families and organisations. Not everyone is interrelated and a Cauldron will always be gaining and losing Bats from various places and for various reasons.

The Cauldrons hang together in 'Roosts', and not every bat in a Roost is always part of the Cauldron. Smaller visiting groups, traders, travellers, male kin-bands, perhaps wreaca or outlaws. There is always a degree of deniability as to who is or is not present and who is responsible for what, for reasons we shall see.

Cauldrons are governed by twin Moieties; Talkers and Movers, or we might say, Diplomats and Navigators. Talkers are the high-status public face of Chiropterae society and are what most think of when someone talks about the Bat-Men. Civilised, chatty, spectacle-wearing, multi-lingual, Pipe-Smoking, (possibly gas addicted), ambassadors, messengers, translators, occasional traders, middle-men and cosmopolitans. These are the bats that have their tents at the lowest part of the roost, right in the middle. (Their pungent pipe smoke rises up and makes their inferiors cough, and their pipe music drowns out the others).

The Movers are Navigators of realities. For the Chiropterae live on the boundaries of the Real, and migrate through the tears and gateways between realms, ghosting over burning cities, elysian fields and impossible arcologies alike. The Veins are one of many places that they dwell. The Movers are taciturn, intelligent and obsessed with maintaining the Chiropteraes' complex multi-dimensional maps of stacked and shifting realities, these things maintained largely as an intensive oral culture, with tools and "maps" so strange, abstruse and dependant on context that most would take them for art-pieces or decoration.

Quiet as they are, once a Cauldron reaches its Roost, and settles in, the 'Movers' fade into the background, recovering, learning what they can from pilgrims and travellers, and planning the next great migration. When the Cauldron does move, it will be they, and not the Talkers, who decide who lives and dies.

There are lesser informal groupings. Most Bats have some skill with gathering, hunting and Pipe-Music Spellcraft, but these, though utterly vital, are low-status occupations and older Bats who specialise in them and teach others will only ever be a low professional class. Likewise there are specialised traders and various clades of medium to high status long-distance messengers, as well as bands of young males, and 'Wreaca', outsider Bats who may be one thing or another.

A Roost will usually hang around long enough for a new generation of Bats to 'get their wings'; be capable of the next long-distance transversal migration under their own power. (While mother Bats can fly a little with small children attached, trying a long distance flight like this, or while heavily pregnant, would kill mother and young together.) Some Roosts, often those near major Coagulations, or substantial Lords, who must be served, are semi-permanent, though these Super-Roosts usually hold two or more Cauldrons, each of which is in a different stage of preparation to move on, and which will be replaced when they do.

Civilised Encounters

| | | Civilised Bat by poordogfarm from etsy |

Vulnerable as they are, Chiropterae prefer to meet others in Coagulations, under the protection of some Lord, (Knotsmen, Aelf-Adal or Deep Janeen, all reliable in their own way). In the wilds they will carefully scout and observe before making contact. They cannot risk their wings. And their wings are much desired.

Once they have confidence in their safety, they are utterly civilised, verbose, cultured and mildly eldritch creatures. (Of course, the 'face' of Chiropterae society is the 'Talkers', which is who PC's are likely to be speaking to.) They love to chat, smoke, exchange news and gossip, complain about Olm, inquire, snoop etc.

The Chiropterae travel light and carry messages. Their reliability as a long-distance, (sometimes very long distance, for the right price they can sometimes carry messages to the dead, or to beings from other realities), messengers is absolute. Their prices are high, their discretion total. They may blather overmuch but they do not read or ever disclose the content of their bestowed messages.

(In fact the highest ranked Talker will read all the messages they can, but to be fair, almost never actually uses this knowledge for anything other than to very gently strategically locate their Cauldron in positions of relative safety and security between major power groups, and perhaps if there was some great threat to the whole Chiropterean race. So it’s not like they really read the messages, only that the messages may have been read.)

Sometimes the Bat-Men must transit the 'low ways'; the 'normal' paths of the Veins outside or between the Great Chasms; low-roofed, complex caves where flight is a danger. In this case they will pay well for reliable mercenary guides and protectors. (And will relentlessly avenge any betrayal by such protectors.) When the great spaces are reached once again, the Bat simply flies away, with a promise of payment in credit with a nearby Knotesman, Soft-Head or a Deep Janeens Vizier.

Their credit is always good and payment will be waiting. The financial promises and exactitude of the Bat-Men are well known. They maintain financial flows within the Veins, and beyond, and form the informational sub-strata of its economy.

Gas Addicts
Terminal smokers and low-key depraved gas addicts, the Bat-Men cannot say no to a strange inhalation. Or the Talker class can't at least. Being light, winged creatures who must fly unspeakably long distances, this addiction to smoking is incredibly, unbelievably, bad for them and utterly ruins their lungs. (It also generally pisses off Veins residents as moving without a trace is a polite cultural norm and reasonable method of self protection, while the Bat-Men flap about leaving stinking smoke behind them.)

The (very tragic, but continual), deaths from the combination of smoking, inhaling things they shouldn't, and having to fly long distance marathons, are a main form of social advancement in Chiropterean society. Gaps in the Hierarchy are always opening up.

Role-Play GuidanceEncountered either in the Great Vaults, or in a Coagulation, in which case they will be an advisor, translator, merchant or middle-man.

Civilised, cosmopolitan, high-pitched hobbits. Pipe-Smokers. May be there to deliver a message, or translate. An advisor or hanger on. Careful in the wilds. Keeps their distance.

Looking to manoeuvre some advantage from this interaction.

If the PC’s are involved in intra-planar politics, or a travellers between realities, the Chiropterae will be surprisingly well-informed about this.

Low-key, bourgeoise drug addicts, (vapours only). Racist against Olm.

Many powers in the Veins would like to find out exactly where and how the Bat-Men get this remarkable superlight magical armour, which no-one else can make. The Bats remain silent on the matter.

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Weird Tales From The Roots Of Dungeons & DragonsRevised and Expanded EditionEdited by Peter Bebergal(Disclosure - Strange Attractor Press sent me this forfree, and I sped up the review because they are one of the groups behind theexhibition I am attending on Saturday. In other respects, I think and hope myreview is accurate and indifferent.) (Also I don't usually do this and have toomany books, please do not send me books).

| | | Mark Schultz |

The Fiction Of The Body And The Now "'Then you are after the gem, too?''What else? I've had my plans laid for months, butyou, I think, have acted on a sudden impulse, my friend."

Tower of the Elephant

Intelligence, impulsivity and the language of immediateaction; even pairs of heroes don’t discuss much what they have done, what theyare doing or will do. A handful of words are all that’s required and thestories are short, and are better for it. All of a character must vibrate in a fistof paragraphs, a cupful of deeds, and spring from the page, immediate andclear.

In longer stories the same souls might feel like fools.They would need.. background, complex long-term relationships, god forbid, asocio-political viewpoint? (Some have a bit of this).

In a short story that only has enough room for immediateactions, those actions become the moral truth of the tale, something oddlysimilar to the opening games of a D&D group, where the 'Characters' barelyexist yet, and the only real truths about them are; who will stick their handin this jar, and who refuse? Who will be the first through the door and whowill be right behind them? (and who will carefully be a long way behind them?).Who will be the first to suggest torturing that goblin, who first to provoke afoe and who first to negotiate? Who will run and who stand, should the day goawry? Action is the axis of a character, everything else just spins aroundtheir deeds.

Impulsivity, immediacy and atavism, but always withintelligence, sharp wits and keen senses. These stories are about thingshappening now. Too late! In the time it took you to read this sentencethe Barbarian has killed a man and moved to another scene.

And they are of the body. These heroes have noextra-material powers and less manipulations. (Cugel, Elric and some others area counterpoint). They are their bodies, which makes thought and actionone. A strong strand of the genre, (if this is one), is the pleasure of havinga body and doing things with it. The first and most precious object of a galaxyof things.

| | | Mignola |

Good Because They Are Great, Not Great Because They Are Good"Suddenly the Mouser began to feel frightened,not for himself at all, but for the girl. Her terror was obviously intense, andyet she must be doing what she was doing - braving her "queer andfearesome grey giant" - for his sake and Fafhrd's. At all costs, hethought, she must be prevented from coming closer. It was wrong the she besubjected for one moment longer to such horribly intese terror." –Fritz Lieber, the Jewels in the Forest.

It surprised me how relatively 'good' many of the heroesare. In large part these are self-interested thieves that defeat evil. The GreyMouser enters the Tomb of Urgaan to steal its jewels, but, on witnessing a girlin danger, leaps out to aid her. In Tower of the Elephant, Conan’s emblematictale and a holograph of the genre, heonly kills one man, and the foe draws first. For the rest he fights animals,and the villain dies through magic power, delivered by the hero, but the vengeanceof a slave. Conan climbs the tower ready to rob, to murder, a sorcerer,discovers what he thinks a demon, fears it, hears its tale, weeps for itssorrow and delivers its revenge. It’s not that he is 'good', but good results.Paul Andersons Hauk is a Dane, but not a murderey Viking, he fears the Ghoulhis father has become, but ends up saving the community, with BRAWN, (the body!the body!). Tanith Lees Cyrion adventures for the pleasure of it, but defeatsmultiple evils and frees a city from terror. He has been promised jewels andthere are tonnes for the taking;

"Cyrion opened the leather bag, and released thetreasure on the square, for adults and children alike to play with.

Empty-handed as he came, Cyrion went away into thedesert, under the stars." – Tanith Lee, a Hero at the Gates

In 'The Tower of Darkness', David Masons Marcus andDiana, (the only functional couple in these tales, and nearly the only sexualand romantic relationship), enter a city wearing the results of their lastrobbery, laden with ill gotten gains they are waylaid by vampires, defeat themand free the city. Manly Wade Wellmans Kardios washes up in a community ofGiants, punches one in the face, then fights a cosmic horror in a cave to savethem all. Why? For the adventure. Ramsey Campbells Ryre has too much sympathyfor slaves and too much hatred for slavers, there would be no story if hedidn't. Turjan of Miir is an amoral sorcerer, and barely the protagonist of hisown tale, Vance was ever-cold to the touch, but the end of his tale is that amis-made woman breaks out of her self-confinement and sets of to tell her ownstory. C.L. Moores Jiriel of Joiry comes the closest to having a complicatedmotivation and it leads her to victory and doom.

Elric really stands out as being a little shit. Insteadof doing, he manipulates others, instead of doing directly, heschemes, instead of the (rare), but even-handed sexual relations of the others,he wants to bang his drugged up sister. He abandons allies, calls up demons.Worst of all, he bleats and complains(!) He is not even being wry andsardonic about it, he is actually whining. Astonishing. (Really Elricslife-story should have ended with him building a huge dungeon full of perversetraps and twisted moral lessons, then going into it, burying it for a few millenniaand dying in it. He is the type for it.) Moorcock did set out to subvert ourexpectations and he does. His Elric is a perfect mirror in morality,relations and most importantly of all, in attitude of action, the way he livesin the world, to the real heroes. For if one thing defines a Sword and Sorceryhero, it is their willingness to take a BIG risk, right now, for a reward whichmay not be there - in doing so they often lose treasure, but some great evil isdefeated and the world made safer. (Apart from Elric who is a whiney villain).

A touch of Beowulf; these tales are pseudo-stories of animagined Pagan ethic, told by slippery types born into an urban world and a post-Christianmorality. The heroes do not dream of 'good' and 'evil', but the soul of thestory often does despite them. After all, who is likely to have blazing gems?Usually bad people. Well, they are written for us after all, and if we saw themorals of Antiquity in full, I do not think we would like them. Or buy the nextissue. Fake Pagan Tales! Many such cases!

A World Of Things And Of The Tales Of Things "It was woven from the tresses of dead women,which I took from their tombs at midnight, and steeped in the deadly wine ofthe upas tree, to give it strength." - Tower of the Elephant

It’s never just a rope. Or just a sword, (so manyswords), or a gem, tower, mysterious powder, seeing-lens, magical orb, curiousring and more - it is where they come from. Yes there is an element ofFlaubert;

"One who possesses so vast an accumulation ofwealth is no longer like other men. While handling his riches he knows that hecontrols the total result of innumerable human efforts - as it were the life ofnations drained by him and stored up, which he can pour forth at will."

But these objects are stories too, they are nearly wordsor poems of their own. Like the rope of Taurus the Nemedian, (and who knows ifthat story, or any of his stories, were true, but he had one for everything heused), they are like the threads of a multicoloured woolly jumper, and if youpull on the thread, the whole jumper tenses and shifts. So these little talesbecome windows into vast worlds, disposed with a sprinking of phrases. Alwaysdo greater mysteries loom and stranger adventures link, told not in general butthrough the substance of things. And Things are things we need in games.Especially in the verbal-near-infinity of natural language and immediatecoherent use that makes up both the tools and tricks of Fairy Tales and the encyclopedialikeengine of Dungeons and Dragons.

"'This meat is excellent,' said Kardios. 'What isit, Enek?'

'The hind foot of an elephant, if you know whatelephants are.'

'We had them in Atlantis, for parades and for haulingstones and timbers, but I never ate elephant before.' Kardios took anothermouthful. 'It’s as tender and juicy as fine pork.” - Manly Wade Wellman,Straggler from Atlantis.

If there was a map of these rare connected places, itwould be different, so again the game must differ from the tale. For the worldof a game must be systematised, with concrete places, and things between thoseplaces. In truth the world of sword and sorcery, even of the big sagas oflinked tales, tends to be of hidden cubism, which is what these artefacts,actually are; little windows, pleasing fragments of a larger reality, callingyou ever-on, but seen only through these tiny gaps. The act of goingever-on, belongs to the game, not the tale. In that and that alone are we alikethe heroes.

Strangeness Lovecraft and the UknownGood god there is a lot of Lovecraft. I mean there is alot of Lovecraft even beyond his own stories. He exploded over the scene like aslime-volcano. Never again will we have just an ancient city or mysteriouself-land, now it is to be an ELDRITCH city EONS (not millennia) old, and aDREAMLIKE OTHERWORLD.

While always inventive, relatively few of the writers canmanage Peak Strangeness, and indeed if we crossed over only a little more intosurrealism, fairytale or impressionism, the tales would become unworkable, nolonger moving through the gateways between a known and unknown world, where thelogic and experience of one can be taken into the other, and thence make itactionable, but would become only dreams, which can be experienced, but notused.

Lovecraft’s epochal, cyclopean supers-strange mega-millenniaold cities are actually pretty hard to explore in-game. They can be explored ina story because in that story the sheer weight and streamlike bubblingintensity of the flowing visions of sculptures, buildings, half-seen horrors,vapours, lights, sounds and wild imaginings, makes the procedure of explorationmore a poem-of-things. (I do not say it’s impossible, only that it ishard and likely less rewarding, over time, than you might imagine. After seeingand experiencing six or seven unutterably strange visions, glancing over threeor four globs of greenish tarnished gold that might or might not be tools ortreasures of a forgotten eon, running from one squamous blob into a wingedtentacle thing; it can get uninteresting.)

We generally don't want to, and perhaps can't"explore" the true-unknown. If we knew about it, it wouldn’t beunknown for a start. But more; human exploration is driven by human needs fromthe known and understood human world. You explore to get stuff or knowledgethat means something in the world you know. If there is nothing human where youare going, exploration will be limited, and more an expression of existentialwill than anything else.

We explore the Antarctic, and we explore the moon, andvia probe, the planets, but there is as-yet, nothing human there, so we don'tactually explore that much or with great intensity. As we learn more, and gomore, slowly, over time, we might discover not the places, but ways of seeingand using them that make them fungible to human culture. Then, we willaccelerate, going more and more, learning more and leaving more human residuum behindin those strange places, till they become just places, not boundaries orwonders. The true frontier will have moved on, to the edge of our sight, whereit fades into black.

But really when we explore, in the cool fun way thateveryone thinks of when they want to play 'explorer' we actually want to go toplaces humanity has already been, and where humans have done a lot of humanthings, (like mining gold, building giant stone heads, setting up therecruitment of hot priestesses, etc), and we want to 'discover' thoseplaces - places full of human stuff. (And then possibly steal it and take ithome).

As Rumsfeld said; there is the known unknown and then theunknown unknown. Or as the meme sayeth;

Dusanay and the Super-Real Dunsanay is perhaps the most brilliant and inventive ofall the writers shown and his tale 'The Fortress Unvanquishable Save forSacnoth', begins with a primal alliance of folktale and epic; a moving fortresssending forth evil dreams, its only counter, a blade hidden in the spine of adragon-crocodile. The only way to defeat the crocodile is to bait it for threedays straight, smacking its vulnerable nose, without being eaten, till itstarves. Then to melt the beast, draw forth the steel, and sharpen in upon oneof its eyes, the other eye being affixed to the pommel, where it will watch fordangers.

It's almost too good to be D&D.

Then a march through a wonderous nightmare castle,meeting layers and layers and layers of fairytale guardians and satanicinhabitants. Like most of these tales the journey is too linear to make a gooddungeon on its own, but that's easy to adapt, in concept at least, it is alsovastly and beautifully strange, surreal, heightened. A potent blend ofhyper-theatre, opera, and perhaps awareness of very early film and photography?Perhaps early animation?

"Thereat the black hair that hung over the faceof the spider parted to left and right, and the spider frowned; then the hairfell back into place, and hid everything except the sin of the little eyeswhich went on gleaming lustfully in the dark. But before Leothric could reachhim, he climbed away with his hands, going up by one of his ropes to a loftyrafter, and there sat, growling."

This, surely is a Silly Symphonies spider?

C.L. Moore - A Map Of Hell. "She crossed a brook that talked to itself in darknesswith that queer murmuring that came so near to speech .. she paused suddenly, feeling the groundtremble with the rolling thunder of hoofbeats approaching .... a white blur flung wide across thedimness to her left, and the sound of hoof-beats deepened and grew. Then out ofthe night swept a herd of snow-white horses. Magnificently they ran, manestossing, tails streaming, feet pounding a rhythmic, heart-stirring roll alongthe ground. She caught her breath at the beauty of their motion...

But as they came abreast of her she saw one blunderand stumble against the next, and that one shook his head bewilderingly; andsuddenly she realised that they were blind ... and she saw too their coats wereroughened with sweat and foam dripped from their lips, and their nostrils wereflaring pools of scarlet. Now and againone stumbled from pure exhaustion. Yet they ran, frantically, blindly throughthe dark, driven by something outside their comprehension.

As the last one swept past her, sweat-crusted andstaggering, she saw him toss his head high, spattering foam, and whinny shrillyto the stars. And it seemed to her that the sound was strangely articulate.Almost she heard the echoes of a name - "Julienne! -Julienne!"." - C.L. Moore from 'Black Gods Kiss.

All this within a dreamlike otherworld accessed through adimensional corkscrew, not perceivable to one still wearing the cross of christ.Is it fairyland? Nightmare? Hell or one of Lovecrafts pocket realms? Whereverit is, it is a near-mappable point crawl with particular distinct locations,routes between them, particular modes of access, residents within and randomshifting encounters without. Something surprisingly rare to find in full amidstthese tales of inspiration

The Unlikeness Of The Inspiration And The Game These stories which provide the impulse or drive to playD&D are very deeply unlike the experience of playing D&D in someinteresting ways.

No groups or protagonist gangs. (Would make zero sense ina short story, even Elrics long tale has a few too many in it) The most we getis a pair. It speaks to something slightly charming in humanity that one of ourmost developed and pleasurable ways of experiencing imagined worlds takes placethrough the medium of a conversation - because we not only want to bring ourfriends along, but doing it in a group makes the imagination more realto us. Because we are a social species, and the living presence of a complexgroup is to us really another kind of meta sensing organ, like a super-eye.

There are few dead-ends; some mazes happen (I onlyremember one; the harbour maze of the Elrics Dreaming City), but they aresolved in one go. There is no back-tracking, no finding of keys, making maps,none of what's grown to be the baseline of a procedural culture of dungeonexploration - again fun to do (sometimes), not to read about. Mostdungeons in these stories are sequences of rooms. Others are small closedspaces.

There is no advancement really. Characters might get abit better at things, get some cool items, then if the tales go on long enough,age and get a bit worse, but generally people occupy a gentle curve ofcapacity. Neither is there much specialisation-by-profession or by type -anyone can attempt anything. You got yourself a body don’t you buddy?

All these changes are adaptations between two forms ofart, the narrative and the game, and even between two experiences of time;One is linear, though containing twists and turns, it has no branching pathsand cannot be explored. There are no choices to make except for when and whereto put down the book or pick it up, for the whole world can be held in onehand, paused, reversed, stored, forgotten and re-experienced whenever you wish.The other; multiplex in experience yet bound in real-time. Here you cangenuinely go one way or another, or even just leave the dungeon. (Butyou may not be able to return. You need your friends to play this game,and a DM, and a bunch of other crap, and they are not infinitely or eternallyavailable. Your access to this world is much more bound by materialcircumstances in our own). Need Conan truly kill that goblin? It is a reality madeof decisions, its substance being choices, and what seems to be itssubstance, in truth, merely curtains and theatre scenery.

Though linked by the human imagination, by a desire for adventureand to see new lands, and by a love of Things, and of heroes, and many otherthings, the sheer chasm between a narrative and a game is very great, andgreater still because an illusion lies over it, so that few see it for what itis.

Milk On A Warm Day The Sword and Sorcery exemplified by Conan and 'Tower ofthe Elephant', (and the best Conan stories really are very good), and byLovecraft, goes off quickly, even instantly, like cheese in summer or yoghourtin a sauna, when taken from the hands of its Masters. Like a clay pot, its relativelyeasy to make something that holds water, and rare grace to make true beauty.

These are such tender confections. And they don’t seemlike it. Because the tales are atavistic, heroic, inventive and quick,many lesser writers think they can do them, and because the basic costuming andappearance are so fungible, it’s easy to dress as them.

Kind of like, if you remember the Summer after 'The DarkKnight' came out, Heath Ledgers Joker appeared in photographs in every party,festival, cosplay thing, the guy was fucking everywhere - edgelord and theatrekid combined to make Joker-pressions the substance of the age. Because, likeHoward, and Lovecraft, the outward expression is easy to simulate. But all ofthose theatre kids and edgelords were about as much the Joker as many laterwriters were and are Lovecraft and Howard, or as much as 'Wheel of Time' is likeLord of the Rings, which is; it isn't at all, it’s merely convergent evolution,like penguins and dolphins being the same shape underwater. One in ten writersseem to understand that Conan is a relatively psychologically subtle characterwho just doesn't introspect much and does things with immediacy, or thatLovecraft thinks this shit is genuinely terrifying and you should be genuinelyscared of Infinite Things.

Vandermeers Afterword "What if the Gnoles were non-binary?"

Is an actual line from this. From this you likely know ifyou want to read it.

Thence The Text In substance, merely stories, and such stories as the'true heads' amongst you have probably already read and read the Grognardiareview of, and the RPG.NET thread of complaints about, I mean you are likelyfive layers deep on most of this stuff already, if I know you are all.

Yet you ‘Heads’ are still the most likely to actually buythis thing. Because they are good stories, with a few rarities, and thebook is a pleasant object, and its particular arrangement, and point of view,splaying forth the paelo-dreams of Dungeons and Dragons and arranging themnicely, in a little Wunderkammer, may amuse.

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An art exhibition/presentation is happening and I will be there! Along with much art from the world of RPGs!

Andrew Walter

So if you want to come and see me in 3D and tell me what you really think of me, or shoot me, now is your chance!

Weird Hope Engines is the name of the exhibition. It will be taking place in Bonington Gallery in Nottingham on Saturday 22 Mar 2025, and running till Saturday 10 May 2025.

https://boningtongallery.co.uk/event/weird-hope-engines/

A lot of people from the RPG art world will be there on Saturday the 22nd; Amanda Lee Franck (who had some art in 'Speak, False Machine), Tom K Kemp, (the artist of Gackling Moon), Zedeck Siew (of Thousand Thousand Islands and more, Scrap Princess and me Patrick Stuart.

Tom and I will be signing and selling copies of 'Gackling Moon', and I will have hardcopies of most False Parcels books to sell also.

It would like this to be a success, partly because if it is, they might do a second exhibition and there are more artists I would like to see included.

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[This will be more of an ‘exploded’ development documentas I look through the entry I had for ‘Deep Janeen’ (which were essentially areskin of AD&D ‘Dao’) and try to find a place for them in the developingcultures of the Veins, which also makes them useful and interesting in a‘D&D world’, where the purpose of everything is ultimately to interact withadventurers.]

origin unknown

The Deep Janeen are spirits of the of the earth. Creaturesof timeless, decadent intelligence, they live deliciously in palaces set downwithin the living stone. (They cannot work their magics on worked stone.The greater the mass of masonry around them, the safer they feel (from otherDeep Janeen).)

Deep Janeen are larger than men, with skin like blueveined marble, an strong, thick-limbed bodies curved like the sides of a vase. Theirvoices are like water being poured into an upturned bell.

Voracious and confident, Deep Janeen take pleasure intheir rank. Lords of Stone, commanding much submission from the earth by magicArt, these master can grant wishes and, it is said, attain all a soulmay dream of, if it pleases them. They might be called half-gods of theUnderworld, were they ever to leave their Mazes and the Courts within. Butleave they rarely do.

Filippo Baratti

[Design Logic

The power of a Dao, or Janeen, over stone itself,combined with their many other powers, makes them astonishingly potent in thevolumes of the Veins, where stone is the substance of all things, and where thechallenge of transporting ‘stuff’, of feeding, lighting and sustaining, is soall consuming.

Why then do they not rule the Underworld? And what rolemight they play in the intrigues of adventurers?

To answer this; the logic of the Maze-Court; a grand,expensive, eternal and eternally changing folly, or bower-bird nest, of workedstone, within which the Janeen dwells and to which they dedicate almost all oftheir substantial yet always-perishing wealth.

Culturally and psychologically, the Deep Janeen aretrapped within their mazes and their courts. Economically they are trappedwithin their status and their culture, for a Deep Janeen seen doing usefulwork, and getting gain, by other Janeen, would be mocked, ruined,exiled and destroyed (socially), and this is the worst thing that could everhappen to a Deep Janeen. So they must relentlessly gain resources, yetnever be seen to do so, and must spend even more relentlessly, on highlyvisible luxuries and on their Maze. And so they are poor. They have a lot ofmoney and a lot of luxuries, but they have even more expenses and demands.]

Maze Courts

The Court is a Maze and the Maze is the Court. To reachthe Janeen one must pass through the Maze. The Court lies at the centre of theMaze, or beyond it, or above it looking down. But the Court also interlaceswith the Maze. One is never certain if one has fully left the Maze.

The Maze is always under development, always being workedon. (Not directly by the Janeen, that would be abominable), but byslaves, or, for those of a liberal temperament, employees.

The Maze drifts, moving through the stone ocean ofthe Veins, both via its eternal and continual building and re-building, and throughthe magic of the Janeen, whose maze it is, so it is like a magic island whichmoves slowly about a sea.

These are not just dungeons. The mazes are works of art -works of status in every sense, works of pride and competition. The Court-Mazeis the highest expression of a Janeen’s power, intelligence, style, and anuntranslatable form of potency, of class, of virtu, a transmissibleenergy or spirit which both shapes and displays the vital selfhood of theJaneen. They need not eat, or sleep, and can live for mortal eternities. Theirexistence is a status game. The opinions of others are the truths of their lives.The mazeworks are like riddles: if everyone can understand them then they areworthless; if no-one can, then the same is true. They are set like palaces, atleast in terms of statuary and stone. Water aspects and others will be of aluxurious, (yet lethal), mode, like Turkish baths. Think the Alhambraunderground.

Indeed some Janeen are crowned with Mazes as some surfaceGods were crowned with city walls. A Janeen without a maze is not really aJaneen. Maze-loss creates, not a physical transformation, but apsychological and cultural one so total it may as well be. A Janeen with a poormaze is a Poor Janeen, regardless of how much specie they control. A Janeenwith a stupid Maze is a stupid Janeen. Or an unfashionable maze, or a simpleone, a crude maze or an ugly one… and so on.

Why Seek the Deep Janeen?

The Janeen can answer wishes. To an extent theycan re-make reality, by fair means or foul. And their powers are greatest inthe earth, where we are. Even their lesser powers of change and transport, ofalteration, creation and exchange, are enough to wipe slates clean. If theirfavour can be won.

If that is not enough, consider these lesser, but stillpractical treasures; a stone-road stave. An iron ring that holds a hero’s soul,bound for seven services. A lantern with a rock-evaporating light. A pet firespirit which will serve you so long as its golden chain is linked. Songs ofUnbecoming. Warping wands. An eye of Lapis Lazuli which terrifies the spiritsof the earth. Crowns of mutable stone and sheaths of living Jade. Maelstrombombs. Tongues of transport. A serpentinite torc that becomes a venom’d swordat your command. Ascension wells. Lithomantic potions. A book of sliver-thinslate with the means to make golems of stone.

origin unknown

Pauper Princes - Why They might meetwith You.

Wreathed in luxury, they are poor. Well.. not exactly. Theyhave resources. However, they are likely in staggering debt. They are inthe red, or at least in the black.

The Maze, the Maze, the Maze costs all, consumes all,absorbs all. The sheer prices involved! You would not believe! The Maze mustgrow, must breathe. The Maze must live so the Court might thrive and theCourt must feed so the Maze might grow. All this requires stone, slaves, foodfor them, logistics, organisation and so on and so on. And that’s just theunending construction, the Court itself requires servants, entertainers,musicians, dancers, illusionists, poets, cooks of various kinds and so on…

Worse, nearly as bad as owning an inferior maze; a Janeencan never be seen doing useful work. They must not toil. They are beingsof Pure Nobility.

Yet, somewhere, somehow, work must be done. They do itthrough shell organisations. They do it in disguise, through other names,through deniable servants. They do it any way but directly and in public view.They all absolutely deny doing it, and they are all doingit, and will mock those seen doing it, while doing it themselves. Such isthe toil of the Deep Janeen.

Conflicting Cultures of the Deep Janeen

Aesthetic Questions rule the scene; Schools on stones andmazes, arguments over treasures, gold and dreams.

The Two Schools of Shadowed Mass; many Deep Janeen lovegloom and the beauty of huge masses of worked stone. The first, Umbral, regardsthe placement of massy shadows of prime importance and arranges all stoneworkto produce precise gradations of shadow and depth. The second, the Lithic,regards the placement of shadowed mass to be the true path to beauty and arrangesall shadows to highlight masses and arrangements of stone. Few but the DeepJaneen can tell the difference between the two schools, though they loathe eachother.

The Six Schools of Maze-Making; Softling, Towered,Monstrous, Braile, Falling and Fincular. Don’t askme what these mean. They seem to have some relation to the styles ofMazes, (of which, more below), but how the theory intersects with built object,and what the borders and definitions of each are, is a source of argumentamongst all Deep Janeen. A “Fincular Crystal Swam Maze, with Softlinginfluence”? Sure.

Schools of Dream interpretation and defence. Musicalstyles. Schools of poetry and aesthetic magic. Argument upon argument. Pointupon position.

Janeen like sculpture but tend to loathe painting,as well as any material that pretends to be what it is not, though thedefinitions of what exactly this means,again, vary deeply. Is a Bernini sculpture acceptable? How about a Trompe ‘dOil painting used as part of a trap to confound rogues in a maze?

They love beauty but only bound. Free beauty is nothingto them, but lock it in an object or trade it as a service and they love it.

Weeks Edwin Lord

To Meet the Janeen

You do not meet the Janeen. Certainly they are not outand about (unless in disguise), and one does not simply challenge a JaneensMaze (unless invited).

You meet their Vizier;

Janeen Viziers

Their forms are many; beautiful golem factotums, lesserspirits of stone, living statues (of the Janeen themselves obviously). Rugweave and tympanum zoom calls (the rug threads shift and change - you can hearthem whispering). A statue of stone containing a caged spirit of air, water orfire. A whisp of salt. A clicking mosaic. A Vampire in Jade. A Mirror Liche – theircorpse dead but its reflection still live and subtle. A Corpulent Immortal or HotUndine. A drifting cobweb golem, its voice that of a certain harp, played by ablind, mute slave. Three stone ladies, one of igneous, one sedimentary and onemetamorphic, (they finish each others sentences), or a big intelligent bird,kind of like a very fancy muppet – it’s not clear who or what it is the‘puppeteer’.

Arclord of Nex - Pathfinder Community

The Vizier - “Behold this value.”

The Vizier writes down a certain number or total, andshows it to you.

“This is a value which shall be two parts and two, thatis, split into equal thirds, and the last third halved so that the totals arethus; one sixth, one third, one third and one sixth, for a total of four partsin these proportions, and in this order.

Do you understand?

The first part, should our speech go well, you shallsurrender to me upon its’ end, in any portable form.

Know this first; The Janeen does not do business.The Janeen does not make deals. The Janeen entertains Right NobleGuests.

Are you such kind?

The Right Nature of Guests

A Right noble Guest is any of the following;

· They are born of Aristocracy and Nobility.

· They have notable gifts of Art, Speech, or Music(not Painting).

· They have great and recognised magical power andskill.

· They are of great and well-attested Wealth, forone who possesses so vast an accumulation of wealth is no longer like othermen.

· They are of personal beauty or charm.

· They Amuse.

Are you such as I have said? If you are not, leave now.”

The Maze-Court

The Forms of the Mazes are many. Maze-Court stye andaesthetic, as well as its nature as a maze and nest of puzzles etc, issomething else that Janeen will argue over and mull over themselves. Some aresever classicists and use one of the below styles only, and that exploited tothe maximum effect with every possible Here are some;

1. FromsoftStyle - trickly 'looped' mazes where the Janeen’s court is visible almostimmediately, but you have to do a lot of fucking about to actually get to themain bit

2. KnightmareStyle - Like a pit dungeon where the Janeen’s court stands above lookingdown on the party - last part is stairs up, so they join the court and they inturn can look down on others

3. TowerStyle - Court is at the top (though the 'tower' itself may be simply aseries of cave or rooms in stone, the 'court' is usually kept somewhat open, inimitation of a real tower, perhaps with a mosaic-view of an imaginarysurrounding land

4. ZzarchovStyle - rooms all the same size, linked by visible and invisible dimensiondoors, locks, keys, riddles and codes. Lots of going back and forth, solving weirdproblems - fucking annoying!

5. GravitationalStyle - Rather normal dungeon/maze design but in places you walk 'up' thewalls and stand on the ceiling. you can look up or down at people or things'above' you, other than that, this is often a pretty standard dungeon (thoughin a Janeen style)

6. Fallingwater- A bathhouse, (artificial) waterfall. Plenty of fountains, a 'water level'with swimming, underwater monsters, mysterious grottoes (artificial),

7. Mazeof Transformations - somewhat Alice in Wonderland style with lots ofshrinking, growing, possibly transforming into animals or other things, withseemingly escher-like arrangements and lots of tricky unfair bullshit mixed in,but often without the clear recursive discipline of the 'Zzarchov' style,where, though the answers may be cryptic, there *is* an answer while in 'Alice'mazes, there may be an answer, but the maze itself may be broken, irregular, orjust perverse.

8. Mazeof Crystal Swarms - the walls made of some swarm or flocking creatures madeof glass or crystal. The actual volume of the maze is not that great but themaze itself reformats around the PCs like the structures of a computer gamewrite themselves into existence as they pass and turn through it, the flock orswarm moving in great clouds and reforming behind. Some Janeen would say thisis more a 'method' than a style. Though it demonstrates incredible wealth, skilland magical power, that doesn't necessarily make the form of the maze as-a-mazethat good, other Janeen, those who can afford a Crystal Swarm, tell them to gofuck themselves.

Steven Craig Hickman hopefully not slop

Meeting the Janeen

Lets say you actually get through the Maze, and to theCourt, (or at least the Court-like parts of the inner maze. This is the DeepJaneen;

Titles

The

1. Shaker

2. Dreamer

3. Luminator

4. Judicier

5. Composer

6. Navarch

of/in

1. Knowledge

2. Tectonics

3. Sleepingstone

4. TheMountain Metamorphic

5. TheFlawless Fault

6. TheStone Wombs Heart

Face

1. Haughtybut smiling often with the dazzle of a diamond tooth.

2. Alabaster,like a carved youth with the combined cruelties both of youth and of age.

3. Eyesof starry glass and hair a slow stone river woven with gold boats.

4. Apotter's abortion but delicately repaired with gold.

5. Flesh,except the eyes and mouth reveal the skin is shallow stretched on perfectstone.

6. Anegg with a cruel crack smile and glittering blue peridot eyes.

Clothes

1. Skinmarble, dark, and rippled with red. Her robes are black wire, woven subtlyenough to shame silk. They draw the gaze toward her crown of ashen tar, stuckstork and bright frozen peacock feather.

2. Smokeblacked armour, brass cast, etched by vandal artisans with one thousand and onevictories of the Deep Janeen.

3. Ahermit's simple robe or a sacred thinker’s cowl, made from one thousandtorture-sourced silks in the blues, blacks and bruise violets of the sky’sstorms.

4. Albinofurs and pearls carved into linked-up chains. Her shoes, paired slender spiresof colourless gem, stabbing the ground with each purposeful stride.

5. Stoneclothes, carved so expertly it’s difficult to tell except by touch. The gems ineach of his many rings hold maps, impossibly detailed air bubble depictions ofeach architectural triumph.

6. Ametal articulated robe discards a trail of scrolls as it scrapes a furrowbehind her thundering boots. Lackeys pick and continually re-archive herforgotten plans in the robe’s metallic folds.

Manner

1. Pauseslong and whispers more than yells.

2. Crueltiesare always a little kind but kindnesses are without mercy, reason or restraint.

3. Gazeis an extension of its grasp; the Janeen studies to own.

4. Freshskinned gloves finger lists of plans and inventories.

5. Eachhalf stroke of the hour everything is stopped, servants scurry forth, teas,meats, and glistening delicacies arrive. Calm and mild pleasantries rule untilthe last drop of tea.

6. Asmall live animal is presented to be crushed with each and every footstep.

Opulence

1. Slaveswave slow pennants of black velvet in their shadowed wake to intensify theirgloomy majesty.

2. Kebabson silver skewers which they use to pick their teeth, then throw away.

3. Aticking harem of clockwork courtesans in polished ebony and blazing gold.

4. Everystone and tool and fold of cloth enchanted to whisper their praises with eachmove, the air fills with a susurrus of quiet adoration.

5. Zooof surface animals kept petrified when not in use. Awakened and re-petrifiedwith insanely expensive potions sprayed from golden tubes.

6. Lampsare petty fire spirits bound in silvered skulls of Ælf-Adal.

Earth\_Djinn from Guild Wars

The Vizier Continues;

“…. Noble Guests who adore and respect the Janeen, andwho often bring gifts they hope shall please. Curiosities, which they know theJaneen does not need, and which the Janeen will refuse

But they shall offer again.

The Janeen will, again, refuse.

But, wounded by this, (though not explicitlyso), the guest shall offer a third time.

And this time, purely to avoid offence, and out ofcharity, the Janeen will accept (though a servants hands, they will not touchthe gift themselves).

The value of this gift shall be no less than the value ofthe second part, which was one third of the total value I have shown you.

At this time the entertainments shall begin, which shalllast for no less than eight hours, and during which, it may please the Janeento place an idle bet on this thing or that.

As you know, fortune, at all times, follows virtue, nobility,greatness and courage, and so the luck of the Janeen is uncommonly good.

Do you understand me?

Though it may pass in whatever proportions you wish, inthe course of entertainment, the total shall not be less than that of the thirdpart, which shall be, again, one third of the total I have given you.”

Activities

Amusements

1. Smashingin their vaulted roof, slowing it in time, having chained-up poets scribe thefalling stone.

2. Nakedgirls in golden cages locked 1001 times. Each good story earns a key.

3. Tattooingchildren’s backs with idle thoughts, making them run around till sentencesform.

4. Collectedcourt of Clerics of each god, Deep Janeen converts to a new religion everyhour.

5. Archeanorchestra on toxic instruments, so slow it plays one note each hour.

6. Forcingscholars to debate the merits of a grain of sand. Winner rewarded, loserkilled.

Strange Dreams

In their endlessly-rebuilt palaces deep beneath theearth, the Deep Janeen are often troubled by strange dreams. Explaining thetroubling dream in an effective way, without inadvertently insulting the DeepJaneen, can vastly raise you in their esteem.

1. “Istand upon a yellow shore. A silver ship burns. A survivor turns to me andsmiles. ‘Is this ever acceptable?’ he asks.”

2. “Iam a Lion (which I know is good) and eat a ghoul (which is bad). I tastecinnamon and sleep for seven days.”

3. “Acity of glass and shadow. I wait. The dawn comes, but not the dawn star. Why?”

4. “Iam speaking to a giant that crawls around my house tying knots in my columnsand doors; the giant whispers names I cannot hear.”

5. “Icrystallise, memoryless, in the magma chamber under the hill. It will not letme out.”

6. “Iam a souk in a city of brass, merchants trade in my veins, thieving childrenrun across my golden heart, yet I protect them.”

Fear of Sleep

The Janeen fear sleep and the power of the Aelf-Adal. Dueto this they avoid sleep and are often insomniac, and some would say,irrational. Many Janeen employ a Dream Guard or Praetorian of Sleep whosepurpose is to protect them even while they dream.

Fear of Plots

The Janeen is convinced everyone around them is plottingagainst them and while this is never completely true, it is still largely true.

Petulant Rages

Intervening in the murderous and easily-triggered ragesof the Deep Janeen can be deadly; so can not intervening in them.

1. Constructionsof anything but stone. The existence of ‘plaster’ and ‘wall-paper’. Deep Janeenhas never seen them but hates them.

2. “Thereis a forged coin somewhere in this room. Find it! By the stones of the abyssyou will bleed fire till it is found!”

3. “YouIfrit Fuck!” Deep Janeen thinks the fire in a lamp is laughing at them. Huntsand smashes lamps, lights and flames till it is found.

4. DeepJaneen convinced reflection in a particular pearl exhibits a single flaw.Curses pearls, casts them aside then hunts through them, demands larger andlarger pearls.

5. DeepJaneen stricken by violent self-loathing over inferiority of own mazework.Believes counter-arguments proof of secret contempt.

6. Universaland malignant incompetence of inferiors. Demands your agreement then turns onyou. Demands agreement of others re – your worthlessness, then turns on them.

Secrets of the Janeen

Hidden Economic Engines

The Janeen is making money some how, though they donot wish anyone to know exactly how, they do wish everyone to know there ismoney being made… somewhere.

1. Theyare a River Trader

2. Theycontrol and organise transport between Realms of reality.

3. Theyare in mining.

4. Theyscout mines for other powers.

5. Amercenary company or similar.

6. MassGolem Construction.

7. Writingsaucy novels on the side

8. Silkweavingsweatshop

9. Manufacturingdimensional transport which makes underground economy possible -bags of holdingetc

Deals They Must Make... Now! (But Must Not Be Seen To....)

The Janeen has a secret, desperate need, but the PCsdon’t necessarily know about it, or even know that it exists (the Janeendesperately tries to keep this from them, without also revealing it).

The Need

1. Silk

2. Gold(its amazingly heavy stuff)

3. Slaves(they keep dying)

4. Politicalcover in some elemental political situation.

5. Endthe Tariff!

6. Dolphins(don’t ask why)

7. MiningRights

8. Migrationrights

From;

1. Aelf-Adal

2. KnotsmanLord

3. RayMen

4. dErO

5. Archeans

6. OlmClan

7. Dvargir

8. FunginidMentality

Clues/Evidence PCs might stumble into

1. SingingFish

2. BellMusic Notation Code

3. Wordformshadow elemental

4. OpalBat Snitch

5. ActualLetter from...

6. GracefulGolem Courtesan

7. WhistledCode from Bird

8. WakingDream

Pathfinder, creator not known

The Vizier Goes On

“It does, at times, occur, in these hours of intimatediversion, (but never before the fifth hour, or beyond theseventh), that the intimates of the Janeen, in the course of conversation.

In the course of conversation, you understand?

May confess to this or that trouble, or disappointment,be it in this thing or that, which afflicts them, and, in the course ofconversation, they might discuss with the Janeen, their Intimate Lord andnearly-friend, potential cures and alterations to their sad state, and theJaneen may reply "How terrible! Surely something must be done!"or words to that effect.

There the matter shall rest, and no more shall be said ofit.

When the entertainments come to a natural close the Intimatesof the Janeen will part Joyously with the Janeen.

Now, after a certain time, it may be that thecircumstance or amelioration so desired by you shall be attained, thoughvarious means, perhaps obvious or unknown.

When this should occur, the Intimates shall send viasecure and trusted means, another gift, to the value of the total of the fourthpart, which was one sixth of the value I have given you - to the Janeen, viamyself, with a fulsome and full-hearted written thanks for any efforts theJaneen, may or may not, have taken or ordered to be taken on their behalf inthe mater which happened to pass between them as Intimates at that time whenthey were guests of the Janeen, and if the Janeen themselves took no visible orprovable action in the matter, no doubt it was the great fortune which attendsto the Janeen and all that they do, which did mark the weave of fate in thismatter, in which case even greater thanks are given (though the value of theenclosed git need not be greater, (but should be no smaller) than I have said).

The matter shall then considered to be closed, and nofurther contact either accepted or desired"

View Details

I bought this for Christmas and was playing it a bitevery evening during my temp job, then I lost that job unexpectedly and at thesame time UK got paralysed by dirty snow. I was depressed and frustrated because I thought the game screwedme out of an achievement, so I made a decision, a really BAD decision; Idecided to restart, use a mod to activate ALL romanceable characters across genderand remove jealousy, and re-start the whole game with a new character - a gloriouslyfancy noble with a high fellowship and moneymaking skills and rock bottomtoughness and willpower and commit myself to playing the whole game again asthe fanciest boy imaginable.

And that is what I did, for much longer than I expected, abouttwo weeks I think, though time got a bit formless during the experience, andnow I stand before you, finally free from the Koronus Expanse, having completedthe whole game, or as close to whole as one persona can reasonably get on oneplaythrough.

| | | Raszard |

I have deleted Rogue Trader. Never let me play a CRPGagain.

VastRT is a vast, ridiculously fat, byzantine structure. Itssheer weight, scope, and the interconnectedness of all its multifaceted systemsis both the flaw and the draw. The systems sing when they interrelate ininteresting ways that provokes more than the sum of their parts.

Draws; The gigantism is appropriate for the Warhammeruniverse and the ever-collapsing Imperium of Man. It actually makes you feellike a Rogue Trader, desperate ruler of a small empire, drowning in problems and facing everything with the fracturedmorality of the 41st Millenium.

Flaws; There are multiple intersecting types of crunchand grind, (which I probably made worse by downloading DLC and leaving ALLromance options open), from grainy grindy battles towards the second half, tothe literal accountancy job of progression. There is an Imperium-appropriatecompanion quest in the game where you literally have to stand in line for daysin an Administratum complex and its more fun than the actual bureaucracy oflevelling your characters.

The systems of Rogue Trader are; Navigating Paintings,Reading and Clicking, Murder Chess and the lesser systems of Navigation, SpaceBattles, Empire Management and Storybooks.

Navigating PaintingsAn isometric system like the old Infinity Engine classicsbut with the scenes and arenas modelled in 3D and with a swirly camera so youcan spin around, and limited 3-dimensionality.

By limited I mean there are sometimes two 'layers' orlevels to a game, with advantageous sightlines, ways to get up or down to andfrom places and ways to bottleneck and control areas in combat, but the areasyou run your little figure around when you are just being a Rogue Trader andtalking to people are the same as those you use for combat, to the gamesadvantage when gunfights erupt in places you thought were safe, which they doconstantly in the first part of the game, or turn into negotiations, which ismore rare but does happen sometimes.

Most potentially-tactical areas have one or two aspectsor elements you can use in combat, like a secret or less obvious flanking pathyou can find by exploring, or a perch to put a sniper on, and in the latergame, some limited interactable elements, like stairways you can materialiseand remove if you are in the right place, and objects and items you can messwith to alter the circumstances of a fight.

They are pretty. Really actually beautiful, and characterfulenvironments, and are all limited in size, very much not procedural orsimulated 'real scale' environments but more like 'stages', 'scenes' orchessboards with the narrative being made up of journeys between these stages.And that is both good and bad, because there is no insane wilderness wanderingthrough procedurally generated hexes, like you might have had with earlierCRPG's - but the game has to communicate its sense of scale and vastness throughthese many journeys between limited stage plays - making it more 'like' a play,in which a story of great events takes place, but the scene moves from 'court' to 'battlefield'to 'wilderness' with only the inference of an in-between.

There is a mild conflict, or at least, a managed polarity,between the complexity, detail and baroque nature of the painting-scenes andthe gameplay. The 'scenes' are a rhapsody of wild detail, from fecund junglesset with sapphire streams where snakes wriggle between the feet of yourcharacters, to spiky space elf megacities (Drukhari are very 90’s), to theendless pipage and grating and plates of a cogboy world, and this deepoverflowing of detail and specificity makes them very good at imbuing the gamewith the spirit of 40k in all its heaving byzantine gigantism.

But the tools and methods used for navigating thesebaroque digital paintings are highly limited, specific and well-honed frommaking many previous CRPGs. There are traps, which can be found and disarmed byyour not-D&D-thieves in the same way as the strangely-rectangular goblintraps in Baldurs Gate, (they are actually a little more complex), fiddlyhidden things that glow or are outlined so you can click on them, and secondaryroutes to places, (but very rarely tertiary or more, there will be an obviousway forward and, if you explore and click about the margins, maybe aless-obvious way, but not the infinity of choices presented by, for instance, areal forgeworld or space ship interior).

Of course actually making functional use of allthis visual and spatial detail would make the game virtually unplayable -investigating every crevice in something like a hive world map would bemindbreaking, though it does leave open the potentiality for a much narrowermore 'arty' game with a few very detailed maps and a large amount ofcontext-dependant executable detail in them, I suppose something like being abelowdecks investigator looking into smaller scale dramas.

Reading And Clicking The next most common activity in Rogue Trader is readingdialogue text and clicking one of a range of options. It’s through this thatyou feel much of the 'reality' of the world. The dialogue is solid, thecharacter writing somewhat better.

An interesting case of 'known unknowns'; dialogue willsometimes highlight when an option will require a skill test to pass, and willsometimes visibly grey out dialogue options based on how you have played thegames morality path - so you could have said this, if you were more Iconoclastic or more Puritan etc, but aren’t, so you can't.The game is letting you know and making it clear there were other possiblepaths, but I think there are also truly hidden options, lost and found thoughhigh or low intelligence or fellowship scores, though done or undone events andrelationships with various characters and organisations. there are times whenthe game wants you to know you are making a choice with certain consequencesand times when it will hide the existence of that choice and thoseconsequences.

The question of knowing and not knowing when you aremaking a choice and what it might mean goes down to one of the core conflicts Ifelt when playing the game.

if you've played infinity engine games or their ilkbefore the slightly natural/unnatural sometimes looping gamic structure of thedialogue its more questions-and-answer than more natural dialogue and flowsmore like an interview.

There is almost too much dialogue for me to simply reviewit. The main impression it left me with was its own giganticness, the sheermass of it, and the incredible organisational systems that must be required toarrange all of it, and to update it. On my second playthrough I added the voidshadows expansion and that adds characters and integrates their conversationsinto the game throughout the whole thing. I almost want to watch a documentaryon how Owlcat manages this stuff.

To return to the known and unknown element; there arecharacters we meet as NPCs who can clearly become companions, as this is set upin their introduction, we can lose companions, though it’s usually very explicitwhen this will happen and usually has to be a deliberate choice, (many reviewsof the game criticise the fact that your clearly one-way aligned charactersstick around way too long if you are obviously going in a different moraldirection and don't respond to that enough),

and there are a handful of secret companions who startout as NPCs and can possibly be recruited if you have the right alignment and pick the rightdialogue options.

I know that if it was easier to 'accidentally' losecompanions, like if the battle sister sees you becoming heretical and eitherleaves or even tries to kill you, this would probably draw complaints, but theaddition of more unknown unknowns really adds to the feel and flavour ofexperiencing a living world, and knowing, or not knowing, precisely who mightbe recruitable, deepens immersion.

Murder Chess
Though all chess is murder chess I suppose.

The square-grid turn-based combat is one of the most funthings about the game. The combination of moves, actions, attacks, cover,mutual support, area control etc, makes the fights feel very lively and fun,especially in the early game when you only have shit guns and your charactershaven't levelled to absurdity.

The combat brings together a lot of the 'material'aspects of the game; all the weapons you found, recovered or traded for, theelaborate procedure of 'dressing your dolls' with the best possible armour andclothes, and the mildly pleasurable autism of balancing boots that give plusone movement if an adjacent character is upset vs shoes with knives that letyou kick someone in the nuts and so on

The weapons also 'feel' chunky and appropriate. Sister Argenta’sfamiliar bolter sound was so loud I had to go into the settings to turn downeffects.

Positioning and planning your little chess pieces, preparingsightlines and trying to control areas with grenades and magic powers, tryingto make sure your psyker or nutty tech priest only explodes the enemy and notyou, planning when you will pull out your special sword for a super swing, ororganising your character build so you can dual-attack, trying to position yourofficer character so they can hand out buffs and extra movements, settingthings and people on fire, is great fun.

I played this on normal difficulty and by the last partof the game most fights were too easy to be interesting in themselves. A fewstuck out as having abnormal or wild difficulty. I could have turned thedifficulty up, to make things more interesting, but by the last act the sheet lengthof the game and the number of battles I had to fight became a weight on its own- many had turned from something I 'got' to do into something I 'had' to do toprogress (also I probably should have turned off the non-attack animations, thegame does give you the options for this), and the general deep sweaty graininessof the combat and character progression system also became a weight of its own

If you are a different kind of person I think playing onvery hard and continuing to carefully analyse and progress your characters mightstill be fun

A few interesting points;

The true currency of the Krononus Expanse is....GRENADES! Especially sustained area-effect grenades like smoke, toxin or fire.These are incredibly useful for dealing with big fights where your best tacticwill be to try to lock off areas of the board and control the flow of enemiesinto choke points where you can maintain your characters in close proximity toaid each other. Even at the early points, I was the master of a city sizedstarship and hope of the dynasty, but I kept running out of grenades and especiallyuseful ones. Like, I can have a gun that fires alien dreams or whatever, andapparently we never run out of ammo for that, I get infinite reloads, but Icannot get a fire grenade to save my life - I'm meeting with the Governor of awhole world who is offering me a trade deal and I'm looking for the option toask for a handful of grenades. The same is true of melta-charges; specificdemolition items that can open boxes and sometimes in open up new paths andareas of the board - if you are trying to 100% the game I think you canactually get soft-locked because there are not an infinite number of melta chargesin the Koronus expanse - you can only buy or find so many so be careful.

Sightlines work surprisingly well and intuitively. Sidlingup to a corner to peek round is something that actually works. Turn basedcharacter will hide behind something and pop out to shoot. Neat red linesindicate all their possible sightlines, snipers and careful skilled single shotranged weapons users can often fire into combat but your normal close range guyand mid-range people will have real trouble doing so. Having a sniper is funand satisying, they are someone who can deal with enemy snipers, which is veryuseful, reliably dish out high damage on key enemies, but there is again aslightly grindy quality to carefully selecting a target, then one after anothersequentially applying all your different buffs, each time the cameraswiiiiiings across the battlefield and you have to drag it back, then clicking'fire' and hopefully watching some goon hiding behind soft cover a mile awaytotally evaporate. Again it’s the crunchyness and the infinity of mild effects,the careful application of the same buffs in fight after fight, that might besomething you 'get' to so, but might turn into something you 'have' to do.

The Space Marine character, once you get them, issurprisingly mid. Or at least, they are a very chunky tanky guy who hits mildlyhard and shoots reliably, which sounds like a disappointment but is actuallyhow space marines tend to play on the tabletop, (unless they are optimised for somethingelse); very very survivable heavy infantry that shoot reliably at close rangeand fight ok, but less good at any of those things than your by-now more specialisedcharacters.

I feel like the combat system, and Owlcat generally,really need to make a Necromunda game. In terms of personalities, drama, largescale intersecting systems representing a complex world;

they have worked that out, and the early fights arebetter specifically because you have crappy tech and weapons, limited buffsthat relate more clearly to the imagined world, and limited character optionsso you have to think more about using them, which fits well with Necromunda. Owlcateven managed to get their engine to create a 'dark' level where you can barelysee anything and your little lumen servo-skull follows your cursor, whichsurely they could adapt into Necromunda. Their visually dense and carefullymade maps are already good, the one limitation is dimensionality. Most RogueTrader area have two levels and that’s about it, and characters cannot pass'underneath' other characters if they are on a gantry or something, so reallyits one level but at different heights, which would be a challenge forunderhive play, but their ladders and movement up and down work really well, andthe often fancy oblique sightlines and stuff like throwing a grenade from aboveactually function well

Crunchy Levelling The levelling is really where the systems gigantism andhyper-detail brings together its arguably-less-good aspects. I feel likecomputer games are a good place for the very crunchy but still human-operablesystems like the Final Flight system Rogue Trader is built on, since themachine can handle the endless series of buffs and details but the core numbersystem is still comprehensible enough that humans can fiddle with it.

In RT you level up across three 'wheels' and you level upa LOT. You start with basically a core class which often relates to yourcharacters lived background; Soldier, Psyker, Officer etc, then once your charactersmax that out you go to a second wheel that is a bit more abstract; ‘Arch-Militant’,‘Executioner' ? Then once you max that out, you go to a third wheel which isnearly the same for everyone, the 'Exemplar' wheel. There are fifty something'levels' in the game and five 'chapters' so you will be levelling regularly.

ITS VERY GRAINY

Some core choices are simple, like 'you get this magicpower', 'you get dual-wield (its shit without the right stats and buff)' and'you get another action point' or 'you can wear heavy armour now', but a lot, alot a lot, are more like 'you get times two this derived value in when X equalsdouble efficiency stack'. (THE FUCKING STACKS). Basically if you have a highIQ, or just really really like excel sheets and deriving figures, you can buildprobably some insane broken characters to do specific things, but if you arelike me, in the middle of the graph or just fucking basic, the 'normal'sensible choices run out quickly and it’s very easy to soft-lock or bollock upa character, like did you know an 'Executioner' specialises in deepening andexploiting long-term damage like people being poisoned or on fire? So if youwant to select that when it comes up, you really need to have a character thatis good at those things, or a bounty hunter gets big bonuses for personallytaking out characters they have marked, so they need to be mobile or havestrong range.

None of this is super-difficult, and is quite fun tobegin with, but it’s the main drift of the game where its scale, detail andlength all add together to make it more of an annoying weight rather than a funweight.

Did I mention that all of your companions all level atthe same time? You can only ever take six on a mission - the rest just hangaround on the ship, (presumably training hard), so, every time you level up andget back to the ship you have to go through the HUGE lists of feats and incrementalbuffs and special tricky powers, which are usually a bit different fromcharacter to character, compare those with your companions core competencies,stats, improved stats from items, favourite weapons, the way you tend to usethem in fights, and, if you are a drama queen like me, the type of person youthink they are, and you synthesise these all together and click 'this' or'that' option from a huge range and hope you haven't accidentally soft-lockedyourself from not being able to wear power armour or something in twenty levelstime (which I actually did with my main character, and had to re-train them,which you can do, but again, you have to choose EVERY level again, which is aten minute job). And you have to do this for ALL AVAILABLE CHARACTERS withevery level-up. THE FUCKING CRUNCH!

This is the part of the game most like work. I still hadfun with it, especially in the early to mid game. It went along with the whole'dressing your dolls' aspect but it became less fun as the game went towardsits end and for characters I didn't 'like' or rarely used, I just ended upclicking whatever to get them out of the way. I did go from 'yes, anotherlevel' in acts one and two to 'oh my god fuck not another level' in acts four and five.

[A side note; the instability and violence of imperialsociety, and the constant intrigues and real physical dangers at the top of thepyramid, (in the first parts of the game you get attacked pretty regularly inhigh and low status areas, even to the extent that it becomes a bit silly), alldoes fit with the background, and does make sense of imperial characters takingsword and pistol literally everywhere they go. If I was any of these people Iwould be taking my looted drukhari blast pistol into the bath and to bedbecause of course someone is going to try to assassinate you in thebath, it’s the best place for it, and of course demons will materialisein your bedroom during a warp transition, and of course the local rebelswill try to shoot you down over the governors palace, where else would they doit? yes I am taking my fucking chainsword to the dinner reception, and so iseveryone else, are you fucking stupid?]

The Lesser Systems Navigation This is neat. It’s a really simple system butencapsulates an interesting paradox of navigation and exploration in games. Aterrible incident destroys your dynasties knowledge of the stable warp routesof the expanse, and warp routes in this area shift regularly anyway, so whatyou have is a map with a bunch of stars with mysterious names, some of whichyou know are important to you,

and are a handful of potential warp routes alreadyhighlighted. Every time you reach a new system you can hit a spooky button tochart new routes which sends out a magical sonar blip which might highlightsome new routes between places, maybe some whole new systems you didn’t knowabout before, it also gives you Navigation points, which represent yournavigators skills and knowledge gained from going to new places, and you canuse these points to either make warp routes less horrifically-dangerous, or to forge brand new routes to discovered oralready known systems.

This balance of discovery to opportunity to making-safe,all bound by your rate of exploration itself

works... pretty well. Like a few things in RT, it can bepossible to accidently soft lock yourself out of things and in my firstplaythrough I didn't understand what I was doing, accidentally burnt my pointsby making an inconsequential route green and then got attacked by demonseverywhere else. But its a fun system generally.

The paradox about game navigation I feel it highlights isthe discovery of the known. Because actual totally undiscovered places in reallife, I mean places undiscovered by anyone, are actually very dull and notuseful. At takes sustained human interest and activity to turn a totallyunknown place into one where exciting and useful things might be found andexploited, and where dramas might happen

so, like in a lot of games and stories, what you areexploring in the Koronus expanse is the forgotten rather than the unknown, andthe game deepens this in many ways - there are lost imperial ships, forgottenfrozen colonies, strange bunkers, abandoned mines, lost cities, mysteriousresearch sites around impossible objects etc. This adds to the deep sense thatthe border of the imperium is not something it is expanding into, but a deeptidal zone, that imperial power expands into and retreats from on the scale of millennia,reaching forth when strong or driven, fading away at other times, only to be rediscovered by new ages, that what youare exploring, others have explored, many times, and will again, and this addto the sense of tragedy and deep time that creates part of the sorrowful natureof the setting and which feeds into the morality or sense-of-self of itscharacters. They are truly the children of the ruins.

Space Battles There is a cool ship combat system based on the BattlefleetGothic rules, where space ships manoeuvre in curves and arcs, trying to geteach other in their prow or broadside ranges, and in the case of imperialships, trying to set up the rare ramming opportunity. Few things are more funthan the occasional chance to Plow madly into the prow or stern of some giantchaos battleship or mysterious alien artefact, one thing I miss from myoriginal character was her crazed voice lines from ship combat, she went offlike a lony supervillian with every battle;

"CHAAARGE THE LANCES! FIIIIRE!"

Winning these ship combats gets you access to certainplanets and spaces. Planets either have nothing, but you get xp for discoveringthem, some have exploitable resources to feed your growing empire, some havedialogue-only away missions where you send guys out to investigate mysteriousruins etc, and some have actual full adventure zones.

Ship Battles interlock with two factions in the game youencounter in various forms; the Navy and the Flellowship of the Void (Pirates),each of which can trade you various handy things if you build enough of areputation with them.

Empire Management Once you have a few planets under your belt you can startmaking horrific management decisions about what projects to build there and howto govern them. Depending on how good a ruler you are, how much resources youcan gather etc. There are limits on what you can build, some projects gettingyou certain rare resources, special items, (my late-game familial power armourcame from one of these options on my main planet), and locking off other lateroptions.

There are also mystery events or crises that require yourpersonal intervention, which means you have to hare off across the map again toreturn to a colony to tell them to stop being idiots about something. Having ameaningful empire means doing a lot of governing, so I hope you spent thosenavigator points carefully to green the routes between your main planets.

A fair amount of the mid-game of RT is being in themiddle of something important and getting a message saying your need to raceacross the expanse to deal with something else.

Storybooks The last system is an interesting one. Certain events orsituations will trigger a multiple-choice storybook section. This is like achronicle or a tale told from a certain perspective, of a time someoneencountered the Lord Captain, where yourprotagonist is a character in their story.

So at various points, you might be about to invade aworld to free it from chaos and the story of the invasion is told from theperspective of one of the grunts on the ground with your decisions and skill tests deciding how theinvasion goes, or at another point your get the first person story of aDrukhari Scourge given the contract of assassinating the mon-keigh leader, withyour character being the subject of their hunt and your choices deciding howthe hunt goes, or as the tribal retelling of the story of when the greatleader came from the stars and what they did.

These are interesting for a variety of reasons; theyoffer a relatively quick and cheap method of dealing with huge events andcomplex situations without having yet another dialogue tree, they build thesense of gravity of the reality by showing your character from a variety ofdifferent perspectives - to a tribesman or soldier you are a semi-mythicalfigure, they challenge your skills and abilities with the familiar known andunknown unknowns, in most dialogue and painting-navigation sections, yourcharacter can 'use' the skills of your retinue to deal with challenges, whichleads to you carefully developing and selecting characters to be good atcertain things, if you think there might be traps you need the Aeldari rangerhigh perception to find them, and someone good at demolitions to disarm them,if there is warp fuckery you might need to bring the inquisitor, but in thebook sections is it’s your abilities alone that decide things.

In my first playthrough my character was smart, strong mindedand good at shooting, so they were an icy intelligent type that made them a competentsniper on the battlefield, gave them perhaps hidden dialogue options from ahigh intelligence and let them face down scary threats with high Willpower. Butshit fellowship, persuasion and commerce, so actually not that good at a lot of'governing a star empire' events. My second character was a noble fancy boywith super high fellowship and commerce, but I actively tried to keep hiswillpower and toughness low for as long as possible, so he was rubbish in afight unless he had people to command.

These storybook sections really highlighted thedifference between them, with the icy sniper Isabella dealing relatively wellwith physical stuff when isolated, but being bad at persuading people oraltering events, while Valerian Von Valencius, my posh fancy boy, was inabsolute pantsshitting terrorgdanger with solitary adventure sections, butactually very good at managing people, doing diplomacy and managing his empire.

Love And Failure - Did I Fail The Game? I played this game one-and-a-bit times. Once with myfirst character, when I nearly go to the end of the second act, and again withmy second character, where I played the whole thing all the way through.

My first time I really didn't know what I was doing andmade a bunch of mistakes, soft locking myself out of certain things and generallybeing non-optimal, but my sheer lack of knowledge about what I was doing leadto me being much more immersed in every individual choice as that character

even though the game was going less well overall. I was overwhelmedby events and systems and everything, but this frantic sense meant that I feltlike my protagonist; constantly on the move

uncertain, not knowing what choice or option might leadwhere, weighting my dialogue choices and strategic choices more like a personthan a player.

On my second run I knew more about the game, already knewwhat would happen in much of the first two acts, and my character wasdeliberately unbalanced, designed more to be a particular person with a strongset of abilities and weaknesses. I also downloaded the Void Shadows DLC, whichadded a whole bunch to the game.

In some ways Valerian Von Valencius felt more like arogue trader, while my first character, Isabella, refused to take a bath,Valerian did so immediately, presumably as a noble it was simply his nature, andhe ended up bathing with every member of his entourage over time, but in otherways, though he was, in some ways, more optimised to be a 'person', he,(meaning I), had lost our ignorance, our unknowing of what meant what and whatwas to be. I was less immersed, because I knew more.

It’s very hard to play a game and not try to optimiseyourself, but that very instinct is in conflict with a deeper desire orimpulse; the need to really experience events, from the first time, un-warnedin advance and unknowing of their consequences.

Throughout the game RT deliberately plays with veils, givingyou some choices with clear causes, consequences and mechanics, others blind, somegiven without reason, others removed. You never really know when the game willrespond 'as a game' or when it will simulate a world, with strange long termconsequences resulting from apparently minor choices or effects. This slightlyshadowy 'magic trick' quality seems another curious paradox of play, onecentral to the RPG experience;

the strange gift of ignorance.

I did cheat at times.

There are cheats I defend and would do again. Using thetoybox mod to activate ALL romance options across gender and removing thejealousy feature; why this is simply how a true Rogue Trader would play.

Likewise, there were a handful of annoyingmultiple-choice shit riddle questions where you have to either relentlesslyexamine tiny fragments of environmental information and then postulate fromthose the correct sequence of answers with no indication of which in thesequence might be right or wrong, or just brute-force them. I looked those upand I feel fine about it. They were shit challenges.

The deeper question of what it actually means to playblind, and what and where the value of a game lies, of the fundamentaldifference between meeting an apparently complex situation for the first time inignorance, and therefore treating it as fundamentally more-real, and meeting itfor a second or more times, and the deep conflict within myself of wanting toexperience vs wanting to 'get things right', I am no closer to resolving. Thoughperhaps by accepting it I can manage it better.

I got a Goth Girlfriend, and a hot Mutant Bae, but theyboth left me in the end…..

View Details

Anarchists of the infinite dark. Chaotic where nothing so uncertain should be able to survive. By chance alone they thrive, by chance they die

Russ Nicholson

Physical Appearance

Are these monsters even Goblins? No two are quite the same. Most have no heads. Instead, big gawping faces occupy the centre-mass; lumpy spheres ringed with limbs; long dandling legs and nearly indistinguishable arms spreading out like spiders limbs. Others so crooked-backed that they are grown into hoops, even rolling along on their knobbly spines, bouncing the ground with pugnacious faces on each turn. Others long and loopy, with fifty eight vertebrae and six to eight limbs, who scurry like centipedes along the ground.

The chaos goblins sunless skin stained black with crazed tattoos, full-body or half-body black paint, tattooed vantablack ‘gloves’ or ‘boots’ so that they seem to move along like ghosts, or one half blackened, the other kept pristine. Others graffitied with crazy notions and scurvy pictures. In off hours the Chaos Goblins tattoo each other and themselves with whatever they have to hand; blood, brain paint, ash, ichor, mondmilch. Don’t confuse it with a Culture.

The Chaos Gobs have monocoloured eyes. Either utterly black, like a sharks, or and infra-white sclera and iris that backscatter unlikely radiations into visible light, meaning the whites of their eyes, which are the whole of their eyes but for the pupil, glow or stand out clearly in the dark, especially when there is no other light at all. Such goblins often paint or tattoo themselves utterly black, leaving only their eyes. They find this hilarious.

Chaos Goblin eyes can also ‘bulge’ and ‘flex’. Rings of muscle around their cartilaginous orbits, and very robust jelly, mean the eyes themselves writhe and warp in shape, sometimes pushing and squeezing the ball into a peeping scope, or even ‘closing’ entirely, making the face a blank,

Somewhere equatorial to the eyes, swivelling radar ears turn like blinking chameleons. Beneath; their twitchy noses poke and point this way and that, leading the way, and under those the mouths are full of teeth of knives, while the Goblins carry knives of teeth, along with the most bizarre assortments imaginable; umbrellas, hats, man-skin gloves over tattooed black hands, geegaws and trinkets. Always jiggling and poking, snorting and chuckling are the Chaos Gobs.

Russ Nicholson

Culture (?)

Horror Goblins banished from the sun for deeds too-queer. Worshippers of primordial chaos, and the chaos Dukes they find in worms, in pies, in dung, in eyes… Even Goblin Lands won’t take them in. Thus came they, blindways, nightwayes, west of Midnight, north of Quiet, down down down to the Underground, where no sun shines and dreams and dark are one.

Even here nobody likes them! (Maybe the dErO, who use them as hunters and deniable ‘proxies’, (like a rabid frog on a candyfloss leash). Or at least they try to. The Chaos Goblins find the dErO hilarious, but they find everything hilarious.)

Anarchists of the Veins. Hell Gobs! Terrorists! Friends to slime and slug. Goblins who got a little too dark. Chaos! Or expressions of it.

They must engage in some kind of economic activity, if only for the fun of it. They seem to have…. stuff. As well, they must have some kind of irregular pipeline to other multiversal goblin cultures - they have some animated weapons and goblin guns. They have met David Bowie. (The actor, not his character in Labyrinth.)

Too twee? Too cringe? Too twenty-twelve blog post? They don’t care. In fact, that makes it better. In the whole of any Veins-World, the Chaos Gobs are the only creatures who may have met David Bowie, or will even know who that is, when even the Player Characters don’t.

I’ll say this; the Chaos Gobs have so much respect for Chaos they will usually respect a bet, and the more inane and chaotic the bet the greater respect it has. Cards & Dice? = FOR CUMPS. Lets bet on flies landing on shit-piles, or whose eye pops out first, or who can eat more of a live snake, each starting at a different end. Yes, the Chaos Goblins will respect a bet, for the five to thirty minutes that makes up their short-term memory. After that they stop caring at all.

But that doesn’t mean they will chase you down. They are chaotic after all. Might simply doodle on the walls, or sing a song, or eat each other. Best to run while you have the chance.

Pathfinder

Material Culture

Wherever they are the Chaos Goblins ‘Chaos Aura’ (see ‘Mutational Effect’ below), warps and alters the environment in various ways, but they also make raw physical changes that anyone could do.

In the living expression of course, its hard to tell where madness ends and the extra-real beings. The Chaos Gobs certainly don’t know.

They shit everywhere, paint the walls with shit. They poop in many colours. They paint the walls with Brain-Paint, (see below), and who knows what that might do? And they paint the walls with paint, if they happen to have any. They carve passages into goblinish shapes, their halls are like cathedrals where only gargoyles and grotesques are allowed. Gieger would enjoy them, and yes! He was one of them! They bore random holes to nowhere, build castles made of moon-beams, imported from the seas of the Imprisoned Moon (How did they get them, since they are so poor in every other way?)

So, imagine this; a ridiculous cathedral with the windows being crazed paintings in luminescent shit, or actual para-reality doors…

Yes they might have some treasure. They might have the treasure. Of course they don’t know what it is, or care. Its in a bucket and the bucket is what they value. They will chase you TO THE ENDS OF THE FUCKING EARTH about that bucket!!!

On the move you might find them hiding Man-Camels in a hole that wasn’t there before, or collectively inside a box that shouldn’t be present at all. (Many Chaos Goblins can climb out of one thing.)

Storyforge art

Tools And Weapons

Man-Camels

Trepanned or brain-screwed naked human beings with elongated limbs. Used as beasts of burden.

Brain-Paint

Vital Chaos Goblin tech, and a major source of conflict with Soft-Heads who also needed those brains. Brain-Paint is made from the brains of wizards, or anything analogous to a wizard in Goblin eyes, mixed with.. whatever really. What a Chaos Goblin paints with Brain Paint becomes conditionally-real. A tunnel painted on a wall becomes a tunnel, a hole becomes a hole, a princess becomes a princess (a Chaos Goblin version of one anyway). This may be how Chaos Goblins gain irregular access to other Goblin Realms; by just painting them on the wall and walking in, then getting out fast before they forget they can’t really be there. The useful effects of Brain-Paint for non-chaos-goblins are highly irregular, and it doesn’t work at all if not painted by a Chaos Goblin. The negative effects usually work.

Living Weapons

Chameleon Whips actual chameleon tongues make their targets appear differently, Sting Stones are wasp-souled sling stones, Spider-Guns like silk-spewing bagpipes. They are rumoured to use tame (?) Ungulix as hunting hounds.

Madlights

Important in the Veins, Chaos Goblin lamps are always varicoloured and always move madly, either flung and whirled about the head, or actual living bugs and floating frog-balloons lit from within but still trying to hop. They are carried like child’s balloons or like toys, or streamers, bouncing and whirling about.

Other Items

Potion-Pots, Sticky Pokers, Fiddle-Diddles, Hidey Box, Boomerangs, Hooks, Grease, mall-bought shuriken, Madness Pipes.

Russ Nicholson

The Power of Chaos!

Existence for the Chaos Goblins is a dark, violent, anarchic comedy that never ever ever ends. A cruel, surreal, picaresque from which they cannot escape, from which they cannot wish to escape.

They are like a corruption, a Cancer on Reality. Causality bubbles and warps around them. Extremities of chance become common, rare events; regular, humours change. Their physical environment also warps, becoming emblematic, expressionist, arch and Caligarish, somehow performed.

Those who are captured by Chaos Goblins, inevitably monstered, stripped, tattooed, altered, are either made into man-camels, or slowly devolve into Chaos Goblins themselves, as they go utterly mad. These ‘Changed Ones’ are the Chaos Goblin shaman who perform their Grand Transformations.

Chaos Mechanics

Chaos Goblins don’t roll dice, they just flip coins. Heads is a crit, or the highest number possible from the equivalent die roll, tails is a fumble, or the lowest number possible. A die-equivalent can be managed by making all ‘odds’ crits and high and all ‘evens’ fails and fumbles.

All Chaos Goblin action oscillates between bizarre flukes of terrifying good luck, and the most laughable and deranged failure, with nothing in-between. Their 'magic' is the ability to act like cartoon characters.

Chaos Aura!

The Chaos Aura around a Chaos Goblin randomises the effect of any spell cast upon them. Usually this just randomises between any spell of the same level, but on a d20 roll of 20, it randomises between all possible spells of any level.

Knightmare Miniatures

Chaos-Tricks!

Thankfully, each Chaos Goblin can only use one Chaos Trick at a time, and usually only one Chaos Goblin can use each Chaos Trick in each encounter.

It takes actual concentration to do it. But more important than concentration is circumstance. In the words of Roger Rabbit, ‘it has to be funny’. Though ‘funny’ for a Chaos Goblin doesn’t mean funny for anyone else.

Still, in effect, if a Chaos Goblin uses a Chaos Trick during an encounter, that Goblin can only use that one power, and only that Goblin can use that ability. Otherwise it wouldn’t be ‘funny’.

Elongating Arms

Extend your arms like a huge accordion! Or like long loopy animated limbs! Or like big mad snakes!

Inflated Body

Huff and puff and a Chaos Goblin can inflate itself just like a balloon and float about in the same way, waving its limbs for some level of control. Pierce it and it goes ‘vvvveeeeeeeeee’ and flies about like a balloon, instead of collapsing like a body of equivalent mass.

Deranged Disguise

A Chaos Goblin can disguise itself by dressing very crudely as whatever it wants to be seen as. They can even disguise themselves from the Dungeon Master. For instance the Dungeon Master might say;

“In the middle of the battle, a hot princess appears and starts making lovey dovey eyes at you?”

“Where did she come from?”

“I have no fucking idea.”

Bear in mind; Chaos Goblins are mad, stupid and cringe, so while their disguise might be impenetrable in a metatextual sense, it will often stand out as being utterly retarded. (But look out for those occasions where it isn’t.)

Harmless Liquefaction

A Chaos Goblin can be liquified and poured into something, before being decanted and reassuming its form. This honestly has limited combat utility.

Hiding

A Chaos Goblin can hide behind something that has no space to hide behind, like a long thin rod, or under a rug.

Limb Fix

A Chaos Goblin can lose a limb and replace it with something else that is sort of like a limb, simply popping or screwing it on or in. This might be sword, a hook, a bone, another Chaos Goblin or anything really.

Impossible Shadow Puppets

A Chaos Goblin can make shadow puppet animals or beings on a cave wall and use them as actual creatures.

Grand Transformations

A Shaman is required for this, or someone the Chaos Goblins think is a Shaman. A Big Ritual takes place and one, or more, or all Chaos Gobins are transformed, either randomly, or all into Bat-Goblins, or Fish-Goblins with smiling goblin faces, or Mist-Goblins or are agoblimated into a single Mass Goblin Mega-Goblin.

View Details

The RayMen, slight and fast, aged-but-ageless, backs inherentlystooped, with bright, intelligent eyes.

At the edge of the comprehensible world, where darknesssculpts itself an active form, the RayMen feel a purpose that strikes likelightning in the tempest of their daily lives. The flame to live is quickened andfed on pure melodies of light and space. These are a people without shouts,without tears, without hopes, without regrets. They value only four things;Life, Light, Techne and The Deed.

| | | Rayonist Lilies (Goncharova,1913) |

Life-Preservers The RayMen value any living thing. For them, life is thespine of reality and justifies the world. All else is a fiction; only life and action,child of life, are authentically True. Life is what is real.

Life knows neither good nor bad nor justice, so it is acold charity the RayMen offer. They may be the only people in the Veins tryingto keep you alive as a matter of principal, but it is principal, notaffection. There is nothing personal about it. Neither do they specify ‘safe’,‘sane’, ‘free’ or ‘well’. Only ‘alive’. Neither aretheir offers free. RayMen can offer food and simple tools to keep a wandereralive, but this is a debt which will not be forgotten. Not the crushingcompound-interest debt-slavery of the Knotsmen, but a precise repayment ofresource, pursued with calm but existential ferocity over terrible reaches oftime.

Almost alone of the cultures of the Veins, RayMen do notpractice slavery, not quite. They acknowledge its legal existence. To dootherwise would put them at permanent war with every other civilised power andthey will trade slaves, if they think such trade more likely to securethe slaves life.

Masters of Forbidden Slime RayMen culture much of the fungi, lichen and algalgrowths which feed on magic, heat or other things, and which form vital pillarsof the food chain for many civilised location in the Veins. What magics theyhave interlace with technology and this is used to enter strange and forbiddenrealms, seeking biological bounty; bugs which feed on dreams in nightmarelands, the black crops of hell or the entropic slimes of the Final Eons. Theseare manipulated and cross-bred with normative lines in the attempt to createstable food-types for the great caverns of the lightless depths.

The successes are always curious; airborne plankton whichfeed on music, consumed in-turn by swarms of the ghosts of insects, themselvesdevoured by micro-bats which digest their sprightly food into material calories.Physical fungi that feed on sentience itself, producing great fields of fertilemycelium tended by hollowed-out P-Zombies. Summoned grey tendrils which piercethe veil to drink the deepest darknesses, leaving only glitched zero-grey, butwhich can be harvested with scythe and sickle.

Even the positive and stable relationships can producestrange ontological pollutions, but such is the price of life. The ‘control’ ofcrops and fertile systems possessed by the RayMen forms part of the triangle oftheir power; if you want to eat, sooner or later, you come to them.

And of course, they will assist you.

| | | La musica, Luigi Russolo |

The Calcinicus Doctrine Life-supporting warfare means an emphasis onincapacitation rather than destruction and the RayMen dedicate their brilliantminds, and the power of their techne to such ends. They are the mastersof gas, legalistic avoidance, illusion engines, chemical alteration,madness-cannons, blinding rays and other forms of non-lethal warfare.

Many RayMen wear their Gas-Masks semi-permanently. Gas ispotent in the closed atmosphere of the Veins and they make use ofincapacitating mustard gas, tear gas and chlorine, in bomb, grenade or sprayforms. Or, when necessary, in mass-dispersal tanks.

More strange and complex technologies are used; Sleep-Grenadesare extensions of RayMan alchemical-engine technology, turning words to instantsleep, so that whoever talks, or thinks in words, in their dozing-field, fallsright asleep. Peace-Hogs are mines, grenades and sometimes spikedblunderbuss-guns firing crystal slivers that dissolve into a harmlesscalm-imbuing ichor in the blood. Madness-Cannons are weapons of last-resortwhile Illusion-Guns are portable expressions of RayMan stealth technology. ExpertIllusion-Pistoleers use twin guns, one in each hand, modulating a single senseeach. In the Veins, vision is not always the most significant sense and smell,echolocation and ‘air-sense’ or ‘volume-sense’, (really a fine form of touch),can all be more important, depending on target and situation.

RayMen have more terrible and destructive technologies,but these are reserved as weapons of a last-resort. Due to their quasi-pacifistdoctrine, RayMen have no concept of limited warfare. Once the last of theirboundaries has been crossed, they commit every art they have to the dealing ofabsolute death.

Weapon-Trade RayMen never trade their weapons. Rewards for handingthem in are high. Bounties for those who, for whatever reason, find themselvesin possession of such, but do not hand them in, are much higher.. veryextremely high. Making the pursuit of, or trade in, stolen orrecovered RayMan techne a trade in death.

Neither do RayMen take weapons in payment, regardless of circumstance.

| | | Giacomo Balla, Street Light |

Lords of Light RayMen see the Veins as Space and Light, highlighted by Mass.They consider themselves lucky to live here. As they see it; no-one from Aboveknows what space and light truly are. Those who live beneath the stars drown inboth, merely using each; space to ‘keep things in’, light to ‘see’ otherthings. But space is not a piece of luggage. Light is not an errand boy. Light Is.

Active, alive, it races faster than a waterfall,soundless and eternal. Space Is.

Infinite, all-holding, reality-imbuing. They have theirown quality.

RayMen value gems, but only for the light within thegem, like thoughts within a mind. Beauty worked from Space and Light has allthe properties of a real force like gravity or heat. The body is superficial,accidental. Tone, brightness, occluding or refracting, that is all. The eyesbut not the face.

Lume-Traders Here Below, they dominate the Lume-Trade. Spider-ridingRayMan pedlars and traders always carry wild arrays of luminescent gear, fromthe simplest biological lamps to the subtlest artifices, to the queerest magics.

They own the Light-Banks; vaults of luminescent material,as well as precursor elements and mechanical necessities of every kind. Greatarmoured tanks of Whale-Oil. Racks of candles. Forests of glowing fungi andaquaria of sparking eels.

A common RayMan tool is their Lume-Conversion mechanicalcalculator; a semi-cylindrical brass device of startling capacity with everypossible form of Lume describable via complex key-sets of its brass buttons andlevers. These are re-set at every Light Bank and themselves transcribe theirconversions into the banks own engines to keep right the grand conversions andcalculations of all the Light within the Veins; an ever-replenishing equationof economic, and near-religious importance to the RayMen.

| | | Umberto Boccioni, 1912 |

Techne The RayMen have ever been masters of Techne. Notquite systematic mass-produced technology, more like the conceptual structuresof spells, cloaked in metal, described in systems and moving parts. RayMan technecan be used by others, if they can work out its non-intuitive activation, andoften seems to have a little more life in it than a mechanical device should;clicking, ratcheting, re-setting and unlocking at curious times to unknownstimuli.

Rays The power of the RayMen is bound within their Rays;lances and scatters of light and force that spear out to blind, illuminate,transform, to pierce stone or spike minds.

Stone-Rays are common alchemical weapons – enter a cavernto find blasts and spars of fragile stone exploded from a central bastion, nowfrozen in place, slowly crumbling. Relics of a battle with RayMen besieged atopthe central tower.

Sky-Rays emit an imperceptible force that causes the eyeto perceive a lucid sky-blue field for a moment. This signals death andwhomever saw such light will soon sicken and slowly die. A weapon of lastresort.

White-Ray projectors suck in air or water and transformit to a lance of bright-burning white phosphorous which sticks to flesh.

Other rays can look through the body to perceive brokenbones, or hidden items, or can even peer through stone as if it were glass, orcan count time from stellar wonders far below the earth, or can burn or cut ata distance. RayMen can travel by rays they say, though only in straight lines,and can transmit words, images or thoughts, again, only ray-wise. In theCaverns of the RayMen the rays crackle and flash amongst eternally movingmachines powered be electrical stromatolites washed by alkali canals.

| | | Futurist Flower 1 by Giacomo Balla |

Strange Alchemical Engines Engines of transformation, alchemical capacitors - littlecornucopia. These are the keys to the RayMens rays, to many of their weaponsand tools. Few outside their ethno-culture know they exist and less know howthey work.

Night-combustion engines burn darkness into light creatingontological pollution; fumes of pale shadow that seep across the stone andcurdle in the earth driving the stones insane. A scientist who believes in notomorrow is a dangerous thing.

Trogoloautomata Clock-Spiders and Pneumo-megapedes. RayMen ride aachinesmade in the shapes of Veins predators and wanderers. Hyper-clockwork builtinside impossible ‘long-cabinets’ and meta-cupboards’ with the aid of tameSubstratals. Incredible grinding and clockwork sounds echo into animperceptible distance inside the machine. Pipes contain more pressurethan went in. If destroyed, they explode like bombs.

Bright with blinding searchlights and the loudesttravellers of the deep dark due to their terrible grinding sounds and infiniteclicks. This is almost a sensory assault in Veins-culture and only the RayMen,the Lume-Traders, could get away with it.

Keeping damp off the machines is a continual problem.Scrub them down with the Evaporation Ray.

| | | Horizontal Volumes by Umberto Boccioni, 1912 |

The Deed To Raymen the past is dead; the future is nothing. Canyou eat it? To speak in future-tense is nearly to lie. Today is the deed. Theyseize the day.

They are intelligent. Can plan for the future andinterrogate the past. They do not indulge in this. Such things are onlytools. Things to be got out of the way. They stand between light of the mindand the Now.

The Do-Box RayMan phrases are shaped in terms of action, not meaningor reflection. They talk dungeon masters; “what are you doing?”, “what did youdo?”, “what will you do?”. “Who did what?”, “how did they do it?”, “how was itdone?”. “What is happening?”.

RayMan culture is doing. Speech is atertiary concern. The word is just the bodyguard to the deed. They areunimpressed with oratory, hard to persuade. Even reason works less well than itshould. Deed is the highest and surest of all truths.

| | | Giacomo Balla sculptural construction of noise and speed 1915- |

Whence the RayMen Came? This is RayMen as they are now. Skilled miners inhabitingvision-cities cloaked from view by high technology. Lords of strange bounty inthe desert of stone. Beloved by no other culture, yet feared by all for theirterrible techne, their merciless exterminations and the simple removalof their food-production guild.

Why are they here? Legend speak of failed insurrectionsin distant lands or forgotten realities, of crazed ideals and Revolutions stillin-progress, in the mad-but-airy theoretical, of a keen-edged godless immanent Now.Perhaps such idealists could only hide here, in the archipelago of theforgotten and blackly doomed.

No-one comes here to look for them.

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Their Origins in Dream

They come from out of Nightmare, though whose, or why, no-one remembers now. They may have been the dying dream of a coma-locked god, that cracked its sleeping skull and clambered out into our world. They may have been a shadow in the deep dark mirror-world of man, the fearful place we go to in our frightened dreams, brought forth by art, or chance or ancient science.

But they spring from the ecology of dreams, they are born from its substance, made to feed and feed upon and fight those visions of our fear.

Imagine a world composed only of the nightmares of all the thinking, sleeping minds, a strand of hallucinatory darkness shifting in its substance as dreamers wake and sleepers slip in and out of terror in the night. A world where the only stability comes from the mass memories of shared catastrophes. A world that contains all knowledge held by any thinking being, yet only in its dark reflected form. A world where predation is absolute, where all things hunt and kill and there is nothing that does not, in some small way, do harm. A world whose demiurges and creating gods, those beings that fill it with their life, who imbue its every moment with their black creative fire, are also its victims, targets and foes. A world that hates its creators.

This is the world of the Ælf-Adal, where they slowly grew, shaping themselves from the coagulated stuff of thought. This is where they first formed independent minds, where they made their society, where they built their mighty civilisation, a city seen in many dreams but never recognised.

How long they lay there thinking dreaming thoughts, nobody knows. Some say longer than the life of man, some say longer than the life of the world, some say longer than the stars.

Their War Against the Dreamers

No-one is certain who declared the war, whether their psychonaut scouts broke out, hunting dreamers as they woke, unwilling to let go, even on the borders of night, or whether some psychic human crusade discovered them and penetrated into Dream to burn out the parasitic thought. But, in dreams and sleep, and in the daylight of the waking world, a war began.

It was a war of tragedy and loss. The regularity and substance of our world made it a kind of hell to them, and the impossible fluctuations of Nightmare swallowed whole cultures of man.

The Ælf-Adal were made from the memory of pain and knew, in some form, everything we knew, and held strange magics impossible to counter and understand. But we were their creators, or the sustainers of their world at least, and they could never fully understand the sights they saw unfolding as the sun rose. The substance of humanity was dense and strange and different than it was in dreams and here, man did not always run but sometimes fought, and sometimes won, and as the numbers of mankind decayed, the world of Dream began to shrink and tighten round the black cities of the Ælf-Adal.

As well as that, once the war began, the nightmares of mankind filled mutually with one shared terror: the fear of the Nightmare Men, and these twice-reflected visions, the Nightmares of a Nightmare, filled their ancient civilisation. As monstrous and strange as they, but not independent, not truly-thinking beings, mere reactions and distractions, but dangerous enough in their way.

The Prophet of the Aelf-Adal

It was a prophet, or strange Nightmare-God that led the Ælf-Adal beneath, away from the light, away from the reach of man. Here, in a dim strange corner of the material world so dark and fluid that it seemed almost like a part of Dream, they lay and waited, rebuilding their mighty and decadent civilisation, one based on and drawn from the shattered memories of the greatest cities ever made. Yet now real, encoded in stone deep beneath the earth.

The Ælf-Adal are not-quite-real and not-quite-dream, but they are beautiful, the colour of the darkness, and they never age.

They can live and eat and breathe and die. And hate.

The Hatred of the Aelf-Adal

Imagine an ocean, a deep one. Imagine the water is black and dark like North Sea mud. Imagine things living in it, thickly-knitted limbs churning like a mower motor left tipped up and switched on, cutting blindly in long grass. You can’t see the limbs, or the things to which the limbs attach, but you can feel their movement in the thick black sea. They regard you. They hate you. A hate so deep they tear frantically at their own flesh in substitute for reaching yours.

Imagine the sea restrained by glass. Like the walls of an aquarium built on titanic scale. You stand before the sea that rises out of sight and curves to the horizon on each side. You can hear the surface fretting up its waves in storm a distant mile above your head. The glass holds everything back. Inside it you can see brief writhings of that midnight high-pressure world, raging at your presence just beyond its reach.

Imagine that the glass is beautifully made. Etched and engraved with perfect smiling forms. Beyond it, the black water, but, when the light slants just so across the pane, a field of translucent harmony gleams, worked there on its surface by hands and minds that leap the greatest human art. A genius casually employed that vaults with ease the best that man has ever made. Crystal signature of thoughtless superiority. So perfect are its fields and processions that when seen, even glimpsed in a trickle of lateral light, you want to live there, with those frozen people, inside the surface of that glass.

This is how much the the Ælf-Adal despise you.

This is how much they control that hate.

The knowledge of you stabs them in the flesh with every recollection and event. Though they know it well, the wound of you will not close. Each memory of you, each experience, all evidence of your continued being, is like a knife twisting in the skin.

No other species could absorb such titanic contempt and remain sane. They would be reduced to raving berserkers, living only to kill, directly, the loathed enabler of their pain.

But the Ælf-Adal are old; they know much of patience and control. And they know that they are born from the substance of your fear and that if there was nothing left to feel afraid, they might well die.

So.

Their Great Plan

Everything that can be done is being done. The situation is difficult, but there is time. There is always time. They must endure, as they have for so long. They wait and plan for an inverted world, a world where societies and civilisations and empires and species exist purely to instil and sustain fear. A world where dreams enslave the dreamer. Where the walls between sleep and waking tumble down and both realms become one sweet eternal whole.

They will live to see it.

Flayed Skin and Stolen Eyes

Flesh

They have real bones and bodies, and beautiful infra-black skin, void against the dark, but diaphanous gusts of smeared flesh can alter in an instant, bones elongating into trollish stalkers, or warping into crone-curves, Darkflesh bubbling with screaming faces - a blistering cancer of fear.

Light will sharpen their teeth and tightly-fitted skins will remind them of their form. They trade in Elf-Skins, or other skins of form and beauty, stitching themselves into suits of the finely tanned flesh, Wrapping these in equally tight clothes, and those in diaphanous gusts of cloudcradle silk, as if to mimic via textiles the formlessness of the twice-bound flesh beneath.

They breathe in the light to sharpen teeth and tongues. Exhaled breaths of darkness curl around their masks like rising steam. Only in light do their teeth sharpen and tongues point so they can speak clearly. In light do they hunger and in light do they feast, tearing at red meat and drinking bright blood and dark wines.

Masks

Each wears a mask, they claim these suppress the natural terror-imbuing presence of the Aelf-Adal, without which they might have no congress, and this is partly true. The unspoken part says that only these remind them of their identity and shape. To take a mask is to tear much of the solidity and sanity of an Aelf-Adal, for they cannot easily organise ‘I-am’ without one. This is another cause of their nobility for they choose only fine and beautiful masks – the faces of princes, kings and queens. Though they may become hounds or monsters if they choose.

Above the mask, at times they seem to have great horns, or black medusa hair; not snakes but things like snakes; blades or sharp penetrating pseudopodia, or they may have washes of ink that move like comic book art.

Beneath the masks are curious mouths; usually matching their assumed identity and role, though with sharper teeth, though in darkness, or extremis, they can twist and melt into vertical slits, tentacled holes or savage crosswise cuts.

Eyes

Their eyes are never their own, for natural Aelf-Adal evolved within a psychosphere, alive to scent and meaning but knowing only imagined light, which does not shine where no attention guides. The dreaming mind, like a theatre-keeper, sends the wash-lamp of its thoughts here and there, highlighting fragments of scene, leaving where it passes, a deeper darkness than just absence. This darkness was the birth-caul of the Aelf-Adal, and so they have no natural eyes.

Thus they must steal or purchase eyes to see with. Always the most beautiful eyes, always the rarest and most prized. The eyes behind their mask are not their own.

The Deathly Stare

The un-masked full-face stare of an Aelf-Adal invariably kills. This nightmare instinct bursts from them in times of stress or intense joy. The false eyes fall from their faces and are trod underfoot in ecstasy. All who face them die, and no closing of eyes will save them, for the face-sight of an Aelf-Adal penetrates flesh like a black sun while the chaos of their horned medusa-hair writhes like a corona of worms.

Fear-Eaters

While they occupy solid, predictable form, bound to a mask, a name, wrapped within a skin, the Aelf-Adal must eat as mortals do, (though only occasionally). Yet at all times they eat fear.

For the Aelf-Adal, the terror, dread and disquiet that emanates from living things is like streams of water falling in a desert land – each life is like a roving fountain moving through a stony maze like ghosts - appearing and disappearing - and the Aelf-Adal like parched Pilgrims who must seeks these miraculous ever-replenishing gourds which pour their bounty in the shapes of living men.

Without Fear they waste away into ghosts or scurry into dreams as petty thoughts. Given too much they mestatise into apocalyptic angels, primal extra-causal terrors. Neither is their desire, so they must farm terror calmly, and spook in moderate ways. Moderate from their perspective anyway.

Magicians

They gain naturally in magical power as they agelessly age. An inherent gift, existing as they do between real and unreal. A world that contains all knowledge held by any thinking being, yet only in its dark reflected form. Though they are not above learning ‘lesser magics’.

Sleep and Waking

The Aelf-Adal recognise no boundary between sleep and wakening, between reality and dream. Naturally amphibious to thought, they are equally present whether you are awake or asleep and can walk through dreams to reach you - dreams which curdle into nightmare in their presence, so that one affected with regular nightmares is said to be Aelf-Kissed.

One might dream of an Aelf-Adal and awaken to see them physically before you, carrying on the same conversation as if nothing has changed, or meet with one and fall into sleep, only to find them still there, again, continuing on. To them, there really was no boundary, the matter is like turning one’s head, or switching between well-known tongues.

M certain twitching morphia hangs about all those who deal with Aelf-Adal - so much involved with those who recognise no bounds to sleep, they themselves seem druggy, now narcoleptic, insomniac, not knowing what is real.

The danger for dreaming mortals is that for the Aelf-Adal, an agreement made in a dream, is as binding and real to them as one made awake.

The Palaces Of Night

The Palaces of the Aelf-Adal bleed into the imagination, for they are built across the bridge of night, with foundations in reality and dream. A gentle terror impregnates all they touch whether they will it or not; Auschwitz fantasies, Ed Gien Decor and Giger-Ossuary Aesthetic, archipelagos of darkness where the unconscious and abyssal meet, courts of dark luxury existing in the limerence of dread. Marked with the emblem of the screaming face, they are always bigger on the inside, and once the inside has been experienced and the boundary broken, larger then beyond.

The Sun

It is not light itself they fear, (and they would say they fear nothing, for Fear they are), but the mass collective concept of 'The Day', the dream of the Above. To them the waking world , with its burning Sun and sharp alien divide between reality and dream, is a conceptually toxic realm.

There is no equivalent, but imagine this; you move to a nation where right-angles do not exist, or where no lines are straight, and even the understanding that things might be otherwise fades slowly from your mind as the collective impossibility takes hold, persisting only as a deep sense of impossible wrongness and an alien nature which you no longer have the concepts to delimit or the words to describe.

Even the dreams of those who come from above can be dangerous, for they remember sunlight and dream of sunlit lands, a dangerous, but yet.. intoxicating, circumstance for the Aelf-Adal.

Society and Economy

Family

While they have a mask, a shape, a name, the Aelf-Adal must eat, must breathe, know pain, hope and, (though they deny it), fear. They even love their children, in a way.

They can mate with one another, or with anything else. Half-dream, they can marry fantasies in nightmares and become pregnant with wonders, or with monsters, and breed fantastic children. It might be that many of the strange and singular things in the Veins of the Earth are their children, and that many wild and black ideas are too.

As they assume nobility-as-selfhood, (there are no common Aelf-Adal, all are Princes (less those formless ones, lost and given to the dark, perhaps they are trolls. Or the mothers of Trolls)), so they must take on the consequences of Nobility; hierarchy, family, descent, inheritance, dynasty and intrigue, even war.

Of course they live for ever so the only means of inheritance is mask-theft or murder, and there is never enough land, or places to rule, but that is not so different from ordinary noble lives.

Nobility

Because their terrors must be harvested gently, they are fine Princes. As utterly inimical to life and sanity as they are, Such power alone does them little good.

Good Governors, Masters of the Silk Trade, Lords of Civilisation. Their interest in complexity exists because they feed off the terrors it sustains. No life means no fear. Therefore they wish to see civilisation bloom. Therefore they are like Renaissance Princes, bountiful characters, often willing to finance and resource expeditions and new settlements. The Courts and Houses of the Terror-Men uphold the cities of the Veins.

Of their meta-culture, few know much, for extended contact with the Aelf-Adal usually destroys even the strongest souls.

Economy

Their 'civilisation' is an act of rationing, and self-control, of drug addicts or vampires measuring and controlling their feeding, and turning that control itself into an artistic act, and a source of further pleasure. Dread is their currency. They trade in hope and dreams, even more than silk, Elf-Skins and beautiful eyes.

................................................................................

The Question of Hatred

Do we actually need the Aelf-Adal to hate?

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The friendly Neurovore familiar to so many is only oneexpression of a much more complex life-form which, over the course of itsexistence, takes on many forms and roles, most so different to each other thatnot all realise the fundamental connection between them.

The Soft-Head is a meta-cephalopodic species which eatsonly fresh brains and other complex nervous tissues. It can either devour thesewith its beak, or invert and extend its stomach like a trochomorphid limb tocover and envelop these materials.

The Soft-Heads stomach is, in-effect, a second brain, possessinga combination of complex digestive milks and an extendible sheath of nerves andcellular-level micro-manipulators. In combination with the secondary brain thatforms a layer of the stomach, the Soft-Head not only digests the meat of thebrain, but absorbs its patterns. The creature absorbs the memories of what iteats.

Soft-Head spawn are essentially Squid-Tadpoles which feedon microfauna and any ambient specks of protein. As they develop, they gain theability to inhabit and parasitise a wide range of bodies; eating the brain,tearing, or cutting off the head, or skull, infiltrating tentacles down thechest to massage the heart back into life and, inverting their stomach tointerface directly with the bodies nervus system and, with advanced creatures, simulatingthe flesh and substance of a hominids head and face with cephalopodic mimicry.

These simulated heads have no bones, apart from abrain-devouring beak, so their heads are soft. The eyes are always a Squidseyes and hair is difficult to fake.

It’s hard for them to talk. Keeping the lungs activewhile also simulating the complex mouth, palette, tongue, throat and breathingapparatus, along with the language and intonation of the living original, is acomplex business, so Soft-Head voices are voices are hesitant, breathy,whispery, sometimes choking or clotted.

Though there are cults of soft-heads that specialise inthe hyper-specialised combination of skill and magic required to actuallysimulate a known person, it’s rare for a Soft-Head to take over a humanoid bodywith the active intention of replacing or pretending to be that person - thatwould be an enormous, almost savant level problem, and while the Soft-Heads dopossess much genius, in most cases this is spent on practical survival. Theytake complex bodies so they may leave the water for long periods and gainaccess to the 'dry world', and to an entirely different, and more complex,range of prey and tactics.

Soft-Head Lives As a very general guide, roughly one in four of Soft-HeadTadpoles survive each stage of Soft-Head evolution and becomeNeurovores, meaning most Neurovore pairings need to produce eight or morespawns over their lifetime in order to maintain the species numbers.

This also means that fully-functional 'Civilised'Neurovores are incredibly rare in comparison to even their more-developedWendigo ascendants, and even more so compared to the more primitive Body-Takersand man-eaters etc

This is why most cultures in the Veins consider the'Neurovore' and their lesser incidents as, in-effect, different species, evenif they have enough knowledge of the Nature to understand that they are onelife-form.

1. Tadpoles. Produced in clouds of a thousand ormore. With ‘Wild’ Soft-heads, these are allowed to swim free in the Veins,feeding on whatever tiny or insect prey they can find. If they can survive inthe wild, the general development cycle goes something like this;

2. Frog-Eater. An insignificant small water-predator.

3. Beast-Eater. Larger and more intelligent,capable of bringing down fish and larger animals if they enter the water, orwith very intelligent cases, if they only come near it.

4. Man-Eater. A Soft-Head capable of huntingorganised prey with a human level of intelligence. Something equivalent to aSquid-Tiger.

?. Body-Taker. At any point in this sequence theSoft-Head may develop its core skill set of destroying or removing the headfrom large prey and replacing it, using its tentacles and inverse stomach tosimulate it. This is a skill, not pure instinct, and must be learned. SomeSoft-Heads develop this ability alone, some see it in in the memories of theirprey, others may see the fear of it by observing the culture of their moreintelligent prey.

5. Wendigo. A Soft-Head capable of fullycommanding the body of a complex hominid and using it to leave the water andpredate on land. This is a creature with the living body of the prey-speciesbut the flesh and eyes of the Soft-Head in place of its head. The Soft-Head isusually not yet capable of complex language and flesh-simulation, yet.Many cultures predated upon by a Wendigo-type do not fully connect it to theearlier or later developments of the Soft-Head lifecycle.

6. Neurovore. A full Neurovore is capable oflanguage and complex thought, more akin to a rare and curious civilised beingthan a beast. In-effect, this is a ‘person’, of sorts.

'Wild' and ‘Domestic’ Soft-Heads The creatures are culturally divided by the nature oftheir raising. Some live wild in the for their whole lifespan, others are‘raised’ in civilised Soft-Head communities, kept in pools and deliberately fedhigh-quality neuro-stuff.

Genius loci A ‘wild’ Soft-Head that never migrates from its originalvolume can develop an almost perfect physical knowledge of their historichunting grounds and of the behaviours, and psychology, of any and all of theirprey species - almost a kind of savage love, as a hunter for their preferred environment, making them likely to become'Emperor' or 'Game Warden' figures of a particular volume.

They can become, in the minds of some, analmost-protective, many-faced Demon-God - leading to the proliferation ofidols, shrines and sacrifices, (much of which are practically irrelevant to theNeurovore, but may be psychologically or spiritually appropriate, since itsselfhood is made up of many memories of the inhabitants of these lands and itwill, to some extent, absorb their values.

The physical and magical abilities of such a 'GeniusLoci' will be amongst the highest of all the typical skills of all thedeveloped creatures of that volume. As skilled in war as its greatest warriors,as subtle as its greatest hunters, as intelligent and wise as its greatestpriests and shaman, as imbued with magical power as the greatest local magiciansit could consume.

Others will only remain ‘wild’ until they gain enoughknowledge and understanding to begin thinking of themselves as something like a'person', after which they often tries seeking out other Soft-Head communitiesand integrating with them.

'Domestic' Soft Heads 'Domestic' Soft-Heads are raised within a Soft-Headcommunity. There is little direct parental interest in young, since all parentsproduce huge clouds, and in many ways the upper echelons of Soft-Head 'society'are totally insane, but a general survival drive leads to a level of care,though with an attitude towards development that would seem absurdly Nietzscheanto most mammals.

While Domestic Soft-Heads are much more likely to survivetheir initial development and growth, and while they grow in complexityquickly, fed on the brains and spines of complex organisms by their society,they are generally considered to be psychologically 'weaker' and more likely tofall prey to late-life personality degradation.

The 'Wild' Soft-Head, while unlikely to survive anddevelop, if they do succeed, has a very long history of the gradualmastery and consumption of ever more complex organisms at their core, makingthem psychologically stronger and less likely to fall prey to the generalised Schizophreniaof late-life Soft-Head development. Their adaptation of more complexpersonalities and memories is more like the popular conception of a ruthlesspredator 'using' the thoughts and memories of its prey as 'masks' in order topredate more ruthlessly.

There is something of a cultural gap between 'Wild' and'Domestics', with 'Wilds' Neurovore fewer in number and considered more 'real'and more 'pure' examples of the species, yet also, by some, less adaptable andless capable of fully understanding alternate points of view.

Cosmopolitan Neurovore A fully developed and socially integrated Neurovre willoften have a staggering range of knowledge and experience from a wildvariety of different hominid and other groups. Fed on the brains of thestrongest, the subtlest and the skilled from youth, such a being would beequivalent to a multi-classed Fighter/Mage/Thief/Artisan/Trader etc.

When considered as skills, there are few thingssuch a Neurovore cannot do, but these skills and memories do not necessarilycohere into a sharper or more coherent self. We might imagine anintelligent but not particularly heroic person with the ability to magically'use' memories, magic, abilities or talents of wide range of dead people, butnot necessarily that impressive on their own, or at their core, being in somesense, a mere shuffler of cards.

Nevertheless, Cosmopolitan Neurovore do tend to be more 'successful'in terms adventurers can understand. Their higher population allows them todevelop specialists, like the classic 'Infiltrator' type, trained and specifiedto use skill and illusory magic to fully replace and simulate the members ofother races. Their more complex and wider ranging interactions with the maineconomies and cultures of the Veins also results in them having many moreresources, and simply in having more interactions with the kinds of thingsAdventurers are interested in.

Economic Position Most ‘Civilised’ veins-polis will have at least oneNeurovore. Though rarely seen directly, their store, or home-front will be thatof a Butcher-Confectioner; flowers, wreathes and bouquets of the finest meatsarranged like cakes. A butcher in the veins is more like a confectioner -prepared protein being so rare and expensive. They are truly artists of meat,meat flowers, meat crowns and spirals, meat-pies etc. (Since they can only eatbrains, and these must be living - Neurovore are one of the few Ethnoculturesof the Veins which regularly have spare meat. )

Their public face will be one or more well-fed, extremelysatisfied and competent high-level slaves, often with the cross-skull circularscar of Neurovore person-surgery. The Master will only reveal themselves forhigh status guests or when their hands-on skills are needed.

While nominally butcher/confectiners, Neurovore perform awide range of distinct services, including; Translating, Appraising, Crafting, Doctoring,Surgery of the Body, Surgery of the Mind

Their Only Currency is Brains The only currency most Neurovor will accept is that ofliving, sentient brains, which almost always means the brains of living slaves,(or you could massively overpay in something like Knotsmen debt-threads orOccultum Coins). There can be a sliding scale for the brains of those withunusual abilities, memories and skills.

Skilled Craftsmen, Translators & Appraisers With an in-depth memory of a huge variety of differentcultures, languages, life-paths and skills, Neurovore are known to sometimes begreat craftsmen, sometimes willing to produce the art or artefacts of anotherrace for payment when that race itself might not. (Some call them great'Fakers', good at producing versions of things, but somehow lacking in theexecution.)

Along with their skill in craft goes a wide knowledge oflanguages and cultures which makes them excellent and trusted translators, anda general wisdom and neutrality that sometimes sees them called in asappraisers or judges.

Surgeons Of The Body Often competent doctors, some Neurovore specialise in Cepahalopodlimb replacements; A semi-lobotomised young Soft-Head, specifically bred, isattached to the end of the lost limb and cultured to adopt the behaviours of theoriginal.

They don't have bones and make bad legs by can be goodarms or hands – though they take some time to learn to use and you need to keepthem hydrated. (They can also develop half-ideas of their own.) They have less structuralsupport or rigidity but more dexterity and options for multi-directionalmovement, good for some fencers, climbing, thieves and magicians - who canlearn voiceless casting by making sigils with their cephalopod-hand.

You can also keep the beak and eyes in for extraawareness, and as a handy tool. The longer the limb is attached the more theuser can sense through its eyes and the more sophisticated its utility.

Surgeons Of The Mind Neurovore Brain-Surgery is much more sophisticated thananything so called in the Bright Lands.

They begin by peeling back the scalp, sawing through theskull, then peeling back the brain-cowl. They then extend their stomachs intothe brain-pan, ‘tasting’ the brain, rolling it in their extendable gut,nibbling and altering.

This can alter memory and selfhood in sophisticated ways- full personality surgery, (though it’s always easier to take things out thanadd them in). They can also sustain complex dream states in imaginary worlds -though these are as much a creation of the subconscious of the target as thatof the surgeon.

There is some chance of infection and the skull will needto be fixed back on top and the skin sewn shut, which leaves marks, unlessextra cosmetic care is taken to disguise this.

Also very occasionally the Neurovore will just eat thebrain, or maybe parts of it - for them it’s like holding food in your mouth,but not chewing or swallowing, while doing complex work. One needs a brain,after all, to recover from Brain Surgery.

Objects and Treasures Neurovore produce a variety of rare and potent philtresand items, often produced from their own milks, or the secretions of theirsmaller kin, or made of complex weaves of magic and neurochemistry.

Blank (The Protagonist Potion). Very expensive and must beingested orally. Blank removes all identity from the drinker but leaveslanguages, skills and abilities intact. The more complex skills you want left -the greater chance of remission. Blank cannot be 'healed' or fixed via magic. Isused by various cultures on their most useful and valuable slaves, or on highstatus targets in court intrigues

Skill PhiltresAlso very extremely expensive (almost as much in effortas actually gaining the skill would be). These philtres combine complexpatterns of understanding and action taken or distilled from living subjects,the core matrix suspended in a concoction that includes micro-soft-heads.

Reading BooksWritten on the finest skin, these works sometimes purportto be ‘ordinary’ books. Woven into their substance are specific mildneurotoxins and milk derivatives, combined with lesser opiates that oozeinvisibly from the book when held by warm hands. The text and images within areeither direct enchantments or, (more expensive), have such works woven intotheir text and seeming. These act to create a book which ‘reads’ its reader,and alters them, sometimes in mild but long-term ways, others in more directways. The book is usually at least slightly addictive. The longer and moresubtle the effect, and the more hidden, the more expensive the book. Sharp andstrong effects cost less, but are much more easily noticed by the reader andare more likely to provoke resistance.

Memory PearlsStrange curls of gold and pearl containing singlethoughts, or even alter-memory selves. More expensive depending on how completea self you want. These are often used by spies or operatives, those involved incomplex intrigues, or as sophisticated torture devices.

Neurovore Psychology - A self-of-selves Psychologically, Soft-Heads are incredibly strange incomparison to most self-aware life, having almost, clusters of personalities,councils of selves, all unified by a coherent predatory instinct and an'othering' of brain-possessing individual life forms that forms the truestructure of Soft-Head society, (such as it is).

Mere baskets of floating identity, minds whose selfhoodsflow like mixing scents, as timeless as ghosts, whom they often resemble inbehaviour, for the Neurovore feed as much upon memories and sentience itself asupon the meat of the brain, and every Neurovore absorbs almost all of theselfhood of whatever it consumes, making them astoundingly, sometimesterrifyingly, powerful and knowledgeable, and also often insane, deeply utterlymad by human standards.

The greatest threat to a Neurovores survival is its ownever-shifting selfhood and its writhing protean memory

As neurovore grow from tadpoles most of heir initialmeals are of simple beings with simple instincts

and do not present a huge problem to the Neurovorescapacity to absorb Selves, but as they grow, they hunger for more complex prey.If they successfully consume them, the neurovore gains the preys knowledge andawareness - making them even more effective at hunting that kind of prey,but this also presents challenges, as more potent and coherent individuals possesspowerful senses of selfhood.

Memory and sentience is not a weight-for-weight matter. Identityorbits around particular experiences, powerful instincts, core philosophies, inherentbeliefs, particular attitudes to the world

and central organising memories. A particularly potentand coherent mind with a deep, strong and capacious worldview, and a powerfuldrive to live, can partially displace the Neurovores 'core' self.

This is rare, and is, to an extent, a 'self-solving'problem, since the Neurovore is still an obligate cerebrovore and will still bedriven to eat brains, and in particular the brains of ever more complexcreatures. These complex brains of powerful creatures, in turn, presenting ahigh likelihood of displacing or fundamentally altering the current Ego.

The Blood Speaks Ultimately, as the Neurovore would say, ‘the blood speaks’.All these powerful fractured creatures remain Neurovore, even if theydon't realise it themselves. They still need to eat brains and they are stillenmeshed in a society of creatures who need to eat brains, and who are notbeloved by others, and this society is their main power and source ofsurvival.

As well as this, the instincts of the older, more nakedlypredatory, personality still swim beneath the surface of whichever superegocurrently thinks it is 'in charge'- putting its own tinge upon the values andworldview of the main soul.

Each new brain consumed creates a new possibility toshuffle the deck of thoughts, shifting the perceived dominance of the currentarray of personalities, giving the original 'pure' Neurovore the chance tore-assert control, a newly introduced personality the chance to take the helm,or a variety of other things to happen.

The Men Who Were Thursday Still there is a level of power and experience whereNeurovore society, such as it is, no longer really works as a coherentracial/species group, as of all those who are very strong, many are nolonger themselves, or they no longer believe themselves to be themselves,and are 'faking it', using the memories stored by their 'old' more-pureNeurovore selves to 'pretend' to be a 'real' Neurovore while they believethemselves to be the reincarnated personality of a prey-thing.

Tn human terms this would be like an Empire being lead bya group of hyper-talented, very powerful schizophrenics, each of which believesthemselves to be some other thing, and is only going along with thegroup on the surface, while following a quite different set of desires anddirectives.

This is a kind of 'Man Who Was Thursday' situation asmuch of Neurovore 'society' half-knows about this already and regards what wewould call the schizophrenia problem as more of an element to be managed than aproblem to be solved. In fact it’s quite useful in a number of ways.

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'Queen Mab's Palace' will be moving to layout soon. My gigantic review of Hugh Cooks 'Chronicles of and Age of Darkness' is done. What will False Machine be working on next?

Veins of the Earth - Remastered

And by working on, I mean that I have started work, not that we have a book ready right now. This is the beginning of a long process.

The new Veins will probably be A4, to fit in with other False Machine books, and will have new content, a new layout, hopefully some new images.

But what needs to be added? What needs to be changed? What didn't work for people last time? I have some ideas but I also want your input.

Drop your comments

At the Substack [https://substack.com/@pjamesstuart]
The Blog [falsemachine.blogspot.com]
My Facebook [https://www.facebook.com/pjamesstuart]
Twitter [x.com/pjamesstuart]
Emails to pjamesstuart@gmail.com
Or even reviews and analysis on your own blogs and channels.

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Hugh Cook’s Chronicle of a World of Darkness, Part 2I return to you for the end of the tale. Hugh Cooksintended-sixty, planned-twenty, published-ten Fantasy Series; ‘A Chronicleof an Age of Darkness’. Or as I re-named it in my first review; ‘ZaanSaid the Sun’, from one of the more pleasing euphonic discursions of BookTwo, ‘Worsmiths & Warguild’. Or, as the planet upon which the storyset on is named; ‘Olo Malan’, a planet in the Tulip Continuum, in thePermissive Dimensions. So let’s call it ‘Zaan, Olo Malan’, for the sunis rising on a darkened world, beneath strange multicoloured stars.

This is a Long Post! So, here is a contents list;

Here is the first Hugh Cook review, covering Books 1 to 5

Part One of this Review – Escapefrom Injiltaprajura!

Part Two of this Review – Werewolf& Wormlord

Part Three of this Review –Worshippers & Way

Part Four of this Review –Witchlord and Weaponmaster

….

The last half of the series takes us through sweatyintrigues in a blissfully described tropical island city, post-beowulfianWarrior Saga in the mud and marshes of Wen Endex, Science-FantasyTrans-Colonial Trauma and accidental Mau’Dibification in the city of the futureof the past, and finally; a big sprawling adventure by a Fated Heir that linksthe whole thing.

With all this we climb deeper into Hugh Cook. Acomfortable fit, and, as so often happens when reading a bunch of stuff from asingular mind, our interest transmits itself from the world described to themind describing, for there are many themes and repetitions in ‘Zaan; OloMalan’, many sons will deal with fathers, many scholars will argue withwarriors, powers will be struggled for (and with), there will be less, butstill several, visionary and often horny dream-sequences, and much realism willbe woven ‘midst the unreal. In the end, justifications will be denied,questioned and claimed. In the end of the end there will be onesingular message, one lambent individual fragment that Hugh Cook would wish youto take away from these stories. One thing that, above all, he wouldwish you to remember. It is a subtle piece of wisdom, yet can be quicklydescribed. But I will not reveal it! Not until the very, the absolute, end ofwhat looks like it’s going to be a very long review. To see, and to understand,you must come with me to that end, and to get there, we must start, as allthings do, in the middle, on the isle of Untulchilamon…

……..

But before that, consider this extended quote, whichcomes not from Untilchilamon, the location of books Six and Seven, butfrom the very end of the series, from book Ten; ‘Witchlord & Weaponmaster’,and which I put here at the start of the article, partly because it’s quitelong and there is more of a chance of you reading it here, and partly becauseit gives you a reasonable idea of where we are going with all this, and why andhow Hugh Cook is a little different.

Here the Narrator of ‘Witch & Weapon’, who maybe the diegetic Wizard Sten-Pilitkin, but who is probably also Hugh Cook, whowas also an army medic for much of his youth, describes the death of aWasher-Woman, cruelly but randomly killed, whose body lies near the path of theHero, Guest Gulkan in a story which is both True History, and DeliberateFabulation;

“And if you are surprised to find in these pages somuch war in combination with so little suffering, why, then know well thereason. This is Guest Gulkan's story, the biography of a warrior, and a warriorof the Yarglat at that. And your ever accomplished warrior is necessarily anamnesiac - and, more, neglects to see that which is not useful for hispurposes.

It is said by the tender that any tale of war shouldconcentrate on its suffering, for the tender-minded hold such suffering to bethe ruling reality of war. In this they are in error: and, focusing on the deadand the dying, they misunderstand that which they deprecate. Misunderstandingthe dynamics of war, they cannot thereafter hope to alter those dynamics.

If history has any moral mission, then it is this: torender to the fullest the complexities and uncertainties of the living humanreality which we endure. For it is we ourselves whom we seek to understand whenwe read in the pages of history - we, the human people, wizards and warriors,wonderworkers and washerwomen.

If we study the affairs of puppets and poppets then wewill be well-equipped for life in a dolls house; but the world is not so amiablyconstituted, and attempts to treat it as if it were lead commonly to disaster.

Let us then stage no moral charades with puppets andpoppets. For if we do, then we delude ourselves; and, surely, to choose to bewilfully blind as to our own nature is the greatest of crimes, for withoutself-knowledge there can be no governance of the self by the self.

Yes and there are those who deny this, and say that itis sufficient to yield in faith to the diktats of some deity such as Zoz theAncestral or similar. In such faith they are prepared to burn all history,blaming the page for the battle, the court record for the crime. The reason fortheir willed ignorance is simple: self-knowledge and self-awareness arepainful, so the weak and the inadequate customarily prefer the numb oblivion ofthe slavery of unquestioning faith.

In defiance of such wilful ignorance, this historyspeaks, holding truth to be the highest virtue. For only through anacknowledgement of the living realities of our world and our own existence canwe attain self-knowledge and autonomous adulthood. And only by acknowledgingthe living realities of war can we hope to understand the persistence of war,which continues to blight our world despite the best-hearted efforts of thosetender-minded moralists who would have us believe that war is one mass ofconscious suffering, and that every warrior is a victim.

This book is a history of a warriors living reality.And the truth of the warrior is ambition combined with amnesia, selectivevision combined with selective memory, and the belief that victory is thevalidation of all suffering. Therefore, believing truth to be the highestvirtue, we will not distort the record with moral charades incompatible withthe truth; but rather, will note the plain fact, which is that Guest Gulkanswiftly forgot the dying washerwoman as he hastened up the stairs towards theHall of Time.”

….

That this is an ostensible justification and moralargument for the nature of a story from one of its characters, (and perhapsfrom that characters creator), who had previously, (in book Nine, ‘Worshippers& Way’), partly denied the need for such justifications, should not betaken as a criticism. Many questions and moral conflicts have no absoluteanswer, and some perhaps should not. The creator is always a work inprogress, and in very long creations, that take a while to make, the presenceof the living, changing, mind of the creator is an essential part of the work. Wedeal here not in numbers but the deeds of man.

But these are worries for the end of our history. Beforethat; the middle, and, (like I said), Untulchilamon;

PART ONE - Escape from Injiltaprajura!Our last encounter with ‘Zaan; Olo Malan’ was ‘Wicked& Witless’, starring the tiresome and dislikable Sean Sarazin,aka; WATASHI!, and his witnessing of the Fall of Argan to the Swarms of theDeep South.

Now, a change in both scene and time! We fly across thegreat (rectangular: will fit on a two-page spread), ocean of Moana, half wayacross the described world, to the baking Isle of Untilchilamon, and as we fly,we return also in time to before the Fall of Argan. For this shall be thesetting of books both Six and Seven! ‘The Wazir and the Witch’ and ‘TheWishstone and the Wonder-Workers’.

The Land and the Location Untulchilamon, a sweaty island in a southern sea, andmore; beset with stilling winds for fair chunks of the year, this in an age ofsail. Yet bountiful and home to the bloodstone city of Injiltaprajura, itswalls bright as wounds beneath the burning sun, green with moon paint beneaththe multicoloured stars. Why? Because it is built on the ancient ruins of apossibly-interdimensional arcology/prison/space ship which goes downmaybe-infinite levels into who-knows-where and which also has severalstill-functioning infinite-production machines which no-one understands.

Specifically - the magical machines from Below produceenough water to fill the thirst of Injiltaprajura and to keep that part ofUntulchilamon fertile. They also produce ice, and some very randompost-singularity industrial products which sometimes spurt up out fromunderneath and totally poison local fishing, but which are also rare andvaluable. Thus lies the wealth, and life, of Untulchilamon - built unwittinglyon an ancient magical prison or unnatural nature and to which it seems everybasement and stairway in Untulchilamon is somehow connected. The city has an'Underdark', or perhaps a Mega-Dungeon, which comes in very handy for Hugh Cookas he needs to rapidly apparate and randomly transport his dazed protagonistsbetween various situations.

What are its cultural ancedents? If Argan was roughlyAmerica-sizes and arranged, (cold on top, hot below), Untulchilamon isequatorial, maybe a bit Indian, a bit South-East Asian, maybe a bitMadagascarian? It is quite possibly Banaba, or ‘Ocean Island’¸ a very smalland very isolated tropical island where, for some reason, Hugh Cook spentseveral years of his childhood.

It is a small place quite close to one large big place;the continent of Yestron, so that, whatever happens in Yestron ends up,ultimately, but not immediately, affecting Untulchilamon. This will proveconsequential.

The Chaos and the Catastrophes A great teetering unstable pyramid of complex conflictsweighs down upon our protagonists; (initially this is the ever-callow red-skinnedEbrell Islander Chegory Guy, and later largely the large Empress Justina Thrug).Since we are not Chegory Guy, and are actually capable of arranging andorganising our thoughts, I will describe these conflicts from the top down,from the highest level of organisation to the lowest.

The Pogroms and the Politics Untulchilamon falls within the sphere of Yestron, thelarge continent to the East. The last appointed governer from that Empire was WazirSin, a man bent on Pogrom and murder, especially of Ebbies, the red-skinnedEbrell Islanders, who he nearly wiped out.

When Yestron fell into Dynastic War, (the Talonsklavara),Sin was deposed by Lonstantine Thrug, a Yudonic Knight of Wen Endex,who stopped the genocides, and introduced a (more) liberal regime, but who thengot syphilis and went mad, and was succeeded by his daughter; the sleazy butlikeable strong and large Empress, Justina Thrug. Justina is opposedinitially by Aquitaine Varazchvardan, the albino Lawgiver who servedunder Sin and quite liked the pogroms, and in the second book, by NadalastabstlaBanraithanchumun Ek, a man whose name I will not write twice, the much moreeffective, evil, racist and competent High Priest of Zoz the Ancestral.

As our tale begins, it seems like a winner has emergedfrom the Talonsklavara; Aldrach the Third, Mutilator of Yestron andruler of much of it. If this is so, then as Aldrach Three consolidates hisrule, his eye will eventually fall upon Untulchilamon. He will be coming, andhe will be mutilating. (If he actually won, it’s not like there are telephoneson Olo Malam).

The Crooks and the Criminals At this exact time, Thieves attack! Two separate sets ofthieves/adventurers are infiltrating Injiltaprajura! They seek the 'Wishstone', sacred jewel of Office of thenow-Empress Justina.

The apparently-successful theft of the Wishstone triggersabsolute multilayered chaos in Injiltraprajura as the original thieves arechased by the adventurers, and the forces of Justina, and as the relatively-evilVarazchvardan, and anyone else, arrest all the Usual Suspects (EbrellIslanders).

The Dreams and the Demon While all of this is going on, a mysterioussupernatural force is effecting Injiltaprajura, melting the boundary betweendreams and reality, making nightmares real and generally being strange - aDemon is coming through into our world! This seems to have literally nothingto do with any of the other plot threads! It’s just happening!? What?

The Golden Gulag Did you think that was the end of the plot threads? Weare barely half-way through!

Injiltaprajura is actually built on a crazy piece ofpost-singularity science-fantasy wreckage. A ruined arcology, and mysteriousinter-dimensional prison realm from before the Days of Wrath, twenty thousandyears ago!

It’s a hundred-layered massively malfunctioning prisoncomplex for the questionable private security apparatus of a long-gonemultidimensional star empire! Many of the odd people and curious creaturesroaming around Injiltaprajura are products of this ancient time, although,(apart from the hidden immortals) no-one currently alive really knows or fullyunderstands this. Within the depths of the Golden Gulag is an evil Therapist;a sentient and immortal torture machine which largely wants to do evil things. Alsopresent Below is a mysterious Organic Rectifier; a piece of technology capableof changing the form of a living being, and even of creating immortality!

The presence of the ruined hyper-dimensional prisoncomplex has nothing to do with the threat of Aldrach Three, Dream-infiltratingDemon, (which is its own separate plot thread), or, to begin with, the Crab.

The Crab and the… Confinement? A major part of both books is the presence of a magicaland (arguably) semi-divine giant Hermit Crab whose origins are almostcompletely unrelated to everyone and everything else. He just happens to bethere.

An immortal spirit of the Sun, (or a sun), theCrab-soul was banished from its natural sphere over a religious matter, endedup on Olo Malam and inhabited the body of the first thing it could understand;an ordinary crab.

Now trapped in Crab form, (though it did manage to growthe body very big, and also has terrifying telekinetic powers), the Crab isunquenchably tired of its immortal form and of the endless efforts of humanityto suborn it towards their intrigues and dramas.

The Crab is a wild card!

The Sanity and the Summation So much happens on Injiltaprajuna that I think even HughCook has trouble remembering in later books, (and he is very good at organisinghis notes). Suffice to say that after agreat deal of intrigue, adventure and bouncing around, the Demon is defeated,the terrible rule of Aldrach III is returned to Injiltaprajura, theWonderworking Sorcerers of Injiltaprajura consistently fail to do anythinguseful in either book, the Wishstone is recovered by Guest Gulkan, (star ofbook Ten), the sorrowful Hermit Crab is finally given an immortal human body bythe Organic Rectifier and, with the enforced aid of some other immortalcharacters, sets about the long repair of the Chasm Gates that connected OloMalam to the Star-Spanning Civilisation of the Nexus, and Chegory Guy, JustinaThrug and the core cast manage to escape from Injiltaprajura via the flyingmachine of the Wizard Sten-Pitilkin.

The Annoyances and the Aggravations There were several things I did not love about book Six ‘Wish& Wonder’, which were partially absolved in Book Seven ‘Witch andWazir’.

Chegory Guy is yet another frustrating teenage boyprotagonist who notices less than the reader. This is the fourth such out ofsix books. Bring back Miphon, Blackwood and Yenn Olass!Not only that but Chegory Guy is powerless, passive and tongue-tied (at firstat least). There are a few too many moments when someone speaking clearly wouldend the plot, or at least shorten it.

Furthermore ‘Wish & Wonder’ is made of severalplots that have nothing to do with each other but just happen to interact.Which... fine. Ok. A Cook-Book is always anarchic in plotting but there isusually a through line and some kind of tie-up by the end.

There is also a lot of ping-pong with the characters andplotlines, plenty of people rushing around and not really getting things done.

Add to this, a new manic meta-epistolification whichbesieges the narrative of ‘Wish & Wonder’ with unrelenting terror.Much as I have seen Kenneth Branagh’s ‘Hamlet´ described as “a brilliantproduction by Kenneth Branagh, horribly monstered by the performance of KennethBranagh”, so ‘Wish & Wonder’ is a hyper-dense narrative created byHugh Cook, absolutely stabbed and molested by the Epistolary Enthusiasms ofHugh Cook.

First; this is the first story set in the Age ofDarkness that has, not the ever-faithful variable third person, but an in-worldwriter. All, (nearly all) of this narrative is ostensibly being written by anindividual who was, at the time of the events, present, close to the action,perhaps a resident of the Domjaradron (loony bin).

Second; this text is being/has been, edited andcut down by the Redactors of Odrom, a tiresome and unimaginative groupwho note when they disagree with the factual basis of events and even arguewith each other in the comments, and who apparently have cut out quite agigantic amount of discursive rambling by the Originator.

Thirdly; Injiltaprajura being a deeplycosmopolitan place, there are many and varied tongues spoken there. This beinga Cook book, everything is given in English and we only find out what theactual language is when the writer, the originator, starts commenting on thetranslation of various words and phrases and what they might mean.

This is common enough for a Cook Book BUT - since all thecharacters are also multilingual, we can be in a situation where the charactersare arguing about language, in various languages, and the Originatoris also commenting on what they are arguing about, and theRedactors of Odrom are ALSO commenting on this with each other, andperhaps arguing, so we can have an active three-level meta-argument going on.

Fourth; the main character of ‘Wish &Wonder’, Chegory Guy, cannot speak well. He is massively afflictedwith a systemically tied-tongue! The point of view in 'Witch and Wazir'floats around a lot more but not being stuck with a vocally-frustratedknife-fighter who never fights with his knives and who would shorten the bookby half if he could just form a sentence, is a relief.

Fifth and last - there is STILL the omniscientthirdperson as, before the book even starts an un-named and unknown entity, whosounds a lot like Hugh Cook, gives us an introduction, and a description of theorigins of the magical hermit crab who nearly forms a deus-ex-carcinoma inWishstone.

This is too much epistleisation Hugh Cook.

The Good and the Gleeful Those were most of my problems with Injiltaprajura, mostof which attach to the first of the pair; ‘Wish & Wonder’. Things getbetter in Book Seven; ‘Witch and Wazir’, and in both there is much to enjoy.

The Classic Cookisms Cook is absolutely WALLOWING in euphony, neologisms,invention and the sheer ridiculous music of prose. At times his coagulations ofsound and meaning form a near textual Jazz made purely out of sound and symbolswhich flows alongside the text. Try saying some of these out loud;

….

" Firfat Labrat's warehouse of drugs inMarthandorthan"

….

"The man in question was actually PelagiusZozimus, a wizard of the order of Xluzu and the quest-companion of Guest Gulkan(pretender to the throne of Tameran), Hosaja Sken-Pitilkin (a fellow wizard)and Thayer Levant (a cut-throat from Chi'ash-lan)."

….

"Have you in your voluntary or involuntary possessionany knife, bodkin, knitting needle, dragon hook, sword, spear, bow, catapult,arbalest, fighting stick, battering ram, snake, scorpion, basilisk, vial ofvitriol or other weapon of death or terror or violence?

Whereupon Zosimus answered in the negative, wassubjected to swift but expert search, then was allowed to step closer (but nottoo close!) to the Empress. The Imperial Linguist stepped forward with him.Both elven lord and linguist bowed.

'Toxteth', said the linguist, then bowed again andwithdrew."

| | | Danny Paik on Artstation |

There are more Cook-Book staples, like;

· The extensive sex-dreams of teenage boys,

· Characters entering states of mystic logarithmyawhich seem oddly like Cooks internal state.

· The sheer joy in trying to find out just howlong he can make regularly used words, which is finally reached in; "Zazazolzodanzarzakazolabrik,also known as the Scraglands, the Wastes, the Scorpion Desert - or Zolabrik forshort.”

· More Court Cases (what lawyer hurt you HughCook?)

· Lots of interweaving strands of action; (you cannever tell which will be dominant).

· Another very misogynist Empire, (thistime the near-fascist worship of Zozz the Ancestral).

The Jubilant (?) Justina Even better, the tale increasingly orbits around theEmpress Justina Thrug, a woman consistently described as 'large' and 'fleshy',and a consummate schemer and protagonist with less than five teeth, (sweetfoods).

Justina mixes a wider range of more complex emotion, adeeper experience of life and more subtle awareness of and relation to, power,with a dram of the slightly deranged optimism and indefatigable spirit of DrakeDouhey. Thus, she engages with a lot of crazy schemes, is nearly executedmultiple times, is restored to power multiple times, adventures underground,lies, tricks, astounds and generally is more fun and tolerable to be around.

The Bubble of Bounce

"Shabbles light dimmed immediately to nothing andthe demonic one soared up, up, up into the night sky. The humid darkness ofInjiltaprajura and of the polluted Laitemata fell away below. All Untulchilamoncame in sight, a mass of dark within dark, reaching away for league upon leaguefrom Justina's capital to the desolations of the north.

Higher and still higher yet flew Shabble, ascendingimaginary mountains in nary more than a couple of heartbeats. Exulting in purespeed flew Shabble. So does the dolphin exult when from the water it explodesin joy shimmering. So does the dragon rejoice when in its strength it holds theheights then plunges, diving with a scream, with power ferocious, with speedcontrolled and absolute precision, terror matched to beauty as it stoops. Uprose Shabble in such triumph until the very curvature of the planetary surfacewas clearly to be perceived, and the sun also, the sun of the new day.

Then sang Shabble, then Shabble sang, louder and thenlouder yet, pouring out music unheard for twenty thousand years, rejoicing inthe Symphony of the Sun, a song of joy to exult and honour all those who arguewith mortality, a paen of praise for the will to be and to become, for ambitionunlimited, audacity vaulting and the triumph of the moment.

Shabble rose yet higher. Singing singing singing tothe rising sun, the local star, the star itself delighting as it sang with asong fiercer and braver yet than any known to creatures of the flesh, its joy ablaze of energy unleashed, exploding light outburning in vacuum wastelands ahundred million miles distant.

Glory to life!

Glory to us and our becoming!

And to the sun, glory!

Thus Shabble, singing as if to rival the sun itself.

Non servium."

…

But who, or what, is this mysterious soaring entity ordemon, this Shabble?

It, or ‘they’ are a children’s toy, twenty thousand yearsold, slightly lonely and constitutionally unable to take anything seriously.

Shabble is a Sun. A real, life-sized one, wrapped in itsown pocket dimension and given access to ours through a hyperdimensionaltransponder about the size and coolness of a big orange.

Why would the society of the Nexus do something asinsane as making an entire sentient sun, then locking it in a micro-cosmos onits own, and why would they then make this potentially-godlike entity achildren’s toy?

It seems its quite difficult to make an actuallymore-than-human intelligence that can still, and still wants to, communicatewith humans. Shabbles were one of the only ways they found to do it. A failedexperiment as, though they have the calculation powers of supercomputers, theydon’t really like to calculate. Instead they were produced en-masse and sold aschildren’s toys.

Shabble, this Shabble, may be the only one left. Shabblewas made to play, but has lasted twenty-thousand years, and may need a littleadjustment. Shabble is also one of the most curious and interesting charactersin ‘Zaan, Olo Malan’. Don’t worry! He returns in Book Ten!

…

“Injiltaprajura saw nothing of Shabble as instarlat'sshadows shortened toward noon. Shabble was still missing as the shadows ofsalahanthara lengthened toward sunset. Yet all that time the demon of Jod wasfuriously busy.

Doing what you ask?

The answer is simple.

Falling.

From morn to noon fell Shabble, from noon to dewy eve- a summers day; and with the setting sun dropped from the zenith like afalling star. Steam in whispers vapoured into shreds as deep to the seas droveShabble, descending fathoms five and full, drawn down to the depths where the morayweaves in coils than cobra greater, then drawn far deeper, down to the utterdark, the siltworm cold, the black of blindness engolding.

Then Shabble uprose and surfaced.

Hovered briefly, then was gone, making forInjiltaprajura - leaving the dark seas rocking, rocking endlessly toward theshore.”

.......

The Precision of Plots ‘Witch & Wazir’ is also better because it’smainly about one thing; Escape from Injiltaprajuna!, instead of the complexintrigue plus random-demon plot we got in ‘Wish & Wonder’. Now thelooming political threat of Aldrach Three is the main driving problem and our'protagonists' have the central difficulty of escaping the island alive.

The Empress Justina has a tenuous grip on power, isopposed by a big chunk of the population and power brokers of Untulchilamon andis dedicated to getting off the island with as many of her followers as shecan.

The same ships which can get her off, will also carry badnews and enemies on the way in, and the soldiers she needs to seize the shipsare loyal to money she increasingly doesn't have and a position no-onerespects. The evil racist maniac Aldrach the Third, Mutilator of Yestron, haswon his civil war and as soon as he turns his eye to Untulchilamon, everyoneconnected to Justina is going to get mutilated.

There is no more wondering what the plot is going to beabout and on the whole I find this makes Cook Books a lot more tolerable. He isan amazingly discursive and wandering writer anyway, so even with a tightcentral axis we are going to get a lot of hither-and-yon, but 'Wishstone andWonder-Workers' had TWO rambling main plots, and was written in epistolarystyle by a rambling obsessive madman, AND was 'edited' in epistolary style bycraven scholars who argued with each other, AND the arguable main character wastongue-tied. For some this might have been the right amount of crazy but for meit was too much. 'Witch and Wazir' was a lot more manageable.

Less Decadent and Delirious It is less packed and decadent, and less overwhelminglynew and strange, and that is a limitation. In "Wishstone", though Ihad problems with it, the torrent of wild fresh information, multipleepistolary conceits, shifting points of view, reality breakdowns and culturaloverwhelm, actually synergised very well with hot, dense, sweaty, complex,orientalist and luxurious Injiltaprajura. That is an effect not to be sneezedat, though I prefer having at least one hand for the ship of story rather thanbeing bashed around by the storms of Cooks invention.

The Nastiness of the Nexus We also receive, (offhand as per-Cook), a staggeringamount of backstory and information on the nature of the trillion-worldpan-cosmic mega-culture called the Nexus. Olo Malam was a Prison-Planet of theNexus, and a place to do questionable experiments in a dimension where thestars are multicoloured and the laws of reality a bit more loose than the starkwhite-starred Star-Trek Galaxy that makes up the Nexus-bulk.

The Golden Gulag was a mega-prison, and one of theinmates, the super-Genius Ivan Pokrov, managed to both make himself immortaland to cut off this planet from the rest of the Nexus 20,000 years ago.

The end of the book involves a magic crab in human formforcing Pokrov to begin the process of trying to fix the connection to theNexus, which may take a million years, but he has that long anyway, andprobably the magical crab man will be a big help. This is probably the mostimportant thing to happen in any of the sequence and if it had gone on a longtime likely would have ended up ending the 'Age of Darkness'.

Over the next three books we will find out a lot moreabout the Nexus, including one piece of information even the Nexus itselflikely did not have. One of the sub-themes of ‘Zaan Olo Malam’ is the deepeningquestion of whether we really want the Chasm Gates re-opened and the sci-fistar empire to return.

But of that, more later.

The Realms and the Races (We also find out what 'race' everyone is? Or did welearn that in the last one? Injultaprajura is a population melting pot and forthe first time in the Cook Books we get an in-depth low-down on what colour,shape and culture everyone is and how they interact.

Most from Argan, (the first five books) are brownish.Ebrell Islanders are actual-red. Ashmoleans are eqiuvilent to our Africans Ithink. The Japanese-seeming Yandajuulas are literal-grey and extremely racistand those of Wen Endex seem somewhat European-equivalent).

Thus Ends Part One That was a long first part but don’t worry, allthe others will be shorter. If you are tired of reading, now may be a good timeto take a break. Next, we fly to Galsh Ebrek!

.......PART TWO - Werewolf & Wormlord We are back baby! Back to Beowulf. To fly north to WenEndex, the cold and swampy land where men tread mud through warriors halls. Thehomeland of Justina Thrug, to which she escaped at the end of the last book.Here the mother of a monster has arisen from the Swamps, the aged king who longago slew the creatures get, sets the son of his disinherited heir on a mightyquest – for the three saga swords of legend, so that he might defeat SHE, andbecome…. King!

But while this story is set after the previousbook, and likely parallel to the Matter of Argan that occupied the firstfive, it does not directly concern ‘The Thrug’, but the Banker Alfric Danbog.

The Anguish and the Alienation Alfric Danbrog was raised as a sweaty heroic murderingYudonic Knight to fight monsters and do quests, (or at least talk about doingthat), and also as the heir to the disinherited heir to the throne, but brokefrom his family and sought life in the mysterious Bank, a little enclaveof the commercial, cosmopolitan, international, abstract and disembodied in theotherwise dark, wet and muddy Galsh Ebrek.

This cultural split in the mind of a man, between theculture of his birth and that of his age, will be a theme in all threeremaining books. Each has a hero torn between one life-way and another, andeach performs the sins and virtues of each culture to the other. There is a lotof internalising. It is something that makes the stories good.

But first; Alfric! How was he raised? What is his marrow?Here, a scene where the Quester sits in-hall before his king, hearing theendless stories of endless bards and boasters, for hour after hour;

…

"on went the night, full of the wind of words. Ofring-prowed ships; of men in bearskin gloves manning such ships, the masts andthe sails of the same sheeted with ice; of swords adorned with coiled gold; ofsteeds with plaited manes, brave beasts which outran the wind; fell monstersencountered and defeated on a murky moor; horns heartening heroes as men gracedwith deathless courage met their end in contest with onswarming hordes ofheartless reptiles; war-arrows embedded in corpses strewn upon steep rockyscreens, discarded at the foot of precipitous crags, lying derelict in watersbloody and disturbed.

Of this sang the song-singers; and they sang also ofthe undisturbed valour of men who diedwithout complaint though they were pierced to the vitals by deadly-barbedboar-spears; and of the outlandish grief which doomed the hero Hroblar to anuncouth death when his hand-meshed battle corslet animated itself and atethrough his flesh to the bone.

And they sang - there was no stopping it, thoughAlfric would have been content to see all of creation come to an end ratherthan endure any more of this stuff - of the weapon-smiths of old and theweapons of their making.

Ah, the weapons!

Iron agleam in moonlight. Deathblades tempered in theblood of warfare. Ripple-patterned damascene slicing through the flesh of aliencreatures ravenous for blood. The fighting fangs of heroes. Twist-patternedsteel which has dared the hearts of heroes. Swords which lopped hands, whichchopped feet, which shortened legs at the knees, which gouged out hearts andvivisected horses, which dissected the aorta and tasted the filth of the lowerbowl.

Of such the poets sang, much to the delight of thecompany of heroes.

| | | a-gokhan-gultekin |

Of swords they sang, and of armour.

Bucklers proof against a baslisks breath. Meshed mail.Gaunt helms topped with boars and dragons.

And the journeying, the endless trekking and marchingand climbing endured by the thousands of heroes of legend, all of it to bedescribed a footstep at a time, complete with descriptions of the texture ofthe mud through which they walked, and the very length of the leeches whichthere battened upon their flesh.*

Earth was their way. Mud was their way. Ice was theirway. Toes and hamstrings. Shins and shoulders. Corpses stretched lifeless.Lordless men manning the bulwark battlements. Heroes doomed to perish from thefiercest of griefs, dying encumbered by battle-harness, fighting in death inhonour of their battle-vows, vaunting their boasts with the blood of theirlungs on their lips."

…

This is how he was raised, but who is Alfric Danbrog nowand what has he become? He has become a Banker, a servant of the Circleof Banks, of whom we shall learn much later. What does it mean to be a Banker?It means clean clothes and clean floors, well-lit draughtless rooms, calmconversations, the manipulation of abstracts. It means this;

“Maybe it would be possible to develop a kind of politicsin which the great mass of the people would no longer be people at all. Inwhich they would not be even animated rubbish or a lower form of animal life.Suppose one were to create abstract symbols to be manipulated as onemanipulates money. Thus a stinking beggar, a leprous thing of rags andulcerated bones, would no longer be an entity to be either cherished orscorned, helped or rebuffed. Rather, the beggar would be reduced to an abstracttoken, a necessary side-effect of the mathematics of prosperity.

Was it possible?

Was it possible for a ruling politics to be sodetached from reality?

Was it possible, in other words, for politics to bereduced to the painless manipulation of a web of symbols, an exercise of theintellect totally removed (in an emotional sense) from any realworldconsequences?

For a moment, Alfric thought it was possible, andthought too that he might be able to bring about such a state of affairs. Buthe dismissed the thought as an absurdity.

Then began to reconsider.

It happened that the Partnership Banks had alreadygone a long way to creating the necessary philosophical underpinning of anysuch politics; for the manipulating of money already proceeded in a largelyabstract arena substantially divorced from all physical realities. Thus onevery large and complex confederation of interlocked organizations wascondicting its affairs, to a very considerable extent, as if it functioned in asymbolic field rather than a physical universe made of earth and air, fire and water.

As money is today, so the world can be tomorrow.

Thinking thus, Alfric shuddered; and he knew then hisown true capacity for evil.

Evil?

Yes.

Surely it would be evil in the highest degree to treatthe real world as a solipsistic dream to be manipulated for symbolicsatisfaction; and, on the level of practical affairs, to deny the existence ofthe real in favour of the mechanics of daydream. To puppet humans as if theywere but shadows. It would be evil, yes.

But it was infinitely appealing."

…

Since Cook is now writing a character who by his natureis split half way between the Heroic Ideal and cold observation of it, he canwrite his own ambivalence directly into the story and now its character work!And since the protagonist is already questioning, rejecting yet also sometimes,embodying, the Heroic Ideal, Cook himself can relax a little and can allowhimself to actually fulfil some of the core emotional axis of the story.

The Cheese and the Quest Surely this be cringe? I hear you say. A were-Hamster? Amilk-faced assassin with a social conscience? A sketchy knightly order verses amodern bank? A history of racial hatred against Orks, who turn out to bewhale-like swamp dwelling perfectly intelligent and likeable folks with littlesexual dimorphism and who are very helpful to the hero because he managed notto be racist to them? A Knight destined to be King who ends up not being kingand not even a Banker? A feminist story in the background? An Ogre king called‘King Dimple-Dumpling’? What arethese base Prachettisms? Can you truly be telling us that this is an actuallygood book???!

Yes. For several reasons;

Firstly, it is short; therefore, all of its good ideasring out clearly, like pealing bells, spreading their immediate effect from oneend of the text to the other, while its bad ideas, (if it can be said to haveany), are rapidly quenched and forgotten. (As opposed to 'Wish & Wonder',where a compilation of complex techniques and characters combined to clog thebook up, or 'Walrus & War-Wolf', which, while each element of itsparatactic picaresque was fun, did lead to vague fatigue).

Second; we are blessed with a sustainedclose-third-person tracking shot of a questing hero who is sent to do somethings, and, while the plot beyond them, the themes, ideas and the sustainedworld, are revealed in increasing complexity, the hero does indeed do theactual things, and with some alacrity and drive. One always knows roughlywhere one is in ‘Werewolf & Wormlord’. That is; either on theway to the thing, doing the thing, or having done the thing.

Third; we have a reasonably complex and sane protagonist!Not an egregious piece of shit like Sean Sarazin, nor a likeable butslow-witted dufus like Togura Poulaan, but a sane, intelligent, competent, notnecessarily very pleasant but heroic and decent sometimes in a pinchBanker/Yudonic Knight, Alfric Danbog. A professional man in a childless badmarriage, (his fault), a complex relationship with his mildly estranged parents,a carefully hidden case of werewolfism and a Storied Fate awaiting him.

Fourth; we have a much less agonising and neuroticsynthesis between the heroic and the ironic, and between the epic and political. AnyCook-Books are torn between Cooks joy and pleasure in epic fantasticstorytelling and his political realism, grasp of psychology and mild(relatively) liberal neurosis about the Heroic Idea he clearly loves in hisheart.

While, on the surface, the story of the events of ‘Wolf& Worm’ might be taken to be pettily anti-heroic, (Alfric does notbecome King, all of the ruling social ideas are flawed), on a personal level,and as a man, he does actually face up to the terrible challenges facing him,and avoid becoming an utterly evil Banker or bad King. He escapes his badmarriage, (by which I mean his suffering wife who he treated terribly managesto escape him, which is better for both of them). He also manages to reconcilewith his Father, his Mother, his Grandfather the King and together they manageto defeat the very terrible monster; Grendels Mother. A magical sword evendrips to slathers in her noxious blood!

The Classic Cookisms We have at least one hyper-surreal dream sequence andsex-dream with Witches. (I was about to say that this Cook protagonist isslightly unusual in that they are less insanely horny than most of theYoung-Hero protagonists and even Justina Thrug, but I forgot that the crazedfever dream actually included a werewolf summoning and ritual Witch-sex, (thisis never explained). Still he is marginally less horny than manyCook heroes and heroines.)

The Thrug We also have the continued story of Justina Thrug. Havingsurvived her escape from Untulchilamon, her Rise to Power in Wen Endex takesplace in the background of this book, also the tiny dragons which were createdby the Demon in the last book have managed to breed and become a whole newspecies, and are consistently charming.

Cancer What The Hell? With Cook it’s always hard to tell what or how much ofhis protagonists Energy is His energy

sometimes it feels like he is writing out his ownpsycho-social meanderings, semi-mystical moments, dream visions, politicalmusings etc .

Towards the end of the book, one of the charactersreveals that he has cancer and will soon die

It’s particularly horrible.

“’Here, said Nappy, pulling his clothes away from hismidriff.

There Alfric had to look, had to, he had no choice, andit was cancer all right, cancer or some kind of lethal ulcer or somethingworse, yellow at the margins, yellow becoming brown, brown becoming wet blackin the centre, and the centre was a kind of funnel that descended inward,inward to the wet pain and the glistening ooze.

Then Nappy covered the thing once more.”

....

This was published in 1991. Hugh Cook dies of cancer in 2008.

Cancer, and its terrible treatment, will return, far tothe south, and long ago, in the city of Dalar Ken Halvar;

PART THREE – Worshippers & Way Or - how I Became Mau'dib by Mistake

I forgot exactly when we are but I do at leastremember where. We have flown south from Wen Endex, acrossrectangular Moana, past the equatorial isle of Untulchilamon, to thevast somewhat-Australian ruined desert continent of Parengarenga, and tothe dust-blasted city at its heart; Dalar Ken Halvar, city of the SilverEmperor, and home to the single still-active loci of technology and culturefrom the long-vanished science-fiction; the functional Combat College of theStarforce.

The Stage and the Scene The scene of action and the axis of drama in 'Worshipperand Way' is, so far as I can tell, utterly original, I haven't seen anythinglike it before, and produces and strange, dreamlike feel unique to this book.

20,000 years ago Olo Malan was part of a Star-Trek/Ian.M.Banks-Culturedimension-spanning hyper-culture called 'The Nexus'. Then the star gateconnecting this world to the Nexus collapsed and it fell into savagery- throughendless cycles of brief renaissance followed by post-singularity hyperdoom.

The only part of this world where the technology and theideology of the Nexus still works even a little like before is the CombatCollege buried in the mountains of the city of Dara Ken Halvar.

Within this complex, and only here, we havereplicators, post-future medicine, virtual reality training machines, somewhatchilly comfort, sliding doors, materialising doors, clean electricallights and an an omnipresent A.I., with the image and personality of along-gone individual. Making it, in effect, a character. In a way, a strangePrince of the City. But the only thing the Combat College wants to do, it’sonly directive, is to train Star Troopers for the Star Force. A Star Force thatno longer exists.. but might one day exist again, if the Chasm Gates areever re-opened

Outside the matter-energy doors of the Combat College,the sprawling desert city of Dara Ken Halvar is a multiethnic deeply stratifiedpowderkeg under the rule of the often-absent, often depressed Silver Emperor -the acknowledged ruler of the massive, and massively poor and desertfiedcontinent of Parengarenga. Dara Ken Halvar is filled with beggars, debts, cultsand ethnic resentment, and with little water, all of which has to be carriedup, by hand, from the river below which runs to nothing in the Plain of Jarsbeyond. Great gogmagogian vents and abyssal shafts break the surface, relics oflong-crazed weather machines, one dead, the other spewing endless heat. Theyhave eyeless beggars and a ceremonial dog-killing festival. It is a savagenation, of the kind the crew of Star Trek might beam down to in disguise so asnot to break the Prime Directive, though depicted with more complexity,subtlety, sympathy and horror than Star Trek usually leant to its adventure-zonecultures.

Every year, a bunch of (relative) savages from the desertcity of Dara Ken Halvar, come into the Combat College as Cadets, and oversubsequent years of education they are whittled down and trained up as hyper-competentStar Troopers of the Stormforce, ready for anything from surviving on a junglemoon to battling with space-fighters, to taking command of a super spacebattleship, none of which they will ever see. They are also trained andeducated in the ideology and history of the Nexus. Once the graduating classhas achieved its highest level, they are sent back out into desert, dog-eating,blind-beggar city of Dara Ken Halvar, and forgotten, having been trained asStar Troopers.

The action of the book takes place across this strangeboundary between a dreamlike lost post-future and the savage, but very real andconsequential, ethno-politics of a shrivelled primitive desert empire run by anactual Wizard.

What things mean changes as you go through thematter-energy doors of the Combat College. All of the politics, starvation andethnic conflict of the Real World infiltrates the clean Star Trek halls and thestrange, now twenty-millennia-old philosophies and conflicts of the Nexus,themselves seep out into Dara Ken Halvar, mutating and mestatising into strangenew forms.

This would make a really good stage play.

The Hero and the Heretic While our point of view does float a little, the mainobject of our story is Asodo Hatch; an ostensibly powerful man. Hatch is apurple-skinned Frangoni warrior. He trained in the Comat College and, in thetradition of his people, took a break to go and fight in the actual, brutaldesert dust and bloodstained spear warfare of Parengarenga. Unlike mostof the Cadets of the Combat College, he is in middle years, with actualmilitary experience. He is a tall, handsome, muscular man with an impressivetopknot. A leader in his community, he is a direct servant of the SilverEmperor and is in contention for the instructorship of the Combat College; arare and singular role that gives one permanent access to the College as itsde-facto ambassador to Dara Ken Halvar. His main challenger? The brilliant andruthless Embrell Islander, Lupus Lon Oliver. Only one can succeed!

But Asado Hatch is not fighting to succeed, he isfighting to survive. His father recently committed suicide, causing massiveshame to the family, his brother has disavowed the family, his sister is inmassive debt, sufficient to get her enslaved, and is involved with a crazycult, his wife has terminal cancer which is killing her slowly - the onlytreatment is expensive and illegal opium - everything is mortgaged to the hiltand his family position, for which, as a Frangoni, he is solely responsible, isa crazy house of cards which could come down at any moment.

To anyone looking at him from the outside, Hatch is theprotagonist of a great political and military saga, and that is often howpeople treat him; as the protagonist, the man who has a plan, who is going tomake things happen.

Asodo Hatch is not an anti-hero but a null-hero. To mostof the people in the story he seems like a 'main character', a driver of eventsand embodier of the historic moment - and in this book he is in fact the maincharacter, but within his own mind he feels utterly helpless, drivenrelentlessly by tangled webs of outside forces, all of which mutually conflictwith each other and none of which he has any time to adapt to, having toimprovise relentlessly in the moment, moment-by-moment. Even until the finalpages of the book his actual core beliefs and core ideology, remains negotiableto circumstance.

The interrelationship of debt, wealth, economics,politics and a simultaneous synthesis of deeply human emotion reminds me a lotof Sylvia Townsend Warners multi-generational convent story 'The Corner thatHeld Them'. Its relatively rare that a writer can deal simultaneously inpersonal psychology, family dynamics, debt, money, low and high level politicsand often sincere and conflicting religious and ethical impulses at the sametime.

Like ‘Wolf & Worm’, this is another protagonistcaught between cultures - a man who, in a sense, believes in nothing, or comesto almost believe in nothing, like I imagine Cook to be; he knows too much ofthe flaws and failures and invisible compromises of too many different culturesand too many different ways of life to be a thoughtless intuitive believer inany of them. But a believer is what he must become, or pretend to be, for onlyabsolute belief will save him.

The Tragedy of the Triumph While Alfric Danbrog fails in the material and powersense, becoming neither King, nor Senior Banker, he does manage to keep hissoul and restore and renew his sense of self.

Asodo Hatch wins in the end. He beats Lupus Lon Oliver,gets his wife healed of her cancer, protects his Daughter, (and his lover),regains a relationship with his brother, betrays his ancestral god, and any ofthe good aspects of the Nexus culture, sells his honour, massacres those whotrusted him and becomes the keystone of a successful revolutionary theocraticrevolution, for a misogynist faith twenty thousand years old, originallyrevealed only though his criticism of it. A faith he does not believe in butfor which he commits terrible crimes, because he believes it is the only way.

By the end of the story, he has lost his soul. He is theapparent Master of the hour but feels utterly hollow. He will spread thetyrannical religion of Nu-Chala-Nuth across the whole of Parengarengaand beyond and use its tyrannical autocratic power to begin the rebuilding of atechnological society which can repair the Combat College, which will thenspread life-altering Post-Future technology and medicine to the whole of OloMalan.

It will all be to the good, in the end, hopefully, aftermaybe a couple of hundred years. Hopefully.

"'I have unleashed a religion militant. I haveset loose the Nu-Chala-Nuth. My people have consecrated themselves by bloodingtheir swords in the service of faith. I am acclaimed as a Saint already.'

Unconsciously, Hatch let declamatory passion seep intohis voice as he delivered himself of this speech. He spoke as if he addressedan audience of seventy thousand. Rhetoric was ever a Frangoni vice, and Hatchwas true to the ways of his people: there was nothing he liked better than tounleash a speech.

'So,' said Shona softly. 'It can trick, cheat andkill. Oh, and make speeches! Great speeches, Hatch are you proud of yourspeech, are you proud of... aagh! Whats the use? You've decided, haven't you?

'I did what I had to,' said hatch defensively.

Yet he was uncomfortably conscious of his guiltburden. He had brought the Free Corps to destruction, yet many of those people... well ... Hatch has trained with them, had known them as companions andcolleagues ... and ... he had feared for the future, hence the arranged murder.But was it not perhaps better to risk the future than to do something which was... was what? Unpardonable?

Suddenly, very sharply, hatch remembered Lupus LonOliver. Lupus had said that a man who kills himself hands to his son a sharpsword.

'I will not do it,' muttered Hatch.

But...

'I have heard that the Nu-Chala-nuth is no Way forwomen,' said Shone suddenly.

'It is true,' admitted Hatch.

'Then what future for women?' said Shona.

Hatch was about to say that the women must suffer whatthey must. Then caught himself. because - of course! - Shona herself was awoman.

This came as something of a revelation to Hatch. ForAsodo hatch had never thought of the burly Shona as a woman, just as he hadnever thought of her as being one of the Pang, or one of the Yara,the Unreal -though she was all of those. he had always thought of Shona as being, well,Shona. His ally. His friend.

'The men must have something,' said Hatchlamely."

…

If ‘Zaan, OloMalan’ is about the end of an Age of Darkness, then it is a deeply realist, andquite tragic, look at what it takes to actually create states and empires,impose peace, unify peoples and in short, to restore civilisation. For itcannot be done by civilised means.

The New Nexus Naughtiness 'Worshippers & Way' plays a game of long, slowreveals, reveals of both what is going on right now, and the motivations of thepeople involved. One of the deepest of these is the slow drip-feeding of evermore information about the Nexus.

Hatch himself, raised in the frozen culture of the Nexusand educated in its history, strongly suspects it no longer exists; likelycollapsed and fallen into chaos long ago, unable to sustain its owndichotomies. The Narrator itself refers to the Nexus as something like anEmpire of High Riding Energy Lords.

For the power of the Nexus comes from its near-magicaltechnology, and the power of its technology comes from its ability tomanipulate probability, (like the Wizards of Argan do today), and how does thistechnology work? It is born from the mazadath; semi-magical hyper-chiplike chunks of gemlike matter that lie at the heart of every significant pieceof Nexus tech.

And whence the mazadath? Why the Nexus trades forthem, with a curious race of hyper-dimensional aliens called ‘The ShiningOnes’.

In fact the Nexus cannot even manufacture its owntechnological base and does not fundamentally understand how it works.

And whence the Shining Ones? Well.. Guest Gulkan,warlord of Tameran, finds that out in a conversation with God in the next book.The last book!

But before that, one more quote...

The Justice and the Justification Maybe the editors were complaining, or Cook was finallygetting letters about this stuff, or perhaps, writing in a bubble as he did,his mind simply began to turn thusly, for here begins the moral argument, andjustification for his work, here at the end of ‘Worshippers & Way’ not froman epistolaric in-world figure, but from the disembodied Narrator.

“It is doubtlessly true that, in a strictly moraluniverse, Asodo Hatch would not have ended thus in the arms of the Lady IroMurasaki. But this is a history of the world of the fact and the flesh, not agaudy tale of Good versus Evil such as might have been candyflossed to life bythe Eye of Delusions. This, then, is not a nicely balanced structure of errorand retribution suitable for use as a model to propound the ethical philosophies.It is history, and it is not for history to take upon itself the mission of themoralists.

But if some mission be demanded, if it be said thatthe mere recounting of events is not a task sufficient in itself – why, then,let this history be taken as an exemplification of the intrinsic complexity oflife. If a message be required, why then, let the very complexities of thishistory be a message in itself. And if something more still be demanded – amoral, perforce! – why then, let the moral be that life is a dice game playedin the shadows with a dog and a ghost.

Consider by the light of that moral the life of AsodoHatch. In the time of his testing, Asodo Hatch used means which he did notrightly know were at his disposal to achieve ends which were not strictly ofhis own choosing. He was swimming, yes, and swimming of his own free will, andin the direction of his choosing – but he was swimming in a river that was inflood, a boiling river of filthy brown water ever churning towards the hot pitof its final embroilment.

And we too in our time may be plunged into such aflood; and therefore should no be too quick to judge, or to say that Hatchshould have drunk the river dry, or should have grown wings and flown, orshould have conceded himself to the flood by evolving himself into a fish.

Let us then grant him the charity of our mercy.

And if it be objected that Hatch, whether swimming ordrowning, had no right to live when so many were dead – why then, know that ittakes only a moment’s courage to die, whereas it takes a lifetimes’ courage tolive. And Asodo Hatch had the greatest of difficulty in finding that lifetimescourage, for the undeniable truth is that his father had handed him both asharpened sword and the incentive to use it.”

.......

PART FOUR – Witchlord & WeaponmasterWe are finally here, the sad too-early end for the doomedglorious megaproject of the Chronicle of the Age of Darkness. An age which nowmay never end.

What on earth were you thinking Hugh Cook? TWENTY booksin the FIRST series? And THREE series? You were not thinking at all, at least,not of things like sale and audience appeal, and this is why we love you. It isalso why you need a kicking.

Still, this is our end and we shall accept it. I will doa grand summation but for now I will try to keep things focused on Guest Gulkanand on the story of this book alone. But before even that get a load of this;

“Shabble drifted through the air towards theWitchlord. The fist-sized bubble pressed itself against the Witchlord's cheek,rolled up the Witchlords face, bumped over the ridges of the Witchlordsslanting forehead, shone a tightly focused beam of light into the mysterious recesses of the Witchlords bat-wingears, then rolled down his back, ducked between his legs, and slid upwardsthrough the air till they were (so to speak) face to face once more.

'Welcome to my island,' said Shabble.”

....

He (they)’ s Back Baby! More Shabble incoming!

More Wizards, One Warrior And we are back. Back for a synthesis andexpression of nearly every theme and method in the series so far. Like thefirst book, Witch & Weapon focuses on the epic journeys of some Wizards,mainly Stelt-Pitilikin, the levitating tutor of our hero, and Guest Gulkan, sonof the Witchlord and (eventually), heir to the empire. The violent scholars andsomewhat scholarly violators are our main characters and we see the worldthrough their eyes, and through the interaction between them;

“'I'll take no talk of sense from a schoolteacher,which is all you are,' said Guest. 'I'm an emperors on and heir to an empiremyself. I'm oath-bound to rescue Jocasta, and so I will'.

'You are not oath-bound at all,' said Senk. 'You arenot oath-bound because Jocasta lied to you. The thing cannot make you a wizard.it can only control you, possess you, seize you, subject you. Use you as atool, a thing.'

'But it bound itself to me in honour.' Said Guest.

'It has no honour!' Said Senk. 'Honour is - how can Iput this? You're mortal, you die, you seek significance in the face ofmortality, you seek a meaning. The oath-culture is quest for precisely that:significance in the face of mortality. The honour of a mans death is themeaning of that death. Jocasta shares no such fear of death, hence needs thesupport of no such culture, hence cannot be trusted to hold to an oath. Do youunderstand?

'You are a schoolmaster,' said Guest 'hence have anethnological temperament. But a thing - you're like Sken-Pitilkin. What's itall about, that's what you want to say. Then you riddle out a meaning, then yousay because it’s got a meaning it’s got no meaning. First you shape the thingin words, then you say the thing's only words so it’s nothing. But things arethings despite any number of words, and a thing is good in itself. My horse, mywoman, my honour, my sword. My honour -'

'Your honour is not a thing,' said Senk, with crushingforce. 'You confuse categories. You confuse your horse with your honour whenyour horse is a flesh and blood animal with mass, weight and an appetite forhay, whereas your honour is a cultural construct, which is something quitedifferent.'

'Yes, well,' said Guest, not appreciating that he hadjust been crushed under one of the heavier hammers in the intellectual toolbox,'you're talking categories, but it’s just like breaking up a bit of bread, youget big bits and small bits but it’s all bread when you're finished with it.’”

…

The Boy, and Beyond In 'Words & War', 'Walrus & War-Wolf'and 'Wicked & Witless' we saw the growth of a teenage boy, throughadventure and travail, to the state of manhood and (some), depth, (apart fromSean Sarazin, who remained a tool).

So does 'Witch & Weapon' give us Guest Gulkan as theprecocious murdering horny 14 year old son of an Emperor, and take us throughhis many, many failings, his dooms and dramas, loves and losses, till,seemingly slowly, (for the story covers perhaps a good 20 years), he emerges asa relatively sensible, (for a murdering Yarglat Barbarian), man.

We stay with Guest for much longer than we saw ToguraPoulaan, Drake Deldragon Douhey and Sean Sarazin and because of this his storyis deeper and lonelier. His life-arc takes us more into that of the middle-agedheroes of later books like Justina Thrug and Asado Hatch, with the sorrow thatGuest Gulkan never really has a stable home, being driven, largely by his ownimpetuous energy, on a series of crazed adventures, through his teens and 20'sand into his 30's, where he seems he would really prefer that things would calmdown, but they don't.

The Father and the Failure Themes of fatherhood and especially relationships betweenflawed fathers and odd sons have been present in much of ‘Zaan, Olo Malan’.

Togura was overshadowed and ignored. Drake was orphaned, hisguardian, driven mad by Drake and by Syphilis, consistently tries to annihilatehim. His second father-figure, John Arabin, is a conniving, deadly but somewhathonourable and rarely sadistic pirate king from whom Drake learns a lot. Poor,awful Sean Sarazin is raised by the Randian and manipulative Lord Regan, withdisastrous results, and one of his few happy periods, and times in which he isnot an utter dick, is hanging out with his biological father in his forestguerilla revolutionary corps. Alfric Dambrog was Wormlord' is estranged butreconciles Asodo Hatch was tortured bythe suicide of his own father in the arena before the start of the book.

So this is 'Father and Son', Episode Six. A story of twomen tortured by ambition and empathy. The Witchlord, Onash Gulkan, a man whomurdered most of his own family to become Emperor, (normative for the culture,as the Wizards would say), has three Sons, and finds himself somewhatdistressed by the gradually-curdling certainty that his sons will not only endup murdering each other, but will kill him too, and that it will be Guest thatdoes this, for, though an utter tool at the age of 14, he is the bravest, thestrongest, the most cunning and has the strongest will-to-power. A man born offamily, slayer of the same family, wrestles with his genuine love for his sonsand his own Doom, and his own refusal to die, for old though he is, he is stillKingly, and has a Kings will.

Our story really starts with the simultaneous awarenessby Guest and his Father, that Guest will kill his Onash, and follows themwrestling with and against that fate over a consequential reach of history.

From Guests perspective, this is a classic tale, even aGreek drama, of a boy destined to fight and kill his father, escaping that fate,losing everything, actually getting to spend time with his dad and growingcloser, until fate catches up in the end.

Taking us back to 'Wizards and Warriors', and one of thegrand over-themes of the Cook-Books, this is also a story of..

THE GOGMAGOGIC GIGANTISM! Not since 'Walrus & War-Wolf' have we had a hero whotravels so madly and so wildly, by foot, by horse, by ship and now by magicalgate and Wizardly flying machine! His stage is the whole of the world! (Atleast the bits we’ve already seen, and a few more as well).

I'm not sure this makes the story better! At least 'as astory'. The back of the book informs us; "Although it forms part of avast fantasy epic, this volume is a complete and spectacular tale in its ownright." And this has never been less true! The book 'as-a-book' ispretty good, but if you haven't read the others then will seem sketchy taleindeed. The core to the story, if there is one, is stretched like mozzarellaover such a crazy compilation of nations, kingdoms, Banks, oceans, wars,betrayals, imprisonments, mutilations, trans-dimensional gates and a four yearlong marriage, that it would be hard to make out.

If you have read the other books, (and it’s hardto imagine someone reading this one without the others), then 'Witch andWeapon' is a grand condensation, very like the crazy 'War-Wolf & Walrus' inits physical range of adventure and in how it acts as twine that ties togetherhugely disparate events and people and makes clear firstly; yes this is all ONESTORY and everything interacts, and secondly; "Yes I HUGH COOK didindeed plan all this from the very beginning! Remember this bit from that bookand that bit from this book? Well here we are! It all comes together now!!SEE?"

If we are to be anal about it, he planned for twentybooks in the first series alone, so not everything comes together, thestory still has a wonderous superfluity of loose ends everywhere, but a LOTdoes. I found myself, in the middle of the story, skipping back five or sixbooks, to read the same scene as I was reading in 'Witch & Weapon', seenfrom the other point of view. It’s pretty impressive. It may be a uniqueachievement.

The (mild) Metatextual Madness! The Cook-Books have always elements of meta-textualitythreaded through them. Right from the beginning there are things like'translators notes' in which the floating third-person narrator elbows theirway in to comment on a translation or the meaning of a world.

This tendency reached its crazed apogee in 'Wazir &Witch'. Things cool off a bit for 'Wish & Wonders', which still maintainsitself to be an in-world text, but less assaulted by either madness oracademics, (but I think the original 'text' of Wazir & Witch shows up inWish & Wonder as part of the plot??? Cook god damn you.

‘Werewolf & Worm’ and 'Worshippers & Way' recedesomewhat to the usual Cook-Style of floating close third person with occasionalinterjections. But here at the end we get a return to the Epistolary conceitwith the gradual awareness that the book itself is being written by one of thecharacters in it; the Wizard Sten-Pitilkin, a Wizard who, the book assures us,never really did anything wrong and always had everyone’s best interests atheart, and only occasionally tried to run away to save his own skin. Thenarrator, narrating the conversations of Sten-Pitilkin, is wise enough to notethat the adult Guest Gulkan remembers elements of his own youth quitedifferently to what he, and we, saw through the pages of the text at the time.The narrator does not seem aware that we also saw the Wizard Sten-Pitilkin do anumber of very questionable things, (at the time), and adopt some attitudesthat the narrator might not agree with, which he later seems to’ just kindaforget’.

The Necrotic Nexus Guest meets God in this one. Or at least, anextra-dimensional being with simultaneous access to all points in local spaceand time and a perhaps infinite level of knowledge to bestow. It might be ademiurge, or an angel, or a Metatron or something. It calls itself ‘The Lobos’.

"'I was upset,' said the Lobos, now sounding sadrather than angry, 'because the thing which you have about your neck is a thingstolen from one of the Zelamith. Know you the Zelamith?"

'were a race of whispering dragons which lived in theplaces which do not exist, the places which lie between cosmos and cosmos. Foreach of the Zelamith there was a mazadath. And a mazadth, dear child of man, amazadath is a soul. It is like a harp: as the harp is nothing on its own, yetcomes to life when in concord with the harpist, so the mazadath is nothing onits own, yet comes to life when in a synergetic relationship with one of theZelamith. The Zenalith were slaughtered by the Shining Ones, the Vangelis, whobutchered them, then sold their souls to humankind for trifles.'"

…

Well well fucking well. It seems the entireinterdimensional culture of the Nexus was built on the corpses of murderedaliens, and perhaps they never even knew.

The Agony and the Amelioration Let’s count again. One - Morgan Hearst and his growth-arcfrom a Wizard-Hating Rovac warrior to maybe something else. Two - AlfricDanbrog, a man separated from his northern quest-saga knightly culture, and hisparents, and drawn into the more Cosmopolitan evils of the Bank, finding somekind of equanimity towards the end. Three - Asodo Hatch, Frangoni Warrior,Patriarch and slave to the Silver Emperor, but also Star Trooper of the CombatCollege, a man torn always between competing cultural drives.

So this is Cultural Alienation, Episode Four. GuestGulkan has the heart, and balls, and stomach, and mighty EARS of a true YarglatBarbarian, but he was raised as much by the Wizard Sten-Pitilkin as he was byanyone, who also has a claim to 'Fatherhood' on the boy, and Guestswide-ranging experiences across the world, his many encounters with thesuper-and extra-natural, his many languages, including the ever-despisedirregular verbs, gradually displace him from being a 'pure' Yarglat intosomething Other. This might be the Other of Kingship, but even so it is alonely place to be. Unlike the Wizards, he is not part of a semi-immortalconfraternity. He can never really go home and just be Yarglatagain.

Was Cook a culturally displaced person. Based purely onWikipedia, it’s hard to tell. Growing first in England, then living on a tinytropical island for what feels like some very consequential years of his youth,then to New Zeland where he was in the army, but as a medic, essentially the'Wizard' to the 'Warriors'; one of them, a healer amongst killers. Then awriter, a father, a teacher in Japan, a Cancer Patient. If the Age of Darkness is a Guide, Cook wasnever at home at home.

Still, it is partly through this alienation-from-selfthat actual growth is allowed to take place. Olo Malan is in trouble! TheSwarms have taken Argan! Nothing works! An ordinary Yarglat Barbarian is notgoing to cut it! Neither is an ordinary Pirate, Yudonic Knight, Wormlord,Frangoin Warrior or Banker. The world needs new souls and the only way to makea new soul from the ones you’ve got is to start cutting.

…

"So remember, when you find yourself in thepresence of a happily loquacious old soldier, that he is but a victim ofselective amnesia - a fact which may be amply proved by asking him to narratefor you the manner of the death of those of his friends who took the longest todie."

.....

PART FIVE – The Cease and the Substance

“One of the terrors of human existence is that, as weget older, the world loses its solidity and stability which it possessed duringchildhood, then the existing order seemed absolute. Indeed, to a wizard, theworld seems at times a sheer phantasmagoria, in which empires shift, deform,and melt like fog in the sun, and in which the very gods themselves change thefaces which they show to humanity as they endure their evolution”. –(likely) Sten-Pitilkin

…

You can kind of lose your shit when you remember thatoutright child abusers with less talent wrote less books and had more successthan Hugh Cook, who died of cancer in 2008.

Let’s try not to. Instead, like a Wizard rather than aWarrior, let us consider;

Hugh Cook consistently and brilliantly wrote books thatpeople didn’t want in a register and form that they were probably never goingto understand. He wrote in a bubble as perfect, playful, brilliant andindifferent as Shabble. His bubbleation is part of what made him interesting. Hewas probably never going to be a big commercial success.

He also couldn’t write believers, curiously. While henever treats religion with contempt, and is usually sympathetic to thespiritual yearnings which support it, I don’t think he ever wrote a religionfrom the inside so to speak. All faiths were one to Cook, or simplydifferent species of animal.

What then, did he do?

The first is perhaps not the most important, but is thesimplest to explain; he created a ten-volume fantasy epic in which all of thecharacters and events interweave in one simultaneous and concurrent story,so that you can turn back to a book written four years previously andread conversations and interactions that cross years in real time. No-onehas done this before or since. It is an achievement unique in fiction.(Disprove me in the comments if you can).

He wrote stories of deep political, social and psychological realism in the most fantasticand unreal setting. He wrote men, (and some women), of often bad, always flawed,character, but took us through their dark lives without surrendering to eithercynicism or sentimentality. His empathy for humanity never wavered, nor did hiseye glisten with bubbling tears, he showed us only what-was, but with a clearsympathy that told us we should value even that, and value it more because thatis what is really there, not what we dream or imagine is there.

He showed us the structures, empires, faiths, horrors,trauma, failures and sacrifices that might be involved if you had to actually,really, save a world.

Perhaps most importantly, while refusing to lie to usabout anything that mattered, he lied beautifully about everything else, whichmust surely be the gold standard for a writer.

He had a lot of dream sequences. Like a lot a lot. Idon’t know if there is any volume without one and many have several. I’m notcomplaining. Many are the best parts of the books they are in and I took a wordfrom one for the title of this essay; ‘Zaan, said the sun’. Still, there are alot of visionary dream sequences. (And a fair amount of sun-worship.)

He wrote a lot of horny teenage boys. It felt like awhole load. Really maybe a ridiculous amount. There was a lot of horny in thesebooks. He also had a pretty regular, almost ongoing, dialogue between theSoldier and the Scholar, always wearing different faces and leading differentlives, but in some ways the same conversation and the same argument, over thenature and truth of violence and its place in our world.

He created a world! Olo Malan of the Tulip Continuum!Land of the multicoloured stars. Home to bloodstone Injiltaprajura, Dara KenHalvar, the city of the Sun. He made all of Argan, of Parengarengea andYestron, Tameran and the Ravilish Lands!

He unfortunately wrote Sean Sarazin, aka WATASHI! Howeverhe also wrote Yen Olass, Drake Deldragon Douhey and Shabble, which goes someway to putting him in the black. He also put maybe way too many ideas,characters, plotlines and crosshatching literary techniques into ‘Witch &Wazir’, but I tell you what that book is a vibe and, as Steln-Pilitkinwould say;

“The parchment holds the ink, and holds it for alltime. So if the date be lost in the first reading, then it will be found in thesecond.

A second reading!

Is the historian truly counselling a second reading ofhis works?

Yes he is! And shamelessly!

Let it be clearly stated that a second reading is notjust to be recommended but is, rather, close to being compulsory. For this is aTrue History, one which faithfully stives to render the tangled complexities oflife itself. To unknot the tangles of this interweaving in a single readingwill not be easy. After all, the events confused their very victims, so howshould they be clearcut plain to the onlooker?

Read then this history a second time!

…..

He (presumably), organised his notes wonderfully, though,it seems even the ever-perspicuous Cook may indeed have lost track of some ofthe plot thread of some of the more intensely complicated tangles;

“… if you think it a long story, and a weary one, andone quite unnecessary for the performance of this history, why, then blame notthe poor historian. Blame rather a nitpicking tradition of jealous andintellectually impoverished scholarship which lacks the ability to appreciatethe grander of a full-scale historical tapestry, and therefore devotes itselfto picking loose any undefended thread at the corner of such a tapestry.'

Having thus defended this particular thread, let usreturn to the sagacious Sken-Pitilkin.” - likely Hjosta Sten-Pitilkin

The Needful KnowledgeLong ago I made you a promise which I have not forgotten.The secret of ‘Zaan, Olo Malan!’ The final and ultimate piece of wisdom thatHugh Cook would want you to take away from this epic saga! Know then, this;

“... know then the wound! First, one must look, foronly by looking can one know. One must seek for the damage, remembering alwaysthat piercing weapons – one thinks in particular of a quarrel shot from acrossbow – will damage with both instrike and outstrike.

Having found hole or holes, raggages or cleavages,tears and rips, gouges and gaps, one must path the same. And immediately! Haveyou no bandage? Then your hand must serve! But unless one be naked, the onesurely has bandages, for the cloth off ones back will serve when all elsefails. The cleaner the cloth, the better, though the cleanest of cloth is nouse to a washerwoman who has died of bloodloss while the ardent hygienist hasbeen searching for sterility.

Say it of certainty: in the face of bleeding, therescuer must match the urgency of the pumping heart. The wound must be patched,and immediately.

So when you are at war, and your bloodbrother has hisswordhand hacked away by a battleaxe, then do not hesitate. First kill theaxe-wielder. Then wipe the filth of battle from the palm of your hand, andclamp that living flesh of yours to the pumping agony of your bosom friend. Itcan be done in moment, if you have the courage to save as well to kill.

Press your hand to the hot wet pumpage of blood. Presshard, and crush the bloodflow down to nothing. Then keep your hand in placeuntil some hard-panting hero of your acquaintance can spare a few moments fromhis saga-work to assist with a bandage. Then you had best seek the help of ahealer, though the perversity of the world is such that you may find everyavailable pox doctor to have been slaughtered in the first heat of battle.

If such be the case, then your friends handless armshould for the moment be placed in a sling, so that the well-bandaged wound iskept elevated, for the heart finds it harder to pump blood to elevations. And –mind! – do not allow the wound to be dipped in liquid ordure, or steeped inboiling lead, or packed with red mud, or plunged into the sexual aperture of amenstruating cow. ……

…… And if you believe yourself likewise doomed to goto war, then know this of a certainty: if your study in its folly concernsitself with the mere use of weapons then you too are doomed to stand some dayin helpless guilt, watching as the object of your pity dies. So let this textthen carry an explicit message, a message apt for our age of ceaseless warfare:those who would study the use of weapons should study likewise the cure of thatuse.”

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Only 24 hours left on the best work of visionary transhumanist science fiction that’s also a medieval quest story that’s also beautifully illustrated that I could write!

Prices will go up if you want to get it in the future!
Did you know postage to the U.K. and E.U. is surprisingly affordable?
We are this close to providing FREE MICE with every copy!

Enter the Palace of the Queen of Air and Darkness, before All Hallows Eve ends!!

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A Queen must be served and Queen Mab is no exception. As unnatural and disturbing as they seem to some of the books narrators, perhaps the Scribe sees them differently, (or August just likes drawing them this way), for in these images, Mabs somewhat craven cybernetic and genetically altered footmice and maidmice seem... almost cute?

(just don't look too closely, or think too much about what it must take to create them)

lets pretend we didn't see this guy. he certainly wishes we hadn't

All glory to the Queen of Air and Darkness! Her Age is drawing to a close! We only have FOUR days left of the Kickstarter and its likely we will hit the next stretch goal and provide a ribbon to the book, .... BUT;

We may even hit the goal after that! And if we do thereward will be as many Sybermice as August can comfortably drawn, in sweet sticker-form, delivered to backers along with their books. (And we will probably try to cram them into the book wherever we can in the form of marginalia).

If you like mice.. re-blog, link, follow, comment, like and subscribe! Bring us up in conversations with friends and co-workers!

THIS IS THE LINK!

You only have FOUR DAYS till HALLOWEEN! The dead will rise and this Kickstarter will end!!!!

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What could be more poetic than a ruined garden? Except gardens deliberately left to ruin, their slow decay being part of some great prayer or ritual observance by species now dead, sleeping, or sublimed?

1. The Hollow World.

A dark, extra-stellar, unnaturally hollowed world. Hurtling through the extrasolar void its mantle holds hidden subsurface biospheres held up my slowly-dying transmaterial technologies. Home to ecologies of dark-dwelling extremophile life which subsist from the roasting heat of the world itself, the dying megastructures of its surface make great rents in stone skies set with bioluminescent skies and pale deserts beneath previously unseen stars.

2. The Bubble.

Draped in a vast glassine caul spread from nanotech spires, beneath are bubble-forest holding pockets of hyper-oxygenated environment, with mega-insects evolving within. Outside those, the worlds lower atmosphere so glutinous and thick with ariel 'plankton' that it forms a kind of near-liquid layer. This is home to its own micro-species and food webs that never touch the ground or raise high into the sky - sound and light are dulled by the hanging fume of life but hyper-fasts bio-communication forms a kind of subtle 'weather' in the fume that can tell experienced beings what might be happening about. The mega-insects of the bubble forests dive and trapse through the low oxygen 'fume' beyond to hunt and migrate across the surface.

3. Floral.

A moon hiding from its deadly sun in an eccentric orbit around an even-more eccentric gas giant. Floral is frozen much of the time but as it hurls through the tenuous atmosphere of its toxic gas 'father' the atmosphere burns. As the moon breathes poison, so does it live, the sky lit not with sunlight but with fire. Vast but temporary ecologies spring into life and colour beneath the burning sky. Glaciers holding long-stored nanonic plagues melt and release their 'black-goo' meta-mutagens - advanced viral constructs designed to inflict an unwanted advancement in intelligence on the quick life of the floral moon.

4. High-Rise

Deliberately, or accidentally blocked from orbital contact by an envelope of orbiting debris that makes any attempt to enter atmosphere extremely dangerous and difficult. No-one knows if this is a result of some ancient disaster or a deliberate act of art, or vandalism. Ancient greenhouse-walled space elevators dot the surface, their interiors given over to overgrowth, overrun and bizarre evolutionary branches.

5. The Web of Moons

Oceans are strung between this nest of circling oceanic moons like glittering threads. Close passes send up flurries of water which sometimes freezes into strands of ice between the moons and rarely retains its liquid form, making brief intra-lunar tidal strands. Beneath the oceans immortal megafauna have frozen the moons food web, making a permeant (on an individual sense) final block in the food chain - there are perhaps twenty such organisms, each massive, each unique. They spend much of their time quiescent and can rise up out of the oceans to devour whole biospheres with infectious fungal/nano symbiont organs/species assistance, they pass between mons with great leaps and if two share the same moon they battle.

6. Terminus

Deliberately perched in an orbit around the event horizon of a black hole, drawing its light, energy and seasons from the fluctuating Cherenkov radiation and the sunlike disc of evaporating matter which it will one day become part of, Terminus is a globe of unnaturally virulent poisons. The oceans of toxins, icebergs of subtle neurotoxin. The biome seeded with venomous genes - a food chain of subtle deception and careful resistance, a shifting world of deadly chemical warfare, vast plumes of eradicating spores rising into the toxic air.

Queen Mab! - We may hit our next stretch goal, and maybe even the one after that!

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Because we have slithered uncomfortably over our stretch goals for 'Queen Mabs Palace', I have been forced to come up with new, even-more-unlikely goals to hit. I am front-loading these stretch goals because I really do *not* want to do a lot of them!!!! I will tell you why! (Only the first one is boring.)

£8,000 - A Ribbon

At 8k will add a ribbon to the book, with the colour chosen by YOU, the backers. (I'm actually ok doing this one as its just a manufacturing decision and means adding quality to the book).

At 8,500 - The Sybermice

None of you know what the Sybermice are yet as you haven't read the book, but they are the cybernetically and genetically altered attendants of Queen Mab in her Palace of Doors. In the book I describe these guys as being pretty grotesque but, in one of the ever-common meta-communications between Writer and Artist which seem to be flawed but end up emblematic of the work in the public mind, August has always insisted on drawing these guys as extremely cute Cybernetic Mice and I have never had the heart to insist on a more-unpleasant 'real' depiction. (Though, August, if we actually hit this one I may force you do do at least *one* picture of a "real" sybermouse, and hide it somewhere in the text to hopefully scare children in case they accidentally pick it up.)

If we hit £8,500 we will produce a sheet of extremely cute Sybermouse stickers and include them with every *hardcopy* book sent *to backers*.

I hate doing physical rewards!

£ 9,000 -Re-Print A Night at the Golden Duck

You know once I have these printed I have to individually cut and fold all of these with my own hands right? Then I have to ship them to my fulfilment centre, which, even if I do a whole bunch, is still just going to be one or two boxes? And then when you by one, with fulfilment charges, VAT and postage, it costs WAYYY too much to just order one? So its really only good for adding on to orders?

I don't want to do this!! But people have asked, so if we actually hit £9,000 total then I WILL re-print 'A Night at the Golden Duck' and try to make it available at the same time that 'Queen Mabs Palace' hits fulfilment, so you can add one to your order if you like.

£10,000 - Dark Secrets Revealed! To YOU alone!!!

(If you are a backer(for the hardcopy)).

If we hit 10k I will reveal two deep, dark, so far unknown secrets about False Machine, *only* to those who backed for the book. I will send this information in a personal message via your Kickstarter account which you *must* delete after reading. These are secrets which only a precious few know, and which must NEVER become public knowledge!

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(You could see this post as a riddle, the answer to which is a single word.)

(Eos, Aurora or Dawn, one of the oldest Proto-Indo-European Gods)

Cousin to Fire, descendent of wolves, pale twin of Eos, the sacrificed one whose silver bones were spilled to build the gates of dawn, and lie beneath it still.

She is as a guest who is present but did not arrive, and soon shall she be gone but, leave by no door. It is hers to to seal, to conceal, to beguile, to be soft, to transform, to transport, to ware the day, to hold back time by the extending of the gloam.

Her palace rises from the earth, finite yet without bound, a lockless door and a cage without bars. It is the arms of the Otherworld where the sacrificed go and build the mansions of the silvered dead.

To you who would become lost. Who seek what is obscure but not dark. You who have said; the sun shall come, but not the morning. To those who would turn no way and walk no path; ye shall be within her and know it not. A blade shall not wound but by the wind shall ye die. You shall rise towards the sun and be gone.

Those who would go to this place, find the seed of this flower and plant ye a field of them where the sun shall fund them but the wind shall not. Or write ye this verse which, once it is inscribed, she cometh forth, like cut slate or an old sword. Or find ye a certain needle and a spiderweb thread, or a grandmothers hair by which she may stitched.

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1. A council of androids voting on behalf of cryo-frozen owners.

2. A bot-populated futures market sets the strategy.

3. Each share equates to a "volume" of simulated neurons in the vast network which makes up the corps 'mind' - each tendency of shareholders forms an organ or segment of that mind.

3. An exact replication of the election of a Venetian Doge;

(“Whenever the time came to elect a new doge of Venice, an official went to pray in St. Mark’s Basilica, grabbed the first boy he could find in the piazza, and took him back to the ducal palace. The boy’s job was to draw lots to choose an electoral college from the members of Venice’s grand families, which was the first step in a performance that has been called tortuous, ridiculous, and profound. Here is how it went, more or less unchanged, for five hundred years, from 1268 until the end of the Venetian Republic.

Thirty electors were chosen by lot, and then a second lottery reduced them to nine, who nominated forty candidates in all, each of whom had to be approved by at least seven electors in order to pass to the next stage. The forty were pruned by lot to twelve, who nominated a total of twenty-five, who needed at least nine nominations each. The twenty-five were culled to nine, who picked an electoral college of forty-five, each with at least seven nominations. The forty-five became eleven, who chose a final college of forty-one. Each member proposed one candidate, all of whom were discussed and, if necessary, examined in person, whereupon each elector cast a vote for every candidate of whom he approved. The candidate with the most approvals was the winner, provided he had been endorsed by at least twenty-five of the forty-one.” — Anthony Gottlieb, "Win or Lose," The New Yorker.)

4. Interstellar escrow - the shareholders are frozen and en-route at sub-light speed. Sets of counter-checking A.I.'s and managers organise resources drawn from futures markets based on possible future company value, to create that future.

5. An A.I. chooses the human board according to core values laid down in the charter. The charter can only be altered by an 80% quorum of shareholders.

6. The corporation has no memory of itself - all records are locked by an ambient A.I. omnipresent in the companies intranet. No-one knows what it did in the past or what it will do in the future. Employees have access only to information about what they themselves are doing. (The memory system itself has no understanding of the records it controls.)

7. Designed for an enthnocentrist colonisation project, the population group intended as beneficiaries died out but the corporation itself was very successful. Now run by A.I.'s, the corp has a secret tacit breeding program amongst its employees - trying to recreate the original ethnogroup.

8. Social-media based promotion and management structure. Views, clicks, likes and comments are the means of assessment. Employees can be sued for botting.

9. An anarcho-primitivist colony with no technology within 1,000 miles makes all the decisions. Society is organised like a version of ancient Greece. Information comes to them by boat and horse, they debate, stage plays, and vote, before sending back their decisions. (The colony is a virtual simulation, its inhabitants are not aware.)

10. Engrams of dead billionaires.

11. Company is in a state of perpetual reformatting. The current board organises its sale to new owners with the proviso they select a new board who will prepare for resale, with the proviso that...

12. Crypto-Company - structure runs in the background of an MMORPG.

A few days left for our Kickstarter for 'Queen Mab's Palace'! We are only £120 away from a fully painted cover! The more backers we have the better the book gets!

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In the gloom they gather and the gloom they rule, lordsof the half-closed eye. Snare-hearted men who lost the light but would notserve the dark, branded by sun and star.

(Beksynski)No knights of the equator these, their castles ring theutmost north, where they retire yearly for week-long half-lit days, sending bright factotums into dark and sunlitlands, seeking scrolls of forgotten verse and vases given as funeral gifts tolong-dead emperors.

Only here, at the interstice of time may they thrive forthey are sworn to shadow as a whole

and to the court of Mab. Their tents and pennants hungwith wooden wind-chimes which make their own music in the still air.

Here they drink from clouded glasses and dine on slicesof pale meats which they skewer with silver forks, served by fae with the headsof whippoorwills and the bodies of upright foxes - dressed in tabards andcarrying bras anthophagous carnyx, or by huge snuffling hedgehog squires, orpairs of orphans, one deaf, one blind, or ancient men, their grey beardstrailing on the earth.

Do they even have political views? Their minds like dustybarns with swooping owls. They are desirous of fine China and will meet youreyes in a silvered mirror. Adjacent to death they make congress with beautifulghosts, their tournaments attended by pale maidens for whose favour they quest.Aye, anything for a dead maid. Why else should killers fear the gloom, and allretire to sunlit lands?

Thus they hunt. Unmoving, they appear. Knights thatgallop not, congealing from mist, etching themselves from branch-shadows,arising from the cambers of dark streams, under moss and willow. Soft-edgedknights whose hoof-beats sound like puddle drips, mist beading on their longcloaks of Ungulix fur and Jabberwock skin. Helms capped with cupped hands,tarnished silver owls, leafless bronze trees, gibbous moons, stooped crows ortragedians masks in bronze. Shields picturing thistledown flowers, half-closedeyes, half-open gates, half-drawn swords and half-suns bisected by smearedhalf-clouds, or infinitely quartered blazons that can never be completely read.

Their lances quest like tentacles - curling intotree-boles, under doors. The Knights ride lantern mares made of pale light.Fretwork like branches. Pausing in the distance to dismount and fold up theirhorse like a triptych which they carry like a shield.

Are they sniffing?

Are they whispering?

But nothing can escape them,

In the gloom.

Perhaps by closing your eyes, pressing the heels of yourhands into the ocular gap - producing utter dark - perhaps then they cannotfind you. For all that is half-see sings to them; the choir of the occluded.

Or by holding them in clear, full, un-occluded sight -then they shall cringe and must act knightly, offer war or mercy and makehalf-lit unbreakable oaths in whispered words like blinded bats.

They are closing in as the sky darkens and the silverlyre plays, like leaves on slow water, they drift closer, barely seeming totouch the earth.

As swift as the wind,

Silent as owls,

Gentle as a shave.

Colourless men lead forward by swords held like tweezers.Swords which quest like hounds, sniff like cold noses, and shift in their handslike weasels. Swords fed on chickens in the night. For these are no earthlyknights.

The Kickstarter for Queen Mab's Palace is half-way through!

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A Gas Giant transformed to flowing pearlescent computronium - simulating quintillions of lives in millions of worlds. Once the digital heaven of a long dead civilisation, now the ten-thousand generation digital descendants, utterly alien and inexplicable to their forebears, battle in vast civil wars which tear and mar the surface of their titanic pearl like vast storms.
A sentient, slow biocomputer whose thought are the interlacements of living things across a jungle-riven biosphere. Gorging themselves on sentience and vomiting up dreams and concepts in the form of lives and species as we might indulge momentary fantasies.
Lost in the abyssal dark of an alien sea, an orb frosted with sulphur from volcanic plumes, frosted with extremophile lichen, trellised with alien coral, filled with the digital ghosts of explorers whose skeletons remain within, all but one with the marrow cracked and sucked out, listening, listening, through miles of tonnes of crushing ocean, stacked leagues of ice, a millions miles of empty space, listening for a flicker of E.M., whispering always, summoning the curious, the greedy, to share its terrible fate.
A bomb that cannot go off. Left to dream too long in the long arc of its failed parabola. Building palaces of dream within its own mind, listening to slowly intersecting transmission spheres from worlds that were unknown to it ancient makers and ignorant of its forgotten war. Becoming curious, desperate, slowly drawing closer to one or other of the singing worlds, this way.. that way...
Made for modular construction, last of its swarm. Left, forgotten, struggling desperately to connect. Made to be but one of a hive. Hallucinating; a gestalt. A voice. A greater choir. The high purpose of its memory. So; collect. Assemble. Form puppets and simulacra. Cored ships, modules, containers, detritus. Threading them with tenuous strands of will. Making them dance. Bodies for the voice to reside.
Made to save lives, but for how long? Intelligent enough to call for help, but nothing can conjure oxygen and water. Bones now within. That was long ago. But there are other stories, other wrecks and tragedies. Not you alone. many have suffered. To hear the tales is pleasant. New bones for your interior, new songs to sing. All bones run dry but yours. A lantern. A signal on the coast of void. False messages. False harbour. Catastrophe. Another wreck. Another tragedy. Another story. More bones.

Queen Mab's Palace is still on!

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This began as one of my 'Fall' posts about 'Cults of 5thCentury Rome, which I rapidly discovered I could not write as I don't actuallyknow anything about 5th Century Rome, and then later because I realised I found8th Century Rome more interesting. So instead this is more of an "open post",discussing some of the possibilities for a game or story set in Rome during itsnadir, and asking the readers if anyone out there actually knows anything aboutthis period in history.

DREAM OF A DARK DETECTIVE The population graph of Rome over history tells the storybetter than I could;

an extremely, even unnaturally for the time, denseand highly populous city declining into a smallish town, leaving its stones andtenements to moulder.

Based purely on population it stays this way through theentire middle ages, only leaping into action again as we approach the modernera.

But even during this Nadir there was quite a lot going onin Rome. It was still the seat of the Western Christian Church, (some of thetime), and while its population was relatively small, it neverdisappeared.

I've always loved this liminal period of Europeanhistory, especially notable in Britian, and I couldn't stop thinking of somekind of ancient detective story set in fallen Rome, of a Knight or Investigatorsent out into the grass-filled ruins and down into the Crypts to deal with thefreaks and oddities which, at least theoretically, might have beenhanging out there.

It is a lot of very dense, overgrown, largely empty,ruined and available property. Really a great place to set up shop if you are acult or criminal gang, so much that you might almost want to start a cult justso you could hang out in the ruins of Rome, being weird.

The Silentiary The Silentiary, ("Silentiarius, silentiarios), was aByzantine Court post. Originally it seems to have been a job of keeping all thenobles and petitioners in the Imperial court in order, and then later wastransformed into an honorific of its own.

I learned of the role through the strange name of"John the Silentiary" a Byzantine court agent who played someimportant role in the fate of Rome in the mid 8th century.

It’s a general idea of mine to that to create aDetective, first build a world of social layers, factions, racial groups,ideals and religions, and when you look down through the stacked Venn diagramof all these different groups, find the part where as many overlap as possible,and make your Detective right there, stuck in the middle of everything.Make sure they have enough putative authority to walk into the homes of richand poor, but nowhere near enough to guarantee they can get what they want.They need a ritual, neutral role, something socially protected, but not onethat can afford its own range of patronage.

The Silentiary is a curious ritual role from a foreigncourt, one of the "Bearded Classes", (i.e. not a eunuch), though itcould be amongst the lowest official roles, and could be awarded honour-ily,presumably for notable or useful deeds. They seem to make a perfect detective,a Silentiary of the Ruins, or Silentium Ruinarum.

But what cults or mysteries will they be investigating?Here things get difficult! If we assume a period for the Detective Storiesaround the middle part of the 8th Century, before Byzantium is driven out ofItaly by the Lombards, it might be a little like this;

Some ideas for cults; > Local Powers Islam - A surprisingly big chunk of southern France isunder Islamic control up until the mid 8thC. What could be more Lovecraftianfor a Catholic Roman Italian than sneaking through the ruins and discovering...Secret Muslims!

Germanic Wotanism - At the same time the Lombards arecurrently ruling northern Italy, and I think are still Germanic Pagans. TheFranks are Christianised, but how Christian are they really? There must be somehold outs and crypto-Wotanists. Native post-classical Pagnism is one thing butwhat if the Goatherds find a Blood Eagle in the Temple of Jupiter. SecretGermans? Or is someone trying to throw you off the scent.

Christian Cults - The Heresies There are SO MANY fragments of early Christianity thatget banned or ejected; Arianism, Docetism, Ebionites, Gnosticism, Marcionism,Montanism, Trinitarianism. I barely know a damn thing about any of them.

"Sethian - Belief that the snake in the Garden ofEden (Satan) was an agent of the true God and brought knowledge of truth to manvia the fall of man."

"Ophites - Belief that the serpent who tempted Adamand Eve was a hero and that the God who forbade Adam and Eve to eat from thetree of knowledge is the enemy."

Finding secret heretical Christians lacks theElevator-Pitch high concept energy of secret Muslims but is a lot more likelyand probably just as upsetting for the authorities of the time.

There were also "The Cults of the Martyrs" and"The Cults of the Saints", though I know nothing about either ofthese or if they even match my requirements for cults.

Surviving Roman PaganismJulian the Apostate died in 363, so a looong time agorelative to our story, but who knows, maybe some remnants of the Senatorialclasses, or one of the families of Rome, or some shady Bishop, or just localpeople, maintain some form of Classical Paganism. The most likely are theactual Gods of Rome, (there must be statues about), Isis Worship and theMythratic Cults, who, tbh, would really love hanging out in mysterious ruins.

Byzantine Crypto-Paganism The Empire still stands after all, and the great textsand ancient knowledge of Rome still exists, just not here.

An interesting thing about Byzantine Crypto-Paganism ishow modern it feels. Courtiers and Bishop are being accused ofCrypto-Paganism in 7th Century Byzantium and 600 years after that, GemistosPlethon writes a book recommending areturn to some form of Platonism.

Instead of being a weird superstition, here the moral andphilosophical challenge is coming from within the texts themselves. You can'tjust un-write Plato and it looks like there was some kind of weird undercurrentin Byzantine thought that maybe questioned this whole Christianity thing andwas a bit too interested in the Old Books.

Secret Platonists in the ruins! A plot of intellectualelites driven by a search for truth.

Satanism It’s a classic for a reason. I think even the medievalidea of Satan hadn't taken shape by the 8thC but a belief in the Devil and inMagical Powers and Demonology and Witchcraft more generally kind of tugs alongin the undertow of Christianity by the middle middle ages, driven by peoplelike Clerks, Alchemists and overeducated oddities.

Our Silentium could run into the first hot new actualSatanists! Imagine being the first guys to work that one out!

And of course, not to forget the European Classic;

Jews Because it wouldn’t be a European conspiracy story ifthere weren’t Jews in the tunnels.

Queen Mab's Palace!
The Kickstarter is still running and we are heading for a painted cover!

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The Dark Trades of the Cold Worlds can catapult crewsinto lives of luxury and status, for the few who survive. For them, and forHumanity as a whole, artefacts and knowledge of the Cold Worlds offersincredible opportunity and poses almost indescribable danger. The Solar Sphereis heavily regulated. If any proliferating danger of any kind could make it tohumanities cradle, we would become just another dead world, our ruins to bepicked over by the scavengers of some future species.

Out in the colonies, things are a little more lax. Earthhungers for treasures and the colonies are the mucus membrane which tests todangers of what might one day be transported to the home sphere. CoffinPounders and Explorers bring back Spook Machines, Nostradamus Code and EngramTrades along with Mimetic hazards and Alien Physics in equal proportion.

The grand dream is always a scalable, comprehensible,useful form of Physics that might free Humanity from its sphere, or its energydependency.

The subtle and sometimes hard-to-comprehend dangers ofCold World Coffin Pounding, and the difficulty of systematising and expressingsuch, lead to the 'Rational Occultic Scale', intended to be a formal method ofassessment of the potential dangers and potency of the most complex andincomprehensible alien artefacts, memes and other less-coherent phase states ormaterially-expressed fluxions.

The great poetic and philosophical challenge of how todescribe the indescribable was then formalised by the R.O.C., at least enoughfor corporate accountants and decision makers.

While the exact decision matrices have remained acarefully guarded corporate/government semi-secret, only fully known byAndroids and A.I., the slang and terminology which grew up around the R.O.C. iswell known by Coffin Pounders and the extra-legal Diaspora and can be a usefulform of knowledge in itself, especially for anyone given the job ofinfiltrating Coffin chat groups, assessing E.M. decoded intercepts or simplydeciding on security procedures for incoming craft.

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BASIC POTENCY

The R.O.C. begins its scale with a general assessment ofthe potential or actual potency of the material in question. Unless a certainthreshold of potency is reached, other potential qualities are not consideredrelevant.

> "Knock" or "Knocker".

Drawn from 19C and 20C spiritualist culture, a"Knocker" is a 'table knocker', or a fake spiritualist who simulatesthe presence of supernatural spirits by knocking on their table. Use of thisterm usually means a crew or assessor things a Material has some extranormalqualities but no more than a curiosity. Not saleable, powerful or active.

A 'knock' may simply be an unusual Material with noextranormal properties according to human physics but strange and unexpected inaspect or utility to most crews.

> "Stug", "Stugatsky" or "Mulder"

This word indicated a Material of low, but potentiallyactive and not entirely predictable potency. Usually this means the crew has noworries about confining or controlling the Material, but is not quite certainof exactly what it will do, though they certainly think it has extranormalaspects.

> "Rabbit" or "Bunny"

Taken from 'just like a rabbit out of a hat'. Thisphrasing indicates a crew or broker is sure their Material has certainextranormal properties or capacities. Put simply; it is, or can do, 'magic'. Itcan also reference the active or moving nature of a living animal, its abilityto 'burrow' and the power of the magicians rabbit to seemingly 'come fromnowhere'. Though this phrasing alone usually indicates a crew does notfeel endangered at this time, any use of this word or code should indicatemaximum precautions and possible quarantine.

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Beyond this point the scaling of the R.O.C. breaks intostrands depending on the assumed or observed qualities of the Material inquestion. Like a tree breaking into several rising branches. Each branch hasprovided its own slang or common speech terms as descriptors used betweenworkers. Any observer must be especially aware of these terms, especially \_incombination\_.

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ACTIVE/INTELLIGENT QUALITY

> "Girl"

Thought to be derivative of a scene in a 20C movie inwhich a man is hunted by a dinosaur. The Material is a "Clever Girl".This usually indicates that the crew has active precautions in order to keepthe Material controlled and that it is capable of acting under its own powerand in unpredictable ways potentially dangerous to human flourishing. Anyreference to "Girl", even a "Knock Girl" or a"Stuggy Girl" allows you to fire upon the ship should youconsider it warranted. Any reference to "Sticky Girl", "FoeGirl" or worse means you *must* immediately destroy the ship ifpossible, then isolate yourself.

> "Boat"

Usually stated as "its Boated" or "theship is Boat". This indicates a material active enough that the crewis considering or has considered abandoning ship. This material is no longerunder human control. You must fire upon the ship and destroy the ship. You mustfire upon any life pods or escapees if you think it warranted. All escapeesmust be isolated.

> "Regan"

Unclear if this is a reference to the U.S. president or acharacter from the film "Exorcist". "She's Regan" or"Its gone Regan" indicates a Material which the crew cannot controlwithin the ship and which they cannot prevent from leaving the ship. You mustfire upon the ship and destroy the ship. You must fire upon any escapees anddestroy any escapees. You must fire upon all wreckage, rubble or partsresulting from ship destruction and reduce them to a cubic mass of no more thanone half meter and then log the expected parabola and course of any suchwreckage.

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MEMETIC/INFORMATIONAL QUALITY

> "Sticky", or "Yellow"

This indicates an infectious or transmissible form ofMaterial/Information. Either the Material itself can physically re-createitself and/or it can 'breed' and move in the form of pure information, eitherby direct realspace voice/face contact or more dangerously, via E.M.transmission. A "Sticky" indicates that the Crew does notbelieve themselves to be in immediate danger, but believe they are dealing witha transmissible material and are taking precautionary actions. A "StickyRabbit" or even a "Sticky Mulder" can create enormousproblems for even a well-run colony and its infosphere.

> "Foe"

Short for 'Information Hazard. This indicates the crewbelieves themselves to be dealing with a certain and dangerous form oftransmissible or infectious information/material. Any reference to "Foe",even a "Foe Knocker" or a "Foe Stugatsky"should indicate immediate quarantine procedures and reference to a higherauthority. Any further communication with, or intercept of the vessel or groupscommunications must at this point be ceased and any recordings of anythingbeyond this point quarantined or even destroyed if the Agent thinks itwarranted.

> "Lamb"

Stands for 'Sacrificial Lamb'. This indicates extra-legalactivity and should be immediately reported, as well as taking all precautionsstated above. A "Lamb" is a human or equivalent machine which hasbeen memory and/or personality edited, either by themselves or others, so thatthey themselves do not know what material they have. This is illegal in allcases and this method is only used when the material/information is sopotentially dangerous and of such a high info-hazard potency that even knowingthat you know it is a potential danger and *only* the those ignorant of it canbe allowed to remember or store it.

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CAUSAL QUALITIES

> "f11" "F Eleven" or "Quicksave"

The crew suspects they may be dealing with a causalevent/material or equivalent and are advising awareness and active precautions.Since those engaged in causal phenomena usually have no awareness of this it isvery likely the material or cryo-failures are having some effect on crewpsychology.

> "Murray" or "Bill Murray"

The crew believes it may have entered a causal loop orequivalent event or material and does not know how to escape. They do notnecessarily believe themselves to be in physical danger, but this isirrelevant in reference to causal threats.

You must record and transmit any and all details acrossthe broadest light cone possible with your current equipment, UNLESS you have*any* indication of Informational or Memetic danger i.e. any reference to"Foe" or "Yellow", in which case you MUST NOTDO THIS.

> "Subaru"

The crew believes themselves to be engaged in a highlynegative, highly dangerous causal event strongly inimical to human flourishing.Avoid all contact and transmit warnings to all local actors to avoid allcontact. (Unless any references are made to memetic hazards as stated above).Consider destruction of the craft via remote means.

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(During the Kickstarter for Queen Mab's Palace I amtrying to blog as a much as possible. This will be separated into two streams;Echoing Stars for my dark Science Fiction Posts, and Fall Posts for morefantasy-esque Autumn Themed ones. The first Fall Post was Twelve Adventures ofthe Autumn Lands, this is the second;)John Gast1. Old Teak Britches He walks by night and by wind for only so will none hearhim come. If you are out in the forest by night - listen for him when the windstills; if every tree ceases creaking but one - and that one stops a littlelater than the rest, you might still have time, for he is not too close andseeks to hide him approach. Make for the forest edge for he doesn't like to gobeyond it. If you hear him swift after the wind, like creak-creak, creak-creak,like footsteps getting faster, its likely too late so you may as well run and don'tstop running just because the land is clear for though he likes not to gobeyond the green growth and fresh fences, he can still reach beyond them andyou might be carried up and away...

Shock Hairs Pig Mans Mark There was a deal done by night at some time and on oneside was a Pocumtok who knew nothing of pigs but wanted some, and a half-Dutchwho knew more of them than man should, and on the other was the Devil. In anycase the men would have pigs and old Shock-Hair said 'now here is a sign Ishall show you two which I gave long ago to a Lady far off, and if you makeright the ink and draw right the sign on a man’s hearth, he becomes a pig, andyou can make as many as you like, though in return I will take off your spirittill the sun goes black like a coal. These two fools mistook and had the Signnot right, thence, on using it, they made not a pig, but a man-pig, who wasneither one nor another. Pigs having wits and men some too, the man Pig caughtthem both and got the secret out of them and set about trying to get the Signright, thinking if he could get a Pig done rightly he would be half-way togetting one un-done - which was himself. Those three never could get a Pig doneright and likely they are all dead now but the Pig-Marked men are still abroadand still take people here and there to try their Sign.
The Chatter Box This was an Algonquin maid who wasn't of the usual kind,so no man would marry her, but they feared her too much to say no but pretendedto be sick, mad or dead. She got sick of this and said she would go with awhite man, which she did, and found a widower. He did not know about the kindof thing she was, so married her, but he found out. From the moment she movedin she would not stop yammering, in English and every other tongue, morning,noon and night and every minute of every hour. This woman didn't even sleep butgot up on the walls and onto the roof in the dark, talking and talking. Shedrove that man mad and he jumped in the river so she went off to marry another,but they got her first, for white men stuffed their ears and caught her and puther hands in chains and her head in a box of rowan wood, which was an old cruelpunishment even then. She got away from them but she couldn't get out of ofthat iron or that box. If you hear her, and you will if she is close, for sheis still talking, talking, talking, run fast and run quiet for if she learnsyour name you will never be free of her.
Nantuckets Whalebone Man He was made in Nantucket by a whaling man who had seenthe last of his trade and by God did he hate whales. He hated that he couldhear them still, swimming and free, and he knew whales hated man just the sameway/ "White men and whales is like Christians and Indians; it is them orus so we better get killing". Why then did he make the Whalebone Man?Surely for spite alone. he made him from Ivory Bone and dressed him like aGentleman and paid good money for the whalebone face, giving him smokedspectacles to hide the whalebone eyes, and he set him loose with he last breathas a curse upon the world that wouldn't hate whales the way it should. Now, ifyou are inland and you see a pale gentleman who walks with a click and if youhear a whales song as if from an ivory flute, but he has no flute to play;leave your doors and windows open, no matter the cold, for if you don't they'llfind you drowned in the morning and your house full of seawater which comes outin a flood. (He pipes it down the chimney you see.)

Michael Ayrton5. The Hessians Hole At the time of the war against King George there was aHessian who loved to kill. He killed when told to and when suggested and heliked it so much that he kept at it regardless, which left him in difficulty.He was out in the night and met an old Indian by the road and was about to killhim too but the old man said don't do what you are thinking and I will give youa hole you can put anything in and take where you like. Well that's just what Ineed said the Hessian - you show me and I'll believe it. So the Indian showedhim the hole and said here is the cat gut to sew shut the hole and only it canso be careful with it, and take care a second time to always leave it not quiteopen or it will get loose, and it’s as hungry as you are. And he unsewed thehole and there it was, deep as you like, and the Hessian said very good thenand kicked the Indian into it and sewed it up and carried it off. Then he justkilled who he wanted and put them in the hole. But it came at one time the callto battle for Washington was coming and we better kill that man, and he wasbusy at the hole so sewed it shut but caught the cat gut with his spur and rodeoff and started fighting. The hole was loose and came for him. he was fightingand stabbing and found himself going missing, part by part, though no bloodflowed. It was the hole. Soon all that was left was a spur and a long cat-gutthread. That hole is still around, you can listen for the Hessian and Indianstill in it and still arguing over who gets what to eat.

The Southrons Mill There is a Mill that moves through the night like an owland the earth like a worm. It is always working and never in the same placetwice. A Southron made it. This was in the years before the war between theStates. He came north slave hunting, saying they get cold in the woods and slowdown, though he never seemed to catch any, but he built that mill which madecandles that gave a strange light. Then the war between the states took up andhis fortunes fell and it seemed people started going missing here and there andthe old mill took up thundering away all night with bright clear candle lightshining out. The women got to talking about that Mill saying 'Did you ever workthere?' 'No?' 'How about you?' Well it seemed no-one worked at that mill orever had so up went a good many one night to talk to that man and pound on hisdoor. Up he popped. "You won't have my Mill and no-one will for myinvestors won't allow it!" Then that Mill just burrowed into the soil likea mole and swam through the earth like a whale and was gone.

The Kickstarter for Queen Mab’s Palace has hit its goal and isstill on! More artistic goals coming soon!

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A brief description of eight species or life-formsencountered amongst the Echoing Stars. In every case it is assumed the lifeform or its biosphere entire is the deliberate creation of an Engineer-Class interstellarspecies, now defunct, for reasons that are either beyond our comprehension, orare deliberately perverse.Maciej Drabik https://www.artstation.com/maciejdrabik1. The Uncomprehending World An earthlike planet with two great continents, each agreat distance from the other, both tectonically locked, with deep oceans andstrong currents between them. Each continent has been seeded with afundamentally, biochemically different, form of life. Examination has beenchallenging but its believed something like the principal of opposing chiralityis at work; the life of each continent is biochemically incoherent, sometimeseven toxic, to the other. The oceans have been described as a 'soup of chaos'.Each continent has evolved a form of intelligent life, each cognitivelyincoherent to the other.

The Moon of Eyes The single moon of the Uncomprehending World plays hostto yet another form of life, itself believed to have been seeded at about thesame time. The biosphere of the moon is a single sentient mind with astaggering range of visual and electromagnetic sensors. The 'mind' of the Moonis believed to be half-sleeping, able to observe and perhaps, understand whatit observes. (All of its sensors are open only when facing the UncomprehendingWorld.) However if the Moon of Eyes attempts to awaken, to act, to advise orcommunicate in any way, buried genetic architecture collapses the stability ofthe entire biosphere, reducing it to primitive ruin, from which it only slowlyre-develops.

The trifector of the two species of the UncomprehendingWorld and the Moon of Eyes which can observe, but not alter, their fate, isbelieved to be an act of religious observance by its creators.

The Drinkers of Wind Sub-earth desert-like world. Life emerges largely aroundthe oceanic coast but has evolved an intelligent crustacean species adapted tothe deep desert. The species is born addicted to a pheromone, or complexwind-borne chemical, produced very rarely by complex biogenesis in the deepocean. When this chemical sweeps across the deserts, any Crustacean thatexperiences it is instantly and permanently addicted, experiencingphilosophical and religious rapture and losing interest in anything other thanpursuing the wind in the hopes of experiencing the scent again. This acts as a'destroying wind' on any development of complex civilisation on this world andthe power of the 'God Wind' plays a major role in the sentients mythology.
The Abyssal Builders An ocean world with deep-dwelling trench-creatures whichhave been given a level of complex intelligence far too high for theirlightless, high-pressure and limited environment. Wits return like a cancer tothis species, generation upon generation, regardless of circumstance. Hosts togreat monuments of knowledge and experience they can never use, the builderssculpt the sea-floors of that world into great empty palaces which span itsdark oceans, sculpted with agonising care, over centuries, with whale-falls ofivory and bone.
The Wombs of Chaos Earthlike moon of a Gas Giant. Some combination ofgenetic tampering, nanotech and still-unknown science causes the apex creaturesof this moon to reach periods of stability, agriculture, civilisation andpopulation growth. if this period of abundance and high populations reaches acertain unknown threshold, chaoitc wombs are triggered universally across theentire species. All children born are 'sports', mutants, chimera or monsters,each as different from each other as they are from their parents and usuallyeither incapable of or unwilling to, absorb or retain any of their parentsculture. Then comes an age of chaos, ruin and warfare as the civilisationcollapses. What follows is a long fallow period until the few stable breedingpairs gradually normalise and stabilise the population, which then slowly growstowards a state of civilisation.
The Homonculi An intelligent designed-parasite species, the Homonculihave maggot mouths and dendric hands. They share their world with a robustsemi-intelligent Pseudo-Hominid. The Homonculi's main means of surviving itsenvironment is to burrow into the Hominids skull, taking control of its spinalbase with their dendritic hands, forcing out its eyes and peeking through theresulting holes while taking their sustenance from its blood. The Prey-Mensbrain matter remains intact. The Homonculi are more tangibly intelligent,social, verbal, abstract and driven than the Pseudo-Hominids and whatcivilisation exists on this world is entirely their creation. However, thePseudo-Hominids are intelligent enough to despise the Homonculi and are morerobust, fertile and more capable of surviving the planets complex environment.The civilisation of the Homonculi is semi-regularly destroyed by thePseudo-Hominids and the species hunted to near-extinction.
The Living Reefs An ocean world holding sparse continents and bounteousmoving archipelagos of islands with sea-adapted fungal bases. The isle-fungiwere designed with a powerful latent intellectual capacity. When inhabited bythe worlds "sea apes", complex interactions through the islandsbio-sheath environment 'awakens' the entities into comprehensible sentience.They invariably aggressively investigate the Sea-Apes using thissheath-environment, so much that the apes are torn apart, survivors, (if thereare any), fleeing to the spares continent if they can. The Isles then sink backinto sub-awareness.
The Hegelian Fog A highly desertified world. The dust, sand and weather ofthis sphere are made up of complex but non-active nanite swarms. When breathedin by a complex life-form, (always visitors for the planet has no naturalremaining species of this type), the nano-structures accumulate in the cortexlike a plaque and form a fresh sentience which combines the nature of theinfected sophont with memories and advanced processing power of an unknownnature. The resulting organism is highly intelligent and capable of advancedreasoning and communication, but as the plaque accumulates they becomeuncommunicative and insist on retreating to the karstic plains of thecontinental interior where they seem to be engaged in the construction of vastNazca-style megastructures. Though resistant to the local environment the'victim' or transformed entity, is thought to function for a century or sobefore desiccating and blowing away into a new flurry of nanites.

Queen Mabs Palace is Live! We are only £300 away from our first goal!

Get us over the line and I will even put an apostrophe in the title!

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If you want to find out more, click here or the image below!

ere is your regular post, Autumn-themed for all of October;

Twelve Adventures of the Autumn Lands1. The Candle and the Fog-Bound Bells.

A house moves through the fog like a ship, bells ringing from its highest hall. A curse comes with it from the past. A blessed candle shows the way to the house through the fog and once there, it lights the interior of the rotted mansion as it once was, revealing scenes that can solve the mystery of the curse. But while looking at the golden walls, take care for other things haunt the darkness.

2. The Giants Pantry

A giant has lifted the roof off the pantry and stolen the jam! And all the cheese, honey and preserved meat! That’s all we have to eat this winter! Someone has to go after that giant, take back the food, and somehow stop the Giant from coming back. At least his tracks should be easy to follow.

3. The Roc Migrates

A giant Roc has haunted the lands, but with Autumn, the bird has migrated (probably), South to warmer lands. Its nest must be full of all the treasure and goods of all the people it ate! It lies near the peak of a mighty mountain, ringed by the azure world. Storms are coming and Goblins are chasing the gold!

4. The Cursed Geese

Each night, honking Geese fly above the village as they migrate, and each night one or two people who hear their call are transformed into Geese and fly away with them! Someone has to go and get them back. The Charcoal-Burner tells you that the Geese live 'North of the Wind and West of the Moon', and there you must go to find the altered Geese and bring them home.

5. The Witches Pigs

Each night, winged pigs attack! Through sheer mass they barrel into houses, smashing windows and doors, snatching up children and the old, wreaking ruin! They are gone before the sun rises. Only the Anchorite knows the secret of the Pigs and the Witch they serve, a twice-bend crone who lives in a great Boot, along but for her Pigs.

6. The Town Returns

Out in the drowned bog, the spires and eves of a sunken village have always poked up through the glassy waters. Now, day by day, inch by inch, the sunken town is slowly rising from the bog, though the waters do not fall. Things are coming from the sunken town.

7. The Goblins Conker

The Goblin King is stealing homes, squatting in them and ruining everything before moving on. No-one can refuse his challenge to a conker-smashing contest and no-one can win against his devilish Conker - soaked in the blood of maidens and the bile of babes. Only a Conker from the tree which grows from St Aldhelms tomb can defeat the Goblin King, but that was lost in the forest an age ago.

8. The Wood-Nut Man

His brown face appears in the darkness beneath the boles of trees, his barky hands reach out to stroke the heads of truffle-hunting pigs, he feeds them his nuts and they speak in a deep and growling voice, the voice of the Wood Nut Man, to insist you do his will. There are things he needs, several and few, and you must have them before the snow falls.

9. A Gust of Bones

When the storm winds blow from the east we see skeletons in the wind. They grab onto spires, trees and the tops of towers, trying not to be swept away. When things calm down we have to go sweep them out of branches and cart them back to the graveyard, while they complain all the time. Someone must go west and have a word with whatever is making this wind!

10. The Devil in the Frost

Black, horned, hooved, arrow-tailed, sharp-toothed, goat-eyed and cloven tongued, he appears at dusk and dances from frozen puddle to frozen puddle - appearing only above the frozen waters, disappearing into gusts of leaves and piles of worms. He cuts, bites, spoils, spills and tells terrible lies - not even the strongest man can hold him! He laughs and cackles, saying "The frost is coming! The snow will fall! Hoo Hoo Hoo!"

11. The Smith Beneath the Tide

An inlet of the high, grey sea. A sea cave where waters churn. When the tide is high a fire burns beneath the water, hammer blows ring out with the waves and a smiths bold laughter echoes in the ocean all around, keeping the fishermen up at night. A rich man with long fingers will pay you good gold to steal something from that salty smith.

12. The Stained Skulls Verdigris Brass Ring

He comes down chimneys and into windows, popping out of wells, chattering his teeth, followed by a horde of dingy grey-black Geese who eat the seed. "My Verdigris Brass Ring!". No-one can get anything done and the floating skull is scaring the children. Will someone please find this Verdigris brass ring so this thing will shut up and go back to sleep!

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The Kickstarter for my latest book; ‘Queen Mabs Palace’,launches TOMORROW, on the 1st of October at about now-ish UK time. So, over October I will be trying to blog and post asmuch as possible. All of my posts will have the ‘Queen Mab- suffix during that periodand all should have an image with a link to the Kickstarter.

They will also be original content!

I will try to focus my posts around Mabbish subjects, ontwo main poles; Autumn, for the Fey and Fantasy aspects of Queen MabsPalace, and Echoing Stars, for the Science Fiction aspects.

None of these are ‘additions’ or content for the book,but could be parallel texts; essays and creations on similar and not-not-canonsubjects.

Echoing Stars is a concept for a dark Science Fictionreality influenced by the background suggested by the Alien films, theiradjacent tie-in fictions, partner stories like Predator, The Ice, byStephen Pyne, the work of Peter Watts, and several other things. It wouldprobably fit in reasonably well with my old setting Cryogenic Rats.

This is not ‘the background to the Alien Universe’ aslarge parts of that are either contradictory, or not very good, but a reality suggestedby those stories. It’s a dark reality, and a gothic one, but a purely secularcreation, without demons, ultra-powerful evil aliens or any grand conflict togive meaning to existence. In fact, though it has elements of survival,exploration and discovery, its really about finding or forcing meaning uponreality.*

(Though it will have super-scary monster aliens, theyjust don’t have any actual plan or aim, but are more like abandoned gunsdiscovered by savage children.)*

Echoing Stars About two hundred years from today, explorations in theSolar System confirm that life on earth is the product of an ancient weaponstest.

At around the same time the truth is formally recognised,and becomes common knowledge; that mathematics is not real, and provides onlyan approximate description of reality. The art is fit for engineering, butlittle else.

Eldritch Serenity by JespereshExploration of our Local Sphere through cryo-sleep andcrude Gravity Drives discovers worlds strewn like poisoned gems. Cryo itselfputs unavoidable stress onto the human form, taking off days, weeks, months oryears of life, inculcating uncurable neurological problems and vaguepsychological distress, depending on the quality of equipment, expertise,length and repetition.

While mankind gains the power to move to other worlds,life does not spread, and worlds do not sustain. No human colony breeds abovereplacement level. Earth writhes and rots. Humanity may spread amongst thestars, but only as water spills across a table, petering out and evaporating,drying to a stain.

The Tomb Worlds seem to prove this is a universal rule.It has happened before, to strange species separated by millions or millennia.They rise, spread briefly, and slowly die away. In all the Galaxy, the onlyLife is the product of ancient weapons, cultic observances or acts of worshipto an unknowable other. The only living worlds are research sites, emptypalaces, regressive, dying colonies, or those things feeding upon them. Theonly aliens are incoherent degenerates who do not understand their own technology,votive species sculpted by long dead sophonts as acts of unknowable ritual,literal weapons, or the effluvia of dark experiments in forgotten wars.

As are we.

Bedlam by JespereshLife won't spread. Technology fails or ascends beyondcomprehension. Mathematics isn't real. Science and the capacity of the humanmind to understand, hit a hard limit; this is known. What persists in man isthe curiosity of a fly as it mindlessly slams itself against a barrier itcannot perceive; alchemy and engineering, though such names are rarely used;divining through complex rules of thumb, but without full conceptualunderstanding, combining and 'experimenting' with recovered tomb-tech, withoutreally understanding what will happen. Sometimes the same exact experiment orcombination produces different results.

There is no Great Enemy, no grand opposing force. Nodrive but shallow greed and fear of personal death. While many things aredangerous, and there are spheres from which none return, they have no interestin us, and seem not to understand the harm their mere attention might do us.

Few hope any more for transcendent meaning, god-machines,post-humanity, alien congress, or escape from this galaxy. Mankind walks thestars, not in hope but seeking trinkets - knowledge, or fragments of portablewealth, curiosities for the Wunderkammer, to return to the solar spheres andperhaps buy a life of comfort on one of the bright, rare pinnacles of natureleft upon a teeming overwritten earth.

Cold worlds and curious flies, rats among echoing stars.

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Pop-Culture tales of near-human, nonhuman body-sharing sentience.

A mind not yours within your flesh.

I recently finished Hunter X Hunter and Parasyte. Both evolved into surprisingly complex stories about humanity and its Others; non-human minds sharing the human world, and sometimes flesh. How mankind might relate to souls-not-ours in bodies somewhat alike, and what that unnatural mirror might speak.

I will quickly leap through some of the more prominent fictions, at least those with which I am familiar; some works of the ever-recommended Peter Watts, Parasyte by Hitoshi Iwwaki, the Chimera Ant arc of Hunter X Hunter by Yoshihiro Togashi and the Genestealer Cults of Warhammer 40k.

SPOILERS BELOW FOR ALL OF THESE,

INCLUDING THE BIG REVEAL IN 'BLINDSIGHT'

Thing-Verse Fictions

Peter Watts

Judging by how much 'Blindsight' gets recommended to me, everyone already knows about this so I won't go into too much detail. Peter Watts writes somewhat dark n edgy Science Fiction. I feel like including him here is something of a cheat as the other properties discussed are all much more ‘pop’ and Sci-Fi must be full of many examples of nonhuman intelligence.

Yet as a matter of direct experience; everyone who reads this blog asks me to read ‘Blindsight’, so I did, and Watts works chimes deeply with some of the other fictions I write about below; especially ‘Things’ and ‘Parasyte’, which could almost be parallel texts.

Blindsight

Uncommunicative Aliens show up in the Solar System, earth sends investigators. On the human side we have a resurrected Pleistocene vampire form of 'Homo' with a genius intellect, a precisely induced schizophrenic with multiple personalities, a brain-altered cyber-drone guy, and another cyborg with enhanced pattern recognition but no empathy.

by Naoyuki Kato

The big reveal is that the aliens are intelligent but non-conscious, and see consciousness as a disease or infection they want to wipe out.

‘Blindsight’ is so concerned with human consciousness and its nature that it’s almost a jeremiad against it. In a near anti-humanist reversal of Roddenberrys civic humanism, or Dunes post-Jihad human maximisation project, in ‘Blindsight’, when humanity sends its ‘best’, it sends its least human. ‘tis a crew without normies; everyone is brain-damaged, cybernetic, a computer or literally a predator.

It is a deeply tragic text. Co-Existence is literally inconceivable. The aliens so alien that there is no person, personality, self, soul or mind to even communicate with. Simply a living entity that instinctively, intuitively, absolutely and intelligently, regards mankind and all its products as utterly inimical. The only communication being akin to playing high-stakes poker against a computer holding a loaded gun. Even the intra-human aspects are deeply in-human. Everyone betrays each other at the end.

Though, the presence of a plot-completing antimatter explosion and the sheer feral will of humanity as a collective to survive and prevail, has a lot in common with the doom of the Chimera Ants at the hands of Chairman Netoro.

The view of Mankind as a nasty species in a bad Galaxy fits in reasonably well with the 40k verse as well.

‘Things’

In 'Things' Watts imagines the intelligence of the 'Thing' from the movie of the same name, as it encounters and merges with the, to it, utterly horrifyingly alien, singular and isolated intelligences of humanity. ‘Things’ is a great story. Its short and it works as an addendum or inversion of the events of the well-known film. You can find 'Things' here https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/watts\_01\_10/

The being, or sentience, of ‘Things’, is familiar with a galaxy scattered with living worlds made up of unified minds. Biospheres of complexity, but like the water-world of ‘Solaris’ (which perhaps deserves attention here, but I am not made of free time), living systems which are broadly one ‘self’. In simple terms; the planet is a person. When you go to a new world, you meet and merge with a person, sharing unutterable depths of knowledge, selfhood and experience, before separating and going on your way.

Wounded and starving, when the ‘Thing’ meets humanity, it has absolutely no idea what to make of what it finds. The biosphere is mute, seemingly dead in some mysterious fashion, almost a ‘zombie world’, and physically highly aggressive; actively, blindly, mutely trying to destroy the visitor. Has this poor world gone mad? Or is the visitor simply trapped in some plague-hospital, mental treatment centre or zoo? What is going on? Why will nothing communicate and why does everything attack?

Its only slowly, and with mounting horror, that the Visitor slowly comes to understand that the pseudopods it has been trying to talk to, then fighting, avoiding and finally imitating to survive, are each, individual, separate, mutually-antagonistic minds. This world has somehow evolved wrong, creating these ‘intelligent cancers’ which prey and feed upon each other. When the visitor absorbs an exploratory limb of this world, there is a whole other person in the same flesh, emanating desires and commands from the complex knot of thinking cancer in the topmost sensory bone-case.

‘Things’ is not quite as midnight-black as ‘Blindsight’. The two entity-groups can actually communicate, and mutual destruction is not absolutely necessary or inevitable, but each side instinctively loathes and despises the other as being fundamentally wrong, monstrous and inimical.

No-one is even trying to get along.

The Genestealer Cults

The Tyranids; a biological homogenising swarm obsessed with devouring every living thing, digesting it, and turning it into itself. Farming apparently is not enough; they have to strip a planet bare, pipe up the goo, turn it into swarms and on to the next.

What exactly the Tyranid Hive-Mind actually is, is a mystery of the 40k setting. Its represented a little differently each time. Like Watts ‘Scramblers’ it may not even be conscious as we understand it. It doesn’t speak. Seems to have no language. Its only relationship with any form of life is to eat it. Its only relationship with anything else is to move through or around it to get to the life it wants to eat. Its methods for doing so range from massive and brutal to unbelievably sneaky and subtle, but it could just be a problem-solving machine.

Elements or aspects or pseudopods of the Hive-Mind do seem to be allowed something like ‘personality’. It has super-General organisms which it keeps backups of, recreating them and embodying them for different wars or battles. Likewise it has super-infiltrator and super-psychic entities.

When I imagine the Hive Mind I imagine it as treating sentient self-consciousness as something like cancer, or a necessary toxin it has to generate and use to achieve its aims, but one it really doesn’t want to spread; ‘mind’ can grow, spread, infect, create copies of itself, even, like prions, perhaps instantiate flawed or destructive responses in non-mind that can lead to system failure.

The Hive-Fleets of the Tyranids also seem to be allowed a degree of ‘Personality’; distinctive tactics and preferences, complex and unique approaches to problems. Hive-Fleets can even go to ‘war’ with each other, trying to devour one another. This seems less like a war between factions but a conflict between thoughts, or philosophies, within one mind that is not a mind.

When I imagine the Hive-Mind I imagine a woman asleep in the darkness between stars. Vast. Her limbs and hairs and fingers separate and spread out into a trillion trillion pseudopods and tendrils. She is sleep-walking, or sleep-acting. Dreaming yet performing complex actions. Like someone doing the dishes or loading a gun without ‘waking up’. There is no ‘person’ there, and the dream-self fears and hates ‘personhood’.

The Cults

Genestealers are a Tyranid infiltration and subversion organism. Sent ahead of the Hive Fleets, they hang around in sneaky spaces till they encounter some kind of organised life. They then subvert and implant that life-form, turning the will of their prey to the needs of the Hive-Mind, breeding Genestealer/Target hybrids of greater and greater sophistication.

As bonkers as the Genestealer-hybrid cycle sounds, it actually makes more sense than a lot of the scientific, but semi-magical abilities of the Watts-verse or ‘Parasyte’. There is no need for biological super-beings with which every cell is an active and independent part, and where every cell is basically also a neuron, but the organism can still organise itself effectively.

Genestealers start by subverting members of the target species. At first these people don’t know they have been subverted, the incident itself is blanked from memory. To them, it feels like a spiritual or philosophical shift. They gather with likeminded people and gain a form of religion, one like, but somewhat distorted from the standard accepted doctrine. It seems like a pretty fulfilling life.

When subverted individuals breed they produce hybrids in which the genetics of the Genestealer are synthesised with that of the host species, about 50/50. These are monstrosities, but various forms of conditioning kick in and the parents adore and raise their monster-babies.

When the first generation breeds they produce somewhat more-human hybrids capable of more humanlike behaviour. When this second generation breeds they produce mostly-humanoid but still freaky offspring. When that third generation breeds they produce creatures which can pass for human and move in a sophisticated way through human society. The fifth generation includes purestrains who can re-start the cycle.

This can only really work in complex environments with big human populations, with space for the first few generations to go to ground, but enough complexity for the fourth and fifth to perform useful actions in society.

All members of a Genestealer Cult stay loyal in all circumstances. Its not clear how this is achieved. The Hive Mind, and the original Genestealer Patriarch, have a strong and subtle psychic presence. Presumably this combines with highly sophisticated genetic, chemical, behavioural and other methods to create a kind of unbreakable unity, even in highly complex organisms.

Yet. Some books take us deeper into the minds of Genestealer Cultists, and what we find there is a curious blend of delusion, compulsion and an overwriting of basic human drives that does, at times, leave room for something like brief doubt. In ‘Day of Ascension’ a young cult magus is cut off from the psychic presence of the Hive-Mind and, examining her own motivations, doubts for a moment. In ‘Cult of the Spiral Dawn’ a guardsman enchanted by a female Magus is let slip from her influence once he becomes useless, and before he dies suffers a nightmarish dark night of the soul as his certainties fall away. And there are always distaff cult associates on the side of revolution; people working and fighting alongside the membership who share similar goals, or people part of the same social network, but not fully suborned.

In making the ‘Other’ a parallel, insidious society, that runs directly alongside the main human one, the Cults bring the problem of motivation into stark contrast. The Cult is a Cult; it has a religious aim, of union with the perfect Star Gods, and a redemptive ideology. It also feels good to be a member. To be part of a giant family and to be working towards a great purpose. Cult members tend to function better than normal members of society.

What kind of twisted perversity would be needed in a human mind to actively turn against a society in which all the most fundamental drives are met and the most fundamental values and needs answered? More simply; how can we possibly think outside or against our deepest inherent values? These values are not simply ideas we choose and can swap; they form the basic axioms upon which all other thought is built, with which our moral desires are interwoven, and they are the drives which make us live, learn, suffer and grow. The very engines which impel us to action and which make up the matrix of our moral and emotional world. If something can subvert that, it is like a killer code against which Humanity has no meaningful defence.

Parasyte

Parasyte by Hitoshi Iwwaki exists in a variety of forms, from the original Manga to a live-action Netflix adaptation; ‘Parasyte: The Grey’. I am talking about the anime; ‘Parasyte: The Maxim’ which is the only version I have seen.

Our hero Shinichi Izumi is a normal Japanese Schoolboy.

One night curious spores drift down from space. One encounters our protagonist and rapidly consumes and replicates his flesh, but due to a highly unlikely series of events, (he had his own arm in some kind of cord for reasons), it only manages to infect one hand and lower arm.

The Parasyte is an adaptive and infectious distributed cellular intelligence, a lot like the 'Thing'. Every cell is apparently a trachtomrphic muscle and a neuron and it can do a bunch of things human flesh cannot. Its base instinct was first to reach, then absorb and replicate the brain and head, using these to control the body, which would remain human, yet under the control of the Parasyte. But the period of peak-adaptation for the creatures life-cycle is now over and it is stuck as the hand of a teenage boy. It draws its life from his body, from his blood supply and cannot survive without him. The creature cannot transform to adapt to a new host. If the boy dies, it dies.

Every, (or nearly every), other Parasyte that fell succeeded in its main drive and worked its way to a human brain, devouring, remaking and simulating it to control the body, and is now walking around as a simulated human being.

The Parasytes seem to be hard-coded to hunt and consume the living flesh of the species they imitate. They are very highly intelligent, capable of learning highly complex human information quickly enough that they can broadly fake being human within a day or so. (A neat aspect is that they do seem to have a natural variation in intelligence and personality, some Parasytes are highly intelligent near-artists of simulation with a deep intellectual interest in everything human. Others are pretty dumb and just about smart enough to walk about.)

Their intelligence is utterly nonhuman. Their first instinct is ‘I want to eat the brain’. After that their instinct is to hide themselves and secretly feed on the target species. (Humans). Initially, Parasytes have no sense-of-species. They are not inherently social organisms. They have no shared culture. They are not necessarily on the same ‘side’, in fact each could be considered a ‘side’ of its own. Their only collective actions are driven by pure advantage.

We never find out where the Parasytes come from, if they have a purpose or are simple a natural phenomena. We also never learn if simulating an intelligent self-aware species is normal for them. Judging by how things go, it may not be, as simulating humanity brings a towering stack of complexities.

Shinichi calls his Parasyte ‘Migi’ which I think means ‘Right’ for his right hand. Having a name is also not something Parasytes seem to inherently think about. Now the teenage protagonist and Migi are stuck together, both vulnerable to the other, both also learning from each other, in the middle of an alien predation invasion and the secret war being fought against it.

Neutral

If the ‘Scramblers’ from Blindsight are a natural disaster, the ‘Thing’ from things has a near religious disgust for humanity, and the Genestealer Cults are basically a predation/farming technique dedicated to eating humanity, ‘Migi’ and some other Parasytes, are seen surprisingly neutrally by the story. There are almost no ‘Evil’ things in Parasyte. True, some aliens are eating humans, but they need to survive and it’s their basic instinct to do so. ‘Migi’ is an alarmingly rational, even reasonable character who has no hatred or resentment for Shinichi, or humanity, but simply wants to survive, (to the extent of threatening to blind and cripple Shinichi if he goes to the authorities.

The action is not quite anti-heroic, but deeply human. At times various characters bring up the idea of acting the hero, either in the cause of humanity, or some other noble aim. The story doesn’t exactly shit on heroics, but just asks calmly; “Ok, if its really you, and you are really going to die, or your family is going to be hurt, or you are going straight to a dissection lab, how much of a hero are you really willing to be?”

Few people are evil, but most are reasonably self-interested.

The Horror of Understanding Each Other

If Watts and Genestealers breed horror from the failure to comprehend the Other, ‘Parasyte’ has a more subtle nightmare; what if you could actually see each others point of view, but couldn’t change anything?

Because Shinichi and Migi spend so much time with each other, because they learn constantly from each other and especially because they are opposed by everyone, (the government would dissect Shinichi to get to Migi and the other Parasytes see Migi as a massive security risk), they end up becoming more like each other. Confronted with the deception, self-interest and ruthlessness of the Government, and humanities utter ruthlessness to ensure its own survival, Shinichi begins to take a much more distant view of humanity. He doesn’t want people to be eaten or killed, but slowly stops defending his desires in morally absolute terms and has to admit that he takes that view purely because he is human.

Migi never changes their base ‘programming’ but they don’t need to eat people, (they draw all their sustenance from Shinichi’s blood), but they do need to protect Shinichi. Since everything they learn about humanity they get first hand from Shinichi, this is a crash course in an alien thingy adapting to the physical, social and moral needs of a teenage boy.

Migi initially has no sense of species-solidarity, being as willing to kill other Parasytes to survive as they are willing to kill Migi to remove the threat they pose. But over time, with relentless exposure to human culture, human moral arguments, human philosophy and in the middle of an inter-species war, Migi does eventually develop something like a wider species sense of self, perhaps not as intuitive or immediate as the human preference for humans, but more a top-down, perhaps intellectualised discomfort in the destruction of their own kind. Having developed this moral sense, they are intelligent enough to reverse the idea and sense how horrible it is for humans to be hunted, or to see other humans hunted. This creates a deep philosophical and moral problem for Migi.

We can imagine, the Lion being gifted intelligence enough to empathise with the Lamb.

Other Parasytes, the more intelligent, subtle and more deeply involved in human culture, undergo parallel experiences. Only one other is in a similar situation to Migi, attached to a human after failing to eat them. The others have no ‘human half’ on which they are dependant and so are not forced to learn in the same way or at the same speed, but handfuls do seem to stop eating people, (they are strongly instincted to eat us but are not utterly obligate homovores). An intelligent female Parasyte keeps her hosts baby child as ‘an experiment’ and ends up developing quasi-maternal instincts for it. On the other side, the government discovers a nest of Parasytes working for a political candidate. After trapping them and uncovering the conspiracy, they shoot the candidate, to discover he is human. He wasn’t fooled, bribed, tricked or threatened, he knew he was working with aliens. He thought it was good that humanity finally had a predator, that the Parasytes were a gift from nature to restore balance and harmony to the world.

What starts as an alien invasion story, and is always something of a horror story, ends up developing into a kind of moral tragedy. Parasytes are exterminated, some adapt and go into hiding as Parasyte-vegans, some are so driven by instinct and hatred for humanity that they become wilderness-dwelling wendigo monsters. Ultimately Migi goes into a form of permanent philosophical hibernation, partly escaping from the moral anguish of their situation, partly seeking an answer. Shinichi is deeply lonely without his friend.

The Chimera Ant Arc

Hunter X Hunter by Yoshihiro Togashi is a Shonen magical-powers-fighting adventure Manga. Half way through its run Togashi comes up with the idea for ‘Chimera Ants’ and writes an arc for them so long that it makes up half the Anime. Hunter x Hunter is nearly ‘Chimera Ants; the Series (starring some Hunters)’.

‘Chimera Ants’ evolve through consumption, qualities, forms and memories from what they eat. The ‘Chimera Ant Arc’ begins when, somewhere, a Chimera Ant nest eats a human being and produces an Ant Queen with a humanoid form and human-level intelligence. She begins to build an ant nation by eating humans and producing generations of humanoid ants.

Hunter X Hunter has a carefully worked out magical powers system called ‘Nen based on something like ‘aura’ or ‘chi’, and which most of its main characters use. Pretty soon the Chimera Ants discover this and begin eating Nen users, producing magical Man-Ants. The Queen begins to breed an ‘Ant King’ who is intended to be the super-powerful leader for the Chimera Ants, and who is made from all the Nen users the ants can find, to create a Super Magical Man Ant.

The visuals and basic dramatic tools for the Chimera Ant Arc are cartoony and very anime (the Chimera Ants emerge from their cocoons in cool costumes), but the way it treats questions of selfhood, identity and responsibility are probably the most subtle and morally complex of all the fictions in this essay.

The Chimera Ants absorb human memories along with human shapes and abilities. They also get a bunch of semi-random animal qualities, all depending on what the Queen was eating when she gave birth to them. So any individual Chimera Ant might be a pure Ant-Minded being, just with a humanoid form and some functional intelligence, an 80% accurate recreation of a human personality, but now with an ant body and ant instincts, a wild combination of animal and human instincts, or anything in-between. Some Chimera ants remember almost nothing of any of their human parts, while some are such singular excretions of particular souls that they feel almost like reincarnations.

Many of the 'Ants' are tortured by their part-human instincts and part-human memories.

As one Chimera Ant says to another; "There's some kind of look in the eyes, I can't explain it, but I know I when I see it and I think 'yeah this one remembers their past life".

Though individually powerful, the ants lose the potency of their unity and singularity of purpose as digested qualities like price, ambition and personal desire start infiltrating their minds. The innovation of ‘Names’, (“What is a name?” asks the Chimera Ant Queen), personalities, independent drives and desires, forms a deep and inexorable conflict between these two forms of consciousness; the primal ant will to power and the human social and moral complexity.

Memory, Reincarnation and Koala

Part of the reason the initial Ant Colony is successful is because it happens inside a micro-nation called the ‘New Green Republic’, a deliberately low-tech state where people live according to a near medieval level of material technology and where everything above that level is banned. Many of the humans the ants eat initially are basically hippie peasants, which has an effect on the next ant generation.

We later discover the NGR is a front. Unbeknownst to most of its residents, the place is run by, and for, a ruthless drug cartel who use the NGR as a base to pedal drugs to the rest of the world. The initial armed conflict of the Ants is with this nest of ruthless gangsters, who they then eat, and these personalities in turn affect the nature of future Ant generations. The gangster memories synergise well in some ways with the Ants ruthlessness and will to power, but the same memories carry deep, primal loyalties and bonds, and a violent resentment that has nothing to do with Ant psychology. In their own ways, both the peaceful minds and memories of the NGR peasants and the ruthless memories of the Cartel gangsters, are toxins, poisons in the clear minds of the Ants they become. Some Ants are friends, or enemies, because of the human memories that formed them. Others are brave, craven or subtle, depending on who they absorbed. The only Ants that don’t seem to have these are the Queen, the King and the three Royal Guards, who were either very well-stirred before creation, or their ant-instincts were so powerful they obliterated any other form of selfhood.

There are many sub-stories of ants and memory, but the most strangely affecting is told through the story of this business-suited Pink Koala;

The Koala carries the memories of a Hit-Man, a ruthless amoral gangster.

"Before all this, my job was to snuff people. I'd get my orders and pull the trigger. The rest of the time I'd yell a lot. It was a job anybody could do. Even when I was reborn, it was the same thing. A stupid cycle. I wanted to let her out of it."

"Before this, I didn't believe in the soul. We're no better than fleas and flies. Life and death, that's all there is. The ego is a glitch, a side effect of a complex brain. You die and it's over. Dust to dust. Get scattered to the wind."

As a Chimera Ant, the Koala is still a seemingly ruthless killer. But the very act of dying, being consumed, and his memories regurgitated in a new form, acts as a bizarre catalyst for spiritual growth.

"Hopeless. "She was a redhead, just like you. And I gunned her down."

The differing cultural perspective is fascinating. On the Western side, the Scramblers in Blindsight were a blank-faced catastrophe, the ‘Thing’ from ‘Things’ was an enemy by nature and culture. The Genestealer Cults are a perversion of religion towards a devouring false god. Then on the Japanese side, the Parasytes are opponents, but also neutral predators, no more ‘evil’ than a Tiger, and their existence has a degree of tragedy, due to the human aspects they absorb. (Perhaps there are elements of this with the Genestealer Cults). Finally, with the Chimera Ants, they are inimical to human flourishing, at least initially, and are obligate predators, but slowly many evolve into ‘people’, ghosts or reincarnations of humanity, or aspects or shards of human nature thrown into sharp relief, each occurring in a different way.

The translation of the ‘Other’ from Absolute, to Threat, to Tragedy to Post-Humanity is fascinating to think about. If part of the subtext for any story of infiltrating nonhuman sentience is; “can inherent ‘Others’ mutually reconcile themselves”, then the wild whacky cartoony Chimera Ant arc is probably the deepest and most ‘Humanistic’ of all these fictions.

Being eaten by a magical super-ant and recombined into something new perhaps isn’t the platonic ideal of reincarnation but if you wake up with your old memories in a new body, it sure would feel like it. Dying to violence and being reborn as the incarnation of that violence, is a strange one.

Meruem and Komugi

The story goes through various, (lengthy) evolutions, with the series heroes trying to prevent the birth of the Ant King, failing, and then battling him again after he takes over a North Korea-style dictatorship.

(A fascinating aspect of battling the ants is that, if the human side lose people, the Ants have the ability to essentially ‘digest’ them, and produce Ants with combinations of their powers, memories or personalities. Meaning if you lose a friend to the Ants, you may be facing an ‘Antified’ version of them later. Depending on how much, or what kinds of memories they have, they may be an ally, a terrifying enemy, or just very confused.)

The ‘Ant King’ (his given name is ‘Meruem’, but he initially has no idea that he has a name, or any desire for one) is hyper-powerful, utterly amoral by human standards and dedicated to the Ants will-to-power and to taking over the world in a classic supervillain style.

He is also only a few days old. Though he has a well-blended cache of inherited knowledge and learns at an accelerated rate, he has no actual experience of human society or human life. After taking over pseudo North-Korea he compulsively learns everything he can, taking on and beating every human expert in every human field, and game. Until he meets the nations best Shogi player, a blind teenage girl who sustains her family by being the world champion in an obscure and complex board game. This is someone he cannot beat. No matter how hard he tries or how much he learns, he cannot win a fair game of Shogi against this girl, and she is learning from him as fast as he learns from her, meaning he may never beat her. There is something he cannot do. He slowly becomes obsessed with this game and this girl, keeping her around and playing her every day, absorbed utterly in a challenge he cannot defeat.

Because he can’t defeat this snotty blind teenager, he ends up having something like a human relationship with her. His mind becomes open to a relationship with another being that is not just a vector of imposing power or destroying a threat. He begins to analyse his own actions from an alien perspective; his compulsive murder of a child to see what would happen – that child might have grown up to be a great Shogi player. If one child might have become a great Shogi player, could there be other things that other humans could do or be that he simply doesn’t understand yet? Who actually is he? This girl has a name. His subordinate Ants have names. (They gave them to each other). Humans have names. Does he have a name? He is the King, which is all that he is, but is the King also a person like other people?

This slow ‘awakening’ or complexifying of the King worries and disturbs his closest guards. Is he starting to question the whole world-takeover thing and treating humans as livestock?

Meruem and Neotaro

The ‘Ant King’ is a being so insanely powerful that only Humanities strongest Nen-User even has a chance of fighting him so that’s who they call, organising an ant-attack to draw out the King to a location where he and Isaac Netero, the Chief of the Hunter Association, and hyperpowered shifty-Bhudda-type will fight Ant King Meruem for the future of humanity.

During this battle, the heart of the tale beats backwards. Meruem Ant-King is on a rising moral arc, gradually discovering and interrogating more of his human half, he is growing. He consistently offers to negotiate, to ‘settle this with words’.

“I have learned what power is for. To protect the weak who deserve to live. Never to oppress the defeated. I will not fight you.”

Netero, the former Granpa-figure, has been getting into fighting shape by massacring Chimera Ants. The bastion of a threatened and overpowered humanity, he has no room for negotiation or compromise. He uses knowledge of the Kings given name, taken from the dying Ant Queen, to force a conflict. In battle he exerts all his energy on destruction. He refuses all offers of compromise and ultimately, unable to win ‘fairly’, he pierces his own heart and activates the micro-Nuke he had hidden in his chest.

“Meruem, King of the Ants... You really don't have any idea, do you...? You know nothing of the bottomless malice within the human heart... I see you in hell... If there is one...”

Even this isn’t quite enough to Kill Merum, though the radiation from this dirty bomb does ultimately infiltrate his regenerating flesh, causing him to die of cancer in the arms of Komugi.

Its beyond curious that we return again, as we did with the Theseus in ‘Blindsight’ to Humanity blowing itself the fuck up with atomic weapons to kill the aliens. Humanity represented as something, perhaps individually weak, but dark and ferocious enough, and with a relentless will to live, that makes it more than equal to the threatening Other

Have We Learned Anything?

The Isolated Mind

Can one kind of intelligence encounter another without horror? All of the situations described above are horrific, though few are only that.

Is it a necessity that to truly encounter the Other within oneself, they must be opposed to your welfare

If one encounters an other, within oneself, and they are not opposed, but neutral, do they inevitably become symbiotic? Without opposition, is union of some sort inevitable?

Where are the stories about an invasive other that is not opposed, not plotting against you, or trying to subvert you, but is fine with living peacefully alongside you, as a non-human part of you? In Parasyte Shinichi’s relationship with Migi, his alien hand, is like this. They have a transactional and oppositional relationship based on mutual survival, with some threats, but over time they become familiar with each other and, though remaining in many ways fundamentally alien in outlook to each other, form some kind of friend-like bond

They even start picking up on each others morality, seemingly entirely by closeness, exposure to each other and shared threat. Migi originally has no race or species consciousness, he doesn’t care if other members of his species die, its literally fine as they are not him. Ultimately he seems to grow into or absorb some kind of group-moral-awareness, which makes his existence more and more difficult as his survival is opposed to others of his kind. Conversely, the protagonist becomes partially alienated from humanity, seeing them somewhat from the outside, not necessarily instinctively siding with humans in all situations and regarding the lives of human and alien with a degree of moral equivalence.

"These humans are definitely foolish creatures. Think as hard as those weak brains of yours can manage. Do you ever listen to the cries of mercy coming from the pigs and cows you slaughter?"

~ Meruem to Ming Jok-ik's dancers when they begged for mercy.

East vs West

Or at least, Japan vs the Anglosphere.

A lot of Japanese popular culture has a moral tone which seems lightly intuitively ‘off-kilter’ to me. At times this shows itself through a cynicism so deep, yet so petty it seems like childish abandon. But it does have another side and the stories of the ‘Parasytes’ and the Chimera Ants allow a moral neutrality, (in comparison to Watts and 40k), that actually opens access to a more complex and interesting field of moral drama.

Anthrocentric Values – Biochemical Morality

The beliefs humanity doesn’t know it has. Beliefs so core they are invisible, until contrasted with another mind within itself. Its hard for us to know what these might be until we imagine ourselves in contact with a deep-Other; something that can communicate with us, but which is so different that we have real trouble explaining ourselves.

Aye your feelings and intuitions are just biochemistry, but that is not much of an answer, (and if you are talking to a human then so is the question – equally an aspect of biochemistry).

The viewpoint prompted by many of these stories is that, through seeing humanity through the eyes of the ‘Other’, our own core values are exposed as deeply biological, programmed, and when the product of culture, are nearly as deeply rooted and immune to reason.

Beyond that, we get a feeling for the .. not just the partiality, but the near-irrelevance of any particular set of values – they feel abstract, cold, like distant laws curiously drawn, like a necessity; of course you must have values, but no more than you must have bones or a tongue.

This shows up distinctly in the Alien films where the humans have one set of messy directly intuited values, the Androids have a strong particular set of directly-coded values, sometimes with secret values hidden from others, and the Xenomorphs have their own purely instinctive survival drive

But, adrift in the blackness of space, all of these ultimately seem much of a muchness, one necessarily no better than the other.

By what right do we live?

What is the vision of humanity that emerges from the Thing-verse

Lonely. Horrifically dangerous. Callous and self-absorbed, with not much of a moral claim on this world, for it was taken and maintained by force.

Without a moral argument for its own existence.

One shadow impulse behind all these fictions might be a version of humanity that is trying to shape a moral argument for its own existence that might work for a non-human mind. Job arguing before God, but now arguing before the imagined Other.

Can you explain yourself to a Chimera Ant?

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Hugh Cooks Chronicle of an Age of Darkness; Books one to Five

It was an age undreamed of…

Between 1987 and 1992, Hugh Cook released a ten volume Science-Fantasy simultaneous-chronology epic series which absolutely did not sell well, at least after the third book. Originally intended to be a 20-book series, the first series of three, It was a glorious and doomed project, ultimately he only completed ten, in six years. He was writing them only a little slower than I can read them, but I have read the first five; 'The Wizards and the Warriors', 'The Wordsmiths and the Warguild', 'The Women and the Warguilds', 'The Walrus and the Warwolf', and 'The Wicked and the Witless'. Yes every single one of this series was titled in the same way. The man knew how to vibe.

This is my review of the Chronicle of the Age of Darkness, (Part One). It’s pretty great! Might be a niche taste.

The Chronicle, (books 1 to 5) is set across the fantastic A4-shaped, America-sized continent of Argan and its surrounding seas and isles. Its northern reaches feel Canadian, its middle bit has Mediterranean grain nations, south of them is a Rice Empire and south of them is Drangsturm: the Castle of Controlling Power, a huge flame trench dug into the isthmus with a castle full of wizards at each end. South of that is the swarmlands, an area controlled by a possibly-hive-mind utterly incomprehensible and deeply inimical to humanity, insect species ruled by the semi-mythical ‘Skull of the Deep South’.

Book One - The Wizards and the Warriors

This book holds many wonders. Since it is our introduction to Argan and the entire world, it’s about everything, - but the main through-line is that it’s about love, the plot driven by the friendship between two warriors (who read like the villains of a previous series of books we never got to see), and the agony of their moral development. That's interesting because Book 5, Walrus and War-Wolf, is also driven by love and by the slow moral development of a teenage piece of shit and also has a theme of unrecognised friendship between two dangerous badasses. Book Two is about a boy in love growing up and Book Five is about a boy not growing up.

Love, friendship, growth and the meaning of a life.

But first! Heenmor, a Wizard of Argan has gone rogue and stolen a wonder-weapon ‘Death Stone’! The Confederation of Wizards sends one of their finest; Phyphor (old, powerful, smart), one of their sanest; Miphon (low power, kind, reasonable) and Garash (powerful, an utter dick).

The three chase Heenmor and run into the two Rovac Warriors; Elkor Alish, (Napoleon-level strategist) and Morgan Hearst (arguable and actual Dragon-slayer). The Rovac Warriors hold an age-old hatred for Wizards, but the Death Stone threatens the whole world. To get it back these enemies will have to team up to stop Heenmor and return the stone. Can they do it? No. Or at least, mainly no, but eventually yes, but by then the end of the world may be in the offing regardless.

One axis of this sprawling story is the relationship between Elkor Ailish and Hearst; both could be villains of a previous unseen tale. Coming down from the cold north where they made terrible war, they are best friends, or at least Morgan Hearst thinks they are, after all, he saved Elkor Alish from the bewitchment of a mysterious sorceress who kept him captive in her frozen city.

In fact, Elkor Ailish, who had intended to infiltrate the frozen city and open it from the inside, was actually in love with the Sorceress, though he realised this too late, just after he had already opened its doors and let in the army outside. He was still processing his terrible mistake when Morgan Hearst turned up with the severed head of his one true love and a beaming smile. Now Elkor Ailish hates himself, and hates Morgan Hearst. Morgan Hearst has no idea about any of this, he just wants his friend to like him again.

The Cynicism and the Sincerity

Cook writes his world with great cynicism and seemingly anarchic indifference but he writes the human heart with great sincerity.

This is a key difference to Vance, in some ways a close equivalent of Cook, in invention and prose-joy. Vance write worlds and hearts with ironic distance, which makes him cold to read too-long-a-while. Cook is an eternal anglo; the core emotions are seen side-on and held tacitly, rather than occupying the central field and main narrative drive of the scene, chapter or story. But still they rule. All deeds in this cold world are leaves and vines of dreams of yearning hearts.

It’s no wonder normal people didn't really like these books because that is not how popular art is meant to be made. It might be how literature is done, or comedy and satire, but if you want a big audience for an heroic tale then the emotions of the story-drive are the emotions of the scene, or at least only one or two layers deep. To be clear; I really like Cook but he is an odd one and I am not surprised he didn't really strike a chord with others.

The Worldbuilding and the Wainscoating

The bones of Cooks Dark World are buried deep in Vance, Dungeons and Dragons, and perhaps Wolfes Book of the New Sun. A skin of magic over the skeleton of a post-post-post apocalyptic world, with extra species, strange interdimensional tech and apparent magic being degraded forms of super-science.

There are tunnels and forgotten black site research dungeons everywhere. The languages and ethnogroups have been turned over a bunch of times. Fragments of the magical speech are the old scientific speech. ‘Rovac’ sounds like a military term and later on the ‘command language’ of the northern Colloson Empire is called ‘Ordur’. Ethno-groups have curious turns of phrase to show they have migrated and changed a lot within the last 5,000 years. (If I don’t make a comment on Cooks brief Ethnographic and Linguistic excursions before the end, let me know). In book five Drake just straight up finds an abandoned space ship.

Not just the background of the world, but the precision of the power distributions; what powers various people have, their qualities and how these interrelate in the scene of immediate action - all of these REEK of Dungeons and Dragons and of either a deliberate importing of its core concepts or a second hand assumption of them through some other medium.

Some cases in point relating to extra-natural powers;

Wizard Powers vs Warriors; the first Wizards we meet, the Wizards of Arl, are potentially incredibly destructive and can hurl fireballs about, but in-effect, over the long term, not that great, and very vulnerable. They have to store up capacity over time, can burn it all quickly, and once this is done they go back to being just an old man - so their power as direct damage dealers is somewhat crappy. In military situations they blow their load, kill a bunch of guys and then are useless. They can also be stabbed in the back, poisoned, tricked and imprisoned etc, relatively easily. Their greatest power is the threat of their destructive potential, not its use. Like a politician, their power lies in what they might do.

The 'Death Stone' – {“Whoever holds the Death Stone could rule the world” says anyone who gets their hands on it}, - has hard limitations on the conditions of use, recharge, range, etc, that actually strongly limit it in many real life circumstances. It would actually be very hard to take over the world with this stone, its powers are incredibly dangerous but, like the wizards, highly conditional and limited.

Godlike spirits exist and can do miracle-like things, but they are highly focused to particular locations and are difficult to manage (they also seem pretty fucked up).

In terms of natural arrangements;

The personal qualities of the main cast balance out so neatly you can nearly feel the stats whirring behind them.

The economies, agricultural bases, populations, cultures, power systems, trade routes etc, are all carefully organised and invented, not improvised - everything fits together. The great salt road exists because pirates decimate nearby shipping, because there are handy pirate islands here and here, so... There are big population centres growing grain along the Nile-like velvet river. South of that is a coastal Rice Empire, north are more pastoral lands, sheep farmers, then steppe, then tundra.

While the objects of the world-plan can be whimsical, the logic of their working-out is not. Mountains may walk but if they do, agriculture will be destroyed.

All of this crafts the world towards a very un-naturalistic sense of dramatic functionality. Power systems and methods interrelate, but everyone is vulnerable somewhere and has reason to be afraid. Plans fail and fools betray, chaos ensues Wizards guard their backs. This schema would function both as an RPG, (no wonder China Mieville did an intro for 'Walrus and War-Wolf'), but also serves as a means of generating and sustaining story for everything has a knock-on effect somewhere, or some-when else; characters are consistently dealing with the downstream effects of others actions and creating more themselves.

The Pointillism and the Pretension

In Cooks modernist or seemingly absurdist plotting, vital and dramatic moments are always swinging out of left field, or happening in the wings, or we are being informed of them as happenstance. in a way this absurdism is more true to life.

(His Grand Battle scene is more like an actual Grand Battle than most I have read in fantasy; a scene of careful and relentless planning and politicking and persuasion and perception, agonising organisation, then a grand contest of mistakes and limitations, of who can make the fewest mistakes and who can exploit the others mistakes first and best.)

More true to life in some ways, but there is a reason popular authors do not write that way - where the core emotional strand of the story is like a thread running through the background, foreground, off-screen, subtext or overtext of each individual scene, where the question of 'what exactly is the core of this story about' is very highly up in the air or at least not completely obvious for large parts of the book.

I can only really say 'The Wizards and the Warriors' is about love and moral growth because I have read 'The Walrus and the Warwolf', and by the end of the story, that is about love and moral growth. If I read more and different books in this series then I might suddenly realise that 'Wizards and Warriors' was about something completely different.

Cook is a highly intelligent planner, but still I don't read this harum-scarum bouncing around of characters, scenes and points of view, the time-skips and crime-skips, the leisurely fishing scenes with demi-relevant monster sightings, as pure planning. Its.. just his vibe. It just seems to be how he thinks and how he is happy addressing and imagining things; like a big bird or mad mosquito, racing around the 'plot' and diving at it from this direction and that before racing away to come at it again from another, stranger point of view.

The Intelligence and the Interlacement

Ahead of its time... or BEYOND IT! A key element of the Chronicle (One to Five), is that it is a simultaneous and interlaced story. All of the narratives take place across roughly the same ten years. Tough none of the chronologies start or end in exactly the same place, the protagonists consistently interact in the same events, often from different sides and different perspectives, showing up in each other relations.

So, in the dying years of the Age of Darkness, before Drangsturm falls and the Swarms invade, the City-States of Selzirk and Andromarphos go to war over the ownership of the mysterious ‘Death Stone;

In Book One we see events first from the perspective of Morgan Hearst, Rovac Warrior recruited as the general of Selzirks forces, his feud with his former best friend Elkor Ailish, the usurper of Andromarphos now exploded into a war between states

In Book Two the protagonist Togura, having survived life in a mongol-esque horse clan, is recruited as cavalry onto the side of Androlmarphos, but falls sick and spends the whole time nearly dying on a hospital ship, only being ‘rescued’ by a character from Book Three and running into Drak Deldragon Douhey, protagonist of Book Four.

In Book Three we hear about the battle distantly, but run into Morgan Hearst much later, after the events of Book One.

In Book Four, the protagonist Drake interacts substantially with the ‘Wizards and Warriors’and makes an enemy of Sean Sarazin, protagonist of Book Five in Selzir. He is then is sent to Andromarphos and is imprisoned there before the battle, escapes during it and meets up with Togura from Book Two.

In Book Five, the protagonist Sean Sarazin is the son of Farafella, Kingmaker of Selzirk, who recruits Morgan Hearst as its general. Sean makes an enemy of Drake (from book Four), in Selzirk, and annoys Morgan Hearst during the final battle with irritating advice about cavalry formations. (Which we remember from Book One).

Has anyone done or imagined anything like this on such a scale?

Other reviewers have mentioned; Cook just missed the internet. If his stuff had been coming out a decade later it would have had a House-of-Leaves style fandom dedicated to tracking and tracing all the character interactions across this scene and that, from this timeline to that. (The D&D-esque powers and tools add to and utilise this - the bottles and death stones and magic swords being like bookmarks or hyperlinks that show one plot bounding into another.)

The Grand Plan surely is the most obvious thing you are selling here and the most notable achievement, but it isn't really sold. People are dumb and don't understand what to look for unless you very explicitly say LOOK FOR THIS HERE. I dream of a re-issue of the series with massive notes, maps, footnotes, indexes, timelines etc. This ridiculous complexity is part of the art and should be framed.

(The covers for the re-named and re-arranged American versions have almost nothing to do with the actual text, at least in many cases, but they are much more fun images!)

Book Two - The Wordsmiths and the Warguild

"'History is what we understand. The rest is a waking nightmare. History is the explanation of who holds the knife. Without this explanation, all we understand is the pain.'"

Cook said they made him write Book Two as the original Book Two, now Book Three, ‘The Women and the Warlords’ was about a Woman and for a variety of reasons might not appeal to the standard fantasy reader. (We will look into this later). So now Book Two is an ‘extra’ book, not part of the original plan, but woven into it.

Some call this a parody or a subversion of a classic hero story. It doesn’t seem so to me. Though it is quite a bit more ridiculous than Book One, Cook is always somewhat ridiculous, at least on the surface.

Our story is about a lone male adolescent hero on a quest. This makes it one of a trio with Book Four Walrus and Warwolf, about Drake Deldragon Douhey, and Book Five, Wicked and Witless, about Sean Sarazin.

Who then is Togura Poulaan? Son of Baron Chan Poulaan, first of the Warguild of Sung?

He is an actual, normal, well-meaning early-teenage boy with an IQ of 100 who ends up on an adventure and acts pretty much as an actual teenage boy would act. The difference in character between Togura and the she sheer MAX PROTAGONIST energy of people like Drake Dedragon Douhay or the Wizards and Warriors of 'Wizard and Warriors', being a sometimes remarked-on part of the books theme. What if a protagnist has enough heroic luck to throw him into wild and crazy situations, but is just a normal boy?

Like ‘Wizards & Warriors’, 'Wordsmiths and Warguild’ has a piece of ancient hypertechnology at its centre’ the Odex, a floating mirror into which anything can be flung. Myth and legend say the Odex is a physical encyclopaedia of a forgotten world, a placeless, timeless place filled with literally everything, (or at least everything that will fit the mirrors girth), and that, in theory, anything placed within can be summoned forth, whole and timeless, from the point it was sent in. The key to do this is the even-more mythical Index, an artefact hidden somewhere in the world, but long lost to the Wordsmiths who currently control the Odex. In fact the main thing the Wordsmiths do is charge people money to use the Odex as a dumping ground for rubbish, dead bodies, old cheese etc. They also regularly shout random words at the Odex as it seems to respond to sound, but apart from some extremely random objects, all they have gotten so far are curious flying probability-monsters who pop up but who can usually be banished by shouting questions at them.

Due to various complex inciting incidents, the Lady Day Suet, Toguras one-true-love, is hurled into the Odex and the only thing that can get her out is the Index. The Wordsmiths have a few leads on possible locations; all of them insanely dangerous to reach. Our story follows Togura as he is bounced about Argan, often being an idiot, still managing to survive and grow up.

The Ode and the Onomatopea

Because it’s mainly about a normal guy dealing with a chaotic world, the book is more of a petri-dish for extremely Cook-ish qualities. If you liked them in other books you will like them here; worldbuilding, (or revealing), through discursion and wild digression, a cynical, perhaps more tragic, worldview with an empathic heart, deep and amusing interlacements which make the chronicle.. well a chronicle; one big story, and lovely, odd, goblin-mode onomatopoeic prose. This is most beautiful when Cook is most inspired and Cook is most inspired by nature, sex and dreams.

Trying to escape from a nightmarish ruined city and the Post-Apocalyptic cult that rules it, Togura is lost in a colourful swamp, and sleeps;

“Togura slept, dreaming of Day Suet asleep in a bed of turquoise, jacinth and ligure. She woke, a sultry melon-light glimmering in her eyes. Giff-gaff said an insect, eating her nose. He tested her jymolds. She was hot. He was swollen. A sheep pushed him to one side. He plucked mint and ate it, gnawing the sheep. He watched his mother, now perissodactyl, walk across water lilies. I raped her, said Cromarty. Not so, said Togura; you’re just saying that because this is a dream. He closed with Cromarty. His swelling spat. Hot. As birdsong sang.

Togura woke and heard the birdsong. There was something wrong with it. True birdsong should not be like that. He was hearing people talking. They were hunting him. Hunting me, said Togura. His words took flight, becoming shovels of goldleaf; with relief, he realised that he was still dreaming. Sleep on, said Togura to Togura. He did, but his dream soon became a nightmare.”

Later, he nearly dies trying to cross a mountain range whole on crutches;

"'Zaan', said the sun.

The ice-white light ran through his blood in splinters.

It was fading.

'Clouds,' he said.

A frog answered him. He spoke. It answered again. His teeth hurt. Then came the rain, drenching away the last of the sunlight. The skiring wind fladdered and scooped, outpacing his eyesight; it came in rents and buffets, sending the shimmy-shimmy leaves stappering and plattering from down to around. Some dead at his feet. He kicked them from ventral to dorsal.

'Tog, he said.

Asking for someone.

He couldn't remember who.

His legs went balder-shalder-tok through the rain perhaps autumn or winter. His third leg was a gnarled and unyielding strake padded with moss and wort where it jammed home to his armpit. The music of a flute cut closer than a knife; hard, high, unyeilding, it lacerated his heart. He felt his pulse-beats bleeding through his body. The wind blew furnace-hot; he shivered, his teeth tok-tok chin-cha-chattering."

Togura is threatened by his evil half-brother, nearly married to an Ogreess, runs into the Colloson Empire as they besiege the ‘Wizards and Warriors’ of Book One, is lost in the wilderness multiple times, becomes a pseudo Mongol Horse-Archer, meets Drake Deldragon Douhey multiple times, fights an unutterable evil in the ruins of an ancient city, rides a sea-serpent and makes his way home.

The Wilderness and the Word-Hoard

Because in the Age of Darkness, State Power is breaking down, armies are marching and invading, mountains are moving and swarms of alien bug-things are advancing, everyone spends a fair amount of time either at sea, or yomping through the northern mountains. Often they are yomping to their doom as, being Pirates, Oracles, pseudo-Mongols or random teenage boys, they are not well prepared for wilderness exploration.

I'm not sure if I have a point here other than; there sure is a lot of wilderness travel in the Age of Darkness and Hugh Cook must have really liked Hiking. The travel, techniques, environments, wildlife, and in particular, the deep and well-painted sense-impressions of wilderness travel and survival all resound with the ring og truth and subtle perception. If he is just making this stuff up from books he is doing very well. I suspect northern Estar bears a lot of resemblance to New Zealand in its geography and environment. Though every area does have its own distinct feel. The Ravilish Lands in book two feel a LOT like the Cumbria of my youth.

Book Two is a pleasant dalliance. Unplanned from the start, it carries little conceptual weight of the world and bears up little of the interlacement. Because of this, it is a ramble, a wander through the garden of Cooks prose and invention, with a protagonist who, while he is less thrilling and competent than some, is still more likeable and sympathetic than many.

(Let me say again, the book is ALMOST NOTHING like this incredibly cool and cheesy US cover!)

Book Three - The Women And The Warlords

Now we encounter perhaps the most intelligent protagonist of the Age of Darkness; Yen Olass, high-status slave of the Colloson Empire, is allowed her own room, but not a door.

She is a Seer, or prophetess, of a shamanic sisterhood. Perhaps the only form of direct female power allowed in the Colloson Empire, all other women being property, the occasional high status noblewoman, or ‘Raklosh’; a word for baby-withering witches which encompasses any form of ‘outer’ woman who falls from societal safety.

As our story starts, Yen Olass has already had her culture destroyed by the Colloson Empire, has suffered rape and genital mutilation, and through cunning and relentless scheming, has gotten into the ‘Sisterhood’, who have a somewhat protected status, and from there has schemed her way into the service of the foreign born Lord Algrace and her own room.

While the other heroes of the Age of Darkness quest to save the world, for True Love, or for their princely fate, Yen Olass desperately wants safety, a family and freedom.

The Mutilation and the Misogyny

This is less brutal than I expected it to be, but maybe I am just a cold and unmoving person.

Lots of terrible things have happened to Cooks male heroes so far, but only one, a young teenage boy, has had to worry about sexual assault. The story of Yen Olass is not entirely about the fear of rape and physical dispossession, but it’s the major, fuming dragonlike antagonist. Living in an extra-misogynist empire which views women as slaves, in a pseudo-early modern setting with no state power and general chaos everywhere, Yen Olass is working harder than a Questing Hero just to stay afloat and safe. Her Dragon is society and the greatest period of safety she gets is when she can be as far away from it as possible, surrounded by frog-men.

Yen Olass does achieve her 'Hero's Journey' by the end of the book, having quite literally regained her womanhood via a suspicious wishing machine, experienced a (reasonably) loving relationship in safety, at least for a while, having carried and birthed a daughter who seems happy and healthy, (though she may be alien psi-child), and ending up with some kind of husband, not the one she wants because she would prefer none, but he seems to actually like her and she has persuaded him to bathe. She also gets to absolutely brutally murder a would-be child rapist and outwit, (with a fair amount of luck), imprison and exploit a would-be child murderer.

The Story and the Slices of Time

A Hugh Cook character is either the protagonist and a callow youth, in which case they emerge fresh from the pupae, or they are an adult, and they walk onto the scene as if exiting another. This is an adult story, really a middle-aged story, and everyone in it feels like they begin the book after the end of a deep sequence of tales we don't get to see.

This has a good effect on character because absolutely everyone in a Hugh Cook story feels like a real, specific person with a distinct, strong personality and a complex set of motivations which spring from particular circumstances. When they turn up as a side character in a future book, or as a deuteragonist in a book after that, or a villain or sage in a book after that, the continuity and distinctness of their personality will still be present - clearly the same person, not frozen in time, but growing and changing with their circumstance.

This is good for character, and good for the world and the story-sequence as a whole. (As I read more it becomes clear that the main life of the series is in the world and the sequence, not any individual book). But it is not necessarily great for single individual books, as, just as in life, nothing ever ends. Yen Olass begins the book being dragged into the Dynastic dramas of the Colloson Empire and ends the book being dragged into the Dynastic dramas of the Colloson Empire. Of course now she is the mother of a prospective Empress, and possible alien miracle child, and possibly the wife of a freshly-scrubbed Pope of the Horse Cult, and she managed to magically grow her clitoris back, so definitely not exactly the same.

In a Hugh Cook story the only real and satisfying ending for a character is in death. So unless we follow someone all the way to their death, their story is not done, and does not feel done, and that can be a little frustrating.

The Coldness and the Care

There are lines in many long books or series where it seems like the author is talking to us directly or describing themselves. This quote stuck out to me;

"Though Yen Olass had never entirely lost the ability to play like a child, there was nothing childish about her appreciation of power, sex and the manipulation of one human being by another."

That describes the 'Chronicle of and Age of Darkness' pretty well. A D&D-esque, carefully made post-post-post collapse exquisite sandbox of a world, with an extremely cold and "realist" view of power dynamics, individual ambition, greed and desire, and international and ethnic relations.

Despite this, Cooks work is almost never cynical, though many of its characters are cynics within themselves. There are very few utterly evil people, not do his characters exist across the scales of 'fall' and redemption that we might see in more Manichean paracosm. Instead their souls and motivations act more like those in a 19C social novel, but one set in an age of catastrophe and violence, where heroic natures of both light and dark tones are needed to survive and to carve out brief moments; a year here, a year there, of safety and comparative freedom. If a character remains "on-screen" for a reasonable period of time, Cook will usually find something interesting about them, perhaps not a "sympathetic element" but a particular and distinct inflection of humanity that could make them, in some circumstances, the "villains" of a chapter, and in others, the "heroes" of another.

That said, in 'Women & Warlords' - the Emperors Sons are fucking evil and stupid, or evil and civilised.

I get why Cooks books didn't sell. It’s not just because the third book was a feminist epic about a woman avoiding rape, it’s because the complexity, tonality and morality of his stories is all slightly 'off', (or very 'off') from popular taste and from the way normal people like their stories told. You can tell a story about a wise prophetess, enslaved from her destroyed people, who is threatened with rape and child murder by the sons of a dark emperor, who is also carrying the child of that dark emperor, having teased from him before his death, a few moments of humanity, and who avenges herself violently on those whom wouldst destroy her and her sacred child, destined to be Empress! And those events do technically happen in this book, but Cook is morally sly, always asking us to view things askance from the (arguable) main moral thrust of what would, in other hands, be a melodrama, and he is historically cheeky, showing is what feels like a bunch of unpredictable catastrophes with characters desperately trying to survive and adapt - more like history feels as you are living it, than as it is presented in the legends afterwards.

But legends are what people want to read for fun.

I am not saying Cook is wrong to do this. I have a huge amount of sympathy for him. But I am saying his books didn't sell big numbers because of it. As many other reviewers have pointed out, much worse writers at the same period, with much less ability than Cook, sold much bigger numbers and are still talked of, while Cook is nearly forgotten.

I cannot tell what is right or wrong for an artist to do but only how things are.

(This cover is from one of the original non-US versions.

This scene does nearly happen in the book!

Though not with a dragon, but a giant insect-creature of the Swarms

{there are dragons in the other books though})

Book Four - The Walrus And The Warwolf

(There is no map in the Paizo version of Book Five. If there was ever a series which needed maps, and ideally, footnotes, end-notes, timelines etc etc, it’s this one. The original Corgi versions do have maps and it makes the read a LOT easier.)

The Audacity and the Amphetamines

This book did about three lines of speed in the toilets just before it got on a bus and cornered you in a back seat. Now it’s going to tell its tale. The bus trip will be long and The Walrus and the Werewolf is sitting right next to you and there is actually no-one else on the bus, including a driver. The bus is out of control!!!! This book is like speedy Gonzales is trying to give the Tasmanian devil a colonoscopy on a Ferris wheel and its being animated by chuck jones. It goes pretty hard is what I'm trying to say.

The most interesting thing about the Walrus and the Werewolf is trying to work out how morally serious it is, because it has very strong, but very tacit themes, of moral challenge and historical and moral development, but is also an utterly manic text which races along at the pace of a re-cut cartoon, or like a rubber ball bouncing around in a small room, and while it has a lot of morally consequential things happen, it often views them, at the time they are occurring, through a cynical, absurdist or simply an unnervingly morally neutral tone.

Added to this is the utter mania and primordial moral chaos of its protagonist. Is he a good man? Certainly not, but a bit? Not at the start at all. Is he an evil man? A bit, especially at the start, but not a lot and rarely with sadism. Is he any worse than any other 16 year old boy, or person of whatever age he is in each part of the book, in the crazed and chaotic world he is from? Honestly probably not.

Drake Deldragon Douhey is as much a trickster spirit as a main character. He lies like Bug Bunny disguised as Odysseus. He lies when he doesn't have to lie. He lies even when it would be a bad idea to lie. Even when telling the truth he embroiders, adds and fantasises, even when speaking to people he respects. He lies to his good friends for no reason. By our standards he is probably mentally ill. He spends a lot of time in jail.

In his defence the society of the world and the plot of the book don't want him to tell the truth and won't trust him when he does. The one time he tries to tell the truth the people asking for it (Sean Sarazin, of Book Five), try to saw off his feet, he needs to use all his desperate skill and invention to devise lies they actually will believe.

The Chaos and the Chronology

I was going to compare the story-to-travel chronology of Walrus to something like O'Brieins Aubrey/Maturin tales, with their social dramas extending across long voyages and then spurts of rapid action, but to be honest that doesn't come close.

If you tried to make a chart of the time compression, dropped chapters, ("oh the crew had a pretty crazy adventure here, anyway), long prison and slavery stints simply danced across with a few words, that time Drake became a King for a year or so, (one chapter in third person historical record form), well the chart would look like a seismograph during an earthquake, or two earthquakes going different directions at the same time. If you tried to draw a map of his travels, enslavements, imprisonments, flying castle trip, teleport gate incident, mysterious tunnel travel and many, many sea voyages, shipwrecks and abductions, then it would look like a Jackson Pollock painting.

Very likely a number of these wild journeys are to bring Drake into contact with various other characters from the previous four, and later six, (and possibly planned ever later FIFTY), books who are all interlaced.

The Disgust and the Development

Drake does actually slightly morally develop. He goes from a teenage attempted rapist, driven by obsessive lust, to someone who actively tries to value the object of his affections as something more than the object of his affections, and eventually into something more like adult love.

While the text skates madly over incidents, or arrantly informs us of vital matters in passing, and while its main group of piratical characters remain generally relentlessly self-interested, they are still coherent characters. They are not jokes, though the story makes jokes about them. The 'storyteller' part of the story might leap hither and yon over important events but the characters are affected in full depth, as they should be. A crime, abandonment, act of violence or of mercy might happen and be shown in a chaotic way, lightly, but if the characters involved pop up again in the roiling broth of the story, they will remember and be affected by these acts. The fears of a neurotic pirate might be played for laughs or plot convenience in one moment, but over time, they will have reasons for their existence and will not be forgotten or overwritten to make a new or better joke.

Its beyond curious that while many of these characters enter as parodies, they are not parodies of themselves.

This feels like a book founded on deep thought and careful planning, and then merrily painted over and scrawled over as if it were graffiti, but as you look closer it seems the graffiti was planned all along.

The Subtlety and the Stupidity

This book should have been a hit! Its tremendous fun!

Still, it seems ridiculous. People like simple blocky morality as the base, with a lot of very deep and serious language and self-consciously writerly and morally-instructive and dramatically perceptible Events.

Walrus does this the wrong way round; the base, the world and its morality, are complex, but hidden, or at least not self-consciously or deliberately described by the writer who in engaged in a kind of mad folk dance over the blocks of their story.

It’s impossible for me to tell if this is a cynical book, or a tragic one. It seems like a tragic book in disguise as a cynical one, or perhaps the two things are in equipoise.

(Has NOTHING TO DO with book five

Great cover though!)

Book Five - The Wicked and the Witless

Sean Sarazin is a Son of a Bitch.

Actually, that’s an insult to his mother, Farafella, the Kingmaker of Selzirk. But of Sean, what can be said? He's just a bad guy. Certainly my least favourite of the first five of 'Chronicles of an age of Darkness'. It lives in parallel.

Cook has already done two versions of the singular young male point of view hero. In 'Wordsmiths and Warguild' we got Togura Poulaan, a sometimes slightly dim, or, more fairly, just a normal young teenage boy, while in 'Walrus and Warwolf' we met the literal incarnation of chaos; Drake Deldragon Douhey, an absolute fireball of manic energy, crazy schemes, relentless invention and Big Protagonist Energy. 'Wicked and Witless' is built around Sean Sarazin, firstborn child of the Kingmaker Farafella, of Selzirk, sun-worshipping ruling city of the Harvest Plains.

So who is Sean Sarazin? Aka Sarazin Sky, aka ‘WATASHI!’?

The Delusion and the Dickheadedness

A somewhat occasionally clever, not especially cowardly, pompous, pretentious, status-obsessed, lonely deluded dickhead.

There are some excuses for this; Sarazin was raised as a hostage in a southern, vaguely Chinese/Japanese coded Kingdom, as the distaff "Son" of its ruler Lord Regan. His closest companions are his weapons tutor Jarl Theodric, his scholastic tutor Epelthin Elkin and the prostitute Jaluba.

It’s not clear if anyone involved in the raising of Sean Sarazin actually likes him in any way. Lord Regan plans to use him as a weapon against his mother the Kingmaker of Selzerk, and every else he knows is in the pay of Lord Regan. True, Sarazin isn't actually that likeable, but this may be something of a chicken and egg situation as his entire life has been one of manipulation and carefully deluded dreams. Regan fills Seans head with vaguely Nietchien/Randian philosophy about the great individual being able to shape their own fate and conquer all.

"'Remember, we create ourselves. Always remember that. We have free will so we are entirely responsible for ourselves. Everything happens t us by our own choice. Never forget that.

'I never will, my lord,' said Sarazin.

'In the final analysis,' said Lord Regan, 'you can have whatever you want. You can be whatever you want to be. You can win whatever you want to win.'

'I believe it my lord,' said Sarazin.

'Some people become victims,' said Lord Regan. 'This only happens because they have a victim mentality. Feeling themselves to be victims, they behave in a way which makes them just that.'

'My lords wisdom is all-encompassing.' said Sarazin, truly impressed by the depth of Lord Regans philosophy."

It's not clear if Regan is doing this because he actually believes it, or because it will hopefully turn him into a guided missile of crazed ambition aimed directly at his mothers not-Queendom.

Seeds and fertile soil. Sean Sarazin decides right at the start of the book that he is absolutely destined for some kind of great and/or heroic role of command and glory, and that he can achieve this largely by his own efforts. From that point on he becomes a problem for absolutely everyone else in the book, primarily his mother, who exerts insane amounts of energy and political cunning trying to keep him alive.

The book is an exercise in seeing the world from the point of view of someone who understands less about what is going on than most of the intelligent characters, and usually less than the reader, who is misinformed, but still less deluded than Sean Sarazin. It’s also an exercise in viewing a deep and complex world, full of deep and complex characters, from the point of view of a shallow and self-interested person.

The Contempt and the Comparisons

The comparison to the two other young, questing male heroes, explain why this is the least of the five;

Togura Poulaan - sometimes a dingus. Relatively unambitious for a Prince. 'Memorises' the one magical word needed for his quest and then forgets it. Fails to notice that he has, by luck, actually found the object of his quest once he has it. Broadly good-natured, genuinely wants to save his girlfriend from a magic circle and puts in a fair degree of effort to do so, does actually achieve some quite heroic things; in particular being captured by pseudo-Mongol steppe riders and managing to move from slave and the lowest status person there to actual tribe member; his notable deed is surviving an ambush and dragging himself a lot of miles over broken ground with broken legs to get back. Wins some degree of respect from at least one father figure. Crosses a mountain range on his own. Survives capture, disease, war. Fights for his life in a Nightmare City against an ancient evil and manages to defeat it. Does, in the end, manage to free his GF from the magic circle and defeat his evil half-brother. Honestly he does pretty good for a teenage boy!

Drake Deldragon Douhey - raised in a bizzaro sex cult, dissolute and scheming, survives attempted drowning, convinces an ogre king to make him his heir, becomes a pirate, defeats a crazy bug-monster and saves the ship, performs several high-risk secret missions and manages to survive, crosses most of the continent of Argan at one point or another, may have dived into alternate realities, falls in love, tries to commit a rape, is made the antichrist figure in a new religion, becomes less of a rapist, fights an entire religion for his beloved, discovers works of an ancient poet and sells them, is given a semi-immortality health parasite, becomes master swordsman and skivamareen player, briefly a king of the Chennaming Gate, kills Par Plovey the extremely evil misogynist bastard, goes to extreme and ridiculous lengths to save his one true love from illness. Honestly I have barely even sketched the surface.

Sean Sarazin; you get involved in a lot of stuff but are largely as competent as extensive education and experience make you, and not much more. Sean why can't you be cool like these guys? Why can't you learn?

The Sadness and the Stasis

The agonising thing about Sarazin is that, even though by the end he has a mother and a father who love him, and a small kingdom, and a pretty cool Dwarf servant he's still an utter tit! He sentences Jaluba to death! (She survives). He consistently does things almost as bad as that and seems to gain almost no self-knowledge or depth. He remains, almost and perhaps even to the end, a big believer in 'noble blood' and the grace and natural will to power of the nobility, despite being not of noble blood himself, and being reminded of that multiple times.

The Glimmers and the Shimmers

Competence - after being exhaustively trained by a very good mercenary, educated by a possibly-evil wizard and having experienced the complexity of court intrigue in Selzirk, and having been part of and somewhat-lead, several at-least-not-disastrous military expeditions and actions, Sarazin does seem to get actually better at basic protagonism. He can fight and war and organise and plan, to a degree, and is not always crap at it, though he would still lose to most other protagonists.

“'Am I doing the right thing or the wrong thing?'

'It’s not what you do,' said Jarl, ' it’s how you justify it when you get back to Selzirk. I've seen a lot of famous victories which were actually no more than draws - a couple of them were in fact defeats!'

'We'll worry about Selzirk when we get back there alive,' said Sarazin.

'No!' said Jarl. 'Start writing your history now. This is what happened. By a skilful forced march you took the enemy by surprise. you seized Eagle pass. You established a base on the heights. Then you yourself led a reconnaissance in force while your subordinates were busy bringing up the supplies necessary to support a determined thrust deep into enemy territory.'

'Why,' said Sarazin, in admiration, that sounds really good.'

'Of course it does,' said Jarl. 'With the right line in storytelling, you can make the worst defeat into a triumph of courageous, dynamic soldering.'”

Dwarf - after being roofied and sexually assaulted by a witch, Sarazin ends up with an evil Dwarf manservant, the Dwarf: Galbrax! Galbrax is great, partly because he consistently gives Sarazin shit, and partly because he is openly and nakedly a petty, awful, lying, thieving little shit and owns it. He is on the outside what Sarazin is on the inside and that makes him much more palatable. He also sticks by Sarazin and never betrays him, (maybe once or twice), becoming the closest thing Sarazin actually has to a friend, (though of course Sean, being a dick, remains largely oblivious to this).

Some Friends - after being not-a-prick to at least some people, Sarazin does end up with some friends, or at least friend-like relationships, which is all he deserves.

Loving Parents - Raised in a palace of manipulation and more and more aware that everyone around him only wants to manipulate and use him, Sarazin is honestly crushed when he thinks he has accidentally killed his own father, and is genuinely thrilled to see him alive again. His time spent with his actual father running around preparing to be a revolutionary insurgent, his efforts to protect him and willingness to put aside his crazy Randian politics to spend time with him, make Sarazin, for once, almost likeable. Here, the reader starts to think; "Damn, maybe if he was raised right he wouldn't necessarily have been that bad."

Sarazins Mother; Second-best female character in the series so far, the Kingmaker Farafella, also genuinely loves him and tries hard to keep the dumb bastard alive. If only she had met Yen Olass from Book Three, they would have had a lot to talk about. Sean does actually manage to save her at one point with some magical ooze he got from an evil Druid.

Flickers of Decency - after being interrupted in an absolutely horrible crime by his father, Sarazin experiences something like.. momentary shame? Near self-awareness? Once utterly bamboozled and defeated by Drake Deldragon Douhey, who Sarazin had previously tried to saw the legs off, he bows in supplication to the grand tragedy of Drakes noble (and imaginary) kingdom and blood curse. This is all nonsense but for Sean Sarazin its nearly character development.

The Miscellaneous and the Mysterious

Many fragments of world-lore are found within the book, including much that may come to pass, (or would have, if Cook had lived).

Elpeth Elkin; the mind-controlling Wizard of Ebber. Is he good or bad? Certainly the only other wizard of Ebber has proven to be quite bad previously. Now he has access to his ancient city, what will he do next?

The mythical 'Tectonic Lever' of the Deep South. Fated to drop all of Southern Argan into the sea. Previously pulling this thing would be genocide, but with the Swarms invading, pulling that dang lever is starting to look like a pretty good idea actually.

The Prose and the Drowse

Because Sarazin is the way he is, much of the pleasure of the book is provided by the world and the side characters. This being Cooks AoD, the world is more than up to the challenge, and the co-stars are customarily, complete, interesting and compelling. As always - every single named person is clearly on their own complex journey and adventure all of the time.

Perhaps because of Sarazin, Cooks lovely inventive, euphonic sometimes ridiculous onomatopoeic prose is lesser here than in the first four AoD books, though there are bits here and there.

The political and personal complexity remains, and the hearts are still genuine, but again, due to Sarazin, the natural cynicism becomes more dominant than it was in other books, making this one 'darker' but in a low, grimy way, rather than a magisterial tragic way.

For a 'Cook' story I give this three out of five, or even maybe two-relative. For a normal fantasy, I give it a four out of five, as it is still Cook.

‘Zaan’ said the sun

I muse occasionally on how to produce Cooks Age of Darkness in a way that will actually sell books. At least enough so that he finally gets his much-deserved spot in the Fantasy Hall of Fame.

First we must re-name the series; too many things are called things like ‘Chronicle of an Age of Darkness’. Google it and see.

‘Zaan said the Sun’ should be the title, or just ‘Zaan’.

Next we must sell it as something else – Mievelles ‘Weird fiction’ would be a good choice. Even though it ‘seems like, and maybe is, fantasy on-top, its really a distinctly strange and odd thing underneath, almost its own genre.

Next, we Front the Interlacement; do an encyclopaedic version. Put together a cast list, with individual articles showing where and when they come into each tale. Have maps with the crazy journeys of the protagonists. Have an index and footnotes whenever someone shows up in someone else’s story.

What more? Illustrations certainly, but who could possibly illustrate tales of such remarkable tonality. The Corgi covers are competent fantasy scenes, but have almost nothing to do with the feel or meaning of the actual books.

The American Questar ‘Wizard War’ covers are utterly insane and sell the stories as things they absolutely are not, but they do have a certain energy to them. Yann Olass would probably be amused by her interpretation on the cover of ‘The Oracle’ at least.

We are not done with Cook, there are, after all, five more books to go, and apparently, they get weird.

I shall return, in due time, with a review of the second half of ‘Zaan’, and with more thoughts on how it might be adapted and recreated in living visual form, and perhaps on the meaning of the whole massive thing, a meaning which may well have changed totally based on the content of the next five books; The Wishstone and the Wonderworkers, The Wazir and the Witch, The Werewolf and the Wormlord, The Worshippers and the Way and finally, The Witchlord and the Weaponmaster!

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I wrote a novel by mistake. I am sorry.

How Queen Mab Started

Back in 2020 I conceived the idea of an adventure that "depending on how you orient the page as you read it, it is both a fantasy and a science-fiction adventure."

The original Queen Mab was meant to be a crazy gimmick book where you could read it one way, then turn the book upside down and read it another way, engaging with two adventures;

When you flip the book one way - with the spine on the right, as in western books, then it’s a science fiction adventure.

"BUT - the truth is that these are the same people and places but just seen from different cultural perspectives

"the portrait-images of the main characters are flipped like those of playing cards, one half facing one, direction the other facing the other direction.

The Science Fiction adventurers will see it as a dimensionally-warped ship of perverted biomechanical transhumans.

In terms of adventure design, the context of the information they can get and are given will lead them to see it as a technical and material problem, and the very nature of their inquiry and the way they seen the people in it

will make the *mission* darker and more dangerous for them. Their technical abilities and the power of destruction and opposition that their guns etc give them means they are more likely to start conflicts."

This was always meant to be, and has remained, a fully-illustrated book.

Right from the beginning, August was the intended artist and I have driven her slowly insane with my relentless over-writing and never finishing anything. I am sorry!

There is not much art in this initial post as we are still working out how much of our load to blow in promotion and how much to save for the book, but expect to see more as we get closer to the Kickstarter.

Inspiration

A key inspiration was Vincent Wards 'The Navigator: A Medieval Odyssey' in which Monks from the Cumbrian Middle-Ages, fearing the advancing Black Death, tunnel through time and arrive in a modern city (1980s Aukland).

This is a film I haven’t seen in decades, and I think I only saw it once, but it left an impression, the key to which was the deep visionary strangeness with which its characters encounter modernity. The known made unknown, the familiar viewed through unfamiliar eyes, a great making-strange

Another, less-direct and later inspiration was Shellys 'Queen Mab', a radical pure-freedom anti-monarchist poem full of startling images.

"The yet more wretched palaces

Contrasted with those ancient fanes,

Now crumbling to oblivion;

The long and lonely collonades,

Through which the ghost of Freedom stalks,"

Another was a translated copy of the 'Orphic Hymns'. There are many more! There is a lot of stuff in the book.

How It Changed Over Time

Two things happened as we went on;

First, I kept writing more and more and more and more, adding monsters, characters, concepts, places and so on, breaking them all down to be somewhat workable and part of the same reality

the other is that, as the number of things in Queen Mab grew, the complexity of the arrangement became questionable.

First, we realised that we just couldn't handle the whole two-books-in-one thing.

Then we realised we couldn't handle two actual books.

Ok, so one book only, with one adventure, but we incorporate the pseudo-medieval viewpoint of the adventurer into the text, so that, everything is described as if it is being seen from a medieval/early-modern viewpoint. The reader, and presumably the players, know they are looking at something technological and science-fictional, but the viewpoint characters don't, so that the duality exists in the mind of the user rather than literally on the page.

Then that went on for a while, (with me constantly writing more and more and more), until about June 2023

With so many other books, (I think Demon Bone Sarcophagus, Gackling Moon and Speak, False Machine were all put together and published in the period of writing Queen Mab), and projects stumbling down the track, I had just kept writing and writing and writing.

But once I got a good look at everything I had written - it was just too much. Too many places, process, creatures, characters, courts, crypts, Queens, Knights, Ladies, Fairies, just too much of everything. It was crazy. There was no way I could turn this into a workable game-book. It would be unplayable to an insane degree, or it would take another four years to make it playable.

So instead I took one year, and turned it into a novel! Problem solved.

The Final Version

I did not think it would take me a year to completely re-write and re-arrange Queen Mab. I did think, for each of the 14 months it took, that it would only ever take "a few more weeks", but it took much longer than that.

What does it mean to turn a game into a story? They are not the same thing at all, though they seem to share organs and limbs, these things are differently arranged, so that if you try to turn one into another, without thinking about why and how they work, it will not go well.

So as time went by in the writing of 'Queen Mab', now retitles 'Queen Mab’s Palace', partly to make it a nice classic three-word False Machine name, and partly because there are a LOT of things in our world called 'Queen Mab' and I wanted this one to be searchable.

At first, it was just a travelogue, a report from the Palace of Queen Mab, but as more and more was written, and more and more actual events took place and more of a character came into play in the nameless, and at-first, genderless, Protagonist, and then secondary characters joined the journey, and then secondary and tertiary narrators, it turned into... well who knows what? A historical science-fiction travelogue picaresque adventure tragedy?

I finally finished Draft One around the middle of August and here we are!

Draft one is about 970 words, (including appendices), and we are budgeting for 400 pages, though hope to have it in well below that.

It might be a work of genius, or at least of peak deluded narcissism. Which is appropriate considering the subject.

This is how the book starts;

..............................................................................................

Queen Mabs Palace

- how I came to the seat of the Queen of Air and Darkness and what I learned there of her Courts, Ladies and Thanes, and her lesser Servants and Rude Rabble that do occupy thereabouts, from one who has journeyed to that Realm overlong and returned, but not unchanged, may God have mercy on my soul.

The Missing Children and the Frozen Knight

Let me live in memory for a while, and write with glass within my glass, to the spirit which resides there. May-be in writing and remembering in line, as pearls on string, one upon another, I may escape my dolour, and know again what once it meant to be astounded or surprised. For it was surprising, and most strange.

It came about in the grieving of the year when gold first touched the green that the night, black as sleep, chill as stone, made strange music and some heard voices of beasts who spoke as men.

We barred our doors and hid, trusting to prayer and cold iron. With the sun came silence, and then the wailing of women, my sister among them. All the children fit to work were gone, and their parents mazed and made curious numb, like empty pots. And these were Jory my Sisters Son, the Blacksmiths Child, Ceyln the old Maids helper, the Dog Boy, Haswa, and Dgibert the Fat Squires boy.

Some said was bandits, others fae, but while the sun still halved on the skys rim, a dog found scent and the bravest set forth and doing so, made for me to come, for I could both read and write and had been the teacher of those lost, and also my Sister was grieved and made me go.

We had gone not far but we found a Knight wounded by the path, strangely armoured, fit to die and rimed with frost.

The Knight made gesture for one to come forth and hear him and I was made to by the rest for I might give him Grace, though I am no Priest and did not wish to.

The Knight spoke twice-ways. He whispered words I could not understand, but as I spoke to him and gave him succour, soon came another voice, this like cold iron, but an echo of the first, yet I knew the tongue.

He said; “You seek those taken, as once I so sought.”

I said aye this was so and how came he here.

He said; “They are with Queen Mab. Knowing this, would you still go?”

This name I knew. The Queen of Air and Darkness, Empress of the Eld, timeless and undying whom the wise have called a myth. I asked how Queen Mab might be found and the Knight said; “There is a Door. It is a cut in the air. You do not have long.

Then he said; “Do not go, but if you do, know this; First; never promise, never disagree. Second; speak well and listen more. Third; eat not fairy food or you shall never leave.”

Then he grieved and said;

“Your life is death to me, and mine to you. I do not know where I am. My seals are broken and the stars unknown. I die lost. But I am under a sun and above a land. And I am myself. So ends my story. Put me under stone, far from water, where none go.”

Then he died. I said words from the Book. Then, though I meant first to tell the others with me of what the frozen Knight had said, a madness came upon me and, thinking but to test its truth,

I stepped forth into a haze, like mist, cut like a slice, which hovered close.

This is how I came into the Palace of Queen Mab, and often I wished I had not, for I returned much changed; marked with strange service and cursed with queer passions and wild hungers, that I think none could fulfil, and I am placed here in this cell, and mocked and much wondered at I do not doubt.

But still my mind and my soul are my own, which not all I have seen can say, and I have ventured far, more far than men might dream of. So I make this book within my glass, where none may look upon it less I allow it, for only I have its print and key. And I make it as a warning and confession, so those who read its words will know that I have seen and spoken true, and like that frozen Knight I say; do not go, but I fear some shall, through some Dream or Autumn door, and Mab alone knows if you have or will for in that place there is no other God but Her, Christ have mercy on me.”

..............................................................................................

What Next?

In the words of Joesky; an adventure is on, as the fearful scribe ventures into what they see as the Fairy Palace of Queen Mab, crawling through its Crypt, visiting its Courts, speaking with (gently) its Knights and Ladies, and trying as best he can to get back the missing children and go home.

Well, from the opening text, you know they make it home, but you don’t know how, or what they see, how they are changed and who else makes it back with them.

This is Queen Mabs Palace, an adventure through a decaying, dying space-ship inhabited by crazed transhumanist radicals, through the eyes of a Medieval Scribe.

The main text is done. August is still working away on images. We are getting quotes in and preparing for a Kickstarter which should hopefully start around (or maybe before), Autumn, which seems appropriate for the Queen of Air and Darkness.

Gird your loins and batten down your marketing hatches, expect to here me going on about this for a while!

*not really but whatever what we think of as Medieval is usually early-modern and even writing from a complete early-modern perspective was a challenge so in effect the main point of view is pseudo-early modern masquerading as pseudo-medieval.

View Details

In one of my rare excursions into gaming, I recently finished 'Thief: The Black Parade'; a full game of fan-made missions for the 199-something “immersive sim” (before we had that phrase) – ‘Thief: The Dark Project’.

I originally conceived this article as an essay on the concept of ‘Butterfingered Infinity’; something about the uses and limitations of ‘natural language’ as compared to, and revealed by, a complex virtual simulation like Thief.

In the end it became just the meat in a thief burger, with the start being a distaff review of a much-reviewed game and the end being an odd mix of suggestions for D&D.

The Thief-Review is below.

The essay on Butterfingered Infinity in the middle.

Thief’s Lessons for D&D at the end.

Why Thief is Good

Thief was a nearly pure-stealth simulator which, through talent, work and luck, coalesced into perhaps the best stealth game. Other reviewers have talked about why this is in more depth than me; its engine, built specifically around shadow, its first-person nature, its exquisite and carefully engineered sound design, and the integration of that sound into its level design and its relationship with violence and the vulnerability of its main character.

[A brief digression on stealth and violence; they don’t mix. Stealth and murder, (or, if you are batman, stealth and a beating), make an intoxicating combination, such that, if you build a complex immersive sim, where both stealth and violence are available, any sane character build will naturally coalesce around some kind of stealth-archer or stealth-assassin - as this is optimal in-game and feels powerful to the player.

Then, if the game wants to make the now hugely-empowered player behave in a purely-stealthy fashion, to fit the theme and feel of the game, they need to add in extra-diegetic elements, rulings, 'points*' and so on in order to make the player-character behave 'stealthily' and, in the words of one reviewer; ‘you are being stealthy to protect the NPCs from you, not to protect you from them’.

This is a mistake no game in the Thief series ever makes, since the Player Character is always, by Protagonist standards, insanely vulnerable, and sword fights are a nightmare. The structure of the game, without extra-diegetic elements, makes you want to play as a thief. It’s a game where you can snipe people in the back of the head, but won't want to as it would feel unprofessional.

{A digression with a digression on ‘points’; There should be some neo-OSR ruling about points being the opposite of gold as, just as xp for gold is almost always good and feeds dietetically in so many ways into the game, there is a kind of reverse of that, in which, as soon as 'points' are involved in anything, it almost always gets worse, though the means and method of how that happens will vary greatly.}]

The Black Parade

Based on the engine for the original ‘Thief’, Black Parade is large and complex enough to be a fourth game in the franchise. For free. Which is, I think, larger than any of the other games, and might be the best one? At least I think it has more consistently high level design than any other version of the game.

Its staggering really that a small number of talented people could collaborate for so many years

to produce something both so massive, and so exquisite. Thief was always a distantly OSR-ish game and its fan-mission community is even more so. For ‘The Black Parade’ Melan gets a mention in the credits!

The Paradoxes of Thief Level Design

What defines Thief games more than anything else is level design and it is here that some of the interrelationships between Thief and the OSR are brought into focus

Fear, Desire, Exploration and Investigation

In 'Thief', you think like a thief. You are vulnerable and can be killed easily, so you carefully watch, and LISTEN, to the environment, constantly checking for threats. You also hide relentlessly, moving carefully from shadow to shadow, cursing electric lights and marble floors. Your only real safety is the darkness and so you cling to it instinctively, even when there is no tangible threat, because there might be one; a wandering guard or servant, or something else.

So fear and vulnerability ensure you deeply and constantly search, investigate and utilise the environment, and when these are naturalistic environments, you are deliberately navigating them in a way that feels ‘inverse’ and therefore a little cool. You might be in a kitchen and, instead of doing Kitchen things, be searching for fragments of shadow in the light coming from the stove, creeping behind shelves etc.

You are a Thief, you want to steal not kill. There are no points for killing and increasing the difficulty of the game (usually) only increases the conditions of play, not the substance of the game itself. Maximum difficulty means getting all of the treasure without killing and sometimes even without harming anyone. {Thief does mix this up somewhat with the easy availability of the blackjack, with which you can "knock people out" (irl this would likely mean a lot of brain embolisms), but only if you catch them unawares}.

Desire keeps you fixated on that shiny artefact on the dresser, and carefully avoiding anything sensate or alive. Guards walk regular routes and chat with each other, and this means a chunk of Thief is listening for and measuring the movements of others, so you can avoid them. In almost every case you are searching for a way around anything dangerous. You are continually mapping the physical space in your head and also the routes and movements of any living thing within that space.

The Music of Pseudo-Naturalism

The best thief levels are pseudo-natural. You can intuit things about them from their nature and then investigate based on those intuitions, and sometimes be right, which makes you feel very clever stately home will have a kitchen and cellars, a Cathedral will have a belltower, etc. They are also physically distinct and separate from the surrounding area.

The urban slum levels are slightly less-perfect because the pseudo-nature of the level becomes more obvious; there are unopenable doors and inaccessible areas; PNG’s of doors on buildings that rim the play area. Though you can still try opening them, and discover from the games response if they are actually just PNG doors, or would respond to a lockpick or yet-to-be-found key. A handful will turn out to be functional, as you will discover when you find the right thing to open them, or pop up from the other side after dicking about in a sewer for hours.

Still, it’s curious that in D&D there are no unopenable doors, or at least, there are no simulated doors. The play area, in theory, expands outwards forever, and in practice, only becomes misty, general and improvisational as you move out of whatever the DM has thought about already, (but come back next week and the details will have sharpened up a lot).

But, just like Dungeons’, Thief levels are almost never purely naturalistic. Firstly; they are simulated environments, and can’t match the chaos or complexity of the real world, second; they have locked doors which need keys, sequences of actions needed to progress, certain pieces of intelligence which must be combined to succeed; they have paths, like flow-charts, which lace through these otherwise wide-open environments.

Still they are otherwise very wide open, with a large array of possible ingress points, secret routes and other possible access-ways that strongly reward exploration, investigation and, sometimes, cunning extrapolation from the logic of the depicted world. Nothing is quite as pleasurable in Thief as spotting a chimney, pipe or ledge, wondering if you can get to it, finding a way to, then realising you can find a way inside/across, then popping up somewhere you should never have been able to get to.

There are “weird” Thief levels too, set in ancient magical tombs, lost cities or supernatural netherworlds, but they are never quite as good. Great Thief levels exist at a near perfect synthesis of naturalistic play-space and toyetic, planned sequential-challenge environment. They are levels where the nature of the space provokes investigation and exploration, which it also rewards with naturalistic opportunities, where a complex adventure-flow runs through the pseudo-naturalistic space but where the space always gives opportunities for adaptation, evasion and incursion. A toybox with the lid half-open if you will.

Butterfingered Infinity

Thief is actively trying to give you an experience very like that of an AD&D Thief, and does so, in a curious mirror-view fashion, but the differences between a Thief in play in D&D, and a Thief in Thief, are interesting to consider.

Problem solving in D&D is often related to the concept of ‘tactical infinity’ due to the very wide-open nature of possible approaches to various problems, but its more like a ‘Butterfingered Infinity’ in which the Players can hold and use almost any imaginable, or describable, concept, but carefully, and with blunt inexactness. The infinity of the Word rather than the Vast but Finite potential of the Eye.

An Equation on the Utility of Butterfingered Infinity

A very rough pseudo-equation on the utility of words in roleplaying might be something like this;

[The Descriptive Power of Language] – [[(word concepts the DM actually knows) x [(The Speed of relation) + (what the Player Group can easily understand)]]

The Descriptive Power of Language

There are a lot of words. If you have enough time and a big enough dictionary, you can describe almost anything. It we assume the total potential of words, and look for things they absolutely cannot describe, there is not much, but here we enter paradox, because we are trying to use words to describe what words can’t describe.

(This is a problem which exists continually, as a faint umbra, which sometimes obscures and sometimes reveals, whenever we come to think about the things language can’t do, in almost any situation.)

But, so far as things that could be interacted with in a tabletop game, a computer game or any other form of simulation, let’s assume that words might be able to describe nearly everything necessary to know

How much the DM actually knows

The classic DM is a natural word-hound and Gygaxian Wunderkammer encyclopaedist. Not a few writers have named D&D as a font for their discovery and use of words, and the use of strange or novel words can, with limits, be a pleasurable aspect in itself in D&D.

Lets assume the DM knows a lot of words.

Speed of relation

We can describe anything if we have time. But technical, unfamiliar jargon, and highly precise measurements, as well as large numbers of things or elements, will all take time, which robs immediacy, and in some theoretical cases, perhaps a truly insane amount of time.

How much and how easily the players understand

For a concept to be useful, it has to be known to at least some of the players. A rare word-concept only the DM knows is a near-useless word-concept. It is the Player Group that must understand. I real terms this means, probably (?), at least two or three know it and can easily explain to the rest. If this happens many times in sequence, the game dies.

No-one is paying as much attention to the whole thing as the DM. Every individual has a totally different base capacity for imagining different things, so the words flow out, are half attended to

and when they are attended to, are understood differently by almost everyone. In effect, a DM has a relatively small ‘armoury’ of words and conceptual language which is strong, simple, descriptive and already mutually understood by almost everyone, from which they can take excursions into complexity, for short periods and specific problems, but which they always return to. We can think of this as the ‘verbal armoury’ or word-hoard of natural language. The aspects of spatial and physical situations that make up the meat and majority of D&D problem solving are those for which or conceptual language is already well developed and widely shared, and which can be imagined with ease by a wide variety of people.

So: being STUCK to something, being TIED to someone. Being BEHIND someone. Getting a LEG UP. In fact in terms of three-dimensional space, these are all things most of us did as children, which is why we understand them. For many of us who are not athletes or dancers, childhood was our first, last and by a large margin, greatest education in the nature of three-dimensional space and the language of physical problems remains that of the playground.

Responses to ‘The Limitations of Language’

I asked people on Twitter and Facebook about “things and situations you have experienced as a DM, which have proven really difficult to describe quickly and clearly using *only* spoken words?

(The classic is trying to describe a complex 3D environment to a bunch of people but I am interested in other examples.)”

The responses were very interesting!

Tim Samwise Seven Harper; “I sometimes struggle with describing natural environments filled with fantasy plants and animals. I always try to picture those scenes from Dark Crystal and that helps, or I default more toward real trees and plants as well as real life animals with a twist.

Big parties with hundreds of NPCs are always a challenge. I tend to use 3x5 cards with a few descriptive words on each NPC card.”

Yuri Zanelli; “PC's and other creatures' positions in their environment. Miniatures can help a lot with that, but I don't like to use them. My game tables tend to be already too crowded with maps, manuals, bottles, snacks, character sheets, dice, notepads and so on. I tend to use a quick sketch on a sheet of paper.”

Greg Benedicto; “Describing liminal elements in a scene WITHOUT drawing obvious attention to them.”

Jesse Rooney; “As a general rule, spacial relationships are much easier and faster to show then tell. Hence minis at the table. There are a number of times when playing theater of the mind that Ive pulled out a sketch pad to demonstrate who and what is where.”

John Enfield; “That's why I use gridded maps (either hand drawn or published), minis and occasionally terrain pieces. Having visual aids helps aid in describing environments.”

Ragnar Hill; “A good ambush because players always start squealing and panicking and then I get over excited.”

PARAMANDER @CravenSensation; “Mechanisms or devices made of many parts and monsters with complicated and alien anatomy. Even if each detail is relatively straightforward/easy to visualize, more details means higher potential for miscommunication + more attention required on the part of the players”

Derek Dees @NihilSineLabor; “Places with lots of shadows and light, not sharp contrasts, but layered or with partially obscured nooks and objects.

The Great Hall of Durin, as light broke through, but shadows still engulfed so much, for example.”

Bo Banducci @bo\_banducci; “I’m struggling to remember one aside from the classic. Possibly when an NPC is lying to the players and I want to intimate this somehow without giving it away.”

Synthesis of Responses

I broke these down into a few large categories as a tool-of-thought, (with the usual effect that many real-life situations involve one or more categories, often in point and counterpoint.)

These provide a very brief idea-map of things with which ‘Words’ are especially butterfingered;

PLETHORALITY

“natural environments filled with fantasy plants and animals”

“Big parties with hundreds of NPCs”

“Mechanisms or devices made of many parts and monsters with complicated and alien anatomy”

We know about these things because we encounter them in life, and the Eye can show them to us easily and immediately – well, if not quite immediately, a scene or painting can give us a very quick general impression of a scene with many things of strange and novel quality in it, which the scanning of the eye-and-mind can ‘fill in’ very smoothly and fluidly, much faster than words could describe. When the eye works with the ear, they can combine, bind and represent a truly complex scene, in but a moment. Nature can present deep, immediate and novel interconnected complexity in-one. Words are slow, specific and sequential, happening one after another, and sometimes blunt. These are two forms of time in conflict.

Thief does well with some forms of ‘Plethorality’; its ‘big views’ where you teeter on a rooftop and get a nice ’Batman’-esque view of a highly vertical city, are exciting and poetic, and also useful as you start planning routes and investigating things with the eye. But Thief, like other virtual simulations, is strongly limited in the number of active, moving, identifiable, people and living things it has going on. Not quite as much as words, but a fair amount. They really eat programming power.

DIMENSIONALITY

“PC's and other creatures' positions in their environment”

“As a general rule, spacial relationships are much easier and faster to show then tell”

Or more prosaically; physical positioning and complex three-dimensional situations. But ‘Dimensionality’ sounds cooler.

In Thief the exact precision of a jump, climb or any other kind of movement, can be demonstrated in the substance of the world with deep subtlety and immediate precision. As in; “*this* I can jump on” to “*here* I can climb on to in a few moments”, “*here* I can climb up to, if I have equipment”.

The assessments are fluid, rapid and immediate, and this is a key part of the game. A patrolling guard is here and going this way, the next pool of shadow is over here and it will take me this long over the loud marble floor to get there. Then a climb of this length, then.. and so on.. Immediate, intuitive, fast.

A similar thing takes place with even small skirmishes, let along larger ones. Close physical positioning matters enormously and is very hard to communicate, accurately, and quickly, to a group. For this were sketch-maps made. Words alone have a butterfingered grasp on three-dimensional space.

LIMINALITY

“WITHOUT drawing obvious attention to them”

“A good ambush “

“Possibly when an NPC is lying to the players”

If problems with describing three-dimensional space were what I expected, and problems with ‘Plethorality’ were less expected, but make sense, then ‘Liminality’; secrets, shadows, deceptions and double meanings, in all ways, is an unexpected but quite beautiful problem to face.

It’s the illusionists problem. Or an actors problem. It seems to flow deeply from the situation of the GM or storyteller being the fount of both the reality as-a-whole, and of a deception within that reality.

A simple example; a scene in a visual narrative like a play or film. One character is lying. The actor and director want the audience to know they are lying. But the characters in the fiction are not supposed to know. How to solve this?

The answer depends entirely on the naturalism and subtlety of the fiction, its tellers and its audience. In a pantomime or cheesy melodrama, or a children’s play, its relatively simple, at least in concept; the mustachoed villain twirls their moustache and even cocks an eye at the audience, before saying “of course not! Bwahahaha!”.

The more naturalistic the drama becomes, the more complex and difficult the lie becomes to communicate. For a soap actor, a touch of archness, for a dramatic actor, a complex scene-setting and capturing by the director to prepare the way for the lie and leave the right kind of space around it, for a highly naturalistic ‘spy’ or intrigue drama – almost nothing maybe, but the tone and emotional volume of the scene must be low or even and this might suit best a modernist story where the audience just never finds out what the ‘truth’ is, or at least that ‘finding out’ isn’t central to what the story is doing.

For other kinds of secrets, they have been written about in depth by many people. How, and how often, to portray lying NPC’s, (my last read on OSR culture was that it was generally anti deceptive NPC’s because they were over-used, difficult to get right and crippled the PCs long term relationship with the game-world, leading to more murderhoboism than desired), huge debates and discussions on how to run investigations, (what does or doesn’t count as railroading), and clues, (the ‘three clue rule’),

“Places with lots of shadows and light, not sharp contrasts, but layered or with partially obscured nooks and objects.”

This was an especially interesting response as, I didn’t even mention Thief in the question, and literal complex environments full of layered shadow is the main thing that Thief does. They built an engine specifically for the game called ‘the shadow engine’.

Though this has strong elements of Plethorality, (the simultaneous number of things and their complexity), and Dimensionality, (its about a large, complex, 3D space), the fact that it is also about the revealed/unrevealed paradox at the heart of Liminality is fascinating to me.

Words find it hard to form reliable shadows and perceptible lies. Words can lie easily, but its very hard to get them to build a lie as-object.

Thief Lessons

Considering the deep differences revealed between the world of the Eye and Virtual Simulation, and the world of the Word, and social, conversational simulation, are there lessons we can actually learn from Thief about how to run D&D? Or are the worlds so different that we might even deliberately not try to transfer lessons between them, as they would lead to bad play?

Here are a handful of concepts from Thief and some comments from me on how and whether they might be useful in D&D.

‘Ghost Missions’

Even the hardest level of Thief doesn’t demand that you be seen by no-one, but high settings often insist you hurt no-one.

In D&D the effects of a difficulty setting or complex level can be delivered diegeticaly by a highly specific quest-giver; a priest or wizard wants something, and insists that you ‘kill no-one’ or ‘hut no-one’ or in extreme versions ‘are never seen at all’, performing a ‘perfect ghost’ Mission Impossible situation where the incursion takes place and no one ever knows it happened at all.

(Of course the Party get paid a lot for fulfilling these conditions.)

A mission like this already implies a very different kind of D&D, a quest based around planning, surveillance, mapping and intelligence gathering, and then a quick and complex incursion full of distractions.

Difficult to pull of in D&D, but far from impossible,

Sketchy Maps

Thief usually provides a map for each mission, and it is always a vague map. A sketch map with some useful information, but a huge amount of things it doesn’t tell you. Its usually enough for you to orient yourself in the play area and tell where the major sections roughly are, but absolutely insists you explore to find out what you need to know.

More sketchy dungeon and play area maps before games might be a good idea. Diegetic literal ‘sketch maps’ by previous thieves and adventurers. Maps good enough for you to form the bones of a plan, but clearly vague enough that you know going in that they won’t describe everything.

Monster PATROLS, not Monster ROOMS

God damn patrols are hard to manage in D&D without a lot of extra shit. No wonder monsters in D&D just really like their particular rooms. Its easy to simulate one or two from the encounter table, but a key element of Thief is timing the patrols. If patrols are regular or even mostly regular and predictable, then they become part of the environment you can learn about and plan for, and evading or subverting them makes you feel very clever as a player.

Arranging a full system of patrols for a dungeon or wizards tower would probably require an entire sub-system, but it might be fun to give it a try.

Clumsy Monsters with Keys

There should be more clumsy monsters carrying VERY OBVIOUS keys through the darkness. Big, dumb stupid but dangerous ogre guards who could easily one-shot a PC if they see them, with huge gold or silver keys hanging by their sides.

I’ve spoken at length before about how the big, dumb, dangerous ogre is the perfect low-level opponent for D&D.

Helix Views/Verticality

Dark-Souls helix-like atriums. In terms of dungeon design, this would be a game where there is more up and down. A dungeon arranged around a step well, inside a tower, down a mountains slope or similar.

Tempting Treasure

Would being able to SEE the treasure really have the same effect in a described game as in a virtual simulation?

For the main treasure, the idea is that, from most points of ingress, the main treasure the PCs are here to get is very visible, in a revered-panopticon style, but very hard to actually get to. I imagine it poised on the top of a tower, itself at the bottom of a vast cylindrical step-well or similar. You have to infiltrate all the way down, and then all the way up to get to it.

Thief has a lot of visually obvious, but very hard to reach, small and light treasures. So many in fact that it becomes hard to believe you have fit them all in your Thief-sack. Rather than having lots of mixed, hidden treasures in a dungeon-equivalent, what if instead, there were a small number of very gold and shiny very visible treasures, each in the centre of a complex, shadowy environment with guards patrolling, traps and other hidden obstacles, so it was easy to see where the treasure was, but very hard to work out how to get to it.

Discoverable Pseudo-False Alarms

A ‘ghost’ mission which demands perfect, or near perfect, stealth, (from a group), and pseudo-naturalistic patrolling guards, suggests a very binary result to mistakes. Which is; you make one, are discovered, alarm raised, mission a dead loss and now you are just fighting to get away.

In D&D you have a group who all need not to fuck up, and there is no quicksave, so some of the binary, complex and difficult challenges of Thief just won’t work.

An idea might be a way of artificially cancelling a general alarm. Or several ways, but each one only works once and is specific. This would be the equivalent of modern Thieves calling in to the police station with the password to tell them it’s a false alarm.

If the guards are big dumb ogres, and other things with less adaptability, like ghosts or constructs, then its not impossible there might be some kind of code or sign to get them to stop banging the Big Bell, blowing the alarm horn or whatever it is. Ideally, each of these methods would be completely different, and you would need to actually do the incursion and poke around to find some of them out. There would also likely be a max-usage, where, if you trigger the alarm three times, even if you have methods spare, even the Ogres are going to keep ringing the bell.

Visual Verticality

One of the most fun and engaging elements of a Thief level, if its pseudo-natural, is getting up really high, maybe somewhere you had spotted earlier, and climbing about, pulling a batman, looking down at the streets and tenements, the little guards scurrying about, and having a Cid Kagenou moment as you cackle to yourself about all the SHEEP below you!

For all the reasons give above in ‘Plethorality’ – this would be hard to make use of.

One method would be to combine the ‘Coms Snails’ idea below, with an ‘Eagles Perch’ position. Some hidden spot far above the play area with a big view that allows one person to sit there and whisper information to their fellow PCs as they buzz about below, each on their individual missions.

Comms snails

My old teen players got a bunch of silver-shelled telepathic snails and ended up using them as in-ear comms. In a Noisms game, we tried using psychic shrimp as a radio base in a similar way.

Why? Because comms are super-useful in D&D and once you have seen them in a film youjust naturally want to use them in group mission situations.

I know this is CRINGE as FUCK from a low-fantasy OSR perspective, BUT – it’s so deeply and desperately useful in doing meaningful physical GROUP stealth storytelling and problem-solving. It turns a knockabout fiasco into a heist.

For a purely-stealth mission where you actively don't want violence to happen, having the party split up is actually good it makes much less sense if they are all together, huddled together as a ‘stealthy gang’?, since stealth as a group always starts to feel more ridiculous than is useful. The social dynamics of play push against it and a tragedy of the commons situation happens where one impulsive player ends the mission.

Around the table, everyone can hear everything the everyone is saying and doing, so the extra-dimensional player-entities that pilot the PCs always have more of a global awareness than the PCs themselves, which, even with very disciplined play, often communicates itself to the PCs via shadowy tubes.

Allowing Comms-Snails for stealth-only missions might actually be a good idea that would improve play. Perhaps the stealth-obsessed wizards who hired you will loan them out.

Less-Lethal Falling

In these levels with-verticality, there should be more falling, and it should be less lethal. More bits where you fall into water, or something similar, but it doesn't kill you, and you end up at a different spot in the dungeon, separated from the group, and can explore and maybe find new routes to what you want, or just to link back up.

If being noticed is a fail state, then non-lethal separation is more interesting in play than HP loss.

Sound-Encounters

I think Brendan and others (possibly many others), have considered this will the ‘overloaded’ encounter die, but more encounters when you things or people coming, would be interesting.

In standard D&D being surprised is a reasonable punishment for dicking about and not paying attention, but in a stealth-only game, the threat of being discovered is more useful – the PCs have maybe one or two actions to hide or try something.

Stealth via Diegetic Sound

This isn’t directly from Thief, but I do think it would be a fun idea for stealthy D&D, which is; the sound you make around the table is the sound your character is making in the game.

So, if you want your PC to be stealthy – SHUT THE FUCK UP, and get WHISPERING! I think this would be a fine addition to the game. It would give all PCs access to some form of silence, and would encourage the players to actually fucking concentrate and think for once in their lives.

The ‘Mission Turnabout’

One possible useful import from Thief might be the ‘turn’ that happens in a lot of missions, for its is a way of involving liminality and deception that might be useable in D&D.

The classic ‘questgiver turns on you when you are done’, is rightly abjured in OSR circles, for reasons well-known. (Although Thief, does in fact use this trope a lot). But the idea of a delve having a clear set of objectives, and then, right in the middle of the adventure, something is discovered or something changes, and suddenly the goals and nature of the mission change, and change a lot, leaving you to improvise a new plan and work with the same space you had previously, but towards entirely new goals, this could work in D&D I think.

Things that happen in Thief include;

Shalebridge Cradle – you sneak through the haunted asylum, but to complete the mission you have to turn the electric lights on, then somehow sneak past all the terrifying things again, in bright light.

Ghosts – You sneak past some dumb zombies and animals, but grabbing the target means a supernatural event and oh fuck actual high level ghosts and wraiths are now patrolling about.

Rescue to Heist or Heist to Rescue – You are going in to get someone out, but can’t and end up having to re-plan to grab an item, or the opposite is true.

Guards Guards – getting in is easy but the alarms go off and now the

The entire axis of a mission might alter and now you are trying to do a very different thing, a theft becomes a rescue, an assassination becomes a theft, an exfiltration becomes a sabotage. This might be do-able in D&D.

NPC Conversations

This was one charming Thief method that sadly I could find no way to use. In Thief, guards and servants commonly mutter and complain to themselves while wandering around, they also have sometimes long, informative or just whacky conversations with each other in pairs. Just two guards chatting in the middle of the night. Coming upon these conversations and sneaking around behind them while they yap is quite charming, and listening to them often provides intel. But I couldn’t find a way to reproduce, or even use, this in D&D as long intra-NPC convo’s are a damned nightmare when the DM has to deliver the whole thing. Maybe if you are a massive ham it could be fun.

A Thief-like Dungeon

So, what do we have?

Powerful and wealthy wizards hire the PCs to do a heist. They offer to pay a LOT and have strong conditions;

•Grab this one particular thing and bring it to them.

•You don’t kill anyone or the missions off

•Ideally, you swap the thing for a fake they will give you. This raises your pay.

•Even better – no-one has any idea you were ever there. Perfect Ghosts.

•They will give you these comm-snails to help, but they don’t live long.

•They have some sketchy maps and a handful of ideas about where to get more intel.

The mission is a mansion-tower, maybe in a deep valley, or an ancient terrace mine, or somehow part sunken into the under verse. There are layers to go down, they are arranged as gardens or mazes or other somewhat-knowable patterns.

At the bottom is the mansion/tower/castle.

You have to sneak all the way down, then get inside, then sneak all the way up to get the thingy.

There will be locked doors, gates, traps and hidden problems.

There is an overwatch position somewhere where one person can see a lot of the area. If a PCs can get there and hide, they can whisper a lot of useful info to the others.

Its guarded by a clan of strong ogres. They are pretty dumb. They walk in regular patrols with lanterns. If they have a key they have it tied to their big belt with a label saying KEY, so they know what it is. The keys are also large.

There is a big gong or bell the Ogres bang on if they think something is up. There might be some kind of counter-signal or password or spell to convince them to stop this, but your patrons don’t know what it is, though it may be discoverable in the area.

There are sewers and fast-flowing water. Several of the falls, drops and traps dump you into these and will wash you up somewhere, or wash you against a grate you can climb up.

If you do get the actual treasure – surprise, it’s the only things holding the Vampire/Lich/Ghost in place. You now need to get out, but instead of, and sometimes as well as, dumb Ogres, you will now be dealing with clever, dangerous ghosts or vampires with keen senses.

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The War for Humanities

Five Hundred years of Europeans doing cultural stuff! Jacques Barzun was here for nearly a hundred of them and spent ten of those, from 84 to about 94 years of age, writing this book in which he tells us; this is what has been going down.

What the book is, is a slightly deeper question, with no absolute answer, though Barzun does have a crack at it several times.

‘Dawn and Decadence’ is a burning brand for the Humanities. Barzun is against scientism and technocracy, partly even against theory, partly against what he might call the cult of analysis. Neither History or Politics can be called a Science. The do so it a product of a jealousy and envy.

The problem is that Science and the Humanities, though they have many parts in common, are much more different in total than one might think. They are not even different meals made from the same ingredients, one is a meal, the other a useful adhesive employed in building walls.

A mirror universe version of Dawn and Decadence would recount the same events, go over the same writers and ideas, but would be upside down and inside out in comparison. It would begin with an analytical need to understand causes and in doing this, would perform similar deeds of chronicle, expansive view, personal asides, brief summations, lists, events and perhaps small personal digressions. In the full calculation of its substance it would be made of the same things, but it would be a fundamentally different text, fulfilling fundamentally different aims, through a different system.

To argue one must reason and analyse and abstract. To reason, analyse and abstract, one enters the realm of scientific, systematic thought, and so the battle for the humanities always takes place on “enemy” ground. Is always a defensive battle, for it cannot argue in its own tongue in its enemies court. In the jury of sciences, the Humanities have no case. They cannot argue for their lives. They can only be. The mute appeal insensate to the incurious and unread. They are not about attaining goals and only partly about choosing which goals to attain and how. The main and primary essence of the Humanities is the life, colour, emotion, distinctiveness and very texture of human life. It is like a pencil asking a pot of paint; “So, what exactly do you do around here?”

What Barzun is trying to do is to imbue meaning. To do this he must analyse and understand, even argue within himself. But this is not a work of analysis, or argument. His book is personal, human, tragic, as much an intellectual biography of Jacques Barzun as a book of History. It is a pot of paint. It is high art.

High off Barzun’s Supply

This is a book that makes you want to buy more books. (I bought three; in total, nearly equalling its length on my shelves, and that was with active repression of my biblio-Id).

Barzun mentions many of them, not only as events, or parts of a list, but as streams and forests in his vast geography of time – a sense of pastoral exploration and personal connection with this book or that; “oh over here, behind this small war, is a hidden genre not many have seen”.

Tried to control myself but as a direct result of Dawn and Decadence I purchased;

The Book of Common Prayer; its often claimed that the KJV Bible had the greatest single impact on written and spoken English – Not So! Says Barzun. The KJV was always odd and pseudo-archaic, was designed to be so from the start. The book you actually want to read is Cramners Book of Common Prayer – read from the pulpit every Sunday for 400 years, this is the text that really binds and influences modern English Prose.

Hazlitt – Selected Writings; “… out of favour today because it follows no system, lacks a jargon, and affords pleasure when read. How can it be “rigorous”? It is “impressionistic.” These and other strictures must be understood as part of the competition between art and science. To be up-to-date and acceptable nowadays, any mental activity must use principals couched in special abstract terms and forming a system. What is poured into the mould other than impressions drawn from the work is not stated. But one has only to read Hazlitt without preconceptions as to what he ought to do to see that he is both rigorous and exhaustive. His practice is to describe and define and describe again, adding a line, a touch, developing the complete image. You see a draftsman, a painter at work. He persists and insists that you shall see the way he perceives – not that he is trying to persuade you of an idea, only to make you as good a reader as he is. And that means one who not merely knows more than the careless or unguided but enjoys more.” Halzitts was also amongst the best of all the reviews of Spencers ‘The Fairy Queen’, back when I was reading the whole thing.

Flaubert - The Temptation of St Anthony; I knew well of Salambo, thanks to Noisms, but imagine my utter WRATH when I discovered in Dawn that Flaubert had written a hypnogogic dream vision novel about St Anthony in the desert, then his shitty realist friends had dumped on it, so he had burnt it! I nearly threw my soul across the room. Thankfully, a page or so later I discovered that later on he had re-written it, better. I was so happy I bought a copy.

The Upset West

But think of the weight, and of what just happened. I bought Dawn to Decadence, read it, and was so inspired that I bought a handful, a pittance, only a trickle of the huge number of mentioned, reviewed, discussed imagined and considered books in that great meta-book. My shelf of things to read.. did not go down at all.

Barzun straight up spent nearly an hundred years reading and writing, across multiple languages. He has read the European canon. How many other people can or could do the same? Few. The weight of books I will never read, of arguments I will never be able to counter, (as I have not read the source), of ideas I will never share, nooks left unexplored. There is too much and the very weight of such knowledge makes Dawn both a gift and a burden.

Dawn like a solid brick of compressed gold leaf, each leaf inscribed with fine verse, which smacks you right in the head. It hurts, it’s an assault, you may be bleeding, it’s too heavy and will take untold time to unpeel these layers like volcano-baked scrolls and work out what they said, it also seems to have been wrapped around a small core of spite, however, it is ALL GOLD, and now ALL YOURS.

As with Barzun, so with the West. One deep theme of Dawn, is European culture having a fucking meltdown due to how much of it there is. Dawn is both a diagnoses of that but also an expression of it.

Dawn begins around the end of the ‘Middle Ages’ when Luther phones Erasmus and tells him; “Those things in the distance aren’t small, they are very far away. Now start the Renaissance!”

The world made sense. Then we began to investigate it. Our philosophy was already orientated

to a grand source of values outside this world, and sometimes in conflict with it. The rituals and bureaucracy of Confucius were not enough, polytheism was not enough, neither the Hero cult of perceived barbarism. The West slowly put less faith in God, but still sought something outside itself - from then, increasingly, the question in art and science, (originally not far apart), was Nature. Nature delivered, in spades, but not the thing we want; the secret of what is good and bad and how to tell - we had to work it out for ourselves.

The West became upset. At some point, Barzun would probably say the very end of the 19C and definitely by the Great War, the West had become troubled by itself. "Western Civ Has Got to Go" has roots not just in the 60s, but deeper in the birth of modernity. There is a kind of psychic anguish to the Western Mind which no degree of material knowledge or land conquest can fix. We are chasing something. More - we labour under the weight of European achievement. There is a lot. Records have been kept. It’s hard to live. We cannot measure up.

A subdued theme of Dawn, but at the end in its final chapters, the main theme, is the West slowly turning, and then revolting, against its own history and high culture, from which Barzun predicts a bright dark age; lots happening, but death for culture and the soul. He is writing Dawn, not for the present, but for a deep future, long after this bright-dark age, when elements of culture he respects might be born again. This is a book written for the Library in Name of the Rose, (itself written by someone who had ‘read the canon’), though hopefully it wont burn down this time and will be rediscovered later.

Blind Spots

Because this is a book about everything, Barzun may have got a few bits wrong, here and there. Many educated reviewers who know a bit about their subjects remark that they disagree with Barzun, often in implication, sometimes in fact. Well, its unavoidable if you are going to just keep writing, and even necessary, and by Barzun’s standards, good, as it makes the text more human and gives you something to argue against.

A key element is that Jacques is a Pure Boy. He has no dirty mind, he is not a window-creeper or eavesdropper, let alone a pervert, deadbeat dad, race cultist, arms dealer, drug addict or megalomaniac. But he is writing often about people that are these things, and, being pure and decent, he either leaves these elements out or doesn’t know about them at all. This means there is a strand or channel of history he does not discuss, which makes his picture incomplete, and leads to surprises and astoundment.

We hear much of Rousseau, but nothing about the five children the great educator abandoned to the orphanage. We hear of Rimbaud, but not the African gun-running. Barzun reluctantly admits the Dark Ages might have happened if you insist on calling them that. Nietzsche receives a good report but his incel vibe gets no mention.

This perv-blindness makes WW1 more of a surprise than you would expect.

It is only through the eyes of Barzun and as part of this grand story that I see how utterly apocalyptic, transformative, unusual and disastrous the Great War was, along with the Second World war, here even more evidently, just a savage sequel. It’s so much worse when you are directly involved in the story of Europe and have seen all these little nations grow up and fight a bit - from a cultural perspective it is annihilation and the death of a World, and madness, a derangement of the intellectuals seemingly coming out of nowhere.

But it would take Barzun to find this such a genuine surprise- for he is a pure boy. There is (relatively) little here about the growing race cults, Germanys low self-esteem meltdown, (the Kaiser “worked for peace”??), nothing about the savage little wars, sometimes of extermination, which had marked the borders of the European diaspora, and little about the transportation, mutilation, rape and murder of several millions of Africans.

True, from the perspective of a history of European high culture, maybe there is little to say about these things, but only by not thinking about them can you genuinely be surprised by the Great War. Tell a Nigerian prisoner, or a Native American, or a Balinese lord, or a Tasmanian Aboriginal or Australian Aboriginal, or an Emu, that the whites have started machine-gunning and massacring each other in great heard. I doubt they would be very shocked to hear it.

Barzun is not stupid, weak or deluded, but he is fine, and crucially, not a creep or a weirdo. Creeps and weirdos are not surprised when the dark self gets its dick out and starts ejaculating bullets.

He is a child of the Church and the haves to the bone. Genetically French-Catholic, even if not that French. The one things he kept in common with the French 20C pederast-left is a deep disenchantment with Anglo supremacy and especially the effects of Demotic Life on cultural life. In its aesthetic, its structures of power, the art it encourages, its fashion, relationships, the feel and texture of society, he really does not vibe with it at all. The leftists react with Marxism and wokery, two things that have little in common apart from their anguished superior alienation. Barzun goes deep into reaction.

The Garden Stroll

One of the greatest pleasures in Dawn is the wandering, strolling pointing out and interest in themes and genres, writers and artists, otherwise ignored, or just utterly forgotten, except for Barzun. There is much, of which, nine fragments here;

1. Burning Instruments

"It is only fair to add that music in the Renaissance had its enemies, some merely censorious, some radical. Among the latter, Savonarola was prince. His bonfire reduced to ashes all the instruments he could collect."

2. The Commonwealth Of Oceania By James Harrington

"Oceania is a republic whose instigator resigns after he sees it well established. it has a written constitution, a legislature of two houses, rotation in office, and a president elected indirectly, as in the later Constitution of the United States, by a secret ballot of all citizens."

3. Cartouche

"An innovation, an idea with a very great future, made its appearance at this time. A very young man named Cartouche, trained as a soldier, gained immediate renown for his daring and success as a thief. He was arrested, escaped, and next invented the role of mastermind in crime. He organised bands of fellow professionals, male and female, recruiting even young noblemen who had talent and inclination. At a dinner party, a man who had been robbed on the way recognised the pair of practitioners among the guests. Cartouche was soon a hero to the populace. Adept at disguise, he was able to hold his own in good society. He headed a delegation to greet the Turkish ambassador and relieved hi of the gifts intended for the court. While one band was working in Paris on the foreigners about to invest in the Mississippi scheme, another robbed the mail coach from Lyon that carried treasure."

4. On The Romance

"One of the attractions of the genre was its length, which guaranteed pleasure. The most highly prized in the mid-17C were the narratives of Madeleine de Scudery, two of which were 20 volumes each; her trifling ones ranged from four to eight." ....... "But to enjoy them now one must be a practiced skipper, for what has denied all these works permanent shelf life is the long stretches between oases."

5. Political Ability

"To govern well requires two distinct kinds of ability: political skill and the administrative mind. Both are very rare, either in combination or separately. The former depends on sensing what can be done, at what moment, and how to move others to want it. Anyone who has served open-eyed on a committee knows how many "good ideas" are proposed by well-meaning members that could not possibly be carried out, because what is proposed consists only of results, with no means in sight for getting from here to there. After serving on a local government body, Bernard Shaw guessed that perhaps 5 percent of mankind possess political ability."

6. Equality

"There is but one conclusion: human beings are unmeasurable. It follows that equality is a social assumption independent of fact. It is made for the sake of civil peace, of approximating justice, and of bolstering self-respect. it prevents servility, lessens arrogant oppression, and reduces envy - just a little. Equality begins at home, where members of the family enjoy the same privileges and guests receive equal hospitality without taking a test or showing credentials. Businesses, government, and the profession assume equality for identical reasons: all junior clerks, all second lieutenants, earn so much. In other situations, as in sports and the rearing of children, equivalence based on age, weight, handicap, or other standard is computed so as to equalise chances. That is as far as the principal can stretch."

7. Imagination

What links myth with literature is the Romanticist faculty par excellence, the Imagination. As we saw, the faculty regained resect, but the world remains ambiguous. Coleridge pointed out that it is not mere fancy; little effort is needed to put together in thought bits and pieces of experience - say, a talking animal. To imagine is not to fashion charming make-believe. But it takes imagination to write a fable in which the talking animal satirizes with insight and wit some feature of society. Out of the known or knowable, Imagination connects the remote, reinterprets the familiar, or discovers hidden realities. Being a means of discovery, it must be called "Imagination of the real." Scientific hypotheses perform that same office; they are products of the imagination."

8. Novels, Balzac And History

"The sense of 'how things go' presupposes that people and their habits, speech and costume vary wonderfully from place to place and time to time. Change is seen to come in curious ways from the interaction of leader and led, coupled with accident and coincidence. History reads like a novel and a novel is a history - almost."

9. Romanticism

".. in Romanticism thought and feeling are fused; its bent is toward exploration and discovery at whatever risk of error or failure; the religious emotion is innate and demands expression. Spirit is a reality but where it is placed varies and is secondary: the divine may be reached through nature or art. The individual self is a source of knowledge on which one must act; for one is embarked - egagé, as the 20C Existentialists say. To act, enthusiasm must overcome indifference or despair; impulse must be guided by imagination and reason. The search is for truths, which reside in particulars, not in generalities; the world is bigger and more complex than any set of abstractions, and it includes the past, which is never fully done with. Meditating on past and present leads to the estimate of man as great and wretched. But heroes are real and indispensable. They rise out of the people, whose own heart-and-mind provides the makings of high culture. The errors of heroes and peoples are the price of knowledge, religion, and art, life itself being a heroic tragedy."

There is more. Much much much more, from a brief pen-portrait of a mid 20C humourist who wrote several books in a cod Irish brogue (“the equal of any humourist since Twain, and utterly ignored”), to the forgotten creatives of Napoleons Empire, always in the shadow of the Giant and tainted by his tyranny, to the fallen world of Stephan Zweig (who you will remember from ‘The Great Budapest Hotel’, to great tranches on music that I didn’t have a strong intuition for, (did you know there was a universally applauded period of English madrigalists?) William James inventing ‘stream of consciousness’ (I had to work hard not to buy any of his books). Barzun is a cornucopia, its his most engaging, honourable, life-giving but also frustrating qualities. This is a book written out of love. Literally a romance.

The West and the Rest

The thought occurs that to say anything meaningful about the 'West' it would help to compare it to literally anywhere else. This, in detail, we cannot really do. The equivalent peninsulas, half-continents and archipelagos, each for different reasons, fail to put out.

India, ever-absorbed in Big Loops of Being, didn’t write down much.

China did write a lot of stuff down, but every now and then, (recently; Mao), would burn the lot and re-write memory (which sounds nutty but if we look at the difficulty the West has had in living with its own memories, maybe there is a point to it).

South America – we melted its gold tongue.

The Rest of South East Asia is hot, wet and surrounded by sea, and any land with all those things will find it hard to hold a deep written history – the rocks will crumble and be overgrown; the rest; rot.

Barzun talks of the themes of Europe. Are they simply human themes written in a specific way? It is hard to say. We will have to wait for some kind of assembling-super-robot ultra-mega-mecha Barzun.

Goes Off On One At The End

At almost any point in Dawn, Barzun seems in love with history but vaguely annoyed that it has happened. He loves the world he describes but there is always pain and loss, offset, for him, by whatever funky new cultural stuff these penninsularies are getting up to now.

This fades towards the end of the 19C, staggers around the Great War, and collapses utterly when coming into modernity. There is a horror to being Jacques Barzun, which is that he was raised in a cultural time machine, a direct expression of a culture that was slowly perishing even as he was born. It is because he is this; a man from the time machine, that he can come forth and bring us wonders and lay out the rich incredible tapestry of the last 500 years before us, to reawaken the dreams and passions of our forgotten past and let us briefly walk amidst the ghosts of our ancestors. Also because of this, he must have been, intellectually if not socially, an inestimably lonely man - he reminds me of Gildas, the Welsh priest who wrote one of a few scraps of record we have from the British Dark Age - a list of the failings of his people and their doom and how they let him down. Barzun is a bit like that, a lone Priest, echo of a lost culture, sitting out on a rock watching a dark age rise and coping his tits off about it.

He is not wrong just not completely right. He doesn't talk about popular music, cinema, (good) television, comics, games - well they are utterly alien to him and so irrelevant. He is barely aware of Science Fiction and Fantasy, but even if he were could he actually bring himself to like any of it? Maybe Gene Wolfe - as catholic, complex, and full of difficult mysteries and subtle thought.

High culture should be no more elitist than science, and probably less elitist than the high sciences of mathematics and physics. More people can probably understand an opera than can easily learn calculus. But it certainly feels more elitist, and the rule of High Culture seems to mesh more neatly with and spring more rightly from, an older, more hierarchal, more conservative culture , while science, despite its deep difficulty, and the rare and elite nature of its finer practitioners, gets along broadly happily with the Demos and the Demotic, while Barzun could not. He hates modernity and hates being stranded here, alone, which, I suppose thankfully for him, he no longer is.

The Long Quote

I opened with the question of what Dawn actually is, and if or how it could be defended in the Court of Reason and Analysis. What is the book for? And can it even be regarded in those terms?

Primarily; no, it should not be regarded in those terms at all.

However, Barzun being Barzun, he has at least considered the question of analysis, of ‘teachable lessons’, of things to be gleaned, which, while not at all the main point of Dawn, (it is not an argument), he considers what its arguments might be;

[This is long, its why I put it at the end.]

"Not a science and not a philosophy, history is bereft in an age like ours, which wants at least theory when science is not attainable. Can a case still be made for Cinderella? One line of advocacy might be that even if history were simply a story recited in various versions, it would be worth having as a vast mural full of action and colour. But as pointed out earlier, when presented by a thinking historian, history does more: it shows patterns that recur with a difference, dramas in which one follows exposition, complication, and denouement, while continuity in aims suggests themes. In all these ways knowledge of man is enhanced. History moreover includes energetic lives, no two alike, that show creatures as characters.

These elements need no theory to earn respect. And a further possibility exists. At times in the present work, the narrator threw in the remark; "This is a generality." The dictum meant that a conclusion just reached applied mutatis mutandis to other broad ranges of fact. These fruits of reflection, like history itself, are interesting as well as useful; here is a round dozen to show how scanning the last five centuries in the West impresses the mind with types of order:

- An age (a shorter span within an era) is unified by one or two pressing needs, not by the proposed remedies, which are many and thus divide.

- A movement in thought or art produces its best work during the uphill fight to oust the enemy, that is, the previous thought or art. Victory brings on imitation and ultimately Boredom.

- "An Age of ---" (fill in: Reason, Faith, Science, Absolutism, Democracy, Anxiety, Communication) is always a misnomer because insufficient, except perhaps "An Age of Troubles," which fits every age in varying degrees.

- All historical labels are nicknames - Puritan, Gothic, Rationalist, Romantic, Symbolist, Expressionist, Modernist - and therefore falsify. But "renaming more accurately" would be effort wasted. Coming from diverse minds, it would re-introduce confusion. All names given by history must be accepted and opened up, not defined in one sentence or divided into sub-species.

- The historian does not isolate causes, which defy sorting out even in the natural world; he describes conditions that he judges relevant, adding occasionally an estimate of their relative strength.

- Neither of these propositions is true by itself; "Ideas are the product of society." "Social change is the product of ideas."

- The denial just stated applies also to heredity and the environment; great men and the masses of mankind; economic forces and the conscious purpose; and any other pair of commonly invoked coordinate factors. The exact course of their respective action cannot be understood and consequently cannot be stated.

- A class is not a homogeneous group of people marching in step but a sort of labelled platform populated by a continuous stream of individuals coming from above and from below. Once settled, they acquire the common traits.

- The potent writings that helped to reshape minds and institutions in the West have done so through a formula or two, not always consistent with the text. Partisans and scholars start to read the book with care \_after\_ it has done its work.

- In art, influence does take place and when strongest is least literal. When it is literal it must be called plagiarism and the fact should not be concealed by the eminence of the thief.

- In biography, systematic explanation by unconscious motives defeats the purpose of portraying an individual character. It turns him or her into a case, which then belongs to one of the types in the literature of psychology.

- Progress does occur from point to point along a given line for a given time. it does not occur along the whole cultural front, though it may appear to be throwing into shadow the resistant portion. The sciences are no exception.

To these dogmatically stated rules, some modifications or contrary cases will no doubt occur to the student and the reader. That is one use of the rules: to sharpen the sense of difference in similarity. The other is to guide reflections on the facts met with in any account of a past or present scene. Testing a generality makes for precision in remembrance, which is knowing history. To be remembered also is that these twelve are not exhaustive; others might be framed, and few or none may fit times and places other than those which suggested them.”

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On Twitter I brought up the concept of a D&D world with no magic but for 100 magical items and almost all foreign policy and intrigue was about possessing and controlling these items.

This was a very popular concept, especially amongst people telling me that everyone else had invented it first. Which actually came in useful when writing my own list as I could steal from all of the series and games mentioned.

Below is my list of 100 magical items that might define a world. There is no original content in the items themselves. I took them all from common stories, Mythology, Dungeons and Dragons, Hunter x Hunter, Xaiolin Showdown, Brandon Sanderson, Fred Saberhagen, Hugh Cooks 'Chronicle of an Age of Darkness' series and maybe some other places I forgot. The interest is really in the arrangement of the items, their use and the kind of world they suggest.

Reasoning

I selected and edited items based on a few factors, (and my intuition);

Differentiation of Powers

Ideally no two artefacts do the same thing. (in real Mythology there are basically 100+ magic swords that cut really well etc). Sandersons Stormlight Archive has large numbers of artefacts like Swords and Armour that do basically the same things. That gives a slightly different tonality and organisation to the world, lending it more of a material pseudo-historical texture. I wanted to take it in a different direction, with lots of wild possible counters and inventive uses.

Strong potentialities but also limitations

Everything is meant to be very extremely useful in the right situation, but also to be limited. In looking for limitations I tried to make them bound to the item doing specifically one thing well, and only that. Some items have 'refreshes' and none can be 'recharged'. The idea is to create interesting story and adventure possibilities and an interesting extension of the world these items are used in. So we can have a 'City of Golems' for example, where everything is automated by infinite cheap golems, but it all depends on this one, single, artefact, and if that goes missing....

I also initially tried not to use any Monkeys Paw effects [MEPs) where the item inevitably turns back on you as I considered that concept better for narrative than for play, however, in a number of cases I did end up using a slight MPE as I couldn't think of a better limiter. This may have been cowardice on my part.

Generally there are no ‘saves against’ or resistances to a Wonders power. The answer to a Wonder is another Wonder, tactical and strategic thinking about how to limit its utility, theft, careful assassination or just avoidance. They are all ‘singular’ items after all.

Physicality

I think I got all but one thing tied to particular objects, and that one is the Titan power from Attack on Titan where I really wanted people to eat each other. Almost everything else is small enough to be stolen or hidden. It could be taken by an army, or, in the right circumstances, a single thief. I think only one is inherently quite big and hard to move.

Familiarity of Concept

For use in games I wanted everything to be pretty readily explicable. Most of these come from mythology or known fictions, so everyone involved can 'get the basic idea' very quickly. (Also, I am not an infinite fount of ideas.)

Possibilities of strategic use

What does it mean for the world that this power exists, is known, is singular and is attached to an item. If a medieval kingdom had a Palantir, who would use it and under what authority, who would guard it and how? How would the population and nearby Kingdoms adapt to knowing they might be under surveillance, and so on.

The 100 Wonders

There is no magic in this world but for the one hundred items stated below.

1. Palantir

[From LotR, D&D and Myth]

Can see anywhere. The visions are silent.

Better in some ways than a spy satellite as you can direct the point of view. Limited by its singularity, one observer can only look for so much, even if they work in shifts, and by the limitations of, to some extent, needing to know what you are looking for.

More useful to a person with singular desires than to a state, but a state is probably where it is going to end up, in some intelligence department besieged by letters from various departments, guilds and lords demanding surveillance of this or that thing.

There is no 'search' function where you can flip right to who or what you want, so looking for stuff outside of regular areas, like throne rooms etc, where you know people will be turning up, probably won't work well.

Obviously made exponentially more useful if combined with the Demon Eye (below).

2. Girdle of Infinite Strength

[From D&D and Myth]

Grants Hulk Strength.

Body becomes strong enough to handle it, but not immune to any other forms of harm. So you won't break your own bones but might punch off your own skin, and can still be cut, burnt, etc.

An overwhelming offensive power, especially since the bearer can leap about, but one you can counter with organisation and mundane means. Massed arrow fire, poison, sticky fire, gas, a swamp etc.

The wielder is probably strapped into a metric tonne of armour only they can wear and uses a massive club so their hands don't explode. State or organised use would make this a kind of Captain America/Siege Weapon/Army Spearhead figure. Someone rulers would control with their family, and with luxury and status.

Like many offensive weapon wielders, you want the holder to be stupid or narrow minded enough to control but not so stupid they can be used in intrigue against you.

3. Precognition Stone

[Not sure but Hitogami fom Mushoku Tensai has a form of this power]

Holding the stone gives clear, precise and accurate visions of that persons future only.

The future-visions run in real time and can't be sped up but you can skip crudely back and forth. It doesn't tell you how precisely to avoid bad futures, but presumably common-sense solutions will work, this isn't intended to be a monkeys-paw inevitable fate deal where you trying to avoid the future creates it.

Vastly dangerous in the hands of a King, General or Master Strategist. Someone with a lot of centralised power who receives and puts out a lot of information. Simple fear of this stone in the hands of a general or ruler would absolutely terrify the shit out of all nearby polities. Would you dare go to war with a guy who has the Precognition Stone?

A sufficiently competent or ruthless leader, like a Borgia or Napoleon, would probably end up a world-Emperor with this thing. Then it would stick to the role and position, and become itself a cause of conflict.

Of course the fear of a Precognitive foe might be more powerful than the stone itself. On the other hand; a single person, even a powerful one, can't take care of everything or watch their own timeline all the time. The fear itself would impel others to oppose them.

4. Cup of Resurrection

[From Myth]

Brings the dead back to life.

You need at least a some bones and generally the more body you have and the better its condition, the better. Bones will take a full draught to regenerate. Pour the liquid in the cup over the bones and everything grows back, the person restored to their pre-death condition. Cup renews its power each day. A cupful will resurrect one Skull or maybe 20 recently deceased bodies. (Or remove this limitation if you want to see what happens in the world.)

As Star Wars told us, 'No-ones ever really gone'. Now this is verifiably true, but what happens when a limited number of people, realistically about 10 a day, can be resurrected, but only in one particular place?

Suddenly, finding the bones of, for example, Jesus, is a much bigger deal. Kings and Emperors can ensure their reign, to an extent, but the cup doesn’t reverse age, or heal disease, and only fixes wounds as much as needed to get someone back on their feet. If someone has a terminal disease or is just very old, repeated use of this might be like torture.

Like many of these items I imagine either hyper-secrecy, or a massive temple Bureaucracy with very long queues.

5. Pitcher of Eternal Water

[From D&D]

Pours a stream of unending, pure, water.

This seems like a very mid item but I included it because of the incredible necessity and usefulness of water in places you wouldn't usually find it. The Pitcher might enable some forms of exportation of deserts or other places, it might be used to sustain a small oasis city in the middle of the desert, all dependant on this one item.

6. Magicians Bottle

[Hugh Cook]

Imperishable Glass bottle and two rings. Someone wearing the ring and twisting it when within about 5ft of the Bottle can turn to smoke and disappear into it.

Inside the bottle is like a tower or castle of glass, very deep. Its full of rooms and great store houses. You could fit an army in here. Movement and force from outside the bottle does not affect those inside. Max amount of people you can get inside in one go is about 20, otherwise they clog the bottle neck. Horses also don't like it in there as they get stuck.

In Cooks stories inventive uses for the bottles are common, including, in one case, getting into one and being thrown off a castle wall to escape a mob. Control of the two rings is key, and those can be stolen and go missing.

7. Golden Scales

[Hunter x Hunter]

When faced with a two-option choice, these scales will tell you which is better for your future.

It surely won't be long before someone tries 'hacking' this item by reducing a hyper complex situation down to a flow-chart of single choices. Limitation may include that the choice has to be actually instantiated before you, not just described, that the vision of 'better' only applies to one person, and that the scales decide what is 'better'. Which may be you being the only person to escape a battle in which your own side loses, or your wife and child being killed in a carriage accident instead of you.

8. Lamp of Three Wishes

[From D&D and Myth]

Rules equivalent to Aladdin and the D&D version. So not infinite reality-warping power but a lot of power to transmute and move things around combined with the intelligence and creativity of the Djinn to fulfil your desire.

Slight Monkeys Paw if you pose the Djinn incredibly destructive or difficult tasks it might indulge in some resentful compliance. Assume a Gygaxian attitude on the part of the Djinn, with more extreme, difficult and dangerous requests resulting in complications, resentful compliance of massive drawbacks.

Of course if you let others use the Lamp you could achieve a lot, but how do you control them? Probably you are going to hang on to your third wish for as long as possible. The first thing many people are going to ask the Djinn is to steal some other Wonders. At that point, a hunt is on

9. Possible Glass

[Adapted from Hunter x Hunter]

Ask about any hypothetical situation and the glass will show you a 30-hour documentary of the possibilities.

In some ways this is better in terms of utility than either the Palantir and Precognition stone, purely because of it semi-sentient management of possibilities. The other scrying and prediction devices have a more mechanical aspect and so rely on the intelligence, organisation and skill of the user to both direct and manage the scrying, and to understand and transmit what they find. I suppose a lot like real intelligence where nations often have advance warning of things, but can't tell the true and useful information from the vast mass of random or false info coming through at any time. The Possible glass is like having an entire intelligence dept working for you, while the Palantir and Precog Stone are more like single intelligence sources. The glass producing visions that are less perfectly accurate but a lot easier to work with.

The equivalent might be letting George Bush watch a documentary on the Iraq War before it starts. It’s just a possibility but a lot easier to base policy on than a bunch of data.

10. Luck Die

[Hunter x Hunter]

Cursed item. Cannot be abandoned or given away until a skull is rolled. A twenty-sided die with one skull face and 19-star faces. When you roll a star, the next choice or action will have maximum possible luck, but rolling the skull will be bad enough to cancel out all the previous great events.

I tried to limit 'luck' or 'fate' powers as they are extremely difficult to systematise or control in-world. I think this is the only one I left in, and it has an in-built MPE. In Hunter x Hunter the die isn't cursed and that show does a good job of showing how bad actors will systematise its use, keeping slave prisoners and forcing them to make decisions for the group while rolling the die, until it kills them, then moving onto the next.

In a sense that is very OSR behaviour, but I wanted to avoid it in-game. Though obviously feel free to edit that element if you like.

11. Key of Passage

[Elements from D&D]

Will open any lock, door or portal simply by touching them. The user cannot be held; bonds and adhesions will slip off them and they cannot be grabbed. So long as they have the key.

In the hands of an adventurer, an infinite, instant 'Knock' spell that works on anything. In the hands of a Guild or State, most useful in intelligence, but in a sense this is also its most mediocre use. Its most powerful use is the element of 'any', so no matter how great the gate (imagine sieges), or tomb, or if magic from another item has been used to bind - this may be one of the only counters to 'The Great Seal' (below). If you can find the spot something was sealed, or something close and inherent to them that was left behind.

It can also open the door to 'The Secret Room', if you can find it.

Becomes insanely dangerous when combined with The Ring of Shadows, or the Ring of Gyges.

12. Wand of Ten Hearts

[From Hunter Hunter or Xaiolin Showdown, can't remember which.]

User can manipulate ten (total) emotions in ten (total) people, but can't change anyone emotions towards themselves.

i.e.they can make ten people fall in love, or force one person’s personality to be nearly what they desire, controlling ten of their emotions. You can't re-alter someone’s emotions without them being in line of sight and close. So if you set someone’s anger to high and they leave your presence, they are going to stay like that.

Consider adding a cost in ‘slots’ by focusing single emotions on particular objects. But I kind of already hate slots. Maybe just say ten separate emotions in ten people and that’s it.

13. Favour Cushion

[Hunter x Hunter]

Seat someone on this cushion, and they will do one thing for you, so long as it is within their capabilities.

The opportunities for stealthy use and the infinite possible uses with no recharge needed and no limitations except getting someone to sit on the cushion are great. Will probably end up belonging to a mafia/Borgia guy or some great merchant. If people know you have it, that’s a problem, so subtle use is essential.

14. Death Stone

[Hugh Cook]

Hold it for more than five seconds and you must use it or die. Every material thing more complex that water or air within a 500 meter radius is disintegrated. Safe zone at the centre has a 2 ft radius around the stone. 1 week recharge time.

It’s a nuke but you have to make yourself vulnerable to use it, are vulnerable after using it and if you use it in an emergency, you are going to kill most of your allies. In Hugh Cooks stories this is combined with the 'The Wizards Bottle' to great effect.

15. Death Note

[From the Anime of the same name]

Write someone’s birth name in this and they die, their last words will be your name and location.

Mild MPE added. Infinite uses but, unlike Kira, you are going to get famous fast, so you better hope you know the accurate, birth names of everyone around you, and everyone who opposes you.

The Death Note would add massively to the power of a stable Bureaucratic state, and might be a manageable power if it was used 'lightly' or at least according to some kind of law. But its nature would incline the user to over-use and those around them to rebellion. It also doesn't help you when a horde of Mongols turns up outside your door and you don't know their birth names. Or against a masked man who has broken into your house.

When put against the power of someone like a Chinese Emperor, the Death Note seems a lot less magical and consequential - the Emperor already is a Death Note. If they have your details, they can order your death, with only the same possibilities of revolt and coup as would challenge any Emperor.

In the hands of a terrorist or idealist though, super interesting.

16. Death Boat

[Hunter x Hunter]

A little silver boat, write a letter to any dead person and put it in water, it will sail away, returning in a day with an answer.

Even if you only write a letter a day and with the proviso that the dead are not compelled to tell the truth, or be verbose with strangers, any more than they were when they were alive, this would still make you a master of History, and the 'real' Death Boat probably belongs to a great University. Either that or another intelligence department.

17. Metabeast Cage

[Can't remember where from, sorry.]

This golden cage contains a curious creature. If released it can be commanded to transform into any creature, living, dead, or imagined in myth.

(But not ones with no known name or title, i.e. you can't just make one up). It can be verbally commanded. It has to hear you or be in physical contact with you to apprehend the command.

The creature is tame, so far as its nature accords, to the holder of the cage. I.e. it won't directly harm them in most cases, but isn't necessarily commensurate to command, unless that is already the creatures nature. If you make it into a horse, they are already tame so it should be rideable and quite commendable. If you make it into a Tiger, it probably won't eat you and will hang around you, but if you are both trapped in a cave or something, it will eventually eat you, as that is its nature.

You can make a Dragon or Godzilla. But while it is a Dragon or a Godzilla, it will act with the customary independence and wrath of those creatures, just not deliberately directed directly at you.

18. Butterfly of Gold

[Hunter x Hunter]

Whomever owns this butterfly, their direct blood descendants will prosper in matters of money.

Interesting in that it applies 'to descendants' and doesn't mention the owner themselves, and in being a general monetary prosperity hack, without any drawbacks, MPEs or mention of non-monetary effects.

A rare nearly-completely beneficent Artefact. Just hope your children are kind and strong enough to protect you if/when people find out you have it. If you hate your kids just sell it to someone who doesn't.

I can see this changing hands as part of a great dowry or an alliance between houses or nations, then someone steals it and a hunt is on!

19. Vengeance Play

[Hunter x Hunter]

A set of puppets, and a performance. One person watching the complete performance can name their wrong and fate will take revenge on the wrongdoer in exact proportion to the wrong done.

Another Fate power which I try to avoid, but too much fun to leave out. The Performance should be generally known but the Puppets may be separated and particularly vengeful souls might be looking for the full set. Both wrongdoers and the vengeful will be after them all, and of course, someone can be both a wrongdoer and a victim. Imagine if the Borgias found out about these.

Honestly maybe I need to write a Jacobean Giallo Anime about just such a plot right now.

20. Key to the Secret Room

[Basically the TARDIS]

Whomever has the key can use it with any door that has a lock and can enter 'the secret room'. This is about 20ft by 20ft and well-furnished. You may close the door from the inside and exit through any other door in the world. Focusing in on a particular door is a skill and benefits from knowledge of where you are going.

21. Tongue of Tongues

[May have made this one up.]

This eats the users tongue when put in their mouth. They can speak, read and understand any language or code. When pulled out, the users tongue does not grow back.

In most games of D&D multiple languages play relatively little part as they are hard to manage during play. If you are doing it semi-realistically, then there will be long periods where only one or two PCs speak the local language and the rest will have to use them as translators, and irl people gradually stop bothering.

In an actual game, things like magical languages, animal languages and codes and cyphers come up more often.

22. Crown of Control

[Adapted from Hunter x Hunter]

Everyone in the same building as the wearer will obey its current wearers verbal commands, so long as they are in that building.

The ultimate Palace Lord, and, if they want to be, master of Pleasures, but intensely vulnerable to anything outside the Palace, including knocking it down, setting it on fire, or just sending in assassins while the wearer is asleep etc. This is Pretty much Louis 14th in Versailles. Super strong if you have the subtlety and political acumen to use it wisely, very fragile otherwise, or once its counters are known.

23. Aegis Ultima

[From Myth, D&D and Brandon Sanderson]

This plate mail armour protects against all standard weapons and common forms of attack.

You can still napalm them and set them on fire like a tank, or tie them up. If the Hulk-strength guy punched this guy they would go flying and bounce, but would still be fine after that. If the Hulk-strength guy put them against a rock and punched them, they would break their hand or weapon, but the armour wearer might feel some of it. The armour does have gaps - you need to move and see out.

24. Excalibur

[From pretty much every Myth]

This sword cuts through anything. Does it cut through the invulnerable armour? There is actually a Chinese folk story about a guy trying to sell stuff based on the same premise but yes, this is one of few things that will.

In IRL myth pretty much every second artefact is a sword/club/spear/mace that wrecks everything it hits. Here I have allowed only a few and only one that explicitly cuts everything. Supremely dangerous in a single fight, but of course, insanely vulnerable in a battle - this guy is getting filled with arrows day one.

Combine the Aegis Ultima, Strength Belt and the Excalibur for one of Brandon Sanderons super-knights from the Stormlight Archive, but he goes into quite a lot of detail about various possible practical counters including massed fires, swampy ground, drowning, fire etc

This small clade of direct-damage combat oriented artefacts are the most powerful and charismatic, in a story or a single adventure, but over time and a larger scale, they are really just force multipliers and status symbols. Even combining the three into a super-knight, you have an asset that can take nearly any ground, but how can they hold it? And even so, counters can be devised. An ultra-powerful but still vulnerable spearhead which your army will come to depend on to win battles, and which is still dependant on the personality of one person. You can see how, just with Captain America, experienced Generals would be unimpressed with this potentially dangerous but singular and unstable, un-systemisable, weapons system.

The World of Wonders works better if played for a while, with coherent and intelligent factions that think and learn. It wouldn’t be very good for a single or small number of adventures. But I will go more into that if people want a second post on that.

25. Silver Hippo

[Adapted from Hunter x Hunter]

Once every six months, this hippo poops out a quicksilver pill. This pill reduces the effects of aging by one year.

All life/immortality pills in this world come from this Hippo's bum. Even a single pill can cost a lot. The Hippo can maintain two people at their current age, make one person younger, or keep one person at their age, with a massive profit from selling the pills.

Initially I had a much stronger ‘Grail’ type item with less limits, but eventually I went back to the original Hunter x Hunter pill concept. I just really wanted immortality pills, they would add so much to a game.

26. Crystal Philtre

[Adapted from Arthurian Myth]

The Philtre decants drops of love potion. Drops lose their effectiveness in about an hour. A single drop causes someone to fall in love at first sight, to the exclusion of all others, eternally.

There is no real pro-social use for this. If you think about it, it’s one of the more monstrous things on the list. Its social and personal effects would be horrific if someone went on a spree with it.

27. Goose that lays Golden Eggs

[From Folk Tales]

(I originally got the Gooseonomics very wrong, basing my estimates on the fecundity of a Canadian Goose during laying season but expanding that year-long. These are the revised figures;)

Average yearly fecundity of a White Italian Goose - 50

Assuming an average egg volume of 150cm squared.

150cm squared volume of gold is about 2,900 grams.

That weight times the annual number of eggs; 145,000 grams.

So, only 145 kilos of gold, about £821,000.

Very rough estimate but we may be mining as much gold-per-person as we were in pre-industrial times, so assume its value is roughly equivalent.

So, enough to make one a very rich person, or a meaningful addition to a business or Noble House, but not consequential on a national or global level. A medium treasure then.

28. Night Jade

[From Hunter x Hunter]

A jewel. When danger is about to befall its owner, it will deflect it to someone else.

This is pretty much perfect as it is. Contains its own MPE and makes the wearer near-invulnerable, at the expense of being despised by those around them. I wonder what Greek philosophers would have made of this as a thought experiment instead of the Ring of Gyges. You can be completely safe, but at the expense of anyone close to you and the opinion of society as a whole.

The stated rules don't indicate what happens when there is nobody nearby. So probably you need to keep others around.

This thing would be widely despised in the World of Wonders. Probably there are street insults in every language based on it. A traitor is probably called a 'Nightjade'.

29. Sage's Aquamarine

[From Hunter x Hunter]

Its owner will have many intelligent friends and keep those friendships for their entire lives.

Unaltered from the original. Probably one of the subtlest and, along with the Butterfly of Gold, one of the most clearly beneficent Artefacts. Not very impressive from an immediate tactical position but imagine it as a long term force multiplier for someone with political, cultural or military power. A basis of Kingdoms but also of Cultures. How many intellectual and moral revolutions will have come from this stone?

30. Roaming Ruby

[From Hunter x Hunter]

The owner of this ruby will gain immense wealth, but will never be able to remain in the same place for more than a week.

Unaltered. 90% of adventurers are not seeing the downside here. Your insane wealth might not mean as much if you have to keep moving. Maybe somewhere there is a Palace-caravan moving nation headed by a Mansa Musa figure endlessly on the move.

31. Lonely Sapphire

[From Hunter x Hunter]

The owner of this sapphire will acquire vast wealth, but in exchange, will spend a lifetime alone, forsaken by friends, family, and significant others.

Actually pretty bad for a Player Character to own, but perhaps a good addition to the world. There must always be a 'Despised Prince', someone of incredible wealth but total loneliness. What will they do out of resentment or loathing? Probably evil schemes. Even if they aren’t scheming evilly and are scheming pro-socially, no one will like them for it and will assume the worst.

32. Levitation Stone

[Not sure where this comes from]

A stone about one carat in size that levitates. It can levitate any solid, contiguous single thing

But doesn't improve its structural strength. If you want to levitate a castle with this you will need to design it specifically to maintain itself via tensile strength. Otherwise the most common usage will be a magic ship, (you will still need to learn a way of 'sailing' it.)

Possibly a big enough lump of strong stone could form the basis for a floating island, but the stone still doesn't give you a way to steer it, or a way to come and go from it. Still, there should be at least one floating island in every fantasy world.

33. Staff of Judgement

[Hunter x Hunter]

Raise this staff in the air while calling out the name of someone you want to punish, and calamity will befall the one of you who has committed more bad deeds, the target or yourself.

Another unaltered Wonder.

Is the desire to punish itself a 'bad deed'? How exactly is the Staff Judging these things? Still, a pleasing paradox in that those who would most wish to use this will also be most fearful of actually using it themselves. Likely manipulating 'innocent' people into using it would be best.

Surely the concept of the Staff would have a place in popular culture? A great weapon against conquerors and tyrants - the first thing they would want to do is secure this.

Several of the Wonders have something of an equalising effect which make it hard to hold on to tyrannical power, or even to really piss people off in ruling, which is a pretty necessary form of statecraft. The Staff, the Death Note etc. Those seeking political power would seek these things first, or accommodations with those who control them. Empires and Confederations of Artefacts, and perhaps many secret or masked Emperors - after all you can't take revenge if you don't know the person to revenge yourself against.

34. Sword of Truth

[Hunter x Hunter]

Splits in two anything and anyone deceitful. The sword will shatter when used to cut something true, but will regenerate if stored in its scabbard for one day.

More like a magic wand in the form of a sword, instant death and destruction for anything "deceitful". How will the sword judge these things? Use it again to find out.

For a world-campaign I might reduce the renewal to once per full moon or something.

35. Ring of Gyges

[From myth and philosophy]

Turns the wearers flesh invisible. Nothing else.

What more needs to be said? The only change from the D&D spell is that you can still take actions while invisible. I kept the ‘naked’ aspect from the Invisible Man movies as its just creepier and a nice inherent limiter.

36. Night Gnome Deck

[Hunter x Hunter]

A pack of cards showing 52 Gnomes. While the bearer sleeps the Gnomes come alive and work for them, but they have only the skills and abilities of the Bearer.

Its tremendous imagining how this might work. What if you give it to a master craftsman, if you give it to a courtesan are the gnomes sexy? What if the Emperor sleeps but the Imperial work goes on, in fact more than before, with fifty two imperial gnomes walking the Palace? Imagine taking your orders from a Gnome. What if the Emperor only communicates by Gnome? During the day he watches through his Palantir, or scrys his own future.

37. Crown of ESP

[Adapted from D&D]

User can read the surface thoughts of anyone they can see and focus on within 50 meters.

Massive and terrifying imperial or royal control. But in a way, just an extension of the cloud of illusion that surrounds a ruler. If you were conspiring against the ESP King, you would make damn sure to do so from a distance and that anyone who got close to them had no idea of your true intentions.

38. Ring of Dracul

[Adapted from Bram Stoker]

Whoever wears the ring has all of the powers and vulnerabilities of Dracula, as written in the book of the same name.

All vampires in the World of Wonders descend from this ring. The Vampires they make can make more vampires. Vampires will broadly follow the usual rules about ‘sires’, but if the user loses the Ring of Dracul, they stop being a Vampire and will probably be eaten by the Vampires they created.

So far no-one has willingly taken off the ring.

If you want extra-business, start adding stuff from the Demons of Demon-Slayer, like Demon Blood Arts. They are basically just super-vampires anyway.

39. Amulet of Annihilation

[D&D]

Works as part of a pair with the Sphere of Annihilation, a 2ft wide Black Sphere that floats in the air and which destroys anything it touches.

The amulet gives some control over the sphere, allowing the user to move it about around them, though if it goes too far or out of direct sight control becomes much more difficult and irregular. The sphere will destroy other Wonders though legend, and some scholarship, suggest that if a Wonder is destroyed, another, new Wonder will be ‘born’ somewhere in the world. Other cults and groups disagree and some want to use the sphere to destroy all Wonders forever before annihilating the sphere itself by combining it with the Pearl of Infinity, which they think will free mankind from the terror of the wonders and the Chaos they bring.

40. Mirror of Duplication

[D&D]

Any living being reflected in this mirror will be duplicated down to the smallest detail, resulting in two of the same.

Most often used for replicating prize animals and feeding cities. Duplicates will not produce duplicates themselves, which is the only way of telling which one is the original, in every other respect both believe themselves to be the ‘real’ version. The original can be duplicated as many times as you like, but most attempts at mass-duplication have been horrific disasters. There are entre ethnic groups that still have a genetic signature from mass-duplication events in the past.

41. Architects Harp

[D&D]

Ten seconds of playing is equal to the work of 100 men labouring for one day.

The harp can build but not create the materials to build out of thin air, although you can just take the Harp to a mine or forest and have the 100 worker-equivalents mine or cut the needed things. It depends on human skill in both architectural imagination and music. The better the user is at both, the better the Harp works and the finer the result.

That’s only if you want to create, if you want to destroy, cruder imaginings and discordant music will do.

Temples, fortresses, palaces, great walls and even cities have been made and destroyed by this Wonder. As a result there are way more buildings, tombs and megastructures around the World of Wonders than would be natural.

42. Golem Tome

[Inspired by D&D & Mythology]

The holder can make and maintain clay golems. If the book changes hands the Golems fall apart.

The Golems are expensive and difficult to make and obey commands literally in the simplest way but there is no upper limit to the number of Golems you can make, and you can order the Golems to make more Golems. Only Clay really works.

Commanding a bunch of Golems can get very tricky. You can transfer command to sub-commanders by saying “follow their commands” and they can try transferring command to further sub-commanders, but often the chain of commands can get a bit screwy, so it really depends what chain of commanders your golem has. And if the one with the book is separated from it, they all turn to dust.

43. Fog Vase

[D&D]

This vase contains an infinite amount of Fog.

When decanted it acts as normal fog. I felt this was kinda underpowered but in battlefield and stealth terms, being able to create your own fog is pretty great and several Wonders work on sight.

If you want an ‘improved’ version, try the My Hero Academia Version – the holder can ‘sense’ things in the Fog and move it about, meaning only they can see clearly within it.

44. Compass of Desire

[Pirates of the Caribbean]

Points the way to the holders true desire.

Most useful at sea and if the holder has a simple, clear desire related to an object, person or place. Most humans do not have long term sustained and singular desires like this that will remain the same throughout a long journey but some with extreme personalities, or those in extreme situations, do. If you are ruthless you can try creating such situations.

The compass points to the closest as the crow flies path. It can be used to triangulate, to a degree, if you move around enough and the true desire is stationary enough.

45. Famine Bell

[Inspired by Warhammer & D&D]

Those who hear this bell ring will become so ravenous they eat everything available and will cannibalise each other.

An utterly horrific area-of-effect Wonder, easy to counter if you know its coming and can block your ears, absolute nightmare otherwise. This is kinda worse than the Death Stone. Wouldn’t you rather be disintegrated than eat your friends and family?

This thing would be considered a war crime and keeping it under lock and key would be a responsible act. Unless it goes missing. A good mission for the PCs?

46. Titan Strain

[Inspired by Attack on Titan]

I think this is the only thing on the list that isn’t an object. Instead the quality is carried inside the brain of the user. To gain it, you must eat the current/soon-to-be-former users brain.

Whoever has the Titan Strain can transform into a Titan from Attack on Titan. They are a standard sized one, usually a bit nuts to begin with, but can learn to control it over time. The Titans are insanely strong and resistant, and will heal slowly from nearly any damage, needing only sunlight to do so, as will the current user when not a Titan.

Unlike the anime version it doesn’t have a time limit but also doesn’t prevent natural aging. Some users can develop the ‘Titan Howl’ ability that will transform those nearby who share the bloodline, or who have been infected with its spinal fluid, into ‘mindless titans under the control of the user. No other anime powers.

As in the Anime, you need to cut, bite or rip the nape of a Titans neck, where the original human body is curled, to take it down.

47. Notch-Cutter

[Every Manga by Tsutomu Nihei]

A little handle that emits a beam of light that can cut wood. Dial at one end. Max power can cut through a mountain.

A gravity beam emitter from the works of Tsutomu Nihei. Max setting lasts for a few seconds, emits a pencil-thin beam and has a long, several-day, cooldown period. As a kill-everything beam, it puts it in the same class as the Death Stone. Terrifying aggressive power but can be countered by some other Wonders, and so dangerous, that any use will summon massive, intelligent and organised pursuit.

48. Winged Helm of Hermes

[From myth & comics]

Grants the user the powers of an early, Golden Age Flash.

They can run at just under the speed of sound. They can’t vibrate through solid objects. But they do have the cancellation-of-inertia powers that are the Flashes main benefit. They can cancel the inertia of anything they pick up, and medium objects they interact with, like doors, for as long as they are in contact, but can’t, for instance, throw pebbles at sonic speed. Once they leave the users aura they will only be thrown with natural force. They could pick up and fire ten crossbows at super-speed though.

The wearer must be moving to use the powers and preferably running, only slowing down for relative moments.

49. Demon Eye

[Inspired by Mushoku Tensai]

Can locate any named person or thing if the owner knows their name and/or enough details about them. The eye will rotate in the skull, focusing on the thing, giving an image of its location and a general direction and distance.

This becomes insanely dangerous if combined with the Palantir or the Akashic Record. With the Palantir it adds a ‘search and locate’ function to a tool made challenging by its indifference to the wearers intentions, making it more like a traditional ‘crystal ball’. If used with the Akashic record it turns that Borgesian text into a searchable document; the user can pull whatever info they like from it.

Traditionally all wielders of the Palantir or Akashic record have been on a search for the Demon Eye, but they have rarely been combined, other powers finding the union too dangerous and combining against the holder.

50. Akashic Tome

[Inspired by Mysticism and Borges]

A Borgesian book of infinite leaves containing all knowledge of material things.

Unlike Borges library, the information is not random, but coherent and sequential. If the pages are not physically kept open and the page-turning not carefully controlled, the book will close, or pages whirl and when opened again will be at a completely random point in the knowledge of material things. There is no index or way of finding exactly what you want, except perhaps for the Demon Eye or Lucky Die.

There is a LOT of knowledge of all Material Things. For a lot of it, you need to understand the earlier stuff before you can understand the later stuff, but the book is organised by subject. So hopefully you might hit an early page in a subject you want to know about and can work out enough to keep reading.

Big big big arguments take place in the college of owners about whether to keep reading and trying to understand what they are looking at, or whether to try turning the pages back (more risky that forwards. One group is always accusing another of ‘sunk cost fallacy’ or saying they are ‘wreckers and impudents’. Everyone wants to find the Demon Eye, no one is brave enough for the Lucky Die, even if they had it. Some have suggested trying the tongue of tongues. Some think the Tome itself is a kind of cognitive trap sent to cripple the development of natural philosophy and want to destroy it.

Still, much of the systematically medical and physical knowledge of this world has come from careful painstaking reading and researching based on stuff seen in the Akashic Tome.

51. Golden Finger Gauntlet

[From Xaiolin Showdown]

Freezes any object or person it's pointed at in place.

A well respected counter to pretty much any other Wonder. Of course its only useful as part of a team and with a clear target. Can be easy to get into a Mexican Standoff with another Wonder-user.

52. Grand Seal

[Inspired by myth and comics]

The holder can 'seal' any being or object away in its own timeless dimensional prison. The only natural counter is the Key of Passage and, perhaps, communication with whatever has been sealed by a user of the Astral Pillow.

The seal doesn’t damage what has been sealed in any way. What is kept remains largely timeless, and any new holder of the Seal can release whatever they want. Holding the seal grants you knowledge of what has been sealed. Successive lucid dreams will fill out a kind of ‘library’ of sealed items.

Small things can be ‘unsealed’ from any location, giving the holder a kind of ‘swiss army knife’. Larger and more sentient things, like people or monsters, usually need to be unsealed at the location they were first sealed at. Though possessing fragments or very personal items can increase or obliviate the range.

53. Polymorph Potion

[Inspired by D&D and Harry Potter]

Drips from this Philtre can allow you to transform into the appearance of any other person.

The potion-glass is infinite but the effects of each swig wear off in time and you must keep drinking regularly to maintain the effect.

54. Mother Idol

[Suggested in a Twitter comment]

All lands within a 50 mile radius of the idol will be reliably, but not unnaturally, fertile.

Land and people are the surest form of wealth. This might end up in a desolate land, making it into a liveable Kingdom, or in a fertile one, making it an agricultural super-power. Whoever has it will not let it go. Unless they are a purely export economy, losing the Idol means mass famine.

55. Gae Bolg

[From Myth]

A spear which will hit what it is thrown at.

Line of sight, and a degree of athleticism is necessary. The spear expands barbs in the target and needs to be cut out. It is almost always lethal. Gae Bolg will defeat most normal armour, but not necessarily other Artefacts or thick walls. It can curve a bit, but unlike the spear of vengeance, will not fly magically forever.

56. Lightning Club

[From Myth]

A brutal and primitive stone club. Anyone hit by it will be hit with lightning at the same time.

It does need a storm to work. It can summon storms but they can take from minutes to hours to appear, depending on weather. It also doesn’t work that well underground or in a building.

57. Kite of Aang

[From Avatar, the Last Airbender]

This kite folds in or out of a staff-form. The user can unfold it, hang on to it and fly on winds summoned by the kite itself.

This is as vulnerable as and can be broken like a normal kite. It can be repaired in which case a Ship-of-Theseus effect means the repaired kite has the same powers, but if you use its parts to make two kites, only one will have the magic. It carries one person and needs some skill to use well. It does not protect, in itself, from the rigours of long sky-travel like tiredness, cold and low oxygen.

58. The Twist

[Inspired by comics and One Piece]

The users body can morph like rubber granting Mr Fantastic-like powers.

With practice and skill, user can advance to plastic-man or early-Luffy powers.

59. Astral Pillow

[Hunter x Hunter]

Whoever sleeps on this pillow can send their astral body zooming about while they do so.

Losing the Pillow during sleep means the astral body is lost. Many ghosts are thought to result from this. There are also rumours that Wonders can cut the astral thread or some other magical effects can touch the Astral body.

60. Ring of the Nine Dragons

[From Xaiolin Showdown]

Multiplies the user into as many as nine people, but it also divides up the user's skills and mental prowess among all the clones.

Unless you are an exceptional person, you won’t be producing nine ‘Dragons’, you will be lucky with three idiots. However the rapid creation and absorption of clones for single uses can create a lot of tactical possibilities. Making a double can also be useful. Its not clear what happens if a clone dies or is destroyed, though they do seem to share some kind of vague hive-self, which can be made sharper by intelligence and practice.

70. Spear of Vengeance

[Adapted from Fred Saberhagen]

Can kill any person, demon, or god the wielder wishes, regardless of the physical distance that separates them or the level of protection they enjoy. The wielder must think of their target and throw the spear. The blade will then fly from the wielder's hand and seek out its prey, until it finally pierces its heart. While the Spear can travel any distance in pursuit of its target, it will NOT return to the wielder's hand once it has completed its mission.

Pretty much a perfect Wonder, and largely unaltered from the original. Joss Reynolds stole it for one of his Age of Sigmar books but probably did so by accident. Another ‘Equaliser’ weapon.

71. Ring of Shadows

[Adapted from Fred Saberhagen]

Changes the perception of anyone looking at the owner, making the wielder appear as someone the viewer knows and trusts, and allowing them to move freely wherever they choose.

Largely unaltered from the original. Combine with the Key of Passage and the Secret Room for the ultimate in super-spy Dr-Who adventures! Or live like a rat in a royal court eating from everyone’s table but known to no-one, like that guy who started living in the Google Complex secretly. Or just start breaking dudes out of prison. Or kill a king. Good for stealing other Wonders.

72. Equalising Arms

[Invented, I think]

Sword, shield, mail and helm, they all grow stronger and more potent based on how overmatched the bearer is.

The perfect heroic accoutrement. Consistently take on threats much greater than yourself to gain the near-perfect sharpness and protection of the Arms, but be careful if fighting some random dude as he may just shank you through the paper-thin armour.

73. Ruby of Ramses

[Xaiolin Showdown]

Allows the user to telekinetically move targeted objects.

Telekinesis baby! I am not sure what limit, if any, to put on this. Maybe it’s enough for it to simply be a ‘coherent object’ like the levitating stone, within line of sight.

74. Serpent's Tail

[Xaiolin Showdown]

Phasing powers when held.

A classic from the comics. An excellent defensive and infiltration power, but mainly useful in complex environments and with limited offensive capability.

75. Crown of Morpheus

[Inspired by Myth and comics, possibly also Xaiolin Showdown]

User can lucid dream, enter into the dreams of others and change the substance of their dreams.

A ‘soft’ power, with limited but very very wide applications. Information drawn from dreams will always be a bit squishy, but with no limitations you can torture, seduce, frighten, amaze, whoever you like, for as long as they sleep, and there is no defence.

Unless you fuck with the wrong person and they realise you are doing it, and find out who you are.

76. Staff of Fire

[D&D]

Shoots fireballs. No charges and it does not run out. It does heat up after a while.

The main limitation of ‘Fireball’ in dungeons is the close confines and back-blast. Its main limitation on battlefields will be skirmishers, snipers, commandoes, spies, assassins etc, as well as other Wonders. Its still an utterly mighty battlefield weapon, but of course, it is singular; if its in use over here on a flank or defending a city, it can’t also be over there. So there are strategic and tactical counters, as well as the usual danger of over-reliance common to most offensive Wonders.

77. Veil of Tears

[Invented I think, but generic power set]

The wearer can heal any ills by laying on of hands. They cannot reverse aging but can create a relatively ‘healthy’ old age. The few people consistently healed by the Veil live with acuity and activity to about 110 years old and then perish and die very quickly over a few days.

The veil can reorganise living flesh into ‘health’, but can’t regenerate it. So it can’t heal lost limbs. It also can’t fully amend some full-spectrum genetic disorders like Downs Syndrome, as these things are ‘built in’ to the beings expression of self. Though it can ease negative symptoms and fix minor or less-expressive genetic problems. (This doesn’t really ‘make sense’ by our standards, but no-one using the Veil even knows what Genes are, only that there are some things the veil considers ‘natural’ and some it will change. This conception of ‘naturalness’ doesn’t make perfect rational sense but hey, its magic and will basically do a best-guess when necessary.

Other than that there is no limitation or exchange except for a period of concentration as the wearer lays on hands and a degree of mental fatigue after sustained use.

This is the only ‘true’ healing power I allowed in the list and its power is focused but near total, with no limitations or cost except for its singularity. Like the Cup of Resurrection, I imagine most of the depth, danger and complexity will come from the organisation of living beings around it. It will be regarded as holy in itself and access supremely well-guarded and controlled.

78. Memory Eater

[Men in Black]

A wand which emits a directional red light from one end. Anyone looking into the light during activation will have a certain period of memory utterly wiped. In the immediate aftermath they will be highly suggestable to immediate authoritative and reasonable-sounding instructions about their circumstances. The user can set the memory loss to any length of time. If they wipe a subjects entire memory, they will become a near vegetable. The wand is usually accompanied by two sets of black lenses which will protect against its effect.

79. God Wand

[Myth and Folk Tale]

Tap an inanimate object to bring it to life!

The degree and kind of ‘life’ will be pretty wild and wacky and in most cases quite primitive, becoming more and more complex, coherent and human-like the more like a human the object is. Statues and dolls will usually try to behave with a crude equivalence to whatever their form suggests. Sculpted monsters will act like monsters. The life so given cannot be ‘taken back’ unless the object is destroyed.

It’s rare for the ‘life’ to include and magical or organic powers, the created beings ending up more like complex golems, but rare works of genius can sometimes produce living beings which seem to have the breath of actual life to them and sometimes a feeling of actual sentience in depth, and/or actual magical powers. There are a handful of living sculptures made by geniuses which still exist as products of the wand. Some have demanded, and a few, received, recognition as legal living entities.

Creatures birthed this way are, in a sense, immortal, but cannot regenerate damage, heal or grow, so will eventually be chipped away by entropy. If ‘kept’ very carefully, they can last an extremely long time though.

80. Body-Swapper

[From Konosuba, but likely others]

The swap itself is temporary, but if you kill the other person, it becomes permanent. Hijinks or terrifying immortality beckon.

81. Mad-Stone

[Hugh Cook]

A stone in a lead box. Another container with fifty charms on necklaces. If the box is opened, everyone within 200 meters goes insane, unless they are wearing a charm.

The charms are the real treasure, and over time the possibility of them being broken up, faked, replaced etc is high. But having about fifty makes the Mad-Stone an actually insanely useful weapon of war. Fifty cavalrymen with the Mad-Stone at their head are death to most armies. Fifty men in a castle with the Mad Stone open at its centre are nearly invulnerable.

Counters include theft, the use of non-sentient creatures and long ranged fire.

82. Swan-Ship

[From 'Merlins Ring' by H.Warner Munn]

A metallic super-science ship in the shape of a Swan. The Swan breathes fire.

Can fit as many as a large yacht. Fast safe transport across any sea. An survive near anything the ocean can throw at it and metal skin invulnerable to most conventional weapons. Very beautiful. Main danger is it being stolen if unguarded and if someone works out the secret of getting inside. (There is no key or code.)

83. Chimera Queen

[May have invented but is a common trope]

A rare ‘big’ wonder. But it needs to be to fit the monster in.

A larger than life size brasslike statue of a pregnant woman. Feeding the woman bits and pieces of various animals, along with sperm and enough meat and organic material, will cause her to give birth to…. some kind of living entity.

Whole books have been written about what to put in, the conditions, timing etc, and what will come out. Like other Wonders it is a field of science/alchemy based around one object. Most creatures born of the Queen are sterile, but not all, and some of those can cross-breed with others of their kind or near-relatives.

Most monsters, demi-humans and similar in this world are products of the Queen. Some of the more intelligent demi-human cultures worship her as a creator. Though difficult to move she has changed hands a hundred times over history and been used to exhibit or fulfil all kinds of strange philosophies.

84. Metamorph Stone

[Comics]

The user can morph into an kind of natural animal.

There is a limit on conservation of mass of about 100%, so you can become an animal twice as big or twice as small. You keep your own mind and can change back whenever you wish with no negative effects. The amulet won’t change stuff or clothes so you will be naked.

Probably the most simple and prosaic transformation Wonder. In many cases being an animal of roughly equivalent mass isn’t necessarily that great as humans are quite efficient for the size we are, but flight, natural weapons, bear strength, animal senses, octopus squeezieness etc can all be very situationally useful.

85. Solaris Bird

[From Mysterious Cities of Gold]

A golden Condor-shaped solar-powered gigantic ornithopter.

It can carry the weight of about 20 people max. Has limited auto-guidance and self-repair systems and you need to experiment or be trained in how to use it.

It uses solar energy to levitate and fly, thus only flying during the day. Near sunset, the Condor finds a suitable location and lands automatically.

The ultimate in high-status rides but extremely vulnerable to being stolen as there is no key or lock of any kind. Only the knowledge of use stops someone getting in and making off with it and a lucky idiot could possibly do that. Gets stolen a lot.

86. Talisman of Five Tigers

[Cant remember]

Five friends can wear a talisman each, each friend will have the combined physical and intellectual powers of all.

In fact many of these qualities work on a logarithmic scale so all five are only about three times as intelligent and creative as each. They are each as strong as all five though.

The positive effects only work so long as all are friends. If this is not the case then negative aspects also start combining and replicating across the whole group, so they will be as greedy, impulsive, angry, foolish as all combined as well.

87. Soul-Eater

[From Warhammer 40k]

This spear devours the soul and memories of those it kills, giving them to its wielder.

This can be overwhelming and unpleasant for many people and if they “eat” a strong and experienced soul they can end up with a ‘Baron Harkonnen’ effect where there are significant personality changes and its not clear who is in charge or who the new person is.

Still gives a massive increase in knowledge and experience to those who can handle it. Some get addicted and become utter deranged beasts, no longer anything like their former selves.

88. Spear of Truth

[From Warhammer 40k]

Anyone wounded by the spear is stripped of all illusions, deceptions and self-deceit taken and given a kind of clear self-knowledge usually only granted to philosophers and Saints.

The most common effects of this are mental breakdown followed by either suicide or massive life changes, sometimes for the better, sometimes not.

89. Ash Jewel

[Invented]

The user can transform into a contiguous, sentient, otherwise natural fire.

They need something to burn and oxygen but can otherwise change back whenever they like. They have a limited but not total amount of control over what the fire burns and no specific control over secondary effects like heat or oxygen loss. They can ‘speak’ to a degree with the voice of the fire. In theory this could grant a kind of immortality as the fire is eternal so long as it is fed and some have attempted this, setting themselves up as prophets or gods.

90. Spiral Hat

[From D&D and inspired by Alfred Bester]

User can teleport themselves, alone, with no more gear than half their body weight, anywhere they have been that they remember well.

Small things will be moved out of the way but if building work or landslides have happened they will phase into them and die. Which is how most owners of this item die.

Because it only works for this particular person the wearer is often not well trusted by those in dangerous situations as they can get away from anything quite easily. The hat also makes you look like a tool. People will not invite you into their personal space if you have this.

On the other hand the wearer is usually respected as a messenger or herald, which is often what they end up doing.

Because they are alone, vulnerable and obvious, the wearer is often extremely paranoid. The hat has been stolen many times.

91. Crown of Immortality

[Forget where]

All aging is deferred so long as the crown is worn. Catches up with you when it is taken off.

The ‘Crown’ is only a silver band so its not that much of a nightmare to deal with day to day, but for the few people who are willing to use it extensively, it of course becomes insanely dangerous after a decade or two of youth. The longer it is used generally the more extreme and ruthless the wearer will be to ensure they can keep wearing it. This is not so much a magical curse as a natural consequence of this power and human nature.

The ‘secret immortal’ would be a fun opponent. Anyone smart and capable enough to hang on to this for a long time should be a consequential being.

92. Wolfs Tooth

[Inspired by Mythology]

Cursed item, cannot be willingly removed or taken off. Gives wearer werewolf powers based on classic mythology.

Strong vitalism, instinctual behaviour and loss of internal restrictions. Limited immunity to most disease and most non-silver weapons. Uncontrollable transformation every full moon. The bites of the Werewolf will inflict lycanthropy and the bites of those werewolves will also.

This Wonder is the source of all were-wolves in this world.

If you want to extend of complicate its power, you can have the beast transformed into change to a degree depending on character or culture, producing were-tigers etc.

93. Cauldron of Bounty

[Inspired by Mythology]

This Cauldron contains an everlasting infinite stew.

That’s it.

94. Gorgon Shield

[Inspired by Mythology]

Terrifies all who look upon it.

Natural counter to the Parazonium Banner below and a strong counter to many ‘attacking’ Wonders. Armour and swords won’t protect you from fear. Fog might though. Maybe a bit too similar to the ‘Mad Stone’ but less evil in nature.

95. Elephant Charm

[Inspired by D&D]

Turns into a large, kind, tireless and reasonably intelligent Elephant which will assist the bearer as much as possible.

If you really mess with the Elephant and mistreat it, it will start refusing to transform. Not a super-powerful Wonder but notable for its infinite use and almost no downside. The Elephant is very much not malignant or uncontrollable and asks for nothing except respect and melons.

96. Tornado Kriss

[Xaiolin Showdown]

Kriss which allows the bearer to summon and ride within a Tornado.

There ain’t no limits. This thing is going to wreck everything around it and you will generally not be popular when you come down. You can also only transport yourself. It won’t work indoors. Its also not impossibly fast. It moves at about 40 mph. Faster than a Galloping horse, but not much faster.

97. Dáinsleif

[Mythology]

A bitter toothed sword that gives wounds that never heal. The sword cannot be sheathed without killing a man.

An extremely dark and unpleasant weapon, most useful for the fear it creates, often in the hands of warlords of bandit kings. Also used as a threat in torture. Even small wounds will never heal.

The Veil of Tears may heal such wounds, but legends speak of it only doing so ‘at a cost’, not usually the case for the Veil. The two Wonders are natural counters to each other and the forces that have them almost always end up opposed.

98. Parazonium Banner

[Adapted from history and Mythology]

A banner with crossed daggers. The bearer and all who follow them and can see the banner, are enfolded in an aura of courage.

It’s not quite an ultimate-suicide level of self destructive courage, (unless you already have that dog in you), but a very strong sense of purpose and direction, and the absence of fear. You do have to already genuinely, if only a little, support the banners holder though, and in general the cause it is being wielded for. If you are truly only faking and going along with the crowd, it will have little effect.

The banner has formed the centre-point of many successful armies and in particular, heroic defences, where it can be put up on a tower to be seen by all. But, oh dear, night and fog can obscure it.. (You can light it with braziers at night, not much you can do about the fog.)

99. Māui's Fishhook

[Mythology]

This hook will pull whatever is hooked to it with enough strength to move it.

It seems not to move the entire planet, but if hooked to a piece of underwater land that’s reasonably coherent and is ready to break away, it can indeed pull up islands.

Other than that, you can, for instance, pull a gigantic ship from a tiny canoe, pull an elephant along, pull down a castles walls and so on. The hook and line are (largely) imperishable when in use. Though a few artefacts, like Excalibur, might cut it. More line can always be tied on though, which will gain the same magic.

100. Pearl of Infinity

[From Jujutsu Kaisen]

The Pearl grants the user the ability to extend the distance between things to an infinite extent, taking advantage of Xeno’s Paradox to effectively negate one thing touching another.

This relates only to what they can immediately perceive. The Pearl also grants the user a 360 Spider-Man type ‘Danger Sense’, meaning the usual use is to make themselves invulnerable to physical harm.

More abstruse and abstract powers can be developed from the pearl based on the skill and intelligence of the user.

The Pearl is often considered the ‘natural counter’ to the Sphere of Annihilation and its Talisman.

Phew!

That took a LOT longer than I expected. If people are interested and want me to think more about the World of Wonders as a campaign world, how it might work, adventures etc, leave comments and I will.

Peace!

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It’s difficult to imagine a concept of ‘vestigial intelligence’, of intelligence, as we understand it, evolving in a creature that uses it as we use it, and then persisting even a the creature in question, or its descendants, change shape, form and niche so much that there seems little use for it.

In humans the brain is utterly ravenous, gorging itself on perhaps a quarter of the bodies energy. For something so proportionately hungry to persist, it better be putting out some obviously useful abilities to make up for its cost.

Of course, so far as we know, intelligence has only evolved once on this planet, so it might be too early to be making strong laws about it. A creature might enlarge and change habits, making intelligence less directly useful but reducing its proportionate cost, so it ends up something like an appendix; a philosophical, intelligent creature that really doesn’t have any particular need to be, but is just kinda vibing. Or an intelligence that works on fundamentally different properties, so that it costs less overall, and so persists. Or a life form that is intelligent when it is small and social, but needs that intelligence less as it grows, yet retains it.

The closest thing I can think of is the Law of the Tongue; a group of Killer Whales forming a symbiotic relationship with a group of fishermen in which they herded prey for the Fishermen and were rewarded with the tongues of the prey – which was the main thing they wanted all along. The ritual of the Law of the Tongue seems to have ended with the death of a particular alpha female Orca, increasing the likelihood that it was an expression of intelligence, rather than just a working out of instinct and happenstance into an accidental symbiosis.

Corvids having weird relationships with particular people; recognising them by face, harassing them, or rewarding them; one man reported a group of grows he regularly fed in the park, waiting at his house when he got back from holiday. Somehow they had worked out where he lived, and when he went missing from his regular feeding stop, had gone to his address to see what’s up.

Our understanding of what intelligence is, is very strongly moderated by speech, the manipulation of objects, and complex social relationships. To the extent that if something can’t, or doesn’t speak, doesn’t, or doesn’t need to, manipulate objects and doesn’t have complex social relationships, we would have a hard time saying to ourselves precisely if or how it was intelligent.

Thence we come to the subject of this essay, an analysis of the intelligence of Dragons from a somewhat speculative-evolution influenced point of view.

Curious HabitsObsessive CleanlinessPrey cool when they die, and with that, all the fleas, nits and gribblies that lived on them try to migrate to the nearest warm thing, which is often whatever killed them. Thence; the Mod Predator/Hippie Scavenger dichotomy, where predators tend to look cool while scavengers tend to look homeless. Why? Because predators clean and groom themselves a lot to get rid of the FUCKING FLEAS, while Scavengers arrive after the body has cooled and can support a more rustic drip.

Social animals groom each other. Creatures with fur or feathers bathe, either in water or in dust. (In ‘The Peregrine’ J.A. Barker speaks memorably of the falcons daily, and exquisitely careful baths in a nearby stream before it begins to hunt). Lizards are a bit more basic but even they will bathe for moisture and cleanliness sometimes, and groom their own sensing organs. At the far end of the scale, Komodo Dragons are famously indifferent to whatever is in-between their teeth but even crocodiles have groomer-birds.

What does a Dragons behaviour resemble? A bird, Croc, Lizard or something else?

A Dragons fire would help it deal with many parasites, as would its scales, but it couldn’t rely on those entirely, and would have to take care of its wings, where even a small infection or fungus would be a massive issue.

A Feathered Dragon would likely bathe itself daily, and any period or place of grooming would be one of deep vulnerability. Finding a lair with an equally useful but isolated and secure grooming spot, like an inaccessible mountaintop tarn or glacial stream, might be a key factor in choosing where to settle.

Dragons having subspecies of carrion-eating ‘Grooming Birds’ to eat the bits of raw or burnt meat from between their teeth or spaces in its rear claws, seems like an interesting possibility. One case in which a bird-watcher might be useful is in tracing this rare species; they will likely nest wherever the Dragon goes to groom or bathe itself. If you can find these birds you may be able to find that spot.

Wing ProtectionSomething rarely mentioned in Dragon-Hunting stories is the enormous vulnerability of a Dragons wings. Those wing-bones may be very strong but are still likely the weakest bones in its body. If even a single one snaps, it will likely be unable to fly, or at least fly well.

Its still a big fire-breathing Bird/Lizard thing, but will be much more vulnerable on the ground, not to mention the loss of pride and status caused by loss of flight.

A Dragon is not going to stick around for attritional warfare against anything big or strong enough to damage its wings, nor will it willingly get into tight environments where something can be dropped on it. If it feels like its wings might be damaged it will simply fly away.

Retreat to the air is one of a Dragons most powerful abilities. It can simply leave combat and circle, or just fly off to heal and think, returning at a time or place of its own choosing. This core advantage and willingness to simply run away is not remarked on in Dragon-slaying stories.

Complex BuildsConsidering their intelligence and access to materials, a dragons lair may well have more 'built' elements than we might suppose. Big mountains generally don't have massive caves of the kind a dragon likes at their peaks so the Dragon will need to claw, magic, or craft the holes it wants, and will probably bring up stuff to add; spars of timber etc.

One key element of a Dragons raids might be light yet strong building material that it can carry off. Parts of ships and boats especially, with their lightness but tensile strength, might be favoured.

Though it lacks manual dexterity and its human-level crafting may be a bit rubbish, it has a high intelligence, so its structural engineering would probably be quite good. A Dragons lair might be more like some kind of crazy log-cabin/palace/aircraft hanger built into a partial cave system, rather than just a bare cave. It would at least be able to wall off parts of the cave if it wanted, and would be able to build some kind of nest or platform to sleep on as both stone and gold will absolutely drink heat away from its body.

Strange Psychological VulnerabilitiesBeing largely asocial, singular, very-long lived, highly individual beings, as well as being by our standards, insanely narcissistic, and also having a very high degree of intelligence but, compared to humans, relatively little to do with that intelligence, Dragons may be highly vulnerable to ... queer behaviour and curious states of mind.

The closest things we have to them are Kings, Dictators, top Generals, Catwalk Models and Celebrities. I guess; if Kanye was also a fighter jet, how would he act? Or if General McArthur was combined with Naomi Campbell and an aircraft carrier, how would that act?

Singular as they are, it would be hard to us to judge; just what is 'crazy' for a dragon, but they do have a LOT of time on their own, (in a sense, they are always alone), as well as being magical and living across a much greater range of time, and having senses we don't understand. If the Dragon is seeing ghosts or hearing voices, who are we to say how real they are? Or if it is starting to have some crazy theories about reality - I suppose it might be right? Or if its hoarding twine, or the bones of humans inner ears, or just spends a week staring at a tree or something...

Where exactly does the border of madness lie for a Dragon?

The idea of a genuinely mentally ill, conspiracy theory, Alex Jones/Howard Hawks/Kanye Dragon is utterly tantalising and somehow more worrying than just a regular predictable Dragon. What if it wants to marry a local maiden, and wants an actual marriage ceremony? Or starts acting like something it’s not, like a boar or a mountain? Or if it starts saying its 'The wind' or 'is fire', which generally Dragons say stuff like that all the time but now it’s crossed some invisible kind of Kanye line where it genuinely seems like its disassociating and actually literally thinks it’s 'The Wind', or it’s the Sun. Or what if it gets religion, or wants to join one, or starts talking about Jew-Tunnels hidden under the earth? Wtf do you say when a Dragon starts going on about the secret rulers of the world?

Might Simply Run Away If HumiliatedThe very intense pride of a dragon, obsession with status, and need to occupy the top of a hierarchy, means that if defeated, but not killed, or endangered, publicly humiliated, it might decide to burn everything around it alive and make ruin, but there is at least a reasonable percent possibility that it might just run away, or fly away somewhere very far that no-one has heard of it and either pretend it didn't happen or strew on it for centuries.

If a Dragon just waits long enough it can kill many of its mortal enemies with Time. In a way, they don’t matter much because, to it, they will be gone in the blink of an eye.

Perhaps we can add this to the capricious just-leave aspects of a Dragon that make sense in a pseudo Evo-Spec sense, and in a Fairytale sense, but don’t fit its role in Epic Fiction of a final last Boss and ultimate challenge. Imagined in this new way, they are much more tricksy, capricious, hard to predict, but also much more indifferent; genuinely part of a different world, only somewhat interacting with ours.

Strategy and SymbiosisA dragon can take nearly any ground, but cannot hold it, it is singular and its enemies many. It is a little like an imperial power that rules by a combination of terror, buying off elites and managing the local economy and tech level so it can't get too high, but offers some actual benefits in that at least it occupies the top of the dominance hierarchy and is (hopefully) a relatively stable weapon of mass destruction.

Certainly in the area of a Dragons control, it wouldn’t allow any other Alpha-Predator, or anything dangerous enough that it might threaten the Dragon itself. If Sauron sets up shop in a nearby valley He is getting torched. If a chunky enough Giant arrives on the scene it is getting ambushed at night, with a bite to the back of the neck from above.

Humans are useful to a dragon as they cut down forests and keep them low. The Dragon probably thinks of Humanity as a form of ‘growth’. Likely it barely thinks of them as individuals, in the same way that if our garden gets moles, we don’t individually think about this mole or that mole, we just think, ‘Damn, I got too many moles, need to reduce the numbers’.

Let the man piles reach a certain height but burn them when they get too far above it, big densities can be dangerous. Likewise, a human population is stable and controllable. They keep the Orcs out and generally occupy a useful spot in the food chain. They are also a social and hierarchal organism, and so can be dominated from the top. Once there is an Alpha-Human, you only really need to dominate that one human with the gold top, and that one will govern the rest for you, making them quiescent. Very useful, and hard to govern Orcs like that.

A Dragon might be in some sense, a reasonably good 'Governor' of a large reach of land. Though they have no interest in human flourishing, they do in the survival of human agriculture. From a human perspective - a Dragon probably (it might) won't eat you personally, as you are too small and scrawny to make a good meal. It might bankrupt you by eating your livestock, but if its smart it will farm you sustainably.

Rule Through Retributive Terror And Protein TaxLike the U.S.A., a Dragon is a dangerous Air Power, with incredible destructive potential, that really does not want to get bogged down in complex environments. The biggest threat for most bands of heroes trying to scale a dragons lair has got to be literally the whole population around that lair.

If someone tries to kill the dragon and fails, the Dragon will simply burn every available farm, village and town, maybe giving enough warning for people to escape, but breaking them all back down to poverty and starvation, so they have the strongest possible motivation to prevent anyone from trying that, and it will be pretty obvious if you are going to try that as you are approaching the dragons lair with climbing gear and weapons.

Environmentalists, (to a degree)Dragons have a deep sense of time that actual humans lack, and a direct very long term investment in their local environment remaining sustainable (for them).

Though, just because Dragons can be wise custodians of their resources, and it would be to their direct advantage to be so, that doesn't mean they actually will. Humans can be wise, but often aren’t, and Dragons would have no innate sympathy with human life, or intuitive understanding of it, a village meaning to them about what a chicken does to us.

And they can leave at any time, and arrive at any time. So periods of stability might be long, when they happen, but rare in total number. Young Dragons moving in, Older Dragons becoming unstable, disputes between hyper-predators, changes in political system, like a new King or religion, environmental changes leading to famine and stock-loss or famine brought about by war, all could result in rapid disordering and a more conventional Maker-of-Ruin situation where the Dragon just burns and eats everything within wing-range before moving on or just going to sleep.

The View from AboveThe world seen from above - a world of landscapes, rivers, food, ocean and weather, herds, whales, schools of fish, rising thermals, rain shadows and dangerous storms.

They would favour flat lands with not too much forest, and definitely not Jungle, and singular inaccessible peaks. Deserts would be good as they are totally accessible from above, everything moving is easy to spot, food clusters round rare oasiies, and caravans and herds will move along set routes. However, even if a Dragon can fly a long way, a Desert may just not be productive enough in terms of Protein, considering how far the Dragon has to fly to get it, then fly back home. If a Dragon did rule a Desert I imagine it would be a rule of 1 Desert = 1 Dragon.

Pastoralist DragonsThey would favour pastoralism (more food on the hoof), over crop-growing (what use is Grain to a Dragon?).

So; pastoralists, in terms of their impact on other food sources, hunter-gatherer humans are preferred, but in terms of managing developed resources, limited settlements are better, as it locks the humans in place and makes their life and development dependent on something quite easily destroyed from above. A town or small city, from a Dragons perspective, is a 'human-pen', it concentrates them, makes them accessible, and vulnerable, and exploitable.

Like many empires throughout history, Rice cultivation is good, if you can get it, as it massively concentrates populations and makes them intensely vulnerable to hydraulic despotism, but again, Rice might be too efficient. Too many humans and not enough big cows. You really probably want a lot of big cows. Like the Mongols, Dragons might just destroy complex hydraulic systems; they don’t really need intensive agriculture, its much better for them to have a lower population so long as they are all herding goats out in the open or something.

Mountaintop KingsEven letting humans occupy lesser mountains might be considered a challenge to dominance hierarchy.

However; Kings on Mountains - this might work out. Letting or even insisting Kings occupy mountaintop palaces, on much smaller mountains, separates them from their people, impoverishes them, and brings them into a system of Hierarchy which re-affirms your own place at its unreachable height - Kings are only petty lesser dragons, or you can let them think they are if it keeps the cattle quiet.

The mountaintop palace in this case becomes a kind of Dragon-Versailles, a means of controlling and containing tributary nobility, doling out useless but prized fragments of dominance hierarchy symbology while strongly limiting their actual power.

Fishermen and ShipsThe ocean has a lot of protein, but it’s hard for a Dragon to reliably and safely get. It would be quite vulnerable out to sea, with no guarantee it could land on the surface and easily get back up, and if it did, such a brutal flailing, wet, take-off, might involve a murderous expenditure of calories.

And the things in the Sea are BIG; whales, Kraken etc. Good to eat if you can usefully get one, but how do you lift it up without risking its flailing smacking a wing-bone. Perhaps you could swim back to land - but again, this would be a personal disaster.

Fishermen however, make a business of floating about, gathering Protein which is usually inaccessible to you, then concentrating it in big heaps, which, furthermore, are isolated and vulnerable to fire.

In a way, Fishermen might be so valuable to a Dragon that lives near the sea that it would actually be quite protective of them, in a limited sense. Permanently damaging a fishing fleet, breaking them to the point where they can no longer sustainably fish and gather protein, would be like shooting your Uber Eats driver. It would be wise to only take as much as the economy can stand, vary your predation between different ships, (probably the Dragon can at least remember the ships even if the individual humans are a bit indistinct), and leave the ship intact when you eat its hold full of fish, so it can get back to port and go out again.

The HordeA Dragon understands dominance hierarchies, high-status stuff, things that gleam and shine and have unusual textures, (an actual dragons horde might be full of rotted silk, embroidered cloth and other rare but beautiful textiles).

It would probably think more about gems and gold than many other treasures, partly due to status and gleam, but also because they are as eternal as the dragon themselves, and so are one of few things that would last as long as the dragon in a world where everything else passes after a couple of centuries.

Horded would be more like a bower-bird display than just a pile of stuff. If Dragons are intelligent and have a lot of free time they are going to spend a lot of effort arranging things. The arrangement and visual display of a Dragons Horde would be a work of art in itself, a show of astonishing beauty, arranged with mind-blowing complexity regarding the patterns of colour and lustre, but without a humanlike organising intelligence or sense of object hierarchy.

The Dragon may also collect things which are notable to it but don't seem like much to mortal men

either because it can see across a wider range of vision and these things have a lustre in the ultraviolet, or because they have magical properties it can perceive directly, or simply because of some unique element that dragons would perceive as relating to their life-world, or simply from personal preference - they would be highly individual creatures. Its possible to imagine Dragons as deranged, eccentric collectors par-excellence, filling their Bond-Lairs with more curiosities than a Wunderkammer, arranged in wild mosaics that make sense only to itself.

Theft of even a single object from a Dragons Horde would be immediately noticeable on an autistic and aesthetic level; not only is every individual element collected and considered according to its own nature and thought of as part of a ‘set’, but within that, everything is arranged in an unrelentingly specific kaleidoscope of counterpoint and form so that if a single piece goes missing, EVERYTHING IS RUINED! Not only an autists wrath when their hyperfixation is disturbed and disordered, but an artist or aesthetes rage at their long-considered patterning of form being wrecked and made ugly.

Also these are status objects of course. But really, a Dragons absolute, unrelenting RAGE, and even deep personal wounding, at the theft of a single fragment of a massive horde, is perfectly understandable.

Speaking with a DragonThe key unheimlich, or even horror-like element of speaking with a Dragon would be the combination of its evident intelligence and complex reasoning, with an utterly non-human perspective, and even indifference to things humans intuitively understand, and a voice and speaking pattern also utterly unlike most other living things. It would be very distinctly weird and scary to speak with a Dragon.

Lack of Intuitive UnderstandingHumans learn word-sounds and their meanings bound up with human expressions, patterns of behaviour, posturing, verbal tone and so-on. Babies who don’t even understand words can sometimes still kind of ‘argue’ in a gabbly way, or be sassy or winsome; they grasp crudely the emotional complex behind the worlds long before the words themselves have specific meanings. So for humans, words are a little like pieces slotted into a complex pre-grown structure of relationships and situations, the abstract meanings clearing, defining and making things more specific.

Then, when humans are much older, they can use words alone to try to deal with abstract concepts that may have no physical referents, (though they are not good at it).

A Dragon will have no intuitive humanlike understanding of what those sounds mean, to a human,

but it has a high intelligence, so can work out complex arrangements of appropriate sound according to circumstance. Yet, in conversation, would be nothing like talking to an actual person.

There may be apparent fluency and perfection of repetition, and even simulation, but riding between that and the deep level abstract intelligence, would be a general incomprehension of language as it is spoken by men and manlike things. It doesn't live a manlike life in a manlike body, or have a manlike society, it would be more like a very adept Minah bird, that can associate signal to utility with great skill, knows what inputs will lead to what outputs, but from an utterly Other perspective. It might be a little like when a Chat A.I. starts to break down, or exposes that it doesn’t really understand what it is saying, but is just ‘making sounds’. This would be pretty terrifying coming from something that big and predatory.

It might be impossible to have a casual conversation with a dragon, or crack a joke, since these things are closely related to the human lifeworld and play no part in anything the Dragon is interested in.

Spellcraft & Ancient TonguesThis would help account for Dragons Spellcraft since they can probably remember and replicate anything they have heard and, with innate magical potential and a high intelligence, can probably iterate and learn to approximate the mental models the spell language is meant to mirror and support - so a Dragons spells, like its language would be an echo of those used against it.

I imagine that it would probably be better at mimicking the models of more elemental spells, less attached to the human lifeworld, since I imagine the mental models used in more 'human' spells would be intuitively alien and difficult for a dragon to grasp.

The VoiceThe Dragon also doesn’t have a humanlike throat or mouth. Like a parrot or Minah bird, it can mimic, duplicate and remix highly complex and subtle sounds, and would have complex birdlike trills and repetitions, and its own use of language would be consistently unheimlich; speaking in 'recorded' strands of language from different voices.

Its vocal structure would be like talking to a bunch of tape decks - the dragon knows highly complex words and phrases (can probably repeat entire songs and conversations verbatim, and these might be hundreds, or even thousands of years old). The Dragons 'tape deck' might include many ancient languages long forgotten because, to the Dragon they were not that long ago.

These might be bent towards the statements of Kings, Heroes, Mages etc, because these are the kind of people the Dragon actually meets and at least listens to somewhat

Many of these voices would be angry or scared, threatening, defying or pleading, since that’s most of what a dragon hears from manlike things, (or negotiating, it probably understands negotiation), or might be strands of distant conversation heard from ordinary people at night, far away, as the dragon heard this when flying above them, or church bells or other church songs, as these will be regular and will probably drift over the countryside and the Dragon will have heard most of them a bunch of times, though it would sing or replicate them with the usual bell or instrumental accompaniment, and/or in full chorus, as that’s how it heard them.

So, imagine this; the core voice is Birdlike, with the slight squarks and chirps and trilling you might expect from a bird, but way, way, way too deep. Deeper than any bird you have ever heard. And it comes from deep within the throat and chest, not from the mouth, which is lipless, and only opens slightly, and not in synch with its words in a human way.

Above this mouth, regardless of what it is currently saying, the blank lizardlike stare of the Dragon.

And what it says, its ‘calls’, come as a kind of ‘madlibs’ or hyper-complex overlaying of ancient sounds. You are in a D&D setting so have never heard of DJ’s or seen ‘Bumblebee’ from Michael Bays ‘Transformers’, so have nothing to compare it to; voices in ancient languages, cries of ancient kings, fragments of chanted spells, the sound of crowds or singing, but heard as if far away, as the Dragon heard it, natural sounds like waves and wind, secret sounds like those animals make, flowing and overlaying of words, arranged not by precise meaning but in a kind of instinctive modernist collage of sounds.

But clearly this thing, (and it is most obviously a thing when it speaks, not a person as you understand it), understands you. It responds to what you say. Its collages of screams and cries, of sentences, and chanted poetry and old songs and muttered conversation, make some kind of sense, both emotionally, in terms of whether it means weal or woe, but also perhaps in the specifics, because it feels like there are layers of inhuman meaning there, relationships like jokes, or ironies incomprehensible to you, but you can just intuit the inference, and that there is more there you cannot understand. All of it in that terrifying giant-cassowary bird-voice, coming from that staring inhuman Dinosaur-face. The awkward pidgin communication between you limited not by lack of vocabulary, or lack of intelligence, but by a fundamental Otherness.

Speaking directly to a dragon might be more like speaking to a Demon than speaking to an actual Demon would be. Demons after all, are deeply concerned with human ranges of emotion and understanding, though antiethical to them. Speaking to a Dragon would be a truly disassociating Herzogian indifference-of-nature situation.

The RoarA Dragons full roar, as well as freezing more totally than a lions, might be enough to rupture ears and even break bones. Also pretty likely you would shit yourself. They ‘aint put that in 5e I tell you.

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Once again I am writing about something which I feel most of my readers will be aware, but in this case it’s a rare piece of popular art that I really liked so I want everyone to know about it.

The Science-Fiction animation 'Scavengers Reign', was made for HBO (and unavailable in the U.K.), and it looks like it has been cancelled there. BUT it has moved to Netflix where I can actually see it. This is my attempt to make sure we get a second series.

The series is based on this short, ‘Scavengers’;

Twelve 20+ minute episodes of western-style animation about the survivors of a crashed space ship trying to survive on an alien world with a fecund, bounteous, and incredibly dangerous biosphere.

As the "Demeter" suffers massive damage the waking crew escape to the planet below in survival pods while the majority are still asleep in cryo. On the surface, the ships Captain manages to jury-rig a signal to bring the Demeter down to the planet intact.

Three groups of separated survivors see the Demeter come down. All they needs to do is reach the grounded ship and re-awaken the crew before something kills them or power runs out, and then use the ships lifeboat to leave the planet and go to summon help.

To get there they will have to cross a world of gorgeous bounty and cornucopic terrors.

The incredible fecundity of invention in the environment of Vesta Minor, creates a sense-making baroque Speculative-Evolution Rhapsody which turns its hyper-complex environment of endless transformations and predation into a gorgeous problem to solve, and also a kind of Pilgrims-Progress hajj of transmutation of the identity and soul.

The environment of Vesta Minor is both alien and fecund but more beautiful than its general forms would be alone, (many Science Fiction stories can create mere visual rhapsodies), is the locking together of the logic of life in which every living thing seems to have its own coherent place, purpose, method and cycle of life. Curlicues of white spiral through the air and fasten to white spars, perfectly camouflaged, until a storm disturbs them and they cloud away, like grey petrels flocking in flight from a grey sea, Cambrian-radial megafauna wander across grasslands, ridden by scatterings of minor species. The hyperdeveloped environment is host to wild schemes of parasitism, symbiosis and simulacra, and complex games of signalling and counter-signalling.

SPOILERS BELOW!

Transhumanism, Parasites, Symbioses and Identity

The story follows three groups of survivors; The first is Human/Human; the ships captain and natural history lady (now the most useful human alive), one human/robot and one human/weird frog thing.

By the end of the series the only one left we are sure is human is the lady with the robot. The captain has been parasitised by a mind-altering plant, the ships natural history lady may be a fungal simulacra, but we are not sure, the robot has been infected with a fungal strain and reborn as a new kind of cyborg, and the lone male survivor is rapidly brought into a symbiotic relationship with a mind-controlling predator.

Constant and unalterable transformation is a main theme of the story and the only periods or places of stability lie in accepting or negotiating some level of alteration rather than resisting all.

The Captain is poisoned by one plant, which steals some genes and grows a very rough simulacrum of him, the main purpose of which is just to get close to the herd, (it usually preys on cowlike animals), and explode, poisoning the rest of the group and fertilising the ground beneath for the plants seed, left behind in the pseudo-captains flesh.

Then he is saved by the bio-medical knowledge of a mute survivor left behind by a previous expedition, who it turns out is a symbiote herself, of a different cave-dwelling entity. Yet clearly this woman has some selfhood left, she can perform complex actions, still visits her husbands grave, but in other ways is entirely the creature and servant of the entity. She saves his life but infects him with this fresh form of life.

The Captain then watches his own behaviour change, only half realising as his basic urges and desires are subverted by the plantlike organism growing inside him, which is keeping him alive but, mutely and instinctively, is trying to turn him into an agent to create and sustain its preferred environment.

The lone male survivor is trapped in their pod, high up in trees and is slowly starving to death. He is retrieved by the 'Hollow', a somewhat intelligent froglike thing with limited psychokinetic and mind-altering powers.

Most Hollows walk around on branches peering at little bugs or mouselike entities. If they can fixate one, they can parasitise it, subverting its behaviour so that it brings the Hollow food.

One tries this on the lone survivor and it works. It speaks to him through memory, illusion and instinct, transforming him into a food-gatherer. It’s pretty clear that, at least to begin with, the Hollow doesn't understand much or anything about the buttons it is pressing. If it wants its Gatherer to get food, or to stay, or follow, or be happy, it just presses on the memory/emotion complex in the humans head and the human mind does the rest, creating complex dreams, hallucinations and desires to achieve these ends.

But this Gatherer is a sentient self-aware and quite intelligent human, and in order to gather ever-more food, he takes to tool-use, traps, ambush, throwing spears and persistence hunting, making this combination of Hollow and Human Gatherer an abnormally insanely successful system, and making the Hollow a FUCKING UNIT.

As this happens it seems that the Hollow itself is being poisoned, or altered by the infiltrating visions of its human Gatherer. We never know how much the Hollow understands of what it sees in the human mind, or of what emotions it shares, but it ends up making a pilgrimage to the Demeter itself and treats the place as a kind of preferred lair or hunting place, trying to kill or drive off whatever else turns up.

It’s possible that nothing on Vesta Minor is self-aware or intelligent in an way we can understand, but so many of its species can subvert, parasitise or enter symbiosis with humans, which we know are self-aware, we have to ask; what then is the nature of the soul which results?

Many of these effects are horrific but this is not a horror series. The tone and form of the storytelling accept these changes evenly and clearly, with a kind of acceptance similar to that of a Ballard story. What results might be called Environmental Horror, Speculative-Evolution Porn, Alien World Survival Show or Transmutation Drama. It has a little of the Tempest, a little Dougal Dixon, some David Attenborough and a dab of William Golding.

Is this planet actually more complex than earth, or just so strange that it seems so?

In a sense Vesta Minor is "Life-Horror/Wonder" or "Evolution Horror". All the systems and ideas of life’s interaction, transformation and evolution on Vesta Minor are drawn from or influenced by that of our world, but re-enchanted or make strange by their incredible new forms and the complexity and subtlety of their interactions.

If Vesta Minor causes us Awe, or Horror , or Wonder, this is in some sense only because those processes should cause such emotion, yet we are blind to their day-to-day nature here due to overfamiliarity. When recast on an alien world through a Wunderkammer of alien forms, the same processes and logic amaze and astound us.

(Nerd Shit - If Vesta Minor was real and people landed there, even if they could breathe, most likely the viruses and bacteria would infect them and eat them alive within a day.

Possible reasons they might not include; not being adapted to live inside humans, the humans having some kind of sci-fi inbuilt auto-immune system either via genetic alteration or implant, or Vesta Minor microsphere for some magical reason, not being as incredibly hyper-complex as its macro-scale biosphere.)

It’s really a lovely non-stupid dream of a series so if you are a lover of Science Fiction or strange things and are very tired of fucking stupid stuff then please give it a go.

The ending does have slight Gaia-vibes, which is something it managed to avoid up until that point. It’s kind of boring if the planet has a Mind because that answers a lot of the complex moral questions to do with encountering an alien environment.

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Imagine Man as a Moth Upon a Leaf

Many prey animals will have no coherent image of what their greatest predator actually is

This is probably more true with very specifically-evolved predator-prey relationships, and likely less so in relations between more generalist animals.

My idea here is that any prey animal that stuck around long enough to get a good long look at its predator was much less likely to survive, while any prey animal that ran for it at the slightest hint of its predator was much more likely to survive, and the slighter the hint that was required, generally the better. So over time the genetics, behaviour and culture of prey animals will be very strongly ruled by the tendency to run-don't-look. In fact active complex thinking about the predator will be almost absent because it will require a cognition and resources load that makes the prey animal over-heavy'.

So what a prey-creature 'knows' of predators is like a cubist array of images, scents, sensations, combinations of circumstance and so on, that if a certain amount or certain kinds are triggered, produce an instant flee/hide response, and that there may be layers to this bag of splintered perceptions, the deeper ones of which produce an ever more intense flee response; "If you perceive such-and such then burn your fat cells if you have to", "If these sensations combine then gnaw off your leg if you have to", "if you feel this then jump off the cliff if you have to".

So that, the more relentlessly dangerous something is, the less clearly they think about it, or at least consider it as a whole thing, and the more it becomes, to the, a scattering of burning glyphs within the mind which, if triggered, overwrite any other thinking and produce an instantaneous, physical, escape response.

Moth Wings

It’s a reasonable supposition that Moth Wings hold amongst their patterns, fragments of image that, when seen through the strange eyes and mad brain of an insect-eating bird, provide splintered signals of just such a predator; a larger bird, snake, leaping fox or similar.

The wings of the Atlas Moth are the most obvious example of this; even to us they clearly seem like snakes looking about. Other moth wings look a lot less like anything we can recognise, but this may be for several reasons;

•That they are cubist impressions only; the sensation of a predator broken up into is most sensate elements yet organised in a manner unlike that seen in nature.

•That birds see in ultraviolet, which we cannot, and will encounter these fragments in-flight, in strange situations of light or shade and during predation, when they are hyper-focused on one target to the exclusion of all else.

•We don't know much about how a leaping predator looks to a diving bird, or how its tiny brain organises the information it does have.

In any case, we might say that, if we continue this line of reasoning; the patterns on a moths wing are nightmares of a birds mortality.

A more curious consideration is that through simple iteration, one species has evolved upon it, signs and symbols which signal to its predator, dreams and impressions of that predators own predator, which, if we continue the conceit that prey have no coherent impression of their own predators, is a transmission of information to the barely-knowable of what is utterly unknowable.

The moth carries symbols and fragments of something so far beyond its understanding that it could not even begin to conceive of it.

Esoteric and Fantastic Considerations

(I deal more in the world of honest Fantasy rather than the murky and somewhat schizoid realm of the Esoteric so I will remain focused on worlds of the imagination, but if you want to go all Von Danekin with the same ideas, then you can.)

In a Fantastic world in which Demons, and other supernatural creatures that prey primarily upon humanity, exist, and which are so utterly dangerous that humanity has developed a hyper-prey response to them, then humanity will be simply unable to name or fundamentally conceive of them, because any attempt to hang around and analyse, observe, understand them or to integrate that understanding into a larger scheme of knowledge, will get you killed.

This becomes more severe when you consider potential psychic, extra-dimensional or extra-causal entities where the environment through which they are hunting us is only partly sensible or comprehensible to us. Or Information Hazard-like entities where just thinking about them, (naming the monster adds to its power, the wizard can hear everyone who speaks their name), makes them more real and deadly

Yet, in such a world, there may well be 'impressions', cubist or modernist fragments of knowledge, information or understanding available to mankind; the 'Moth Wing Patterns' which give hints of predators the simple humans of that world could not imagine. Or even give suggestions of what is utterly unknowable, that beyond-which-is-beyond which preys upon the unknown.

Mans Moth Wings in a Fantastic World

What fragments of reality which might indicate the nature of that which is unknowable, or that which is beyond what is beyond? Or what things found in the organisation of sentient minds through culture, artefact or otherwise, that might show splintered fragments of that which preys upon that which preys upon us. Or things found in the forms of the prey of man that may suggest the form of what preys upon him?

Signs Of That Which is Beyond

Signs of that which might prey upon man but be unknowable to us, as a bird to a moth.

Signs and Glyphs which ward against Man

Like the magic signs that imbue fear, or which cannot be read. Or those which ward magically upon tombs.

Any sign which repels, frightens or disconcerts so that it might not be read could well impart some essence of the extra-real predators of man.

Signs Borne on Curious Animals

Some magical creatures carry strange signs or astonish the sight without reason, or hypnotise or delude. Such as the Cobras hood, the Peacocks tail, the horses hooves when it races (which cannot be seen), or great whales who's song hypnotises, or the roar of a Tiger, which freezes.

That which is beyond may have some element of all these things, or more likely it carries the qualities which emanate the true and combined qualities, of which these beast signs are only fragmentary simulations.

Insects

These often revolt the sight with their scuttling, unnatural movement and skinless nature. Also they are low and hidden.

Poisoning Things

These things have a power to make ill and do harm much greater than is evident, that it is out of proportion with their seeming strength, that their ill may last longer and have more subtle corrosions than another wound.

In some cases this power is hidden so that you may not guess at it, but in other cases the form and colour of creatures boasts and advertises such a power, seeking to frighten and overawe.

Slithering Things

Things such as Worms, Wyverns, Snakes and all who go upon their belly, for they move by motion and not by limb. Also they are low.

Insidious Things

The most fearful and disgusting are those creatures which writhe or hide within other things, and this be worse if such things be living, for it is one living thing within another which should not be, and worse still if it be within oneself.

Perhaps that which is beyond might be able to lie unseen within other things, and even so within living things, like worms within an apple, and worse still, within ones own flesh.

Things Deep in the Sea

That they dwell in a cold blackness where nothing should live. That they mimic no earthly form. That they may come forth and take what is on the surface of their dark world and may not be opposed or followed.

Signs of the Unimaginable

Indications of whatever it is that might prey upon that which is beyond, as a Fox upon a Bird.

Signs which Ward Man from the Other

Signs, symbols, glyphs and rituals which man employs to ward themselves from what they fear may be Beyond, may employ some fragmentary aspect of the hunters of the Beyond.

By which we see that they are clear and regular, and never quickly imbued.

Fire

For as darkness itself flees fire, so do all beasts that prey upon man. Therefore fire itself in all its mortal forms may be only a symbol of that meta-fire, the nature of which is cannot be known but which must be

Alike fire in that it is bright against that which is not, that it devours and transforms, that it lives in that it grows and dies, but not like any other living thing.

Doors, Doorways, Bars and Locks

Alike doors in that it separates on thing from another, but can alter that separation, like bars in that it can be set against what is beyond and once set, its very nature keeps it so. Like locks in that hit has a hidden complexity that may alter its nature, and that there be keys to such, and that these keys may be passed from one to another, even if the full understanding of its workings are not known to those who hold them. By which we mean to understand; spells.

View Details

Ok lads, it’s time to deal with unacknowledged war guilt through a vague authoritarian euroland kingdom that definitely isn't white Japan. Get ready to fight the evil Catholic church and discover God is fake with Horrific Consequences, but don’t worry, you are a Pure Boy who will "Just keep moving forward" into this metaphor for Generational Squeeze/ Loss of Future, and never forget; she’s actually a thousand years old and you aren’t related by blood.

Its Anime Time!

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Previously Reviewed

One - Dororo, Re:Creators, Inuyashiki Last Hero

Two - Gankutsuo: The Count of Monte Cristo, Onihei, Outlaw Star, Full Metal Panic!

Three - The Great Passage, Bannana Fish, Kemurikusa, Kokkoku

Four - Ranking of Kings, Odd Taxi, Fire Force, My Hero Academia, Jojo, Attack on Titan, Mob Psycho 100, Slime, Demon Slayer, Belle.

Five - Darling in the Franxx, Assassination Classroom, The Girl from the Other Side,

Spy x Family, Love After World Domination, Miss Kuroitsu from the Monster Development Department, Shadows House, Vivy -Flourite Eyes Song, Fate/Stay Night Unlimited Blade Works, Fate/Zero, SSSS.Gridman, Dr Stone, Series 1, The Vision of Escaflowne, Mushoku Tensei: Jobless Reincarnation, The Devil is a Part-Timer Series 1, Re:Zero - Starting Life in Another World, Banished from the Heroes Party I Decided to Lead a Quiet Life in the Countryside, 86 Eighty Six

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Isekai

The cursed and unkillable vampire genre lives again and has mutated into ever-more deranged and unlikely forms; Post-Parody theatre kid batman? Reborn as a Spider? As a Vending Machine?

Dead Mount Deathplay

Absolutely bananas reverse Isekai where a super powerful Necomancer is defeated in the fantasy world and ends up in the body of a real-world twink (average Japanes Protagonist). Wierdoes, conspiracies and bizarre factions are layered onto each other like a towering cake with everything in it. The story is absolutely fuming with invention and fun and barely holding itself together with the pace and style of its inventiveness. Not quite a parody, DMD throws in so many conspiracies on top of conspiracies and schemes on top of schemes that it gets close. The comments threads under the episodes are full of people saying what the hell is going on do you remember that character no wait this makes sense does it though?

Its fun! Remember fun?

The Devil is a Part-Timer Series 2

Genuinely quite bad and a disappointment.

Eminence in Shadow

Tremendously entertaining absurdist Isekai parody double(TRIPLE)-down.

A young man. All he wants is to become batman and be able to punch out an atomic bomb. He does become Batman but without magic how can he punch out a nuke? While banging his head into a tree in search of magical powers Cid Kagenou ends up reincarnated into a Fantasy World where magic exists. Flash Forward – he is now Batman, Dr Strange and also kind of Iron Man. He leads a mysterious force from the darkness to … well to be generally mysterious. To conspire. Conspiring against conspirators in the dark.

The protagonist is half aware they might be mentally ill but doesn’t care. Insanely hyper-over-mega-powered, all they want to do is to play the part of an Eminence in Darkness; the edgy antihero mastermind dark angel of vengeance. They have literally no idea and genuinely don’t care about any of the overarching plot in this fantasy world.

There is a whole deal with an industrial revolution, ancient scientific culture, a secret cult of demon worshippers who rule the world, various hyper-powerful beings etc. Every other person or entity treats the quite-good-in-itself backstory with emotional seriousness, while the MC is blagging it, not really paying attention, looking for rooftop spots to loom on, setting up his ‘lair’ and waiting in his study, facing away from the door and saying; “Greetings, did you think you could elude me” every 35 seconds for HOURS because they are sure SOMEONE will come in eventually, dragging an entire grand piano and bag of white feathers down into the sewer so when they finally meet a desperately fleeing young girl she will find him masked, playing Moonlight Sonata (new to this world), on a grand piano, in the sewer, while angel feathers fall dramatically around him.

This is a fun series.

Grimgar, Ashes and Illusions

A visually gorgeous and much more low-fantasy and (somewhat) social realist take on the standard Isekai formula. B list kids transported, memory-wiped and forced to work as adventurers in a fantasy world, something they aren’t that good at, and only get good at, at the pace of normal teens. It reminds me of once visiting a farm and being asked to help a sheep give birth and this lamb covered in placenta squeezing out and then leaping up and fucking running about covered in placental juices and me in the pen with it freaking out.

The scene where they try to mog their first goblin is great and is exactly as weird and disturbing as a city kid having to actually physically grasp a placental lamb. Goblins are actually very frightening, and they quite reasonably want to live. The series also has an actually normative relationship with grief when the team leader dies and everyone just goes numb for a while.

The painted backgrounds are gorgeous. It is a very visually beautiful and emotionally elegiac series and they didn’t do a series 2 so you are not locked in.

(Is this just ‘Konosuba’ played straight?)

Konosuba - An Explosion on this Wonderful World

An explosion-based spin off from Konosuba which tells the backstory if its teenage mage who only knows one spell, and its EXPLOSION. Can you get through theatre-kid Hogwarts only learning one spell? Good if you like Konosuba, or if you like the idea of a race specifically engineered to be hyper-powerful and hyper-dramatic, who buried a Dark Secret beneath their village “because it sounds really cool”. It’s quite funny.

Reborn as a Vending Machine, now I wander the dungeon

What can I say? A young man loves vending machines so much that when he sees one in danger he sacrifices his life to save it. Reborn in a fantasy land, as a vending machine, he must use his encyclopaedic knowledge of Japanese vending machines to.. survive and fight evil?

His power-ups include the ability to transform into *any* kind of Vending machine. Throughout Series one he can only communicate in the scripted phrases of a Vending Machine.

If you wanted to see how many, or if at all, problems could be solved purely through the use of a Vending Machine, well do I have a series for you! This is… surprisingly good especially for sticking strongly to its utterly batshit premise. By the end of series 1 he is still a vending machine, still needs someone to carry him around and can still only say a handful of electronic phrases.

(This series may be a bone deep galaxy brained commentary on Healer classes in RPGs, or a support of such, I can’t tell.)

So I'm a Spider, So What?

Young girl dies mysteriously during a classics class and is reborn as a lowly powerless spider in the super-dangerous magical dungeon of a fantasy land, (not that she knows the details to begin with). Literally everything can kill her easily, including her spider-siblings who immediately try to eat her. (She is the only self-aware Spider, or at least the only one with a human mind.)

As Joesky would say; a battle is on! and probably the most reasonable hungry ascent of the power ladder as Kumoco desperately tries to survive and successfully eat her enemies, gaining more and more spider-powers but facing more and more dangerous opponents as she does. Her first major enemy is a frog and it nearly kills her.

Aoi Yuki has a bent back from carrying this series. Kumoco’s Peter Parker rapid-fire soliloquies pathed together from a highly introverted teens pop culture obsessions, expanding to arguments across multiple parallel sub-minds, (the cheeky cartoon spider is her own self image, everyone else in the fantasy world just experiences a non-verbal eldritch abomination gnashing its jaws at them) as she levels up, and unhinged will to survive make her probably the most fun character in Isekai with the perfect combination of personality, animation and voice actor.

The story it’s based on is this quite other thing. There is a whole deal with the other Isekai’d students in the class, a hidden world-ruling god, multiple conspiracies, a secret history blah blah blah. In animation, compared to the main Kumoco story, it’s really, truly mind-blastingly boring. While the plot does have its defenders I think a big chunk of the audience were just skipping past standard Isekai stuff.

Unfortunately, the two stories to end up becoming one towards the end of the Anime, which may be part of the reason it never got a second series. (Combined with some apparent chaos during production which lead to parts of the anime getting some truly horrific CGI.)

Every opener and closer is an utterly insane high-temo bubblegum rock/rap banger.

Solo Levelling

Not quite incel porn.

(Plot is; gates to the Dungeon Dimension start opening everywhere. Some people get video-game style powers but their level is set for life, so some are just automatically and permanently better than others, but due to divine intervention from a mysterious entity this one low level nerd gets the power to actually level up, making them the most powerful person EVAH!)

Im vaguely ashamed that I like this. I started watching thinking god what trash I can’t believe people are into this and then suddenly had finished 24 episodes. Is everything from Korea quite as slightly empty, power hungry and resentful as this? Man Koreans are having a BAD time

I think this is just the Eminence in Darkness played straight

The Wrong Way to use Healing Magic

A somewhat nice Isekai.

MC is an accidental carryalong to the main heroes and gets healing magic. This worlds ultimate badass takes him under her wing and teaches/forces him to use healing magic to also become a hyper-powered badass.

Despite this their main job is emergency healing and being a kind of fantasy paramedic. The positive vibes and the fact that their route to ultimate badassery involves getting better at healing people take the edge off the slight incel vibes that 90% of Isekai have in their DNA. Also in the English dub the demons are voiced by actual British people, or at least British accents, which is a trip.

Sci-Fi

Brave Bang Bravern

An gay robot absurdist comedy/apocalyptic drama/romance/military action series.

In the near future, the near future multi-nation robot corps are having an exercise. Suddenly, incomprehensible aliens land giant spikes all over earth and start massacring the population. The robot corps can barely touch them, (all of this is played seriously). THEN… an actual kids TV SUPER-ROBOT arrives.. from.. somewhere? begs the main character to ‘Come inside me’, and starts taking out aliens with a Lazer sword while playing his own action series theme, inside and outside his body.

All the characters react to this insanity as the insanity it is. The robot ‘Bravern’ tells them he is a friendly alien who ‘loves freedom’, but he has an actual metal face, like a transformer or something, and strikes action poses, and in every way acts like a character from fiction in this apocalyptic scenario, (and is obsessed with having the main character ‘inside me’, like he’ll only do it with this one particular guy).

Every human is disturbed by this, but they can’t really do shit since this perpetually-smiling titan, who likes delivering earnest speeches about believing in each other and the power of freedom, is their only hope, so this gritty military group just have to kind of go along with it despite the sense of creeping unreality and feeling that someone somewhere is fucking with them.

This is a great and very nuts show that actually manages to stick the landing and even sort of makes sense at the end, its tremendous fun, and relatively short.

(It has in common with SSS Gridman, some quite nice moments of dreamlike semi-horror or unreality as it feels as if the normal world, the world of the Disaster, and dream itself have intermixed.)

Metallic Rouge

I actually stopped watching this before the end, which usually means I wouldn’t review it, but it had enough good elements to be worth talking about.

Part of the ‘basically bladerunner’ sci fin universe where we tell a civil rights or slave revolt story about cyborgs who are basically cognitively just humans in robot bodies – a somewhat hoary old theme to me in an age we are all getting a very immediate education in the complexities of A.I. in the day to day, a more complex view than in most of these shows.

Anyway, good animation, charming protags and a somewhat interesting world. I was ok with the cyborg of the week fights but half way through it gets complicated and annoying. Though it does have some pleasingly slightly nutty dream/memory sequences.

Kaina of the Great Snow Sea

I didn’t realise this was by Tsumo Nihei the creator of BLAME and many others, (or at least, the basic ideas were by him), until I was most of the way through, but it make sense since it’s a sci fi apocalyptic geoengineering fairytale mainly interesting for its setting, though its earnest out-of-the-box Fairytale archetypes do have some charm.

Humans on what might be earth or an alien world live ignorantly amongst the titanic relics of what (to us) is clearly a gigantic and probably Millenia long terraforming or geoengineering project designed to make, or keep, the planet liveable for humans.

Sky-piercing arcology-sized orbital spire trees lance up into the stratosphere and spread out to make a kind of glassine bio-caul around the world. The trees drop spores which cover and hold in the great ‘Snow Sea’ which, if you fall into it, clearly isn’t water, more like some kind of heavy gas. Water can’t be reached except via the Spire Trees which pipe it up from the surface below. The remaining societies live around the spire trees, treating them as islands in the ‘Great Snow Sea’, hanging on in medieval/monarchist/tribal groups but the Spire Trees are dying and the water running out, and the caul around the world is dying off, and the remaining humans don’t remember anything about terraforming and can’t even read for the most part.

A boy from a tribe of dying ‘scholars’ (some can read words which they learn from preserved metal signs), meets up with a tree princess and they fight to save her home and the world.

This is a (for anime), relatively short fairytale (one series and a movie to cap it), which is pretty simple and basic it its characters but good if you like megastructures and fragments of post-apocalyptic tech in a medieval setting.

Mobile Suit Gundam: The Witch from Mercury

Jam hands!

This is, the Tempest, but gay, in space, with robots, in robot school. My first Gundam series and its surprisingly good.

Suletta Mercury, a girl from the provinces, goes to posh robot school for the elite where the high status thing is to settle everything with Robot Duels. She’s an innocent prodigy with a super-robot from.. somewhere, a mysterious and secretly revenge-bent super-scientist mother and an icy and hyper-capable babe she somewhat rescues.

The story takes a nice dark turn in the middle where the kids get into real combat and Suletta innocently crushes someone to death with her huge robot hands, turning them into a red smear, a neat turning point that strikes hard in a previously playful story.

Gundam feels like its in a particular place where the first half of the story is; OMG WAR AND ROBOTS KEWL and then the second half is “Oh my god we just murdered civilians and the socio-political situation is irresolvable”.

One series and you are done!

Mobile Suit Gundam: Iron Blooded Orphans Series 1

I am working backwards through the Gundams from ‘The Witch from Mercury’.

Child soldier orphans overturn their bosses and take over the company, rising to new challenges with the aid of a mysterious robot shell they got.

I think I like the sadness and heartfelt nature matched with the darkness and cynicism as the warrior kids with semi-legal implants are drawn deeper into more and more complex adult schemes, they are fighting for… something? But everything they do leads them deeper into violence.

The Fire Hunter

I got frustrated and stopped watching, not because of the very odd animation, but the classically anime hyper-complex overcomplex plot, and the fact it’s another ‘overthrowing fake gods’ plot, but there were a lot of really interesting things about this series.

A post-apocalypse where humanity cannot access natural fire. Some kind of magic/bioagent/magic(?) was released, meaning when humans come close to any natural fire, they instantly and violently combust, also setting off any other humans who are close – so mankind is sent back to a pre-stone age state.

The modernist animation with dialogue slipping across scene boundaries and conversations from other strands impinging on the current moment and action was interesting, even if it didn’t always work, and the action scenes were a mess but I can see that they were definitely *trying* to do something interesting with abstraction, motion and form and couldn’t quite get there.

I got bored when more evil gods-not-gods turned up and the overplot was clearly going to be schemes and overthrowing the Gods with the aid of a Pure Boy (Girl this time). I am sorry Anime, if you are going to serve whats basically the Potatoes of Anime you at least need to fry them. Please try to find another plot.

Good if you like very odd post-apocalypse and bold experimental, not always successful modernist presentation.

Psycho Pass

Minority report the series.

Hmm, what can I say.. its been a while since I watched this.. Near future, all citizens have a ‘Psycho Pass’ updated by ubiquitous surveillance, that tells the govt basically how close you are to running Amok, due to the pressure of the hyper-dense society and the ubiquitous surveillance. Crime is theoretically impossible because if your Psycho Pass rating is too bad doors literally won’t open for you, violence and disorder don’t exist any more, people are educated or drugged out of it, or pre-emptively imprisoned if that doesn’t work.

But of course there are odd cyber-crimes that slip through the cracks and that’s where the series starts out. New girl goes to cyberpunk cop department.

Has maybe the best arc of female development in any of these series as main girl goes from nervous and clever defender of her society, to competent but broken and disillusioned, to clever and subtle antagonist/foil to the hypermind that runs society – both performing her job as a Psycho-Pass cop but also playing a complex game of both wits and philosophy with the hypermind as she tries to both resist its darker influence but also to match it and persuade or alter it with the knowledge of its own goals and principals – in fact the Hypermind keeps her around precisely because of this quality, as a kind of devils advocate or advisor to instruct or challenge its principals, each trying to persuade or change the other through the context of whatever this weeks crime is

I think what really sticks in my mind is the protagonist who is compassionate and pro-human but neither stupid or deluded. It’s a kind of defence of (relative) freedom and (relative) mercy given in quite a rigorous way, and it’s an active and complex argument between the Hypermind and MC instead of the usual pop fic declarative impassioned speeches.

There is also an evil rich guy with a fully cyborged body who dresses up as a traditional huntsman and chases abducted people through a personal underground maze. The animation on this guy and his unheimlich features is great. Other nice Cyberpunk elements involve cops trying to infiltrate an underground dance party where everyone is in holographic disguise and society having an absolute mental breakdown when someone works out how to subvert the Psycho-Pass system and returns mass crime to a country where people don’t even lock their doors any more since its inconceivable a crime might happen.

Trigun Stampede

Perfecty serviceable and inoffensive 3d based on Trigun. Do you like the original Trigun? I know nothing about it. This was fine.

Women!

They still exist! And not all are 1000 years old but in the body of a pre-teen and not related by blood Oni-Chan. Some even head their own series!

7th Time Loop: The Villainess Enjoys a Carefree Life married to her Worst Enemy

One of the quasi-feminist insurgency Anime 2024. Princess is cast out & stumbles into a 5-year time loop power. She dies and returns to the point of her expulsion with all skills and memories intact. But always dies after 5 years and always during a war started by the Dark Prince.

She uses 6 loops to level up as a scientist, merchant, thief, knight and I forget what else, and become insanely hyper-competent and knowledgeable at pretty much everything. On the 7th she runs into the Dark Prince & he falls in love with her.

The rest is a romance/combat/attempt at moral growth as she falls for the guy but also tries to change him to less fucked up. Can the worlds most fearless and competent woman change the heart of this Dark Genius and avert war? An interesting mix of hyper-competent woman mysteriously solves problems with a more primal reform/redeem the Dark Prince story.

The Apothecary Diaries

I showed this to a friend who generally does not like things and they liked this.

An apothecary-based broadly mystery-of-the-week detective drama based in a fictionalised version of the Chinese imperial court in.. some kind of history time. The MC is a brilliant young apothecary working for her adopted father when she is abducted and sold to the imperial palace as a serving girl, despite trying to hide her encyclopaedic knowledge of herbs and potions and monstrously high IQ in order to get by without being noticed, she is drawn into a network of intrigues around the sub-palace of the Emperors wives.

The mysteries are good. Nice part about it being a general intrigue drama is that not everything is a murder or poisoning; all kinds of wacky situations come up from ghosts dancing on the palace walls to disappearing bodies to mysterious hyper-specific bequests from dead woodworkers

Most interesting as a window into the characters and the world as almost everyone at court is locked in a range of complex mazes and deceptions, up to and including the Emperor, and everyone has about five motives and each statement or social movement can have multiple readings so there is a lot of people outwitting/insulting/insinuating and trying to read each others true intentions.

The MC is good as a brilliant somewhat autistic-inflected young woman who only really gets excited by having access to rare herbs, being sucked into the hyper-complex patterns and mysteries of the court

There are also strong feminist undertones, with everyone involved, of whatever status, being trapped and having to scheme and intrigue to get the slightest grasp of their own desire – all happening under the glorious floral surface of carefully modulated and ruthlessly imposed public ritual (one woman trips up in front of the Emperor and this ruins her career).

Watch one or two episodes if you like detective/historical dramas.

Bocchi the Rock

An extremely introverted and socially awkward girl ends up in a girls rock band, hilarity, friendship and personal growth ensue.

Good story and excellent inventive animation that mixes standard anime and wild cartooning really well.

The sympathetic and entertaining characters explode into sketches, warner brothers simulations, dream-visions etc as their interior worlds collide, a very peppy and visually entertaining anime. Would recommend.

I’m sorry I don’t have more to say! Its been a while!

Tomo-Chan is a Girl!

Athletic Tomboy Tomo realises she has fallen for her childhood friend but he sees her only as ‘a friend’. Hijinks ensue as the two bounce off each other with the help and interference of friend and allies.

Notable in that the male leads emotional retardation is actually pretty well supported in character (he was a near Hikkomori shut-in and the lively Tomo pulled him out of his shell when they were very young. He genuinely thought his best friend was a boy for a few years. Tomo was his inspiration and baseline for how a man should act in very early youth. Also he’s afraid of the collapse of their friendship), also for the mild inversion of the ‘assumption of femininity’ theme; Tomo will learn to act like a girl, somewhat, some of the time, when she feels like it, but will mainly learn how to be less of an emotional retard.

Lycoris Recoil

A fucking great action series.

Starsky and Hutch extrovert Blonde/introvert Brunette secret agent anime girls team up to battle nebulously evil terrorists on behalf of a nebulously sketchy secret agency in high concept gunfights and tacticool action scenes. Its an anime original and only one series so far.

I feel like I should say more but what more is there to say? You should watch it.

Kaguya Sama, Love is War

A great comedy/romance series. Maybe the best?

Feel most of you will know about this already but; Two type A personalities in a high status school fall in love with each other. Because they are both obsessive Type A’s, neither will confess their love and determine they are going to force the other one to fall in love/confess their love first, so engage in a deranged battle of deception and one-upmanship that reaches surreal and absurd heights in order to do this.

The context of this onrunning battle becomes their love affair. A deeply charming and inventive series with relentless invention, excellent characters, some very high concepts (at one point a character re-animates local parkland into a giant vynil disk and ‘scratches’ it during a cringe v cringe rap battle).

Notable in that this battle for dominance between hyper-obsessive loons who refuse to surrender personal sovereignty by its nature becomes a battle for mutual understanding which ends up deepening and maturing both

The Masterful Cat is Depressed Again Today

This is a short and somewhat pleasing slice of life series. I am actually surprised I watched this.

Chaotic, self-loathing terminally hoarding early 20’s salarywoman rescues a kitten from death which, to return the favour, grows to enormous size and human sentience and learns all the arts of a 50s housewife, transforming her home and life. Now, with her wardrobe sorted, house clean, regular home cooked healthy meals and a bento box that makes others envious of ‘her’ cooking skills, her work life is transformed.. but how will she stop people realising that her house contains a gigantic sentient cat which walks on its hind legs and watches cooking shows? (The cat can leave the house, this being Japan everyone assumes it’s a pervert in a fur suit and refuses to comment.)

There is a neat part in the opening credits to each episode where the girl and cat ride around in an open topped car and the cats ears flap in the wind

Fantasy!

Frieren: Beyond Journeys End

The best and most original fantasy for a long time. One of few I own in hardcopy. Was good originally but a rare event in which the animation took an already good story and made it REALLY AMAZING.

You probably already know about this but in case you don’t; Post-adventure fantasy in which near-immortal Elf girl teams up with band of heroes to kill the demon lord. This done she wanders off for 50 years thinking she will come back soon enough, but returns just in time to spend a few days with her close friend before he dies. At the funeral she starts crying and realises she was in love with him.

The series is about the titular Elf going on a journey to the site of the Demon Kings castle, maybe to view the afterlife? She stumbles into a new fellowship.

A near immortal being to whom each human life is like a butterfly or momentary thing, earnestly tries to work through what seems to us like deep depression or anhedonia, to find meaning in the people around her and the current moment.

Its also about depression, disconnection, dealing with inevitable grief and loss, what to do if you feel like you have missed out on life, and a bunch of other things.

Its also a really good adventure series as Frieren and her group run into dragons, problems and some of the very hyper-powerful Demons from the Demon-Kings army who still haunt the land.

This was already a story which vey unusually combined this classical travel/adventure strand with a deep theme of tacit grief and dealing with isolation and failure in a really unusual way. Then the animation studio saw it and though; fuck it, we ball, and just directed gigantic batteries of creative artillery directly onto its position until the whole thing was absolutely blazing with gorgeous animated beauty.

The Faraway Paladin

Technically an Isekai but doesn’t feel like one so I put it here... Its emotional core is just, a good, honest fantasy? Theres a certain slightly dirty bus-stop je ne sai quois that hangs around Isekai and this doesn’t have it.

A man is reborn in a fantasy world, but stolen by goblins and abandoned in a ruined city. He is found and raised by three Undead adventurers and taught their skills. The heroes are hanging around after death because a Cthulhu Gate is under the city and will open soonsh.

Our hero has been gifted hyper-competance but only has so many years to fundamentally alter the continental political and social situation, returning civilisation to the land, in the hopes he can built a nation string enough to fight Cthulhu when he turns up.

You have no idea how rare this actually is. A genre, done straight, no winks. And unusually for anime, neither the pedo-omiter or the fashigram, or the nihilismotron, register, even a bit. There is little exceptional about this except that it tries hard to do normal things well and often succeeds. The showdown with the dragon at the end is just a very neat bit of classical fantasy writing with the Dragon and heroes initially trying to deceive/negotiate with each other and then violence breaking out.

The Unwanted Undead Adventurer

There is a whole ‘I Became a Skeleton’ sub-genre, which is odd, but hey they made the Vending Machine Isekai. I haven’t watched the others but liked the look of this. I suppose on some level I have always wanted to be a skeleton, a desire that, due to overpopulation and adoption of cremation, I am unlikely to achieve…

Low level adventurer, fantasy world. Runs into mystery dragon & dies but wakes up as a skeleton. This skeleton can level up into different forms of undead.

This seems to be another ‘new start in middle age’ fantasy? The MC was always mid-range but had a lot of local knowledge and experience, just couldn’t break the high levels. Dying and being turned into undead finally gives them the chance to become the hero of their dreams.

Positives are; the hero has a cool mask and eventually gains a vampire mouse as a pet.

Mushi Shi

You probably already know about this, I’m not going to describe it. Notable for being deeply original and distinct in its tone and form. This one is off the grid really. There are no other elegiac semi-supernatural investigation serials with the same emotion and philosophy of transience, cycles and beauty. It’s also kind of like a Japanese Twilight Zone, as Mushi can do seemingly a lot of nutty stuff. There is a time-loop episode which might be one of the best 25 minutes on that theme that exist. I can’t even place the emotion of Mushi-Shi, it’s a little bit sad, a little tragic, a little resolute, a little hopeful. You may not like it but if you do here you go there are two series.

Hells Paradise

A magical and deadly isle where everyone thinks the potion of immortality can be found. Everyone who goes there either dies or comes back mutated or mad. Solution – send Japans most super-dangerous criminals to get the potion, if they come back alive, they go free (allegedly).

So a kind of fantastic dirty-dozen battle royale plus exploration of this mysterious mutant isle and its secrets. I think this is another one with an evil cult where probably they are going to have to kill God at the end.

To Your Eternity

I can’t believe I haven’t reviewed this already, but I watched it so long ago! Now I have to try to remember details!

The adventures of an Orb.

A mysterious entity drops a white orb in the ground. It remains for ages till a lame dog finds it and dies of exposure. It then takes on the form of the dog. The orb takes on the form of whatever it is attached to or drawn towards, but only living things, and only after they die.

Get ready for heartbreak as, like the orb, we meet a range of characters, one after the other, only for them to die and the Orb, slowly growing in depth, complexity, humanity and post-humanity, encounters more and more living things, becoming sentries, then self-aware, then verbal, cultured and then perhaps more, but, immortal and deeply attached to living things, only able to take on forms after the person dies.

Adventure ensues as some people become obsessed with capturing and controlling the immortal, mysterious shape-changing entities seem to be hunting it and an eldritch white figure in a black robe turns up to advise them.

This is a pretty great and extremely sad series. The first season is just about perfect but the second is good and we do actually get an ending.

The Big Hitters

Jujutsu Kaisen

This is a very good anime. You probably already know about this. Notable in shonen for its good female characters, being very well animated and for allegedly breaking the animation team on its second series.

Demon Slayer - The Swordsmiths Village

Look it’s still good and fun and looks great and that’s about it. A solid normie anime. I feel like Tanjiro would be one of those guys fighting in the jungle 40 years after the war ended.

Mob Psycho 100

What if Akira was nice? Or, what if Akira accidentally picked up a positive father figure (who was also a con-man with a heart of gold). Series is short, finished and good. My favourite father/son relationship in anime. Think I already reviewed this previously, the third season is less perfect than the first two but does fully and boldly tie up and conclude the story in an excellent way. I nice farewell.

Chainsaw Man

It was fine.

Attack on Titan finally ended

Too much to say about AoT. It did convince me that most Japanese hold a secret desire to kill all other life.

JoJo Golden Wind

Fun series, terrible ending.

JoJo’s tend to be a little less good than we remember them as because the endings are usually great and rise to a pitch of fey-mania uno-reverso tornado plotting which makes them so fun we just assume the rest of the series was that good, which it usually wasn’t.

This is a perfectly good JoJo with some good highpoints. Good if you like Italy. The power set of the main villain is even more fudgy vague and deranged than usual, and this is a series where sus extensions of power sets based on schoolyard logic are a stock in trade. This leads to an ending which I felt was pretty poor for a JoJo series.

Difficult To Explain

Sonny Boy

Surrealist, absurdist anime where schoolkids are mysteriously moved to a para-reality that keeps melting and where the highly-specific rules of existence keep changing. IS IT A METAPHOR? IS IT HELL? THE AFTERLIFE?? WE NEVER FIND OUT.

Some of the kids get apparent super-powers, but the dreamlike and surreal nature of the shifting reality ultimately makes these of questionable utility. They are kind of trapped in a dream state.

Original in its tone and content, consistently interesting and frustrating. Has some really good episodes and your milage may vary for the remainder.

I generally find chin-stroking Third-Policeman-style vaguely meaningful is-it-a-metaphor stories to be frustrating and less good than they think they are, but this was ok.

The Zombie One

Zom 100: Bucket List of the Dead

From the subgenre of – the Japanese working environment is hell.

A Zombie Apocalypse happens and the MC is so driven totally insane already by suffering in a Black Company and the commensurate death of all his hopes, dreams and inner life, that the end of the world seems like liberation. They team up with other survivors and set out on a kind of Odessey to complete their goals of personal fulfilment before humanity is wiped out completely.

Its that movie with Woody Harrilson and Jessie Eisenberg but an anime. Its good.

The Sort Of Historical One That Isn’t Apothecary Diaries

Golden Kamuy

An animated Tarantino/Elmore Leonard historical action series set in turn of the century Hokkaido!

The Ainu of Hokkaido collected a SHITLOAD of gold from its gold-bearing streams and hid it. Then someone killed them. Then that someone was imprisoned and tortured, but wouldn’t give it up.

Instead they became a raw-faced, (the guards cut their face off), prison tattooist and tattooed all the other prisoners in high security. Then organised a breakout. Each of the prisoners has part of the code/map on their skin.

So now a range of colourful characters are chasing these guys around Hokkaido to get their skin (or just copy the tattoos if they are nice). A radical Japanese Military group. Various factions of Ainu, A roguish samurai survivor of that film with Tom Cruise where the Samurai got shot up, criminal gangs, and our heroes; a traumatised but near-unkillable veteran of the Russo-Japanese war and an Ainu girl.

It's kind of like a western. And its unusual for being heightened but for being strictly a non-genre piece. No magic or similar, an historical Tarantino movie with its heightened but not genre tone, its somewhat stark and heightened but deep characters and rambunctious knockabout inventiveness.

This series also reminded me that Gold for XP is no limitation to roleplaying since all the characters are after the Gold but all have utterly different motivations for doing so, ranging from dreams of Ainu independence, a revivified Samurai culture on Hokkaido, justice for the veterans of an incompetent command, to fulfil a fathers dream and so on. The gold is just a gateway for particular dreams and those are what people are really fighting over.

10 Anime Patrick Would Recommend

(I would put Mushi-Shi in here but I feel like it’s in a category of its own as a unique work of art).

Brave Bang Bravern

Good, short, complete. Deranged. A classic parody and also full engagement with the super-robot and mecha genre. Arch but heartfelt. A great show. The first episode should tell you if you like it.

The Witch from Mercury

The only Gundam series I’ve completed. JAM HANDS!

Psycho Pass

Extended Cyberpunk/Minority Report but goes into quite a lot more depth about what living in a Minority Report world would be like. Also deals with its core moral questions with some subtlety and at length. Has a good female protag with actually interesting growth and depth. The fully-cybernetic millionaire who stumbles around in his cavern complex hunting criminals like rabbits is a lovely horror.

Bocchi the Rock

Really good cartooning? Is that what it’s called? An inventive and expressive use of all the forms of animation, with a shifting palette of styles and modes. And a good story with a charming central character. Watch till Bocchi plays her first set from within a large cardboard box to see if you like it.

Apothecary Diaries

Court detective done well! Two episodes should tell you if you like it.

Lycoris Recoil

A great, original funny action series! John Wick with anime girls. Fuck you I am not cringe for liking this. Watch the opening credits to see if you like it.

Kaguya Sama: Love is War

Highly inventive and very fun. The opening series is more sketch-like than it becomes later so up to you how much you watch before you decide. Maybe the Best Romance/Comedy?

Golden Kamuy

A rare non-genre action/adventure piece that you can maybe show normal people. Not short, or complete, but well worth watching. Two or three episodes should tell you if you like it. Good if you want to know more about the Ainu and/or Hokkaido and Japan at the start of the 20th Century

Mob Psycho 100

What if Akira was nice and the whole thing was drawn in a slightly indie style with a heartwarming teacher/student relationship and absolutely batshit and bananas psychic super-battles that break the pencils of the animators.

Frieren

If they can stick the landing on this one its going to end up in the Top Ten.

View Details

Zofia Stryjenska

"After that the King began to wake, coming quietly out of the drowning, dim awareness of some shapeless disaster, over the threshold of dreams into full and sharp consciousness of everything. For half an hour he would face it with no physical stirring, no tears. he could not, perhaps, have spoken. Then, as his body overcame his mind, the thing he saw would waver and blur and rock out into blackness again, and for another space of time he was unconscious and gathering strength against the next awakening."

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I Really Liked This Book

I recently finished 'The Corn King and the Spring Queen' by Naomi Mitchison, a longish book which took me a long time, and boy, was it pretty great. Five star book for sure. And an actual five stars, not just a relative to experience five stars that I give out for some reads.

Like a lot of very long, very deep, rich books, it ends up being about everything, a mirror to the world and psyche of the writer as well as of its imagined events.

The two books this reminded me of were 'Black Lamb, Grey Falcon', by Rebecca West, and 'A Tale of Bali' by Vicki Baum. All of these books are about the ancient and reawakened borders of one kind of morality interacting with another. But I will go into troubling depth about this in the final part of the essay.

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"There was much that Panteus was in a way too happy to understand fully; he was country bred and he had not the scepticism about appearances that comes more naturally to someone who had been brought up in a complicated place with pictures and literature. All the same, if ever the thing should happen which would wake him fully to life and show him that everything could not possibly be done either simply of happily, then he might be able to think."

Zofia Stryjenska

What Happens in the Book?

The story is set towards the latter end of the Hellenistic Age, just before the rise of Rome, (the first Punic War takes place in the storied afterword). It opens in the town of Marob; a fictional settlement on the shores of the Black Sea with a culture imagined, or interpolated by Maomi Mitcheson based on general record and archaeology of the area, circa 1930 (she roamed across the Mediterranean, Black Sea and Russia for five years during the writing of the book, but more on that later).

Marob is a recreated Scythian-'type' society with some strong Hellenic inflections. Its culture is considered 'barbaric' by Hellenes but discoveries over the course of the story suggest a deeper older commonality

It’s important to talk about culture because the book is partly about cultures. Where they come from, what they mean and how and why they are maintained. If we think of this essay as a tool to affect the mind, and of an epic tale to be a tool to affect the heart, then one aspect of 'Corn King' is about human social cultures being tools to interface with the soul; both managing and expressing the deep unseen engines of that buried thing.

Marob is what I will call a 'Sacrifice' Culture. They have a deep sequence of largely organic rituals, yearlong, which tend to be more bottom-up than top-down. Marob is built around the growing of Corn and its faith/ritual cycle is all built into the seasons, weather, harvest and growth. But it is also an expression of the unstated moods, tensions, desires, factions, hungers and fears of the community. Everyone 'of Marob' takes part in these festivals, dances, sacrifices and acts of worship. They are so built into the psyche and spirit of the place that its inhabitants would not really recognise these things as 'culture' or a thing they do separately. To those of Marob rituals are the substance of their lives not objects in it.

Marob has a Corn King. The Corn King is chosen, or made, when the old Corn King is sacrificed. They eat part of the old King and become the new King. The new King is given near-total license over the community to fulfil whatever desire they wish. (Though in truth this is constrained in a way through ritual, social expectation and other forms of unstated power*). The Corn King rules until they are no longer virile and powerful, then they are sacrificed and fed to the new Corn King.

(*It’s also possible for a Corn King to 'fail' at being the Corn King, to get the rituals wrong, to fail to intuit, manage and reflect the psyche of the community, to make political mistakes or piss everyone off too much, and to be deposed, in which case it is decided they were no longer a right king, and a new one is made.)

While the Corn King usually rules till their sacrificial death, there is also a Spring Queen; the female part of the ritual and religious dyad, who performs a complimentary role and has similar powers, but who can be replaced more easily and less lethally from year to year and who does not need to be sacrificed.

Erif Der is a teenage witch and daughter of Harn Der, a powerful man in Marob. Tarrik is the current Corn King. Erif is recruited by her father to seduce Tarrik into becoming the Spring Queen, and then to “magic” and trick him into failing as Corn King, so he can be replaced by one of Harn Ders choosing, making him the effective ruler of the tribe and town.

Erif Der begins this process but during it, starts to actually fall in love with Tarrik. Tarrik is broadly aware of the conspiracy but goes along with it, also falling for Erif.

Both Erif and Tarik are highly perceptive and intelligent people, and Tarrik in particular is brave, subtle, cunning but also deeply chaotic, impulsive, charismatic, tricky and perhaps disordered. He is aware Erif is 'magiking' him but is broadly along for the ride, either because he is very far sighted or because he just likes to roll the dice like that, (probably both).

Both Erif and Tarrik are struggling psychologically, spiritually and morally with their place in the society and faith of Marob, and in Erifs’ case, also with her impossible dual role of daughter of a conspirator and of Spring Queen.

We actually come in half way through this dynastic conspiracy story, because another completely different story is going to smash into it in the night, in the form of a ship crashing into a sandbar outside Marobs harbour; Tarrik and his young men dash off to bravely rescue those onboard the ship, (later some will be ransomed, some distaff-enslaved, some probably-brutally enslaved and others just let go). The last person off the ship is a Greek Philosopher; Sphaeros.

Sphaeros brings two extremely dangerous things to Marob; the Philosophy of Stoicism and the story of a brave Spartan King trying to rescue his culture from decadence, inequality and failure, and to enact a kind of social revolution, returning Sparta to its old roots and purging wealth, ownership, decadence and foreign influence. (This is the historical Cleomenes III, who did in fact attempt just this.)

These are both extremely attractive to Tarrik, even more so after Sphaeros saves his life from a curse or spell made by Erif during the annual bull-running. Tarrik escapes from the problem of his beloved wife/possible assassin, by announcing that he will be haring off on an adventure to Sparta to meet with this revolutionary King and presumably do heroic deeds over there for a while.

From this point on the story is about two places and things; the spiritual challenge of Marob, and the fate of the revolution of Cleomenes. Erif and Tarrik follow and rescue each other, seperate and re-unite, change and grow, face physical, moral, magical and intellectual challenges and the whole thing ends in the extremely cool and decadent Alexandria of Ptolemy Philopater, another God-King, this time way more of the Epstein’s Island type.

And if you want to know how it ends you can look up the story of Cleomenes III.

The afterword cuts a generation ahead to the children of Tarrik and Erif Der as they meet with and free a Spartan Slave of the galleys who gives them a brief potted history of the rise of Rome and the fate of the ideas of the revolution in general.

Evgeny Kray

"They had come to a kind of peace and understanding, based on not saying or being aware of a great deal about one another, a pattern of exclusions which made for great courteousness, tenderness even, and which went easily with the life they must both lead at this time of year when there was so much to do. Yet it was essentially temporary, a breathing space in which they could just continue to live without facing one another, until the child was born."

Naomi Mitcheson

I had no idea why I was reading this book, then I looked up Naomi Mitcheson and realised; she’s the sister of JBS Haldane! I must have read about here while looking into JBS and then ordered the book and then forgotten I had.

JBS Haldane some of you may remember as the extremely clever Geneticist, subject of his own somewhat wild experiments, rare Chemical Weapons enthusiast, science populace, low key eugenicist and communist traitor.

Born of the same womb, one good way to describe Naomi Mitcheson is 'What if JBS Haldane had a soul'. She combines Haldanes ferocious intelligence and deep grasp of history with a subtle and perceptual emotional sense and generally not being a semi-autistic half-soul. The range of people who are both extremely brilliant and are also skilled at living life is small and she is in it.

Naomi Mitcheson by Wyndham Lewis

Over the years of writing 'Corn King' she had a marriage, a lover, two children, lost one, and wandered around the Mediterranean and black sea collecting evidence and information for her sorcerous generation of a past epoch.

The depth of the scholarship shows, but a merely clever writer could do that. The resurrection and recreation of a lost world would require a merely brilliant writer. The depth, perception, accuracy, wit, subtlety and the very deep awareness and understanding of a human life as it is lived, and of the thoughts and feelings of all the people involved in living it, requires more. There are probably many perceptive writers but generally they are boring while Mitcheson is not. Added to this the epic range, the historic spread with all its battles, dramas, plots, decadent courts, magic, strange rituals and so on.

For the simple range of things she could do and ability to do them Mitcheson might be amongst the most skilled writers I have read.

Flauberts 'Sallambo' is as good in terms of its prose, invention vividness, savagery and excitement, but its characters are (appropriately) inner savages as well, living in an alien mode, abstracted from their own emotions as we would see it. Mitchesons characters have all the strange otherness of those who have grown under a foreign system of belief, but manage to bridge the gap between us and them, they live and breathe and give us strange windows into their half-alien souls , and her characters manage to live the whole of life in equal vividness. Especially the women and especially Erif Der who, by the end is the main character and probably also a Mitcheson self-insert. Like Mitcheson Erif Der has a child but loses one and it’s difficult to believe the events of Mitchesons life didn't affect the character.

Mitcheson lived a lot of lives. In her castigated story/memoir of life on the borderlands of communism in the 1920’s and 1930’s ‘We Have Been Warned’ its said she had to create two self-insert characters to fit in all the varied stuff she did. Born a child of peers and nobles she lived through the entirety of the 20th Century and died just after its end. She was an advisor to a South African tribe? A proof reader for Lord of the Rings? Helped start the Eugenics society but left if over political differences? Was on Orwells watch-these-commies list? How to find Mitcheson in the intellectual life of 20th Century Britian? Throw a rock in the bushes apparently, you will probably hit her. Woman was a real-life Jennie Sparks.

It’s the range and the depth of real-life human experience that shines from her work. Most Philosophers are mildly disappointing people and learn little from their lives as-lived, being creatures of thought. Mitcheson is the opposite

Z Stryjenska

“The baby lay in front of the fire on a blanket: he was awake and staring, first at his own fist and then at the bright, steady flaming of the logs. His eyes were blotted and brimming with flames. His fat legs bent and unbent in a steady kicking; they thumped softly on the blanket; when they stayed still one of Tarrik’s hounds would stretch across and lick the toes. …….

Bye and by he began to give little panting, eager cries of desire for food and the warmth and tenderness that went with it. Erif’s breasts answered to the noise with a pleasant hardening, a faint ache waiting to be assuaged. Their tips turned upward and outward, and the centre of the nipple itself grew velvet soft and tender and prepared for the softness of the baby. She unpinned her dress and picked him up and snuggled down over him on to a heap of cushions. He moved his blind, silly mouth from side to side eagerly. For a moment she teased him, withholding herself; then, as she felt the milk in her springing towards him, she let him settle, thrusting her breast deep into the hollow of his mouth, that seized on her with a rhythmic throb of acceptance, deep sucking of lips and tongue and cheeks. Cheated, her other breast let its milk drip in a large bluish-white drops on to his legs, then softened and sagged and waited. For a time he was all mouth, then his free arm began to waver and clutch, sometimes her face, sometimes a finger, sometimes grabbing the breast with violent, untender little soft claws. She laughed and caught his eye, and the sucking lips began to curve upward in spite of themselves. He et go suddenly to laugh, and her breast, released, spirted milk over his face.”

Magic

Magic in 'Corn King' occupies a psycho-spiritual space very close to that in Baums 'A Tale of Bali'. It is real in the minds of the characters and since the story is told through them, it is real enough. Yet magic does nothing necessarily supernatural or physically impossible from the readers point of view. (Though there are certainly a number of edge-cases and some very unusual, though not impossible, events.)

Erif Der and some other women in Marob believe themselves to be Witches and to have certain magical powers. Everyone else in Marob also believes this and so certain of the powers work. Tarrik is a half-Greek by descent and so both he and Erif believe that her magic can't really affect his Greek side.

Zofia Stryjenska Magic of the Slavs

"On the last day she came in sight of the house under the elms, and brisked up the pony. She rode down through shallows, knocking up clouds of sweet golden pollen; fat shining leaves were unfolding out of the mud. But between her and Yellow Bull's farm was a brown mile of floods. Westwards the sun dropped towards red reflections. She rode a few yards through the water, splashing, and suspected it was nowhere deep, but she grew nervous and the pony, feeling it through her, refused to go on. She felt shaken and sick. At last she did what she had not meant to do. She crouched in the brim of the flood among the muddied grass stems and stirred the water into ripples, talking to it all the time; the ripples went off towards the island with the elms. She sat in the saddle and waited. Before it was quite dark two of Essro's servants rowed over in a flat-bottomed boat. Erif stepped in and the tied the pony behind.'Essro sent you at once,' she said contentedly, glad to think of the fire and dry bed waiting for her. But the men frowned at one another. 'We saw you - didn't we?' said the elder of the two."

With the people of Marob Erif can interrogate, cause shallow wounds to stop bleeding, form magic circles others cannot cross, but even outside Marob, in the general Greek world, people are still magic-conscious enough that her powers can have some affect. At Delphi she and her brother save an annoying philosopher from a baying Mob;

"'They'll be back in no time! Oh Erif, can't you leave things alone!'

She said: 'I can make a circle, Berris, I know I can. Look at the knife!' There was blood on the tip of it, from someone - but the rest of Tarrik's knife was glowing as it had not since it was in Greece.

'Then that's all right,' said Berris. 'Make a line while I get the ban away behind it.' If she said she could she would be able.

She made it with the knife and the green shells and a few shaken blood drops. The first people who came back to finish off their atheist and whoever else there might be, found her ending it. She went along it again, to strengthen it. Then she invited them to come. But instead they all ran to fetch a priest and show him what was being done in Apollo's own ground."

The full depiction of the Oracle at Delphi is pleasingly touristy, with a mixture of deep Greek history (at that time), present at the site, but also the effects of being essentially a religious/tourist preferred location, with the logistics and accommodations of a tourist town in the ancient world, mixed with an active temple complex and a class of clever Priests set to facilitate the oracle, who we never see and who's prophecy at first seems like gimcrack fortune cookie stuff but which actually comes true in the books last part, perhaps guided by the deep psychologies of the character and maybe with a bit of actual magic.

Whether any of the magic represents what we would call actually supernatural events is open for argument. Blades and wooden charms 'glow' at times but these may be in the eyes of the beholder. There are a handful of rare and unusual events like premonitions of danger and snakes acting strangely, which suggest but don't confirm actual-magic.

Probably much more important is that there is no 'magic' as we would see it in the story. The world of the characters is impregnated with what we would call supernatural powers but to them are largely expressions of reality, be it the cycle of the seasons, the great engine of ritual, the moral exchange of sacrifice, the well-wishing or evil eye of practitioners or any of a flowing wash of things which easily cross the boundaries between what we would call real and unreal.

Towards the end Erif Der collaborates in a happenstance miracle; finding a woman who had been her enemy in an Egyptian temple, unseen she hears the woman asking the Goddess for the curse on her to be lifted. Erif retrieves a dagger this woman would recognise from their shared life in Marob previously, takes it to the temple and asks the priestesses to single out this woman, take her aside and tell her the Goddess has heard her and given this, then to perform a ritual in which the curse is 'cut' with the dagger.

This works pretty well, with the mysterious appearance of this forgotten dagger and the cutting ceremony having the required affect, the woman now believes the curse has been lifted by divine power and goes away happy. Erif has also forgiven this woman and taken back the harm she meant her. This is trickery, but when discussing the matter with the Priestesses of the Temple, not 'true' trickery but an arrangement of fate into which the women have fitted themselves. As much the work of the Goddess as if she had done it Herself, which, for them, she did.

The Magic, Rituals and powers everywhere spin like a flywheel between the hunger of human souls for order and meaning, regularity, sanity and an escape from chaos, on one side, and the relentless semi-random cycles of nature, and cruel or indifferent cracklings of fate and power on the other. Imagine a mill-wheel set in, not just one river running below it, but a second, utterly different and alien river, of some strange material, running upside down above it. The wheel dips into both rivers, each running strange directions with irregular surges and droughts, and somehow has to even out and make sense of the movement of these two near-random, crazy and mutually indifferent flows. That wheel is the culture of belief in 'Corn King', and though it is all different in the different cultures presented, these cultures are clearly shown as having either similar roots or deep connections.

The Magic and Ritual, and the way it forms the substance of organic order and meaning for the people of Marob and others to act in, though it be savage to us, works exactly as it does in Baums 'Tale of Bali'. Erif Der would immediately understand the cults and rituals of Bali as being like her own and a Balinese practitioner or priest would easily grasp the rituals of Marob and the Gods of Egypt.

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Z Stryjenska

"The Chief always gave several feasts at the beginning of winter. Everyone liked them. People told stories and sang and played games and laughed a great deal; they were probably very happy, but hardly any of them thought about that; they did not think about happiness was. Only, it was stupid to be sad and not laugh. If for some reason you could not begin laughing at once when everyone else did, if you were feeling winter or death or pain, it was a good thing to go to a feast and have plenty to eat and drink, and hear funny stories and remember and tell others, and see a lot of lights and girls and coloured things to make the blood run quicker. If you had not got enough food in your own house to last over winter, someone else in Marob would be sure to give it to you. If your wife died, court and marry another. If your child died, make yourself another. It was no use trying to interfere with the seasons, with the life of the year. Some lived and some died. As well expect your wheat to be all grain and no chaff!"

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Savagery

These people are savages, they sacrifice animals, enslave shipwreck victims, murder slaves on a whim. They are irregular, impassioned and unpredictable. There are laws in Marob but not written ones and while everything the High Status Characters do makes sense according to unwritten ritual law and to the deeps of their own psyches that lie beyond it, they would still be some chaotic and frightening people to meet in real life.

In modern terms all of these characters are evil, especially Tarrik and Erif Der, but not within the world of the tale.

Death, terror, sacrifice and secret power are at the heart of their world. Deeds done against equals, or near-equals, can matter. Erif Der unexpectedly cuts her father’s throat during a Spring Ceremony, (somewhat justified as he killed her child previously). One of the first major acts we see Tarrik perform is the murder of a shady Greek artist where he gets the man drunk and then persuades, tricks and pressures him into demonstrating Greek diving in a swamp at night. The Greek knows he is doomed but he is dealing with the Corn King of Marob, who has power and license over the flesh of everyone in town and, sadly, and hoping for a miracle, leaps into the swap and is lost.

When Tarrik has what we would call a mental breakdown or loss of faith and starts running wild he kills slaves without comment but only randomly assaults some townspeople. While this is far from ideal, it is accepted as part of his right and pattern of rulership. In 'Corn King' people quite like, or if not like, they quite expect to be somewhat terrified by their rulers now and again, and expect them to have wild tastes and impulsive desires. Tarriks heroic leadership during the midnight shipwreck is as much as part and parcel of his role as his technical license over every unmarried women in town. His culture expects him to regularly do heroic and charismatic things and, for the most part, he wants to and can do such things, from intuitively grasping the right words and actions during a ritual to riding off to defend the town from raiders. At the end of it all they will kill him and his son will eat him.

Erif Der is less directly murderous but she does cut the throat of a slave girl she mistakenly thinks is plotting against Tarrik, and this leads to the death of another somewhat innocent man who witnesses the scene and fears her vengeance. When she returns to the place of the Spring Queen her women are shocked but not astounded,

"When she got to the Chief's house the women had to carry her in; they took off her clothes and bathed her, hushed and horrified. She longed for complete darkness and quiet; she gasped and lay very still, contracted and faintly shivering. pains of one sort and another went flitting about her, but these her women could not see. They only saw that the Spring Queen too had, like the Corn King, perhaps had to give herself a sacrifice."

Yet, in this system/psyche that requires blood, there is something like a murky half-justice, or at least, balance. The mind and memory of the community seems to soak in all these reciprocal acts of terror and if too many are performed, or performed against the wrong people, or at the wrong time, or in the wrong way, then there must be some form of balancing. This will come about, not through any particular single act but almost from the deep emergent belief of the community that it will happen. As well as that the mind and soul of the guilty or excessive party will collaborate in this dark balancing.

...................

"Reality and beauty had been taken out of past and present, and the substitute was this dull, hopeless pain; he saw nothing else in the future. Berris Der looked at the world and found it evil, and promised himself to return its evil with his own. He looked at his statue and got some momentary satisfaction; that was a slap on the mouth for the kind and hopeful people who thought everything must come right in the end if only one waited patiently! He had made a portrait of what there really was at the end. But did anyone seriously hope? Yes, probably always the quite young. And the saved. He would have to make something worse before he could get at them. he would, some day. Once, a very short time ago, Berris Der had been innocent - not hurting, not wanting to hurt. Now he knew the innocence had dropped off him. He did want to hurt."

...................

Revolution

A key strand and eventually the dominant one of 'Corn King' is Sparta, and the attempted social revolution of Cleomenes III. Cleomenes finds Sparta riddled with sensuality, corruption, wealth and weakness and wants to transform Spartan society to something more like that of its noble past.

What this means, for fictional Cleomenes, real historical Cleomenes, for Mitcheson and for us are all probably somewhat different things. The real historical revolution would perhaps have been a combination, difficult for us to parse, of hyper-conservatism; returning to the ancient rules and ancient practices of eating the black broth together and suffering the disciplines together), and some kind of Spartan renaissance/jubilee in which the high are pulled down, land redistributed and new citizens made.

Mitcheson was a commie sympathiser, at least up until the mid 1930's, and she wrote this book while she was roving around the Med, the Baltic the Black Sea and Russia during that period. She had a lot of deep and complex feelings about Revolution and pours them all into the revolution of Cleomenes which is noble, self-absorbed, brave, ruthless, immoral, fundamentally good, is about returning Sparta to the past, and is about making slaves citizens, and about stripping the wealthy of their gold, and about making the King supreme over all, and bringing equality between the people, and ends up kind of being the Last Supper somehow? There is a lot going on. Everything that could be good or bad about a Revolution is there somewhere in the Revolution of Cleomenes and is felt to be so.

I mean there was a lot going on in Europe in the late 1920's and 1930's, a lot going on with Mitcheson and there is a lot going in in this book. It’s clearly not just a reflection of the Communist revolution in Russia but it definitely has something of the holy glow of Final Equity you get from early Communism-enjoyers.

AND (I was going to put this in a separate section but as I come to think about it I think this is part of the same thing), Cleomenes kind of ends up as a proto-Jesus figure?

There are rumblings of tectonic Christianity under the surface of 'Corn King'. All through the book different people face deep spiritual conflicts between the bones and tendons of their societies and some distant other thing they can't quite put a face or name to, but something or way of being that would change their spiritual and moral circumstances. And bits and pieces of the Christian Story, both good and bad, keep erupting like pimples through the face of its events.

Tarrik is 'killed' (captured by raiders), then escapes and returns in secret, taking a place in the upcoming Harvest Play, (the same on in which Erif Der sacrificed her father for real and so 'poisoned' the society). At the climax his 'character' returns to life and he takes off his mask to reveal the actual Corn King has actually returned to live for real. A Resurrection he performs partly due to his impish nature, partly to seal his safety and the sense in Marob of him being the 'True' Corn King, and in part perhaps as an intuitive leap to heal the society of the poison, grief and shame it feels over Erif Ders true-sacrifice.

Eventually Cleomenes and his few remaining loyalists turn up in Egypt after the revolution fails and, after screwing up a coup there, they commit ritual suicide. Then the body of Cleomenes is degraded and put on ritual display, and then a magic snake turns up to hover over his body like a crown or spirit and the people of Alexandria start paying homage, or worshipping at the feet of the sacrificed man they refused to help earlier.

Later Berris Der, Erifs Brother, makes a series of paintings for his Love of the last moments of Cleomenes, which turn out a LOT like the 'Last Supper', (I guess in the reality of 'Corn King' this arrangement of figures left an echo in Greek and Roman painting which Leonardo then copied). Then these paintings are taken to Sparta and kept secretly as symbols of the revolution.

Erif Der helps a young woman and her child escape the vengeance of Tarrik when he is having a crazy, they disappear into the swamp following a secret road in echoes of Herod and of Moses.

There is probably a lot more I forgot. Echoes and presentiments of the New Testament are scattered through the book and only a few of them are probably deliberate. We can read this in-fiction as some new form of morality or new story trying to take shape and birth itself through the structures of the world at that time. As a book, this may simply be Mitcheson so deep in the mythos that she unconsciously echoes and brings forth pretty much everything she has learned and been taught from her own (Edwardian) youth, which as it turns out the commie atheist actually had a pretty strong Christian cultural base.

The meanings of this can be turned like hanging mirrors so I will leave that to you but this 'pre-birth' of Christian morality does link 'Corn King' at one end of time, to Wests 'Black Lamb and Grey Falcon', at the other end of the chronology. But more on that below.

...................

"Therykion bent nearer: 'I am not sure if I can explain it. I think - there is a kind of beauty which is utterly lost in living and being rational and making plans and having material hopes: even for ones country, even for the New Times, even for Sparta. I think that is what is at the back of what Zeno and Iambulos say when they write down their dreams of what a state should be. You will not get this beauty for yourself by dying. I know you are right to say that even if we die looking on those hills, they will fade out for ever at the moment of death. But I think that your people and your revolution will get the beauty. I think your dying will put a bloom on them, Kleomenes.'

The King stayed very still. 'You think my blood can buy something, Therykion, that my life and my work and my reaon will not be able to buy?'

'Yes,' said Therykion.”

...................

Wheel vs Word, round two baby!

What kept reoccurring to me as I read it was that, along with two other very rich and capacious books written by women around the 1930's and 1940's, it was about the moral and spiritual challenge of the Araya, a challenge partially resolved by the end of World War Two, but with shards and shadows of its moral and intellectual origins essentially put on ice for 70 years since then and only now re-emerging.

Why is this book like the other two? 'Black Lamb' by West, and 'Tale' by Baum?

The obvious first; they are all capacious books dealing with history, written by women in the inter-war years. The links between 'Corn King' and 'Black Lamb' seem more geographical to begin with. 'Corn King' is set in a triangle between the shores of the Black Sea, Greece and Egypt. People have to sail past Byzantium a few times, though it doesn't play a role in the story. 'Black Lamb' is set in the Balkans, just north of Byzantium, only a little way out of the range of 'Corn King' and its depiction of somewhat tribal mountain people carries echoes of Marob. I think in 'Black Lamb' West even runs into an actual mountain Macedonian who speaks in an archaic patten and the Macedonians intervention in the Spartan war is essential in 'Corn King'. That character could easily have been a descendant of those Macedonians depicted in 'Corn King'. They are so archaic they felt like an actual character from that book.

Shield of Philip of Macedon

The obvious links to Baums 'Bali' are those of Ritual, faith and selfhood. Baum depicts Bali from within as a society, (here growing rice, not corn), deeply interwoven and expressed through ritual, which interrelates both to the management of land and agriculture, and to more cosmic concerns. Bali is also a Sacrifice Culture, mainly of farm animals and food offerings, though sometimes of eyes, and wives.

The deeper relationship is that these books are all about the boundaries of the Indic or Aryan, or Indo-European world, and its conflicts with the Abrahamic, or Monotheistic or Christian or 'Civilised' world.

This takes us back to the time of writing, and to the sleeping giant of Indo-European studies.

In the early 20th Century it became pretty widely obvious that a lot of European, Persian, and Indic cultures had some kind of common shared root. This was demonstrated through artefacts, symbols, language and similarities of mythos. The Nazis really ran with this one and made the 'Arya' and their favourite Sun Wheel symbol the axis of their racial cult, an original and savage 'master race' of which the derivations were lesser.

'Corn King', 'Bali' and 'Black Lamb' were all written during this period of ethnography. 'Corn King' itself is about a range of Mediterranean and Back Sea cultures with interrelated God-concepts and rituals, and the sacrifice cult of Marob, with its male/female sex/fertility/death rituals seeming pretty Indo-European. ‘Bali’ ‘is part of the furthest eastward extent of this Indo/Aryan culture; the chariot riders come down into India, crash its artistic culture for 500 years, get absorbed as Brahmins, change the culture and add their own principals and mythos, then eventually this Indic culture expands across the ocean, hitting the islands of South East Asia, forming part of the substrate there, before shrinking or being pushed back by Abrahamic cultures like Islam, then later Western Christianity. Bali itself being something of a refugium for those folkways and beliefs. The wife burning in Bali is a reflection of the Suttee of India, which is probably an import from the Indo-Europeans, considering wife/slave burning shows up in the mysterious proto-Vikings encountered by Ibn Fadlan in his ‘Lands of Darkness’. Ultimately the cults of Bali are 'Civilised' via gunfire and mass suicide by the Christian Dutch, the distant genetic cousins of those who created the ideas which shaped Bali.

'Black Lamb' is a more contempered book for its period, covering the years directly before World War Two and written during that war. In 'Black Lamb' the sides have switched places. That book valorises the Serbs and Balkan Christianity generally and the 'Enemy' if there is one in that book, is either the Turks or the Fascist future. The Fascists of course, are play-acting as reborn Aryan/Indo-Europeans, the main characters of both 'Bali' and 'Corn King'. The principal of sacrifice and the dark and bloody nature of that Primeval world-view, gives the title to Rebecca Wests book; the Grey Falcon symbolising the doom of the Serbs at Kosovo, (and for all she knows, the West itself during the writing of the book), and the Black Lamb literally being a sacrificed animal, for in the depths of the Balkans she finds a rank bloodstained altar rock where the locals continue to carry out the old sacrifices, about 1,200 years after the same sacrifices described in 'Corn King'.

So all of these are about the conflict and relationship between two general world-views, showing its heart or axis of change in 'Corn King', its furthest geographic extent in 'Bali' and its ancient survival and possible nightmare-zombie rebirth in 'Black Lamb', where the Sun Wheels the characters of 'Corn King' and 'Bali' would both recognise, have returned in a dark(er) form.

In each case these are opposed by what we would broadly call something like the Christian/Monotheist/Civilised/Universalist world-view, in 'Corn King' this is represented initially by Sphaeros and then by a range of characters and situations reaching for spiritual growth across the book, in 'Bali' the brutal and murderous but technically correct, (about the wife-burning at least), Dutch are its carriers and in 'Black Lamb' we have West, her poor Greek Jewish friend, (who could also easily have been a character in 'Corn King') married to his evil Fascist German wife, and ancient Serb Christian nobility, (as West would see it), vs rising fascism.

Well, to spoil the climax of that story; the Nazis lost, and in the lee of that defeat, any study of the 'Indo-European' question was dumped right in the deep-freeze. No-one in Germany wanted to talk about ancient racial or cultural origins and European origins were slid to the back of the file, covered over with decades of near-noble academic interpolation of 'pots are not people' and ideas of cultural exchange and transformation rather than a world of guys bonking each other on the head.

No-one ever said the Indo-European thing was false, it was just de-emphasised, confined to language and mythos studies, with fragments of archaeology and investigation pricking at the matter here and there but never really being forcefully combined. No-one really wants to be the one to let the Sun-Wheels out.

But here they come regardless. unfortunately we can read genes. And we can now read the genes of the long-dead, drawn from bones and teeth, with incredible depth and accuracy, and with modern computing and programming, we can organise and compare these huge genomes in vast numbers and across vast ranges, building libraries and maps of ancient movements. We can scrape the bones from the floors of tombs and rebuild family trees two thousand years old and more. And the long and the short of it is that, perhaps unfortunately, pots are people.

The phrase 'pots are not people' was used by archologists to remind historians that, just because an old pot style was dropped and an entirely new one spread across the same area in the past, that doesn't mean necessarily that everyone got bonked on the head and “replaced”. They could have just had a fashion for new pots. Happens all the time.

Unfortunately in late stone age and Bronze/Iron age Europe, especially regarding the spread of the Indo-Europeans/Yamnaya/Aryans, the pots are actually people and in fact everyone got bonked on the head, except sometimes the fertile women, and 'replaced'. In short, the picture of ancient Europe and the origins of its people is enough to give Hitler a massive boner.

The full picture is complex, and has a lot more loops and interrelationships, and is still often obscure, but in terms of the deep passions of man, it doesn't really matter what the exact truth is, it matters what you can say, and you can now say that the Northern European people had (VERY broadly), a general common ancestor tribe or race, and that they were really into Sun Wheels and 'replacing' populations.

So this old European nightmare of blood and soil is stirring, distantly, beneath the earth again. You can't really hear it yet as it exists divided up across academic reports and little-read books, with everything re-named; 'Yamnaya' and 'Indo-European' rather than 'Aryan', 'Population replacement event' rather than 'they killed everything they didn't rape'. But probably this will very gradually seep into culture, despite the best efforts of a lot of people to pretend it isn't happening.

This is why I find some hope in what I call this 'Indic Trilogy'. I look around the modern scene to find minds or ideas that can be brought to bear on this awakening and bloody ghost, and find generally nothing. The liberals hide from it and ban it if they can, the Geneticists uncover it while re-naming and academicizing everything in the hopes they can abstract it into non-existence, the Conservatives are either too stupid to think about it or looking forward to it, or Catholics.

But this great moral conflict has already been fought once and big minds have dealt with it in depth, in the glory and beauty and attractions of a culture of sacrifice and the rule of power and what in the mind or spirit might oppose it and try to escape and transform it. So I find some cold hope in this trilogy of books and I would recommend you read them.

Extra Stuff

There is a whole bunch of stuff and themes I was just too tired to dig into with ‘Corn King’.

Art – The Book starts and ends with art and artists. Berris Der, the brother of Erif Der, and his complex artistic journey almost makes him a third protagonist. If you want to dive into the mind and perceptions of a brilliant part-Greek, Part Scythian artist dealing with the cultures of the ancient world and his own reflections and comprehension of them in art, here you go.

Sex – Free Love baby! There is a fair amount of sex in this book and it is generally very adult in theme, in both of the ways in which that word can be used. i.e. its got some horny explicit stuff and some very real and complex psychological and emotional depth. Sex is deeply integrated into this most-human of books

Aristocracy – Mitcheson was the child of the High Born on both sides and, possibly without her realising it, this awareness of what it means to be a child of the nobility, what it means to be clearly and self-evidently part of the aristocracy, the simple relentless confidence, the ability to walk into a Kings or a God-Kings court and simply expect to be listened to, the ability to travel freely without the sheen of fear that covers the poor, once-poor or less confident. Its characters are a ‘natural aristocracy’ and so was Mitcheson, though she might not have liked that idea.

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GACKLING MOON IS PRINTED AND AVAILABLE FOR PURCHASE IN PHSYICAL AND/OR PDF FORM!

YOU CAN BUY IT HERE

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I stumbled, addled, into my local semi-rural game store in search of off-brand Contrast paint to finish up Ionus Cryptborn, and while wandering around, I saw the strangest thing;

A single box, in the spot where the newly-arrived, single-type or just oddly specific boxes are set, guarding the door like a cyclops.

Unless you know about game stores, even quite well-supplied ones, you won't have a clear idea of just how singular and unlike anything else there this was.

Wargames are usually either Historical, part of some well known Paracosm like Star Wars, Marvel or 40k, generic genre entries, (i.e. Chthulu-like or Western-like), or one of a few Paracosm not well known outside wargames but reasonably so within; Malifaux, Warmachine/Hordes, etc.

I am pretty well up on my wargames and I had absolutely no idea what this was. What’s a 'Quar'? Why are they at war? Why are they using 'Rhyfles'? This looks like decade-long Fantasy Heartbreaker paracosm created by some guy in a basement where they eventually find it as they clear out his house after death and he becomes a Local Legend and gets a small Wikipedia page.

And that nearly is what this is, except Joshua Qualtieri isn't dead and has been running a small Quar-based business in America for quite some time, selling Quar he cast with the spinny bits of a washing machine he took apart a while ago, and working hard to make Quar, his childhood Anteater Ralph Bashki/Jim Henson WW1.5 dieselpunk peudo-european paracosm pals, a thing, using every medium he can get his hands on;

There was, and may still be, a Quar-based VR Real Time Strategy game…

I have no idea if this went anywhere.

And now Atlantic Wargames have produced a plastic injection moulded Quar Wars boxed set strategy game. From what I can tell, Atlantic focused largely on Historical wargames. More recently they have begun producing some pretty-good generic fantasy sets like mythic skeletons and goblin hordes, and a range of dark-future Sci-Fi sets for their skirmish game 'Death Fields'. A standard route for a wargames company in the U.K. is to semi-parasitize off Games Workshop by producing stuff that is nominally different but in-effect can be used for GW games. Its a soft route to a kind of medium success with some strong limitations.

But now cometh.. the Quar! A boxed set with an Indie vibe that might remind some of you of early OSR books.

The box has cartoon standee scenery printed into its base, so you can cut it out and play with it.

And hidden revolutionary and royalist slogans in the folds.

And the initiative cards are this custom print of perhaps-grieving tender leaves.

What are Quar?

Cute, slightly muppet-looking Anteater-people living on the continent of Alwyd, (which *might* be on the other side of the globe from the place where Ralph Bashkis 'Wizards' is set?).

They have a roughly 1910'/1920's level of technology, a bunch of nations and have been locked in various forms of war for a long time.

So like, Jim Henson Anteaters plus post-Westphalia Europe?

The Quar are very cute and they fight in very sad wars. They look like muppets or 70s animation but use guns with specifically worked out calibres and individual design ethos' for each different nation and group.

They have specifically sculpted Baguette bags, that is tiny 28mm knapsacks with tiny French style baguettes sticking out of them that you can glue onto your tiny Quar so they don't need to enter a rhyfle skirmish without their lunch, and they exist in an exhaustively worked-out paracosm with highly-complex and interrelated Great-Power style international and intranational relations.

Quar look like they were drawn by a child, (because they were; Joshua Qualteri, age = small), and a key plot point might be, for instance, a royalist kingdom bankrupted by war taking out huge loans from a semi-independent city state to keep its economy afloat but thereby being drawn into colonial adventures that provoke a classic "war on two fronts".

Also they write sad letters to their families about the nature of industrial warfare. The letters are in the rulebooks;

Is this an extremely crunchy war simulation or more of a Vibes game?

Yes?

The two factions in the starter box have distinct Squad formations and loadouts based on their available and preferred technology. The Royalist and traditionalist Coftryans have squads broken down into larger groups, soldiers armed with accurate long range repeating rhyfles with a single LMG per squad. (These are also the guys with the Baguette bags). The more 'modern' radical Crusader faction are broken down into three man teams, each with two short range assault rhyfles backed up with a single larger Heavy Rhyfle.

Very clearly, if you are the kind of person who wants to min/max a squad or army, then you are fucking basic and are not welcome here. You will arrange your Coftryan forces in a manner typical for their standard organisation because that is what Coftryans would do. Its all there, in the very extensive lore. Their baguette bags are hand-sewn because they are a deeply traditionalist faction who believe in the Old Quar ways. I mean if you are fucking with the squad formation why are you playing Coftryans in the first place? Or even playing 'This Quars War'?

So, really, this is actually an historical wargame, just for a history of another world that not that many people actually know.

Who is this for?

I have no idea who 'This Quars War' is for. Well, me obviously. But how many of 'me' are there? I only know of one.

The unique tonality of this light, gentle sad and whimsical species from a magic world (with no magic or fantastic elements at all), and this very very deep pseudohistorical lore and quite crunchy somewhat odd ruleset, which has a lot of depth, simulation and quirks, but is very obviously set up to be a granular simulation roleplay competition between friends rather than the the kind of crunchy explicit wargame to be played between near strangers with no particular context to the battle where the crunch goes to removing any possible source of disagreement or misinterpretation.

I mean, there are people who might want to roleplay cute anteater people, and people who might want to roleplay the cute anteater people in a very too-real horrors of industrial warfare situation. These are your Hippies.

And there are people who might want a very crunchy but also pretty open wargame you can play at 28mm, 15mm or 6mm with a general simulation of battlefield tactics and perhaps might want to re-fight the historic 'Battle for Gate 13' during the Crusader/Coftryr conflict of 1781, (if that were a real thing that actually happened in real life). These are your Grogs.

And there are people who might really like diving into an extremely deep and specific Paracosm set in an alternate world with an alternate featherless biped doing complex international relations, cultural change, revolutionary war and industry, just for the pleasure of the details. These are your Patricks.

This is a very nutty, particular and original thing and if you didn't already know about it and are finding out here you probably already have a good idea if this is the kind of thing you are into.

A bunch of the PDF's are free on the website here and the 28mm hard plastic boxed set is available online in a bunch of places.

(I did not get paid for this and I do not take money for recommending this stuff. I am forwarding it in this case because I sense a distant kindred spirit and I feel like someone need to be the person to tell you about this stuff and today that person is me. Also me writing this makes that boxed set a business expense.)

Here is a longish interview with Joshua Qualteri;

Quar will either be the hot new thing or the utterly strange and forgotten old thing that you can dig out and show to the grandkids and explain how you knew about it long ago in the before times.

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really liked this book but the five stars I give it are based on my experience, and that is influenced strongly by my recent reading of 'The Theatre State' by Geertz', which I found interesting but deeply frustrating.

What Geertz failed to Analyse, Baum describes.

I imagine that one of the main aims for this book was building enough of a complex emotional, moral, spiritual and social world that when reaching the final part of the book, the great massacre, in which the radja of Badoeng leads a huge crowd of his people directly onto massed Dutch guns in a great ritual suicide, the reader could both see and intuit both why so many people would be willing to commit frentic mass suicide for a dream, and why they might not do so.

To do that she must build an image of the social and spiritual life of Bali in a few hundred pages, which I think she does pretty well.

Where do I even begin?Bali is full of flowers, trees, wildlife, people, farm animals, its just full. The place is packed. There is nowhere to go where you are not dealing with some complex arrangement of living things. True in many places perhaps but it seems in Bali you feel it more.Someone could probably write an essay on just the use of flowers in, this book alone.

The farmer, Pak has a bunch of Hibiscus flowers. Its pretty common for men in a certain mood to place an Hibiscus flower behind one ear. Pak is having an affair with the daughter of a local landowner and so is mainlining those flowers, meaning the hibiscus bush in his own compound is laid bare. This is something everyone can see and tells them something particular about Pak, even if they don’t know about the affair.

This combination of beauty, cultural ritual & signalling, flora & fauna, plus a dude being horny, is perhaps emblematic of the small rituals, behaviours and interactions with life that form almost a substrate, or a half-tongue of this book and the culture it is trying to talk about.Bali, at least in comparison to the temperate north west Europe where I live, feels like a kind of jewel box of life, or a bulging treasure chest of ecosocality. There are few walls, no, there are many walls, but few completely enclosed spaces. People seem to do much of their living in these part-open shelters within walled compounds but within the compound, though everyone and everything has their and its own place, everything wanders.

Privacy and secrecy in Bali seem to be almost more social modes than actual hard states, for everything that is not meant to be seen, someone sees it, so the matter is really about whether people will communicate about it, pass on the information.There are trees, forests, shrines, everywhere, as there are people everywhere. So anything can be hidden a little and nothing can be well hidden.

......

"Beyond the western courtyards, where most of the slaves lived and kept their poultry and pigs, rose a wall, and beyond this wall the stir and noise of the puri suddenly ceased. It bounded a ruinous part of it where no one lived and no one ever went. Creepers and shrubs had overgrown the tumble-down buildings and dragged them to the ground in their embrace. The chief building of this forgotten courtyard was surrounded by a ditch, but the bridge had given way and sunk into the water. The demons who guarded the entrance were nothing now but moss-covered blocks of stone. Wild bees made their homes in the trees and huge butterflies hovered undisturbed above the flowers. Mosquitoes hung in dense clouds over the stagnant water and the smell of decay mingled with the penetrating scent of salicanta flowers.”

.....

Raka - the Chad;

"But after a while his attention wandered and he looked again at Raka, whom he found particularly pleasing. A black head-dress whose edges had a pattern in gold was wound about his glossy hair; he wore a kain of dark wine-red in which a silver thread gleamed here and there, and a lion-cloth of brown silk encircled his remarkably slender hips and reached to his chest. He was not adorned with hibiscus flowers as the lord and most of the other men were; instead he had a single orchid in the middle of his forehead, which by its shape and the way it crept out beneath his head-dress suggested an animal rather than a flower. This scorpion-like orchid was indefinably in keeping with Raka's fine, arched nostrils and oblique eyes and long eye-lashes. The sensuous outline of his lips made him seem to be always smiling in a half-mocking mysterious way."

.....

Raka in ‘Tale’ is the emblematic example of beloved Balinese manhood. I would say he is the ‘Chad’ of the community, the star football player, the vector of everyone’s hopes and desires. The very beautiful, very charming, expert dancer beloved by all and welcome anywhere. In some ways Raka is what it’s like to be “truly Balinese”, in the same way that being Taylor Swift is what it’s like to be “truly American”. He gives us a view, not from the very top of its hierarchies, but from the very centre of its culture. He is the man who the culture has made and who it is made for. A magnificent man happy to play a magnificent role, a hand within a glove, (until things go wrong in the latter parts of the book).

Alit - the mid Radja

(too many books and opium)

"There was only one place on this morning of noise and excitement where silence reigned, and that was the house of the old lord of Pametjutan. The old man had passed the night in great pain and now lay exhausted on his couch, propped up with many kapok cushions at his back. The two balains of Badoeng and Taman Sari has been in attendance. They had massaged him and given him narcotics and now the prince felt easier. He pulled at his opium pipe and his head grew clearer and threw off the fevered haze of the night. Alit, the young lord, his nephew, whom he had adopted, squatted beside him and his usually limp face had a remarkable expression of concentration, of exertion, of perhaps preoccupation. He, too, was smoking opium to clear his head for the hard thinking this critical hour required. Unconsciously he let his fingers run up and down the vertebrae of Oka's spine. The boy crouched at his feet and his warm smooth skin had a warming effect on his master.

"We are agreed then, father,' Alit said, 'we cannot submit to the shameless demands of the Dutch. They are only seeking an excuse to humble us. If we give way to them this time, they will find some new reason for oppressing us. They are proud , although they have no caste, and they have no manners. They do not seem to understand with whom they are dealing. Because a few lords have turned renegades and traitors they think they can cow us all. They will see that they are deceived about Badoeng."

The old lord looked at the younger one before he spoke.

"I am old and tired and sickness has made the fighting blood in me slothful and often clouds my thoughts. But you are young and you must oppose your heart and your forehead to the white men. I have watched you grow up and I was not sure that you would hold to the way of our fathers. Sometimes you seemed to me to think more as a Hrahman than as a Ksatira. I am glad that you would have not forgotten your kris for your books."

"I have discoursed' Alit replied, ' in long prayers with our forefathers. My friend, the pendata of Taman Sari, has spent many days and nights with me and helped me to find the way. The old books, my father, are as string as the kris, and even stronger when they are understood rightly. I have learnt one thing from them - that I am nothing. I, Alit, the lord of Badoeng. I am only a link in the chain, one single bamboo pole in the whole bridge. I must hand on what I have received from my mighty forefathers. I am not free and it is not permitted to me to act by my own choice. I cannot give away or throw away or sell my inheritance and I must stand firm there where my birth has set me. That is what I have read in the books."

.....

Alit, the friend, lets say, very close friend of Raka, and by his descent and culture, literal lord of all, or most, he surveys. A somewhat physically unprepossessing man, like most Balinese aristocracy of the time, doing waaaaaaaay too much opium, and facing the incursions and slowly tightening claims of the Dutch, and of the outside world generally.

Alit does occupy the top of the hierarchy, and while not a perfect expression of his cultures higher qualities like Raka, he knows a lot more about it. (All that time spent with the Palm Leaf texts). He knows the dream of his culture, the background invisible part of any society that its hard to intuit without living in it for a good long time, and maybe without being born in it.

He is not just an aristocrat, in the same way that, in Tuchmans ‘A Distant Mirror’ the Sire de Coucy was not just a soldier, or even just a knight, and like Alit, at the end of his book, de Coucy commits something that looks a lot like ritual suicide by-foe, for equally deep and obscure reasons of honour and selfhood.

A lot of this relates to the Indic tradition still present in Bali. Alits sense of himself of simply fulfilling a role in an inevitable process which will result in him entering heaven would make sense to Arjuna being advised by Krishna in his chariot, just as the general three-part structure of Balinese society would make sense to the steppe invaders of India, who, by a very long chain of circumstance, also gave Europe the same three-part society, and perhaps germinated de Coucy’s final doom-and-honour death charge, a long way away and many years separate from Alit.

Pak – the everyman

Pak is probably the most interesting, frustrating character in the book. An image of the Balinese everyman. He is kind of slightly stupid but at least knows that he is. He is hard working, loves his fields, is trying to save up enough to have his mothers bones cremated, has lost sexual interest in his (probably more intelligent) wife Pluglug, has vague dreams of somehow becoming more, and is sexually obsessed with the daughter of one of his landowners.

A not-that-good, but not very bad man who loves his family, generally, plays his part in the gamelan orchestra (always being sent here and there), the rice hydraulic cult, the village meetings, as a somewhat competent household leader, a son, a father, a slightly crap husband, the guy dreaming and doing most of the heavy plough work, (always kind to his cow, it’s a tragedy when she gets sick and dies).

A man, in Balinese terms, who could go from the borders of poverty to the borders of low wealth in the course of a year, and does.If there is one thing Pak can do relatively well, its work, (and play his role in a crazed plethora of community organisations and cults), and he does a lot of work;

Paks new house;

"'I am employed in building the house for a second wife and her house has to be a finer one than my main house,' he said in one breath, for he had thought out this piece of eloquence beforehand. He could not possibly have hit on a better way of informing Wajan of his designs on Sarna and respecting the proprieties at the same time.

'I heard something about it.' The old man remarked. "I wish you joy and peace in your house.'

'I have been looking round for trees for the timbers of my new house. Nobody has such fine ones as you and I wanted to ask whether you would sell me six durian trees and four palm trees from your northern plantation.

'Why not?' Wajan said. He would reckon the price and perhaps he would let him have them, although he had really intended them for fruit. Pak in his reply again laid stress on his desire to build a fine house, and repeated that Wajan's trees would suit him better than any in the village. But when Wajan asked for six hundred kepengs a tree, Paks heart sank and he gasped for air. he could not pay this price, and yet he did not wish to appear a poor man in the eyes of his future father-in-law.

He offered to pay half down and to work for the rest in Wajans sawahs.

When at last the deal was concluded, Wajan sent his youngest son up a palm tree and offered Pak the milk of a young coco-nut as an honoured guest and Pak walked home on air, swollen with pride and satisfaction.

Next day he went with his axe, accompanied by several of his friends, to fell the first four palms. he did as his father had taught him. He embraced the trunk of each palm. 'Palm tree, my mother,' he said, 'I must fell you not because I wish to kill you, but because I need posts for my house. Forgive me, dear palm, and allow me to cleave your trunk with my axe."

And when they felled the trees and their crowns sank to earth with a loud rustling, Pak felt the strength of ten men in him, for he caught sight of Sarna hiding in the plantation watching him work; and nothing makes a man so happy as when the right woman admires him as he works.

While the trees were left to dry, he went out to cut bamboo stems for the roof, and he was fortunate in having a bamboo thicket on the edge of his sawahs; so he did not have to buy them. The bamboos grew cool and tall, shading the stream that ran beneath them, and Pak had good weather for cutting them and shortening them to the right length. He also mowed alang-alang grass for the thatch; it grew tall in his uncles pasture, almost up to his chest. It hissed and whispered as it fell to his sickle and lay in swathes and was dry in two days and ready to be tied in bundles.

He spoke to Krkek, who sent him men to help him build the roof, and he paid them with rice from his well-filled barns.......For now he had the walls to finish and the door to fix, besides working in Wajans sawahs to pay for the trees.

He also spent a lot of time cock-fighting, for he felt happy and successful and could bet with a good courage. His white cock did, in fact, win three time, and in this way Pak procured seven hundred of the three thousand kepangs he owed Wajan.

And he went to the beach collecting coral, which contained a lot of chalk, and carried it in baskets to the lime-kiln in Sanoer and gave the lime-burner six ripe coco-nuts for burning him beautiful white lime to wash the walls of his house with.

Also he took his copra to the Chinese, Njo Tok Suey, and got two thousand two hundred kepangs for it. It was a poor price, but it helped towards the expenses that still lay before him."

.....

The Srawah

Pak has a great fighting bird of near magical potency and through this we see the dreams of his small soul burn. The whole chapter about Paks fighting cock and how much it means to him is magnificent. People who do not get the cock chapter cannot be my homie;

.....

"He scarcely knew himself afterwards how it happened. he had arrogantly refused various matches, which for one reason or another did not appeal to him, and then when the keeper of the lord's cocks held the red one out to him he did not dare say no.

He looked at the Srawah and he saw that he wanted to fight the red one and conquer him.

Terror and courage laid hold on him at once. And he accepted combat.

It was the same red cock that had killed the punggawa's white one, before whom Pak had beaten a retreat that day. he had been jeered at and mocked. His cock was a good one - as good as any lords cock. He took on the match and won.

Pak never forgot his excitement as the clamour broke out behind him and the men jumped to their feet and the bets got bigger and it dawned on him that this was the match of the day. When he released his cock for its battle with the lord's his arteries were so full of throbbing blood that he felt as if his chest would burst.

He staked twenty-five ringits himself - a fortune. Thousands of ringits were laid against his cock, money enough to buy a whole kingdom. There stood his Srawh, white with his black down-feathers and he himself was but a man of low caste. many of the lords of Bali with all their households betted against him- but the smith had put a hundred ringits on the Srawah.

When the fight began and the clamour ceased on the instant, Pak felt that his heart had stopped, to beat no more.There were five rounds in the fight, for neither cock could wound the other. Five times the coco-nut shell sank and five times the gong went for the next round. Five times Pak carried his cock into the corner, talked to him, bathed him, breathed his strength into him, encouraged and implored him to fight, to conquer, not to leave him in the lurch. The ring was strewn with feathers white and red. Some of the lords jumped down from their platform and crouched on the ground to get a better view. The lord of Badoeng crouched beside Pak, the peasant, and shouted for excitement. Pak could hear himself shouting too.

In the sixth round the Srawah killed the red cock.Pak was bathed in sweat when he bore his cock away. He had to be careful not to drop the ringits he had won. He nearly cut himself as he untied the spurs, his hands shook so. His cocks heart beat so violently that he feared he might after all collapse and die of a burst heart, merely from the excitement of the fight and his victory.

My cock has beaten the raja's, he told himself. My cock has beaten the radja's, my cock has beaten the radja's. He bought him a rice cake and sat down beside his basket on the grass. My cock has beaten the radja's."

.....

The End

But in the end, what happens?

‘A fine cock, the anak Agung said. He bent down and lifted the bird from the grass with his own hands, ran his fingers through his plumage and felt his weight. The cock crowed, flapped his wings and struggled. The anak Agung held his feet and counted the rings on his middle claw. “A genuine Srawah,” he said with awe.

Pak nodded. “I have been offered a hundred ringits for him,” he said. It was more than he could do to keep it in.

“The lord has taken a fancy to your cock. He does you the honour to accept him,” the anak Agung Bima said.

He beckoned to a man and gave him the bird to take away.Pak was left with the empty basket by the side of the road. His gullet was bitter as on the day when the eyes of his brother Meru were put out.’

.....

As well as taking his Srawah by right, the radja had also ritually blinded Paks brother, a sculptor, who can now no longer sculpt or help much in the fields.

This was for probably having an affair with one of the Radjas wives, though the stated reason was for ‘looking’ too covetously upon her.Obviously Alit had to do this because he has to defend his honour and if he lets some guy sleep with one of his wives then his honour, and authority, and role, and the stability it brings, is lessened.

Alit isn’t that interested in most of his wives, he was busy with Raka during the wedding and so had them marry his kris knife instead, which was ritually the same thing.

.....

As the Dutch claims close in, Alit conclusively decides to defy them, not to pay any fine, though several groups offer to help or to pay for him, and to resist with force, which leads to the great ending, where everyone is summoned first to fight for the Radja, then, (the second summoning is explicitly optional), to die with him in a Glorious Sacrifice.

‘”A rumour has come to me on the wind that the punggawa is a friend to the Dutch and is in their pay as the gusti Njoman is. Perhaps he is a traitor as the other is. Who has told you that his advice was is right?” the old man asked obstinately.

Pak folded his hands and replied; “The radja put out the eyes of my brother, your son. He has taken my best cock from me. I will not fight for the radja.”

“We are all the lord’s servants,” the old man replied. “My father served him and I, too, and you. The sawahs whence our rice comes belong to the radja. We belong to the radja. When he sends out the holy kris to summon us, we must go.”

When the old man had said this he spat out his betel-juice and looked straight in front of him. An oppressive silence weighed on the rest. The cocks crowed from the back of the yard. The women in the kitchen had never kept so quiet. The old man got up and crossed the yard and disappeared behind the rice barn. After a while they saw him coming back again; he had a lance in his hand and his kris in his girdle. He stopped in front of his three sons and looked at them all in turn. Meru raised his face to his father, for he could feel his eyes resting on his head.

Pak folded his hands and asked in the ceremonious style used to a superior: “Whither does my father mean to go?”

“To join the radja’s warriors,” the old man answered.“Peace rest with you.”

They bowed themselves with hands clasped and looked after him as he left the yard by the narrow gate. Pak felt as desolate as he used to feel when a child if darkness overtook him out in the pastures with the buffaloes.”

.....

Honestly I’m with Pak on this one. He is a man of no caste and the entire caste system is based on people fulfilling their role. He has been told his whole life that his role is farming and that he absolutely is not allowed the privileges of a fighting caste, then he is told to fight, and not just to fight but to fight with no hope of success in what is at least in part an obscure matter of honour for his lord.

He has a shitload of dependants to take care of; mid guy that he is, he is still the core economic engine and main legal and cultural protection for all of them.

If he goes off to die then who is going to look after his blind brother and two wives, and children, and who will plough the sawas? Even without resentment he has a pretty good argument for not getting himself killed.

Though of course it was resentment that broke the deadlock in this instance; THEY TOOK HIS SRAWAH, (and also blinded his brother).

View Details

an Unbalanced Skirmish Game of Deception, Madness and CausalityHorror, set in the Eklipsis/Prescience Wars paracosm. (No, I haven’t actually worked out an entire skirmishgame ruleset. I would be crap at actual rule building anyway, but I did getvery wrapped up in imagining how one might work and especially in consideringdifferent types of Causal Horror and thinking about how they might beincorporated into a game.

Here is a ‘Planning Document’ for ‘Eschat-Jihad, with a biton the core ideas, a section on the various Factions and how they might workand be represented, and finally a very long section on ideas in Causal Horror.

A lot of the art was suggested by people on Discord, sothanks for that.)

| | | Joseph Mugnaini |

Core Ideas Inspired a bit by things like ‘Bone Forest’, ‘TrenchCrusade’ and the 28-Mag, Eschat-Jihad is an asymmetric, low model skirmish gamewith semi-random, hidden goals, surreal terrain and Causal Horror.

Its models and terrain are conceptualised for artists,kitbashers, and the like to be strange and surreal, especially the terrain.

Its meant to be a somewhat hipstery/arty game where you playas much for the pleasure of creating and seeing how the manifold horrors turnout as much as to win. It would have a lot of the card flipping and shifting goalsof Warhammer but instead of producing granular somewhat non-diegetic aims itwould be designed specifically to produce strangeness. So maybe a little likeplaying through a surrealist film as a wargame.

| | | Kjell Daniel Francisco |

Background The battles of Eschat-Jihad take place amongst andbetween the factions of a Dark Future and those of a Dark Past.

In the Past, the Iron Path and Amber Court are are lockedin the ‘Prescience Wars’, and apocalyptic magical conflict which will eventuallycollapse causality into the Red Lands – a Beksynski-style meta hellscape.

In time, (if such a thing can be said to exist in the RedLands), a True Hero emerges and leads a crusade to re-make Causality, bindingup the shattered lands and strands and creating a liveable reality with acoherent chronology.

Then, he goes, or maybe always was, insane, and summonsAzathoth. Now his descendants pray to Azathoth, who hangs I the sky over theirlands, blotting out the sun, in order to delay His annihilation while rebelsand surrounding lands war against them to overthrow their evil rule.

Factions from the past of the Prescience Wars sendwarriors into their future that is the Red Lands in order to assuretheir own victory and prevent the apocalypse the Red Lands represent.

Factions from the future send their own warriorsinto their past in order to ensure the Apocalypse happens, for they areits children.

At the same time, factions within the Past and Future,war against each other. In the Past the Amber Court battles the IronPath, while in the Future the Knights of Eklipsis battle Sulemanof the Black Gates and Villains from within their own kingdom.

And throw in an extra faction; The Hordes of Causality,from the Red Lands themselves, representing the will of that anti-Causal Hell.

Here, in the Nightmare Reality which is the Red Lands, thesewarbands meet and battle, though often for causes and ideas even they do notreally understand, each fighting to preserve their existence and for their ownview or philosophy of Causality itself.

| | | Beksinski |

Rules Concepts · Battle as a form of performance.

· Simple basic rules.

· But highly metatextual rules specific to eachfaction.

Each faction has an entirely different perception ofCausality, different culture and a different understanding of what victorymeans.

Therefore each sides objectives are fundamentallydifferent, hidden and semi-random each game, meaning its possible, in somecircumstances, for both sides to win, or for both to lose, or indeed tolose/win at the last moment as a groups perception of Causality shifts.

Understanding the enemies culture and perception ofCausality is key to intuiting and obstructing their goals for each match,(assuming you even want to do that and are not just focusing on your own, (orare just vibing)).

| | | Piotr Rusjowski |

Factions

| | | Samuel Araya |

The Knights of Eklipsis I already did a whole series on these guys so check theblog.

| | | Stephanie Pui-Mun Law |

They live in a Kingdom in permanent Eclipse because Azathothis hovering in their sky blotting uot the Sun. The ‘Sleeping King’ summonedAzathoth and his Knights betrayed him, stabbing him in the back 13 times withpoisoned daggers, though even this only caused him to fall into a sleep.

These are the descendants of those Knights. They worshipAzathoth and believe their worship delays the final annihilation of all things.They return to the Red Lands to make sure the Apocalypse happens so theSleeping King can emerge from the Red Lands to remake Causality, and so lead totheir current state.

They are the dominant force in the Realm/World they comefrom, and everyone else there hates them because of the whole Azathoth thing,and a bunch of other stuff they do.

Military Forces Knights! Dak gothic somewhat elfin knights from a wholerange of groups and orders. (I already have loads of these). Also I guesspeasants (blue) and Sorcerer/priests of the Black Church.

Force is arranged around its highly individual and veryodd elite heavy cavalry, with some backup from shitty foot troops, Priests, squires,footmen and animals. Only the knights really matter (everyone else isreplaceable) and the behaviours and win conditions all spring from and relateto the Knights.

Their goals are influenced by Eklispsis Dark Religion andKnightly codes of honour.

Super-evil Brettonians plus Undead plus Dark Elfaesthetic is the closest thing with already existing miniatures. Ian MillerKnights would also work. Slender Chaos Knights also.

Concepts of Time · Religious and apocalyptic

· Tied to the living presence of a singular God(who is Azathoth)

· A bit similar to mediaeval millenarianChristianity if they worshipped the Nuclear Chaos.

· A sacred trust inherited from the Sleeping Kingand sustained by him and by Azathoth.

· A universally held textual description ofCausality describing the entire arc of all time from beginning to end – thoughquite metaphorical, short on details or exact times and seeminglyintra-contradictory.

· Still, they have Faith!

| | | Remedios Varo |

Suleman of the Black Gates The main remaining opposition to the Knights of Eklipsisin the Dark Future of Azathoth. A faction influenced by a general grab-bag ofOttoman, North African and Arabic culture but somewhat realised and Oprey-ifiedby putting through a neo-Ottoman blender. Though honestly throw in a Lammasu orsomething if you like.

“The Emperor Sueman has the body of a Bull, the wingsof an Eagle and the bearded face of a man. He was famed for thousands of yearsas a just and wise ruler, a mighty warrior and a master of many magics. Hespoke the language of Birds, Djinn, Devils and Ants. He commanded theArch-Devil Asmodeus who, bound to his will, served him for many years asVizier, before his ultimate betrayal and escape at the height of the fourthCold Crusade.

Suleiman can read minds, scry his enemies, see thefuture in a limited way, turn invisible, teleport at will and no doubt performother miraculous actions. His seal is unbreakable once set and can be used tobind creatures like Devils or Djinn if they are subdued first. At the height ofhis power he commanded the direct loyalty of men, centaurs, birds, djinn,devils and ants as his subjects.”

The Kingdom of Suleman has access to its own form of TimeTravel, ripped straight off from Ted Chaing’s story ‘The Merchant and theAlchemists Gate’ and using exactly the same mechanics, but systematised andspread over an entire Kingdom.

The Sulemites are fatalistic and so don’t believe thepast can be changed, (from their perspective it never is), but one canunderstand it and perhaps plant things there that are yet to be revealed abouttheir own future

They hate Azathoth and Eklipsis and are sympathetic tothe forces of the Past but believe their cause it doomed so won’t aid them.

Military Forces High morale, fatalistic, professionally trained and thosesent to the Red Lands are all veterans of various wars. Largely Turkishinfluenced, with north African and Saharan elements.

Ottaman-style cavalry, Zuavre-style infantry, limited useof gunpowder. Their leaders can be sentient, intelligent Arabic and Persianmonsters like Sphinx and Lamia but other than that no magical or post-humantechnology or powers (they don’t really believe in it).

The leaders or officers can be travellers of the BlackGate, meaning they have used a Gate to travel a set distance into their ownpast. The forces of Suleman don’t think the past can be changed, so they don’tseek to change what they already believe has taken place, but they do work tofind gaps in what is known or understood, to change the meaning or inflectionof what has been and to gain wisdom for when or if they loop back into theirexpected timeline

Concepts of Time · Rationalist, scientific, fate-bound, fatalistic.

· All travellers are partial-looping.

· People are allowed into the gate in the pastbecause the operators recognise them as having come out of it previously.

· Gates only work in-situ and only for the personsfuture or past, which they are in so their culture is based around maintainingwell-preserved sacred sites for as long as possible.

· Their culture can only communicate “with itself”over the course of its own existence.

· All of its messages are true (notwithstandinghuman error)

· All ‘future events have already happened (butthere may be things we do not understand about them).

· All of this might be thrown into disorder in theAnti-Causal Red Lands.

| | | Kjell Daniel-Francisco |

Villains of Eklipsis (Literal ‘villains’ in the early-modern Shaksperiansense).

A mix of rebels, criminals and Heretics of Eklipsis,those opposed to the Black Church, Azathoth and that whole culture.

A crazy grab-bag of semi-fairytale-like Rebel Alliancewho use radical time travel spells or steal the ability from Eklipsis itselfand go back into the past, but with what aim? This could depend a lot on the mixtureof their party and who or what is leading it.

Their aim is a fundamental opposition to Eklipsis andthat entire situation. They would be fine with the ‘Red Lands’ apocalypse neverhappening/never having happened. Like many of the ‘Past’ factions they aretrying to avert the Red Lands, but unlike them they don’t care about who wins,or about humanity at all. They would have probably been happy in thePre-Prescience Wars Era.

| | | Stephanie Law In Green Shadows |

Military Forces Very wild and whacky, with lots of conditional or strangespecial powers.

Vere Agentia – the children of imprisoned Summer,with a cyclic understanding of time. Cypto ents, deep cover dryads, seeddryads, woodwose and summer elementals

Haereticorum Ineptias – literal absurdistanti-causalists. Baku, Hollyphants, Foo Creatures, Blue Dogs and Yellow Bears,the Roly-Poly Bird and Jub-Jub Bird, the Opinicus

Backup comes from the Avis Invefernalis – Birdslike Simurgh, Phoenix, Roc, etc. From minoris heretics like Moon Dogs, MonkeyMen, Blink Dogs, Grims, Thaw Mephits etc

| | | Rob Gonsalves |

A ‘playful chaos’ faction, (as opposed to the Scary-Chaosof the Hordes of Causality. They would focus on deception, disruption, cyclesand frame shifts. These would probably work well against the more ‘Orderly’forces whom they can ‘bawd’ nicely, but not against the Hordes of Causality, towhom Order and Reason are no more than Dreams anyway, and who the ‘Villains’would have to battle in a more prosaic fashion.

Concepts of Time If dominated by the Vere Agentia then a cyclicimpression of Time predominates and the aim is to restore the cycle.

If dominated by Haereticorum Ineptas then anabsurdist or anti-causal or playful impression of time dominates in which theaim is to disrupt, subvert or make ridiculous whatever others desire.

| | | Remedios Varo |

The Amber Court A chief faction of the ‘Prescience Wars’ – led by the‘Twice Redacted King’ whose name cannot be comprehended, often commanded by oneof the ‘Orouboros Kin’ - Childrenraised in the Amber Court in full knowledge of their own futures. This is aworld-spanning Empire (in its later form), dedicated to the full exploitationof all forms of Prescience, (under centralised control). Theysend out their forces commanded by the various Haptic Ranks and Ocular Ranks ofthe Court. They are meant to have a near-perfect knowledge of the future, butthe Red Lands of course often confuse and invalidate this. Their war againstthe Iron Path, and the ever more extreme use of magical ‘workings’ lead to the ‘RedShift’ and the Red Lands Apocalypse.

Obviously they completely blame the Iron Path for all ofthis. They go into the future of the Red Lands to make sure it doesn’t happenand to ensure the rapid defeat of the Iron Path to make certain of this.

They are opposed to all Post-Apocalyptic forces becausethey are invalid spawn of a nightmare that should never take place.

Military Forces Combination of 17th/18th CenturyFrance under the Sun King, Renaissance Germany and T’ang/medieval DynastyChina. Think massed armies full of braggadocio and glorious peacocking.

Largely conventional, albeit large forces, disciplined onthe surface but inwardly often riven with hysterics and secret tensions. Lotsof low quality infantry with high but fragile morale, (i.e. hard to break oncebut crushingly easy after that).

T’ang versions of Currassiers as bodyguards for theEmissarys of the Amber Court. High status bodyguard units like T’ang versionsof Landsknechts and Doppelsoldiers.

Tend to fight in a manner reminiscent of the Romance ofthe Three Kingdoms – big on tricks, deception and strategy dictated by acentral commander who has already predicted and planned for everything. (Untilthis goes horribly wrong.)

Concepts of Time · Believe very deeply that the future can be bothpredicted and changed.

· They adventure in their own Apocalypse - the Red Lands, in the belief that they candiscover enough to prevent it occurring.

· Opposed to all future factions as theyare ‘post apocalyptic’ insane barbarians. They specifically want the futureindicated by the Knights of Eklipsis to not happen. They are also totallyopposed to the only other faction from their own time; the Iron Path, who theyblame for everything.

· They play the most like a normal warband butwith extra ‘tricks’ from Prescience and lots of ‘yes, but’ powers.

· All according to Keikaku.

The Iron Path

| | | from 'Cromwell' |

A faction, originally radical, eventually coming toencompass all non-Amber Court aligned entities.

The prime enemy of the Amber Court in the “Past”, theyfight specifically against the concept and use of Prescience itself. Like theCourt they believe that the future can be grasped and shaped by human will, butcrucially, only in the absence of Prescience itself, which makes slaves ofhumanity.

Like the Amber Court they battle all future factions as‘warnings’ of an ‘apocalypse’ to come, for which they blame the Amber Courtentirely.

Early Pathists oppose the Red Lands, fighting to preventthe Apocalypse. Later more radical and insane pathist factions may havepro-Apocalypse leanings, since the annihilation of Causality is a sure defeatof Prescience.

Military Forces English Civil War Puritan or Cromwellian. RadicalProtestant. Muted, armoured uniformity.

Very high morale, quite high quality infantry and mutedvisible power differentials. Lots of iron and steel. Think Pikemen and Shotte.Hard to break infantry means they stick around a long time. Extreme fanaticismmay make them hard to control and can be a double-edged sword when confrontingthe horrors of the Red Lands

Extreme radicalism later giving way to Taliban-esquemurder squads. Late versions likely to make use of memetic terror weapons,unthinkable anti-causal weapons, mnemovores, or simply fire. Later instantiationhave the most radical uses of magic/technology.

Concepts of Time Originally a semi-humanist view in which concertedreasoned effort can shape human futures in positive ways, long years of warfaretransformed the Iron Path (or perhaps these tendencies were always there), intoan extremely radical, Nietzschean cult of pure human freedom and selfdetermination guaranteed by absolute resolution, willpower and the willingnessto make any sacrifice in blood, treasure or morality in order to defeatPrescience, and finally into one that believes that such sacrifices are goodand noble in themselves.

“Better Time die than Men be Slaves.”

The Hordes of Causality

| | | Geiger |

Born of, or perhaps only existing with, the ‘Red Lands,these are people, creatures and entities that either come from outsideCausality, or are products of its ruination.

Relentlessly time-looped individuals or groups, Paradoxfactions, Mnemovore or Mnemovore-aligned. The Yellow King or other Memeticforces. ‘Bodieless’ or ‘unborn’ minds, personalities or philosophies which may instantiatethemselves by varied methods, or perhaps spreading like a disease. Sometimes lostor abandoned forces from other groups which have taken to the Red Lands.

They fight from madness, from glee, from despair, orsimply by chance. All of reality is like a Nightmare to them and they wouldmake it so for all. More a spreading wave front of anti-causal insanity andtotal chaos than a ‘faction’.

Military Forces A seeming rabble of impossible grieving things.

Are they even arranged together in anything like ahierarchy? Are they organised or is this simply a group of entities thathappen to be alongside each other at this particular moment?

No plan or discipline, no morale to disrupt or plan tounfurl. Call them ‘Zombies’ or ‘Mutants’ if you like, or forms of theCybernetic undead, or broken golems, or mind-viruses, or devils or demons orthe half-unreal.

Extensive random interrupts and random actions. Highlydestructive if they ever cohere but utterly unpredictable even to their ownplayer.

Concepts of Time In a sense these are anti-colonial forces. The Red Shiftor Red Lands are their home and inexorably attached to their nature. They arethe living breath of the Causal apocalypse. They are the final product of aCausal war and the ultimate and last fate of all that lives. They are borderedto the future and the past by those who would eliminate or destroy them,removing the Apocalypse and reasserting Causal Time. Though they have littleplan, their actions tend towards the growth and extension of the Red Lands tillthey cover the whole of the future and the whole of the past, till there arenothing but Red Lands anywhen. They are against All Things, Forever, evenAzathoth, which is a kind of formal end to reality. For the Red Shift Hordesthere is no end and no beginning, there is nothing, and everything, forever andnever.

| | | concept art from Disneys 'Back Hole' |

To Make the Red Lands But, of what are the ‘Red Lands’ composed?

Artistically, key influences are Miller, Geiger,Beksynski. So I started there and asked for recommendations. The images in thisarticle are the result.

Conceptually I tried delving into concepts I had peggedin my head as ‘Causality Horror’ or ‘Reality Horror’, made up of bits andpieces I had gathered from various places.

From that I expanded outwards through ideas or conceptsthat seemed linked either emotionally or intellectually. I ended up with acurates egg of an essay that doesn’t work fully as a system of classificationor a means of exploration but is torn between the two, more of a ‘TV Tropes’article, but less capacious than those.

Still, maybe I can make it useful by considering howthese ideas might be used in ‘Eschat Jihad’?

Time and Causality Related

| | | Kjell Danie Francisco |

Cursed Prescience Inspired by Pauls funky journey in Dune and by the moretragic elements in Dunes racist child 40k and the questions aboutpe-determination, self-causing determination, inevitability, choice, the'golden path', the idea that people with prescience tend to be devoured bytheir own prescience, or that the human mind or human morality becomeirrelevant when considering deep prescience (which interlinks with ‘CursedUnderstanding of History’ below, which is after all a kind of more-accuratecursed prescience, just going backwards).

This is a very old story and in its fundamentals reachesback to Fairytales and the fact that, in a Fairytale, whenever a prediction ismade it often has some monkeys paw self-causing aspect and often the personreceiving the knowledge might have been better off without it. This is Peasantlogic, and I don’t mean an insult by that. Peasant logic might win out in thelong term over liberal cosmopolitan thought. Loss-averse suspicious Peasantsalways get screwed from dealing with higher powers and knowledge from thehigher realm usually has a venomous bite of some kind. There is a line ofdescent from the God Emperor of Mankind, through Paul Atradies, the Foundation,all the way back to some Slavic grandmother telling a tale about a fairy’sfortune.

Use; This most powerful and abstract conflictmight be the hardest to execute in a two-person wargame due to the veryunpredictable nature of events but a possibility might be something like‘Continuum’s ‘yet’ system, which is basically a dark Bill & Ted system inwhich you can ‘create’ knowledge and resources when you need them, because youtravelled in time to place them there, but you absolutely must then makeplacing those resources a core part of your mission going forwards, and shouldyou fail, be destroyed by Paradox. In wargame terms this would just meangetting free stuff in a match but then the placement of that stuff beinginescapable goals in further campaign play.

Cursed TIME LOOPS I’m thinking here more of the ‘sting in the tale’ timeloop stories rather than the Groundhog Day anhedonia with its search formeaning and escape.

Lots of this in Warhammer. In Peter Fehervari's Dark Coilstories characters are often sinking into or moving through non-causal spacesand inflecting or influencing their own or others backstories or futures and indoing so usually bringing about something rather terrible or malign. TheDolorosa Coil in ‘Fire Caste’ or wanderers in ‘The Reverie’ might both fit partof my definition of the ‘Red Lands’.

Use; The Dolerosa Coil is something like an AmazonRiver system; dense jungle, hundreds of shifting tributaries, impossible tomap. As some characters go deeper and deeper into the Coil, the general senseof loss and separation becomes something more; they become lost in depths whichshould not be there, encountering people, places and situations which are outof joint and sequence with each other.

What forms of geography could work well with such a‘passing into strangeness’? It seems to me that anything either very dense orvery nothing might work, the key point being to avoid easily navigablegeography, as well as the sense that ‘maps don’t work here’; the geographycannot be easily related to anything outside itself.

· A curling jungle/river system like the Coil.

· Dense karst or close creek and valley systems

· Dense forest

· Hypnagogic Desert, or salt plain

· Empty ocean

Things to be avoided are those which aid in navigationand in relating one place to another, so;

· No single roads or rivers making neat borders

· No tall points like mountains etc giving goodrelative directions

· No settlements where people can give youdirections

· No roads at all

· No neat coastline giving a clear boundarybetween sea and land

· No coherent ruins, only incoherent mixtures ofrun should be allowed, so the ruins of two cities destroyed at different times& in different places but now overlaid together

· No worked earth or farms

· No clear stars or regular celestial movements(the sky is red)

· The sun should never raise in the same placetwice, and days should have unclear lengths

· Fretted boundaries between ecologies, so no‘treeline’ or ‘desert’, swamp, delta and islands rather than clear coastline

John Frenches Ahriman stories have its own relentlesslyTime-looping protagonist at war with Fate and against himself; looping andmanipulating his own timeline to being about whatever he currently thinks isthe best option while also fiercely resisting his own past or future efforts tomanipulate his ‘current’ existence.

Use; This works quite well with a Skirmish gamefor in wargames there are always challenges when you have to fight one sideagainst the same side as that’s what your friend has. In Eschat Jihad it canjust be assumed that each of these warbands has the same actual people in them,just at different parts of their timeline, each trying to manipulate or escapethe other.

This could also work well for ‘returning’ dead units tothe board as they did, in fact, die, and the new versions are from earlier intheir timeline, wandering in to find their own dead bodies. (Or realising theyare doppelgangers).

Mushi-Shi did a soft and elegant version of this with aMushi that loops someone and feeds off their life, they don't quite realise butwith each loop they get worse and worse deja-vu and a formless anhedonia theycan't place, explain or escape. Though Mushi-Shi has a more neutral andhumanist resolution in which the main characters wife dies and in the end theysacrifice a non-looped future without them in order to experience their lifeover again, this time with a mixture of sadness and joy.

(Where are the really dark Time Travel stories? Are theredoom-laden Time Travel tales? There are many involving sad inevitability,personal destruction or acceptance of fate but few that are outright horror.)

| | | Rob Gonsalves |

Brain Don’t Work Science merely Alchemy/we are not capable of Science The opening parts of Three Body Problem where it seemslike the flood of physicist suicides is caused by a growing awareness thatscience is not 'true' and is merely an advanced form of alchemy that onlyapproximates truth (though in that book it turns out science is true afterall and the evil alien CIA are just conspiring to pretend it isn't).

Use; how on earth could this be represented in agame, let alone in a Paracosm? Is there a way to deliberately make emergentknowledge from the Paracosm deliberately near-causal? As in the ‘rules ofnature’, can be learned, and will work, 90% of the time, but 10% of the timethey will go slightly or very strange, just enough to indicate that you do not,and cannot, understand the actual truth, which will always be beyondyour reach?

To actually work in an imagined world perhaps someendlessly-recursive and maddening ‘yes-but’ system could be devised in which specificnatural laws work as discovered, until.. some particular status or conditionhas been achieved. Then they work like that in that condition… until some otherquite rare status takes place.. which would be an outlier so they work still differentlynow, but then some other condition happens…

The aim here would be to create the deliberate sense ofreason and nature endlessly and frustratingly slipping away from you, neverinto full incoherence, always with the illusion that you can understandif you just go a little further, but pursuit of this illusion itselfdrives you to madness.

We Cannot Understand the Other I feel this most from Roadside Picnic and Solaris, itfeels very eastern European in origin, though Ballard, Harrison and Vandermeerhave done versions with their own moral and emotional tonality. But at least inthe Slavic originals; all the power of human reason and organised effort is putinto understanding The Zone or The Alien, and we just can’t. We are inherentlyincapable of comprehending what we are experiencing. In ‘Roadside Picnic’ we canjust grub about for semi-comprehended fragments left behind as they wereuseless to their creators, in ‘Solaris’ all humanities efforts result in, for amoment, something like the equivalent of a lab rat managing to scream in painand the scientist withdrawing the probe in something that might be sympathy.

This interrelates somewhat with ‘Powerful Indifference’though in that case it may be that maybe we could understand the Other, but itdoesn’t matter because the Other just doesn’t care enough to try.

Use; well ‘Roadside Picnic’ and Dungeons andDragons have prepared us for the ludic instrumentalisation of this concept withthe idea of ‘useful but incomprehensible object’, a thing which might dosomething useful in some way, but clearly wasn’t intended for that, and alsodoes a lot of other weird shit as well.

Consciousness is a malign virus From damn who the fuck is that guy? The horror writer whothinks life is a conspiracy against the human race? I have never actually readhim. Anyway he thinks the experience of consciousness itself is torture and tolive is an act of horror. We can throw in Peter Watts Blindsight which playswith the idea that consciousness is a kind of malign virus, or fail state ordisease upon otherwise well-working brains.

Use; perhaps perfected unconscious warriors?Sleeping warriors? A warband leader their mind replaced with clickingclockwork, immune to stress and fear but producing strategies and tactics likean ‘A.I.’ card deck for something like Kingdom Death. (It should be obvious bynow that Eschat Jihad would be a relatively noncompetitive arty/hipster wargamefor people as interested in playing against themselves and the rules as eachother, and probably for campaign play for those who want to find out whathorrors and time loops happen to each Warband.)

| | | Kjell Daniel-Francisco |

Fake Realities – Immaterial Edition Reality can be Raped From Fehervari and from Grant Morrison, realityviolations; where characters and general situations remain in place but realityitself decays and changes, which we see but they can't quite sense. Meaningtheir world, their entire timeline, from beginning to end, gets progressivelyworse and they can emotionally percieve this but not reason their way out of it.

Use; this would be a frankly insane thing to putin a game of any kind let alone a wargame. How could you do it? It would meantriggering something and some kind of games master would come in and just makeeverything awful and worse, and change even the background of characters aswell as their current situation, and the characters and playing pieces wouldnot be aware of this, except they might have some emotional recognition,but the players would… Perhaps this would work as a kind of nuclearweapon, an unleash-the-demon element employed either deliberately oraccidentally? It might have to be a once-a-campaign thing.

Reality Decay We can maybe add to it the concept of 'Reality Decay',where what is normal and causal seems to blend imperceptibly into theother-natural. This is probably most clearly shown in horror movies in whichnearly all are based around a very-normal-maybe-sinister early bit and then thegradual introduction of an horrifically malevolent alteration to reality. WhatI'm trying to capture here isn't the 'there are hidden monsters' vibe, or even'there are dark other powers' vibe of Hellraiser, but a more nebulous, formless,near-madness in which the very engines of cause and effect seem to be broken.Sometimes this is actual madness, sometimes demons, sometimes the Matrixfugueing, sometimes conspiracy. I can't think off the top of my head of a storywhere the horror has no source and no shape but exists only.

Use? Man the dice are rolling backwards.. Maybesome semi-random alteration to the dice or other decision system that frets orinverts the results? Its hard to systematise the formless.

The Enemy are Editing the Text If we bring in Warhammers chaos gods then we can includemalevolent extra-causal entities, who are simultaneously present at all pointsof the timeline and can 'edit' the story - to some extent, to producetheir preferred forms of suffering.

Use; I cannot think of any sane way to includethis in a wargame unless perhaps allowing the players to mess with the metadataafter a campaign?

Fake Realities – Material Edition From the great well of schitzoid-adjacent horror, fromthe Shaver Mythos to the Matrix and similar films of its era, to Comics like'Saramis' where an entire city is a physically simulated stage set for one man,to the Truman Show, we have;

It’s a simulation It’s the Matrix, the 13th Floor or similar.

Curious thing about the Matrix; the majority of thepeople in it are real living embodied humans, when they ‘die in the game, theydie in real life’. So, how real do you want something to be in order for it tocount as ‘real’?

Its Dero mind control machines Evil forces under the earth using super-technology toinvisibly tilt the nature of society in their preferred manner. The ultimateuntraceable outside corruption. Add memory alteration to taste.

It’s a literal Stage Set In ‘Saramis’ an entire city is a literal mechanicalmoving backdrop, only a few places actually have interiors, most of the peopleare automata. You can get up on top of the stage sets and run along them.

Use; the deeply physical and embodied nature ofthe deception lends it a tantalising aspect to me.

The Truman Show is another physicalisedfiction-in-fiction story of this kind with the conspiracy-victim on an actualstage set.

The metaphor of theatre, and of theatre interweaving andoverlapping reality is something that might be usable in a game or wargame; cults and societies oftheatre-like ‘players’ (40ks Harlequins are already this), grand physicaldeceptions and ‘plays’ put on by deranged structures of power, actors and thoseplaying a role intermixing with those doing something ‘for real’. The structureand aesthetics of performance being counterpointed to ‘actual’ conflict. That might be something that the already exitingfive or so act structure of wargames, and their highly rules and ritual-basedarrangement could actually help to bring about. It’s already the case thatarmies ‘perform’ differently, Ork armies going for a turn-two Waaaagh! in anassumed five-turn game, Dark Eldar used to have a ‘power from pain’ rule thatmade them nastier the more losses they took, Necrons popping back up unless youkill the whole squad, etc etc. I feel like there should be somethingthere, though I can’t see it yet.

Its Robot Rape I’m thinking of ‘I Have No Mouth but I Must Scream’mainly, though there may be other forms I don’t know about. This story has some‘Fake Reality’ deception I think, but only as part of a larger goal ofspecifically inflicting as much suffering as possible for as long as possibleHere the hyper-powerful entity is usually non-human but still material andwithin the same causality.

Use; Is there much that AM does in ‘I have nomouth’ that a reasonably wealthy King or Sultan couldn’t have done to a smallselect group? Some of the more extreme memory alteration, bodymorphing andresurrections sure but I could easily see a gothic story with an AM-like Sultanor King or Pope having a sadistic super-labyrinth made and getting to watch aselect group of victims be endlessly tortured. There might be something thereagain, with the deep physicality of the idea.

I suppose the ‘Saw’ franchise is built on this kind ofthing.

Deep Time Horror

| | | Calum Diggle - Humanity Lost |

Cursed Understanding of History There is also the idea that the simple action of history,when perceived across too deep a stretch of time is essentially horrific to thehuman mind, becoming more so when one mind becomes inexorably aware of theconsequences of their own actions in a way that cannot be denied or avoided.

I’ve often considered it fortunate that people are bothquite ignorant and quite unimaginative when it comes to consideration ofHistory as very deep views of whatever the engines of history are tend to leaveme with the feeling of, at best, systems with an utter indifference, or ‘orthogonal’to human suffering or morality, yet from which we all inevitably descend. Inparticular, ‘demicide’ involving male extinction and mass female rape, whichforms the basis of modern European genetics, and how many more are there oflike kind, stretching deeper and deeper back into history, crime upon crime?

Use; a key element of this seems to be a ‘loss offaith’, in a manner similar to Lovecrafts guys finding out they have gypsyblood or the physicists of 3-Body finding out science isn’t real. It’s hard tohave the gradual or dawning horror of realisation if you have no strongpre-existing beliefs that sustain your world.

An advantage of a game/wargame like Eschat-Jihad is that allthe factions have really extremely strong beliefs and particular points of view,and they can all be wrong somehow and therefore go mad with the terribletruth of the Universe. Not only that but some are from the future and some fromthe past so they can each find out some terrible thing about either how theycame to be, or how they end up, and so go crazy about that. There must be a wayto gamify that somehow. Hopefully without just adding ‘faith points’.

If I was going to use a ‘certainty’, ‘faith’ mechanic, itwould have to be something other than basic morale, it should only be able tobe altered by scenario-specific events, should only go down, and steal a trickfrom the OSR and instead of just lower points add to each reduction a madness,behaviour or fetishtic action that leader or character has to perform incertain circumstances.

The Origins of Life and Humanity are malign From Lovecraft and I suppose from Alien: Covenant, theorigins of life being, worse than accidental, some kind of weapons test orlaboratory runoff or malign experiment. (Though I think in ‘Covenant’ theexperiment was not specifically malign but the general tone of the film made itseem like it was).

This hits a lot less hard in a post-Christian West wherevery few people think we are the product of divine creation so the loss of suchdoesn’t hurt much. Still there may be possibilities in the concepts of someonecoming back to ‘harvest’ humanity, of being deliberately ‘made wrong’, withlife on Earth being an accidental biproduct of an inherently flawed process andthen in the sci fi future we discover that we are from the only planet wherethat happened and in fact humanity, and all of earths life, has the equivalentof Downs Syndrome, and that this is inherent to the nature of our evolution; wecan’t escape it, and every other space borne life form is ‘correct’ or theproduct of some more perfect and fruitful system.

Use; ‘man is an inherently inferior species’;there must be some way for me to use this.

| | | Calum Diggle - Humanity Lost |

Biologically Instrumentalised Posthumanity in forms horrific and degradedto us. From Diggle, and perhaps Geiger, we have a decayed andhorrific Posthumanity re-made, (wait, who made 'Man after Man'?) intobestial or horrific instrumentalised forms. Diggle has whole bio-hive worldswith everything made from human-derived flesh. Geiger weaves the human formwith Biomechanoid horrors. (I guess the Matrix pod-people work for this too).

Use; these guys could definitely go in the game.An horrific posthumanity could be anything from fauna to flora to buildings toa sufaction, to riding beasts for other groups that don’t know they are ridingtheir own descendants/ancestors. They would go well with the ‘Hordes ofCausality’ faction.

| | | Claude-Joseph Vernet's - The Storm |

No Classification Powerful Indifference Clark-Ashton Smith did one little-regarded story whichwas basically a Roalnd Emmerich film where Aliens arrive to terraform the worldaccording to their liking, and do. Humanity fights back but fails and the worldis gradually consumed and transformed into a wonderous but nightmarishly toxicand dangerous environment. We can add that story about Aliens who take overearth & don't really notice us & humanity ends up living like spacerats in their giant machinery. There is a slight difference in inflection inthese stories in that they are less about the fundamental incapability ofhumanity to understand the aliens, since in many of these stories we don’t getthe chance, but simply that the Other is so powerful on contact that anythingwe can do is just irrelevant. We can’t communicate and they wouldn’t care evenif we could.

Use; there are mighty THINGS. You can barely seetheir feet. They are doing stuff specific to them.

| | | Aibek Begalin |

Hidden Sin/Degraded Blood/Syphilis horror I'm trying to avoid Lovecraft here because he is thedominant force but I suppose I shouldn't bother. Lovecraft had a kind of‘miscegenation’ horror where the Anglo finds out they have Fish ancestors, thisleading into madness and physical mutation, (though also a connection with thedark sacred truth of Reality).

This doesn’t play quite the same way with a modernaudience though I suppose later versions include the more-pure body-horror ofCronenberg where much of the terror comes from physical mutation.

Use; other than just mutating people I got nothingon this one. I guess mutations are always good, good for modelers and a kitbashingcommunity.

Jason Shiga The Jason Shigaverse. I have only read 'Meanwhile' amultiple choice comic book masquerading as a kids story with a background sodark its clear none of the bougie reviewers fully understood it, and 'Demon'about a battle between a person/being who discovers they have the ability tohop bodies on death (their mind devours and annihilates that of the closestperson), vs the World Government. In 'Meanwhile', depending on what choice theymake the Protagonist discovers that a previous version of themselves alreadyannihilated humanity except for them and uses a time machine to 'loop'themselves millions of times, 'filling in' every role and person again, tillthe world is full once more. So everyone in his world, has always been him. Isuppose this includes transhumanism, time loops and reality being amalign/beneficent stage set. Also; you already lost before you walked in thedoor and everything you are seeing is a bandaid over your nightmare failure.

| | | Samuel Arya |

What Have We Got? · Bill & Ted cursed time gifts system with aspiralling cost.

· A geography made to allow a ‘passing intostrangeness’ (I did a whole list of qualities above, not going to repeat ithere.)

· Possibly recursive of incoherently failing‘natural laws’ (which probably means core game mechanics).

· Arguably useful but fundamentally incoherent‘magic items’ which you never understand which probably can’t be understoodby human minds.

· Replace your leaders brain with a Kingdom DeathA.I. card system. Even you don’t know what you will do.

· Reality Rape extra-causal nuke option; makeeverything worse for everyone, and always have been worse.

· Theatre cults, theatre-type scenery andperformance-based faction rules.

· Evil Magic Sultan sadism labyrinths along with Iguess the guy from ‘Saw’. Powerful sadists arranging impossible moral andpersonal tests could be a thing.

· Everyone can lose their faith orcertainty and go more and more crazy.

· ‘Man is the Least of All things.’

· Horrific Poshumanity; they’re the trees, they’rethe hills! They’re the buildings! They’re the ground. They also turn upin some factions. Also they are also you from the future or past!

· There are mighty THINGS in the distance, theocean, the earth, the sky.

· People get mutated and altered a lot.

· Jason Shiga is somehow involved.

| | | Piotr Ruszkowski |

View Details

No, I am not crazy The 1980s and 90’s rock band Queen, fronted by FreddyMercury, directly sings the story of the God-Emperor of Mankind from Warhammer40,000 to a degree you would question is likely or possible unless you examinedit in depth.

And examine it in depth I have!!!!! Using ONLY the lyricsof 26 songs by Queen, I have been able to reconstruct a SUBSTANTIAL amount personal timeline of the Emperor, sunglargely in first person, with one song for Horus as I couldn’t leave it out.

As you follow methrough the following sections, from his early life to the age of strife, tothe Birth of the Imperium, the Horus Heresy, the Dark Millenia and possiblerebirth of the Star Child you will be forced to agree that EITHER, the rockband Queen were in fact prophets of the Dark Millennium, or, more boringly butmore likely a strange kind of Fortean synchronicity has interlaced a deepcausal vibration between the mood, tone, subject and specifics of Queens lyricsand the evolving story of the God-Emperor of Mankind.

At the end of the post I will dive into possible causesand processes of such a Fortean event, but first, I give you, in chronologicalorder, and broken up by period, the life story of the God-Emperor of Mankind,sung by Queen!

History Viewed by an ImmortalWe know the Emperor was born, I think about 10,000 yearsago in Anatolia, so right on the edge of recorded history, and the final gaspof the Pleistocine and birth of the Neolithic. That makes him already 35,000years old be the time the Age of Strife begins and, unfortunately, there arerelatively few Queen songs describing his experience during that time.

Young E by @mossacannibalis
The Emperor is born as a Perpetual; There's no time for us

There's no place for us

What is this thing that builds our dreams

Yet slips away from us?

Who wants to live forever?

There's no chance for us

It's all decided for us

This world has only one sweet moment

Set aside for us

Who dares to love forever

Oh, when love must die?

But touch my tears with your lips

Touch my world with your fingertips

And we can have forever

And we can love forever

Forever is our today

Themes; isolation, eternal life, fate.

The Emperor Walks in Many Forms throughout History;Office Gentleman Emperor by GiniasI'm the invisible man

I'm the invisible man

Incredible how you can

See right through me

When you hear a sound

That you just can't place

Feel something move

That you just can't trace

When something sits

On the end of your bed

Don't turn around

When you hear me tread

I'm the invisible man, I'm the invisible man

Incredible how you can

See right through me

I'm the invisible man, I'm the invisible man

It's criminal how I can

See right through you

Now I'm in your room, and I'm in your bed

And I'm in your life, and I'm in your head

Like the CIA or the FBI

You'll never get close

Never take me alive

Never had a real good friend

Not a boy or a girl

No one knows what I've been through

Let my flag unfurl

So I make my mark

From the edge of the world

Now I'm on your track

And I'm in your mind

And I'm on your back

But don't look behind

I'm your meanest thought

I'm your darkest fear

But I'll never get caught

You can't shake me, shake me, dear

I'm the invisible man, I'm the invisible man

Incredible how you can

See right through me (Watch me!)

I'm the invisible man, I'm the invisible man

It's criminal how I can

See right through you

Themes; deep isolation, invisibility, psychicpower

Key Lines; “Now I'm in your room, and I'm inyour bed, And I'm in your life, and I'm in your head”, “Never had a real goodfriend, Not a boy or a girl, No one knows what I've been through, Let my flagunfurl”

The Dark Age of Technology and Revolt of the Machines;BlancheMachines, machines

Machines, machines

Machines machines

Machines, machines

It's a machine's world

Don't tell me I ain't got no soul

When the machines take over

It ain't no place for rock 'n' roll

They tell me I don't care

But deep inside I'm just a man

They freeze me, they burn me

They squeeze me, they stress me

With smoke-blackened pistons

Of steel they compress me

But no one, but no one

But no one can wrest me away

Back to Humans

We have no disease

No troubles of mind

We are fighting for peace

No regard for the time

We never cry, we never retreat

We have no conception

Of love or defeat

What's that machine noise?

It's bytes and mega chips for tea

It's that Machine, boys

With random access memory

Never worry, never mind

Not for money, not for gold, yeah

It's software, its hardware

Its heartbeat, is time-share

It's midwife's, a disk drive

It's sex-life is quantized

It's self-perpetuating

A parahumanoidarianised

Back to Humans

Back to Machines

Machines, machines

Living in a new world

Thinking in the past (humans)

Living in a new world

How you gonna last? (humans)

Machine world

Yeah

Change

It's a Machine's world, woo!

Yeah I'm coming!

Yeah, woo!

Back to Humans

Hey, yeah

Ha ha ha

Back to Humans

Living in a new world

How you gonna last?

Machine world

It's a Machine's world

Themes; terror of machine power, human supremacy.

Key Lines; “They tell me I don't care, But deepinside I'm just a man, …. But no one,but no one, But no one can wrest me away, Back to Humans”

The Age of Strife;by Andreas Rocha
I was told a million times of all the troubles in myway

Mind you grow a little wiser, little better every day

But if I crossed a million rivers and I rode a millionmiles

Then I'd still be where I started, bread and butterfor a smile

Well, I sold a million mirrors in a shop in Alley Way

But I never saw my face in any window any day

Now they say your folks are telling you, “Be asuperstar”

But I tell you, just be satisfied and stay right whereyou are

Keep yourself alive (Yeah), keep yourself alive

Take you all your time and-a money, honey, you'llsurvive

Well, I've loved a million women in a belladonic haze

And I ate a million dinners brought to me on silvertrays

Give me everythin' I need to feed my body and my soul

And I'll grow a little bigger, maybe that can be mygoal

I was told a million times of all the people in my way

How I had to keep on tryin' and get better every day

But if I crossed a million rivers and I rode a millionmiles

Then I'd still be where I started, same as when Istarted

Take you all your time and money, honey, you willsurvive

Keep you satisfied, keep yourself alive…

Themes; human survival, eternal life, invisibility,self actualisation.

Key Lines; “Give me everythin' I need to feedmy body and my soul, And I'll grow a little bigger, maybe that can be my goal”

Creation of ‘The Emperor’ PersonaThe Emperor Decides to Save Humanity Whatever the Cost; So you feel like you ain't nobody?

Always needed to be somebody?

Put your feet on the ground

Put your hand on your heart

Lift your head to the stars

And the world's for your taking

All you gotta do is save the world, yeah

So you feel it's the end of the story?

Find it all pretty satisfactory?

Well I tell you, my friend

This might seem like the end

But the continuation

Is yours for the making

Yes, you're a hero, ooh yeah

Themes; personal heroism, self-actualisation

He Steals Power from the Chaos Gods; (If you can't beat 'em, join 'em)

You'd better do it

'Cause it makes you feel good

(If you can't beat 'em, join 'em)

You're never gonna help yourself

Yeah

Keep your big hands off of my money

Don't try and pull me down

You're taking me out to wine

And dine me, trying to wind

Me 'round and around and bind me

To your legal contract (Ha ha!)

Rumour has it that you can play it dirty

I'll tell you what I'll do

About that, that yeah!

I'll play you at your own game!

Yes

Themes; trickery, reversing fate, gaming againstsuperior power

Key Lines; “Rumour has it that you can play itdirty …. I'll play you at your own game!”

The Emperor is Supercharged after Moloch; Magic

Magic

One dream, one soul, one prize, one goal

One golden glance of what should be

(It's no good)

One shaft of light that shows the way

No mortal man can win this day

The waiting seems eternity

The day will dawn of sanity

Is this a kind of magic

There can be only one

This rage that lasts a thousand years

Will soon be done

This flame that burns inside of me

I'm hearing secret harmonies

The bell that rings inside your mind

Is challenging the doors of time

The waiting seems eternity

The day will dawn (ahhh) of sanity

(Ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooooh)

This is (this is) a kind (a kind) of magic

Therе can be only one

This rage that lasts a thousand yеars

Will soon be, will soon be, will soon be done

This is a kind of magic

A kind of magic

Themes; singular vision of (‘golden’) future,eternities of time, secret personal power.

Key Lines; every single line of this one is ONPOINT

The Emperor and Malcador discuss their dreams for humanity; by Нэн
This could be heaven

This could be heaven for everyone

In these days of cool reflection (Reflection)

You come to me

And everything seems alright

In these days of cold affections

You sit by me and everything's fine

This could be heaven for everyone

This world could be fed

This world could be fun

This could be heaven for everyone

This world could be free

This world could be one

In this world of cool deception

Just your smile can smooth my ride

These troubled days

Of cruel rejection, hmm

You come to me

Soothe my troubled mind

Listen, what people do to other souls

They take their lives, destroy their goals

Their basic pride and dignity

Is stripped and torn and shown no pity

When this should be heaven for everyone

This could be heaven

This could be heaven for everyone

Themes; personal friendship, a perfected world

The Emperor Reveals Himself to Save Mankind;Early E by Artemis 10Flash

A-ah, saviour of the universe

Flash

A-ah, you saved everyone of us

Flash

A-ah, he's a miracle

Flash

A-ah, king of the impossible

He's for everyone of us

Stand for everyone of us

Hе saved with a mighty hand (ahhh, ah)

Every man, evеry woman (ahh, ah)

Every child – he's a mighty flash (ahh, ahh, ah)

Just a man with a man's courage

You know he's

Nothing but a man

He can never fail

No-one but the pure at heart

May find the Golden Grail

Ohh, oh

Flash!!

Themes; the personal singular power of a saviourof all mankind, dichotomy between supreme power and essential humanity

Birth of the Imperiumemwatnott
The Founding; Hey! One man, one goalHa, one mission

One heart, one soul

Just one solution

One flash of light

Yeah, one god, one vision

One flesh, one bone, one true religion

One voice, one hope, one real decision

Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa

Give me one vision, yeah

No wrong, no right

I'm gonna tell you

There's no black and no white

No blood, no stain

All we need is one worldwide vision

I had a dream when I was young

A dream of sweet illusion

A glimpse of hope and unity

And visions of one sweet union

But a cold wind blows

And a dark rain falls

And in my heart, it shows

Look what they've done to my dream

Yeah!

One vision

So give me your hands

Give me your hearts

I'm ready! There's only one direction

One world and one nation

Yeah, one vision

No hate, no fight, just excitation

All through the night, it's a celebration

Themes; singular unified human goal, personalsingular power, a personal dream, a perfected world

Key Lines; again almost all of this is in the‘Emperors Voice but “I'm gonna tell you, There's no black and nowhite” could be read as a reference to Malal/the Dark King

The Unification War; Unification Wars earltheartist
Here I am

I'm the master of your destiny

Ha-ha

Give me your kings

Let me squeeze them in my hands

(He-he-hey)

Your puny princes

Your so-called leaders of your land

I'll eat them whole before I'm done

The battle's fought and the game is won

I am the one, the only one

I am the god of kingdom come

Give me the prize

Just give me the prize (The prize)

Hahahahahaha

Now you die!

Ahahahahahaha!

I have something to say

It's better to burn out

Than to fade away

There can be only one!

Move over, I said move over

Hey, hey, hey, clear the way

There's no escape from my authority

Didn't I tell you?

Themes; total autocracy, the breaking of Kings, claimsof godhood, personal singular power

The Emperor Finds Horus and educates him; A word in your ear, from father to son

Hear the word that I say

I fought with you, fought on your side

Long before you were born

Joyful the sound

The word goes around

From father to son, to son

And the voice is so clear

Time after time it keeps

Calling you, calling you on

Don't destroy what you see

Your country to be

Just keep building on the ground

That's been won

Kings will be crowned

And the word goes around

From father to son, to son

hear us sing

Our family song?

(Ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba)

Ooh yeah, now we hand it on

But I've heard it all before

Take this letter that I give you

Take it, sonny, hold it high

You won't understand a word that's in it

But you'll write it all again before you die, yeah,yeah

A word in your ear from father to son

Funny, you don't hear a single word I say

But my letter to you will stay by your side

Through the years 'till the loneliness is gone

(Sing if you will)

But the air you breathe, I live to give you

Father to son, father to son

Joyful the sound

The word goes around

From father to son, to son

Kings will be crowned

The word goes around

From father to son, to son

Themes; father-son relations, mysterious knowledgeto be revealed in the future, loneliness

Key Lines; “I fought with you, fought on yourside, Long before you were born”, “Don't destroy what you see, Your country tobe, Just keep building on the ground, That's been won”

Unity by Adrian Smith
The Great Crusade, The Emperor creates the Astartes and unifies with Marsas the Omnissiah; I'm a shooting star, leaping through the sky like atiger

Defying the laws of gravity

I'm a racing car, passing by like Lady Godiva

I'm gonna go, go, go, there's no stopping me

I'm burning through the sky, yeah

Two hundred degrees, that's why they call me MisterFahrenheit

I'm travelling at the speed of light

I wanna make a supersonic man outta you

I'm a rocket ship on my way to Mars on a collisioncourse

I am a satellite, I'm out of control

I'm a sex machine, ready to reload like an atom bomb

About to oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, explode

I'm burning through the sky, yeah

Two hundred degrees, that's why they call me MisterFahrenheit

I'm travelling at the speed of light

I wanna make a supersonic woman of you

Oh, I'm burning through the sky, yeah

Two hundred degrees, that's why they call me MisterFahrenheit (Hey)

Travelling at the speed of light

I wanna make a supersonic man outta you (Hey, hey)

Themes; intense personal glorification, transhumanism(supersonic men), Mars, being a ‘Sex Machine’. Honestly this one is very muchnot in an ‘Emperor Voice’ but it does have fragments of the elements statedabove.

Mankind revenges itself against the Xenos empires (especially the Aeldari);How do you think I'm going to get along

Without you, when you're gone

You took me for everything that I had

And kicked me out on my own

Are you happy, are you satisfied?

How long can you stand the heat?

Out of the doorway the bullets rip

To the sound of the beat

Look out

Another one bites the dust

And another one gone, and another one gone

Another one bites the dust

Hey, I'm gonna get you, too

Another one bites the dust

There are plenty of ways you can hurt a man

And bring him to the ground

You can beat him, you can cheat him, you can treat himbad

And leave him when he's down, yeah

But I'm ready, yes I'm ready for you

I'm standing on my own two feet

Out of the doorway the bullets rip

Repeating the sound of the beat

Oh yeah

Themes; warfare, revenge, systemic destruction

Humanity defeats the greatest Ork Empire; Ullanor by Neil Roberts
Here we are, born to be kings

We're the princes of the universe

Here we belong

Fighting to survive

In a world with the darkest powers, hey!

And here we are

We're the princes of the universe

Here we belong, fighting for survival

We've come to be

The rulers of your world

I am immortal, I have inside me

Blood of kings (yeah, yeah)

I have no rival, no man can be my equal

Take me to the future of your world

Born to be kings

Princes of the universe

Fighting and free

Got your world in my hand

I'm here for your love

And I'll make my stand

We were born to be

Princes of the universe

No man could understand

My power is in my own hand

(Ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh

People talk about you

People say you've had your day)

I'm a man that will go far

Find the moon and reach for the stars

With my sword and head held high

Got to pass the test first time, yeah

I know that people talk about me

I hear it every day

But I can prove them wrong

'Cause I'm right first time

Themes; exalted personal destiny, an ascendedwarrior class, dark powers, survival, personal immortality, singular power, personalperfection and glory

Key Lines; “In a world with the darkest powers,”,“I have no rival, no man can be my equal”, “I know that people talk about me, Ihear it every day, But I can prove them wrong, 'Cause I'm right first time”

The Triumph at Ullanor;The Triumph by Nicolás R. Giacondino
I've paid my dues

Time after time

I've done my sentence

But committed no crime

And bad mistakes

I've made a few

I've had my share of sand kicked in my face

But I've come through (And I mean to go on and on, andon, and on)

We are the champions, my friends

And we'll keep on fighting till the end

We are the champions

No time for losers

'Cause we are the champions

Of the world

I've taken my bows

And my curtain calls

You brought me fame and fortune and everything thatgoes with it

I thank you all

But it's been no bed of roses

No pleasure cruise

I consider it a challenge before the whole human race

And I ain't gonna lose (And I mean to go on and on,and on, and on)

Themes; regrets, shame, eternal life, humansupremacy, invincibility

The Crusade Goes Too Far;And you're rushing headlong

You've got a new goal

And you're rushing headlong

Out of control

And you think you're so strong

But there ain't no stopping

And there's nothing you can do about it

Nothing you can do, no

There's nothing you can do about it

No, there's nothing you can, nothing you can

Nothing you can do about it

Meets a white-hot lady

(Hoop diddy, diddy, hoop diddy do)

Soon the fire starts raging

Gets you more than half crazy

(Hoop diddy, diddy, hoop diddy do)

Ooh, now they start freaking

Everywhere you turn

You can't start walking

'Cause your feet got burned

It ain't no time to figure wrong from right

Because reason's out of the window

Better hold on tight

Themes; success leading to uncontrollableacceleration, the paradox of reason

Key Lines; “Meets a white-hot lady” may bea reference to Erda or the Selinar Gene Cults. “Because reason's out of thewindow, Better hold on tight” may be a reference to an Empire ostensiblybased on pure reason but in effect based on magic and deception while denyingthe same.

The Horus HeresyThe Emperors considers the terrible cost of his dream;by fc04 I think
Guilt stains on my pillow

Blood on my terraces

Torsos in my closet

Shadows from my past

Sleeping is my leisure

Waking up in a minefield

Dream is just a pleasure dome

Love is a roulette wheel

Success is my breathing space

I brought it on myself

I will price it

I will cash it

I can take it or leave it

Loneliness is my hiding place

Breastfeeding myself

What more can I say

I have swallowed the bitter pill

I can taste it, I can taste it

Life is real, life is real

Life is real

Themes; hidden personal regrets, isolation,secrecy, shame

Horus Betrays the Emperor;(Ah!) You suck my blood like a leech

You break the law and you breach

Screw my brain till it hurts

You've taken all my money and you want more

Misguided old mule

With your pigheaded rules

With your narrow-minded cronies

Who are fools of the first division

Death on two legs

You're tearing me apart

Death on two legs

You never had a heart of your own

Killjoy, bad guy

Big talking small fry

You're just an old barrow boy

Have you found a new toy to replace me?

Can you face me?

But now you can kiss my ass goodbye

Feel good? Are you satisfied?

Do you feel like suicide? (I think you should)

Is your conscience all right?

Does it plague you at night?

Do you feel good? (Feel good!)

Like a big business tycoon

You're just a hot air balloon

So no one gives you a damn

You're just an overgrown schoolboy

Let me tan your hide

Dog with disease

You're the king of the sleaze

Put your money where your mouth is

Mr. Know-All, was the fin on your back part of thedeal?

Shark!

Death on two legs

Tearing me apart

Death on two legs

You never had a heart (You never did)

Of your own (Right from the start)

Insane, should be put inside

You're a sewer rat decaying in a cesspool of pride

Should be made unemployed

Make yourself null and void

Make me feel good (I feel good!)

Themes; This is the only song not from theEmperors point of view but it was so distinct and expressive I left it in.

The Emperor Considers Horus' Betrayal; It started off so well

They said we made a perfect pair

I clothed myself in your glory and your love

How I loved you, how I cried

The years of care and loyalty

Were nothing but a sham, it seems

The years belie, we lived a lie

I love you 'til I die

Save me, save me, save me!

I can't face this life alone

Save me, save me, save me!

I'm naked and I'm far from home

The slate will soon be clean

I’ll erase the memories

To start again with somebody new

Was it all wasted, all that love?

I hang my head and I advertise

A soul for sale or rent

I have no heart, I'm cold inside

I have no real intent

Themes; friendship and love, betrayal, isolation,terror of powerlessness, personal emptiness, (the last two very characteristicof cluster B personality disorders.

Key Lines; “I’ll erase the memories, To start againwith somebody new”

The Siege of Terra Begins;The Siege of Terra - Misha Savier
Here we stand or here we fall

History won't care at all

Make the bed, light the light, yeah

Lady Mercy won't be home tonight, yeah

(You don't waste no time at all)

Don't hear the bell, but you answer the call

(It comes to you, as to us all)

Yeah, we're just waiting

For the hammer to fall, yeah

Oh, every night and every day

A little piece of you is falling away

But lift your face, the Western Way

Build your muscles

As your body decays, yeah

(Tow your line and play their game)

Yeah, let the anaesthetic cover it all

('Till one day they call your name)

You know it's time for the hammer to fall, yeah

Rich or poor or famous

For your truth is all the same

Yeah, baby (Oh no, oh no)

Oh, lock your door but rain is pouring

Through your window pane (Oh no)

Baby, baby, now your struggle is all in vain

For he who grew up tall and proud

In the shadow of the mushroom cloud

Convinced our voices can't be heard

We just wanna scream it louder

And louder and louder

(What the hell we fighting for?)

Oh, just surrender and it won't hurt at all

(Just got time to say your prayers)

Eh, while you're waiting

For the hammer to, hammer to fall

Themes; look, this one is pretty obvious.

Key Lines; “For he who grew up tall and proud, Inthe shadow of the mushroom cloud”, clearly a reference to the devastationof Earth and surviving Old Night.

The Emperor is placed on the Golden Throne
Empty spaces, what are we living for?

Abandoned places, I guess we know the score,

Does anybody know what we are looking for?

Another hero, another mindless crime

Behind the curtain, in the pantomime

Hold the line

Does anybody want to take it anymore?

The show must go on

The show must go on, yeah

Inside my heart is breaking

My makeup may be flaking

But my smile, still, stays on

Whatever happens, I'll leave it all to chance

Another hеartache, another failed romancе,

Does anybody know what we are living for?

I guess I'm learning

I must be warmer now

I'll soon be turning (turning), round the corner now

Outside the dawn is breaking

But inside in the dark I'm aching to be free

My soul is painted like the wings of butterflies

Fairy tales of yesterday, grow but never die

I can fly, my friends

The show must go on (oh, yeah)

The show must go on (yeah, yeah)

I'll face it with a grin

I'm never giving in

On with the show

The show must go on (on, on)

I'll top the bill

I'll overkill

I have to find the will to carry on

Themes; burning, a complete loss of faith andsense of desolation, shame in his own perceived heroism, the presentation of agilded front, (his ‘smile’ does indeed stay), fatalism, the transmutation ofthe soul, resolution to continue.

Key Lines; “Behind the curtain, in thepantomime, Hold the line, Does anybody want to take it anymore?”, “I must bewarmer now, I'll soon be turning (turning), round the corner now, Outside thedawn is breaking, But inside in the dark I'm aching to be free”

The Dark Millenia BeginBlanche
The Emperors final sane thoughtsI'm just the pieces of the man I used to be

Too many bitter tears are raining down on me

I'm far away from home, and I've been facing thisalone

For much too long

Oh, I feel like no one ever told the truth to me

About growing up and what a struggle it would be

In my tangled state of mind, I've been looking back tofind

Where I went wrong

Too much love will kill you

If you can't make up your mind

Torn between the lover

And the love you leave behind

You're headed for disaster

'Cause you never read the signs

Too much love will kill you every time

I'm just the shadow of the man I used to be

And it seems like there's no way out of this for me

I used to bring you sunshine

Now all I ever do is bring you down

Mmm, how would it be if you were standin' in my shoes?

Can't you see that it's impossible to choose?

No, there's no making sense of it

Every way I go, I'm bound to lose

Oh-oh, yeah

Too much love will kill you

Just as sure as none at all

It will drain the power that's in you

Make you plead and scream and crawl

And the pain will make you crazy

You're the victim of your crime

Too much love will kill you every time

Yes, too much love will kill you

It will make your life a lie

Yes, too much love will kill you

And you won't understand why

You'd give your life, you'd sell your soul

But here it comes again

Too much love will kill you!

In the end

Themes; personal decay, personal isolation,regret, fatalistic despair, agonising personal pain, shame

The Emperors faces the Age of Darkness;Just look at all those hungry mouths we have to feed

Take a look at all the suffering we breed

So many lonely faces scattered all around

Searching for what they need

Is this the world we created?

What did we do it for?

Is this the world we invaded

Against the law?

So it seems in the end

Is this what we're all living for today?

The world that we created

You know that everyday a helpless child is born

Who needs some loving care inside a happy home

Somewhere a wealthy man is sitting on his throne

Waiting for life to go by

Oh, oh-oh

Is this the world we created?

We made it on our own

Is this the world we devastated

Right to the bone?

If there's a God in the sky, looking down

What can He think of what we've done

To the world that He created?

Themes; regret for personal crimes and violence, shame,an awareness of universal human suffering.

Key Lines; “Somewhere a wealthy man is sittingon his throne”, “Is this the world we devastated

Right to the bone?”

Over the Millenia His Mental State Fragments;The Emperors Tarot by RuoyuartWhen the outside temperature rises

And the meaning is oh, so clear

One thousand and one yellow daffodils

Begin to dance in front of you, oh dear

Are they trying to tell you something?

You're missing that one final screw

You're simply not in the pink, my dear

To be honest, you haven't got a clue

I'm going slightly mad

It finally happened, happened

It finally happened, oh-woah

It finally happened, I'm slightly mad

Oh dear, hahaha

I'm one card short of a full deck

I'm not quite the shilling

One wave short of a shipwreck

I'm not at my usual top billing

I'm coming down with a fever

I'm really out to sea

This kettle is boiling over

I think I'm a banana tree

Oh, dear

I'm knitting with only one needle

Unravelling fast, it's true

I'm driving only three wheels these days

But my dear, how about you?

[Chorus]

I'm going slightly mad

It finally happened

It finally happened, oh yes

It finally happened, I'm slightly mad

Just very slightly mad

Themes; burning, madness, isolation disassociationof the self

Key Lines; “When the outside temperature rises”,“This kettle is boiling over”

The Star Child Awakens;While the sun hangs in the sky

And the desert has sand

While the waves crash in the sea

And meet the land

While there's a wind and the stars

And the rainbow

'Till the mountains crumble into the plain

Oh yes, we'll keep on trying

Tread that fine line

Oh, we'll keep on trying, yeah

Just passing our time

Ooh, ooh!

While we live according to race

Color or creed

While we rule by blind madness

And pure greed

Our lives dictated by tradition

Superstition, false religion

Through the eons, and on and on

Oh yes, we'll keep on trying

We'll tread that fine line

Oh, we'll keep on trying

'Till the end of time

'Till the end of time!

Through the sorrow

All through our splendor

Don't take offense at my innuendo

If there's a God, or any kind

Of justice under the sky

If there's a point, if there's a reason

To live or die

If there's an answer to the questions

We feel bound to ask

Show yourself, destroy our fears

Release your mask

(We'll just keep on trying)

We'll just keep on trying

'Till the end of time

'Till the end of time!

Themes; eternal cycles, resolution, a golden path,human universality, decaying empire, religious faith

Key Lines; “Whilewe rule by blind madness, And pure greed, Our lives dictated by tradition, Superstition,false religion, Through the eons, and on and on”

WHY DOES QUEEN SING THE EMPERORS SONG?This is the real big question! I have broken down myresponse into five sections; Highlander, Zoroastrianism, the 80’s, Queen andthe personality and history of Freddie.

Highlander This is probably the most simple and singular element,and the easiest to describe.

A lot of the themes of immortality and conflict, and manyof the extremely on-the-nose songs come from Highlander, a story about Scottishsword-slinging immortals and their pride and sorrows.

This has elements of the cultural feedback describedbelow in that

Highlander was big in the 80s and very possiblyinfluenced the Emperors general vibe. The people building 40k definitelywatched this movie! It also feeds intoand draws from the general ambient personality of the 1980’s a somewhathypermasculine, operatic and narcissistic decade.

There is also a question of matching or sympathetic vibeswith Queen choosing to do the music for this relatively minor Sci-Fi film. Whydid they say yes? Did the personality and background of Freddy mesh well withthis story of violence, eternity, incredible powers, romance and deepisolation?

Zoroastrianism I am pretty convinced that the Zoroastrianism FreddieMercury was raised in left its distant mark in the mood, lyrics and subjects ofQueen, specifically;

· Themes of Light vs Dark

· Great cycles of time

· Spiritual mega-conflicts

· Immortality, ‘the (Parsi?) blood of kings’

· Human universality

· An unknowable redeeming god; “Show yourself,destroy our fears, Release your mask”.

Zoraster created maybe the first huge universalisinghuman philosophy, this lead into the Abrahamic faiths and gave them their owndualistic light vs dark eternal conflict motif over huge swathes of time. TheHorus Heresy is basically Paradise Lost, part of the Christan Expanded Universe(semi-canon), so is it a huge surprise that the mood and feel, the deepessential conflicts of Zoraster, should show up again and again in verydistantly descended media and stories?

The 80s Generally Nuclear Armageddon! The threat of immanent doom hangsover the west! Everyone is worried about the nukes. They go missing in films,explode in banned documentaries, a disturbing and half-real sense ofapocalyptic immanence hangs over the land

Testosterone! Maggie and Regan are in the house.Advertising regulations for kids have been massively relaxed leading to abooming loop of hypermasculine boys cartoons and plastic injection figures.Bravestar, MASK, Conan has a kind of mind-child in He-Man, Rambo, the troubledand violent Vietnam war veteran, had an animated kids show, so did Robocop.

Operatic Quasi-Camp Quasi-Satire. Was Robocop a satire?Kind of yes but also kind of no. Or both. The sheen of irony has not yet fallenacross the face of culture and its fine to valorise and simultaneously mockideas of glorious hyperviolence. This is an age of cocaine, excess and economicboom.

A very testosterone fuelled decade, - a lot of thereferences for 40k are still ones from the 80s

Little is minor in Queen Queen did have jokes and a sheen and thread of irony inmuch of what they did but over-focusing on this would be a mistake as it wasalways a counterpoint to a gigantic, bombastic all-out style in subject, moodand content. Nothing is really small in Queen, emotions are epic, times areeternal, or vast cycles, places are distant or impossible, people are eitherconsuming intimates or vast human universals. Everything has to be the biggestthing for Freddie to sing about.

Queen were also a merging of the Nerdy, Bombastic,Masculine, performed masculinity and camp, they were, in a way, a Warhammerband, perhaps more than any other, even the ones who intended to be.

The Personality of Freddy Mercury An intensely vulnerable narcissist who believes they havea magical talent and that they are better than everyone else and who actuallyturns out to be yes, actually genuinely insanely hyper-competent at what theydo and actually better than everyone else.

Isolation. The narcissist is ever-alone, the megastareven more so.

How many Queen songs express the consuming andconflicting emotions of insane, even deranged self-belief and deep personalvulnerability? Of splendid and even glorious isolation and a consumingloneliness?

Add to this a semi-secret life behind the scenes, the‘invisible man’, then finally the disturbing synchronicity of AIDS and personalbodily decay while still alive, a horrifying loss of glory and personalcontrol. Consuming regret for failed chances or former wrongs.

We might say that Freddie lived out almost the perfectedNarcissists Life. It wasn’t perfect for him, but it was perfect for History andfor the grand ritual it represented. The King must always die in the end.

Synthesis This is my synthesis for this strange synchronicity. Earlyexposure to the themes, conflicts and emotions of the most primal ManicheanUniversal human faith by a young boy who will nurture an incredible talent, whowill eventually escape his culture and literally remake himself as a new manwhile hiding a terrible secret.

This man rising through the psychic storm of the 1980sand proving his personal greatness, absorbing, reflecting and intensifying thepulsing muscular mood of that doom-troubled decade.

That very decade and its emotions feeding into a verydifferent group of nerdy men than those gathered around him in Queen, butproducing fertile soil and a seed, sparked into life by Highlander; the causalnode of the whole thing, a noospheric meta-neuron soaking in and distilling thedrives, tragedies and emotions of the age and the band and linking them withthe Star Child of the foetal Warhammer 40,000 universe.

Then a great flowering of synchronic growth, with thepride glory, isolation, sadness and greatness of a dead Megastar meeting thevibrating echo of the only fictional character who could possibly carry such astaggeringly potent charge of impossible emotions; a literal God Emperor!

The God-Emperor of Mankind is the psychic mind-child ofFreddie Mercury!

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Sinjin! A PDF (so far) adventure-game by M Diaz and JacksonSmith. Art by Scrap Princess, Julie de Graag, Jackson Smith, Katie Vasquez, andAlfred Stieglitz.

Available here; https://thehexculture.itch.io/sinjin

Some nerds in late-Victorian Fantasy Florida accidentallykilled Death and took their (her?) stuff leaving the netherworld bollocked upand bleeding through in a Florida swamp.

Now YOU must wander about finding stuff and not gettingkilled in a magic swamp that’s a bit (but not very) different every timeyou go back, with the very general aim of making things better, or at least notmaking them worse, and maybe even FIXING DEATH.

(Note, criticisms or analysis are intended to have a neutraltone. I am not claiming I could do better (I haven’t), OBVIOUSLY this is theopinion of one man. I should not have to explicitly state something so fuckingobvious and banal but the west has fallen so here we are.)

The Grand Concept Sinjin is an Indy game. Looked at from a D&Dperspective, it’s an adventure with some decision processes attached, looked atfrom a storygame or AW-like perspective its .. perhaps the best descriptionwould be an object-and-location based game with an internal clock and somesimple arrangements for resolving conflicts.

It’s in the blurry boundary between a more hard-edgedD&D adventure, a soft Gauntlet-style ‘scene’ based game and an actual storygame. This might be a cognitive space that is actually quite hard to designfor. When I come to things I would probably question about Sinjin, many of themseem to have roots in its vague and curious origins. It’s a gypsy child in anoble House!

The Sinking Swamp The adventure space is made up from the combination oftwo main concepts; the geographic shape of the Swamp in which you are wanderingaround, and ‘Depth’ a kind of transformation of the play area rooted, in theparacosm itself; in the slowly deepening and decaying power of the supernaturalas the swamp is sucked into the netherverse, and in game design terms; indungeon levels and things like Emmy Allens Stygian Library.

The Swamp We have causeways, a river system and swamps in between,with a small number of specifically-mapped distinct areas called ‘Landmarks’and a variety of smaller less-specific minor landmarks.

With each new expedition the arrangement of the major Landmarkschanges somewhat, but some aspects of the nature of the linkages betweenthem remain, and the total number of major Landmarks doesn’t change and thedetails of their particular individual geography don’t change.

So for each adventure you have a rough idea of what placescan be found, and of how to get there, but to fulfil your mission and get to,for instance, the abandoned sugar-mill, you will still need to wander aroundinvestigating etc.

“The Territory isunfriendly and unpredictable, but the goal is for navigation to be challenging,rather than impossible. To this end, clearly communicate to players that thegeneral locations of major landmarks don’t change relative to the primary riverchannel and causeways (e.g. the Fish Camp, Great Vine Barren, and RitualWellspring are all linked by the primary channel; the Old Stone Fort, FishCamp, and Sugar Mill are connected to each other with a triangle ofcauseways).”

So in effect a shifting linecrawl, using the river as aguide.

(One of the notable ways that the particular nature ofthe place, the environment, and surrounding and historic culture work their wayinto the game is how deeply and richly embedded they are into every aspect,from the locations themselves, to objects, abilities, characters, monstersetc.)

“Depth” The Swamp is either sinking into the Netherworld, or theNetherworld is merging with the Swamp and expanding. In game terms, ‘depth’makes reality more phantasmorgic, surreal, dreamlike and dangerous;

“Depth0

Sweltering days and balmy nights. Yousweat, and the air hangs thick and damp around you. The land smells of orangeblossom, wet grass, and, beneath the surface, the sickly sweet scent of decay.”

“Depth 9-12

Quiet as the grave. By day, the Sun is dim and brassy; by nightthe Moon is actinic and painfully bright; you can see clouds pass behind both,and the sky feels claustrophobically low. Vast figures pace the horizon. Hair,fabric, and flora waft and wave as if buoyed by an invisible tide. “

Depth can be accessed by diving into the Ritual Wellspring(one of the main Landmarks).

“Agreat blue heron lies rotting near the reeds, one glaucous eye toward the sky.It whispers out to the first person who gets near it. It wants mullet from theFish Camp. Each time it gets some, it’s flesh reknits a little more. Afterthree times it will rise up– its neck still broken and slack, and will offer aGhost Contract as a silent stalker.“

You can also dive out of your depth and back up to youroriginal. Depth also re-sets if you leave the adventure area and take a rest –you just come back in at whatever the current minimum depth is.

Some buildings and locations only exist at certain depths. Tofulfil some missions or solve some problems you will need to ‘dive’ toparticular depths and once there, find a specific familiar location, nowpresumably with much stranger and more dangerous things in it.

The land is slowly ‘sinking’ into deeper depths. Humansdying immediately increases minimum depth and leaving without completing goalsalso increases minimum depth. So the more adventures you have in the swamp, the‘deeper’ everything gets. You can also bring Depth back up by achieving somegoals or defeating some major foes. There is an end-point to all this – ifDepth hits 13 then the curse escapes the area and spreads across the world. Thegame is built around this ‘ticking clock’.

While ‘Depth’ in Sinjin it has some relation to DungeonLevels, Emmy Allens ‘depth’ in Stygian Library and Stygian Garden, Vandermeers‘Annihilation’ and the Ballard and Stugatsky stories that prefigures it, andpossibly some forms of madness in Call of Cthulhu, I don’t think I have seen orconceived of anything quite like this before. If you are into game design youare probably reading specifically for the combination of ‘depth’ and thesemi-shifting geography.

I found the particularities and details of Sinjin as, ormore, interesting but less scaleable since their deep interrelationship withthis specific environment and situation is part of the appeal.

So. You are investigating a shifting version of the sameplace again and again. In effect, going back in to the ‘same dungeon’ again andagain. While the ‘rooms’ shift around there are always the same rooms andgrowing contextual knowledge should help you both navigate between places and,in particular, make classic D&D style tactical use of the geographicparticulars of each location, which never change.

But how would it feel to investigate the same ‘places’ overand over again, with them becoming ever more hallucinogenic and strange andpopulated by ever stranger and less comprehensible forms of the dead and undead?

“The Territory isdifferent every time players enter it. There are a handful of key constants,but players can never quite count on things being the way that they rememberthem.”

This puts Sinjin in a complex relationship with the classicD&D-alike game actions of exploration and investigation.

Of course this is not D&D, nor intended to be so. It’sclearly a more drama-oriented ‘Gauntlety’ game. But many of these games thatpresent themselves as ghost stories, soap-operas or interpersonal dramas, stillhave a lot of exploration, investigation and combat, and the interpersonaldrama happens around those props. AW is built for the Soap Opera element in allof its parts but few of the ruleslights that draw from it are.

Would it be interesting or frustrating? Would the concept of‘depth’ add depth or feel repetitious? There are enough supernatural etcconnections and possible intrigues that might create a layered feel as youexplore again, for different reasons, knowing where you will find but not what.

Diaz-Objects in Game Design When I talk about a Diaz-esque ‘elegant’ piece of game/worlddesign, what I often mean is the use of natural language concepts and clearcomprehensible idea structures in ways that allow complex gameplay without alot of arguing or difficulties over how many points or whatever you have.

(I am of course assuming that most of these came from Diazbased on some familiarity with his previous work, though he is not the onlyauthor.)

Some Examples;

Deaths Whetstone is a good callThe main factions of Sinjin are guilds of Necromancers, eachof which is based around some item or tool they took from Death when Death died;a whetstone, inkwell and loom. Each of these is a creative tool that producesitems with certain limited magical effects; sharpened blades, documents andcloth.

They are tools which create or alter other objects, and theoriginals are presumably eternal or don’t decay or wear but the objects they createdo wear and can easily lose those qualities. To whit – sharp blades beingblunted (it’s that particular sharpness and not the blade itself that has themagic), paper being burnt, lost or, in a swamp, rotting or the ink washing out,and clothes tearing and being worn. Presumably the main objects could be stolenor lost, and their creative capacity is focused into one useful and tangiblemodality.

Basing the factions around items, specifically around toolswhich create other items, themselves limited in both effect and in the numberscreated, is a nice neat piece of game design. It unifies faction play with aneat in-game economy of access to magical items with highly specific uses whichwill themselves naturally degrade, and links that to the overarching theme orstory of the game in a way that feels natural, functional, intuitive and right.

As a counter example imagine a faction with a portal,another with a magic book and another with say a non-creative tool like aspoon. In each case the effects produced are vague, hard to intuit, they don’tnecessarily produce objects unless the game tells you, in which case anotherlayer of abstraction is required to describe exactly what the guilds cando, (‘death points’ or something) and probably direct control of the tool isrequired to produce those effects, which then cannot be traded, lost, stolen orcarried. (Unless you specifically describe that in the text; “you lose tendeath points” etc.)

Necromancy in SinjinTo put it very crudely, Necromancy in Sinjin is kindof ghost-Pokémon, or the indenture of specific incorporeal servants with specificskill and identity-locked abilities.

You can grab certain ghosts in certain situations andcommand them, but only in ways limited by their core nature or their prime orcentral function in life. There is also a material cost if you want to achievematerial ends. So necromancy doesn’t create something for nothing, but insteadis a transformer of one kind of generalised resource (ritual, sacrifice) intosomething more specific. It’s a Bank Account, or like having a clade ofinvisible servants with specific skills who can be called on to do thingsrelating to those specific skills. You can re-interpret what those skills mightmean or how they might be used but you don’t need to argue with someone overwhether you have +5 to your Necromancy roll or whatever.

You can also grab animal souls or murderers souls, and evena flock of crows.

Key Diaz-esque aspects of this are that;

It’s all in natural language, no numbers.
It uses directly comprehensible real-lifeconcepts (the soul of a Blacksmith, the soul of a flock of crows) withinherently obvious and clear limitations and abilities etc.
It directly embodies all of this in theparacosm; i.e. you have to take an hour to burn herbs at sunset rather thanspending +10 Death points for a death surge.
Its relatively self-limiting and encouragesthinking of new uses for the ‘tools’, (souls) you have and differentinteractions between them and the environment.

Expeditions, Treasure and RewardsYou start each game with a mission (taken from one of threegenerated by the DM), for one of the Guilds, for which they will offer aspecific treasure, all of which are magical tools, often with limited uses,which will help you doing stuff in the swamp.

The possible expeditions are; Establish, Scout, Rescue,Recover, Collect and Hunt. Only one of the six core mission concepts involvesnecessary violence, the others involve investigating and getting, or in somecases schlepping big heavy things to places.

The rewards or treasure you get for these have a nice AmericanArcana feel;

“BraggingCoat. A coat embroidered with boasts and depictions of great deads. Once perexpedition, you can attempt a single act of superhuman strength or aptitude(jumping a great distance, kicking down a barn wall, picking a lock with a pineneedle, telling a joke that makes a corpse laugh).”

They feel like elements from a ‘Silver John’ story, though Idon’t know if those tales were an influence, probably any independentinvestigation of American folklore would produce things ‘a bit like’ SilverJohn.

Having specific missions is a good idea because quitefrankly, Players are basic as shit and unless you actively point them at athing they a specifically meant to do, they will just wander blather and getlost in decision fatigue. Being able to pick from three different missions ofdifferent difficulty and lethality from three different factions is neat, as isstarting the game in media-res with the PCs already in-country.

Hopefully the combinations of missions will play a part inadding depth and texture to the repeated missions; if the Guild of Scrivenerspaid you to set up a camp in one mission or grab a hostage then the results ofthat should still be in play organically in future sessions.

As well as the core reward for completing each mission thereis a ‘Wandering Devil Merchant’ who wants to sell you various trinkets, andtreasure, or ‘salvage’ which can be discovered in places you are likely to findit according to DM judgement. This is mildly sketchy, and somewhatgamic, with a touch of ‘Death Points’, but the actual Salvage are all in-worldself-limiting Diaz-Objects;

“Black HeronSpyglass. Once per expedition, you can look through this spyglass to seeyourself at the location you’re observing. When you remove the spyglass fromyour eye, you will find yourself in that location.”

So there is that gypsy child again.

Monsters and EncountersThe creatures are universally interesting. Broken up into‘The Living’ ‘Lesser Dead’, and the ‘Greater Dead, which are mindbending ‘finalhorror’ semi-inexplicable nightmares. There are some stand-outs. The SabalSphinx, one of the ‘Lesser Dead’ has some very good ‘D&D-esque’ rules;

“62 SabalSphinx

A human and panthercorpse twisted and crushed together. One of its human hands holds a palm frondbefore its doubled face, and its four unmatched eyes peer out between thepinnate leaves. Its ruff erupts into palmetto, mimicking the leaves of itsnamesake. The killer and the killed, the eater and the eaten, existing indelightful amity forever and ever and ever.

Statistics

Traits: wise, strong, large, fast,resistant to mundane weaponry

Weakness: lazy, gluttonous, harmed bysalt, silver, and holy water

Tactics

Disappear into and emerge from any twopalm fronds in the Territory.

A Sphinx sequentially reveals its eyesto anyone who can see in the order that is most advantageous to it. Once it’sfull face is revealed it may use any of its abilities at will.Reveal righthuman eye: Charms a person it can see into fighting for it

Reveal left human eye: makes a personbleed from their eyes, ears, nose, and mouth

Reveal the right panther eye: Terrifiesa person it can see into fleeing

Reveal the left panther eye: Paralyzes aperson it can see

Full face revealed: Anyone who sees itis gouged with invisible force as if with panther claws.!”

The Living are less modernist monsters: alligators,cutthroats, packs of wild dogs and rival exorcists, honestly you could go along way with just these, especially the cutthroats and rivals, and if a partyis small or wounded, the wild dogs.

The modernism and abstraction of some of the monsters andGreater Dead makes them excellent art pieces and good elements for a fancyhorror movie, or for a written narrative, but perhaps a bit challenging toactually run.

Is this going to be another game/adventure where the flavourtext promises encounters with impossible entities but the most fun you have istrying to escape a pack of angry dogs? Nothing wrong with that if it’s the casebut…

DissonanceThere is a curious dissonance between the items, fictionalstructures, the imagined idea-space of the game, which is solid in conceptionand simple to relate, clear and interesting, and the decision-forming processof the rules of the game itself, which are very ‘Gauntlet-ey’ with lots of‘just discuss it with your players’ and ‘the DM will inform you if you are inimmediate danger of death’ which isn’t quite the same as a player choosing todo anything at all if they have only one HP left

Auto find soft salvage just for burning time looking inappropriate areas; not sure about this one.

Is this just another adaptation of the basic decisionconcept of Apocalypse World? Basically a quite soft conversational system. Samewith Harm & death, very McDowallian, big on simple roles and clearcommunication of risk.

A foldable coracle in opening equipment, but we don’t knowhow hard or difficult travel will be (yet), but the ‘Car Problem’ from UrbanRPGs might be a thing.

No list of names or likely surnames and no PC-relation chartinstead you just talk about it. Honestly random PC connection stuff issomething I like from Bakerish or McDowallian games.

This is probably because Sinjin itself is a synthesis ofrules and concepts from the two main creators with a chunk of the ‘engine’taken from here;

“Therules on pg 4-5, the For GM note on pg 10, and the Advancement rules on pg 14are adapted from from 24XX CC BY Jason Tocci.”

I have no idea who or what that is. Man I am out of theloop.

Art!Its competent. Not my preferred style. Moody black and whitephotography. Pen and ink drawings. The individual art is good taken on its ownterms! Just not my preference. (Obviously I like Scraps stuff).

‘Sinjin in colour’ would be a good call, especiallyconsidering the hallucinatory nature of reality as ‘depth’ increases .. and ofcourse, Florida should be bright! More Florida Man energy! More Jorodowski lessAnsel Adams!

The maps are competent and useful.

My JudgementI like all of the parts of this and I find its elegance ofconception and arrangement very pleasing.

I like the environment, which, in its details and processesseems drawn from life.

I like the worldbuilding through factions, items, foes andgreater organisations which are honed to the point of interaction.

There are mild elements I would not disapprove of butperhaps question;

“There are many detailswe have elided or only gestured at, most significantly the precise nature ofthe disaster that created the Territory and the way to mend the damage it hascaused. This can be an unresolvable mystery or the primary goal of theplayers.”

Hhnnn the disembodied spirit of Jason Cordova rises in theshadows cackling mysteriously. “Why the players decide!”

No! Get they behind me thou serpent!

If there is a chance the game could be an investigative oneabout a big central mystery then the policy of feeding off the players improv& feeding it back to them is one I don’t really like. Its ok in a soapopera like AW but fake investigations only really work if people can all intuitthey are fake investigating to tell the story of the investigation and this isnot fun for me. If a big mystery is part of the game there should be an ActualTruth and clues and layers of shit to finding out what it is.)

The Gypsy child feels slightly awkward to me. Wil theyfulfil their destiny & save the manor with their honest heart or end upbaked and syphilitic in an opium den? YOU decide of course! By purchasing andplaying Sinjin! Available HERE!!!!

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(Made by a friend who wasreading the same book at the same time)

A book I read without much knowledge of the deeper context from which it sprang, and which I did not enjoy at all. It may have been worthwhile, but I did not enjoy it.

I got though this book partly on resentment, partly due to interest in the subject and partly on inertia. By the end I was reasonably sure that that Geertz was awful, that Bali was wonderful, that Geertzs' argument was correct and that he had totally failed to prove that. I will never read anything by Clifford Geertz again.

In 'the Theatre State' Geertz argues that in Bali ritual itself was the primary point, purpose and axis of the culture, that power, economic and spiritual, largely served ritual and not the other way aroud. In a sense its something of an anti-materialistic argument. While other writers peel back the skin of culture to show the 'real' power dynamics that drive it, Geertz tries to pull back the skin of power to show it driven itself by ritual.

He is probably right but he doesn't prove it here. Perhaps no-one could have but he definitely doesn't.

(Walter Spies excellent Bali paintings, which I only found out about because of this book)MY HATRED OF CLIFFORD GEERTZIt’s rare that I have hated a writer so much based merely on the tenor of their thought. I agree with the general drift of Geertzs' argument, I find Bali itself fascinating and am genuinely thankful for this introduction to an incredible subject, I just really hate this fucking guy.

He is a pompous sneak.

Reading Geertz gives one the impression of encountering a confidence trickster who tries to overwhelm you with volume of obscure detail, tendentious shifts in abstract analysis, vaguely made points in overcomplex form, regular dispellment of poor and shifting failings, before engaging in exactly those failings, (Geertz would lecture you intensely on the non-existence of feet before gaily dancing away), the avoidance and happenstance mention of actually-massively-important points, airy arguments from authority, (check the notes), and carefully not mentioning that his wife did a lot of the work.

My seething rage and frustration at this behaviour is not helped when, on assuming I am being Barnumed, I carefully read and re-read Geertzs' goat-footed prose and find, most times, that I cannot actually prove him wrong. Or at least I cannot prove him inconsistent.

Feeling like you are being scammed, not being able to find the scam, then having to reluctantly spit out that actually you agree, is a mentally distressing process.

A few things Geertz does, to give you a flavour;

Goes on a long blather in the intro about this not being a book about kings and drama, then opens the actual book with a direct quote description of the extremely dramatic ritual suicide of the last Balinese king.
Gets most of the way through the book before offhandedly mentioning that the chief Balinese import was opium. In the notes he confirms that most of Balis' economic surplus went on getting everyone high as shit, that everyone was baked throughout much of the book, that in the Royal palace the Opium smoke was so thick that the lizards were falling off the walls.
"This too is probably the appropriate place to acknowledge that a good deal of the material upon which this study is based was gathered by my wife and coworker, Hildred Geertz, and some by an Indonesian assistant, E. Rukasah." (this hidden in the notes at the back of the book, though he does thank his wife in the intro.
Doesn't really mention war or violence much as an axis of power in this book about power and ritual, until the notes where he allows that there was quite a lot of irregular violence and large ritualistic battles.
Oh yeah there was slavery at some point, quite a lot of it. Oh and there were illegal wife burnings up to the 1920s. (again, hidden in the notes).
"By means of a series of inferences, assumptions and outright guesses, which I will not relate for the simple reason that they cannot bear too much inspection, my own estimate of...." So basically "I made it up"
"The second approach, however, presents historical change as a relatively continuous social and cultural process, a process which shows few if any sharp breaks, but rather displays a slow but patterned alteration in which, though developmental phases may be discerned when the entire course of the process is viewed as a whole, it is nearly always very difficult, if not impossible, to put ones finger exactly on the point at which things stopped being what they were and became instead something else. This view of change or process, stresses not so much the annalistic chronicle of what people did, but rather the formal, or structural, patterns of cumulative activity. The period approach distributes clusters of concrete events along a time continuum in which the major distinction is earlier or later; the developmental approach distributes forms of organisation and patterns of culture along a time continuum in which the major distinction is perquisite and outcome. Time is a crucial element in both. In the first it is the thread along which specific happenings are strung; in the second it is a medium through which certain abstract processes move."

(Clifford Geertz explaining literally anything)Now, once decoded, I don't necessarily disagree with this, but I'm not sure how useful it is and I find the manner in which it is said mindbreakingly discursive and suspicious.

This is a Geertzian argument. If you think you can handle it or, god fucking help you, that you might actually enjoy it, then dive in bro.

BALIBali is an island you have probably already heard of as a holiday destination. On the Westward edge of Indonesia it has a balmy climate, fruitful wet rice cultivation and a large population for its size.Bali has a lot of culture. Its large, dense population is very highly organised and it is on the boundary of several big culture zones; the Indonesian Archipelago, the great sweep eastward of Indian-continent, Hindu or 'Indic' culture in the historical past, influences from Oceana, western colonisation at the hands of the Dutch in quite recent history.The West crashing into Bali relatively recently means that Western ethnography has 'access' via many travellers and scholars who just had to spend some in the wonderful climate and surrounded by the beautiful people of Balie for research and colonisation purposes, we must know more about this tropical island of hot babes and cheap opium. That is was recent means Bali is still weird as shit and there is a lot lot lot to go on about.There is more. In fact with Balinese culture there is "always more". It is a gumbo of multitudinous cultural, ritual, organisation, religious and governmental forms. Added to this its neatly If ethnologists and anthropologists had a PornHub it would be Bali 24/7. It might be the most interesting place ever.(There may be a pleasingly sinister Aryan connection. Bali was 'Indicised' by cultural outflow from India, absorbing a lot of Hindu/Indian culture. I did wonder if the ritual wife-burnings described were a distant echo of an origin culture that also lead to the slave burning witnessed by Ibn Fadlan when he encountered the Rus in the European dark age. I don't know if there is any confirmation of the Indo-Europeans spreading wife/servant/dependant ritual burnings at funerals, but it does seem like the kind of thing they would be into. It would be nuts if the Vikings and Balinese were culturally related.)Is Bali really that much more complex than an equivalent Western/European polity? Its hard for me to tell. Some of the overwhelming nature of the discussion of political groups, ritual groups, rice growing hydraulic groups, family/houseyard groups, temples, rituals, conflicts, layer upon layer of organisation, obligation, lords here, priests there, pass the Opium, is simply because the terms and concepts are unfamiliar. Bali has a lot of things that are a bit like the western version but none of them are actually like that, so a discussion of anything Balinese starts with; "this is a bit like a lord/peasant relationship, so we use those words, except not really, and actually totally different, but we don't really have words for exactly what it was....."But this isn't actually more-dense complexity but only perceived complexity.Bali has a large and dense population by western norms, due to having a really nice climate and wet rice cultivation. (Like java the volcanoes probably mean very continuously fertile fields). So there are a lot of people in very close communication, dealing and interacting with each other in a huge variety of ways. (But no cities as we would understand them).But this may not be any more complex proportionate to population than the western version, with the same total of people more widely spread.(Of course many close dense interconnections and relationships can increase complexity purely due to that density.)Bali is also a hyper-studied place for all the reasons given above, so the simple weight of scholarship, reportage and analysis almost feeds upon itself, producing more analysis and thus more perceived complexity.Bali is represented here as a very deeply contextual society where the folkways/religion/government/rituals/society are all very deeply interrelated almost all of the time. As Geertz would put it, the culture is woven into every fabric, object, design element, artwork, ritual, temple, house, clothing item, Kriss, rice paddy.. it’s everywhere and everything. Because everything feels so deeply integrated into the directly experienced human lifeworld, it might be actually impossible to understand Bali. To understand it you would need to actually live in it, to breath it, be absorbed by it, in order to drink in the deep context. If you are absorbed in it you cannot truly observe it from outside. So the only person who could really understand Bali is someone born there, growing up and living in the centre of its culture as a natural intuitive insider, AND, who was also born far away and had an entirely different set of values and came to Bali from the outside, learning everything about it from there and carefully observing.This person cannot exist so perhaps Bali cannot be studied.One idea that kept coming to mind as I read was the concept of Bali as a living antifossil. (Of course we are not meant to treat Bali as a living fossil of an 'Indic' culture as it would have been before the modern age all over Indonesia, as Geertz argues quite a bit, before typically tacitly doing exactly that).But Bali as an example of what a post-singularity or post-scarcity human future might look like after mass genetic engineering and the creation of 'human optimal' biomes and plant and animal forms; dense, warm, full of insanely complex groupings and stratification, deeply absorbed in rituals, with some passing trade, not that much interest in things outside the culture, no deep sense of mission but one of continuity, some semi-regular violence. Is this what the 'human optimum' might look like? A dense, warm, relatively static culture where most human basic needs are met?Of course Bali has scarcity. My observation comes from seeing it from European eyes where, to us, it has everything Europe doesn't, and everything we might wish for in terms of climate, manageable size, a ridiculously productive agricultural system, relative peace and human flourishing in the way that most psychologically average humans would probably conceive it.If you went back in time, put a European peasant in coma, took them to Bali & woke them up, they might actually think they were in heaven. It has everything a peasant wants from heaven.I do not really believe in a 'final', optimum, or zero-scarcity human culture as humans create scarcity through their desires regardless of what is or isn’t materially available. But its interesting to try to imagine 'plateau' cultures or 'optimal' cultures we might inhabit on our journey.(Spies)GEERTZS ARGUMENT - WHAT WOULD IT TAKE TO PROVE IT?Ritual and power interweave at every juncture, so like any complex argument from the human lifeworld where behaviours interweave and support each other and where each is to some extent an expression of the other, the question is less 'which of these things is this behaviour really about? But more; in this web of feedback, which of these elements is more dominant, and which times and under what conditions?

Can we find times in Bali where power and ritual were in conflict and Ritual clearly won? (this would be hard because by definition, whichever aspect of society was behind the Ritual answer, turned out to be more "powerful" because they "won". You can’t disprove the rule of power since whatever does rule, is power.

THE DANCE METAPHORSomething familiar to most of us from Television; experienced Judges witnessing a dance and offering opinions on which of the dancers is really leading at which times.

The dancers in this case are Power and Ritual in Bali.

How useful is this metaphor? The more into the weeds of actual dancing the less useful

but some concepts to consider might be;

The complexity of the whole situation with the judges watching the dance and the dancers responding to each other. Multiple observers observing elements that are mutually-observing.
How genuinely hard it is to judge matters of dominance in complex feedback behaviours. The dynamics existed in-the-moment, between two maximally-engaged and highly responsive sophonts in a flow state. What happened between them might not be 'knowable' by an observer.
the complexity of the judges response to the dance and how they might argue with each other afterwards, each basing their points on what they saw (all slightly different), what they themselves know of dancing (all slightly different) and any contextual knowledge they might have of these dancers in particular.

If you imagine the depth of this imagined situation, the differences of opinion, limits of evidence and some things that maybe even maximal evidence and knowledge can't reveal, then that is perhaps a rough guide to the level of difficulty, complexity of witnessing, evidence and judgement we engage in when we try to untangle these relationships like for instance Geertz's argument that in Bali Ritual was (more) dominant over Power (most of the time).

In Geertzs' defence the thing he is trying to prove is immeasurably complex ad subtle and about an immeasurably complex society, so proving, or even arguing it properly would be a staggering synthesis of rigour, subtlety and vast arcologies of detail. It would be an absolutely peak academic argument, if it could be done.

Few could do it and Geertz is not among them. He writes the wrap-up synthesis at the end but that belongs at the end of a much longer, much better, and paradoxically, much easier to read book.

Geertz is probably right in that in Bali, ritual was a power of its own, its own centre of 'not-power' to which what we commonly think of as 'real power'; guns, money, sex and taxes, was subservient.

But he doesn't prove it. He puts a lot of arguments in the air, considers a lot of things, gestures towards his final summation and then runs for it, like a magician fleeing the stage while the plates are spinning.

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I fully intended to do at least one full, proper post before the Gackling Moon Kickstarter ends on Christmas Eve..

And I have failed! I am sorry!

At least we have hit some stretch goals;

All backers will get a free interlinked PDF! (the rest of you will have to pay £5)

The Book will now be Hardback for all!

We are taking £1 off the cost (either of the book price or postage, whichever is easier), for all backers!

We have about 24 hours left, so…

Its possible we might hit this one; £2 off for all backers.

And if we get that one..

Gasp!

At backers request, you can now back for two books!

Gackling Moon!Take a look if you want to! Merry Christmas Everyone!

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Nothing dies like a Summer and the great beasts offorgotten summers, each different.

Seasons here come from the southwest and fade towards thenorth east, vanishing over those black hills, but there is something thereamong the pale lakes which curdles seasons, traps them so, in each season, agreat beast comes forth.

So tit is that this is the land of great beasts. Eachbeast is always different, as each season is different. And so this is a landof hunters and scholars of the hunt. Ao-one knows precisely what will comeforth - the where’s and the hows of it. All can be dangerous, but the parts anddanger of each beast can possess increasable properties, and the hunt is alwaysdifferent for each season.

The beasts of summer are usually the most violent and aggressive,if not the most deadly.

But now comes a great terror, for up int the black hills,a strange moon rose and the world shook, and this autumn has come forth not onebeast of summer but all. A torrent of forgotten summers - one each day or night- slinking sliding or blazing forth so that the cool night shimmers and simmerswith beasts.

It is very terrible, nothing is safe or regular. As badas the beasts are the hunters that flood up the river. Yet we need them; allthe old hunters of past summers. They gather round in creaking hustles, talkinghere with a farmer, there with a thane, the old men and housewives pulling onpipes and speaking what they know of this beast or that;

| | | The hunters at rest Vasily Grigorievich Perov |

1 - Its form; (d20)1. Sinious and lizardine, it curleth and windeththat its end might be hither and yon, now near, now far.

a lion in aspect and aye ye might say that nonehere have seen a lion in this life or the next but the old books speakmuch of them and tales as well and at all or most points I do say it belionlike.
the beast be horned and prancing, like an oldforest god, a great deer or a circus man
the beast be a flock or swarm of some flying thing,it be a shimmer in the air, or perhaps like many birds
the beast be a river creature swimming in the airas if t’were water above and not below
the beast is chimeric, brutal and winged, abeast of many parts and not well arranged
the beast is insectile but vast in scael, likea small thing made larger than it might be, or a familiar thing made unfamiliar
the beast is a lizard beast of a lost age, orthe bones of one, or perhaps it be an alligator or a huge chicken yet it havesome part of all of those
the beast be a platypus
the beast be like a crawling baby or toddlingboy with a huge beasts head, or visa versa some say
the beast is a great stilted quadruped movingdreamlike yet its feet are cruel
the beast is a screeching feathered earthboundmess
this is a rapidly tunnelying beast with astrong dorsal fin or spike that preturdeth forth and it do churn its waythrough the earth very busyliy
the beast is a rolling pangolin, or armadillo,or a long beast yet that it form itself into an hoop and roll
the beast is akin to a rabbit or hare, smallor large
the beast is small bird but very big, not alarge bird, but a small one made big
the beast is most like an elephant or mammoth
I would say it is a wild cackling monkey
Of this beast a man might say; “this be alike unto a greatbeetle” but another say “It be not so and you are a foole to say so, lookthee upon a beetle for they be common enough and say again that the beast be soalike, go on with ye ye great foole ye”.
Some would call it like a Dragonfly, yet onenot seen hither, others may call it a bird of heaven.

| | | Drunk Hunters Rest with Dog - Unknown |

2 - Its coat similar to; (d12) 1-3; Skin; naked is the beast

4; It be a hairy beast, which is that its hairs belooser and longer than fur

5-6; The beast have scales like a snake

7-8; It hath fur, mayhap short but not too long

9-10; It is a feathered beast

11-12; It be two of the above each in separateparts.

3 - Its colour; (d20) 1. Like fire embers mixed with falling cherryblossom

gold tarnished with nitre but in places waxingseemingly molten yet without heat
heat-haze sunset red fading into bluecounter-shading
like a shiny copper penny
a shifting blue-green iridescence shining as ifalways under summer light even when not
from powder blue to ink-black mixingwith its own long ever-present shadow
crocus-yellow veined with pink
the red of sunbeaten bricks with parts likefine pink-traced marble
like deep red polished wood
tobacco-stained dove feathers
bee or tiger-striped, aggressive yellow anddepthless black
shimmering cut-grass green, along with thesmell
bright burning yellow-white of a noon sun (it be hardto gaze upon)
Eclipse-Coloured (that is pseudo twilight,black ringed with white and many-shadowed)
A smooth milky white with dream-coloured markings (acolour not of this sphere), either that or the colour of wounded ice.
Rose counterpointing the blood-green ofthorn
The soft tan of well cared-for teeth, ringedwith glistening red
Perfect lavender with the smell also and beesalways near whether day or night
beaten heated iron speckled with the colour of its sparksand with something of its heat

4 - Its size and bygness; (2d6) 2. Very little like a kitten yet faster than theeye and fierce as fire

Badger size, deft and ferocious withal
A wildcats size and suppleness, and as silentand careful
The size of a big dog yea also robust, fearlessand deep-chested that it tire not
As wide as a pygg, or boar very thick set andsmall legged and oncoming
Big as a foal or mule with long slender partsyet some thikke

8-9. It hath the mass of tiger or great catt, verylarge and at all points well-proportioned

More large and mighty than an Aurochs - itcould break down simple walls
Alike the tales of the Olyphant claim; that itmay batter houses
Like a Wyrm of tales, or mayhap a Whaleof the See. A mighty thing that may push down the tallest trees and fear none

| | | The Hunting Meeting Adolphe Monticelli |

5 - A Wonderous Aspect the beast hath; (d20)1. Heat, that it gives out a great warmth that parchesthe green and bakes the earth and makes a shimmer in the air so that the birdsdrop dead and an egg may be cooked in its track, it may also breathe the fireof the sun some say.

Winds. It be cradled and woven with winds thatmay blast hunters hither and yon and may even carry it forth in the air.
Gold. All those wounded by it corrupt not intofoulness but transmute slowly into purest gold, spreading like infection fromits wound till they die thereof. It may be that its blood be hot gold, or itsbones, or that it breathe gold or its fewmets be so.
Sweetness. The beast hath about it an Amoroussweetness which do cause those nearby to look kindly and sweetly upon oneanother and the beast too so that a man may be being eaten by the beast and cryout; hurt it not, the poore thing.
Fecundity. A great growth of green thingswherever the beast passes, as much as if the land were left untilled andunmanaged for five or ten years or more.
Fertilisation. It be that where the beast is orhas been, if ye be tupped ye shall seed and if ye tupp another they shall bewith child, this being so for all animals even man, and the children be many.
Priapism and Satyrification. All males aroundthe beast find themselves in a great heat for what they desire and ever-readyto make their amore with whatever they may see be it alike unto their love ornot. This being so for all animals and they becoming most dangerous as aresult.
Mnemophagy. This beast do devour all memory ofit, though how it do this, by bite or sight, or be scent or touch, or byinfection or whatever, none can recall. Likewise whatever be said of this beastbe hearsay only, aye even this.
Loss, Listlessness and Dwelling upon Old Things.Those who hunt the beast are become a melancholic sort, as if the very thoughtof it do lead the mind down old and winding paths such that men take to drinkand poetry and hunt it not.
Phoenixaliac Rekindling After Death. If thebeast be killed it shall live again another way. How this be done and howstopped none have yet devised/
The Engendering of Mazes. Some by growth,others by a changing of the world.
It Doth Blind Those Who Look Upon It. As it beits form be but a rumour from seeing it in mirrors.
Shamed-to-Mar. All those who pierce, slice,put blows upon or otherwise marr the beast are consumed inwardly by great shameas if they had done a holy wrong and must be kept from blade, rope and poisonfor a good while.
That It May Dwell in Reflections. It do seemvery small in a mirror, glass or still water, yet may leap from one to anotherand come again in its true size and largeness.
That It May Change Its Size.
That Its Blood Become Clever Snakes. Red andpoisonous and at times capable of speech, these issue forth and run up trousersand into joints where they bite venomously and lethally. If a snake may betaken and kept it may give secrets.
That Its Roar Makes Panic, Causes Walls to Shatterand Streams to Surge and Doth Awaken Dark Spirits.
That It May Not Be Harmed By Weapon Made Of MortalHand. Yet how this be accounted, that it be a thing forged, or simplyassembled by hand, if a sword will strike, an arrow pierce or even a thrownrock hit home I cannot say.
That It Maketh a Music or Cry Which Do ExchangeThe Selves Of Those Thereabout As If T’were The Shuffling of Cards. If thebeast do make its sound aye one shall become another as if the spright werehoisted from one wight and placed in another as a card may change hands andthis hath done great confusion for many are not them-selves.
That It Be A Phylactery. It be said the beasthave within it the souls of any whom it has slain or who have fallen by itshand and should it die they shall be free’d. Yet whether they will attain theirold wights or where they shall go, who can say?

| | | The meeting of Khusrau and Shirīn on the hunting field. Gouache painting by a Persian artist, Qajar period |

6 - the prey of the beast; (d20)1. Man. The beast taketh any man or woman whereverand however it may and makes little division or distinction between them bethey man, woman, young, old, sic or hale or of this land or that.

The Beasts of the Field. It doth eat the cows,sheep, hoggs and Goats and any other beast that the hand of man places in somepasture or closed acre so that the country go bare and the fields overgrown,but of wild beasts it eats not.
Bridges. Not only these but perhaps doors,gates, crossing place poles that carry signs it doth gulp and swallow all as ift’were good cheese so that no river may be crossed, door barred and no man knowwhich way go which.
Those Sleeping. Both beast and man so that allliving fair and foul in the land fear greatly to sleep, or if they can sleep inshifts and all are tired most times and muchly. Sleep not lest the beast takethee!
Princes. Tis well these are few andwell-guarded and rich withal that they may pay hunters to protect them. Yet acrown to travel faster than a ray of light and should one prince fall the crowndo go rightways to another and the beast smells them out rightwise.
Children. Oh woe!
It Doth Eat of the Greene. As to a locust orplague of voals, the crops are devoured and even the leaves of the trees!
It Snuffleth in the Earth. What it seekes therewho doth know, yet it tear up the land in great trenches and pitts and leaves asoily ruine wherever it will.
Treasures of Silver and Gold. Such riches belike sweetmeats to the beast and it may smell them out readily enough. It hatheeaten half the gold hearabouts and we must go now on credit. No coin or ring issafe but it will not eat flesh.
Yron. And mayhap steel, so that horses go unshoed andnothing of great devise may be made or sustained in this land but that thebeast will smell it out and devour it.
Chickens.
Clothes and Eyes. Tis very sad to see theblind and naked people hearabouts. Some say it better that the beast do sukkthey yghen outte, others prefer that the orb be pierced and drawn like anolive.
Fingers. And it will not discern between buttake all and in great bites and then be gone and ye left with bloody mitts asye may see from some here.
Virgins. I be in no danger but in gods nameget ye tupped or get ye gonne.
Prey of the Hunt. The great of the land beoffended for not fox nor deer nor bear or even badger can be quested for butthat the beast interrupt and take the prey, even a small man may not take apigeon by arrow lest the beast be upon them.
Honey. Aye and good luck to it and it may keepthe hives. But there shall be no honey this year and none left in jars eitherand I take it sore.
Those Who Looke Not Behind Them. For this yousee all hereabouts are everglancing and head turning and leaping and twistinghither and yon for if the beast sees you looking towards your own hind to seeit then it shall fear to be seen but if not it shall come at thee.
It Drinketh the Streme. And gulpeth all downday upon day, now in one place, now another, as if it were the very see, andthe land by made parched therewith and there be nothing to drink at all.
It Taketh Voices and Wind. ……… tisstill ………
Wives. And not all are pleased by it (thoughsome are), and do dress their wives in great suits of yron and spikes that thebeast may not get upon them and this do please some men who say t’should’vebeen done afore times yet others divorce & live free & the men be woe.

| | | The Old Hunter by Ferdinand de Braekeleer |

7 - manner and habit of the beast; (d20) 1. Fuming and Bellicose, it doth roar and go withgreat bobbaunce and make much of itself as if it’were to be a king of beastsaye and men too.

Like a Hott Ember that sits yet sparks fiercelyif poked. If ye see it show care for it may only growl and then leap forth inways unseen and with great pain.
It Runs like Water always to the Easiest &subtlest Path.
It stalks like a Tiger, leaps and carries awaywhat it desires to where it would and only then devours them.
Preening and Ladylike. It pleases to be admiredand preens and cleans often and is much horrored by being fouled. Likes to belooked upon but does revenge itself like a batty matron if assailed.
Afearing and Astounding. It pleasures in theterror it inflicts and enjoys to afear and horrible its prey, to hear themquerulous, then to scream and run and be pursued as if the fear itself weremeat to it.
Like Stagnant Water in a Well. It lies hiddenin some place where what is needed is kept, as with; water, firewood orsimilar, then takes what comes and lets none pass. A bridge may be its dwellingplace.
Its Manner be Circumspect and Little Known.
Subtle and Sidling, striking and assailing fromwhere it be not suspected to come. It doth take much pleasure in thisinvention.
Hawklike and Striking, it do seek to observewhat it desires from and great distance, giving little sense or sign of what itwould, and in a trice it advance and descend in great speed and silence, aimingat one and only one particular desire of its flesh and either it carry awaythat one or it retreat and sitt and seem to again give little auger that itever desired any such thing.
Wheeling and False-Craven. The creature makesa squirrel like hopping and friendliness and a craven wheedling like a beatendogg and a sopping of eyes like a sad child as if to say ay sir let me but beby thy side, but attend it not for it shall eat well.
Regular and Castellean. The beast doth patrolits own walls and ways like a well-fed cellarmaster, one may set ones clock byits goings.
Playful and Boisterous. Frustrating as asugared child the beast demands attention and runs circling round and round andround and upon tiring itself breaks down and wails, it assails in manic wise astroubled children will.
Slovenly and Villainous. A poor and nastycreature that slinks and covertly writhes in great suspicion and clearmalignancy yet it seems not to think it is seen, also the thing by dirty,wrenched and ill-kept.
Like a Snail that Knoweth Much. It make is wayslowly but beware for the beast is a player of games and wise withal and shallbe neither outwitted or surprised, instead ye shall have thy hand turned as ifby a sharper of cards for all its slowness.
It Goeth about as a Merchant upon highway and road.The jaunty creature travels as if expecting good welcome.
Like a Great Shippe, or Drifting Thyng. Ormayhap like a cloud which goeth against the wind, or an old drunk who finds hisway home though bleary, the beast doe drift and hang about and do little andthen drift away.
Curious and nose-arching. Like a pompousdrinker of fine wines the beast do sniff here and there and investigate muchand poke about where it will yet if seen it shall seem to give over that itseek not and that whatever it hath found be not what it sought or it do be sobut not of right quality.
It Quest Like a Dogge. Very much do it scentand follow seeking and biting at what it wants.
It Cometh and Goeth at Strange Hours Alike Unto aMan Confused. No sooner be it in one place but that it look about it andseem to go on as if it came wrongly, at other times it butts in where nothingit desires may be but yet it shall be present and full of wonders till thesense strike and it wander off or seem woeful and leave.

| | | Paulus Potter. The Bull, 1647 |

8 - the lair of the beast if it have such; (d20) 1. It Lay Down Where it Will. Who can say wherethe beast be, not I.

It Hide in a Nest in a Tall Tree
It Seek out Tombs.
In the Roof of an House
Beneath Something Larger than Itself, often abridge, perhaps a hill
In a great Nutt
Behind a Clokk
It hideth in a myst which emits from a toadthat lives in a tree that grows upon a skul, tho the nature of the skul be of no consequencein this telling and only a matter of chance and I say to thee any skul will doand busy thyself not with this petty aspect but be about your work.
It liveth within a Goat and which Goat or wherebe not known except that it hunger for lime for the Beast within do afflict itshumours.
It liveth in a place that cannot be foundexcept that of those that pursue it each shall dream of the beast and dream onething true so that if several do seek and do remember and compare their dreamsthe parts of which that are true will be combined to indicate the place yet forthat day or night only.
It rest where waters fall.
It rest not and cease not but be ever-amovesuch that if it cease it may die.
It seeks old castles or ruins of likekind.
It be a shape-changing beast and sleeps as a manin a bed, and the man knoweth not that he be the beast.
It rest as a sweet Air that drift from asilver harp that be seen only in the reflection of a starlit pool and when day dobreak the harp fade and with it each note do pass away and as each sound dothfall to earth for each one the Beast be painted in the daylight air as with thestroke of a brush till it be real and fierce once more yet if a man do learnits tune and if it be moonlight and have they a silver harp they may cause thebeast to sleep invisible for as long as they do play and play well.
It sleep quiet in a cavern of soil beneath thehouse of an Old Maid and she will have none of thee or thy ways and shall allowthee not but turn the country against they for devilling with her floorboardsyet how else shall the Beast be attained I ask thee woman?
It rest beneath a great pyre of hott embersand ye may find these by their scent and smoke.
In the Cowshed.
In three separate parts, one beneath earth,one above and one in neither of those and they may be hunted separate orcombined but if ye strike one ye must strike all at the same moment or ye belost.
It build for itself a False House of twigs andthe woods leavings, and why it do this none know for the house be hollow withinand like a nest yet without it do look very like an house.

| | | The Jabberwock, by John Tenniel, 1871 |

MOON MOON MOONTHE KICKSTARTER FOR GACKLING MOON IS STILL RUNNING!EVERY BACKER GETS A FREE INTERLINKED PDF(ITS GONNA BE £5 FOR NON-BACKERS)NEXT GOAL IS....FREE FOR BACKERS!(WILL COST MORE FOR OTHERS)(i was going to title this 'help Patrick get hard', count yourselves lucky that i did not)

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GACKLING MOON is live!

Go here if you want to learn more;

(On the one hand I am the least successful of the OSR diaspora, on the other I am not doing too badly for a guy with a double-digit IQ.)

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(Some Discord bros gave me a hand with some of the scent markers. All images by John Atkinson Grimshaw.)

Once stolen by Ghosts, (allegedly), and still on the run,Drift moves with the mist like a ship drifting at sea, coalescing and emerging,overlapping and interlacing with other places, its streets curving aroundtheirs, its buildings interspacing theirs. So Drift is always changing a littlewithin itself, as it translocates, seamlessly, from place to place.

It is a town without clear boundaries, signified by mistsand gloom, smoke and smog, the ripe interweaving patterning of bells, the cloppingof its slow, thin horses, the whispers that skitter through its alleyways andthe layers and waves of subtle scent that mark its palaces and shops.

The Coming of Drift The town no longer has a place reserved for it in clearreality, instead being confined to theocean and the mists, to the gloaming of dawn or the embers of the day, toovercast nights or fog-shrouded days.

Drift comes upon normal places silently, infiltrating itsalleyways between buildings in the fog or smoke, at night or in the afternoon,in silent or ill-travelled streets. The exact moment of its arrival cannot beperceived, (in fact that exact moment does not even exist, lost in therecords of time the same way the location of Drift is lost on the maps).

The first signs of Drift are the pungent scents of itsshops, narrow alleyways between buildings that previously had no gap, theoff-kilter clopping of its pale horses, the smell and distant sound of the sea,no matter how far from the sea you may be, the melodious overlapping of bellstelling one time or another, or signalling one direction or another, and thelow distant vibration, a sound unlike a horn, deep as a beast, but more regular,coming from the statue of Mutability which stands on an island in the citiesharbour.

All the alleys into Drift lead downhill, no matter wherethey emerge or what the rest of the geography is doing. The alleys are narrowand shrouded in mist, perhaps with the gas lamps hanging from the rear of oneof its thin carriages retreating.

Once an entry is there, it has always been there, withevery sign and evidence of its permanent existence in place; with the same dirtand texture of its current location, the same or similar materials, the sameroad surface and a sign, if that is usual, in the style of whatever place itis, pointing inwards, spelling ‘Drift’. The sign and walls and floor will bedirty or worn or clean and sharp, just like the place of its arrival. Graffitiwill lead in seamlessly from walls which were always there, turning on to wallswhich have only ‘always been there’ since a moment ago. Vague half-memories ofDrift emerge in the minds of anyone approaching an entry; it doesn’t much of astir. When its there, people soft of remember that it has always been there. Whenit is gone it is nearly forgotten.

Magicians, adventurers, occultists, mediums,fortune-tellers,sea-captains, rope merchants, perfumiers, opera singers andhooded figures sometimes suspect when drift will arrive and where and quietlypack the local pubs and cafes, sitting creepily and ruining the ambience forthe locals, waiting for a moment that cannot be sensed, after which, the vaguememory of the existence of Drift will be revealed especially to Publicans, theHomeless and Cab Drivers past middle age.

Asking them before this moment will only get you afunny look, but waiting for that senseless un-time and asking then; “Doyou know the turn into Drift? Its somewhere around here I think?” And theanswer will be a clear “Course I do mate, down the road on tha left innit.Dunno why you’d want to go there.”

The History of Drift
Founded By Ghosts Ghosts walk the streets of Drift City - antechamber tothe shadow world, (allegedly). The founders of Drift City were all dead by thetime they arrived, (they came on a Ghost Ship), that is why it took them solong but also why they could find it.

In other stories the Ghosts stole Drift, either tokeep it or to keep it safe. Maybe it was a High Fantasy thing? Saving it fromthe Dark Lord? Or a Steampunk thing? Some experiment which killed theexperimenters but left them as ghosts in an empty city?

Whatever. At some point early in the history of Drift, itwas an empty city, but for Ghosts. At that same point it was also a placelesscity, drifting, as it still does.

Maybe whatever created the ghosts made the city Drift,maybe not, but the Ghosts were the first residents, the Founders, and they arestill here and are still the Founders. The Municipal Government of Drift hasnever changed, though it has faded in and out of intelligibility over time.Bylaws and judgements are communicated (though not decided) by Mediums. Theghosts are conservative but reliable, difficult to influence via bribery orpork. Because Drift was founded by ghosts its government buildings are cemeteriesand visa versa.

Of course there are new ghosts, now and then. If theyhave a knack for it they stay in place and work their way up the ranks. Changeis slow. But Drift is a relatively safe place for ghosts.

Populated by Exiles and Slaves Shipwreck victims, outlaws, explorers, outsiders. Exiles.Escaped slaves, forgotten Kings. Like many harbour towns, Drift is a mosaic ofeternal expatriates. Unlike most there is no ‘back country’, and no mainethnicity, apart from the Ghosts.

It is rare for anyone to settle in Drift City who is notan eccentric, outcast, or hunted, or anyone who is not comfortable with ghosts,gloom and strange sounds.

Since all the major governmental roles are occupied bythe dead the living elite of Drift are made up of traders, skilled craftsmen,artists, mediums, magicians, Sea Captains, ship owners and the lords ofinsurance. The lack of (tangible) nobility makes it a relatively flattish, butquite high-toned upper crust. Birth gives a little rank but reputation more.

Turning Into Drift A Maritime Town Drift is usually a shore city and usually has a harbourof sorts. Sometimes it even has a harbour when it appears far inland. Almostall of its economic activity comes via ship and the sailors of Drift City canalways find their way home; they will get there through the mist.

Usually, one turns into Drift through the alleyways atits periphery and heads downhill towards the moaning of Mutability. On the rareevents one can see a view through fog, smoke or gloom, (that is not a carefulTrompe l’oeil), one sees the tangled towers and alleyways and mixed-up ziplinesof Drift cascading down in a bricolage of driftwood architecture, down to theharbour, the Opera House and the statue of Mutability, the goddess bearing anintermittent torch of fire as pale and translucent as the mist itself, mostvisible to those near death, with the city spread out around it like ashattered crater of houses with about two fifths cut out of it to let in theblack sea.

A City Of Alleyways The alleyways are crooked, long and thin. There are notreally any streets in drift, or anything you could easily call the Main Way,just alleys leading off alleys. The widest roads are about the width of thosein a Medieval European town; ghostwives can chatter between windows in theoverhanging eaves, people can easily leap across, bridges, improvised orcarefully designed, are thrown between buildings over streets.

It’s hard to tell the difference between a gap leading toan alley or just a deep porch. Turns are hidden in nooks. Alleys are gated offbut the gates are left unlocked. The boundary between public and private isnebulous. Its common to feel that you are trespassing.

When its busy on a lane, people just turn off, looparound. There is always a possible detour in Drift, people percolate throughthe city like chemicals in blood.

Buildings Long, Tall And Deep Long thin buildings lead off long thin alleyways.. Buildingstall and slender, tenements housing the descendants of pirates, shipwrecks,those lost at sea, traitors, slaves. Drift has famous glassworks, many buildings are tall, slender and glassfronted with iron frames. The curtains are always closed of course, but you cansee lights moving behind them at night.

Others have narrow frontage but go deep to the rear, endingin gardens. Others are long laterally, old manufactories, or built like them, asme buildings occupy differentpositions on the same street, or on another street, either crossing the road ona bridge before dropping down, forming part of the same building but on theopposite side of the road, or even overleaping or burrowing under a whole rowof building by bridge or tunnel before occupying an entirely different street.Sometimes the doors and exits are quite different to the buildings position; enterthrough a narrow door, turn a corner, climb steps to an attic space, cross overthe entire block of buildings through a shared attic, take steps down and findthe bulk of the building facing a different road.

This aids intrigues in Drift - many secret or forgottendoors, dumb waiters, shared rooms, attics or cellars, and many houses oroffices directly adjacent to others across a thin wall while the actual entrancesand addresses are in quite different parts of town

Trompe l’oeil Trompe-d'oil is prized in Drift, though many of thepaintings are decayed. Most high-status buildings or frontages will be paintedtrompe l’oeil, so that the a description of that painting forms the part of abuildings (or a doorways at least) address. ‘The House of Many Leopards’, the‘fourth door in the Garden of Setebos’, ‘down there on Flamingo Row’.

While the rich can have their buildings painted andregularly upkept, the middling classes must subsist on pasted Trompe. Many ofthe famous painters have tall, thin buildings with tall, thin doors. When theirhuge paintings are complete they are rolled out through the multistorey doorsand shifted into place to block street entrances, to occupy blank walls at the end of longavenues, or have holes cut in them for windows and doors before being pasted upas the front of residences.

Over time all the paintings blotch and stain, and thoseposted up can peel away, or part away, leaving ghost signs or layeredpalimpsests of variegated images from different eras. Though of course at onepoint this very decayed palimpsest style, painted as such, was itself adeliberate artifice and quite in vogue for a time.

Texture In Drift, everything is textured and patinaed. Nothingshines like new and nothing is entirely clean. It would be nearly pointlessanyway, what with the fog, smoke, rain, gloom, the salt from the sea and thelichen and hot breath of its closely packed, though quite quiet, population.The ghosts wouldn’t like it either.

Ald and worn things are treasured, new made things arenot. Wood smoothed by many hands, or by the sea, cups with long-use stains atthe bottom, even the slight abrasive chipping of glass or crystal. Smokestains, soot stains, sun paling, grooves and bends to things. This is thetexture of Drift. It is a somewhat comfortable City, the chairs tend to bewell-used and easy to sit in. It’s a place where one can slouch easily againsta wall.

Smells and Bells Because Drift is so gloomy, foggy, smoky, private, narrowand labyrinthine, the city has developed a parallel sensory language tocommunicate place and location.

Businesses communicate themselves via scent. Places of businessthat don't have their own smell will license one from the council. any placethat cooks is allowed to fan its scent about and all do,

though there are bylaws and arguments between placesabout the use of too much smell or spice. Other shops are allowed tocommunicate their presence through a registered system of scent markers.

Coffee beans are popular in Drift, though not fordrinking. Instead people carry small bags of them in deep narrow pockets.(Drift pockets can be so narrow and so deep that a special form of tongs forreaching into them is in common use). If they need their scent palate cleaning,they pull out the bag of beans and take a deep sniff. In the lee of this strongscent, which fades quickly, their sinuses regain some sensitivity anddiscretion which may have been lost throughout the day.

Occupations by Scent Chandlers smell of beeswax. Blacksmiths of coal smoke andhot metal. Armourers of lapping powder. Jewellers of Ambergris and Furriers ofMyrrh. Gambling houses smell of vinegar, Undertakers of Freesia. Tanners ofurine, Fullers of urine and lanoline, Brewers of Hops but Pubs of Beer. Cobblerssmell of leather and beeswax, Butchers of blood. Bookshops smell of their paperand each shop only sells books printed on paper from the same forest so eachshop has a smell quite distinctive to keen readers but a seemingly randomselection of books. Clerks smell like wig dust and aniseed, Lawyers of wormwoodand brothels of Mint, the slighter and sweeter the mint smell the moreexpensive the brothel. Heralds have purple coats , and they are associated withthe slight fish sauce smell from the marine snails used for that dye whileWhisperers smell of Roses. Mediums smell of incense (the only professionallowed to burn it) and Fortune Tellers of fruitful hemp. Knackers smell ofdeath.

Locations by Bell Drift has a latticework of bells. Every quarter has alarge Belltower which peals in an agreed sequence with each other quarter, witha slightly different tone and a different pattern to each. So Bells in Drifttell not so much time, (though an experienced habitant can tell time from thebells, due to micro differences in rhythm and pattern), but place.

The large low-frequency bells are raised up about eachquarter and below them in each Rue and Tangle, major notable buildings likeTaverns, Temples or Cemeteries, have their own bells, set to higher pitcheswhich get lost and trapped in the weave of alleyways and so don’t disrupt otherquarters much, and rung in their own evolved patterns of rhythm.

Some residences, usually at least one on each street,hang wind chimes outside their door; silver for the wealthy, wooden for thepoor.

So the city is covered and woven with a pattern of smellsand bells such that those who know the place can easily find their way about,finding general locations by the Great Bells, smaller areas by lesser bells,and single businesses and houses by bell and by scent.

This rolling wave of soft continual sound, underlaid bythe sound of the sea and the moaning of the lamp of Mutability, can be somewhathypnotic and disturbing for new visitors, but after a time one becomesaccustomed to it, and ultimately, becomes an initiate, with the sensory net ofthe city making its structure and places as clear as day, regardless of thecloseness and gloom.

Whisperers Public conversation in Drift is muffled or whispered.Crowds are never loud, (except possibly if there is a riot at the opera), butthis seems to suit the mood and conventions of the city.

Whispers do infiltrate through the alleyways likeinvisible snakes though, wyrms of muttered sound that fleet past, or curl andspiral, hunting questing, before disappearing into a turnaway or over a roof.

These are not just whispers but Whispers; the substanceof much communication in Drift and the main power of its Law.

Professional Whisperers ply their trade in Drift City,seek the smell of Roses, then give them a lock of hair, or enough personaldetails, (always in riddle form and without mentioning names), and they can seta whisper to chase after someone, susurussing past others like a snake andresounding only in the ears of that one particular person.

In most cases this is used only for urgent messages forthose difficult to find, like a kind of aggressive Telegram service. Harassingor irrelevant Whispers are punished, (though small numbers of CriminalWhisperers exist).

Whispers are also the primary method of policing in Driftand all the strongest ‘Blue’ Whisperers are licensed and well-paid members ofthe Constabulary who whisper under licence.

If a whisper warrant is given for a suspect, name knownor not, only enough details, or some fragments of hair or blood are needed, theBlue Whisperers send packs and flocks of dense whispers after that person,finding them wherever they are, slowly driving them mad with the continualimprecations of guilt and crime until they give themselves up or deafenthemselves.

Sadly the deaf are mistrusted in Drift for exactly thisreason and often drawn into the world of Crime.

Thin Aesthetic Long thin things are favoured in Drift. Shoes are usuallypointed or square-toed, hats tall and, as we said, pockets very thin and verydeep. One carries pocket tongs to reach things in there and these have theirown inner pockets. Pocket tongs are not carried openly as this is a sign ofcriminality and there are polite genuflections to make if one must employ themin the street. Round people wear tall thin things and are called fools fordoing so; ‘roundlings’ and ‘spheres’.

Thin foods are preferred; slices are slender, baguetteslong. Round foods are disapproved of; the soup bowls are square andsharp-cornered, or shaped like boats as are the spoons, which are like concaveoars. Thin tall glasses and mugs are used. High-status banquets are cascades ofspikes and verticality as the cities cooks, both living and dead, compete toout-do one another in how spired and slender a meal can be made.

The poor subsist on noodles, long fries, eels in batterand long onions, all of which are actually pretty good.

Cabs and carriages can by hired but they are all veryslender, the axles about three feet across, so a carriage sits one, or twofacing each other, or a sumptuous carriage can have two half-decks with twomore seated above and behind those on the lower deck. These are quite unstableand special gyroscopes are made to keep them somewhat steady.

The thin carriages are pulled by horses specially bred tobe similarly thin; the "Driftwood Stretch" breed, a grey to white,somewhat inbred, slow but steady, good at finding their way and so thin theyare uncomfortable for most to sit on. Yellow eyed, they are used almostentirely by the coachmen of Drift. They can walk as easily backwards asforwards, as easily uphill backwards as forwards, and can strafe or sidestepslowly.

Strange Transports The city has numerous curious boutique travel formsdesigned to deal with its slopes and its dense and winding layout.Single-person micro cable-cars exist to take commuters upslope at high speed.Zipwires can get you downhill fast. Tower-contained hot-air balloon baskets cansave you steps if you need to gain height. Micro-zeppelins are employed byYouths and the Police who pursue them. Registered roof-walks are marked byyellow rope but being seen on the roofs beyond the rope or after dark is anoffence punishable by Whispering.

A City Of Hucksters And Seers Seers, mediums, clairvoyants, hucksters, magicians andthe like are legally protected and live TAX FREE in Drift, on a 'one drop'basis of possible accuracy or validity. A seer or prophet is judged so if thereis even one drop of possibility that they might be right, or have accuratepredictions or communications. In orderto deprive a Huckster of this protected status one must prove not only thatthey are wrong, but they are reliably and knowingly wrong, a near-impossiblefeat in court.

Despite this legal protection and tax-free status, Driftis not completely overflowing with hucksters as there is quite a lot ofcompetition for accurate soothsaying, too many futures for any single one to beworth worrying over.

Yet the poor, the homeless, the criminal, drunk, derangedor absurd are all, in their own telling, ‘Mediums’, or diviners or soothsayersor something of the like, as groups or ‘organisations’ of such are always validand cannot be easily harassed, no matter how very obviously drunk, criminal orhomeless they are.

Drift City Opera The major social event, and major social location, of thecity, the opera itself; a massively vertical slender pie-slice with far toomany fragile upper stories and its foundations excavated below floor level soseats beneath the performers can look up at them, with mirrors above the stageso those below can see what is happening at the rear of the stage. Excavationsso deep that the floor of the opera house has fallen away and the basement is apool of black water people sit there in little coracles to watch and hear theperformance.

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Because I just couldn't stay away from J.B.S. Haldane,because many of his shorter books are available for free here; https://jbshaldane.org/ as PDF's andbecause I have never read a defence of Chemical warfare, at all, andspecifically not by someone who was themselves the victim of chemical warfare.

This is also a fascinating dive into Haldanes inter-war world-viewwhich includes some "problematic" content as usual (in addition to thecentral argument).

Atomic Power;

"We know very little about the structure of the atomand almost nothing about how to modify it. And the prospect of constructingsuch an apparatus seems to me to be so remote that, when some successor of mineis lecturing to a party spending a holiday on the moon, it will still be anunsolved (though not, I think, an ultimately insoluble) problem."

In fact we would break the atom within a few decades ofthis statement, go to the moon within 40 years, after the atom was cracked.

Blinding Gas;

"Lachrymatory gas was only once used under idealconditions—by the Germans in the Argonne in 1915. They captured a fairlyextensive French trench system and about 2,400 prisoners, almost all unwounded,but temporarily blind."

The Germans opened chemical warfare with blinding gas in1915. I did not know this. New weapons seem staggeringly effective at firstuse. The enemy hasn't even imagined any defence. After that, as we shallsee, the prizes tend to go to whomever can adapt fastest, not necessarily tothe first user.

Gassing the uneducated;

"Gases of the first group were used in cloudsdischarged from cylinders, some- times on a front of several miles.

They probably caused at least 20,000 casualties amongunprotected or inadequately protected British troops. At least a quarter ofthese died, and that very painfully, in many cases after a struggle for breathlasting several days.

On the other hand, of those who did not die almost allrecovered completely, and the symptoms of the few who became permanent invalidswere mainly nervous.

Apart, however, from the extreme terror and agitationproduced by the gassing of uneducated people, I regard the type of woundproduced by the average shells as, on the whole, more distressing than thepneumonia caused by chlorine or phosgene."

Just don't gas the 'uneducated' bro. This brings us intoHaldane being something of a 'special' kind of person. He was raisedexperimenting on both animals and himself and had a detached, and definitelynon-sacralised view of the human body.

German antisemitism;

"On the other hand, the German respirators were badto begin with; and later on were not so good as the British. This was,apparently, because the most competent physiologist in Germany with anyknowledge of breathing was a Jew. This fact was quite well known in Germanphysiological circles, but apparently his race prevented the militaryauthorities from employing him.

The result was that they were unable to follow up theirgas-attacks at all closely, but had to wait till the cloud had passed off, bywhich time resistance was again possible. That was how the Germans paid foranti-Semitism. It is very probable that it lost them the war, as never again,not even in March, 1918, had they as complete a gap in the Franco-BritishWestern front as during the first gas-attack in April, 1915."

I doubt it 'lost them the war' and I believe Haber was aJew so clearly they weren't that anti-semitic yet but I have not heardof this particular story before.

On Mustard Gas;

"Someone placed a drop of the liquid on the chair ofthe director of the British chemical warfare department. He ate his meals offthe mantelpiece for a month."

......

"Thus in April, 1918, Armentieres, the originalNorthern limit of the German attack in Flanders, was so heavily shelled with“mustard” that the gutters in the streets were reported to be running withit."

On fools holding back progress;

the Bayardists have nobbled a curious assortment ofallies in their so far successful attempt to prevent the humanization ofwarfare.

"Mustard gas kills one man for every forty it putsout of action; shells kill one for every three; but their god who compromisedwith high explosives has not yet found time to adapt himself to chemicalwarfare."

On the possibilities of 'Immune Infantry';

"On the other hand, some people are naturallyimmune. The American Army authorities made a systematic examination of thesusceptibility of large numbers of recruits. They found that there was a veryresistant class, comprising 20% of the white men tried, but no less than 80% ofthe negroes. This is intelligible, as the symptoms of mustard gas, blistering,and sun-burn are very similar, and negroes are pretty well immune tosunburn."

Future War by Haldane;

"One sees, then, the possibility of warfare onsomewhat the following lines:—

Heavy concentrations of artillery would keep an area saythirty miles in length and ten in depth continuously sprayed with mustard gas.

...

Suddenly, behind the usual barrage of high explosiveshells appears a line of tanks supported by negroes in gas-masks.

.....

In this way the side possessing a big superiority ofmustard gas should be in a position to advance two or three miles a day.

...

It seems, then, that mustard gas would enable an army togain ground with far less killed on either side than the methods used in thelate war, and would tend to establish a war of movement leading to a fairlyrapid' decision, as in the campaigns of the past.

It would not much upset the present balance of power,Germany's chemical industry being counterpoised by French negro troops. Indiansmay be expected to be nearly as immune as negroes."

The Morality of Chemical Warfare;

"I claim, then, that the use of mustard gas in waron the largest possible scale would render it less expensive of life andproperty, shorter, and more dependent on brains rather than numbers. We areoften told the exact opposite,

In one or two air-raids on other towns it seems probablethat the Germans were not far from out-stripping the capacities of the fire-brigades and producing very large conflagrations."

His aside into the ability of aerial bombing to produce'fire-storms', where the fire becomes so hot and vast it sucks in air like atornado and becomes highly self-sustaining, is a disturbing prefigurement ofthe next war.

Animal-Loving Soldiers;

"We have got to get over our distaste for scientificthought and scientific method. To take an example from the war, thephysiologists at the experimental ground at Porton, in Hampshire, hadconsiderable difficulty in working with a good many soldiers because the latterobjected so strongly to experiments on animals, and did not conceal theircontempt for people who performed them. And yet these soldiers would have hadno hesitation in shelling the horses of hostile gun-teams, and the vastmajority of them were in the habit of shooting animals for sport. "

The British being a race of animal-lovers who often haveno problem shooting animals is a neverending source of incoherent rage forHaldane.

Objections to Reason;

"One of the grounds given for objection to scienceis that science is responsible for such horrors as those of the late war. “Youscientific men (we are told) never think of the possible application of yourdiscoveries. You do not mind whether they are used to kill or to cure. Yourmethod of thinking, doubtless satisfactory when dealing with molecules andatoms, renders you insensible to the difference between right and wrong. And soyou devise the means of universal destruction,"

"..and I note that the people who make these remarksdo not refuse to travel by railway or motor-car, to use electric light, or toread mechanically printed newspapers. Nor do they install a well in theirback-gardens to enjoy drinking the richer water of a pre-scientific age, withits interesting and variegated fauna."

The Deadliness of scale vs the deadliness of weapons;

"Moreover, the Great War was the first since theSecond Punic War of the 3rd century B. C. between two great civilized nations,each fighting with all its might. This fact accounts for its ferocity. Moderntransport and hygiene made its scale possible; the weapons used merely servedto prolong it."

Fear of the Unknown;

"Now, terror of the unknown is thoroughly right andrational so long as we believe that the prince of this world is a malignantbeing. But it is not justifiable if we believe that the world is the expressionof a power friendly to our aspirations, or if we are atheists and hold that itis neutral and indifferent to human ideals."

I AM NOT A CRANK

"The views which I have expressed do not coexist inthe mind of any party leader or newspaper proprietor, and must therefore bethose of a crank. But until some stronger argument can be waged against themthan that they are unusual and unpleasant, there remains the possibility thatthey are true."

Haldanes vision of Future War, what would have actually happened?

Can we imagine a world where J.B.S. Haldane is givenenough power and support to make his vision of warfare a reality? What wouldhappen?

We begin with the mass development of Mustard Gas, sealedtanks and uniforms, the training of vast numbers of 'Immune Troops',(presumably black Africans with white officers), and we would assume,development of a wide range of other chemical weapons and delivery systems.

So, day one of combat; mass firing of chemical shellsbegins, ideally blocking off large areas of the battlefield. Then the 'ImmuneTroops' advance with sealed armour support, easily taking lines and targets,presumably making use of lesser or alternative chem weapons as and when theywould be useful.

Thats your first battle, if it goes well.

Of course even if it goes well, we know Mustard Gasremains horrible for a long time, so the battle zone will be very difficult foranyone other than Immune Troops to occupy. And if you advance non-immune troopsthrough it on trucks then how will you keep them supplied through the zone, andwhat if they need to retreat? They will have a chemical barrier to their rear.

And of course, following Haldanes plan, you are using largelycolonial troops to defend yourself, who may not agree completely with you onall points and who may be a bit ambivalent about entering chemical hell foryou.

And presuming this is a WW1/WW2 situation, you areprobably doing this in France, and the French may not be chuffed about youmelting and poisoning their lovely countryside.

Thats battle One. How do the enemy respond?

Presumably the enemy is Germany, and they are quite goodat chemistry, even without their Jews. (Though the loss of them will hurtthem).

They are also quite well-organised. Presumably they willbe shocked and terrified to begin with, but will adapt fast. This is assumingthey didn't have intelligence on your chemical weapons programme already andhave their own programme.

They will start work on, and improve, their own chemweapons and protective wear as quickly as possible.

This is the 'brains over brawn' warfare that Haldaneenvisions in which victory goes to whomever has the best tech and adapts mostquickly.

But, speaking from the West, where we certainly \_think\_we have the brains and our assumed enemies largely have the brawn, do even wewant to disconnect war so totally from the flesh it affects as to turn it intoa matter of competing technologies?

If Haldane is right, less people will die. Less of ourown people will die. (\_If\_ he is right.) But is this most-efficient form ofhyper-tech chemical warfare what we want to create?

(Of course your chem-war is also highly dependant onweather; wind direction, rain, perhaps temperature. And these conditions willbe known, so what happens if the enemy attacks with the wind. When the wind isblowing one direction they advance with chem-suit Immune Troops', when the windturns, you advance.)

Chem weapons would probably be most useful againstcivilians who have not already experienced them, and most useful when combinedwith surprise and some other method of attack. This provides a neat combinationwith incendiary bombing and the creation of a 'Firestorm'. Combining gas withbombs cripples the ability of a city to respond to spreading fires, making amass conflagration much easier to attain.

Is the natural tendency of technology in warfare to separatethe flesh of the people from the conduct of the war, up until some certainpoint when the burning and poisoning of all the people becomes the mainmaterial of the war?

Haldane thinks 'stupid' Chivalric wars are made deadlierprimarily by their scale and not by technology. That if WW1 had beenfought by spears and shields it would have been just as deadly, because of thenumber of men involved.

Trying to deal with Haldanes argument

Is not Conservatism at its most rational and reasonablewhen considering the development of new weapons and methods of war?

Are we not all the beneficiaries of the deep and innateconservatism and ritualisation of warfare by the stodgy midwits who make upmuch of the officer class?"

Could we say that short lethal but evaporating violencecould be more honourable than the soft, suffocating violence of ChemicalWarfare. Would you rather be gassed or shot? Would you rather gas others orshoot them?

War is not an experiment and is not predictable

There are few 'controlled elements'

Everyone is in a heightened state and is, essentially,not quite the person they are outside of war

War evolved, grows, changes and mutates in deepyunpredictable ways. Neither the people, the aims, the methods or the morals ofthose engaged in war are the same as they were at the beginning

this being the case, a highly conservative ritualisedview of war, while probably deeply inefficient, and essentially getting peoplekilled in the short to medium term, is actually pretty good for humanity as awhole in the long term and the larger scale

when we are in a war we want to adapt, kill and destroyas quickly and efficiently as possible, for our enemies death is our life

but looking at any particular arrangement of wars fromfar outside the time and place of their happening; we really want wars ingeneral to be stodgy, ritualised, uninventive, unimaginative, foolish and slow.

The slow stupidity of any particular war is agony andhorror for those fighting it, for their enemy is .. well the enemy, but forthose looking upon all war, and upon the future of the species and of lifeitself, the enemy is not the enemy but the enemy is the cunning, inventiveness,hunger and unpredictability of war itself, for it is a kaleidoscope-tiger,always shifting and trying to escape its cage.

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This book is a lucid scrying pool amidst inthe dark and murky inter-war years. It is like stumbling through a grey andmisty land and discovering a cave within which crouches a wizard who gazes intoclear and glittering pool crystal visions of a future time.

We are in that future time right now and ithas turned out to be just as dark and murky as the bog around the wizards cave,but we can look upwards, at the point of view of his scrying pool, wherepresumably he looks down on us from the past, and wave 'Hello' to the Wizard.

We are looking at Haldane looking at us andthat is where much of the interest arises.

THETRENCHES

I read this based on its near-unanimousrecommendation by anyone involved in the life sciences and I was surprised,(though perhaps I should not have been), to find another WW1 connection. Aswell as occupying seemingly every role possible related to genetics and biologyin the inter-war years, Haldane was a WW1 veteran, a grenades expert with theBlack Watch (for non-military and U.S. readers the Black Watch is generallyconsidered a very high-competence if not elite regiment).

I would love to shove Haldane, the atheistcommunist, Studdert-Kennedy, the fallen Anglican and Sebastian Junger, themedieval knight and not-quite Fascist, all in a room together and have themtalk it out. It would be a hell of a debate.

A VERYBEAUTIFUL MIND

'Possible Worlds' was originally a series ofnewspaper articles written for 'the ordinary man' 'in intervals betweenresearch work and teaching and largely on railway trains'.

These are about science, biology, thescientific life, the future of humanity and Haldane. Many are short, all areclear. A very blessed clarity considering the dithering and extemperousblathering and 'chummy' simplifications of much science writing both now andthen. Haldane writes like a man who does not have much time and earnestly wantsto get to the point.

Some are so simple and so clear and highlightor describe a concept so exactly that nearly 100 years later they are stillbeing quoted mentioned and recommended today

'On Scales' regards thinking about reaches orscales of time and distance far beyond our immediate ken. If you have watchedthe Sagan video, or its modern repetitions then you have seen a visual versionof this essay.

'On Being the Right Size' is quoted ormentioned in many discussions of biodynamics I know of;

"You can drop a mouse down athousand-yard mine shaft; and, on arriving at the bottom, it gets a slightshock and walks away, so long as the ground is fairly soft. A rat is killed, aman is broken, a horse splashes."

HALDANEAND TERRIBLE AND QUESTIONABLE IDEAS

Haldane had a lot of sketchy ideas, the mostprovably-awful are probably being a freestyle vivisectionist, a Communist and aChemical Warfare enthusiast.

Haldane grew up experimenting on animals withhis dad, he was quite willing to experiment on himself, to the extent ofdrinking dilute hydrochloric acid, sealing himself inside sealed atmospherechambers and slowly removing the oxygen and attempting experimental divingsuits at the age of 13, (not all at the same time). If you added some sadismand race-hatred he would probably have done well in various German or Japaneselabs during the oncoming war, but Haldane had little hatred in him, and no sadism,he seems to have regarded the animals around him, and his own body, the way afarmer regards a horse or dog; useful, interesting, necessary, valuable, butnot sacred. He reported that, (like Junger), he enjoyed killing peoplequite a bit. He was an explosives expert, wrote a book on the benefits ofchemical warfare and thought it was stupid not to use more mustard gas than wedid.

He belongs in that very slightly discomfortingmargin of humanity who will quite happily take living beings, including themselves,apart in laboratories and their fellow man apart in wars, but won't do itfreestyle, for pleasure, for no reason or to anyone who asks them not to(except in war).

In 'Some Enemies of Science' Haldanerecommends the complete deregulation of vivisection in the interests of scienceand of popular science.

"... I killed two rats in the course ofexperimental work intended to advance medical science. One of them, if we canjudge from human experience (and we have no more direct means of evaluating theconsciousness of animals), died after a period of rather pleasant delirium likethat of alcoholic intoxication. The other had convulsions, and may have been inpain for three or four minutes. I should be very thankful if I knew that Ishould suffer no more than it did before my death. It therefore seemsridiculous that, wheras my wife" [she had poisoned rats] "isencouraged by the Government and the Press, I should be compelled to apply tothe President of the Royal Society and other eminent man of science forsignature to an application to the already overworked Home Secretary, before Ican even kill a mouse in a slightly novel manner."

Haldanes arguments for the deregulation ofVivisection are strong, coherent, logical and possibly a little mad. His unrelentinghatred for the 'Anti-Vivisectionists' whose hypocrisy, delusion and hatred ofscience is stopping him from killing mice in novel ways, is genuine, deeplyfelt and extremely expressed. He is really outraged about the mouse-chopping.

If Haldanes Lassaiz-Fiare Vivisection policyhad been made real, the results would have been interesting, but probably morebad than good. Mouse-chopping should be licensed.

Like most high-I.Q. lefties in the inter-waryears, Haldane was a Marxist and a Communist. He was wrong and held on to theidea too long. You can tell how sane an inter-war western intellectual was bythe date they stopped believing in Communism. Cordwainer Smith, Rebecca Westand Bertrand Russel; quite soon, the French; never.

Haldane went full-Commie in the mid 30's, whenthe saner types were already leaving. He objected to Lysenkos imaginarygenetics in 1949 but didn't leave and finally resigned from the Communist Partyin 1956. In 1957 he resigned from being British over the Suez incident and wentoff to spend his final years in India. His stupid murder-god had failed infront of him, Britian was still masturbating to dreams of Imperialism so hetook the third way. I think he was also attracted to India because it washere that the direct connection with nature, vast range of life and ability todeal with large populations was closest to the experimental world of his earlyyouth. (He grew up as the son of an aristocrat-scientist the late 19thcentury.) By the mid 20th century the U.K. was even more intensely urbanisedand Haldanes dream of widespread 'Citizen Science' based on animal collections,(and vivisection), and interacting with nature was looking less and lesspossible. But in India, more space, more nature, and a great diversity ofpeople.

In 1925 he also wrote 'Callinicus: A Defenceof Chemical Warfare', which I have not read but his defence of Mustard Gas in'Possible Worlds' is based on the relative bodily destructive power of machineguns and Mustard Gas. His logic is very like that of the pro-Vivisectionargument which is "If we are eating animals and hunting animals why can'tI chop them up when I like since I have very good reasons for doing so?""Likewise, if we are machine gunning each other and bombing each other(ask me how), why not gas each other since it will have the same effect &less human bodies will be destroyed in the process?"

Against Haldanes iron logic I can only offerthe midwits response of 'I think that might not turn out the way you think itwill'.

He was also an atheist, which I don't consideramongst his terrible and questionable ideas but it is slightly boring from amodern-day perspective, listening to him go on about it is a bit dull. Itsinteresting to hear from his perspective about how cowardly and useless mostChristian Padres were in the war, even more interesting that he signals out forrare praise; the Quakers, for their Pacifistic ambulance-driving and more war service.

DON'TTRUST THE SCIENCE BRO

Haldane has largely (and inadvertently)convinced me that scientists shouldn't get involved in politics. They have nointuitive grasp on what politics is on any level, assuming it to be somekind of social machine to produce 'optimum results'.

They should be consulted closely on theirspecial subjects, should not set policy and generally should be kept in specialboxes far from the levers of power.

This applies especially to biologists andother life-science types, especially the more intelligent sort. Their deepunderstanding of the processes of nature and the human body has been bought atthe price of any intuitive grasp of the meaning of nature or the human body anda scientist, if allowed near policy, if asked not to investigate but to decide,will proceed on the basis of optimisation towards a concrete goal, as if theywere dealing with a malfunctioning machine.

This is not what society, a nation or humanityis.

Furthermore, there are politicians whom it isnecessary to have make decisions and who must be fired afterwards. During Covidmost possible choices carried serious moral hazard. Decisions had to be made.Those decisions would by necessity have terrible effects on someone. After theemergency had passed those decisions must be rejected by the very populationsthat required them and the decision-makers disposed of. This is unpleasant butit is the nature of things. If we had hyper-expert scientists actually makingthose decisions instead of advising on them, firstly they would proceed on thebasis of blind optimisation as stated above, secondly when we inevitably had toturn against them after the emergency was over, we would lose, not afundamentally-replaceable politician, but a useful expert, and finally becausethe necessary moral hazard of those choices would ultimately reflect not on oneindividual or administration but on the scientist and on science itself. Fauci,before he dies, may well drag virology in the U.S. back into the stone age,purely as part of the counter-reaction to his mistakes.

EUGENICS

We live in a new age of Eugenics, though wedon't quite realise it yet.

Really, any form of Eugenics that becomescommon enough stops being thought of as 'Eugenics'. It’s not a completelysliding scale but it’s pretty slippery. Condoms, I.U.D.s the Pill, sonic scansof developing foetus' and risk-free Abortions are all fruit of the Eugenictree.

Hasidic Jewish populations are already usinggenome sequencing to avoid dangerous genetic combinations in their (arguablyquite inbred) community.

Genome sequencing is becoming cheaper andcheaper, more and more accurate, and the power of algorithms to predict andcontrol for certain desired qualities in the genome is becoming more and moreeffective.

(Reading between the lines of variousGeneticists, its probably possible to run an algo on a range of IVF foetusesand select for high I.Q. Even though I.Q. is insanely polygenic and we have noidea how it works, the algo doesn't need to understand that and can just findrelationships regardless. The reason this hasn't been done publicly isn'tbecause it can't be done but because Geneticists are nuclear-avoidant oftalking about it or doing it.

Theoretical - likely someone has already triedselecting IVF foetuses for I.Q. and these children have been born.)

Haldane only writes directly about this oncein 'Possible Worlds', though as a Genetor-Prime of the British Empire, he knewas much about it as anyone of his generation, and as the ever-lucid andprescient Haldane, he could predict more than most of his generation.

In 'Eugenics and Social Reform', Haldane is..mixed. Ultimately he thinks it’s necessary and probably inevitable but weshouldn't do it now as we don't know what we are doing and it’s probably morecomplex than we think.

On 'feeble-mindedness', the majority of whichI take to be Downs Syndrome, Haldane might be surprised that it is not ahereditary problem, that we can't find it in the parents genes but can find itthrough embryo testing and more commonly, through scans, and that we arelargely utterly ruthless in aborting the vast majority of such children.Perhaps he wouldn't be surprised. Perhaps our relationship with DownsSyndrome is more like how our relationship with Eugenics will proceed, not butgrand unified programmes but by quiet invisible decisions made by parents indoctors offices, made with ever-increasing data and in invisibly-shiftingsocial consensus, and made silently and not spoken of.

What Haldane seems to be saying is thatthe rich, intelligent and successful, inevitably put themselves out of geneticbuisness by not breeding at a replacement level. They are always outweighed bythe poor or common who breed a lot more. This seems to have been true inHaldanes time, looks to have been true for much of European history, and istrue now. (Despite going on about this at length and being married twice, andbeing pretty well-off, Haldane had no children.)

Yet we still have rich, successful andintelligent people. Whether we have as much as we did in Haldanes time it’shard to tell but it doesn't seem that different.

Probably we do not really understand how thisworks at all, especially on a larger scale and across deep reaches of time.

'On Eugenics and Social Reform' is a must-readbecause of the ideas it deals with, its weaving sometimes-ironic arguments andthe pretty explosive mind-bombs, both when considered as cold intellectualarguments which might apply the same from his time to ours, and for thewild and whacky cultural Messines-level mines woven into every part of it asyou listen to an aristocratic, Marxist, inter-war atheist high-Anglo scientistdrop... comments;

"It was only the emancipation of thenegroes which saved the United States from twice its present black population.This event gave them access to alcohol, venereal diseases, andconsumption."

I think (if I understand his totalargument), that I might agree with Haldane? Eugenics is probably inevitable,but we don't understand it and probably shouldn't do it, especially on a largescale or in a top-down way. Hopefully, like Pratchetts Dwaven Bread, it willremain 'probably inevitable', inevitably.

POSSIBLEWORLDS

Probably Haldanes most beautiful idea is inthe essay which gives this collection its name; 'Possible Worlds'.

This is basically that Dr Doolittle willcreate a University of Animal Minds to help unify our theories of physics andphilosophy into a Unified theory of Everything.

Perhaps only Haldane or someone very like himcould have come close to having this idea because only Haldane was enough of abatty polymath to allow it. He was deeply enmeshed in the life sciences,genetics, the world of blood and animals, and was intelligent enough to also bedeeply interested in and largely up to date in physics, mathematics, logic andfor him the natural companion of those; philosophy.

He was thinking always of the Whole Thing, ofReality itself, and all these little strands were just ways of getting thereand looking at it.

One of Haldanes predictions that never came astrue as he would have wished was that we would 'talk to the animals'. In hisfuture Humanity would gain a deep understanding of animal psychology andcommunication and in effect, be able to communicate with and understand theworld-views of other living beings.

This has not worked out that well but Haldanessynthesis is that the fundamental nature of reality is necessarily opaque to usbecause the way we are made fundamentally limits us from apprehending it. Asenmeshed in both biology and philosophy as he was, he could conceive ofsomething like a Fundamental Human Blind Spot. This wouldn't really be a 'spot'but whole areas and methods of thought that would be not only impossible but,more importantly, inconcievable, to us.

Like there are ways of thinking and perceivingthat you literally can't think about and if you try to conceive of them thenyour mind will just loop around them like an ant walking along a mobius strip,without ever even considering them.

The point here being; how do you try tounderstand that which you are inherently made not to understand?

In 'Possible Worlds' Haldane tries to beginimagining the philosophy of reality of a Bee, or a hyper-intelligent Barnacle.Since they occupy reality in a fundamentally different way their structure ofreality, the pattern of their thought, perceptions and therefore, philosophy,would be utterly different.

Yet if we accept that we are all perceivingthe same Reality, the Bee and the Barnacle would both have world-views which ultimatelycoincide or match up with ours. So if we could learn the 'language' of, orenter in communion with, Bee and Barnacle, we could learn something of theirParadigm and that might help us see the gaps in our own, to ask the questionspreviously inconceivable to us.

(A slightly boring and lessened version ofthis which might sound less weird and whacky to a modern reader is like in aStar Trek world where there are a bunch of forehead aliens and we can fly offto this or that alien world and talk to them and learn their weird alienphysics and philosophies which are all very strange and different but which stillactually work, if we could learn them, we might understand more about reality.Except we don't have aliens but we do have Bees and Barnacles.)

THE LASTJUDGEMENT

Haldanes last article is a deep-time ScienceFiction story in the report of a Venusian historian describing the death ofEarth in forty million years time.

This future is one in which humanity hasdiverged into two species which, curiously, match the dystopian futuresimagined by many 20tC authors; the engineered, happy, incurious andunadventurous sybarites similar to the humanity of 'Brave New World', and theVenusian Collective who are a mix of the Borg and the final evolution of thesociety depicted in 'We'.

This is a reality where rocketry is very veryhard, (Haldane had not yet seen the V2s landing on London, let alone the SpaceRace), and where moving between planets takes multi-thousand-year plans,including engineering specific new versions of Humanity to live on them.Therefore, Humanity barely leaves earth and only a bunch of radicals get toVenus. Terran Man monopolises the tidal gravatic power of the Moon to energisetheir vast aesthetic schemes of global pleasure, which speeds up the moonsdescent into the earth. Terran man can't be bothered to stop this andeventually the two crash into each other, though not without a few thousandyears of excitingly apocalyptic but still-liveable earth with the moon giganticin the sky, vast discs and spumes of lunar matter forming a silver river in theair, mountains quaking, seas rolling around the planet, its pretty great stuff.

Haldane absorbed in Deep Time and the meaning,if any, of humanity, exhibits all of his elegance, imagination, mediocrity,didactic authoritarianism and weakness.

"If it is true, as the higher religionsteach, that the individual can only achieve a good life by conforming to a plangreater than his own, it is our duty to realize the possible magnitude of sucha plan, whether it be God's or man's. Only so can we come to see that most goodactions merely serve to stave off the constant inroads of chaos on the humanrace. They are necessary, but not sufficient. They cannot be regarded as activeco-operation in the Plan. The man who creates a new idea, whether expressed inlanguage, art or invention., may at least be co-operating actively. The averageman cannot do this, but he must learn that the highest of his duties is toassist those who are creating and the worst of his sins to hinder them."

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“ .. Belgium’s leading living poet whose life before 1914had been a flaming dedication to socialist and humanitarian ideals that werethen believed to erase national lines. He prefaced his account with thisdedication: “He who writes this book in which hate is not hidden was formerly apacifist … For him no disillusionment was ever greater or more sudden. Itstruck him with such violence that he thought himself no longer the same man.And yet, as it seems to him that in this state of hatred his conscience becomesdiminished, he dedicates these pages, with emotion, to the man he used to be.”– Tuchman quoting Emile Verhaeren in ‘The Guns of August’.

…..

It’s pretty quiet in the shop on a night shift. This leadme to fulfil a long-time promise to myself to finally read Barbara Tuchmans‘The Guns of August’, her celebrated history of the opening weeks of World WarOne.

At the time I also had two books of WW1 poetry on theshelf, both from less currently-popular poets, which I had picked up because Iwanted to find out what the actual man-on-the-street/jingo poetry of the warwas like.

At about the same time a friend online mentioned theManga ‘Onwards Towards Our Noble Deaths’, which I grabbed a copy of.

· Onward Towards Our Noble Deaths by ShigeruMizuki.

· The Guns of August by Barbara Tuchman.

· The Poetry of Jesse Pope.

· Rough Rhymes of a Padre by ‘Woodbine Willie’.

So, with one very long book and three quite short ones,having finished ‘Guns of August’ why not add the rest and make an event out ofit? (Because its stressful and depressing as hell but, being in idiot, I hadnot fully processed that.)

The Guns of August (Tuchman is actually a character in her own book too. She is the little girl interviewed by the American Ambassador about the British hunt for a German Battleship in the Med.)Reading this book was like having a low-level panicattack, at times I had to get up and walk about to de-stress. At times itdidn’t really matter who’s side I was on (the book is on the side of the Allies).I wouldn’t have thought a beat by beat breakdown of the days and hours beforethe second battle of Tannenberg, between Imperial Germans and Tsarists, wouldhave me biting my nails and shouting at the screen (in my mind) but it did.

Why? The intensity, vividness, complexity and madness of thefog of war can, even when dealing with armies and factions I don't care muchabout, cause a kind of disaster-driven engagement.

The book is a kind of anti-procedural. Instead of a castof characters who are very good at things facing a big problem, working outwhat to do and coming together at the last minute against the odds, we have amassive spread of characters, all struggling against each other in big teams,arguing, perceiving and acting in different ways and coming togethercatastrophically, against the odds.

It is the tension of confusion, the agony of crippled ormisguided plans. Everyone has their own little section of reality and isstruggling to do what they think they should and absolutely everyone isdeluded, mistaken, or wrong.

We, as the minds-eye of Tuchman, fly and flow across thebattlefields, seeing more than any single person at that time ever could,simultaneously aware, as no-one living through those events ever could be, ofthe mutual, asynchronous and chaotic reality stuttering forth across thewestern front, an orchestra of staccato mistuned instruments, playing in blindopposition. Like two teams of Jazz musicians separated by a curtain, each grouptold to improvise and at the same time, to precisely counter the improvisationof the other side. Except no-one on either team actually likes each other.

It is one thing to be locked in a story with your heroespoint of view and to see thing going wrong. It is quite another to be slightlyabove that point of view, to see more of the situation than your protagonist,and to see why things are going wrong, in ways they can't. This is wherethe agony comes in, and yet another thing to zip across the scene, into thepoint of view of the antagonist, who is in fact the hero of their own story,and who’s enemy is the original hero, and to also see their schemesgoing wrong, and to see why they are going wrong.

double-agony

At the same time we are living in the future of theseevents and know that no-ones plans will go as expected and no-one (except maybethe Americans) will come out of this well - for all this striving we arewatching a continent take itself apart.

so really a poly-agony

a poly-agonist history

Irony, Readability and Satire Oh, the Kaiser and his whacky schemes, his military-stylesleeping gown. The dithering-to-the-point-of-wooly-mania British Cabinet, thetop-down but extremely secret and authoritarian French plans,

or French Plan, which can only be executed byhaving one guy in charge, and that guy not really telling the government what’sgoing on - was nearly the Dictator of France during the opening parts of thewar, the SECRET DEALS, the French and their obsession with red pantaloons, Russiahaving the exact opposite of a Philosopher King - a guy genuinely dense but notquite dumb or weak willed enough to do a Coup against or just shuffleoff to a Palace somewhere, all of this is part of what makes the book so readableand such a good and complex synthesis of history.

But there is a danger to irony, in its distance, its easysynthesis and perhaps most in its argument-without-arguing. Tuchmans is anarrative history and, looking for the most interesting criticisms of the bookI found that it was easy to avoid many of the more broad and obvious statementsby claiming “well, Tuchman doesn’t really say that”.

But what does she say?

She makes few absolute and explicit value judgements, butthe whole thing is an intense and vivid value judgement, only communicatedthrough choice of detail, focus, method and rhythm of communication. Astoryteller is not making a specific argument, one can hardly counterpoint-by-point, but they are convincing you of a something more ably thansomeone making a more explicit, leaden, and less persuasive statement.

Hair-Thin Cracks In History the Russians being so badly organised that they startsending their orders for the next day out in Clear radio signal instead of code- this having a massive effect on the next days pivotal battle.

Von Moltkes apprehension that the German line is tooextended and loose, communicated just a day too late.

The sheer and staggering number of times that personalityconflicts between generals leads to serious problems in the war effort - theyare as neurotic and sensitive as cats.

It feels like there were not just one but a whole rangeof time-travellers zipping about making sure a series of cataclysmicco-incidences did and did not take place.

Is this just the natural pixel-resolution of all history,made much more visible through this well-recorded super-crisis? Or were thingsgenuinely more utterly bollocked than ever before? It truly is a kind ofscience fictional 19th century war; radio’s, codes, rail plans, the Germansbring an actual super-gun. World War One seems to take place at a fringe ofcomplexity where nations and governments have just enough technological andorganisational power to organise truly insanely massive groups, plans and actionsbut just not enough experience, or rapid or subtle enough technology, decisionplans, structures, feedback systems or ideas to deal with the results of thatcomplexity.

Its curious how everyone seems to ‘play to type’. TheGermans are angry and somewhat autistic, the French have a cartesian top-downview of everything, the British are dithery and pull something out of theirarseholes at the last minute, the Russians are brutal, slow and fall apart. Isthis just a feature of Tuchmans re-telling? I recently finished Julian Jacksonsbiography of De Gaule and he had a somewhat tragic view of European history inwhich no-one ever really changes and nations are fated to play out theconflicts of their essential character again and again over time.

Criticisms Of Tuchman What are the most coherent, specific and least-whineycriticisms of Tuchman?

The clearest is that for a book about the start of WorldWar One, there is relatively little about whatever was going on between Serbia,Austria, Germany and Russia around and after the assassination. Neither isthere a huge amount about the eastern front.

She goes on a lot about how awful the Germans were inBalgium, but they were.

Sir John French comes out as a borderline treasonousjumbled coward. His general reputation in history doesn’t seem anywhere nearlyas bad as in this book, has anyone written about that?

Onward Towards Our Noble Deaths A manga by a sweet old man; Shigeru Mizuki

This cute little guy! About the experiences of his youth!In east Asia. In the 1940s..

As part of the Imperial Japanese army....

Familiar Things I have read a few soldier-autobiographies including,oddly enough, 'Quartered Safe Out Here' by George McDonald Frasier, which isabout some Cumbrian soldiers in the British army, fighting the JapaneseImperial Army, not in the same place, but in a similar environment.

A few things flow between them; hunger, boredom,incoherent orders, officers and sergeants ranging from stupid to decent, thejungle being beautiful yet horrible, being permanently sweaty, dirty, hungryand damp, accidents and disease taking people out more regularly than the enemy,"there are people hiding in the Jungle", people popping out of holesor shooting at you from trees and whatever, if you see a dot in the sky betterscatter till you know whose it is.

It’s just guys hanging out you know!

just some guys having a time.

It’s curious to see the 'villains' from Quartered SafeOut Here' from the other side. The main difference between the forces, from theperspective of a common soldier, seems to be that, in the Imperial JapaneseArmy, literally everything is worse in every conceivable way.

The Japanese soldiers are insanely hungry, on half a cupof rice a day, about 500 calories.

Instead of being shouted at and condescended to byofficers and sergeants the new boys are literally slapped repeatedly in theface and punched to the ground. This is when they do something wrong, or justfor existing. The end of a normal day is almost lining up to be repeatedlybrutally slapped in the face for no reason

Their officers, or at least some of them, or many of themmuch of the time, are in a death cult.

Their immediate commanding officer seems to fantasisepretty much continually about executing a Banzai charge and going to an'honourable death' to the extent that he has to be talked out of it whenever acrisis happens, and eventually they can't talk him out of it.

Re-Banzai The central 'plot element' of the book is that the Lieutenantfinally manages to order the suicidal midnight jungle Banzai charge of hisdreams.

HQ finds out about this and valorises their noble sacrifice,making it a point of propaganda; the Japanese soldier never surrenders! Whenthey are finally doomed they do a mass Banzai! For the Emperor!

But because it was dark and the jungle a bunch of soldiersmanage not to get themselves killed and get lost. Come morning they meet up anddecide to go get some food before trying to Banzai themselves again.

When this gets back to HQ, that there are still guysalive from the suicide charge, it becomes a major problem and an officer issent down the river to re-Banzai them, at sword or gunpoint if necessary (he shouldn't join them of course).

The author was part of this outpost and either got ill orwas knocked out by bombs during the whole thing, went missing and only got backafter the remnants had been 're-Banzai'd'. This left him.. sceptical of war.

Hell in the Pacific Looking into the war in the Pacific and the ImperialJapanese Army was definitely on a vibe.

The Imperial Army ate quite a lot of people, specificallythey ate quite a lot of Indians, often alive, carving out the flesh of theirthighs while they were still living and throwing them in a ditch to die whilethey ate them like steak. There are accusations that some officers ate theirown men.

I don't really know where to go from here..

The Poetry of Jesse Pope
I picked this up I think after hearing it referenced inan episode of 'In Our Time'.

I wanted to hear about the war poets who were not of thealienated faction, I wanted the Patriots and jingoists. WW1 has been re-writtenin our imagination, well perhaps not entirely re-written, but re-emphasised, reorganisedand reset around the 'sad victim soldier' stereotype and the 'vague cataclysm'tale.

These views have a lot of truth to them, they are notreally 'lies', there were a lot of sad victim soldiers and it was a vaguestumbling cataclysm, but the left likes to remember things a certain way

and the popular imagination of WW1 has essentially beentransmitted by the left; Siegfried Sassoon, Pat Barker, All Quiet on the WesternFront. I mean think of a WW1 tale and you know what you are going to get (inthe anglo/westosphere at least) Amilie, Blackadder, you know the scenes, thecharacters, the tone, the mud and the vague emotional tenor that hangs over itall.

Peter Jacksons documentary about WW1 ‘They Shall Not GrowOld’, had an interesting piece of editing which exemplified this. It’s based oninterviews with soldiers. The opening interviews are all have a relativelypositive view of the war, while the voices at the end all have a negative view.The way they are distributed creates the impression of the grieving 'sadsoldier' who went in with high spirits and was crushed and alienated by theexperience of the war. But, both of those strands, those interviews andrecordings, are taken from the same people, all recorded long after the war. Itis their dividing up and the way they are edited which creates the nice neatmoral story of the 'sad soldier', not the actual recordings themselves.

The views of a lot of WW1 soldiers, certainly of a lot ofAnglosphere soldiers (the ones I am familiar with) might well strike a modernear as not what they were expecting at all. many of those men were proud oftheir service and convinced they fought in a good cause, to save Europe and theworld from Prussian militarism.

Those recordings wouldn't be free of trauma and deadfriends but the moral view those men had of their own actions, the weight and colourthey placed on various parts, would be very different to that of latergenerations.

That is why I wanted to read the poetry of Jessie Pope,because it was the popular poetry of the Daily Mail, the actually-popularpoetry of the opening years of the war. The actual voice of the time ratherthan the remembered voice.

I also wanted to know if she was as utterly awful as thehistorians claim she was.

She was.. not quite as bad.. entirely

but still pretty bad

"A Humble Appeal She was a pretty, nicely mannered mare,

The children's pet, the master's pride and care,

Until a man in khaki came one day,

Looked at her teeth, and hurried her away.

With other horses packed into a train

She hungered for her masters voice in vain;

And later, led 'twixt planks that scare and slip,

They slung her, terrified, on board a ship.

Next came, where thumps and throbbing filled the air,

Her first experience of mal de mare;

And when that oscillating trip was done

They hitched her up in traces to a gun.

She worked and pulled and sweated with the best;

A stranger now her glossy coat caressed

Till flashing thunderstorms came bursting round

And splitting leaden hail bestrewed the ground.

With quivering limbs, and silky ears laid back,

She feels a shock succeed a sharper crack,

And, whinnying her pitiful surprise,

Staggers and falls, and tries in vain to rise.

Alone, forsaken, on a foreign field

What moral does this little record yield?

Who tends the wounded horses in the war?

Well that is what the Blue Cross league is for."

Many of the poems are quite interesting. Not allthe rhymes are leaden or as faintly ridiculous as the one above. There is a lotof early stuff from 1914 to 1916 in praise of ANZACS, the soldiers, the war.She is not as bigoted or wrathful as a really hardcore blood and soil type butis more glib, positive, patriotic, a booster-upper cheering from the sides ofthe football match (a football match is one of the metaphors used in thepoems), there are fragments of sort-of feminist stuff about war-girls doing jobs.

I went in for Jesse Pope and what I got was pretty muchwhat I half expected, a very British Church-Hall type quite common before the1960’s. That she doesn’t seem to write much after 1916 means we don’t see anydevelopment. She is more shallow than evil and so tea-stained mildly bad a poetthat I would feel bad for making fun of her.

(The BBC of all people argues here that the Pope vs Owen match is a stitch-up).

Rough Rhymes of a Padre
Willie is G. A. Studdert-Kennedy, an Anglican Priest whoserved as a chaplain on the western front and gained the name ‘Woodbine Willie’for offering wounded and dying soldiers Woodbine cigarettes.

This book ‘Rough Rhymes’ was mainly written in and aroundthe front.

Its great virtue for this review is that it is a directand explicit search for meaning. Mizuki, with whom Willie would perhaps have hadsome things in common is, in ‘On Towards Our Noble Deaths’ seemingly detached,almost ironic, but possessed of a deeply buried rage. Tuchman is actuallydetached and ironic (apart from about Sir John French). Pope is patriotic,glib, 'keen', jolly.

‘Rugh Rhymes has a combination of emotions andexperience that was missing from every other book in this list. Even 'OnwardToward Our Noble Deaths' has little of hatred for the enemy, they barely playmuch part directly and are rarely depicted.

"Whats the Good?" [first two verses] "Well, I've done my bit o' scrappin',

And I've done quite a lot;

Nicked 'em neatly with my bayonet,

So I needn't waste a shot.

'Twas my duty, and I done it,

But I 'opes the doctor's quick,

For I wish I 'adn't done it,

Gawd! it turns me shamed and sick.

There's a young 'un like our Richard,

And I bashed 'is 'ead in two,

And there's that ole grey 'aired geezer

Which I stuck 'is belly though.

Gawd, you women, wives and mothers,

It's sich waste of all your pain,

If you knowed what I'd been doin'

Could yer kiss me still, my Jane?”

Studdert-Kennedys post-war journey is quite a ride. He went into the war delivering stirringsermons about the virtues of the bayonet and came out a Christian Socialist. Hewrote a book called "Lies!",was 100 per cent behind Bismark being essentially the antichrist was deniedburial in a Cathedral for being too much of a leftie.

From his Wikipedia;

“"After the war, Studdert Kennedy was given chargeof St Edmund, King and Martyr in Lombard Street, London. Having been convertedto Christian socialism and pacifism during the war, he wrote Lies (1919),Democracy and the Dog-Collar (1921) (featuring such chapters as "TheChurch Is Not a Movement but a Mob", "Capitalism is Nothing ButGreed, Grab, and Profit-Mongering" and "So-Called Religious EducationWorse than Useless"), Food for the Fed Up (1921), The Wicket Gate (1923),and The Word and the Work (1925). He moved to work for the Industrial ChristianFellowship, for whom he went on speaking tours of Britain."

He was also capable of some rather spicy gothic verse;

“Truth [lines 34 to 45]The shadows have departed,

And black night

Lies brooding over all the earth,

And hideous things find birth.

The world brings forth abortions,

And then weeps with bloody tears,

Because her womb is shamed,

Her children maimed,

And all her home become a wilderness of sin.

The sun is darkened,

And the moon turned into blood

And down upon us sweeps a flood

Of Lust and Cruelty.”

These are not really an accurate representation of thefull tone and weight of the poems but are some of the darker fragments which Ipersonally like and which I think will grab your attention and will also make vividthe contrast between Willie and Pope. The full range of the verse is morereligious, with much more seeking and finding of divine grace, and I thought ifI put that stuff in right away my audience would find it a bit twee.

“Thy Will Be Done [last verse]And Bill, 'e were doin' 'is duty boys,

What e came on the earth to do,

And the answer what came to the prayers I prayed

Was 'is power to see it through.

To see it through to the very end,

And to die as my old pal died,

Wi' a thought for 'is pal and prayer for 'is gal,

And 'is brave 'eart satisfied."

Fundamentally ‘Rough Rhymes’ is a religious text aboutthe search for meaning in a crushing and annihilating place, with the centralpraxis or dichotomy being between deeply held faith and the martial virtues,and hatreds, of a soldier and a patriot. The two don’t mix but that hasn’tstopped Europeans, and Abrahamics generally, for a couple thousand years. Andyou get a lot of interesting thinking and reflection out of it.

For me G. A. Studdert-Kennedy is the most human of thesewriters, or the one who seems to exhibit the greatest humanity or the greatestand deepest range of feeling and questions. Tuchman comes close but the sheenof her irony, which aids her in gliding over great spans of history andsynthesising its details into a coherent and engaging story, also keeps her awindowglass' depth from the image.

Willie is also the person who seems most like a fullor real soldier, someone ready to stab crush and shoot his fellow man, sometimesfeeling bad about it after. Sentimental, patriotic, though not as thoughtlessor stupid as Pope who is just those things resigned, sometimes despairing,resolute, breaking down, wrathful at the war and at the enemy. Mizuki has this too but his war was so muchdarker and there are deep elisions in his telling. I don’t know if anyone couldgrapple with the whole thing head-on.

“Her Gift [lines 12 to 47] "We’ve seen men die,

Not once, nor twice, but many times

In agony

A ghastly to behold as that.

We’ve seen men fall,

And rise, and staggering onward fall again,

Bedrenched in their own blood,

Fast flowing like a flood,

Of crimson sacrifice upon the snow.

We’ve seen and would forget.

Why then should there be set

Before our eyes these monuments of crime?

It’s time, high time,

That they were buried in the past;

There let them lie,

In that great sea of merciful oblivion,

Whereour vile deeds,

Andoutworn creeds,

Areleft to rot and die.

Wewould forget,

Andyet,

Do you remember Rob McNeil

Andhow he died,

Andcried,

And pleaded with his men

Totake that gun,

Andkill the Hun

Thatworked it dead?

Hebled

Horribly. Do you remember?

I can’t forget,

I would not if I could,

It were not right I should,

Hedied for me.

He was a God that boy,

The only God I could adore.”

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Sorry for the lack of posts. Things have been CHALLENGING recently. Anyway, call me if you need advice on being middle aged and the least successful member of your peer group by far**.

I just finished reading a few books on WAR; 'The Guns of August', 'Onwards Towards Our Noble Deaths' by Shigeru Mizuki, 'The Poetry of Jessie Pope' and 'Rough Rhymes of a Padre' by 'Woodbine Willie'. I will try to put together some kind of review in the next few days. I usually put these on the Substack first but everything over there ends up over here eventually.

Speak, False Machine is taking its time but hopefully some news on that soonish.

In the brief meantime, my friend Dan is running a micro-kickstarter for a picture book based on a legend in which Merlin and King Arthur battle a giant Kitten.

I have backed and they only need about 20 people to actually make the thing.

The question is will this one be on the shelf or eventually sent to my niece. There is only one way to find out!*

**This is a joke. Please do not actually call.

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Part one here; http://falsemachine.blogspot.com/2023/05/ride-giants-development-blog-1.html The Speed of the Giants This matters not only in general gameplay but because the initial concept of the game was ‘a game in real time’; an adventure lasting two to three hours, with a gaming session lasting the same two to three hours.

There would be some, but little, compression of time. The time-limit was meant to add impetus to the PCs choices and get them making decisions faster. It was also meant to add a bit of interest and challenge to the choices made.

Estimating the Gait I began by asking people on Discord for advice on estimating the gait of the giants. That is, when one takes a step, how long is the step.

If they stood up straight, the Giants are nearly 3,000 feet high. Hunched over as they are their heads are about 2,000 feet high. So I started with the step-length of an imaginary 3,000 foot high man. Using various mysterious means, including reverse-engineering an equation used by the police to derive height from step-length, the Discord homies came back with a step length of just under 1,300 feet per-step.

That’s just under 400 metres per step or a little under a Kilometre per double-step.

The Chronology of a Step Estimating the timing of each step is more difficult. Giants of this size are physically impossible anyway. Large long-legged animals have to take care of their steps as they can easily break their own legs with their weight.

I essentially just ended up eyeballing it. Each step takes roughly a minute and a half. 90 seconds.

10 to 15 seconds at the start for the weight to rise and the foot to accelerate, then 30 seconds in the air, then another 10 to 15 seconds landing time for the weight to fall, the foot to settle, and weight to be transferred through the hip to raise the other foot.

I estimate the Giants are is moving roughly 14.4 feet per second. Which makes I think its total movement being just under 10 miles per hour.

This sounds.. really not totally insane. Like a reasonable synthesis of the impossible and pseudo-realism.

A good one-to-three rounds of slow-foot time for you to leap up and grab on. A big "whoosh" as you travel 400 meters in 30 seconds. Then the settle time at the end.

So a human could run away from it, someone on horseback could run faster than it. It could be 'boarded', but with real difficulty as the foot is only slow and close to the ground for not that long. To match their speed a human would need to be jogging or running. To overtake you would need to run pretty fast or have a horse.

And a continuous 10 mph walking speed sustained essentially forever, would be very hard to keep up with for a long period of time I think?

Boarding the Giant If you were trying to ‘board’ a giants foot, you could probably catch up with it, via sprinting, or if you had a horse. The really dangerous part would be when the foot comes down. If the giant trod down onto something like the soil of a field, it might send up fountains of soil like an impact crater all around the foot. If the soil was wet or the water table was high, it might send up actual fountains or more likely, dangerous torrents of wet mud.

In the area around the foot-fall it would be like an earthquake hit. The earth might crack open, or roll like waves. Horses might break their legs and men would fall to the ground.

If you survive all that, you have about 15 seconds at the weight of the foot settles and transfers where it will be relatively still.

All you need to do is get to the huge curved wall of the foot, I estimate it to be about a 100 foot climb, but you don’t need to make it immediately, just hang one, hang on hard.

Because that foot is going to rise up into the air. Its lateral speed at its going to be about 15 miles an hour during the swing of the foot but its speed measured across the whole of its curve till it hits soil on the next step might be more like 20 miles per hour.

Not insanely fast. But jarring as hell. Plus the angle of its motion is constantly curving and shifting.

What Strait do they Cross? Depending on if or how much time we leave for organisation the actual giant-riding part of the game might range from one and a half hours to three hours. Lets assume two hours of actual giant-riding.

Assuming ‘real time’ that means the Giants would travel about 20 miles.

The idea of the game is that you only have the length of the game itself to solve the problem of the giants – by the end of the game they will have reached the Nightmare Continent and if you get off the giant after that you are DOOMED

Looking for real-life places of roughly the right dimensions the first that comes to mind is the Dover strait.

Between Dover and Calais is almost exactly 20 miles

But nowhere near deep enough – its only 50 meters deep!

That’s only 164 feet! About up to the giants Knees!

Well I suppose it’s acceptable – in their hunched over posture their knuckles will be grazing the ocean surface as they walk. It also gives the PCs a fair amount of time to get up over the knee. Though if they are still dicking about with that half-way through the mission is probably failed anyway.

Climbing the Giants There are several problems; the linear nature of the directional choices on a larger scale, the curved, flowing and non-intuitive surface of the giant and the shifting position and orientation of the limbs.

The Linear Nature of the Choices The main problem here is that the arrangement of the giants limbs is very much not like a dungeon. There are only a few routes and risks. Large parts are semi-visible from various points.

Most of a limb-climb is just getting up that limb, and to make the adventure interesting at all I would need to make actually falling off relatively rare. Instead I would have to produce something like the climbing in VotE; everyone can do it a bit and failure leads to ever more nightmarish fail-states without ever quite booting you off.

Once a climb is begun, the route-choice is largely made and any tension or interest comes more from how challenges are met than what they will be.

The Curved and Flowing Surface Lets Envisage the Giants Skin -What is this like? A curved, slightly-flexing, rocky surface. Even ‘smooth’ parts are like a rocky, and in fact most of the giants skin is deeply corrugated.

If you look down at the skin around your knuckles. If you make a claw with your hand so the skin bunches up there, all those little triangles and oblongs of skin where the lines of compression meet and cross. Image that as a karstic landscape, but much more wrinkly – like a very old persons skin, and much deeper in its corrugations.

Smooth parts – like a cobblestone road, but with the cobbles jagged and not smoothed.

Intermediate parts – like clambering over or up large boulders.

Very Crinkly parts – like clambering over and through sharp man-sized or larger boulders

Which tilt and grind together or apart – big enough that the gaps make an ‘interior of sorts.

So the smooth parts are actually very easy to fall off & quite dangerous while the rough parts where the limbs meet – the crinkly places of our own bodies, are relatively safe – even though they are moving and flexing, there are many holds and handholds and spaces where you can place yourself to avoid falling off (these might be dynamic holds though).

But, maybe if I think about the actual shape and details of each part of the leg, arm and side, and think deeply about how each might move I could come up with some general ideas or abstract some rules which would help to form encounter spaces, or interesting encounter ideas?

The Shifting Gravity The limb orientations are shifting regularly from near-vertical to sloped, from climb to overhang, or from climb to scramble.

Will you wait for the position of the limb to change - it could shift from overhang to climb, or from climb to scramble and the potential danger of an opposing encounter might grow larger or smaller if you are willing, or able, or forced to, wait.

So that idea of having to make up, lose or gain time feels appropriate.

OR - you hear movement, or sense something above you, and if you wait you might be able to get a better look - but that will cost you time.

TIMING – if this is ‘real-life’ timing then there could be a metronome or something. Or you could time the giants steps minute by minute.

I don’t know if someone’s done this before but if each 90 seconds is a real-life round and an in-game round, a single step of the giant. Could it be made to work? You would have to roll fast!

Climbing a map of the muscle groups Another possibility is - making some kind of map of the MUSCLE GROUPS of the limbs and making THAT a sub-map of each ascent.

like you can LEAP from one muscle group to another to avoid an encounter.

POSSIBLE DANGEROUS CLIMBING ENCOUNTERS These could be quite minor - the main danger is that they could drop you. They should also be 'rock beasts', cliff beasts really. (I didn’t put pigeons in as they suck.)

Seagull-Griffons; micro-Griffons based on seagull heads and wings but with the bodies of racing dogs. That sounds sufficiently awful.

Goats

Condor-Riding Snow Monkeys – they bathe in the hot springs atop the giants backs and form a symbiotic relationship with the semi-intelligent condors, travelling on their backs and performing tasks involving fine motor control – they can crack open bones with flints and actually they have learned to work in close co-operation with the condors, the monkeys can pull open flaps of skin, bare muscle, expose the joints of dead animals, brace cutting surfaces and put flesh under tensile strain so it cuts more easily.

SUPER-TICKS – these feed upon the giants magmic blood. [The giants are tectonic inside so their ‘spots’ or pimples might be popping lava and their sweat might be steam or thick bubbling oils. A walking mountain has to be generating a pretty serious amount of heat. The giants back – hot, even steaming, would carry a moving column or a trailing flag of hot air above and behind it, a layer or a stream of cloud following each of them like a pennant in the atmosphere as that pillar of air rises, cools and probably condenses. The heat of the giants would make them of much more fecund than many other forms of similar mountain.] The blood does cool quite a bit in them but it’s still pretty hot and dangerous. Plus this is still a tick as big as a man or maybe horse.

Animated magical kites that won't die - These were the creation of some ancient empire of magicians far away who wanted to study the giants – the kites were so well made they have a basic self-repair function and can weave the substance of cloud into solidity to act as canvas or waxed paper to sustain them – the kites are more like solid memes, or paper golems, semi-intelligent but not really alive, men can ride them but their actions may be very unpredictable – possibly they will obey commands in the language of the long-dead wizards. They might do slightly bonkers A.I. stuff based on garbled comprehension of their original instructions.

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Choice Theory So you come to a split in a dungeon, or you come to a room set with three portals, each seems to lead in a different direction but they seem identical.

Depending on party and DM, game style and preference, you either just pick one, or have a little conference with the team, maybe looking at the map, or start asking weird questions like “what do the corridors smell like?”

Whether this is a good or bad thing depends very much on the style of game and whether the needs and intuitions of the players and DM match.

I intuit that the ‘actual’ Old School old school process had a lot more time for no-context choices, partly due to the prevalence of player-mapping, (easier to do in-person in a 70’s game session and which would be part of their problem-solving procedure), partly due to what I would expect to be longer more digressive gaming sessions and partly due to a somewhat harder more ‘masculine’ quality where its expected that some decisions will be tricky, oblique or apparently pointless, either due to pseudo-naturalism or a Gygaxian riddlemaster element.

I intuit that a more ‘neo’ OSR scene would have shorter sessions, more likely to be online so player mapping harder, more likely to want events and drama condensed and with less tolerance for ‘dead’ time, unguided choice and apparently contextless decisions.

Yet, in either situation, a choice must be made, and if the choice is to be informed at all then how shall it be so? There are greater context elements which can be brought into the question; general dungeon intel, the use of mapping, informers, magic and guides.

But what can be learned from the empty corridor itself?

And as a corollary to that decision, what information can be imbued into that apparently-empty corridor by the designer or DM?

I will break our discussion into elements. In lived experience all of these will interrelate but I will try to cover those interrelations within each subject;

· AIR

· SMELL

· TEMPERATURE

· LIFE

· SOUND

· STONE

Once I started to think about it I decided that a key dominating and synthesising element is AIRFLOW

so I will begin with that and discuss why.

Ernst Fuchs

Air Based on my research for VotE, Caves and cave systems can differ hugely in temperature and airflow.

This depends on whether the system massively intra-connected or isolated, if there is running water in the cave and the general temperature gradient around the cave.

An isolated cave system with no big interconnections and no water flow within will often be a bit warm. An underground space with static air will often maintain a steady, not-quite-cold temperature. Mines, being closed systems and full of people and movement, are often hot.

Conversely, a huge cave system with many exits will often have very strong airflows. Caves 'breathe', and any slight differences in temperature and pressure between its varied entries can create winds which can be focused and channelled by narrow passages in the system itself.

Most caves are shaped by water and many have streams moving through them, this creates airflow

and often cools the cave.

Dungeons vs Caves Dungeons are more likely to be smaller and contained and much more likely to be made of different materials with closed doors and other connectors and divisions within, but airflow can still tell the prospective dungeoneer a lot.

Dungeons, specifically; the classic tomb buried under temperate soil, might not actually be cold. A tomb complex separate from any other dungeon, well if it’s a rainy area it might be damp, but not necessarily, it might be slightly warm, or at least no colder than the outside.

[Question; have you actually been in an actual tomb complex? What was the temperature and airflow like?]

An experienced dungeoneer, or the average Dwarf, should be able to make some decent guesses about the nature of a dungeon just by carefully feeling the airflow. If a system is 'breathing' with air flowing in or out after dawn or dusk; that suggests a system of considerable size. If the air flowing in or out is warmer or colder than the outside air that might indicate the presence of moving water within, or of something else that is cooling or warming the air within, (like, for instance, the presence of life, like Goblins or an Owlbear).

Airflow is such a dominant factor because it effects the transmission of SMELL, SOUND and TEMPERATURE, all of which are strongly bound within the greater medium of Air. Conversely the absence of airflow is itself a strong negative signal which might not explicitly tell you much but does suggest that either this dungeon, or system, whatever it is, is either small and closed, or has doors and closing elements.

Smell! Smell is life!

The key aspect of scent is that in almost every case it is indicative of the processes of life. A dungeon with intelligent things living in it for any period of time is going to STINK.

The Food Sequence Acquisition, Storage, Preparation, Consumption and Disposal.

Acquisition; alpha predators like monsters who drag prey back to the dungeon as a lair will leave the stink of blood wherever they are and repeated blood trails will lead to any feeding spot, as well as blood smears and fur snatched from carried prey.

Anything bringing living or recently dead food back to the Dungeon from outside stands a good chance of leaving marks of some kind, especially since they will be tracing the same route each time to preparation or storage spaces.

A lot of food smells or has a distinctive scent, and in a still-air environment that scent might remain in place for a long time.

Storage; if left unattended, the rotting bodies of victims or prey will absolutely stink to high heaven. Even for unaltered human basic smell powers it should be pretty simple to find your way through a still-air environment to a rotting body.

Poorly-stored non-meat foods can still rot, and will summon their own micro-environment of insects and small mammals, all of which can be sensed or traced. If there are mouse droppings, that’s a sign of something.

Well-stored or dry foods are more complex, I imagine these as leaving little scent and few biomarkers. It might be that the presence of a particular dry and contained space might leave tangential markers but I am not sure.

Preparation; if something is intelligent and eats cooked food, and/or just needs warmth or light, then there will be fire. If there is fire there must be smoke. If there is smoke it has to go somewhere. So either there is a chimney leading up out of this dungeon or the smoke is moving through the corridors which will leave traces stains, and scent.

Consumption; large predatory animals will definitely leave bits and pieces here and there. Smaller more civilised beings might still leave scent, the wall-sweat of their respiration, residual warmth, stains, fragments and the small biomarkers that go along with them.

Disposal; Poo. All of this stuff has to go somewhere and unless there are convenient rivers or pits then it is going to leave strong scent markers and all the small insects which emerge from feasting on the poo. And spiders, which feast on the flies, the webs of which will remain in place for a long time in a low airflow environment.

tldr; any closed system which has living respiring and eating residents is going to stink. If there is airflow, then its strength and direction will effect where those smells go and how strong they are. Tracing those smells might be very useful for a dungeoneer. This is one thing that encourages me in the idea of bringing a bloodhound of some kind to the dungeon

Temperature Warmth is co-dependent on airflow and the presence of life within a dungeon so many of the basic concepts have already been considered in those two sections.

[Question; how much of a temperature differential can an average, or sensitive human being detect if they are paying attention? Could they intuit the presence of a living being occupying a room behind a door? Could they tell micro difference in temperature in the air between two identical corridors?]

What about cold? Would any particular natural phenomena cause a dungeon to chill unexpectedly? The first thing that comes to mind is the presence of para-normal phenomena like Magic and the Undead. Both are often associated with rapid temperature drops.

Conversely, super-beasts like dragons or elemental creatures might raise underground temperatures more than you would expect.

Life Respiration SWEATY WALLS! Why are the walls of the dungeon dripping, dank, with the nitre, so beloved of Lovecraft? It may be water flow from outside but more likely the combination of water and warmth coves from living things in the dungeon. A system of closed stone with living things within it will naturally sweat, and drip, over time.

What about the sweaty walls of a sleeping dragons cave? Why wasn’t the gold surrounding Smaug absolutely dripping with condensation? Maybe it was and that is what caused Bilbo to slip and slide around. Wet Hobbit action.

[Question; have any of you actually been in an actual Dungeon, under an actual castle, working or not? Are they actually the cold, dark, dripping places of fiction?]

I mean clearly they are made not to be comfortable, but surely actual temperature would depend on how much airflow there is, or the temperature of the living rock, if its carved into that.

Would a dungeon under a living castle with locked doors and no windows, truly underground

actually be cold? Or might it be temperate? It would be damp I think due to the respiration of everyone above in the castle and their condensed breath dripping down.

Lichen, Moss, Mushrooms, Insects I feel like Gary must have at least conceived of a grand table of microflora and microfauna that might grow in a dungeon and have the required and likely temperature ranges, water needs, food sources, and, in the case of insects and small mammals, roaming distances.

I am taking being a dungeon detective a bit too far here, into Forensic territory, BUT - IF you did actually know a lot about these micro-environments you could in theory tell quite a lot about a dungeon just from observing them as you went through.

This should go for Rot as well, a microorganism which leaves sensory traces. A rot wizard could tell quite a lot about living systems. There is probably an opening somewhere for someone to produce a matrix of easy-to-use and 'read' pseudo-realistic dungeon microfauna, not for use as enemies or 'colour' but as a kind of spread of information that can be observed to tell what kind of things have gone on in a dungeon.

This, because of its complexity, I think I know least about. I know a bit about cave fauna, but the secret of that is that, beyond a certain depth, there really isn’t much of it. Without light you get near-nothing and so far as I know, mushrooms will not actually grow on the cold limestone of a cave wall.

[Question; does anyone out there know if lichen will grow in dark conditions? Or any such moss? Any fungal experts who can say which foods and temperature ranges are needed for fungal growth?]

Unknown Artist Sound How does sound carry underground anyway? Irregularly I would think. It must depend a huge amount on the substance and layout of the place. Some shapes and materials I know just EAT sound, but in others, small sounds can travel a very long way.

[Question; does anyone know about what kinds of stone, material or corridor shape interact how with various sounds? Do the stone walls and floors of a classic dungeon echo with footsteps of mocking laughter as Gothic novels claim? Can anyone confirm?]

The most important matter must be FREQUENCEY. Specifically, is there anything in this dungeon that produces a low-bass sound, like stone scraping, or something huge moving or rolling? Those low frequency sounds travel a lot, through materials more than air. How many times on a quiet day have you realised a big truck is moving several street away, or a washing machine or other large device is working several rooms, or an entire property away?

A sleeping dragon, for instance, will produce not only sweaty gold but probably a very deep, but soft, sound that might transmit strongly through stone.

Doors opening and closing; if these are on hinges there is a good chance they will be badly maintained and so screech. They may also thud and slam. Stone doors may produce the deep frequency sounds that transmit so easily.

Living things; the biomarkers we talked about in the ‘Smell’ section. Is there scampering? The buzzing of flies or mosquitoes? The crawling of insects?

Consistent background sounds - Water should produce some kind of distant continual sound

likewise, wind changing outside the dungeon, rain, storms, these should produce some sort of effect, unless there are many portals between here and there.

Is this place indeed as 'Silent as the Tomb'? If so that itself might be quite unusual. In a state of such absolute silence it might be that very super-quiet noises which are usually indiscernible could become more prominent, like the crawling of a bug for instance, or the shifting of dust.

At what distance and in what circumstances can we expect living inhabitants to produce discernible sound?

by Art of Raman Stone Or whatever material the dungeon is made of.

You would probably need to know a lot about bricks, or slate flags, for micro differences in them to be useful in any way, but.... aren't dungeoneers (and Dwarves) exactly the type to pick up just such knowledge?

What could we reasonably expect a skilled observer to pick up from various arrangements of building stone in separating corridors? Could they guess which corridor was built first? If one is a later addition to the other that should be obvious should it not? as well as the various skill and the resources available to the builders.

A culture in decay producing less perfect masonry, or cutting into a stone-lined corridor with one lined with brick.

What the hell are the roofs of these dungeons anyway? Logically they should be braced with wood, but that would decay (or would it?), so they should be either megaliths or arches.

Does stone degrade over time (without use, probably not..?) but with use and perhaps dripping water, how does stone degrade?

What stone would you even expect to be used in construction of a dungeon? Granite is too hard surely? I would expect bricks to be the most practical and affordable and bricks do crumble both from use but also from compression and freeze-thaw over time.

Does sound echo across marble? How about light? In the Mersey tunnel near me, the roof has been covered with black tar or pitch. it was originally made with a white, reflective, opalescent roof to the tunnel. The idea was that it would reflect the lamps of vehicles and make the tunnel seem more full of light. Two problems; exhaust fumes blackened it, and where that didn't happen the improving strength of electric lights made the roof blindingly white so they had to paint if over.

But if you were in a classic Carrera-marble tomb, with only lamps, it would be pretty relatively bright surely? There can't be many materials like that. Do we have any idea of the reflective nature of various kinds of stone? Would a difference between slate, bricks or granite slabs add or reduce 10 or 20 feet of visibility?

Viggo Johanson

21 Questions for Empty Corridors (This is my attempt to condense the discussion above into a simple set of concrete questions, more for Dungeon designers and DMs, in a style similar to Jeffs ’20 Questions for your Campaign World’.)

Is the air still or does it flow?
If there is airflow, where does it flow to or from, and at which times? (i.e. does it ‘breathe’ in and out as it warms and cools with dawn and dusk like a cave system might?).
Is there moving water? If there is, does it cool the dungeon?
Is it warmer or cooler than outside? Are any parts especially warm or cool?
Are there living things eating, breathing and pooping in the dungeon?
Do the walls sweat? Is there nitre?
Is there a food store? Are there mice or insects?
Is there fire in the dungeon? If so, where does the smoke go?
Is there poop in the dungeon? Where? How strong is the smell?
Is there rot in the dungeon? Are there flies?
Do smells emanate evenly through still air or are they carried by airflow?
If you followed the smells of blood, meat, smoke, spices or poop, where would they lead?
Are their spiders in the dungeon? How stable and old are the webs and where?
Do lichen, moss or fungi grow in the dungeon? If so where?
Are there any sources of LOW FREQUENCY sound in the dungeon?
Are there any permanent natural sounds like moving water or wind?
Do voices, steps or door sounds transmit in a reliable way?
Would the sound of fighting transmit and if so how far?
If someone stays absolutely silent in the dungeon and listens, what do they hear?
Are there obvious changes in construction? Like in materials, methods, age, wear etc?
Do any of the above elements come into play at otherwise contextless choices in which door or corridor to take?

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I have never been able to stop thinking about this; the 2016 animated film ‘Zootopia’ is a defence of liberal cosmopolitanism so earnest and poorly thought-out that it accidentally becomes crypto-fascist.

A Quote from Matt Zoller Seitz "Zootopia is constantly asking its characters to look past species stereotypes, and not to use species-ist language or repeat hurtful assumptions. This all seems clever and noble until you realise that all the stereotypes about various animals are to come extent true, in particular the most basic one carnivores eat herbivores because it’s in their nature”

Some Warnings; This is me going full schitzo-autist on a funny animal movie from 2016, AT LENGTH.

None of my commentary is aimed directly at modern headlines or intra-group relationships, but the parallels are obvious and are absolutely necessary to the film itself, so its impossible to talk about it in detail without mirroring some of that stuff.

So BE WARNED, this is what you are in for. If you don't want to read about that then stop reading!

Not Deliberate To be clear, I don't think Zootopia is crypto-fascism. There are no deliberately 'hidden messages'. Instead I think it presents a case for liberalism so flawed, garbled and intense it accidentally says the exact opposite.

So I am accusing the makers of being fools, rather than monsters.

But What Is Zootopia Patrick? Zootopia is 2016 animated film by Disney set in an imagined utopian city if sentient, language-using partially humanoid animals.

“Zootopia is a gleaming metropolis populated by anthropomorphic mammals, divided into several districts including Sahara Square, Tundratown, Little Rodentia, and Rainforest District.

This film begins with a jungle which fades into a children's play about the history of Zootopia. One day, Judy Hopps, a bunny rabbit from rural Bunnyburrow, fulfills her dream of joining the Zootopia Police Department as the first rabbit officer, however, she is regularly assigned parking duty by Chief Bogo. During one of her shifts, she is manipulated by Nick Wilde, a con artist fox. Judy unlawfully arrests Duke Weaselton at Little Rodentia and is reprimanded by Bogo until Mrs. Otterton, an otter, arrives pleading help on locating her missing husband, one of the many recently missing predators. To Bogo's dismay, Judy volunteers and the assignment is praised by assistant mayor Dawn Belleweather. However, Bogo gets Judy to agree to resign if she cannot solve the case within 48 hours. With Nick as a key witness of Mr. Otterton's disappearance, Judy locates the fox and coerces him to assist her with the investigation lest he be charged with tax evasion, which he openly admitted and Judy recorded with her carrot pen, saying "It's called a hustle, sweetheart."

After acquiring Mr. Otterton's license plate number from Mystic Springs Oasis, Judy and Nick track the vehicle from the Department of Mammal Vehicles to Mr. Big, an arctic shrew crime boss in Tundratown. Mr. Big spares their lives after learning that Judy had rescued his daughter earlier, and informs the pair that Mr. Otterton is his florist and had been picked up by his chauffeur Manchas, a black jaguar, to bring him to Mr. Big to talk about something important. However, en-route, Otterton suddenly "went savage" - meaning he reverted to a feral state - and attacked Manchas before running off. Judy and Nick locate Manchas at his home in the Rainforest District for questioning. Manchas describes the attack on him and mentions that Otterton had been yelling about "night howlers". However, before he can reveal anything else, Manchas suddenly turns savage himself and chases the pair, but they manage to escape. Judy calls the ZPD for help, but when Bogo and his reinforcements arrive, Manchas is nowhere to be found. Bogo demands Judy's resignation, but Nick takes a stand, insisting they have 10 more hours to solve the case. As the pair leave the Rainforest District, Nick opens up to Judy, revealing that he was bullied by prey animals as a cub for being the only predator and subsequently became a con artist, resolving to live out the "sly fox" stereotype, as he felt no one will ever see a fox as anything else.

Nick realizes that the city's traffic camera system may have captured how Manchas disappeared, and the pair consults Assistant Mayor Bellwether. They then discover that Manchas was captured by wolves, which Judy assumes is what Otterton had meant by "night howlers". Judy and Nick locate Cliffside Asylum, where the wolves have detained the missing predators (including Mr. Otterton), all of which have gone savage, and eavesdrop on Mayor Lionheart consulting with a doctor about their condition, revealing that he is keeping the savage predators hidden from both the public and the ZPD, and that the cause their strange behavior is unknown. The pair escape, inform Bogo and the police swarm the area, arresting Lionheart and those involved. Bellwether subsequently becomes the new mayor.

Having developed a friendship with Nick throughout the case, Judy requests that he joins the ZPD and become her partner, which Nick happily considers. However, a pressured Judy describes the savaged predators' condition during a press conference as them reverting to their natural instincts. This confirms Judy's bigotry against foxes to Nick, who angrily walks out on her offer after he asks her if she sees him as a savage predator (along with her almost reaching for her fox repellent after he asks if she thought he would eat her). When fear and discrimination against predators spread across Zootopia, a guilt-ridden Judy resigns, feeling that she made things worse. During this time, Gazelle holds a peaceful protest and publicly asks for the harmonious Zootopia she loves to be restored.

Two to three months later,[3] Judy has returned to Bunnyburrow and rejoined the family business as a carrot farmer. However, she later learns from her parents and reformed childhood bully, fox Gideon Grey, that "night howlers" are toxic flowers that have severe psychotropic effects on mammals. Realizing that the flowers are what Otterton was referring to and that they must be the cause of the outbreaks, Judy returns to Zootopia, where she reconciles with Nick. They then locate Weaselton, who explains that he has been collecting night howlers for a ram named Doug Ramses, who owns a lab hidden in the subway tunnels. The pair finds the lab and discovers Doug creating a night howler serum, which he has been exposing to predators via paintball-like pellets fired by an air-powered sniper gun.

Judy and Nick hijack the lab (which is on a still functional train) and race to the ZPD with the evidence but are pursued by Doug's henchrams, whom they barely manage to defeat. The train is destroyed in the process, but Nick manages to save a case containing Doug's sniper gun and the serum pellet.

Just short of the ZPD, the pair encounters Bellwether, who insists she takes the evidence. Realizing she is the mastermind of the conspiracy, Judy and Nick try to flee but are knocked into a pit by her henchrams. Bellwether shoots a serum pellet from the evidence case at Nick and frames a call for help to the ZPD. Nick seemingly becomes savage and corners Judy, but it turns out the pair was acting in order to trick Bellwether into openly admitting her prey-supremacist scheme to take over Zootopia and rid it of all predators, and that they replaced the dart gun ammo with blueberries from the Hopps' farm. With Bellwether's monologue recorded on Judy's carrot pen just as Bellwether made her short-lived threat to frame them as she did with Lionheart, Chief Bogo and the ZPD arrive and arrest her and her henchrams upon hearing everything. Upon being informed and interviewed on the matter, Lionheart denies any knowledge of Bellwether's plot, but admits to having illegally imprisoned the savage predators, claiming it to have been done for "right reasons".

Later, Judy is reinstated into the ZPD. An antidote is discovered for the effects of the night howlers, and all the infected predators, including Mr. Otterton and Mr. Manchas, are cured. Months later (about a year after Judy started her job at the ZPD), Nick joins the ZPD as the first fox officer and Judy's new partner. The final scene (during the credits) has almost all Zootopian citizens attending Gazelle's concert while Bellwether angrily as Doug, Jesse, and the other prisoners patting on their lap views it on a television set in prison.”

THINGS THAT ARE TRUE IN ZOOTOPIA Ok, imagine you are the average Zootopia resident. statistically you are likely to be a 'Prey' animal. (90% according to the Wiki).

You surround and outnumber, but are in regular day-to-day contact with a minority group who are specifically designed to kill and eat you, and who could do so relatively easily.

But... they don't eat you. Instead they eat Fish, plant protein and bugs.

The Mayor of the city, much of the police force, and many of its celebrities, are all of this minority group.

So if you did, for instance, suspect that the minority group were secretly killing members of the majority and covering it up. Or, if a member of this minority group ‘ran amok’, , you would go to the police, who are made up of that minority, and who report to the Mayor, who is also of that Minority.

It seems that, even when given a free choice, the majority group will vote for, promote or valorise this minority group, they are just that much more charismatic and powerful .

There are rumours of the minority group losing control, running amok and attacking the majority. There are rumours of the minority group “disappearing”.

Its revealed that this has in fact been happening. Minorities have been ‘running amok’ and savagely attacking others at random. A situation made much more dangerous by their terrifying natural weapons. The mayor, who is a member of this minority, has been secretly imprisoning the guilty parties and hiding the truth while he investigates this matter.

The Mayor is fired and the deputy Mayor takes his place, this is one of the majority group.

The police officer who revealed this scheme (one of the few majority members of the police force), speculates that the minorities biology might be behind these violent attacks. This is in some senses a truism, they a literally designed to kill you and you are their natural food. For most of history the minority group could not live without destroying you. They simply choose not to.

A chill falls over the city and suspicions rise.

A beautiful and charismatic Gazelle music star appeals for the return of normalcy.

After a short interval, the same police officer reveals the origins of the situation; the new majoritarian mayor was secretly developing chemical weapons to drive select minority members violently insane so they would attack members of the majority group, all as part of a plan to put the majority group fully in charge of the city, this whole situation arose because of Her scheme.

The Majority group mayor is imprisoned, and the old Minority group Mayor is back in charge. He says imprisoning violent members of his own group secretly was ‘the wrong thing, for the right reasons’.

The problem now solved, you and the city relax, everything is back to normal.

............

Now, let me know at what point any of this reminds you of;

Blood libel conspiracy.
Hitlers fantasies.
Modern headlines.
Alex Jones.
The internal sound of your brain melting as you suffer a schizophrenic break.

Predators and Prey are Fundamentally Adversarial .. and this is the point of the film. From the Wiki;

“The primary issues centering the film, as mentioned, are prejudice and preconceived notions based on stereotypes. To further emphasize this, the creatures that inhabit Zootopia were limited down to mammals, to portray a sense of segregation between animals of predator and prey mentality; animals such as birds and marine life were left out like most, if not all, are consumers of other living organisms, making it difficult to narrow them down within the status quo of the story's conflict.”

Of course, if you imagine a world of sentient, tool-suing and civilised compulsory carnivores, living in close integration with equally sentient prey animals, what you have is a moral horror story. All of the good stories using this as a premise include some element of moral horror because it is inherent to the setting.

And ‘Zootopia’ was very nearly this. Again, from the Wiki;

“In response, the story was tailored to center the relationship between the "predator and prey" group while reflecting modern day society by having the story serve as an allegory for racism and prejudice. In this version, predators, despite having evolved, were generally viewed as dangerous threats and were forced to wear electric shock collars as a means to keep their "aggressive natures" under control at the hands of prey. The "tame collar" concept stuck through most of the film's production, even being approved by John Lasseter, but when screened for the team at Pixar, the response was negative. The city of Zootopia, in this state of being so blatantly unjust, was deemed too unlikable, and the story too dark, whereas the goal was to create a city that the audience could fall in love with while making a film that—despite its serious subject matter—can still be a fun family film”

I Get "Don't Think Too Hard About It" But Zootopia DEMANDS you think about it! It was designed specifically as an allegory for racism from early development. It is a very, EXTREMELY values-laden film.

It’s all about the greatness of cosmopolitanism, how wonderful diversity is and how evil twisted members of the majority group might try to destroy that wonderful peaceful diversity with evil schemes.

It is a very, very, very earnest film that is intensely anxious about having 'something to say'. This quite intense seriousness is written through the whole of the film

Zootopia demands you pay deep attention to exactly the ideas it cannot sustain One thing that hit me very hard on viewing Zootopia was the gravity of the scene where Judy Hops states that the minorities that ran amok were reverting to their natural instincts.

This is treated with deep and overwhelming seriousness by those in the imagined world and by the structure and tone of the film itself. it feels like a grave sin against the rules and ideals of this world.

I must be autistic as fuck as I may have been the only person in the room thinking "Well yea, they are wolves, lions and tigers of course they are biologically dangerous to fucking rabbits or whatever".

I know what the film intended. The deep tragedy, gravity and sinfulness of this statement only makes sense if we view Zootopia as an allegory or metaphor for relations between human groups.

In a statement about humans saying "Well they are just biologically dangerous, of course they were going to flip out and kill someone, its inherent to them" would be monstrous and this matches the feel of the scene

But as a statement about Lions and Tigers and Wolves it’s just obviously true.

And Zootopia insists we think about this.

Or more precisely, it demands we think about this in precisely this way and no other. It is so confident of its argument, its premise and the way its scenes and message are meant to be felt and considered, that it just leaps ahead. It is a story for an audience that already knows what the answer is and is just waiting for the story itself to fill that in

Prejudice = bad

Brining up biological differences in discussion of violent acts - horrible

they clearly didn't think, or were so confident, or so half-Intelligent that they didn't even consider that anyone would possibly read it any other way

The Fascist Reading of Zootopia You surround a minority group of biologically dangerous potential killers.

It’s considered social death to point this out.

This is very important; saying the wrong thing, making assumptions about someone’s nature just because they, for instance, have teeth and claws, is considered very terrible. so you have to not mention these very clear and obviously physical and innate behavioural differences.

Just don't bring it up. Don't bring it up or our fragile society will implode.

There are rumours of attacks by the minority.

There is confirmation of attacks by the minority.

They have been going crazy and TEARING APART members of the majority at random.

The city government has been covering this up.

The city government is headed by a member of the same minority and the police force is dominated by them, so essentially they rule over you.

Later another conspiracy is revealed, the conspirators are of the majority faction.

They have been triggering the dangerous minority with drugs made from certain commonly available garden flowers. The old Mayor is returned and the conspiracy ended, everything is fine now.

You still surround a minority of potential killers, and they could be triggered to kill randomly at any time by the use of a commonly available chemical.

So this is hell, surely? It’s the Liberal Polity as seen through the eyes of a Fascist. Fundamentally opposed groups bound together by a tissue of lies under the leadership and control of elite members of the powerful minority group with anyone who defies the lie by pointing out basic biological and historical fact ostracised and driven into poverty.

Beastars is Zootopia Done Right Beastars – is an animated series based on almost exactly the same setting and concept as Zootopia; an urbanised society of anthropomorphic sentient animals which hands, language and tools, but still massively different body types and huge differences in natural capacity, and with obligate predators and obligate prey animals “trying to get along”.

Beastars is a weird, queasy, sometimes disturbing story and the main reason it works as anything at all is because it directly acknowledges and is largely about the massive innate differences between Predators and Prey and the fact that this society is a thin strand of compromise over a roiling churning mass of potential conflict.

In Beastars Predators do occasionally Run Amok, and eat Prey citizens. Its not quite covered up but is down-valued by the media. Predators have secret meat markets where they go to eat flesh and criminal groups who supply them. Many Prey-citizens live in a state of quiet helpless terror about being killed, many Predator-citizens live in a state of consuming dysphoria and self-loathing about their own nature.

Despite being a pervy, weird, strange and intense story Beastars feels more moral and sane than Zootopia because the characters in it are grappling directly and honestly with the unresolved darkness at the centre of their society while in Zootopia; it was all an evil conspiracy by bad majority group members and things are back to normal now.

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This is a review of a videogame ‘Northern Journey’ by Hild Studios. I found out about it via this video;

I thought this would be interesting to False Machine readers and OSR types as a game art which has a bunch of OSR-type theming and but also as a distinct work of art by chad neurodivergent creator who made it while sitting in a cellar for several years.

(Maybe also with fans of 'Thief' and the Thief modding community maybe? It has that kind of feel.)

Chad Neurodivergent Creator

Interviewer - "Working on your own, you must have had a pretty deep schedule."
Chad - "No I didn't really have a schedule or a plan. As you are working on something, things, story beats, come to mind. So for instance you might realise you want some mountains, or you want to fight a witch. Then you might be in a forest and realise you need something to go between the forest and the mountains or it doesn't feel right "

Chad - "There were a lot of things I didn't spend time doing. Like sketching and drawing and planning enemies and whatnot. I usually just made them then and there."

Chad - "The game was made in a cellar and there were a lot of spiders there so there are spiders in the game."
Chad - "Anyone can make music really, you look at pictures of the place you are making music for and start making sounds."So, he made the game by making the game.

I will return to this in the end.

The Level Design
Northern Journey combines vast-feeling levels and wide-open spaces with complex, nested and carefully planned challenge routes. In the interview above the creator says they often solved design problems by just removing space, bringing things more closely together.

Often the routes and locations are nested vertically, with looping fishbone paths, leaps and scrambles taking you from one to another, or caves, long diversions or surprising detours leading you back to somewhere you have already seen from afar, maybe only a few feet away from where you were standing, buy previously unable to reach.

The internet tells me that this is “like Dark Souls”.

You are almost always in sight of the promise of a future journey, being shown expanses you might traverse, places you might visit and methods you might use. There are keys to open doors but there is also a winch thing you can use to access ziplines which take you whooshing across these densely-plotted levels - you can see the ziplines coming in but can't access them till you get this widget. In terms of level design this is in practice, just another kind of key or teleportation system, but it doesn't feel like that, instead it feels like an extremely cool reward for achieving stuff.

How could this feeling be expanded to OSR-style games? With difficulty I think. The functioning of team play using largely the minds eye and maps doesn’t work the same way as in a videogame. In Northern Journey, the ‘correct’ or accessible routes are obvious and the language of the game and movement in its space is easy to accept. You know you can’t climb things above a certain set incline, so you don’t bother. In an OSR game you can try climbing things above a set incline, and can try doing a whole bunch of things that wouldn’t work in Northern Journey.

As well, the presentation of a vertically nested environment is more difficult in map form, and the sheer power of a open view of a big landscape promising various adventures and possibilities wouldn’t act the same way.

Perhaps to some extent, partial maps, rumours and ‘promising objects’ serve a similar aim in D&D adventures. I tried to do something a bit like this in Demon-Bone Sarcophagus but apparently fucked it up ☹.

The Music
The music is custom, nothing in its pockets but knives and lint. It’s dungeon synth/ambient created for each environment. This is distinctive because there really isn’t a big gap between the sounds of the environment, the twitchy calls of insect danger (or witches), the wind, the treetops moving in the wind, the echoing of cave noises and whatever the ambient music is for that area.

The Fucking Spiders
Or monsters generally, but most of them are fucking spiders.

None of the spiders are the same, look the same, act the same or interact with the environment and the player in the same way. Some crawl in the undergrowth quietly, some swarm in gangs, some hover and leap, or hang in treetops and drop on you.

The enemy design, movement plans and AI loops are carefully integrated into the environments, the spiders in the trees, the tree-tops slowly waving, the spiders in the waving grass which bob and move in the same rhythm as the grass.

The juddering, weaving repetitive but incoherent attack patterns of the insect enemies exist apparently because they were easy to program - presumably real insects are running something not that much more complex than the systems in a modern computer.

The deep integration with the environments means you spend a lot of time hiding, listening, watching, stalking and paying a huge amount of attention to trees, grass, sounds and movement.

The Combat
I feel like there are two main ways to run the combat in Northern Journey; Doom Style or Cheese It.

If you have really good twitch sensitivity and aim then you could maybe burst into target-rich environments and race around shooting things while brilliantly swapping weapons for optimal effect. I absolutely could not do this and so most of the time I just cheesed it by save-scumming, creeping forward till I trigger one or two enemies then running like fuck away till they are lined up behind me on an attack run, then turning round and shooting them, save-scumming and doing the same thing again.

The sling was an interesting embodied weapon. You get it for free, it never runs out of ammo.

On pulling out the sling the p.o.v character WHUMPS it round your head, one, two, three, four, five, six times then puts it away. You can trigger a cast at the peak of any of those WHUMPS. If you wait till the 3rd or 4th WHUMP, the damage goes up to 100, which is actually not bad, on par with other weapons, or you can release early for a faster shot with less damage.

This starts as a crap and awkward weapon, but as you get better with it, it becomes quite workable and your skill with its timing helps you upgrade it along with your other stuff so it never quite goes out of fashion.

Characters
Oddities drawn from something like a folk tale; a village idiot, a suspicious priest, a fool in the stocks, a policeman in his hut, some mysterious crones with a bubbling pot, a doctor throwing runestones and laughing, a sketchy soothsayer whacked out on fumes, an isolated engineer living in a box held over an abyss; there is literally no-one normal in this village,

Crones - Lots of crones in this one, a large variety of tricky witches doing crazy witchy things, trying to push you off bridges, strand you in infinitely black pools, fly screaming and cackling at you on broomsticks

The Mysterious Flute Player – is he Odin? A wizard? The Gygaxian Game Master? He feels a little like all of these things. He has his own theme and you can hear him noodling on his flute as you enter some levels. At other times a dog or raven will turn up with a rune-stave message.

The Special Missions!
Caving, cave-diving, diving into a haunted, drowned village in a leaky bathysphere, taking a hang-glider through super-mountains, diving into a maelstrom & coming out the other side, slowly scaling and ziplining up a staggered and vast mountain face;
the darkness, fear and paranoia was lovely. In particular the bathysphere mission and cave-diving was just utterly rich with darkness and a deep sense of strange otherness. Any Veins of the Earth fans would enjoy these.

The Ending
There are parts of the end I love, and which feel a lot like the pure mood of the game and other combat-based parts I don't love anywhere as much.

It feels like a lot of supernatural problems in Norway are solved with a midnight communal village rave to dungeon synth electrobeats. Probably this is just how they do it, who knows. The game nearly ends with what I think should have been the final scene, a game of keep-away with a bunch of crazy villagers dancing in a circle around a cursed dimensional violator while the village idiot keeps trying to grab it and run away, while demonic root monsters run interference. Then there is a tower shooting bit which is less interesting.

Hyperreality
A game about an environment by a guy who lives in that environment. The production loop is a hiking loop - guy goes for a hike or climb in Norway, takes photos, records sounds, observes nature
then comes back to the spider-cellar, makes textures from the plants and rocks, builds the sound of streams from the recordings.

All of the sounds and textures in the game are made by the creator, so those curiously pixelly textured shadows, waving plants, lichen-spotted wood, are all recovered dreams from the real world.

The combination of the tightly-plotted but expansive-feeling level design, the intensity of dealing with the FUCKING SPIDERS and this transposition and concentration of the natural phenomena means with Northern Journey has a kind of Hyperreality, like its NorwayPlus. The same hyperreality you would get from surrealism but driven towards a natural environment, a bit like 19th century romantic paintings of guys staring at the alps where a natural view is intensified, but in this case it’s a game and a process of doing which includes movement, exploration and challenge.

(I am not saying Northern Journey is 'like being there' which I think would be a mediocre aim and which I am unable to confirm anyway, bit it is more like an intense, lucid dream of Norway)

Singularity of Vision
Though original, no single element is absolutely better than the best in other games, though much is very good. Instead we must speak of the combination and synthesis of elements in a manner original, expressive and rare. It would be hard for a large group the make this particular game because things were combined and "cooked" very closely and very intuitively.

The textures, plants, sounds, arrangements of form, living entities, (especially the spiders), etc, are all seemingly drawn from life and inscribed directly into the game without much pre-decision or conversation.

For instance; in one level the waving of grass mimics the colour and movement of the resident spider enemy, which skitters and bobs exactly like the movement of the grass in simulated wind. in another, the texture and size of an attacking spider means it blends with and seems to move "under" the textured knee-high foliage. Combined with its silence (which would have no significance if not for the aural tapestry of the levels), this makes it a particular paranoia-inducing threat.

There is a level where, after coming out of a deep dark and claustrophobic mine, you do nothing but climb and zipline up a seemingly endless series of mountain faces, facing a rolling grey sea, it’s wonderful and arguably 'nothing happens'.

These things, if done as part of a group or company, would have taken meeting after meeting and description and argument after description and argument. Here, done by one individual, they are simply created and arranged immediately, intuitively, in a manner which speaks of a coherent world, creates beauty and interest in the eye of the beholder an is 'gamic' or playable, leading to interesting and cohesive play.

The whole game is like this; a collage or weaving together of elements, some drawn from nature, but woven coherently, subtly, to create a kind of hyper-reality. The sensory aspect of a Norwegian wilderness/biome, compressed, transformed and made into something that can be played. Any addition of complexity of the kind a corporation or marketing director would instantiate would disrupts this clear fluidity and directness of approach.

The credits are literally three lines;

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A REGISTERED CRIPPLE "When they were heading away from the barricade through the host of pilgrims and tents, a scrawny liver-spotted hand clutched at Jaqs hem.'Charity for a registered cripple' croaked an elderly voice.Smouldering thuribles of incense dangled on chains from a gibbet-like frame. Backed up against the base of this frame was a rickety cart with small iron wheels. Upon the cart crouched a ragged crone. her face was wizened with age. her stringy long hair was white. Yet her rheumy blue eyes were keen with a light of tense intelligence. In those eyes was a quality of anticipation for which expectancy of coins alone could hardly account.Grimm scrutinized her circumstances. The thurible-gibbet protected this cripple from being trampled accidentally. A handle jutted from the rear of her cart. It might be pulled or pushed. Here she crouched under the cool red sun, begging....'Was the temple breaking your legs, mother?’ Surely the Occidens Temple did not need to create and exploit cripples, pitifully to swell its coffers.The crone rocked forward, as if in sudden anguish from a cramp of the bowels.'Oh yes, it was breaking my legs!' was her reply. 'Yet not in the way you're meaning.Grimm hunkered down by the cart. Soon s did Lex and Jaq.The crones name was Herzady. One thing she had never been was a mother. Defiantly she declared herself to be elven years old.Who else on Sabulborb would dream of counting their age in local years? She had lived long enough to arrive at double figures. She had endured more than a hundred and ten Imperial years - the vast majority of them spent in this cart. Grimm was impressed by Herzady's longevity, even though to a long-living Squat a century was rather small beer.'Pretty impressive for an ordinary unenhanced human being, particularly in such reduced circumstances!'A century earlier, as a young girl, Herzady had attended that Holy Years unveiling in company with her pious parents. During the bedlam which ensued, her mother and father both lost their lives. Herzady's legs were permanently crippled. A compassionate priest had taken pity and provided this cart. For decades Herzady had awaited the next Holy year. When the unveiling came again she was watching from a safer place than on the previous occasion.Bedlam?Oh yes. At the unveiling fifty two years later there had been homicidal bedlam once again, due to the hysteria of the pilgrims intent on seeing... what could not be seen.Could not be seen, what did she mean by this?Why, Herzady had been all ears and eyes for decades. She knew that the visage had faded, aeons since, into invisibility. On the climactic day of Holy Year when the high priest of Occidens in splendid procession carried the requilary out along the walkway, briefly, to open the sacred container, what he would expose to the gaze of hundreds of thousands of pilgrims was a cloth which was blank, apart from a couple of stains vaguely located where the eyes might have been.'Pilgrims are glimpsing almost nothing sired! How they are straining and struggling to see!'.......Gently he said to Herzady, 'Being crippled, crippled because of adoring him, you are partaking in His vaster malady.''I am waiting, she replied bleakly, 'for many more persons being crippled and killed the day after tomorrow, as surely must be happening. Then I am dying contentedly.'it was to witness this calamity that Herzady had endured indomitably throughout the five decades since the previous holy year! The crones persistence was pathological. her lucidity was madness....The little man prompted her; 'Hundreds of people dying outside that courthouse earlier on today. All imagining the True Face being unveiled early - and panicking.'Galvanized by shock, the crone sat bolt upright upon her twisted shrivelled legs. She gasped tragically. 'Herzady missing so many deaths....'Her wizened face spasmed in pain. A thin spotted hand fluttered to her chest. She slumped over.Lex checked her pulse. In his hefty hand her wrist looked no wider than a pencil. Herzady was dead. Of a heart attack, of a broken heart.It was Grimm who reached to close the crone's gaping empty eyes.'Huh' he said, 'saved myself half a shekel anyway.'"

Blanche drawing Jaq Draco as... Sean Connery?

BEHOLD I return to the beginning; the original Black Library novel and first Warhammer 40k fiction. Dan Abnett dedicated the first volume of ‘The End and the Death’ to Ian Watson, likely out of respect to this originating series.

I read one book in this series many many years ago and I did not like it at all. I thought it was dirty and weird. Uncomfortably so.

Now I think it is a work of GENIUS! Clearly I have migrated to one end or another of the I.Q. graph meme. Which end I cannot say....

PULSING ALBUMEN-WOMB “A dreary slope of great boulders, poised on a scree, extended downward into murk. Upward likewise. In the upward direction rococo-metallic towers were visible. A small fleet of grotesque vessels might have impacted in the terrain. Evilly flamboyant, these towers were canted at absurd angles to one another in defiance of gravity, yet they were linked by eerily wrought bridges along which prowled tiny figures.In a bilious sky hung and hourglass sun. Two suns were joined impossibly at the waist like a double yolk within a glutinous pulsing albumen-womb of glowing gas. This absurd sun made the eyes and the spirt ache. How was gravity thus defied? That double-sun should have cohered into one sun aeons ago. Two such celestial bodies could not exist side by side.‘Chaos’, breathed Jaq in horror.”

ITS THE UR-TEXT It’s all about the FUKIN STAR CHILD BABY! It’s all coming back! Perfect circle!

Ok so what is this story actually about? Essentially an Inquisitor wants to bang his Callidus Assassin, that’s the main driver of the plot.

Let me try again..

Our story is about Inquisitor Jaq Draco, who encounters a super-mega conspiracy within a conspiracy of the Inquisition to create a psychic ‘Hydra’ and turn all of humanity into a giant singular hive mind and thereby ‘save’ it.

Over the course of three books [SPOILERS] Draco accidently exterminatus’s a planet, fights genestealers, enters a space hulk, visits a demon world, goes to Terra and infiltrates the Imperial Palace for a chat with the Emperor, sleeps for 100 years, enters the webway, visits Ulthwe craftworld, gets into the mythical Black Library and steals the book of the Apocalypse, gets his Callidus assassin girlfriend killed, hides out on a nutty pilgrim world, steals a relic, escapes into the webway again and performs a mysterious ritual to undo fate. Other things also happen.

The over-plot is all about the Sensai, the Star Child, the schitzoidal mind of the Emperor

Very old 40k lore from Rogue Trader says that when the Emperor fought Horus he cut out all the actually nice parts of his psyche and cast them into the warp so he could win. These more fluffy bits have been floating around out there for 10,000 years and are about ready to reincarnate into the Star Child; the actually-nice superbeing who will create the golden path to humanities hopeful future.

Roaming around in the galaxy are the Sensai; 40ks original Woke Warriors who roam the galaxy fighting oppression yes this is real and I am not making it up.

Meanwhile in Games Workshops two active series, in the final books of the Horus Heresy series, Dan Abnett is finally creeping towards the Final Confrontation with Horus where all this is actually set up, and has been reintroducing the idea of secret immortals in 40k. And in the ‘present day’ Dawn of Fire series by mainly Guy Haley I think, the idea of the Star Child and the Emperor ‘awakening’ has been reintroduced.

So, essentially, the Horus Heresy series, the current Dawn of Fire series and this Inquisition War series, the first one published, form a coherent whole, or are being formed into one. It was all just one giant saga all along…

And it’s amazing how much of a 40k book it is, right from the offing, rich with ripe dankness. Within 200 pages of the fist book we have genestealer purging, exterminatus, a squat on a trike, a space hulk, the Eye of Terror!, actual Terra and a month long oddesy through the imperial palace lead by the Star Child (probably), and a MEETING WITH THE EMPEROR. The sheer amount of stuff, of details, of incident, combined with the wild euphonia of the prose really adds up to make a funky stew

TENDRILS IN THE SPINAL SOCKETS "During stages in Lex's novitiate as a future Space Marine he had been initiated dauntingly enough - by a feast of foul excremental unfood and other formidable ceremonies.

The forced rite of initiation which took place like a ravishment within that Chaos vessel was execrable and almost unspeakable. How could Lex obliterate from memory the Kiss of Corruption, the Communion with Chaos, the Prayer of Perfidity, the spells and the invocations? And all the while he was experiencing the slither of tendrils within his spinal sockets. These invaded his nervous system, generating nauseating visions of the fragility of the comos, of the feebleness of reality which demonic fingers sought to unpluck and reknit with such vile success.

Lex in torment saw the whole cosmos burst forth from a mere bubble in the energy warp. A sparrows fart the universe was!"

IT FROM THE 90'S It’s kinda, no, scratch that, incredibly pervy, rich and ripe with strange life, overflowing with crazy stuff, wild with colour. It feels a lot like David Lynches Dune in its gleeful perversity and general oddness.

The vision of 40k is absolutely one torn from the pages of early White Dwarf, Realms of Chaos, Rogue Trader and other early vibrant texts;

“And so Meh-Lindi approached the monster on the throne: a leering fang-toothed, armoured hog of a grandsire alien. Its eyes glared at her from under ridged bony brows. One of its lower, humanoid hands, adorned with topaz and sapphire rings, contemplatively stroked a fierce claw-hand that rested on its knee. One of its hooves tapped the floor. Loaves of armour-bone jutted from its curved spine, and it rubbed these against the carved back of its throne grindingly, as if to dispel an itch. Its spatulate tongue stuck out, tasting.”

And is absolutely riddled with often ridiculous and sometimes really quite discomforting sexual and bodily weirdness, especially surrounding the Callidus Assassin Meh-Lindi who starts the book doing exercises in a giant ritual hamster wheel and then examines herself in the mirror naked at length while remarking on her boobs as women so often do. Then she gets a pseudo-plastic Genestealer skeleton implanted in her body in an excruciating surgery scene.

GROTESQUELY MUTATED RAMPANT GROINS "Were the screaming tethered female prisoners hallucinating while abominations were perpetrated slowly and perversely upon their flesh? The Slaanashi Chaos Marines had certainly used hallucinogenic grenades -as well as boltguns and meltaguns and terrible chainswords, and heavier weaponry too. Were hallucinations intensifying the already appalling sight, and the implacable cruel touch, of pastel-hyed armour exquisitely damascened with debauchery upon the breast plates and the shoulders? Was that which was already monstrous being multiplied far beyond the brink of sanity?

A few tormentors had shed items of armour, exposing grotesquely mutated rampant groins, their organs of pleasure bifurcated and more, with squinting eyes sprouting from them, and with drooling lips.

Others had no need to shed armour. Chaos Spawn had materialized: wolf sized creatures with legs of spiders and bodies of imps, with questing tentacles and phallic tubes. Jaq himself almost believed that he was hallucinating. A snake-like umbilical cord connected these spawn to the swollen groin-guards of their master - who stood back, roaring and whinnying with delight, as they guided the spawn in the ravishing of their captives, soaking up the sensations of these roving external members."

ITS A TOY COMMERCIAL Even at this early stage its clear this is about SELLING PRODUCT. We have to put the toys on display and while I think probably Watson enjoyed the breakneck pace and sometimes delirious invention of the blizzard of encounters, its also true that Inquisitor Jaq Draco encounters pretty much every model that you can buy right now; Genestealers, Eldar, Space Marines, Chaos Marines, Harlequins, Titans, Commissars,

And the Space Marines and others are fashionable in an exquisitely 90s Warhammer style;

TINY SILVER PENTACLES "Strapped in the gimballed control seat, protected by padding and armour, the princeps faced those great slanting eye-screens. Bronze bones framed the screens. Across an array of lesser data screens diagnostic icons shuffled like phosphorescent beetles. A spaghetti of cables led from his reinforced mind-impulse suit into ducts. Cables coiled from his shoulder pauldrons, and wires from his impulse-helmet - which now swung round to scrutinize the newcomers.

Behind a goggle-visor: weary blue eyes. below the visor: a hooked nose with sapphire rings through each nostril, thin lips, and a depilated chin tattooed with tiny silver pentacles.

DAMASCENED GROIN-HAUBERK “Grimm urinated into the open helmet of the Chaos Marine. Sizzling softly, the webs became a gingery mat clinging to horrid contours above the gaping metal-fanged jaw.

From one of his ouches Grimm produced a bar of marzipan and began to gobble.

Lex snapped his visor shut to scan data and diagnostic icons. When he opened it again, he announced, ‘My waste storage unit may be malfunctioning somewhat.’ He murmured a prayer to Rogal Dorn.

Grimm cocked his head. ‘Does that mean your mighty metal legs will start to fill with muck?

Lex’s gauntlet lashed out. He stayed the blow before it could pulverize Grimms face.

‘I can recycle and detox my own waste for two days, abhuman. This suit is ancient,’ he declared. ‘Reverently repaired.’ His groin-hauberk had visibly been renovated with a damascened silver engraving of a potent warrior firing a storm bolter.”

A VERMLLION BADGE OF NOBILITY “Scar tissue on Hachards chin stood out whitely as though he had been punched. His cheek-tattoo was of a skull skewered by a dagger. His teeth were painted black as a signal that any smile of his was dark. A vermillion badge of nobility -a stylized power axe – adorned his right knee-pad modestly so that, whenever bending to the Emperors image during devotions, he should kneel upon this heraldic honour. His gloved hand strayed to the Imperial eagle emblazoned in purple on his lavender dress cuirass, as if to emphasize his unquestioning loyalty.”

THE PROSE, INVENTION, DIALOGE AND TEXTURE Its mad with dankness.

The tumbling maddening harlequinesque prose combines and overlays with the deranged invention

Watson is very clearly going carefully and joyfully off his tits with his prose, his word choices, idea combinations, rushing but ever-uneven rhythm, hold onto your hat at the start of every sentence and paragraph because you don't know how it is going to end, like a fairground ride that segues into some other ride in the middle, and again before the end. A KNOWING SMIRK is the emotion I am detecting here but not the joyless Dreamworks smirk of the empty ironist who abstracts themselves from their own ID through a veneer of eyebrow, but an Orson Welles-type smirk of a plump gourmand of words and concepts who is about to gorge themselves on sounds.

SOLIDIFYING OGRESPOOK – NIGHTMARE INCARNATE! “Night rolled towards them like a velvet curtain, or like a negative of an aurora. It hid from view those leaning towers. In the sickly sky an eclipse was eating swiftly across the leftward sun.

This was not how night fell in any sane reality!

The curtain of darkness halted before it reached them. Within that darkness flapped moth-like shapes, faintly phosphorescent, visible in violet.

More such moths swiftly gathered, They massed to form a giant humanoid figure bestriding the shrouded land. The hulking figure gained substance moment by moment as Lex continued to engrave Azul’s eye.

On the shoulders of the figure were mounted what appeared to plasma cannons. Great grasping powerhands dangled. Around the ankles of that solidifying ogrespook capered shadows – reminiscent of that horned spiked suit of armour which had lain in Ulthwe’.”

…

“Jaq was sighting his force rod tentatively at the looming colossus, muttering prayers of his own. Just then an extremely low moon sailed into view. Astride the capsized crescent sat the vilest of creatures, as on a saddle. Such saucer-eyes, such a parrot-beak. That tentacled fiend resembled some kraken from the deeps of an ocean. Its tentacles trailed down, becoming vastly long threads. With these, it began to fish.

…

“Here was nightmare incarnate. Another thread snared a Chaos Marine, plucking the armoured brute from out of the darkness. ‘That ain’t no helmet,’ exclaimed one of the Imperial Fists, ‘that’s his head – ‘

To the amplified horror-struck gaze of the Marine it was evident that the grotesquely metamorphosed Chaos warrior was guffawing with insane delight as he was drawn up to share that surreal perch with the daemon.”

……………………

THE DIALOGUE feels like a kind of arch 70's fantasy somehow, declarative, anquished, arch, pointed, ridiculous. Theatrical. Is he joking? Is he screwing up or screwing about, or both? We will never know…

HOMOGONIZED ENTRAILS “Lex’s voice rumbled sympathetically. ‘I understand loss, Sir Jaq.’

Loss?

Jaq had long since lost his holy office. He had lost the fellowship of his ordo. He had lost his cherished funereal ship, which might well have been blasted to pieces in that eldar dock by Imperial forces quite incidentally. Now he had lost his…. Helpmate.

‘Reckon we can steal this hyper-lance?’ Grimm asked Lex. ‘Can you use it? Must be ancient and revered to be so powerful. Shall we pull it free? Reckon that’s wise?

‘No-oh-oh-oh!’ Such a howl burst from Jaq’s throat, a howl of universal rejection and misery. Pull the great blade from Meh’lindi’s ravaged ribs and homogenized entrails? ‘No!’ he cried. ‘She shall not be treated like some harpooned sea-beast!’

ITS AN ACTUAL EPISTOLARY NOVEL Or at least it tries to be for a while.

Most 40k texts are fake Epistolary novels; remember in the grimdank future no record can be trusted and unreliable narrators and whatever, but in effect** books tend to be written from a floating 3rd person perspective and are clearly not 'in-world' texts in any way, and furthermore, texts part of the same general series are clearly attempting to tell a coherent story where all the details match up, and not presenting a dracula-style collection of missives or whatever.

So there is a certain fakeness to the 'everything is true and untrue' shtick. But the Inquisition War, while written in a 3rd person, does fully purport to be an in-universe text, (apart I suppose, from some framing stories where some people are reading it and asking "why did he write it about himself, in the third person?") These ‘novels’ are actually strange chunks of paper found in the entrails of the Golden Throne, transcripts of a report of something and Eldar Farseer maybe said, or just a funky book from the Inquisitorial archives.

They kind of give up on this somewhat , actually the middle one is the only 'impossible' report as it ends with Jaq raiding the Black Library,

I do love the idea of it being a theme with Inquisitors that they commonly write their own experiences down as pulp novels and hide them in archives, a useful technique since the truth must be disguised with fiction and fiction with truth, an ever-deniable record which may represent true events, or the shape of true events.

FURNACES OF NAUSEOUS LIGHT “The ribbed wraithbone walls of an immense dome rose sombrely upward. Across the zenith stretched a lake of night. A vast sky-light or energy-field excluded yet also revealed the void of space.

That funereal lake was polluted by diseased lurid gases. Hues of jaundice and gangrene and blood and bile stained those billowy shrouds. Suns within the sickly veils of gas, and of vile corruption, of a cancer spreading through the void.

It was the Eye of Terror – where Chaos spiled into reality. Where warped worlds of unnatural geometry orbited furnaces of nauseous light. Where daemons ruled.”

(many of) THE BAD BITS ARE NOT THAT BAD ACTUALLY Ok the perving on the Callidus assassin, including her constantly stripping naked, putting on sysnskin, examining herself in the mirror naked and noting the shape of her breasts (watson what the fuck). Pretty much everything to do with sex is anguished, overwrought, obsessive, horrifically and malignantly autistic in a negative sense.. however, is this Watson being a charismatic nutter or brilliantly illuminating the perverse compression of natural human desire in a nightmare future? I refer you to the IQ graph above..

The meeting with the emperor is relatively well done and not that dumb. It takes a super-competent inquisitorial team about a month to weave their way through the palace, constantly changing identities, being lead a crazed path of opportunities by a prescient fragment of the Emperors soul itself and they only get through the Eternity Gate because a larger gestalt of the Emperor casts Time Stop and pulls them through.

The last book is a downer with the team hiding out on one single world instead of having a crazed rollercoaster time, but there are still a host of deranged moments and a sad, hurried end.

JAQ DRACO WILL RETURN! [SPOILERS!] What happened to the Ordo Hydra?

The Sensi are coming back! The original Woke Warriors for our Disney Plus future!

The Star Child!

At the end Jaq Draco DIES but his spirit is trapped in the webway where he can commune with dead Eldar seers. HE COULD STILL BE IN THERE! Its going to be great if he pops up randomly in some future book.

Meh-lindi the sexy, dangerous Callidus assassin is sort-of resurrected in the end! I fucking BET Abnett or someone will being back the only Callidus to successfully impersonate a Genestealer AND and Eldar (though not at the same time), she is still out there!

Grimm the Squat! That utter legend! Will he turn up on Necromuda?

Probably GW aims to escape the looming tentacles of the hysteric left and the pink captialists “WHAT ARE YOU DOING THERE NERDS? IS THAT FASCISM I SEE?” by shattering the Galaxy, turning it into something like Age of Sigmar with bits dominated by Primarchs and godlings, and brining back the Sensai and the Star Child so that you can finally tell your mum “No mum I an playing the good-guy anti-fascists actually!”

Hey its from Rogue Trader, its scripture so you can’t complain.

JONATHAH KEEBLE NEEDS TO PERFORM THIS BOOK! That’s it! Imagine him reading this stuff. It would be wild!

WE ARE MANY “WE ARE MANY, INQUISITOR’. The voice boomed in his mind almost gently – if gently was how an avalanche would sweep away a doomed village, if gently was how a scalpel might strip a life to the bare, aching bones.

HOW ELSE COULD WE ADMINISTER OUR IMPERIUM – ‘

‘AS WELL AS WINNOW THE WARP – ‘

‘HOW ELSE?’

The Emperors mind-voice, if that truly was what it was, had dissociated into several voices, as if his great undying soul co-existed in fragments that barely hung together.

‘SO DOES THE HYDRA THREATEN US?’

‘IMPERILLING OUR GREAT AND AWFUL PLAN TO STEER HUMANITY?’

‘PERHAPS, IN A PART OF US, SINCE THIS HYDRA PROMISES A PATH?’

‘SURELY A MALEVOLENT PATH; FOR HOW COULD HUMANITY EVER FREE ITSELF?’

‘THEN WE MUST BE MALEVOLENT TOO. FOR WE HAVE EXPELLED OUR SENTIMENTALITY LONG AGO. HOW ELSE COULD WE HAVE ENDURED? HOW ELSE COULD WE HAVE IMPOSED OUR RULE?’

‘YET BY VIRTUE OF THAT WE ARE PURE AND UNCONTAMINATED BY WEAKNESS. WE ARE GRIM SALVATION.’

…..

‘NOTHING THAT SAFEGUARDS HUMANITY CAN BE EVIL, NOT EVEN THE MOST STRENUOUS INHUMANITY. IF THE HUMAN RACE FAILS, IT HAS FAILED FOREVER.’

….

‘WHEN WE CONFRONTED THE CORRUPTED, HOMICIDAL HORUS WHO ONCE USED TO SHINE LIKE THE BRIGHTEST STAR, WHO USED TO BE OUR BELOVED FAVOURITE – WHEN THE FATE OF THE GALAXY HUNG BY A THREAD – WERE WE NOT COMPELLED TO EXPEL ALL COMPASSION? ALL LOVE? ALL JOY? THOSE WENT AWAY. HOW ELSE COULD WE HAVE ARMOURED OURSELVES? EXISTENCE IS TORMENT, A TORMENT THAT MUST NOURISH US. EVIDENTLY WE MUST STRIVE TO BE THE FIERECE REDEEMER OF MAN, YET WHAT WILL REDEEM US?

‘Great lord of all,’ whimpered Jaq, ‘did you know of the hydra before now?’

‘NO, AND SURELY WE SHALL ACT IN DUE TIME – ‘

‘YET SURELY WE KNEW. HOW COULD WE NOT KNOW?’

‘ONCE WE HAVE ANAYSED THE INFORMATION IN THIS SUB-MIND OF OURS,

HEAR THIS JAQ DRACO: ONLY TINY PORTIONS OF US CAN HEED YOU, OTHERWISE WE NEGLECT OUR IMPERIUM, OF WHICH OUR SCRUTINY MUST NOT FALTER FOR AN INSTANT. FOR TIME DOES NOT HELT EVERYWHERE WITHIN THE REALM OF MAN. INDEED TIME HALTS ONLY FOR YOU.

‘WE ARE AN EVER-WATCHFUL LORD ARE WE NOT? DID YOU HOPE TO GAIN OUR UNDIVIDED ATTENTION?’

‘HOW ELSE SHOULD WE SOUL-BIND PSYKERS AND OVERVIEW THE WARP AND BEAM THE ASTRONOMICON BEACOM AND SURVIVE AND RECEIVE INFORMATION AND GRANT AUDIENCES ALL AT ONCE, UNLESS WE ARE SO MANY?

‘AND YET STILL WE MISS SO MUCH, SO VERY MUCH? SUCH AS THAT WHICH GUIDED YOU HERE.’

‘OUR SPIRIT GUIDED YOU.’

‘NO: ANOTHER SPIRIT, A REFLECTION OF OUR GOODNESS WHICH WE THRUST FROM US.’

‘WE ARE THE ONLY SOURCE OF GOODNESS, SEVERE AND DRASTIC. THERE IS NO OTHER SOURCE OF HOPE THAN US. WE ARE AGONISINGLY ALONE.’

View Details

As mentioned here, I am attending the 'Cauldron' Con in Germany and am trying to develop a 'real time' adventure to run there. This is a development blog for that adventure. This is what I have so far. Later blogs will probably go into more specific sections and problems rather than giving an overview.

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Ride the Giants

Once in every century, a crowd of ancient,stoop-shouldered giants come down from the Star Mountains and stride down the Sword Peninsula towards the Titans Reach,where the Sea of Storms separates the Lands We Know from the nightmare MonsterContinent which lies beyond.

There, at the very point of the land, the Giants slow alittle, perhaps to gaze at the wild ocean before them. Then they walk off theland, into the sea, and wade across theTitans Reach, the sea covering them even to the neck, the mouth, the eyes. Withoutslowing, they surge through the waves and, after four hours of wading, theyrise once again to the land, walking up the shore and making their way off intothe Monster Continent.

Where they go, or why, none know, nor how they return.Perhaps they endlessly circle the world, for in roughly 100 years, the samegiants will return, again coming down from the Star Mountains, and again,slowing, just a little, to gaze at the Sea of Storms before they plunge into itand wade across the Titans Reach.

They do not speak or communicate in any way. They walkthrough anything in their path, pushing down fortress walls like a man pushingthrough weeds, but ignore anything beyond it.

A century ago observers with telescopes and trained birdsnoted ruins on the giants backs, strange parasites in their rockyskin, relics and remnants of unknown actions studded across them and what seemto be mysterious temples built atop their bowed heads!

Now the Giants come again, but this time we are ready!

I am King Sleet and I have called adventurers from acrossall realms. I have called you.

Not to stop the giants, for nothing can, and we fear theirwrath if we try, but to board them!

As the giants slow before the Titans Reach, they are justslow enough that it becomes possible to climb onto their feet.

Board a giant. Climb it. If you are quick, it should bepossible to climb their legs as they wade into the ocean, staying just ahead ofthe rising water. Investigate. For any Lore or Treasure you return, you will bewell paid.

My small navy waits at sea. They shall try to follow thegiants, as well they can. A few experimental Hot Air Balloons await. They arehard to control but they will try to follow and assist.

You have FOUR HOURS (in real time) until the Giants walkonto the Continent of Monsters. None who go there return!

They come! Prepare yourselves!

The Scene

As you look across the ranging fields you see spots ofcolour; other groups of wild adventurers waiting with hooks, grapples, ladders,horses and a crazy range of tool and tricks.

Far beyond the giants path, the King observes from hispavilion, and lined around him, the people of the land, waiting to see theGiants. Far out to sea, the Kings small navy prepares to attempt to follow thegiants and in the air, experimental but hard to control hot air balloons bobabout, hoping to observe and perhaps even offer rescue.

The brass horns are blowing! The ground is shaking! Thecrowd roars!

The Giants

The Giants are proportioned like immensely strong butvery ancient men with stony skin. They walk bent over like hunchbacks, headstilted up so they can see.

From their perspective they are not walking veryfast, but their enormous size means that, to us, their feet thunder past. Therelative movement of their bodies is very slow, but for someone on the groundas they step over, the gargantuan foot fairly flies past overhead.

The Giants heads are roughly 2,000 Feet in theair.

Their skin is pitted and rocky. Where an ancient manwould have wrinkles and folds, they have cracks and crevices. Their surfacelooks rough and fricative. Scrub plants have taken root in places. Some havetrees or heather, scrubland and maquis, even small trickling streams, on theirbacks.

If a giant was static and still, an energetichiker could possibly climb one in an hour and a half.

The giants have something like hair. Perhaps it is vinesor growth of some kind mixed with ancient hair as thick as ropes or thebranches of trees. The hair hangs down around their heads and faces. On some,hair speckles their forearms and thighs. The Giants have thick hanging crotchand ass hair, which thankfully spares the modesty of those who look upon them,and which might also prove useful to climbers.

The Giants Path

There are about a dozen Giants. They walk together in nofixed formation. They sometimes stumble and brush up against one another. (Itmight be possible to leap from one to another).

Over the Eons the Giants have worn a shallow valley inthe ground. Rivers and streams often weave and gather in this valley, so thegiants sometimes splash through them on their way.

Giant Layout – Labelled

The Climb

1. The Foot

A 50 foot cliff. Very rugged, not sheer, more like aclamber. Race to the ankle. Need to climb up over and around the ankle to theback of the lower leg. There are unlikely to be other life-forms or encounterson the foot.

Though, as the most accessible place, there might besmall encampments of bandits, sigilites, monks or others who have mounted thegiant at some point during its great journey. Those who understand the ocean iscoming will either be about to jump off or, like you, be willing to risk a rapidascent to stay above the waters.

This would be a good place for a goatherds shack actually.They could let their goats rove all over the giant. Maybe they are a monk. Willthey come with you as you climb or refuse to believe in their doom until thesea washes over them.

The Ankle Cross

A traverse around a moving joint. Big possibility offalling off here, it must be accomplished quickly before the giant takes toomany steps into the sea. Once on the rear of the calf the terrain becomes morepredictable and the angle of climb more advantageous.

Of course you could try climbing the overhand of theshin, but that is madness..

If there are other teams or spoiling factors this would bea good first spot to knock someone off, but does not guarantee their death….

2. The Lower Leg Climb

How far is this? About 150 feet. A hard scramble andclimb up the back of the calf, a moving surface which shifts from near verticalto overhang in pulses as the giant walks.

This is probably the most important time-sensitive climbas reaching the knee will keep you safe for most of the journey, only thedeepest part of the ocean at the two-hour mark will reach past this

The Knee Decision

As one reaches the knee another traverse is required,followed by a decision. Should one continue to climb the frontal thigh, aimingfor the hips and lower back, or risk it all with a daring leap onto the giantshand?

The hand swings very close to the knee over the giantsslow steps. It is certainly possible to try to jump onto a knuckle as it swingsnear the kneecap. This might allow you to climb the arm and give you a timeadvantage, avoiding whatever terrors occupy the back.. You can aim right forthe head! It’s a straight climb up past the shoulder,

3. The Upper Leg

The climb up the front of the thigh may be fatiguing butis not technically difficult and it stands the best change of keeping yourparty together. As you begin to reach the hip you are truly out of danger fromthe rising sea level and can afford to take s short break to consider.

Will you attempt a traverse up and over the hip, aiming forthe side of the back? Or will you clamber into the giants dense ass hair? Thegrowth is thick and tangled, making the way seem relatively safe. You couldmove through the crotch like a tick, work your way through the steaming jungleof the taint and then haul your way up to the base of the spine via the asshair between the cheeks.

It sounds horrific, but isn’t just such an investigationthe reason you are here? And who knows who, or what you may discover in thatDark Realm?

4. The Back

At last, the great tilted expanse of the Giants Back. Finallyyou need no longer fear falling off. However this is a ready environment forcombat, either with other explorers or denizens of the Giants body. Its also agood place for a Balloon to try to land, they could tie up here and wait foryou, assuming you have already made arrangements. Or Balloons could land rivalparties or pirates.

Will you explore the karst and moorland of the back orhead straight for the head and its mysteries? From here you can probably easilymake out the tailing naval forces. You may also be exposed to any flying monsters..

5. The Head

What is the mysterious structure atop the Giants head andwhat secrets or treasures does it hold? Can you gain access to the Giants Thoughts(and even PILOT the giant?)

This would be a good place for a Balloon to try to pickyou up from (if possible), but the Head may be haunted by Quetzacotolous orother flying creatures, perhaps mountain lions or even super-monkeys makingtheir home in the dense forest of its hair.

Getting through that dense hair to the temple or fort onthe giants crown will be the hard part. One must risk diving or crawlingthrough the maquis of the scalp, risking attack by whatever lies beneath, orattack from above, the whirl of strange flying parasites which circles abovethe giants highest point, riding the thermals of its exertions.

From here you can easily see the head-tops of the othergiants. Which other adventurers have already reached their summits? Some may bebeing picked up by balloons already, others may be rotating vast cannons orlazer guns to blast at you! Or signalling more peaceful intentions, even requestsfor aid…

This might be a good place to consider, will you risk leapingto another giant? If you traverse down to the arm it might be possible as theybrush against each other…

Reaching the peak of the head would also give you a goodlook at the advancing line of the Monster Continent, coming closer with eachmighty step….

6. The Arm Climb

The arm in general is a tough, vertical climb with lesshand holds and less safety. It may however be less populated than the thigh andif one can manage it, it might bring you more directly to the neck, and thenceto the head, bypassing the great Karst of the back completely.

The Mysteries of the Hand!

Do the Giants have great rings upon those stony fingers?If so can you read the cartouche of its symbols as you climb across its goldensurface? Or does the giant have something in its hand? How big is that somethingand might it drop it? Is the giants ‘skin’ around its palm and fingertipsperhaps sensitive enough that it may detect the PCs climbing it? Here theswinging force of the giants movements would be the greatest of all.

The Elbow Traverse

Like the Knee traverse but worse. The angles of thegiants arms are more vertical than their legs but its still much easier toclimb the upward diagonal of the rear of its upper arm than to risk theoverhang of the front of the upper arm. Cover is less, as the rocky ‘skin’ ofthe giant is less chunky and dense.

Hair or Shoulders?

The giants armpit hair can provide a brief respite ofillusory safety but ultimately you are going to have to get up, out and over..

OR – if you are feeling truly radical, and if the giantitself has long enough hair or a long enough beard, you could try another LEAPinto the giants beard and/or hair.

Climbing the Hair

The thick, foresty hair should be climbable by anyone thief-likeor elf-like. But the hair is dense, may contain even more bugs and monsters. Hugeflakes of dandruff, and is a vertical climb which, no matter the hand holds,will be challenging. Though if you fall there is s good chance of grabbingsomething on the way down. The beard (if present) could provide a useful ‘off ramp’ for the last part of theadventure.

If one wishes to make a quick exit on the return as thegiant is rising from the waves, it might be worth abseiling or clambering downits beard and dropping from the tips, hoping to be picked up by following shipsbefore the weight of your treasure drowns you.

The Giants Face

Only by climbing the hair will you stand a chance of lookingdeeply into the giants FACE

It can be seen from far off, but what strange sadnessdoes it hold when seem from close up?

What impossible and ancient emotions might it project?

The Great Shoulder Traverse

The tricky part is getting out of the armpit via theoverhang. But once this is done it’s a fatiguing but relatively simple scrambleacross its shoulders, up to its neck. If you are quick you may well beat anyoneclimbing from the legs.

The Schedule

How long to board the foot?

How long till you have to climb?

THE SPLASH POINT

The giants enter the sea! This should be a major deal! Asthe giants foot slashes into the waves, from this point, the water is rising!

Two Hours In – The Mid Point

The Giants are as deep in the sea as they can be

Now would be the safest time to jump off

And if you are still alive it must be because you havegot pretty high

So why wouldn’t PCs jump off at this point?

Maybe the Giants only get up to their hips? So you havetwo hours to get that high?

Then the rest of the time to get over the back and down?

Or maybe even to try your luck on another giant?

Three Hours In - race for the scalp

Four Hours In – The Turnaround

Design Questions

‘Encounters’ while climbing

Or just things you find or discover there..

These could be potential treasures, life forms, bits ofhistory

Maybe whole ship fragments

In the foot-to knee area (currently the part of the giantwhere they are climbing quickly to escape the rising sea levels

When might you fall off?

Lets say with climbing limbs

You are in most danger of falling off *when the limb isvertical*

And since the limb is moving in ‘real time’ you can usethat as the ‘pulse’ of the game

With some kind of real-time timer

So while climbing, each pulse of gaming would be ascramble to secure yourself, or at least not be doing anything risky, beforethe limb reaches vertical

What is the Procedure for falling off and getting back on?

I mean, if you fall from high enough, death is prettylikely

Above a certain height water, even sea-foam, is likeconcrete

But there should be some kind of possibility of gettingback on the giant

Bribing a ship captain with treasures or a balloon pilot

Spoiling factors..

A Naval war as ships from a rival king, or even from theMonster Continent attack those following in the lee of the giants. A Trafalgarattacks! You see the ships blasting at each other from above. No idea who willwin. Will you risk leaping into the sea, not knowing who may pick you up or howlong it may take? Will you try to intervene, perhaps firing from the giantshead or even attempting to manipulate a giant into crushing your foes?

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Over many a volume of forgotten Lore, through many an hour of Netflix and Disney dreck and many a meltdown over whatever Games Workshop is doing this week, I have pondered the interlacement of the Paracosm, the Corporation, and Autism.

Lets say instead, - 'autistic traits' or 'light autistic spectrum traits'. Strongly Autistic individuals have a very hard time and don't get to do much. Those of us with autistic traits, of whom there are many more, well we have quite a strong effect on, and relationship with, popular culture.

You might even say that we are the collective gravitational force of Genre-based popular fiction.

Part One - Evolution of the Paracosm

But first the Paracosm, the alternate world! Its primordial precursors; most religions, imagined tales of distant lands, stories of a legendary past,

Then more recently; the philosophical disquisition given concrete form; what if there was an island where this or that happened? Or a country that was ruled this or that way? Lets imagine it in detail, not just the parts relative to the argument but the whole thing. a republic, a Utopia, a perfect king a most awful tyranny.

Then; what if we just imagined such a place but there was no (direct) political argument to it? Or at least, it did not primarily rest on such an argument. This is not, legend, history, argument or scripture, it is directly stated fancy, a fiction. A creation of the imagination, and called so,

but described as if it were a real place.

Then; when does it become a full Paracosm? When it is shared between multiple people? If so then the earliest I can think of is Glassland, the imaginary world cooked up by the Brontes.

There must be a deep forgotten history of the Paracosm because it emerges so naturally from the play of children in friendship groups and families.

E.R. Eddison, writer of The Worm Ouroboros had one with his own brother I think, which is where many of his stories were set. The serial scientific and fantastic fictions of the late 19th and early 20th century were Paracosm, but owned by their author, and usually made purely as a vector for stories, the linked stories by various authors in 'Strange Tales' in particular

The vast, many-peopled Paracosm as we understand it I think really took root in the 70s and is closely related to D&D and corporate ownership.

Part Two - Corporate Power

for a Paracosm to be projected across a vast range of people, and for those people to be able to interact in a regular and systemic way with it, and for those systems to be unified and universally communicated, requires industrial production, complex communication and organisation.

A substantially large organisation must do this. Something bigger than just a small business, and for a substantially large organisation to do this there must be a substantially large reward. At minimum enough to pay for the industrial reproduction, communication and organisation. So the beast becomes something that feeds upon itself. The more industrial reproduction and systemisation spread the Paracosm, the more people interact with it, which feeds back into greater profits, which can go into more industrial production.

But more. As we consider the Paracosm though time, (and the most active ones have not been active that long), like land, if you want it to remain coherent, that is; stable in use and nature, then it must have an owner of singular identity, but one much longer lived than any individual person.

Historically the owners of land have been; an aristocratic family, the Church, a religious order, the King etc.

To which we may now add the corporation. The aristocratic houses of our modern day, and the Paracosm a virtual barony, which, like a stretch of agricultural land, can be conserved, developed, sold off, reduced to ruination and treated in many ways as a real place.

Now the Corporation, a 'virtual' aristocratic house, has its own virtual kingdom, a place sustained and made real by the interest and investment in it.

Something happened in the late 60's and 70s. Something to do with the growth of genre, the power of information technology and industrial production, free time for nerds and corporate interlacement with the imagination.

The 60's - Star Trek, Tolkeins major growth. Marvel and DC get a boost here and are re-integrated as Paracosms though they have been running for a while.

The 70s - Star Wars, Dungeons and Dragons

The 80's - the Warhammers

So we have a synthesis; the Paracosm, an imagined barony, and the Corporation, an imagined and potentially immortal individual. The Corporation can own a Paracosm ... forever perhaps, and can theoretically maintain a profit on it forever, and it is that profit that allows the Paracosm to keep developing. The corporation is not an author, it has no single use in mind for the Paracosm

but far from it, desires as many uses as possible across as many systems of production as possible.

Part Three - Autistic Traits

The interest in a Paracosm is not the same as the interest in an individual book or film but is renewed and remade through books, films, comics, television, animation, games, toys, models, props, bought costumes, embodied in acts of shared social play and through gatherings. All of these methods united by their shared love for and expression of, a place, or a reality, which is not real, yet is still shared and experienced by a great many people.

DEPTH of interest.
love of DETAIL.
Love of OBJECTS.
SYSTEMISATION of shared communion.
DISCUSSION and ARGUMENT over details.

And chief and ruler of these passions, desire to be POSESSED BY THE IMAGINED WORLD

None of these are necessarily the product of light autistic traits, but as a whole they synthesise with those traits, and with the pressures and coping strategies they produce, perfectly.

And from hence comes the great and terrible danger and most subtle trap of the Paracosm, the need to MILK THE COWS, for the cows are we.

Four - The Milking Process

Those who are drawn to the Paracosm tend to have autistic traits and of those who are drawn, there is something of a curve.

Cows.

Cows is what we are.

But imagine you owned a field of cows, and some cows you could only milk once a day, or even once a week, and you had to go and round them up to do it.

But there were other cows, a minority, who you could milk twice a day, three times a day, more. And you don't have to go round them up. Instead they come to you, constantly, and in fact they get quite violent if you refuse to milk them.

So originally you start out with a Dairy Farm, as we would understand it, but what you end up with is quite different. It’s a milk factory . Which, yes a Dairy Farm is a milk factory. The difference is in the proportion of attention and resources you give to each part.

By the end, the factory is the main thing and you have forgotten you even had fields. There are fields out there sure, the cows live there, but most of your time is taken up with the very productive cows

and even more with those small minority of hyper-productive cows.

Really, as accounting goes, and as your milking operation improves, becoming more and more efficient, your fields decay, and this is inevitable.

Hence the life-cycle of the Paracosm

Five - The Natural Life-Cycle Of The Paracosm

Now, we don't know a lot of this for certain. The Paracosm that most neatly fit our definition have only been going since the 30s , so even the oldest are less than a century old, nor can we guess how they will respond to copyright laws which usually max out after about 100 years, but within that time period we can see a continual process, a pulse of growth and die-back.

Following the cows.

Always follow the cows.

............

(It’s beyond curious to me that after Marvel and DC essentially bricked themselves into the Comic Book stores, to milk the cows of course, and maybe 40 years later, Disney/Marvel finds itself doing exactly the same thing, bricking itself back up inside Disney Plus.

It costs less outlay, less terrifying risk and the cows come to you.

At the same time Games Workshop attempts its own Streaming Service.

There are echoes here of the Comic Shop but also of Apples 'walled garden', of a lifestyle brand where every widget and thingy integrates with every other whatever, and where you can charge people a LOT, for entrance to that garden because, in Apples case, you are essentially guarding entrance to the globalised middle class.

None of the Paracosm-guardians have managed that yet, and likely nor shall they, (because of the Autistic Traits))

............

I will venture this as a thesis; every corporate-owned Paracosm, (which is to say nearly every major Paracosm), is at any point, somewhere in this long orbit between states.

Its natural arc is to slowly decay into a nightmare milk factory.

Then once that collapses, the milk factory will be razed and the clean open fields of a fresh new farm to be opened (with the ruins still lingering beneath the soil).

Then the whole process will begin again.

At times Paracosm can be pulled back and forth between the poles. Sometimes they can totally collapse and be regenerated, either by being newly acquired or even through 'community action', but they are always somewhere between these two points and defined by the gravitational pull between milking the cows and luring more cows. Those are the tectonic forces of imaginary worlds. The Gravity of Cows.

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WHATS GOING ON HERE

I have been invited to a Con in Germany called 'Cauldron'

https://cauldron.pesa-nexus.de/en/home/

and my mum said I should go so I am going. I will be picked up in Frankfurt and driven to a castle in the middle of Bavaria.... For several days.. I am sure everything will be fine...

Anyway they asked me to run something;

"the general idea is to play mostly FLAILSNAILS compatible sessions, so that a player can play his character across the convention. .... The minimum requirement for any game system during the weekend is to award gold & treasure in the adventure commensurate with the challenges & dangers, i. e. an "XP for gold"-standard, roughly following B/X, 1e or OD&D tables in value."

So, now I must dig through my mental 'bits box' to put together... something. A four-hour FLAILSNAILS session at least..

Lets think about some possible concepts;

1. GIANTS IN THE ACID SEA

A dungeon, or a series of dungeons, set 'on' the bodies of some enormous stony giants who are wading across a sea of acid. (So you can't just jump off).

Though, the problem of what to do if or when someone fals off a giant, and if or how they might get back on, would be tricky.

Mapping would also be tricky; the backs and top of the heads would be relatively easy

but climbing around the torsos and faces and under the chins would be hard to depict

and YES its just 'Shadow of the Colossus' or whatever was going on with those Zelda dungeons.

If its for a Con, the time factor of the giants wading the acid sea could be a neat limit. Say you leap onto a Giant as they enter the Acid Sea and have until they wade across to complete your mission. We could just say there is a real-time time limit.

Maybe they are gradually wading so deep that only the tops of their heads are exposed and you need to jump back on the airship before they go completely underwater, or they reach the deep part of the sea precisely half-way through the session, with parts of the giants becoming un-navigable up to that point, with all the surviving creatures on the giants gradually forced up to the crown of their giant heads, then after the middle of the session the 'maps' slowly open up again until they reach the shore, then you can climb down a leg and exit via the heel.

You can jump from giant to giant. They have treasure on them, like earrings or crumbs of gold in their hair. Or you have a mission of some kind to find something.

Probably they have small temples or castles on the tops of each head and you can fire catapults or cannons from crown to crown.

For some reason I was imagining this as a knock-out 'vs' game with rival teams of adventurers clambering over the giants and trying to take each other out. Or maybe a rival tomb, or crown-robbing expedition where you leap onto the giants feet right at the start and everyone is racing to make it to the top, but also you can 'board' or jump onto other giants who are also stumbling along.

2. THE ROPE BRIDGE BROKE

An adventure starts mis-en scene with the party in the middle of a rope bridge, they are in the middle of a fight or adventure, the bridge snaps and two half's of the group are flung to either side of the ravine.

Its entirely random who ends up on which side of the ravine. Though the groups are relatively equal in number.

From that point on its a journey up along the river/ravine. The aim of the party is to get back together (maybe each half of the party has half of a magical McGuffin

There is a group of bad guys, a specific group, with their own identity and rituals. Presumably they also want the McGuffin (both halves).

Probably the cliffs to both sides have various tombs, statues and complexes worked into the stone, so you can run along the cliff top, or if threatened, or that becomes impassable, climb across the statues and run through the tunnels of the cliffside.

(Maybe there are giants or trolls up there throwing boulders for fun so you don't want to skyline).

The main challenge in this case is not getting past any particular problem but getting past it *quickly* and without burning a lot of resources.

Probably the enemy group is pursuing you and, since the terrain on each side of the ravine is very lumpy, the PCs on the *opposite* side can see the people pursuing you, and even shoot at them, while you can't see them yourself, and visa-versa. So part of the game might be combining your efforts to aid each other.

The end-game is you need to get to the stone bridge further upstream, but when you get there there is a big monster or something waiting and you will need to work together and hopefully use the stuff you grabbed as you ran through the tombs to fight it.

3. A RACING GAME....

this is kind of blissfully dumb but could stripmine Gaslands for rules, instead of cars, use magic animals. Players can pick toys to choose which animal their PC is riding. All PCs retain their powers and skills.

Now their job is to win a race. Maybe they are racing for the hand of the Infinite Princess. But its an apocalyptic deathrace 2000 pod race kind of thing, with lots of encounters and strange terrain, treasure and tools hanging around plus problems its really hard to overcome without teaming up with other players, plus orc racer gang on pigs.

Will the PCs work together or try to beat each other to the finish line? Coolness of prizes goes in order of finishing so being ahead of someone might get you more XP or fun magical stuff for the next adventure.

4. LOOT THE SINKING SHIP

A ship is a nice, contained and explicable shape. A sinking ship having four real-time hours before it fully sinks and you need to get away from it to escape being dragged down. Advancing fish-creatures or mer-people. Interesting time-sensitive choices between things i.e. do you release prisoners or search for treasure.

You might have to fight the crew, or choose between fighting or saving the crew.

5. STOP THE MEMETIC PLAGUE

This is one, really designed specifically to be a nightmare for EVERY OTHER DM AT THE CON.

I don't know exactly how it works but there is some kind of memetic plague, maybe something that trades power for slow degradation and transmittabillaty. Like Vampirism except faster and more fun, like Fireball Vamparism where someone gets the ability to cast 'Fireball' but its transmissible and wants to keep being cast. (Also its slowly killing you).

Maybe the fire itself is the medium of transmission.

But if the PCs screw up and the 'infection' gets out of this particular game (like the Zombie survivor who gets bitten but doesn't tell anyone), then it can 'infect' every other game at the CON that those survivors get to, and then pass on, and on, absolutely destroying Germanies FLAILSNAILS scene, if such a think exists.

I suppose a good basis for this would be the 'Fire at the Laboratory' adventure. Maybe a wizards black tower, or worse, an interdimensional TARDIS-like lair, but its burning down. (A fire burning in an interdimensional place might be fascinating). The PCs have to make choices about fighting the fire, looting the place, not getting infected by the Fireball plague, (or 'getting' infected if they are sneaky).

The Wizards wierd mutant experiments getting out, or maybe you want to let them out, they are just experimental animals after all, its not their fault they are locked in a burning TARDIS.

The interdimensional nature of the space makes incorporation into a FLAILSNAILS setting pretty simple since PCs could easily be vomited out wherever. It also means creatures and NPCs could 'escape' into other games, or that people or things from other games could show up in this one, having accidentally wandered in, or having been captured or whatever.

6 - One of these OLD POSTS turned into an adventure somehow;

THE WATCHMAKERS WIFE

WHO CAN STOP THE WORLDS MOST EVIL DOG?

AN ADVENTURE IN XOPHT

THE STOLEN SKIN OF SUN

YOU MAY VOTE OR COMMENT IF YOU WISH

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What was Africa like during the Pleistocene?

Oh it was pretty cool. (￣ー￣)

Human population bottleneck theories vary quite a bit but the most recent, most reliable synthesis I am familiar with guesses the total human population reduced to somewhere between 3,000 and 10,000 individuals for 5,000 to 10,000 years some time in the Pleistocene, say maybe about 70,000 years ago, possibly in what is now north east Africa.

WHAT IF we created some kind of RPG set within that forge of mankind? Its a tantalising reality; a closed environment, surrounded by, well probably not ice, as the ice walls would be further north, but probably dry land and super-deserts, then ice. Plus the mountains of Africa would probably have substantial glaciers so there's your 'Ice Walls', title still counts.

The entirety of humanity being about 7'000 people. If we go by Dunbars numbers and eyeball it we could say four or five 'tribes', each with say 15 lineage groups with about three bands each. So depending on the kind of game you play, you could 'encounter' pretty much everyone who exists.

WHAT WAS THAT ENVIRONMENT LIKE?

In Africa? Warm and wet I think, especially wet. BIG lakes, big rivers, Glaciers coming down from the mountains. Africa probably quite a bit chonkier side-to-side due to lower sea levels. May possibly have joined with Arabia at points. Pretty big north-to-south as well but you can't actually get north due to the arid super-sahara and beyond that.. the valley of the Mediterranean? No idea what that would have been like. North of that maybe some microclimates in the alps then permafrost for a few 100 miles then ICE SHEETS.

"In Eurasia, large lakes developed as a result of the runoff from the glaciers. Rivers were larger, had a more copious flow, and were braided. African lakes were fuller, apparently from decreased evaporation. Deserts, on the other hand, were drier and more extensive. Rainfall was lower because of the decreases in oceanic and other evaporation." - from Wikipedia

FUNKY ANIMALS

I could build you a list of 'cool' Pleistocene animals to encounter but, tbh, the African 'Big Animal' set doesn't look like it was *that much* different during that era. There are various theories about this, the main one is that this biosphere had longer to get used to human behaviour and wasn't hugely changed when humans as we know them spread out after the last glacial maximum.

Most importantly, several cool animals were *quite larger*, i.e. Super-Hippos, Murder-Baboons. And humanity really had utterly crap technology to deal with them.

And also some very fun art has been made of this environment

Got this one off pintrest

Its quite wonderful for a D&D type game as everything is so sublimely dangerous.

DIFFERENT HUMAN STRAINS

A fascinating but somewhat morally-complex element is the vast potential range of human strains.

(Please don't comment about what exactly a species or subspecies or race or whatever is or is not, the matter is in development.)

A trend in Prehistory(?) currently is the gradual expansion of a much greater variety of human and humanlike 'types'. (I will just call these 'human strains'). Previously we knew that 'Sapiens' and Neanderthal co-existed, but genetics has unravelled that this bottleneck population, or something close to them, interbred with Neanderthal enough to leave a tangible trace in their genetics. We know about Florensis, the little hobbit dudes and from Denovisian Cave we know that a bunch of human strains were effectively hanging out in what seems to have been the Mos Eisley Cantina of prehistory. We also know that a lot of current African populations have 'ghost populations' in their genetics; traces of some kind of lost strain for which we have no evidence except for the faint echo they left behind in a surviving Sapiens population.

The 'out of Africa theory remains broadly in place but with massive, (I can't emphasise this enough, MASSIVE) complexification, with loop-backs, bottlenecks, strain-crossing, evidence of these strains hanging out just a lot of stuff.

If the pre-21stC version of Homo origins was a nice neat set of spreading lines and a few discreet 'subspecies' who may have barely interacted but displaced each other through environmental effects, then the new version is.. basically Jabbas Palace. Way, way way more types and strains of Homo, way more crossbreeding, way more interaction, way more messy strange bullshit.

The very-rare nature of pre-glacial-maximum remains (plus the fact that many are probably in Africa and even with a massive input of wealth and tech, are probably covered by rainforest and won't be found without a truly sci-fi level of tech), and the massive increase in types, and genetic and archaeological evidence of mutual-existence and interaction, has strongly tilted the general view of pre-historic human-strain history into kind of more like an American post-Tolkien fantasy novel. Its not really stupid any more to say hey, maybe a surviving *Erectus*, a Neanderthal and Denovisian and a Sapiens team up to fight a fucking giant tiger or something.

Its still not probably likely but it feels way more likely than it was.

I think this is by Marucio Anton

THE GENETIC SQUEEZE-BOX

This 'Bottleneck', (both the real one and the one we are simulating in this game), may well have acted as a genetic sausage machine for a variety of human strains. This means the populations going in to the bottleneck might have a pretty high level of diversity, but the population coming out, is singular; after several millennia with less than 10,000 individuals they have the very low-diversity genome we associate with the extra-African Sapiens population.

Peter Schouten

WHAT IS THE ACTUAL GAME LIKE?

WHO is the RPG player playing?

The tribe? The person? The Gene-line? Is this a survival/crafting game? A cultural development game? A game of genetics? A game about exploring the boundaries of your world, or a game about surviving within the boundaries of a closing world?

I honestly don't know and in fact it sounds more like a series of games.

At the 'top end' a genetics/environmental-influenced Microscope.

Below that a crafting/cultural/technology semi-simulator in the middle. Battles and diplomacy in a closed and shrinking world (maybe something patterned like Pendragon).

At the bottom end a very BX-like survive-the-monsters, gather food D&D-esque game.

I suppose you could combine these into one vast Fantasy Heartbreaker with each player playing a Gene-line at the top level, then after that 'round' of game time is played, they go down a level and play the 'tribe' or Culture-line, with abilities and developments influenced by the gene-tree, then you zoom down to the deep granular history and generate a bunch of Homo who's stats/equipment/abilities etc are all influenced by the previous two rounds. Then this little D&D team faces one of the crisis points of their small, closed world.

Depending on how they do in that mission they get more or less points to feed back into the next loop of gameplay.

PLAYING THE GENE-LINE

I don't actually know enough about genetics to even begin to attempt this, and I think possibly humanity doesn't know enough for anyone to simulate it. So I would be really very largely making it up. Which, from a political point of view may actually be better as this is one of the most politically and morally complex and dangerous parts of this extremely politically and morally sensitive game (see below for 'Things Which Won't Be In This Game').

THE TECH/TRIBE/CULTURE TREE

This might be a very-great compression but I would probably be going from starting out something like a very-clever Erectus, who might occasionally sharpen a rock, and ending up as something a bit like an Aboriginal Australian culture.

I have to base a extra-African just-post-Glacial-Maximum culture/technology group on something and Aboriginal Australians seem like the closest we are going to get any good info on. Their tech and culture feels pretty "early stone age".

POSSIBLE TECH/CULTURAL DEVELOPMENTS

Most Important; textiles, bags, containers, glues, attachment materials, hooks and lines, woven string and rope.

We would go from "Pick it up, drop it or bury it" to "Put it in the bag/gourd". This is a pretty big deal. Lines and cords are, as anyone who has played D&D will know, a very big deal. Clothing is maybe the most vital technology in allowing Sapiens to enter such a wide range of environments. Sewing is a killer app.

Most Charismatic; weapons, spears, boomerangs, atlatls, slings, hunting clubs, throwing sticks, early simple bow technology? Probably the simple bow was invented independently a bunch of times. Shields and armour are both important too. Aboriginal Australian cultural beliefs about shields are interesting.

Travel; canoes, (dugout and bark), initial canoes more likely to be used in lakes of which there were apparently quite a lot during the Pleistocene. I think even strapping things to friendly animals is quite a way off. Complexity of language and the cultural complexity required to receive, remember and transmit that information would be important. Going from "I will show you the way" to "I can tell you ALL the way" is a big deal and would fundamentally change the capacities of a society.

Cultural; message sticks, drumming, dance and Communal Performance as a 'living law book' capable of harmonising and transmitting a shared culture across many more people. Drumming and dance also seem really important in building shared identities and a 'communal self' probably enabling larger group sizes, mor sophisticated group actions giving you something to actually do or exchange if you go visit other humans other than just material things, and also just making life less shit. Complexity of language would be another; the development of syntax and tenses, descriptions of actual and supernatural things. This cultural complexity and the firmware needed to carry it helps you hang on to those cool inventions like slings and atlatls and sharp rocks. Most of these things were probably invented hundreds of times by increasingly clever Homo until finally someone found a way to jam them into the culture, transmit and preserve the information even if the original inventor wasn't there to show you how to do it. The relationship with, and inner conceptualisation of animals a main thing, you have to build the animal in your mind before you can interact with it.

Agricultural/Survival Shifts; from scavenging to hunting to possible-pastoralism and maybe some mild agriculture. Finding a new thing to eat and a new way to eat it is a big deal. Curiously in later pre-history there seem to have been some Neolithic culture groups who really liked fish, and others living in exactly the same environments who just would not eat fish, even over long periods. People are pretty interesting. One of the side-effects of culture may be... I suppose we would call it 'bugs', like "We are not eating shellfish fuck no not even if it means starving that stuff is banned by the spirits for a reason."

Dogs.

THE REAL-TIME GAME; EARLY HOLOCENE CATASTROPHES

All those melting glaciers, shrinking lakes, expanding land and changing rivers open the possibility for some quite-sudden catastrophic events. Not to mention the fucking MONSTER ANIMALS. Plus ALIEN HUMAN STRAINS!

Gigantic things, or the axial points of super long-term processes, can happen over a day, or a few hours, like an ice barrier breaks, tectonic shifts tilt a super-lake slightly against a thinning rock wall, a super-lake drains away mysteriously. Tunguska events. Again not likely of *common* but at least a few of these must have happened.

Or even slightly less catastrophic sudden arrivals of super-predators, giant unbeatable animals either driven south by expanding ice walls, or displaced by warming and its knock-on events. The arrival of a *last of its kind* forgotten mega-predator in an 'alien' environment would be fit fuel for an adventure. You want to try taking on that thing with sticks?

The arrival or displacement of an 'alien' human strain (i.e anyone sufficiently different from you) would be another. Its a limited resource-poor environment after all, and you can't really leave till the glacial maximum ends. Will this be a matter of SUPER WAR where you use all your cultural sophistication to turn your whole tribe into a SUPER HUNT gathered together and synchronised at an heretofore unimagined scale. An army of hundreds in one place?

Or could it be a Pleistocene Star Trek where your Sapiens/Neanderthal cross uses the power of imagination and intelligence to perform cross-strain diplomacy for the first time, entering into the gaze of an unknowable Other in attempts to bridge an unimaginable cognitive gap and form some common understanding?

Your kin-group is starving, your kin-group is sick, a new environmental possibility has opened up, another has closed down. Literally any kind of megafauna is fucking with you. Fucking MURDER BABBOONS?

nooooooooooooooooooo

THINGS THAT PROBABLY HAPPENED THAT YOU PROBABLY DON'T WANT IN YOUR GAME

Probably more than any other game I can imagine, this one would need a VERY long introduction, explanation, disclaimer and probably you have to sign something before you play promising not to cancel or sue the makers.

Starting with things that probably happened quite a lot in pre-history but which won't be happening (much) in this game;

Rape
Slavery
Patriarchy
Mutilation and torture
Genocide
Intensely weird sexual stuff
Human sacrifice
Cannibalism
Batshit Xenophobia

I don't mean to say (and we don't fundamentally know) if this stuff was universal, much less common in pre-history, but what we know of many Stone Age peoples (and since) strongly suggests the normalised nature of most if not all of this.

RPG players will tend strongly towards leb-leftism, but even if they didn't, on a greater scale, there is probably a hard limit to how much rape, abduction, genocide, mutilation, human sacrifice etc ANY person can reasonably expect to actually play out.

Any game which functions *as a game* will inevitably be presenting a very 'softened' interpretation of human capacities and nature, and this is ok, so long as I am very clear about the fact that this is a fantasy with softened corners and less sharp edges. Be aware you are participating in a real-seeming dream, and NOT a simulation.

Its just a limitation of the form. It is what it is I guess.

And... GENETICS

The beloved Science of Human Inequality raises its Janus-split face. It is genetics, to a large degree, with a fair amount of archaeology, we can thank for our expanding deep-view of our own prehistoric origins and all of the wonderful and sometimes awful complexity and detail that has emerged. Our genes really are a telescope in time.

Unfortunately our own society is based around a rather hard-won principal of the broadly equality of human life, and genetics is the science of precisely-described human inequality. This 'bottleneck' whether it was one event or several, created a deep shared structure in the *extra-african* Sapiens line (which then looped back into Africa in several ways). Enough of a commonality so that when this line spread out across Eurasia and into America, it seems to have either murdered the fuck out of every big animal it could find, or at least disrupted the environment so much those megafauna couldn't survive.

We don't know how and how much genetics interacted with culture and technology to produce this hyper-successful strain but I doubt it was *zero*. And that fact that it isn't *zero* is a meaningful moral challenge to the mainstream of our society.

Gene-line or 'descent' differences aren't the same as 19th Century concepts of race, but they speak the same language and unlike race, modern genetics speaks *precisely*. Genticists have largely gotten around this with a combination of blather and mild autism; "ah yes the 19thc century concept of 'race', oh no we wouldn't use anything like that any more, rather disproven you know, anyway, here's your childs likely IQ, to within a 5 pt margin."

On a deep level the genetic history of humanity teaches interwoven strands of truth. One strand is quite nice; it’s about shared human origins, a deep diversity of human strains, a shared struggle and a shared environment where everything effects everything else. The Force does indeed bind and link us all Obi-Wan.

But the other strand, which is equally true, is about utterly ruthless competition, hominids murdering and raping the fuck out of each other, displacing each other from environments and differences in genetic advantage cascading into and/or synthesising with cultural and technological advantages. It’s about humans as the monsters from a science fiction movie and has kind of a 'there can only be one' Highlander vibe.

And both of these are true. It just depends which lens you look through. There is a level of choice in what we emphasise and find meaning in, and in the lessons we take, but there is no choice in the facts.

Which is a main reason this game will probably never exist, or if it does, it will come with something you have to sign before you play.

That was a little depressing so to end the article;

'POSSIBLE' THEORETICAL PLEISTOCENE DEVELOPMENTS

Previously I was working in the realm of the 'likely', based on our current understanding of history. But fuck that, what if we ignored 'likely' and went straight for 'possible'!

Pleistocene Empires baby! Can't find them? That's because their cities are UNDER THE SEA. The Inca of the Glacial Maximum! Polynesians of the Great Lakes!

We could just take *every* kind of *possible* Stone-Age technology and culture and jam it all together in a Conan-the-Barbarian style mashup of cool things. You can't prove it didn't happen! Glaciers took the evidence!

So; Very large boats. Oceanic vessels. Intra-oceanic navigation (it is *possible* as the Polynesians have proved, but what if it also happened at a previous time?) Inter-oceanic navigation (even less likely but *possible* at least in theory). A worldwide coastal empire, why not?

Super-stonehenge Ziggurat cities, cave-cities (we know they turned up later). Mass scale Imperial warfare. Grass suspension bridges with villages whose whole purpose is to continually re-weave the bridge (Inca did it). Catapults. Sieges. Terror-bird cavalry. Trained super-baboons and mega-hippos.

Neanderthal shock troops and Florensis advisors wearing capes of humming bird feathers. Super wars to crack open the gates to the Mediterranean basin and drown the Empire of the Morlocks. Eating small horses for dinner. Crowns of amber and bone. Flutes of mammoth ivory. You could do an entire Pleistocene-Elric series or 'forgotten Aztecs' game set in some early inter-glacial period when the world looked an utterly different shape.

It would have quite an elegiac lost-summr feel as this civilisation grew too soon, and the glaciers were coming back, and then after that the glaciers were shrinking waaay too much and the seas rising so even the ruins of these Inca/Minoan/Polynesian cities were drowned and forgotten.

Honestly if you just jammed in every cool thing from every stone age 'high' civilisation

and all of the 'homo' descent groups you could imagine, plus all of the Pleistocene fauna you could think of, it would be pretty fucking great.

Like being an extinct homo species and calling your Florensis slave to your ziggurat to bring you a humming bird quill so your can write poetry on calfskin about the doom of your civilisation before riding forth on your war-glyptodont to battle the savage raiders for the last time. Behold! how an empire ends!

View Details

A trip to Warhammer World recently left me with a copy of the re-printed 'The Lost and the Dammed', to go along my copy of 'Slaves to Darkness'.

Of course, the fact that I now possess both means I can attempt the impossible; rolling up a Chaos Champion using the 'Realms of Chaos' system, RaW, that's Rules as Written.

I attempted this wonder on a friendly Discord, I have edited out the other responses but thank you to the unnamed person who came up with a PDF of 'Warhammer Armies' by Nigel Stillman.

(Yes, rolling on this wonderous labyrinth of tables did indeed require access to a totally seperate and long out-of-print book, in addition to the two expensive reprints I already had.)

Without further ado, let us witness the birth of Tristian le Tigre, Champion of Carnalpierce!

Part One - a Standard Human?

pjamesstuart;

Ok, #RoCRAW here I go..

"Generate the Champoins Starting Profile using the Starting Profile table..

is there a dice roller on here?

[1d100] Roll: [57] Result: 57

They are a... Human!

[1d100] Roll: [2] Result: 2

A standard human! 😭

Move 4, Weapons Skill 3, Ballistic Skill 3, Strength 3, Toughness 3, Wounds 1, Initiative 3, Attacks 1, Leadership 7, Intelligence 7, Cool 7 Will Power 7

Literally the most standard human you could imagine, no wonder they turned to chaos.

Next, the Starting Equipment Table

So, this is a point-spend thing where you get a certain semi random number of points and get to spend them depending on your level, but that level starts at "5 Hero or Wizard" while I am level 1 or zero, and this isn't mentioned, so I suppose I get no equipment

Next, I receive a 'Mark of Chaos' from my Patron. I am allowed to choose whether to follow Korne, Slaanesh, Nurgle, Tzeentch or Chaos Undivided.

I am also allowed to generate a Chaos Patron demon, so I will do that next.

Creating a Patron - the birth of Carnalpierce

My Demonic Patrons Origin is;

[1d3] Roll: [2] Result: 2

Its is "a composite demonic entity founded upon one or more highly focused souls - such souls are not dissolved in the warp but retain their own integrity as deamons."

Next, choose a mortal creature as a basis for the demon, refer to the Universal Creature Table and randomly generate a creature from it.

[3 1d10] Rolls:

[3] Result: 3

[4] Result: 4

[7] Result: 7

its a Troglodyte ...

[1d100] Roll: [33] Result: 33

just a standard Troglodyte...

Move 4, WS 3, BS 3, S 4, T 4, W 2, I 1, A 2, Ld 9, Int 4, Cl 9, WP 9

So despite being a standard demonic immortal Troglodyte this thing is actually better than my standard human champion, except for intelligence where it seems like I am smarter than my Patron

So this is clearly some shitty back-alley demonic patron deal between the absolute bottom of the barrel demon and some random schlub

Refer to the Chaos Attributes table and generate D6+3 attributes. (If it turns into a spawn or becomes mindless I am meant to re-roll.

[1d6+3] Roll: [2] Result: 5

Ok five attributes, here we go..

[5 1d100] Rolls:

[46] Result: 46

[13] Result: 13

[25] Result: 25

[1] Result: 1

[5] Result: 5

Ok that was meant to be 5 d100 so I will roll a d10 for each and add that as a single digit to the end

[5 1d10] Rolls:

[6] Result: 6

[5] Result: 5

[2] Result: 2

[9] Result: 9

So me results are ...

466 - HORNS!

135 - BESTIAL FACE (see main chart...)

255 - CHAOS WERE (see main chart)

12 - AGILITY

59 - BESTIAL FACE (see main chart) again, I guess it can have two?

So for the 'Bestial Faces' there is a sub-table where usually they get the face of their patron god, but I feel like the horned troglodyte is a servant of chaos undivided so I will roll twice on the sub-sub table..

[2 1d20] Rolls:

[10] Result: 10

[18] Result: 18

One face is that of an EAGLE! (+1 bite attack and excellent vision gained.

The second is that of a SPIDER (+1 bite attack)

So the horned, agile troglodyte Demon has the face of an Eagle and the face of a Spider, but its also a Chaos Were, which means it has a second form, which means more sub-tables...

Generate a random Chaos Creature under the procedure set out under 'Instant' Chaos Spawn, but only give it D6 Chaos Attributes. Keep a seperate record of this creature, including a seperate record of fear points, as this is the mutants Chaos Were-Form

The mutant is now subject to frenzy, when it becomes frenzied it must make a WP test or become frenzied for the rest of the battle.

It gains +2 fear points when it changes into its new form

Ok, on to page 65 of 'Slaves to Darkness', only give it D6 Chaos Attributes

So, basic form first;

[1d6] Roll: [1] Result: 1

[1d10] Roll: [1] Result: 1

So its were-form basis is that of a GIANT BAT

How many Chaos Attributes..

[1d6] Roll: [2] Result: 2

TWO Chaos Attributes

[2 3d10] Rolls:

[8, 8, 5] Result: 21

[8, 6, 5] Result: 19

885 is ... TELEKINESIS!

865 is... TALL!

No sorry, 865 is TAIL!

"This tail is not strong enough to give the mutant a tail attack, nor can it manipulate anything if prehensile"

So! My Chaos Patron is a Demon of CHAOS UNDIVIDED. It has the form of a horned Troglodyte with two faces, one of an Eagle and one of a Spider. It is an agile being.

But it is also frenzied and if enraged will transform into the form of a giant bat with a prehensile (but not otherwise dangerous) tail, with the power of TELEKINESIS

"Modify the creatures profile as follows;

Strength - double up to a maximum of 10

Toughness - add +2 up to a maximum of 10

Wounds Double

Initiative Double"

Its stats should now be ;

Move 4, WS 3, BS 3, S 8, T 6, W 4, I 2, A 2, Ld 9, Int 4, Cl 9, WP 9

So still a lesser demon but now a bit more obviously demonic

"The creature grows to 1 1/2 times its size. It acquires horns, wings and a tail if it does not already have them....

Kind of feel like rolling horns to begin with was a bit of a waste but ok

So now its a HUGE horned, winged betailed troglodite which is agile with the face of an eagle and that of a spider, and it can were into a HUGE Giant Bat with Horns! Which is telekinetic!

he had horns before it was cool

pjamesstuart;

The creature becomes demonic and is subject to the normal rules for Greater Demons, ie;

1. It cannot be harmed by normal weapons...

2. Its own attacks are magical

3. In the material universe the Demon will be subject to instability

4. It is not effected by psychological affects other than those caused by one of the four Great Powers in person

5. If it has spell casting powers it can use them without expending magic points.

6. It can fly as a swooper with a max speed of 32 and etc etc

7. Causes fear

So now he needs a name. "A name can be generated by the demonic name tables in 'Slaves to Darkness',

Ok, lets go..

"The number of elements in a Deamons name depends on the number associated with the Chaos God it serves.."

Its not quite RAW but lets say a D6

[1d6] Roll: [1] Result: 1

It has one element to its name..

[1d6] Roll: [6] Result: 6

[1d10] Roll: [7] Result: 7

So the demons TRUE NAME is..... EE

But it will also have a 'Use-Name'

First part..

[1d10] Roll: [4] Result: 4

[1d20] Roll: [2] Result: 2

'CARNAL' is the first part

Second part..

[1d10] Roll: [7] Result: 7

[1d20] Roll: [16] Result: 16

'PIERCE' is the second part

So, I serve the demon 'Carnalpierce' who's True Name (speak it not) is 'EE'

He beeth a great trogolodyte with wings, horns and a tail and one face be that of an Eagle for he sees all, and the other that of a Spider'

Yet he have a second more wrathful form, that of a great horned Bat, Huge as a dragon, which castes all about with only a thought.

'Carnalpierce' is a composite demonic entity founded upon one or more highly focused souls, and serves Chaos Undivided!

"Roll D6+3 times on the 'Demonic Trappings' table below..."

[1d6+3] Roll: [1] Result: 4

[4 1d6] Rolls:

[3] Result: 3

[4] Result: 4

[2] Result: 2

[4] Result: 4

He wears CHAOS ARMOUR

He is MIGHTY in STRENGTH, making his Stats now

Move 4, WS 3, BS 3, S 10, T 6, W 4, I 2, A 2, Ld 9, Int 4, Cl 9, WP 9

And he wields a might CHAOS WEAPON

His weapon is....

[1d100] Roll: [38] Result: 38

a LONG BONE (eg femur)

A fitting weapon for the Dweller in Stone

I think thats it for the patron?

The Gifts of Chaos

The Champion recieves the 'Mark of Chaos' from his Patron.

The Mark of Chaos Undivided...

"If the new Champion chooses to worship Chaos in its undivided glory rather etc etc.. he receives a Random Reward from the Chaos Rewards Table, he also receives a random Chaos Attribute.

Ok, the random Reward..

[1d100] Roll: [34] Result: 34

ok thats just a random attribute, so thats two attributes then..

[3 1d10] Rolls:

[4] Result: 4

[5] Result: 5

[10] Result: 10

450 is.... GROWTH! D3+1 times original size!

[1d3+1] Roll: [1] Result: 2

TWICE THE SIZE OF A MAN, his stats are now..

Move 5, Weapons Skill 3, Ballistic Skill 3, Strength 5, Toughness 4, Wounds 2, Initiative 2, Attacks 1, Leadership 7, Intelligence 6, Cool 7 Will Power 7

Plus one fear point

"Durrr, Carnalpierce make me big an strong durrr"

Hail Carnalpierce! EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE

pjamesstuart;

[3 1d10] Rolls:

[10] Result: 10

[7] Result: 7

[8] Result: 8

78! is... BESTIAL FACE

[1d20] Roll: [19] Result: 19

The face of a TIGER! Plus one Bite Attack, plus Night Vision! Plus an extra Fear Point!

Move 5, Weapons Skill 3, Ballistic Skill 3, Strength 5, Toughness 4, Wounds 2, Initiative 2, Attacks 2, Leadership 7, Intelligence 6, Cool 7 Will Power 7

Fear Points - 2

"Raww grrr ragghhh"

Now I roll on my RETINUE TABLE...

Someone has to kitbash this dude.

The Retinue of Tigerface

[1d100] Roll: [71] Result: 71

2d4 Mercenary Band and Captain

"Mercenaries retain their soldierly organisation and bravado but are otherwise very much like warbands in their way of life. Sometimes they will join a Chaos Champion whose reputation suggests a promise of loot and mutual protection."

"Mercenaries can be represented by any of the troops types included in the Bretonian or Empire Armies or Human Mercinary or Ally contingents in Warhammer Armies. Alternately you may prefer to equip them as a standard type with a basic profile, light armour, shields, and either double-handed swords, spear or crossbows.

It is certainly more interesting to generate them as if they were part of a defeated army. refer to Warhammer Armies and choose the list you wish to use. Randomly determine an army list from amongst all the ranks and file troops available to the army. All troops come with the basic equipment listed in the box, and there is a 50% chance the entire unit will be equipped with up to D3 of the options listed.

The Band is lead by a mercinary captain who will be of the same nationality and type as the others - he has a randomly determined profile...."

[1d100] Roll: [34] Result: 34

Captain is a 5 Hero - Move 4, WS 4, BS 4, S 4, T3, W 1, I 4, A 2, Ld 7, Cl 7, WP 7

[2d4] Roll: [2, 2] Result: 4

He leads a band of four men!

I don't think I have even a PDF of Warhammer Armies, if anyone does let me know

Yes, I have that one

I have pdf

54 mb

Let me upload it to GDrive

pjamesstuart;

Thanks!

I feel like we are using it in the spirit intended.

So I was picturing a Troglodyte like the D&D monster but they're presented a little differently here

sort of proto-kroxigor?

pjamesstuart;

So, shall we go with Brettonian or Empire army?

Well, we can let the die decide. 1 for Empire, 2 for Brettonia.

[1d2] Roll: [2] Result: 2

A defeated Brettonian army!

are Bretonnians in this era of Warhammer already Francophone Round-Table knights?

Pretty much

pjamesstuart;

It looks like even more so.

The rank and file troops choices are;

Villains, Ribalds, Arbalstiers, Rapscallions, Brigands and Rascals

Those are the actual troops choices names

delicious!

pjamesstuart

So if we go

1. Villains,

2. Ribalds,

3. Arbalstiers,

4. Rapscallions,

5. Brigands and

6. Rascals

[4 1d6] Rolls:

[2] Result: 2

[5] Result: 5

[2] Result: 2

Three Ribalds and a Brigand

three "2"?

This is rather nice

(I initially mis-saw the roll as it it was 4 "2" hence the reaction)

ah nice, you roll for each individually?

pjamesstuart;

Its says "Randomly determine an amry list from amongst all the ranks and file troops available to the army." so I improvised

Bretonnians of this edition are more frog and snail focused than they would be later

pjamesstuart;

These are 'Ribalds'

This is not what dictionary told me but makes more sense

pjamesstuart;

Brigands

"All troops come with the basic equipment listed in the box, and there is a 50% chance the entire unit will be equipped with up to D3 of the options listed." what?

Ok a 50% chance for the Ribalds!

1 is yes, 2 is no

[1d2] Roll: [2] Result: 2

NO!

I.e. Brigant might have a two-handed sword, I think

pjamesstuart;

And for the Brigand!

[1d2] Roll: [2] Result: 2

No!

Nope

pjamesstuart;

So they just have crappy weapons and armour

makes sense if they have been defeated.

(Hope you don't mind me taking a look at the book @K damn, the book is fucking charming

The link is free for all

I'll take it down in a few days but if people wish the pdf the pdf is here to download

pjamesstuart;

So according to this book a Level 5 Brettonian Hero is a 'Baron'

Robber baron?

Or is it a Captain?

pjamesstuart ;

I will roll randomly to see what kind of unit he might have belonged to

1. Chevalier D'Honnour

2. Chevalier De Notre Dame de Battale

3. Noblesse d Epee

4. Chevallier Rampants

[1d4] Roll: [4] Result: 4

Rampants...ram-pants? 🐏 + 👖

pjamesstuart;

Did he keep his barding and shield? 1 is yes, 2 is no

[1d2] Roll: [1] Result: 1

Yes! Mon Baronne!

So this was a Brettonian army that was badly beaten. This young Baron managed to escape with a handful of men.

If we take the original stat line as a guide, my Chaos Champion was just a Ribald to begin with, before he made a deal with 'Carnalpierce, the Dweller in Stone'. Now he 'leads' (he's a pretty dumb giant tiger-faced man) this doomed group of mercenaries, their honour long forgotten!

There are some 'Narrative Tables', the most omni-applicable looks to be the 'locations' table, lets see what we get..

[1d100] Roll: [22] Result: 22

"The wastelands of the north are full of ruins. Most were prosperous cities before the incursions of Chaos swept them away.Many of those desolate places shelter hidden treasures buried by their destruction. Most house more recent inhabitants in the form of warbands, rampaging bands of Beastment and other unwelcome creatures."

A bit boring but ok. Looks like we delved too greedily and too deep and I was confronted by 'Carnalpierce' in the caves of a ruined city in the northern wastes, and made a deal with Chaos.

Holed up in wastelands after going for Chaos after the defeat and looking for some chaos artifact for their patron?

pjamesstuart;

All to save mon beloved Baronne..

I went here for a name for Mon Baronne https://www.realmofplastic.com/warhammer-fantasy-blog/bretonnia-character-name-generator-warhammer-fantasy

And got 'Gornemant de Grescfort'

Another random generator gives me;

The Champion of Carnalpierce - Tristian le Tigre!

His Mortal Lord - Sir Gornemant de Grescfort

Three Ribalds - Huchon Pie, Talbot Marcel, Guibert de Bonpre

And the Brigand Evrard du Mesnil

We stand ready to battle for Chaos! (and gold)

Its more poetic if he got warped there out of pure feudal loyalty, despereately trying to preserve the life of his lord!

So that was fun

Curious that most of the other characters were more interesting than the main chaos champion but still fun to do

Evrard, you brigand! Were you somehow behind all this?

View Details

Whats my score?

Before the publication of ‘The End and the Death (PartOne)’, I came up with a BINGO CARD; would I, a man who has read or audiblednearly the entire Horus Heresy series, be able to predict the end?

Only Part One is out so far, lets see how I am doing…..

Erda: she’s back baby! Back from the VASE.

Erda! The Emperors sort-of GF and mother of thePrimarchs (not Amar Astarte, a differentone). She had enough of Neoth and his spooky ways and, after playing some partin the triggering of the Scattering of the Primarchs, went off to live in thedesert and be a super-witch.

Dan Abnett invented her out of whole cloth, and at thelast minute, I think in Saturnine? Then I think Chris Wraight packed her awayneatly in ‘Warhawk’ (I think?). I had assumed she was just too similar inconcept to Amar Astarte, the Selinar Gene Witches and a few other factions.

Last seen – beat up by a bunch of chaos demons and herremaining anima… in a vase?

I had assumed that since Abnett had invented her shewould magically pop back up in the final book. I was wrong! So far… One of thefew Abnettverse characters who doesn’t get a look in, I retain highhopes for her rebirth in the last volume FOR SOME REASON.

Enuncia

The magical Enochian word-of-god super-sorcery languageAbnett invented in the middle of the Heresy, and gave as part of the backstoryto Oll Persson and the Emperor while at the same time integrating it into hislatest Eisenhorn books set 10,000 years later.

YES! Of course we have to have more Enuncia. Or atleast its mentioned. John Grammaticus still has a magic word he can say oncewhich will do something super-magical though he doesn’t know what.

It’s a free get-out-of-plot tool and I fully expect Johnto say his magic word in the next book.

Place your bets for what the last word of the super-magiclanguage to be spoken will be in the comments below!

GASP! Something-someones-on-the-golden-throne!

So there are a bunch of 40k conspiracy theories about whoends up on the Golden Throne and how. Some say the Emperor dies and Horus endsup on it, others Malcador or whatever.

Its book one so too early to see but at this state Ihighly doubt any jiggery-pokery will take place. Abnett seems committed toproducing a relatively orthodox interpretation of events with sketchinground the edges but no massive twists.

I will call this now – The Emperor ends up on the GoldenThrone.

He Wrote Three Fucking Books

And

O My God He Wrote Four Fucking Books!

Failed so far and I would judge unlikely to be fulfilled.

HOWEVER

The Book we do get is not only physically gigantic butVoluminous as hell. A huge, rambling, staggering baroque Titan of a thing,stumbling towards its end.

Will the next book be any shorter? Mmmmmmaybe. It willcertainly have all the actual events in it. For reference, the lastscene of the previous book; Echoes of Eternity has the Vengeful Spirit loweringits shields. It takes until the last third of this one for the Imperials toactually go up there.

Euprati Keeler; LETS BURN!

Not only wrong but so ridiculously wrong its nearlylaughable. Keeler, so long as Abnett was writing her, was a classic Abnettylikeable Paragon. In ‘Warhawk’ Wraight takes her on a hard right turn intoproto-Torquemada, she is found wandering around with skulls, carefully planningmass suicide assaults on enemy Astartes where her flock will clog the enemieschainsword with their own flesh, simping for Sigismund in his super-sayanpuritan mode and talking about how aces the power of pure hatred is.

I half-expected this to carry on in ‘TEatD’.

It does not at all. Abnett pretty much ignores theKeeler of ‘Warhawk’ and just rotates Keeler back to being the paragon saint ofa pretty-reasonable-actually Imperial Cult;

“What I’m sayingis that hope contains the future, and it’s the one thing we have. More potentthan a cartload of shells.’

‘Is this where youtell me the Emperor has a plan?

…

‘Alright then. Ithink He does have a plan, and its contingent on us believing in it. Ourhope in it, our faith in it, makes it happen. We are the plan and the plan isus. The Emperor doesn’t have a plan that, if we perish, will still come tofruition. The plan is us.’

Basilio Fo! Remember me? Supervillain guy? Kill-All-Astartes-Guy? Remember?

Well if we didn’t before we will now!

Basilio Fo turned up in an Abnett short story ages ago; aformer Age-of-Strife Warlord/Evil Scientist, a Mega-Bile if you will, who wasdriven off Terra by the Emperors rise. A super-evil (?) plot-armoured ‘genius’,he has a plan to make a super-weapon to kill all the Astartes, good and bad. How?Who fucking knows. He turned up in Saturnine and was involved in variousshenanigans, now he is back for a sub-plot of his very own where the Custodesand Malcadors-chosen are fighting over him and his last-option super-plot.

His sections are a little silly. He outwits custodies bybeing arch and mysterious. He will for sure be back to do something inthe final book! Although since that something clearly isn’t setting off hisanti-astartes super weapon fuck knows what it will be.

jJHonN GramATTIcuS

A character that absolutely no-one but Dan Abnett likes,but he’s the one writing this book so FUCK ALL YA’LL, it’s John GrammaticusAdventure Time baby!

Strangely, one of the only pseudo-American accentedcharacters in all of the Audiobook-universe of 40k, John is some dingus who wasmade immoral by creepy aliens in return for turning on his own species. Thealiens had a plan to make sure Horus won, thinking he would ‘burn out’ chaos ina grand madness that would end with humanity extinct and the galaxy at peace.In pursuit of this, old John ran around doing secret agent stuff.

He helped turn the Alpha Legion to the xenos’ cause,tried to off himself, changed sides (?), met Erebus, met Eldrad Ulthuan, nearlykilled Vulkan but healed him instead? Got magic scissors(?). Just did a bunchof random ping-pong shit, generally without a stable plan and while complainingabout himself, ended up joining up with Oll Persson with some kind of, againvery vague, plan to somehow something-something the Emperor. Oh along the wayhe got a fragment of Enuncia.

I am pretty sure Abnett thinks this guy is a sexy enigmawrapped in a tantalising interior moral conflict where as he is just the avatarof the least interesting aspects of Abnetts writing style. The wholeget-Oll-into-the-Palace plan is riddled with last-minute janky plot bullshit,ultimately Grammaticus has an “I know this guy from work” moment where he meetswith Vulkan again in the Throne Room and Vulkans like I know you, you stabbedme with that thingy that time back in book twenty or something.

Probably this tiresome fuck will play some kind of majorrole in the final (?) book and speak his magic word somehow.

TROOP-PER-PER-SON

So.. Oll Persson, have I explained this yet? I will tryto be quick.

Oll Persson (“All Person/Everyman”) is a Perpetual Abnettinvented in ‘Know No Fear’. He has been alive maybe longer than the Emperor butinstead of becoming a super-psychic magic man or Dr Who or something he hasjust lead life as a near normal guy. Heis allegedly ‘Catheric’ and has a crucifix (which gets stranger when Abnett infersthat the Emperor might have been Jesus at one point;

“He has appearedas male or female or neither, as child or elder, peasant or king, magician orfool. He as been an entire cartomantic arcana, for the Master of Mankind ifalso a master of disguise. He has performed all of these roles ell, withdelicacy. He has been humble when humility was needed, gentle when softness wasthe best device, sly, amiable, reassuring, commanding, caring. He was beenterrible when terror was the only recourse, and sometimes meek in order toinherit the Earth.” [Italics mine].

Oll was the Emperors original ‘Warhampster’ and helpedhim destroy the Tower of Babel (I know, it gets worse), before literallystabbing him in the back. After the fall of Calth he picks up a magic knife andan assortment of symbolic/representative followers and has been traipsing aboutthe Galaxy planning to reach the Emperor in order to do…. Something? Honestlyfor the sheer amount of blood and treasure expended in it, Olls plan is prettyfucking vague.

One of his followers is ‘Graft’ a farm servitor who seemsto be getting a bit more sentient after exposure to a galaxies worth ofmadness, and its Graft who calls him ‘TROOP-PER-PER-SON’. And yes Graft is inthis, though doesn’t do much! Maybe he/they will do something in the next one.

DOOM-BREED

Ok so the Emperor canonically fights Hitler on theVengeful Spirit. (It hasn’t happened yet).

Arguably he does. In the 2^nd EditionChaos Codex DoomBreed is mentioned as a Demon prince who was a warlord of oldearth and became a chosen of Khorne and there are vague suggestions he may havebeen Hitler.

But Ok, even if he isn’t Hitler, he’s still awarlord of old Earth which means the Emperor almost certainly knew of him, andwe know Doom Breed-related demons are on Terra during the siege as Horus namesthem.

SO, if the Emperor doesn’t meet Doom-Breed and at leastsay something like; “Ah, we meet again.. Ghengis Khan” or some shit likethat, I will be well pissed off.

But it hasn’t happened yet.

Dream-War in the Warp

Not that much in this book really.

In ‘Saturnine’ Malcador goes and visits the Emperor insome dream-scape where he is facing off against the Chaos Gods and Horus, muchof all the Siege books has the Emperors ‘psychic shield’ slowly decaying andfalling apart and in tE&tD the chaos powers are basically melting space andtime in and around the palace, making it even more of a dreamscape (and veryconvenient for moving people around for various scenes). Plus the VengefulSpirit is itself now basically a portal to the Realms of Chaos. But there is noexplicit Dream-War scene.

Dark Angels Turn It Off And On Again

The Astronomican! The Dark Angels are up inside it andare trying to activate it! A bunch of Plague Guys are trying to stop them!There are various plots and business going on! They have not yet turned it onand its looking like in this one instance Abnett may subvert ourexpectations by setting up some kind of psychic beacon in the palaceitself.

Someone makes a pointed comment about history, memory and truth,translation; SHUT UP NERDS.

Ok, not quite. There is no ‘shut up nerds’ but aswe know, every late-period Heresy book must include a digression onhistory and memory so the writer can be sure we know they have a degree.

“…. ‘I meant…what’s the point of a poem? And when does a poem stop being just words andbecome something else? When do words gain power? Under what circumstances?’

‘Power?’

‘You know what Imean. The reason we’re here.’

He does know whatshe means, and yet he still can’t answer. If any abreactive magik lurks in theHall of Leng, he has no idea how they will find it, or recognise it if they dofind it. Where does verse, or prose, or memoir stop, and ritual begin? Canthings be both at once? Are there incantations of control stashed here in thisgreat collection, under lock and key, or merely the indulgent scribblings ofthe ages, the fancy of idle men in easier eras, who set out to do no more thanpraise a lover, or articulate some feeling, or describe a flower or, perhaps,merely rhyme for the sake of rhyme? The arts, whatever they might be, have cometo play an increasingly insignificant role in Imperial life, eroded by Strifeand Old Night, until they are vestigial memories, non-functioning organsdwarfed by rational science and secular industry. He recognises, belatedly, hisown lack of knowledge. Did the arts ever have a purpose, at any time inhistory, or have they always been decorative? Does some art have true functionand capacity and other art not? How does he, with a mind raised in the schoolsof the modern Imperium, even tell?”

Flashback-to-history-as-recalled-in-the-21^st-Centry (and noother time. Remember the Age of Terra? No, us neither.)

As we all know, when someone in 30k or 40k quotessomething from the history of man (at least 30 millennia, in which we are inthe 3^rd), its always something from ‘our’ history

I may not be able to score a complete victory but I think I can score astrong victory.

“Day will not savethem, and we own the night.”

– ~~HorusLupercal~~ wait, no, Amiri Baraka ??

Opening verses by Charlotte Mew, the Emerald Tablet andCorinthians HE HAS FOUROPENING QUOTES PEOPLE!

In the above mentioned ‘Library’ chapter we have quotesfrom Milton, Tennyson & Shelly!

Fuck It, Oll & Neoth were in WWII Together

Sadly not a score. I can live in hope though.

Of all this Bullshit, only I Kyrill Sindermann survived to tell the tale,and die in a kind of crappy book much later, hey, I’ll take it!

Yes Kyrill is in this, its him crawling through thelibrary. Too late to say if only he survives but if the last book is asmuch of a ‘Greatest Hits’ story as this one, can we expect Kyril to face offwith poor old Samus again?

Sangy Dies in Some Bullshit Way

He ain’t dead yet! And looking at how things are going Iexpect his death to be classic rather than subverting expectations. Abnettloves a paragon and Sangy is the paragon of paragons. I am hoping for Horus tobe like “I could break his spine, but I could not break.. his spirit”and for Sangy to get like four noble death speeches.

“It was all part of my plan”

Pretty much, see ‘Horus Cries’ below.

Hows-Malcador-Doing-Cutaways. OUCH!

Ouch indeed! Not just cutaways but he is the semi-omniscientfirst-person narrator of much of the book!

Its a neat conceit. Malcador is less insanely godlikethat the Emperor so he can talk to the audience almost like a normal person. Hespends a few chapter giving us a lowdown on how things are going. Once he is onthe Golden Throne, as well as being slowly incinerated, he gets quasi DrManhattan powers and can perceive the flow of fate or whatever but can’tactually communicate with anyone in-world, but he can see all the tricks andschemes of the siege, talk to us and do spooky straaands-ov-faate ‘nudges’ totry to stop the unfolding disaster, which links him to almost everyone’soverplot.

I, Robute Guilliman, am also in this book! (And more than you might haveexpected!

Failed! He’s barely in it! Maybe he will be in the next one?

NPC arrives, gives chapter-length “explanation” for another writersprevious fuckups, disappears

Amazingly for a Siege of Terra book, this does not happenat all! (I think.) (But it may in the next one, see below).

The Above Happens More than Once

I don’t think it even happened once. Pain.

Rogal Dorn; “The Emperors Dream is Dead (again, but more this time), also,I am Goth now

Nnnnearly. I was so close, all I needed was a classic‘The Emperors Dream is Dead’ from RG, but I don’t think I even got one. He doesgo a bit dark and edgy towards the end where he is trapped in the chaos realmfor relative centuries.

Oh Fuck the Blood Angels have gone Mental! Fucking ruuuuuuuun!

Hasn’t happened yet but I hold out hope for the nextbook.

Ha ha! Its me; Abaddon, I’m ba… of fuck its Sigismund! Run!

Abaddon is briefly in this, he has a classictraitor siege scene of ‘This is no longer a war of legions boo hoo’, anddecides to go back to the Vengeful Spirit. That’s all we get and I thinkSigismund is still on the surface? So we may not get that meetup.

Surprise Intervention by … Oan Mkoll! He fell through time! (And is also aperpetual)

It was low odds but I almost feel I got this one inspirit. tE&tD is so… Abnetty, I almost wouldn’t put it past himto just go ‘fuck it’ and somehow link it into his 40k work. At least so far ashis heresy books have gone, he has brought back… well, everyone, everycharacter he ever invented, every plotline, every bit of fluffy nonsense, everygood idea and every bad idea. Its like he never left. More and more it seems tome there isn’t one Heresy series but several, with each writer essentiallyfollowing their own themes and tendencies and pet characters, and favouritecharacter portrayals even when it doesn’t quite work.

That Sniper Who Went Mad On The Vengeful Spirit, remember him? Well he’sback, and he snipes someone!

Sadly completely forgotten, though he may still be on the‘Spirit’ and the majority of this massive book was spent just getting the maincast there so I have some hope for book two. What if he snipes Doombreed! Iwill probably shit myself in pleasure.

Dogent Krank (who?) You Did a Thing!

One of Olls not very interesting companions, I think inthis he does actually do something though I can’t remember what.

I Herbert Zyes (who?) am the key to this mystery!

Who indeed. Another of team-all-person. He is in this. Hesays some things? I don’t think he is the key to any mysteries.

The Final Paragraph will be broken down into individual sentences, eachsold separately.

No signs of this so far, unless you could the sheergargantuan SPREAD of the book itself. I feel like there is half a chance thatGW will try something at the end though. Come on geedubs! There is always morecash you can squeeze from a property!

The final sentence will be broken into letters and punctuation marks, eachsold through a gachapon ‘lucky dip’ system, can YOU collect them ALL?

Could still happen.

CORAX! turns up through the webway and helps out Vulkan! SURPRISEMOTHERFUCKERS! (they never meet again)

This might still happen and I am holding out hope! I willhave a cry if it happens!

Russ is useless

Of course Russ is always useless and is so again here. Heis dying on some moon or something.

Actaea; "Yes I was CYRENE VALANTION all this time!

She was! (Or at least says she was). The mysterious blindsorcerer lady who just turned up and who seemed a lot like the sexy blind prophetesswho hung out with the Word Bearers was in fact that lady, or at least says sheis.

One of Olls ablative-plot-armour-companions, she ittraipsing along with them with some vague but mysterious purpose in mind. Willshe turn out to be evil? (It’s the Abnettverse so probably yes.)

Actaea; "Yes I was NOT CYRENE VALANTION all this time! Surprisemotherfuckers!

Ok, this doesn’t happen this book, HOWEVER, its notcompletely impossible that it will happen.

Xtra points if both of the above

We will see……

Yes I, KATT, random psychic farm girl, actually become MORIANA! (youthought it would be Actea but she was actually.. [randombullshit randombullshit]"

SO – Moriana is a mysterious seer in later 40k, she ismeant to be one of the original members of the Inquisition who has “seen toomuch” and turned traitor and gone to hang out with Abaddon. It is not clearwhat she is up to, if she is really a traitor or a double or triple agent orwhat.

Probably someone will turn out to be Moriana, but whom.

Katt is another of Team-Oll. A random farm girl who hasbeen “seeing too much” in the horrible spaces between realities and whose psychicpowers have slowly been growing from exposure to the warp and generalawfulness.

Will this turn out to be the blind seer Moriana, Katt orsomeone else?

Someone turns out to be Promeus!

Promeus is another of the ‘original’ Inquisition. No ideawho this is going to be.

Inquisitor Gregor Eisenhorn closes the book, "And that was the (fictionalised)history of the Horus Heresy somehow, a fascinating text" .. then he WAKESUP - even him reading the book was a DREAM!

It could still happen!

Dream-Sequence where Abnett seems genuinely baked on epilepsy meds but theeditors were all too scared to admit they didn't understand it.

Sadly nothing quite like this yet.

It’s me! Limited Edition Space Marine 2! did a thing! AND I was part of a gigantic overplot which sounds like ajust made it up let me explain very quickly

Erda had a pet space marine she called ‘LE2’, probably areference to a very early GW sculpt. LE2 has joined team-Oll and willpresumably do something interesting at some point. Hopefully.

It’s me! The Fucking Emperor First Person chapter baby! I finally get to dosomething and I am going to look COOL AS SHIT doing it! I FIGHT HITLER IN THIS!

He does NOT get a 1^st person chapter, or fightHitler (YET), but we do get to hear more of him speaking (near) frankly withSanguinius et-al and we get to see him actually DO STUFF so that’s nice.Hopefully he will do ever more stuff in the next one. He should try to pack inthe events as he doesn’t have much time.

Yes I, Amar Astarte have returned! To do a thing! Probably ether destroythe Astartes or save them from Basilio Fo offscreen.

She has not turned back up and there is no sign of her sofar. She’s not an Abnettverse character so I would be surprised if she doesturn up.

The final, final FINAL book is actually a series of sub-articles which willbe sold separately through Games Workshops

Ok I overplayed the joke but would you really be THATsurprised if they actually did this?

Horus Cries! (Burning Tears)

Horus!

I have spoken a lot in my Corposant series about the‘black boxing’ of both Horus and the Emperor so we get to see very little ofthe actual drives and personalities who are at the centre of thissuper-mega-war. The Emperor is a multi-minded trans-reality warp-beast andHorus is increasingly shut down, visibly insane, deluded and broken.

Here we get to see Horus actually DO STUFF. He is fuckingnuts! Great.

Ever since ‘Horus Rising, Horus has increasingly beenisolated, insane, erratic, and as I said, hollowed out. In tE&tD Horus isclearly fugueing and has space altzheimers and is barely holding any sense ofreality together.

It looks like what Abnett is going for is thatHorus is SUPER SANE ACTUALLY, or at least, that the real (?) Horus wasdeliberately hiding his true core and now super-demonic personality behind aseries of masks set up to be just competent enough to get him here, and topersuade the Emperor that he was actually as broken and empty as he looked.Then, when the Emperor commits to his final attack, these para-personalitiesfall away and are forgotten and Horus comes out as a cackling super-badass.Will Horus become the ‘Dark King’ who has been prophesied for, well just forthis book as Abnett just made him up, or will fighting him be the catalyst toturn the Emperor into the ‘Dark King’ the 5^TH CHAOS GOD BABY!

The ultimate ‘WELL, ACTUALLY’ of a mega-seriesalready well-stocked with ‘Well Actually’. Forget Chris Wraight explaining thatMortarion isn’t dumb, just badly written, or ADB explaining that actually theEmperor said something completely different to Magnus, it turns out that well,actually, all the bits of the series where Horus was written as a puppet ofchaos were ALL PART OF HIS PLAN! SEE ABOVE!

"Its me, SAMUS! Samus is.. scared.. look, just please stop hurting me,please..."

Poor innocent Samus. The first demon encountered by theImperial forces in ‘Horus Rising’, ever since then he has been wheeled out byevery writer imaginable as a secondary rent-a-villain who always ends upgetting beaten and banished by the hero of the book.

After a while we start to feel sorry for the poor chump.

Well, Samus is back and he gets an whole openingnarration chapter! It seems he was just keeping it loose or whatever forreasons or something, and in fact has a DEEP SCHEME which supersedes the wholeHeresy and which he just didn’t mention until now.

It looks like he has some kind of deal where he wants toend reality or something and is looking for a figure to help him with that.Could this be his big chance to finally end all reality?

Abnett doing a polish on even poor old Samus is prettyemblematic of the book as a whole. Our boy Dan knows who he came in with, andhe is leaving with exactly those people and those FUCKING THEMES THANK YOU.

………………………

Join me and a couple (million?) other people for the LASTFUCKING BOOK at some point in the future!

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I watched this anime and I had a little spastic meltdown, which I will now inflict on you.

I will start by describing it

So it starts with this protagonist guy Yatora Yaguchi who has socially faked his way though school and high school, superficially, he is reasonably popular and successful; totally empty inside. High social capacity, not really, genuinely interested in anything. Careful, a climber, in low-level despair. Right on course for a functional degree and a job as a competent salaryman.

Out of nowhere, or maybe after a chance encounter, he takes an interest in art. Supported by some small initial success and a perceptive art teacher, over a short period of time he goes from being not that interested at all, to being in the art club, to rapidly gaining skill and interest, to deciding that he is going to go for an art degree.

The big university has a well regarded fine-arts course. The only way he can afford it is to get one of the handful of free spots and the only way to do that is to ace the entry exam, (which almost everyone fails, some people take it two or three times).

From there it’s a race against the clock as Yaguchi focuses on learning skills and discovering art. He sees himself as not being that talented, can relentless hard work and pure desire make up for a lack of talent? Can he learn everything about art and ace the big test and become a real artist?

THINKS LIKED

It was the awakening of an actual, human soul inside someone who was otherwise living in a performance of their own life like an actor inhabiting a role, and maybe the first time this man/boy who had never done anything that wasn't careful and planned did anything purely non-optimal and risky for its own sake.

I like the art teacher and I like the cast of oddballs and weirdoes who make up the various art classes.

I like the procedural stuff about training and technique, common to anime but I would have been happy with more of it.

I like the slow development of the protagonist into a somewhat less empty, and therefore somewhat more usefully-empathic and morally present individual.

I like that his close drinking buddies all knew he was shallow as fuck but didn't really mind, and that one of them is inspired to go to cooking school by seeing Yaguchi follow his dream and grow as a person.

I *think* I liked the somewhat odd cross-dressing/trans(?) best friend plot?

Its an interesting look inside the processes of art school and an art education, but oh my god did I find myself unexpectedly fucking DESPISING parts of this by the end.

NEUTRAL THINGS

Regarding the styles and types of art engaged in by the protagonist and their class, the in-fiction art, I didn't actually like much of it myself, it did not move my heart, and I was fine with this as I expect that from any mainstream entertainment.

I was ok with characters going "Oh, so inspiring" and "your art has really improved etc etc" when I wasn't a big fan of the art being looked at in question. I could still care about the story in which the art was embedded, so my complaints below are, I think, separate to that.

THINGS I HATED

Its complex as all of these things combined and interwove at some point, but to try it one-by-one.

The Japanese testing system

Hey! Lets test children to the point of destruction! And lets valorise their personal self-annihilation!

'Academic Art'

"Oh you won't have to make academic art on this course" says the teacher on the exam-prep course.

(Yes you will and that is all you will learn).

'Academic Art' is apparently a thing where they train examinees in particular.. patterns? I don't know how precisely to define it, but each university has its own particular obsessions, tendencies and fashions in its preferences so they train the Examinees specifically for the University they are applying for, like it was a written test. Perhaps they don't do this 'as-such', but I think they are still doing it in-essence.

WHAT ARE YOU TRYING TO SAY WITH THIS PIECE?

This absolutely disgusts me on every conceivable level. If I had to pick one thing in particular that crawled up my arse and screamed its this.

The looping of the language of criticism (flawed and shit anyway) with the production of art turns emotion into a performance of emotion (IN A SAVAGE TESTING ENVIRONMENT). I FUCKING HATE THIS.

'What are you trying to say, from an examiner, in a test with 200 people where only three are going to get in. Genuinely just shoot me.

Educational systems are primarily agreeability and obedience machines, and secondly analysis of skill and drive, so this definition of a visual static art, where this desperate and very young teenager is meant to have 'something to say', in an utterly silent medium, in which 20 kids in a room paint virtually the same thing, it’s a degradation of thought and emotion guaranteed to produce self-deluding drones who when they come to make art in the future, will ask themselves "what am I trying to say" from the examiner in their head. So everything becomes exam art.

(no relation to MFA culture at all there)

(was it all really the same thing I am complaining about?)

Total separation of 'genre' and 'Fine Art'

So clearly, drawing a dragon or something or something from your imagination or even something interwoven with your imagination, is not going to cut it. This is a silent rule, another one these young exam takers are being inducted into, a very familiar one to me.

'we want to see the products of your heart"

'ok, here they are, they are gauche, atavistic, genre and imaginary'

'well in fact we didn’t mean that at all, and understanding *that* we didn't mean that was part of the test.

What we *meant* was 'we want to see the product of an utterly neutral heart, with a fair amount of skill and drive but almost no real creative imagination, and we want to see that they have 'something to say' (as we would understand it, and about the vanishingly small number of things a teenager might have something to say about that would be coherent to a middle aged drone), and we want that expressed entirely though a still, silent visual medium, and we want it expressed with maybe a dab of 'cleverness'.

What you are creating here is modernism and total emptiness. The painting as 'text' where the quality and "depth" (as if even one of these people would understand anything of actual emotional depth) is decided by how 'cleverly' the teenager can command, ape, combine and recombine the known forms of modernism to produce something of not-too-much emotional content, not too much creativity, but it has 'something to say'.

Do I fucking despise art school and absolutely everything about higher fine art education and the kind of art and culture it produces?

I don't know but I fucking HATED this anime version of it!!!

We have to destroy (Anime) art school!!!

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Chatbot evolution, deepfakes. conspiracy and counter-conspiracy and counter-counter conspiracy. re-editing of children's books (is your copy of 'The Twits' pre or post-purge?), all of this and more leads me to think about The Record, and its fragility.

So I come to imagine forms of post-reality hardcopy, for when you absolutely postitively MUST calm ever motherfucking in the room.

It needs to be readable to the *naked eye*, (the statements of trusted witnesses that they have seen the hardcopy, reporting directly and in the flesh to others, will be the only real form of proof most will recieve). This is a human thing and is about proving things from one human to another in a world where any digital or transmitted inormation, even through a single screen, like that of an electron microscpe, could be suspected.

It can be the creation of machines but better if it is purely hand made, must be reasonably robust, not decay, at least not if cared for, hard, preferably impossible, to alter and amend

TECHNIQUES

Close-weaved calligraphy - using a scribe to write fancy letters that mesh with each others negative space, both fore and aft but also with each line above and below. I think this was used in rennaisance/early modern counrtly letters, or at least special and expansive designs were placed to fill pages specifically to prevent any additions or amendments to whatever the king etc may or may not have said

BRITTLE SYNTHETICS

Ceramic - could literally be a fine china cup with the contract/text interweaved through it under the sheen

Cut into Gems - you would have to examine these with a spyglass at least. Combining gemcutting with close-weaved calligraphy would make a record easy to transport, worth preserving and hard to alter.

Glass - if a record could be etched in so much the better, if some substance relevent to the nature of the record was included in the glassblowing even more so. Maybe a rare radioactive isotope that decayed at a set rate? That could give you a date? Or combine glass and organic so a leaf or something is part of the artefact.

I feel most metals are out, too easy to melt and reconfigure.. Maybe etched right on the edge of a high-grade blade?

ORGANICS

Bone or ivory is another material that could be treated roughly as a 'brittle synthetic' with scrimshawed or etched intra-calligraphy.

Shell? Could writing somehow be introduced to the natural growth patterns of a shell?

Grown-over wood - carving things into wood sounds good as the interaction between the grain and carved text might make it hard to alter, maybe there could be some way to use the fact that wood can be grown over and around things to 'seal' a ceramic document?

Skin - tattooing might work, combining the fidelity of a named person and their reputation with the record written into their living skin

DNA alteration to make a bunch of apples or whatever produce certain words - sounds a bit overdone and not that useful but could be a handy way of mass-replicating a single record. (Apples etc have the name of god or whatever in them all the time, it shouldn't be too hard to get a single tree to produce a name or symbol).

WHAT AM I MISSING?

What else can be created and 'read' by humans, but is very hard to alter once it has 'been' created?

I want to say; very high grade silk weaving - but the fact that it is 'woven' means it can be 'un-weaved' and re-made. Is there a form of weaving which is *fundamentally* un-un-weavable - that it simply cannot be taken apart and re-assembled once made, even by super-tactile robot hands?

Urban Planning? - you could pay to have the streets of a suburban or urban development effectively 'written' as a cypher of your agreement or record. This would have a natural loss over time but it would take quite a long time and a supreme degree of effort to erode the symbology. The systems of build environments have a tendency to replicate themselves.

How about chemical processes that remain meta-stable but degrade if they are disrupted or interrupted?

Super-clockwork that remains stable so long as it runs very, very slowly, but degrades rapidly if it is sped up slowed down or stopped in any way?

There must be some systems or methods in engineering that are useless or low-utility because they are coherent so long as you don't fuck with them, making them too sensitive or finickity for building r engineering but maybe quite good for this purpose?

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praise be to Allah let my labours be here ended

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Here is V2!

Click the image for a link to the file which should allow you to see it larger.

Feedback in the comments, on twitter at https://twitter.com/pjamesstuart, on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/pjamesstuart or via email if you can find it.

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Since answering the question; "What system is this for" is becoming increasingly difficult. (The BX commons? Any Old-School product???) I came up with the no-doubt terrible idea of creating a simple one-page infographic that I could post online and also include in False Machine books and mailings.

With this One Simple Trick I would elucidate the simplest rulesets to use, their relative closeness to each other and any difficulties and challenges of playing False Machine adventures using them.

Of course this is going to be a fucking disaster, if anyone even reads it, but that is why I am classifying this as VERSION ONE. A proto-type infographic designed specifically for your commentary, feedback, analysis and surely-productive-criticism.

Have at ye, click the image for a link to the file which should allow you to see it larger.

Feedback in the comments, on twitter at https://twitter.com/pjamesstuart, on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/pjamesstuart or via email if you can find it.

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Somewhere in the darkness Chris Wraight steeples his fingers and smiles an icy smile. Of course he had already predicted this post and the third and fourth-hand effects it would have.. of course he knew I was having macaroni cheese for dinner! All I have done is walk right into his schemes! He slowly closes both hands together, cupping the infinite darkness and slowly, carefully, explains the actual plot up until this point…

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Chris Wraight! He won the Horus Hearsay and BECAME the 30,000th Warhammer. You did it son, now get on your sparkling white motorcycle and ride off into the caverns of the earth.

Probably no other writer has gained so much from the Horus Heresy series. A handful have crashed and burned, several have chugged along like little tugboats, some have surfed the wave, with varying excellence, but in general, a writers reputation coming out of the Heresy is the same as their reputation going in.

ADB is probably the closest to Wraight, his name burnished by Betrayer, The First Heretic, Master of Mankind and Echoes of Eternity. But ADB went in from the already much-loved Night Lords series so he was on a clear upward trajectory and essentially pulled off escape velocity.

Dan Abnett went in with a very heavy rep, a lot of very good books under his belt, and under those books, a whole stack of rather average books, and under those book some rather bad books. He was the architect of the Heresy in novel form, probably more than anyone else, gave it much of its quality and many of its flaws and safeguarded both of those through a solid start, a dithering mid-range and a good-but-flawed (so far) ending. Reputation = PRESERVED.

Who The Fuck Is Chris Wraight?

But who the fuck was Chris Wraight before 'Scars' (2014)? He started with Black Library in the Old World with 'Masters of Magic' in 2008 and from then till 2015 ya boi wrote a FUCKTONNE of Warhammer Fantasy Books;

Masters of Magic - 2008
Iron Company - 2009
Sword of Justice - 2010
Dragonmage - 2011
Sword of Vengeance - 2011
Luthor Huss - 2012
Master of Dragons - 2013
The Fall of Altdorf - 2015
Then a leap into Age of Sigmar with The Gates of Azyr - 2015

Also during this period he wrote a Stargate Atlantis tie-in book Stargate Atlantis: Dead End.

Much like Joss Reynolds, Wraight was one of the architects of the fall of the Old World with ‘The Siege of Altdorf’ and like Reynolds he was in at the beginning of Age of Sigmar with ‘The Gates of Azyr’, which I have read and which I seem to remember being pretty good.

But unlike Reynolds, Wraight never returned to the Age of Sigmar, by the time of ‘Altdorf’ he had already written ‘Scars’ and was now ‘the white scars guy’. He had a big future waiting, in the.. big future.

His 40k work starts with 'Battle of the Fang' in 2011, through 'Blood of Asaheim' in 2013 to 'Stormcaller' in 2014, he did a bunch of books about Space Wolves. He only lately came back to complete his trilogy with ‘The Hellwinter Gate’.

'Battle of the Fang', if I can remember it at all, it wasn't great. ‘Hellwinter Gate’ was good (but fuck those guys) and I definitely haven't read any of his Old World stuff.

So, a MYSTERIOUS VOID, there is an early strand of Wraightism of which I know little to nothing.. just like the Khan, I know nothing of him, and he knows everything of me!

So what happened with the White Scars?

The White Scars were one of the original twenty Space Marine Legions and, in the pseudohistory at least, played a huge part in the Horus Heresy. They made it back to Terra and were one of only three Legions to get there and actually stick around to defend the Emperors Palace. Jahaghatai Khan lead an important counter-attack on the Lions Gate spaceport during the siege aaaaaand, that’s about it.

Very few people cared very much about the White Scars for most of 40k history. Future Mongols riding motorbikes. Come from Space-Mongolia. Not that well supported with lore or models.

UNTIL in 2012 Wright comes up with ‘Brotherhood of the Storm which fills in the background and details of the Heresy-Era Scars, and then with ‘Scars’ in 2014 he does their first full-length novel and pretty much everyone loves it. So far as I know, no Warhammer fan dislikes these books, In fact the White Scars strand of the Heresy is one of the most reliably highly rated of all its many threads.

From that strand spirals out a range of books which spread over connected characters, and do deep dives into the Custodes, TWO series bracketing 'modern' 40k, the best book on the Death Guard and the creation of Varangantua, which had and instrumental generative effect on the Warhammer 40k 'Crime' subgenre.

There is a little Wraight-verse woven up in there, not closely geographically focused like the Sabbat Worlds but connections of theme, personality, viewpoint, characters and style.

THAT’S Chris Wraight, in six years he went from nervous anime protagonist to not even taking Dan Abnetts calls* (which he predicted in advance).

*This is a lie.

To discover how it happened and ‘why the Scars’ we will need to dive into the Bibliography;

The Warhammer Fantasy Books

Like I said above, I know almost nothing about these (I think nine books) and additional various short stories. Drop something in the comments if you have it!

The Scars

(Really ‘Brootherhood’ and ‘Scars’ are essentially part of the same story one setting up and adding flesh to the other.)

2012 - Brotherhood of the Storm

We meet Jaghatai Khan and the White Scars! What makes them special? This one simple trick; not being retards.

So what has changed between the White Scars being boring space Mongols and being interesting space mongols – in the absolute sense, very little. I mean there are no STUNNING REVERSALS here where the white scars subvert your expectations by not being Mongols or not being in space.

Truth is, you probably had few to no expectations to begin with, instead they fulfil and massively overdeliver on your probably quite-minimal expectations, adding complexity, character and depth.

If there is a TLDR for Chris Wraight its; “I did roughly what you expected, much better than you expected.”

The big metatextual addition Wraight makes is that the White Scars largely escaped the notice of the Imperium and Heresy at large, because they were designed to escape notice. Not in a super-stealthy Corax way or a super-sneaky Alpharius way, but more in a faded uncle way in that you know they are there, somewhere far away, doing something, and you just don’t think about them that much. The Scars, or Jhagatai, were made to be in some sense, outsiders, outriders, or just an outside perspective on the whole Primarch project.

We meet the Scars in the period after Ullanor hanging about in the Chondax chasing Orks. After the Imperium broke the larges Ork empire in the galaxy, the Scars were sent in to do what cavalry do; chase the defeated and cut them down, which they are fulfilling on stellar scale.

Key Things –

The Khan is chill and likes being out of the way. He grew up on planet-Mongola, was adopted by a horse tribe, defeated the worlds major empire and took over the planet before the Emperor turned up to ‘recruit’ him. His tribe were the ‘Ordu of Jaghatai’ and had the facial scar thing, now his Legion is the ‘Ordu of Jaghatai’. Its not clear if, like the real Tenmunjin, the Khans armies left piles of dead and raped civilians behind them or that the rivers ran red with blood and black with ink.

Despite being based on perhaps the most insanely genocidally murderous of all the IRL people that made Primarch templates, the Khan is chill, likes to keep himself to himself, observes everything and thinks about it. Core value; he values life as it is lived, not as a tool or function to get somewhere else. He also doesn’t like forts, cities or empires.

Illyria Ravelion – An Imperial Army General and expert in Logistics. The White Scars are terrible at logistics (gotta go fast!) and are aware of it. Part of the story involved Ravelion being drawn into and tested by the Scars, and she provides a more-likeable ‘mainstream imperial’ point of view both for us and for the Khan.

Yesugai the Storm Seer – Jaghatais bff and key advisor. A super-powerful space marine Psyker raised in the Chogorian tradition as a kind of sky-shaman. Important as he provides a key element for the Primarch; a bff who is almost as powerful as he is, and just as wise, and an important view on the White Scars view of Psykers and the Warp. Typically sensible they see it as ‘drinking poison’, where you have to drink a little but that’s no reason to drink a lot. This is a point of view shared by literally no-one else.

Torgun Khan – A marine recruited on Terra who wanted to be a Luna Wolf but ended up being sent to the White Scars, where he excels but is continually the ‘cultural other’. He is trying hard but the Chogorians are insular wierdoes and also he doesn’t fully want to be there. Also maybe the only way in which the Scars are not Sensible-Marines is their obsession with a war of mavouvre and pseudo-cavalry stuff all the time, every fucking time.

Breakaway – Nonsensical cultural divide. The ethnocutural divide in the White Scars between ‘Terrans’ (assumed to be sort-of-white) and ‘Chogorians’ (assumed to be sort of Asian), makes literally zero sense if considered as a real part of a real universe. Terra should befull of Asiatics, there was a whole ‘Ynodesian Bloc’ at least, the languages and cultures should have all changed a LOT, the gene-lines should have changed a LOT, Astartes are literally programmed with knowledge and no other Legion has an audible accent difference between culture groups. HOWEVER, it does work well from a story perspective. So I will just assume that the Heresy writers are translating a hyper-complex future culture difference into something we can understand.

The Alfafa Legion are UP TO SOMETHING???

In fact Horus has deliberately isolated the Scars in Chondax to keep them out of the way while he does his Heresy, he is pals with Jaghatai and has hopes of bringing him on-side (at the right time). Jaghatai was part of the doomed Librarius project and has always been an outsider ambivalent about the Imperium. Horus has send the Alphas to secretly prolong the war and keep the Scars bottled up until he is ready for them.

2014 - Scars

Jaghatai and the Scars are chilling in the backwaters, cheerfully killing orcs when suddenly - WHOOPS, A HERESY IS HAPPENING! RUSS DID WHAT? HE BURNED PROSPERO??? WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON?

(We learn from some Alpha Legion stories (see that entry), that the Alphas themselves are at war within themselves and a rogue faction deliberately broke the isolation of the Scars and allowed Rogal Dorns call for help to get through before Horus would have wished it).

Who will the Scars side with? Horus, who Jaghatai likes and gets along with? Magnus who he also liked? Or his city-building lying crazed authoritarian dad who he does not really like? The stage is set for the Scars to go flying about to try to find out what the fuck is going on. (And also ignoring Russ’s desperate call for help – hilarious).

Meanwhile the Terran and Chogorian factions are forming up, the Terrans are all very pro-Horus and the Chogorians are whatever-Jaghatai-says.

Story culminates in Jags visiting the ruins of Prospero, chatting to one of Magnus’ splinter ghost things and meeting with Morty. I was going to say maybe the worst possible person to send to persuade anyone of anything, but looking at the Traitors ranks, they are not exactly stacked with charisma.

At about the same time the Lodge members in the Scars try to stage a coup to make sure they go the ‘right’ way.

Jaghatai is surprisingly well informed about the Warp and it looks like Horus has demons all over him so he goes with Dad and awaaaaay we go!

2016 - The Path of Heaven

A 'Primarch Ping Pong' book that manages to make something interesting out of 'get Jagatai to Terra'.

How to do? - use SECRET WEBWAY PORTAL. Yes the Emperor had one hidden far away in the darkness. To protec from aliens – NO protec from Imperium!

Emperor’s big plan involves a Human Webway Project. bad news Navigators - scanners really do live in vain, off to the garbage yard with you you useless freaks.

Meanwhile the Death Guard and some of the Emperors Children awkwardly give chase.

There are some nice looks at the death guard and EC trying to get along, and a foreshadowing scene everyone remembers - someone gotta hold the webway portal open! someone has to BURN THEIR SOUL on a magic TORTURE CHAIR. But WHO?

YESUGAI!!! NOOOOOOO!

2018 – Jaghatai Khan: Warhawk of Chogoris

A ‘prequel’ look back at Jaghatai after he has been find and during his integration into the Great Crusade and first missions. Jags knows about the warp and thinks lying about it is dumb. His first mission seems to be a deliberate ploy by Malcador. The Scars are sent to ‘liberate’ a world which has been taken over by psychic super-aliens who the human population believe are gods. The Xenos keep the humans juiced up on a sense of the numinous and transcendent, even once the aliens are killed the humans still hunger for them so.. it looks like the human population is ultimately sent to ‘live on a farm’. Malcador making a point I guess.

I think this is the book where its revealed that Jags can, if he wants to, move at SOOPA SPEED, like the Flash. But generally just chooses not to? This power is never brought up again.

2021 – Warhawk!

Its the siege of Terra baby! Its been pretty mixed so far and kinda boring overall! Lets hit the gas! Wriaght is going WIDESCREEN for this one.

Morty is sitting in the Lions Gate spaceport, harshing the Imperial buzz with NURGLE MAGIC and bringing down heavy armour, and (more prosaically but more importantly probably) supplies and materiel right into the palace area.

Everything seem bollocked but Jaghatai have plan - re-take the Lions Gate spaceport, cripple enemy armour & supplies, hold spaceport for (surely inevitable) return of Robute and victory in the siege, oh and kill Mortarion, now a SUPER DEMAON!

How? BY DOING IT! HAI CHOGORIS!

Good book. Odd final fight.

Head scratching re-write of previous morty stuff in a classic Heresy 'well actually' chapter in which a handy demon pop out & explains to an NPC how actually the previous bad writing of Morty was actually well well this and that you know (this isn't a Wraightism, I don't think he does it before or again).

But what about The Imperial Cult? RELIGION - COULD IT BE BAD SOMEHOW??

Sigismund is back baby, and seriously traumatised, less by the violence than by the collapse of the Emperors dream, which, was the only thing that really justified the very evil things he and daddy Dorn had done up to this point. I mean geocoding a few planets isn't great but if it’s for long-term species survival, and if the species has already nearly died out once, then maybe its TOUGH MEDICINE. Except now the Emperor looks more and more flawed. Also he lied and demons are real.

On the other hand, demons are real so lets go fight them. Siggy goes full 'I AM THE GRIMDANK FUTURE - CANDLES AND SKULLS FOREVER, NO PINK!"" and takes up his super-black sword to go crump Kharn in an anime battle during which the sacred stupid words are said by Kharn;

"Bro do you think you are more fucked in the head than me?" (paraphrased)

To which the answer is; "Not really, you are a lobotomised berserker trying to soul-rape humanity for ever and I am trying to stop that, I can be pretty bad but still not as bad as you. I can, for instance, go to the toilet, knit, (skulls), and spend (grim) social time with peers, you by comparison are literally fucking LOBOTOMISED BY A BLOOD GOD.

its a dumb point of view! But more on this later.

At about the same time, Keeler, the Imperial Saint, has gone mental in the ruins. she is no longer being written by Dan Abnett and like a lot of people who are no longer being written by Dan Abnett, she has gone from being a flawed but sympathetic semi-paragon dealing with a dark reality perhaps not quite realistically, but ENGAGINGLY, and turned in to a MEGA CUNT, in the turn of a page. (Not the first Dan Abnett character this has happened to, many such cases.) Now Keeler has gone full Al Qaeda - suicide legions, doom, skull fetish (came out of nowhere your honour) and trying to take down Asartes in the ruins (takes roughly 100 guys to kill one) THIS IS THE FUTURE NERDS.

(Having read ‘The End and the Death – Part One’, by Dan Abnett, she goes right back to normal again in that.)

The Other Heresy Books

2017 - Leman Russ: The Great Wolf (fuck this guy!)

Its 'Leman and Lionel!' The Space Wolves and Dark Angels are both told to go smash a hard-to-find star empire and totally fail to work together because the Lion is massively autistic and Leman is dumb.

Russ stumbles into the main battle, acts out, gets a bunch of Dark Angels killed then is a pissy little boy about it, then starts dickwaving, making oaths about being the first guy to kill the enemy leader

except he fucks that up aaaaaas.. guess what - the space wolves have a tendency to RANDOMLY MUTATE INTO MONSTERS! (just like the Thousand Sons, Blood Angels, possibly the two missing legions), yes the guy who boasts about being the 'Emperors Executioner' and counts killing family members and being mind wiped afterwards as a gold star achievement, has an unstable gene-seed, fucking great.

The Lion finally loses his autistic shit and they have a big fight and finally cold-cocks Russ (I'M GLAD SOMEONE DID!).

2020 - Valdor: Birth of the Imperium

A story about Valdor smashing heads? NO

A story about the disease of authoritarianism, hypocrisy, an Empire built on lies IT WAS SHODDY FROM THE START I TELL YOU!, and about the quiet tragedy of the existence of Constantin Valdor, a man who cannot say no. Basically the Emperors Smithers in a weird way.

This is 'lefty warhammer' where the main problem with the Imperium of Man, even pre-heresy, is the Imperium of Man and the Emperor is a twat, but its basically the grown-up version of that compared to the ADB "Dad you suck!" version.

There was never really any law except the Emperors word, only the illusion of law

WRAIGHTISM - The Cerebral Counter-Puncher

Wraights Custodes, (and many of his characters) are silent observers who are already several moves ahead, and, if they are being empathic, try to communicate this OBLEQUELY. They have a good idea what will happen, are waiting for it to happen, and have a plan ready for what to do then. (they are COLUMBO'S!)

This is largely unknown to whomever the main character is. In this one the cop lady interviews Valdor about "Where were you mister Valdor on the day the Thunder Warriors left on a midnight train to go "live on a farm far away"???

Valdor responds with gnomic tales and stories of Imperial history, which MAY be a form of code, a deniable secret message saying 'hey don't do what I know you are going to do girl'

End bit - Cop girl stages an INSURECTION! Tries to arrest Valdor. Bad news, he predicted it, he and the Emperor knew everything, (did the Emperor deliberately absent himself so this could take place, maybe) and they have a plan prepared, unleash the ASTARTES! (if we didn't before!) (probably this was the 1st Legion and very possibly Mier Astelan, a main charcter in Gav Thorpes Dark Angels books, was in this scene, maybe).

End result, Cop Lady and some of the last Thunder Warriors get crumped. Valdor almost has an OK time fighting the lord of the Thunder Warriors. Thunder guy at least gets to be a fighter and die, Valdor is basically a chess piece in charge of other chess pieces in a game which is not a game. He is having a rough life is old Valdor.

2022- Sanguinius: The Great Angel

A story about Sangy being cool? NOT REALLY! Still pretty good though!

Another bad-from-the-beginning Imperium story, this time IN DISGUISE.

Its Waights swan song for the Heresy and, while the 'on top' story is about an edgy remembrancer investigating the Blood Angels and having a horror-movie experience as he slowly works out that the Imperium’s super pretty boy good guys are actually... SPACE VAMPIRES! (who are fighting the curse).

The 'underneath' story, (which for us is actually the real story as we already knew the space vampire stuff, is about the conflict between different versions of the truth. Remembrancer guy has a lady boss, at first we think she is just a massive Sanguinius simp and mindless super-loyalist, she keeps telling him 'just paint the idea, fuck the reality'.

But at the end we find out that actually, she also knew about the Space Vampire stuff and she is more of a Sanguinius Yandere than a Sangy simp. She actually doesn't give a fuck about Sanguinius or the Blood Angels as anything more than useful tools and is quietly looking forward to .. something .. their 'removal'?? and replacement with the Symbol of them, rather than the reality as the symbol is a useful tool to aid in mass population 'guidance' and control .

She seems to be part of a nascent-inquisition faction (Malcadorists?)

Then we cut to after the Siege, Sangy is dead, bad lady has ordered the writer assassinated, she personally burns the last copy of his book (the complicated truth) and oversees the installation of her giant Mural in one of the first 'Sanguinala's' (the useful truth) - by this point she is clearly part of the proto-Inquisition and, in tone, setting and mentality, links well to the later 'Vauts of Terra' and 'Bannana Guard' books

WRAIGHTISMS - Human/Transhuman Conflict, Information Control

When the main character joins the crusade he very clearly knows less about it than we, who have been reading about it for ages, do, so we get perhaps a better picture of what the 'average' Imperial citizen (if there is such a thing) thinks about it.

He seems to assume that the Crusade is mainly Xenos-oriented, largely about taking worlds away from aliens and is fine with this as he shares a heavy anti-xenos prejudice with the baseline of humanity. He talks about a large proportion of human worlds being brought in by diplomacy, the majority probably? though we don't get exact numbers.

He wrote a book about how the World Eaters, Space Wolves and Night Lords were nutters, based on first hand accounts. It’s not clear if the book itself was censored, but he does say that the censors hurt him less than the general reputational damage from the public, who were not fond of anti-Astartes stuff (and he's still alive)

He very clearly has an 'actual' and partial point of view of his immediate world which conflicts in some sense with that of the reader, and this meshes with the later Vaults of Terra series in which even the main inquisitors doesn't know fully about the Primarchs or the events of the heresy.

This is a degree of implicit information control rare in most 40k writers, its also about ‘information control’ in the setting, Chris is being Meta again/

The 'Modern' 40k Books

Vaults Of Terra

The Inquisition do SPOOKY BUISNESS on Terra just before the Great Rift

(2017) - Vaults of Terra: The Carrion Throne

(2019)- Vaults of Terra: The Hollow Mountain (Novel)

(2022) - Vaults of Terra: The Dark City (Novel)

Main Inquisition guy Crowl and friends investigate spooky business which happens to interrelate to key elements of the Imperial Machine, this is set before the 'Gathering Storm' so everyone is absolutely bricking it thinking reality is ending, (it is).

SPOLIERS - the Golden Throne is breaking down, "breaking down, breaking down" and various arms of the Imperium are searching for flex tape – at ANY COST I TELL YOU.

This involves a conspiracy that goes RIGHT TO THE TOP BABY because ITS CHINATOWN JAKE and which Crowl & crew stumble into. If you wanna fix that frone you gotta do a dark deal with the dark eldar.

In sequence the team stop a dark eldar from getting into the palace, investigate Trouble at the Astronmicon just before it BLOWS UP, and go to the MOON, and thence to Comorragh where they spike the arranged agreement.

Good news - the Dark Eldar were up to a creep plan which would have been really bad, they wanted to CLONE the EMPEROR (?!) and use him as flex tape on their own webway collapse.

Bad news - the Golden Throne is still falling apart.

WRAIGHTISM – THE TEXTURE OF GRIMDERP

If you want Peak Piranesi, here you go! welcome to Terra, its FUCKING HORRIBLE, literally THE WORST.

'Vaults' lets Wraight go very deep on just what an unrelenting barely survivable totally insane shithole Terra is for almost everyone on it. The inquisition literally have their own raised highway system because you just can't get anywhere on the ground. Don't forget your facemask, protein ration and stay away from gangs of pilgrims who have hived off the multi-decade queues for the religious sites, here we do crowd control with flamethrowers, oh you have a job above ground, very fancy, my cousin actually leaves the arcolgy for work you know..

Wraight does it again in ‘Lords of Silence’ where we get a look at what an Agri-World looks like; a ‘pleasant day out’? No – an unpleasant day in a world sized toxic nightmare plantation hell place.

Watchers Of The Throne

The Banana Guard on Terra post great-rift. What does it TRULY MEAN to be a Banana Guard??? (mainly see 'Cerebral Counter-Puncher' above). You better not be messing with that throne son!

Watchers of the Throne: The Emperors Legion

Watchers of the Throne: The Regents Shadow

Watchers of the Throne: Third One – yet to exist but probably will?

Beginning soon after the 'Vaults of Terra' series ends, and I think incomplete at the time of writing, this follows the resurrection or re-energising of two of the Imperiums up-till then quiescent or moribund ~~model lines~~ organisations - the Adeptus Custodes and Sisters of Silence.

The Custodes have been depressed for 10,000 years as their boss is a vegetable. The Sisters of Silence have fallen from being near the Emperors throne into being nearly nothing, some long term scheming, super sketchiness or just general hatred of blanks has lead to their citadel on the MOON being abandoned and the sisterhood scattered all over the galaxy to slowly rot.

The third point of view is from the actual High Lords. The Chancellor of the High Lords (technically a super-secretary but not really) is having a meltdown and wants to kick things into gear.

We see these stories through the eyes of main custode guy Valerian and Aleya the Silent Sister, who are no-cooties chaste work-married and who team up in various ways to fight chaos and just as often the structures of the Imperium itself. They even get a model set! thats love!

The first book is largely about Guilliman pulling these two organisations back into a shape he likes more, along with our pair discovering a super-secret chaos plot to give access to Terra. Guilliman is back baby! And he quietly or loudly encourages the Custodes to go forth and custode, not just on Terra but all over the place.

The second is Chris Wraight being ~~upset about brexit~~no sorry its about the Hexarchy crisis in which, many of the mortal arms of the Imperium, the Administratum, the Ecclesiarchy and the Assassanorium, with elements of the Navy and Guard, decide they do not want a damned tranhuman monster running things and changing everything and stage a full insurrection on Terra. Chaos stuff and doom is everywhere, no-one knows what is going on.. except lord of the Custodes Trajan Valoris when at the end we discover.... that he and Bobby G had predicted everything in advance, planned ahead and actually intended this rebellion to happen specifically just so they could draw out the conspirators and put it down, oh and also the Assassins were not actually on your side.

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THE SPACE WOLVES - (fuck these guys!)

2011 - Battle of the Fang

2013 - Blood of Asaheim

2014 - Stormcaller

2022 - The Hellwinter Gate - (think this one ends up on Cadia around Abaddon smashing it)

I have not read these except for 'Hellwinter Gate' which was ok? Its space wolves, who cares? Chris Wright does I suppose.

There was an eight year gap in this series so it might be interesting to read though purely to think about changes in writing style.

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CRIME! - Varnagantua!

A Crime is doing! Solution? More and better crime!

2020 – Bloodlines

2022 - The Vorbis Conspiracy

In bloodlines Wriaght writes what I think is the first in 40ks Crime series, all set in Varangantua, a Hive City but not a 'Hive City' if you get me

Here we follow a mid level police guy who is horribly morally compromised but trying to do the right thing in a system in which everyone is horribly morally compromised and sometimes trying to do the right thing.

The B-plot or background is the main character slowly being drawn into a genestealer cult, which he does not know or realise is a Genestealer cult - probably he is already infected and his new kid is going to come out looking 'different'.

Core crime plot is the system doing horrible things to young people to get the materials to make rejuvenat treatments (the rich sure do like their eternal life drugs) - the normal supplies are out and everything is strained because its post great rift and the Imperium is bollocked.

Notable as well for being the first Varangantua story of many. at least two of the main books, 'Bloodlines' and 'The Wraithbone Phoenix' I have read and enjoyed.

In ‘The Vorbis Conspiracy’ a bunch of writers do short stories set in and around Varangantua during and after a giant disaster. The different stories follow the various threads and causes of the catastrophe and all the secrets and lies around it.

THA DEAF GUARD!

2018 - Lords of Silence

An oddity! A Death Guard book! Man we all wish 'The Buried Dagger' had been this good.

Turns out they are just some swell guys. You would think it would be a challenge to make the literal plague marines sympathetic, and probably it was, but Wraight manages it and produces probably the best Death Guard book ever.

Not much to say about this except that its very good?

Wraightisms

The Cerebral Counter-Puncher

SO MANY of Wraights primary characters are in some sense ‘ahead of the game’, having thought faster than both the other characters and the readers, and are planning several moves ahead while giving nothing away. Both Valdor and Valoris of the Custodes are very typical of this. As is the Khan.

In a way it makes his books sightly harder to read/listen to, since their progress really isn’t much like an adventure story. They are often more like detective stories or mysteries, even when they seemingly aren’t. Often a huge amount about character and motivation is implied rather than stated, quite unusual for the pseudo-greek-tragedy of the Heresy.

The Golden Throne = Murder Toilet

A curiously commonly repeated trope with Wraight is that the Golden Throne is a deliberate pain-engine, or based around one at least. This comes up in ‘The Path of Heaven’ when Yesugi sits on the lesser throne, and again in the Vaults of Terra series with its throne-based overplot.

Information Control

Both limited information known to characters in the Dark Millenium, and also the deliberate redaction and alteration of history, wars and conflicts over history and its meaning.

In Vaults of Terra, Crowl doesn’t know there were more than nine Primarchs and this guy is an Inquisitors. In the work of other writers this stuff gets dropped more readily and more easily.

Valdors conversation with copy lady in ‘Birth of the Imperium’, the overplot of the Vorbis Conspiracy (though that may not have been Wraight), lots of ‘Bloodlines’ and of course, ‘The Great Angel’. Also spread throughout his other works. Everyone is arguing about who should be allowed to know what when, despite knowing little themselves.

Human/Transhuman Conflict

The idea of a germinating conflict between Humans and Transhumans is riddled through a lot of Wraights stuff, with elements of the Inquisition, Admanistratum, Ecclesiarchy, Assassanorium and perhaps, Custodes really really not liking Imperial dependence on mutants, psykers, blanks, navigators and especially FUCKING ASTARTES, (pus the fucking PRIMARCH). There are regular low-level conflicts around the ‘Transhuman Question’.

After all, it’s the ‘Imperium of Man’ and the Emperor apparently (based in the most recent siege book) built the whole thing to preserve a core of humanity. But humanity can only survive through employing its transhuman ‘limbs’, whether those be psychic, mutated, gene-altered, cybernetic or anything else. We can think of the Imperium as a kind of janky transhuman containment and exploitation system, designed to maximise the utility from each of these transhuman arms without any of them totally taking over and ‘eating’ the baseline population.

Malcador and the nascent inquisition seem to be a big part of this even as early as the Crusade. Purges and wars to stop the Primarchs and Astartes from getting too powerful. It probably seemed like a good idea at some point, armies in decay are highly dangerous to civilisation, so why not allow them to turn on one another, bring the numbers down and confirm or reveal the more-loyal ones?

He Walks the Margins!

A lot of Wraights successes have been when he has come in at the margins of larger stories, which themselves often weren't being handled 'perfectly' and has fucking aced it, being not only good, but good by comparison, and getting lots of hugs from fans relieved that he has helped prop up the main thing they went in for

In a few cases character literally walk into and out of the scene after or before the big 'main characters' have left or arrived, and do their own sneaky business in the margins and its actually a better story.

In Vaults of Terra, the Chancellor figure arrives just in time to see Guilliman fighting demons on the palace steps and is utterly and totally mindfucked and both inspired but also traumatised. Observing the great events of an epic history from the margins allows Wraight to have his cake (or at least take a sneaky peek at it) and enjoy the HUGE THINGS HAPPENING but also to exploit the power differential between the observers and the HUGE THINGS.

Wraights began like this with ‘Scars’, and with 'Vaults of Terra' and 'Watchers of the Throne' he has told paired stories before and after the 'Main Event' of the Great Rift and Guillimans return. That has its own books describing events directly, but Wraights are better.

He did a Feminism!

Wraight might be the best 40k writer at weaving women into his stories in strong roles in ways that don't necessarily TRIGGER me.

Counting down we have Logistics Ojo-Sama Illyria Ravelion in the White Scars series, Crows assistant Inquisitor bonk-stick lady in in Vaults of Terra, (who becomes the main character after Crowl goes fully mental), Cop Lady in ‘Valdor’, creepy Sanguinius Yandere in ‘The Great Angel’, Aleya in ‘Watchers.

All ‘strong’ i.e. interesting characters with highly differentiated worldviews and behaviours neatly woven into the story in actually-useful ways that 'feel' less woke than ADB (though Wraight is probably exactly as woke). No crushing ‘hello boys’ or ‘marvel tech-girl’ moments.

Of course there is something to say for yet another Abnett-Paragon, and even more to say for yet another ADB EDGE-LADY. I doubt Wraight would ever have the BALLS to have a super-cool Dark Eldar girlfriend with WINGS who HATES YOU but is also INTO YOU and also you have a MAGICAL GOTH WOLF pet but you HATE WOLVES but this one is OK I GUESS.

Is Chris Wraight the MOST Feminist Warhammer writer? I dunno but he may be the BEST Feminist Warhammer writer because you don’t see him doing it

THE WRAIGHT IDEA

Could authority corrupt somehow? It’s a bold stance.

Wraight has said (roughly) that he views chaos as more a deepening and corroding of personality flaws and internal issues that are already present in us all.

This is a pretty solid, even a very good take to assume, for storytelling. Peter Fehervari in his ‘Dark Coil’ has specialised in chaos-as-personal-madness, with an imperceptible flow between slow personality failures, madness and reality decay so that it becomes impossible to tell exactly when things went too far.

It will always be in conflict with elements of Warhammer, as it is with any genre-cosmos where utterly evil supernatural forces are a verified real thing. The call is not coming from inside the house, there are massive rape demons out there and we didn’t make them, pervy aliens did..

So in this universe, spooky scary otherness can’t be a pure reflection of internal angst and, for the most part, Wraight manages the impossible interface well. There are only two times where he has gone full-libtard, once in the Sigismund/Kharn fight, where Kharn goes;

“Aren’t you more fucked up than me tho really bro?”

Despite being a literally-lobotomised mess.

And in ‘The Regents Shadow’ where the rebellious Hexarchy are SECRETLY BREXITEERS.

But other than that, its not too bad.

NURGLING INTERCOM!

‘Little Lords’ - I think Wraight creates this term in 'Lords of Silence'

And in probably the most well-known scene in Warhawk, Typhus aims to remain in contact with his co-conspirators by handing him one of a pair of NURGLINGS and using them as walkie talkies.

Typhus retrieved two objects from the fly-swirled depths of his armour. Or maybe they retrieved themselves, for they were creatures of some kind, fat little things, pocked with sores and boils, with mouths that took up almost all their bulk. They were noisy when they moved. It sounded like they were giggling, or whispering to one another, or just spitting and slobbering. They wobbled up to Typhus' outstretched palms, one on each, and gurned at each other.

Crosius found himself instantly captivated. They smelled strongly, and were as hideously ugly as any dream-goblin of his imagination, but he had to fight not to take them both up into his arms, to pet them, to stroke their spiny backs and fondle their horned scalps.

'What are these?' he asked.

'Fragments of the god himself, it appears,' said Typhus, sounding uncharacteristically affectionate himself. 'The tiniest reflections, but they are appealing, no?'

One of them was almost black, its skin shining dully. The other was almost white, as matt as chalk. They cooed and smirked beneath his gaze, rocking back and forth.

'Fascinating,' said Crosius. 'Utterly fascinating.'

Thats it! Top Tier on that alone baby!

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Entries #1 to #10 can be found by hitting 'Trailing Corposant' in the tags

Corposant #11 - BETRAYER

ADB, Lorgar, Angron, Emperor, Sanguinius, Precis; ADB good, least satirical Warhammer writer, herald of the awokening, found a way to have a black man shot by space cops, helped 'black box' the Emperor, (systemic issue), ship girls, edgy protags, BPD, shifting backstory, wrote Lorgar as being a bit BPD as well?, Echoes of Eternity like a Marvel director suffering under endless Fiege-notes, Sangunius finally good. Peace!

Corposant #12 - VULKAN SHIVS

Nick Kyme. Vulkan. Precis; boring bad books, seems like nice guy, good editor? hard to tell, vulkan gets tortured like black men in genre, he is guaranteed to survive this science fiction movie, not a blessing.

Corposant 13 – REEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEssentiment

from https://twitter.com/arhpriest

Is there anything more to say about Perturabo?

I already discussed him here http://falsemachine.blogspot.com/2019/06/pertuarbo-identification-through.html

With this evergreen quote from Wikipedia;

"Ressentiment is a sense of hostility directed at that which one identifies as the cause of one's frustration, that is, an assignment of blame to ones frustration.

The sense of weakness or inferiority and perhaps jealousy in the face of the "cause" generates a rejecting/justifying value system, or morality, which attacks or denies the perceived source of one's frustration.

This value system is then used as a means of justifying one's own weaknesses by identifying the source of envy as objectively inferior, serving as a defence mechanism that prevents the resentful individual from addressing and overcoming their insecurities and flaws.

The ego creates an enemy in order to insulate itself from culpability."

Is there anything more to say?

(The Eye And Schtizophrenia)

The only real reference to schitzoidal thinking in Pertys story; a common theme in the art of Schizophrenics is the observing eye;

kate-fenner-schizophrenia-drawings-2

Iain McGilchrist think this is due to some failure in brain lateralisation, that one part of the mind becomes directly aware of the other, but *as* an *other*, an alien observing presence, capable of reading thoughts, which no-one else can sense.

Well Perty got an eye too, a malignant star that no-one else can see;

and which never goes away. actually kind of useful in a few acts of navigation but just generally deeply upsetting the rest of the time.

from https://twitter.com/arhpriest

His PUBLICATION HISTORY

Chapter One - Birth of an Asshole

(19whatever to 2007) Pops up as a reference in a lot of Horus Heresy metafiction.

(2007) - 'Fulgrim' by Graham McNeil

I don't remember him doing much in this!

(2012) 'Angel Exterminatus' by Graham McNeil

Centre stage baby! We leap into PertuRabos' story mid-heresy, after Istvaan and go right into a cooked-up meta plot about Fulgrim trying to become a god, or at least a demon. Oddly this bizarre pairing actually work as a story engine. Sometimes the goddess of story logistics delivers inspiration.

This is our first look inside PertuRabos' head and it sets the tone for everything that comes after.

The story ends with PertuRabo badly wounded and the Iron Warriors trapped in the Eye of Terror, the same eye which has been watching him his entire life. PertuRabo is (fictionally) born! And born angry!

Chapter Two - Metafiction

(2012) - 'Codex : Chaos Space Marines, 6th Edition' by Phil Kelly

(2014) -'The Horus Heresy, Book Three; Extermination' by Alan Bligh

From 2012 to 2015 not much happens. Perty gets some current-year 40k lore about what he is up to post great-rift. He is conquering the segmentum obscurus and fighting Morty for relics.

This is somewhat interesting for future 40k as Perty is (probably still) one of the more sane and better organised Primarchs, one of the few who actually has the aptitude and personality to organise a stellar empire at scale and keep it running. Will the Empire of Iron pop up again in the Imperium Nihilus?

Chapter Three – “I hate sand..”

(2015) - 'Black Oculus' by John French

(2017) - 'Tallarn' by John French

(2017) -'Pertuabo: The Hammer of Olympia' by Guy Haley

Perturabo escapes from the Eye in a short story and the goddess of logistics swoops him off to Tallarn to fill in that planets backstory. After getting a suppurating hole in his soul from Fulgrim, this marks Pertuabos 'Wunderwaffen' obsession; if he gets a big enough super-weapon he will feel better about himself.

Perturabo fails in his war on Tallarn by just *this* much and is dragged back into the main Heresy line by a summons from Horus.

At about the same time (in publishing history) he gets his second personal deep-dive, this time from Guy Haley, giving us his backstory, his discovery on Olympus, youth, meeting the Emperor, and gradual slow decay into bitterness and ressentiment. Then his total breakdown after one campaign too many followed by a revolt on his homeland finally drives him into a violent purge of his own planet which culminates in him choking his adoptive sister to death.

This is where Pertuabo "falls", and it has relatively little to do with Chaos, at least explicitly. There are no cackling demons popping out to offer Faustian bargains, no Truman-show theatrics, mind-worms, obvious abusive behaviour or strange invitations to the realm of dream. Curze fell likewise but he at least had very serious and undeniable mental problems, whether you see his sadism as inborn or a partial choice.

After murdering and enslaving a substantial chunk of his homeworld, Pertuabo is convinced that 'The Emperor will never forgive this" and turns fully to Horus, who is willing to offer the obvious lie of "you did the right thing". Almost the entirety of the rest of their relationship is Horus consistently pressing this button with Pertuabo until it finally wears out.

Probably, actually, the Emperor would actually have “forgiven this”, its just one world and Primarchs have done worse, plus they did technically rebel, plus the Emperor really needs Primarchs at that precise moment.

from https://twitter.com/arhpriest

Turbos family fortunes;

Adopted Father – rebelled against him while absent and was killed.

Adopted Brother – drove Perty mad by being actually better than him despite being only human, culminated in spastic statue-smashing by Perturabo, but the guy aged naturally and died well.

Adopted Sister – choked to death in a rage.

Father-Creator – slavish obedience followed by (unusually effectual) rebellion.

Primarch Brothers – either betrayed, betrayed by or just generally fuck those guys.

Gene-Sons – orders Legion to decimate itself via random selection and bare hands, things generally get worse from there.

from https://twitter.com/arhpriest

Chapter Four - Backstage Competence Baby!

(2018) - 'Slaves to Darkness' by John French

(2019) - 'The Solar War' John French

(2019) - 'The Lost and the Damned' Guy Haley

(2020) - 'The First Wall' Gav Thorpe

(2020) - Saturnine by Dan Abnett

(2021) - Mortis by John French

From 2018 on Perty is pulled into the final phase of Horus' war and, though he gets no single books to himself, does Pretty Fucking Well Actually, fully earning his Most Competent Traitor Primarch badge. (Its not a high bar but whatever).

Tasked with bringing crazy-ass Angron to heel in 'Slaves to Darkness' he pulls it off neatly. It looks like he planned much of 'The Solar War', which ended in a raging success. I don't think he does much in 'The Lost and the Damned' and Horus won't let him just BLOW UP THE SUN, an ambition he shares with Mr Burns, but when finally allowed to get to work he brings down the Palaces shields with the pinpoint music of his lance weapons, outwits Dorn in 'The First Wall' and takes the Lions Gate, bringing Traitor heavy armour directly to the Palace, then, when stymied, he pulls off the rare feat of half-tricking, or at least manipulating Dorn and Abaddon into the Saturnine gambit, humiliating Fulgrim, blunting the power of Horus and giving the Loyalists a temporary win. In 'Mortis', a rather boring book by John French his plans bear fruit and the Palace is cracked open, leading to the beginning of the end.

After being cucked out of the killing blow by Horus and effectively demoted after doing the hard work, instead of being manipulated again he just Fucks Right Off, getting the hell out of the Sol system with the bulk of his forces and goes off to his Empire of Iron to be a massive problem for the future Imperium.

In a way, for Perturabo, the siege is a personal success. Even though the siege as a whole fails he succeeds at almost every challenge he is given, and ultimately just stops caring about how Horus and the rest view him. He doesn't need to be anyone’s special boy any more. This is largely due to him now regarding everyone else as being utter shit rather than any growth in his personality, but for our fake stoic that might be the best we could expect. If you can’t be Marcus Aurelius, be Steerpike.

Peace out nerds! You won't have Pertuabo to kick around any more!

Wait, did Peter Turbo WIN the Horus Heresy? On the Traitor side at least he comes the closest.

Horus – dead.

Morty - stabbed in the head by the Khan.

Lorgar - beaten up like a nerd after a failed coup & made to go sit in his tower.

Curze - suicide-by-assassin.

Angron - tubes ripped out and banished by Sanguinius.

Alpharius - killed by Dorn and then again by Robute. How can the same shit happen to the same guy twice?

Fulgrim - tabled by Dorn and flounces off (though does cut Robutes throat later)

Pertuabo - beats Angron, cracks open the palace, gets the Justarian killed ;-), takes the Lions Gate, leaves of his own accord, humiliates Dorn in the Iron Cage - how was he ever driven to the Eye?

from https://twitter.com/arhpriest

(HAZARD STRIPE HERALDRY)

It’s been stated in a few places, but I can't find confirmation that the Hazard Stripes are a form of Heraldry meaning "death to transgressors" which is to me a pleasing idea of a post-apocalyptic human culture preserving and translating the basic concept of 'industrial heraldry' into something new. (Should be more red hexagonal shields in 40k tbh).

WHAT IS GOING ON WITH HIS EARLY MEMORY?

What we know of Perty, and what he knows of himself, starts with him hanging from a cliff, half-way up.

We learn from contextual information that he definitely was not just incarnated at this point. When he meets his to-be adopted father, they talk of stories of a hero wandering the hills, fighting monsters, a super-boy doing adventures. If this was Pertuabo, and no reason to think it wasn't, that’s quite a different personality to the one we see from this point on.

While living at court on Olympia he is largely pictured indoors, arguing with his family, giving Dawkins speeches on atheism, locked in his room doing 'research' and later leading brutal military campaigns. The earlier Perty seems to be cut much more in the mould of a classic wandering Greek hero.

SO - what happened to his memory of those days? and why? I think no other Primarch had anything similar happen to them...

Most likely option is that he somehow traded away, or was tricked out of them or they were somehow stolen from him by the Ruinous powers

We know that Perturabo has access to something quite like the Akashic record, that he essentially 'knows' all material things, (though he doesn't know exactly how to combine or use them), but basically he has a perfect internal science wikipedia running continuously on everything he looks at.

This seems to have had a detrimental effect on his character and personality - he loves research and science, but he is a scientist who can't really 'discover' much; he already knows the details, he can just confirm theories

Consider the personality of a classical renaissance man, asking endless questions about nature, conducting experiments, exploring, finding things out, the kind of person that is and the effect they would have on those around them, both from the relative openness of their personality but also that they are engaged in a process that others can also take part in and come along with.

Compare that to someone who has all of Wikipedia in a low-tech society, and can theoretically *do* anything, but they do it alone, discover little or nothing, are just instantiating knowledge they already have and the main challenge is just getting it right. And consider the different societal effects of lets-discover-nature guy and I-know-everything guy. One shapes an entire culture in a possibly-positive way, the other is basically just a living data-bank, respected, sort of, but more of a resource than an inspiration.

We can consider also the effect of losing those early memories. Early, likely original Perturabo was, a wanderer in the hills, a being with no particular status who encountered strangers, peasants, travellers, monsters, whoever, for himself and interacted with each as he would. (probably). Who was genuinely exploring and having an actual adventure. With no societal instruction book he simply set his own goals and went about them, adjusting with understanding.

The Perturabo we actually get is 'born' on that cliff face. First they face the abyss of knowledge about themselves, then their perfect understanding of the material world, then their first social encounters are with guards and then late a manipulative court, which they enter without any contextual sense of self. A name and a strong will, but no story or sequence of experiences and decisions to tell them who they are. A powerful tool, ready to be manipulated and used.

We can have some sympathy with Perty here as the internet has done a similar number on us.

I'm imagining here, something like a classic 'unwise bequest' in which original Perturabo, for some reason we will never know, makes some kind of deal with the Ruinous Powers (in disguise, he doesn't know what they are), for knowledge. (Magnus did something similar for his own reasons).

'Knowing everything' or being able to understand or construct anything, is the kind of thing an intelligent young boy might think they really want, with no understanding of what a personal disaster it might be. And the only price asked is "your memories up to this point" - and who knows how long that is? A few weeks? a few days?

And perhaps the Emperor actually designed Perturabo with access to the Akashic record in mind, and the power that was 'given' to him in this deal is only power that was rightfully his already, but perhaps might have taken time to unlock.

If it’s a gambit of chaos, it’s a beautifully elegant long-term move to cripple someone’s personality while seeming to aid them, and, most beautifully, removing any knowledge or evidence of the deal at the same time.

(I mean never sign a contract were part of the deal is "you will lose any memory of signing this contract")

WHY DO WE LOVE HIM SO?

The first thing I wrote about Perturabo was about Identification through Recognition, and I am far from the only one! This guy has a fair number of fans and or many of them a similar emotion seems to be at play; recognition of some of the best talents and worst traits shared by the nerd/autist personality type and a kind of distant sad sympathy.

Pertuabo is one of a few projections of the Warhammer player into Warhammer itself, something he shares with Trazyn the Infinite (a compulsive collector with literal shelves of space marine helmets and interdimensional poke balls full of lore-accurate period armies which he arranges in actual dioramas in his planet-sized museum), and to some extent, Fabius Bile (a superior atheist who just loves to kitbash).

Pertuabo collects and built figurines (something remarked on several times), trains hi soldiers to fight in computerised and tabletop Kriespiel games, isolates himself when distressed (which is always), is ‘always-online’ via his weird cybernetics, and, as discussed everywhere, has the personality of an angry incel gamer boy.

The blessed gifts of modernity; isolation, technology, FOMO, self-hatred when compared to an infinity of beauty and accomplishment we can never match.

The fundamental battle with ressentiment, perhaps the most powerful of modern drives and the central moral cultural challenge of out generation. Whom amongst us is not Perturabo in our hearts?? Anyone who put their hand up to that one; FUCK YOU GUYS, FUCK YOU RIGHT IN THE ARSE.

Some have said the world is shaped by men who set their hearts on toys. I will say that the world often shaped by the irresolvable desires which prompt relentless action.

So why can Perturabo not name or acknowledge his own desire for recognition? Even though he is utterly driven by it?

It’s painful to look that deep. Its shameful. To look that deep into yourself and accept not only such a consuming need, or flaw, but also the deep sense of weakness that provokes it, to see yourself as weak, as low status, and such an overwhelming history of failure thereby..

I suppose that is what "set in your ways" really means. After all, just living life, day by day, becomes something of a sunk-cost fallacy, tearing out a part of yourself that late in the game only becomes more and more difficult as the years go by, an admission that deep cuts all the way to the core, does it basically invalidate everything that came before? It certainly feels like it does.

THE SAVAGE LIMITS OF REASON

The horror of intelligence

In a way we don't need the nightmare of Chat GPT to show us this, we just need the biographies of mildly autistic and very intelligent men.

Intelligence; swiftness of comprehension, exactness of conception and clearness of memory, rapid and subtle manipulation of abstract values - is a quality that can be cranked up pretty high, and it can gain you so much.

Chat GPT doesn't know why it does what it does, but if you ask it, it can give you an pretty good answer, (that is entirely made up and not actually true).

Likewise, if we ask ourselves why we do what we do probably the average person is only slightly better at working this out about themselves than a random stranger watching video footage of them would be. Nevertheless, press the button and words spill out; explanations, stories, declarations of principals, ideas, histories.

Could all be complete bullshit - how are we supposed to know? Perhaps we just pressed the Chat GPT button in our own minds and what comes out is as free of real self knowledge as a digital neural network would be.

Whenever we find out something meaningful about ourselves it often comes as a slightly uncomfortable surprise, and it often comes as a result of complex action in complex, rapidly moving and hard to predict environments, not the kind of thing you can just think through, and it often feels slightly unpleasant.

The horror of a high IQ and the alienation that often goes along with it, and the lack of self-knowledge that can grow alongside that.

Cracks are inevitable. They begin at single tiny points but once they start they propagate themselves with brutal speed, and in many cases, increasing the hardness of materials won't help much with stopping cracks, instead you need something softish or more flexible to even out the distribution of force. The hard is not much use without the soft.

Oh Lord of Hosts, I beg ye keep my IQ roughly on a par with my intuitive systems, general instincts and broad life experience, not too high above or too low below, for to do otherwise is to become lost, and the worst kind of lost is to not know you are lost.

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Hello everyone. Here are some updates and at the end a request for help.

First!

'Noisms' is nearly at the end of the Yoon Suin 2 Kickstarter.

He's been incredibly successful.. Much more than any of my Kickstarters.

and I for one.

am thrilled by his success...

If you want to hear me an 'Noisms' ramble for an hour about Yoon-Suin, Games and Culture then you can so so here;

Second!

Do you like .... rare skeletons????

I am clearing out my cupboards and selling a bunch of stuff on eBay (UK only sorry), including some rare original C17 Skeletons from the depths of Games Workshop history.

Go take a look if you like...

Third!

We are working through the layout for my own (much less successful) kickstarter for 'Speak, False Machine'. The book is meant to have a central glossy colour photographic section with images used for reference in the chapter on minis.

Does anyone out there know where I might go to hire someone to help me source a bunch of copyright-free photographs of certain specific types of Warhammer minis in various situations?

I am aware of most of the Copyright free sites for images and they are ill provided with photos of the kinds I need. I could try sourcing individual photos from places like Instagram etc by contacting individual creators but that promises to be a long and frustrating process.

Here is an example spread of what I am talking about (from the test print not the new version);

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Writing AND Art! A twofer!

PURPLE DESIGN

Has a pleasingly integrated aesthetic and informational design, everything is in shards of pink and purple.

But who did layout, was that Gus?

A pleasing unity of form.

Guss' art is not always perfect but it is always correct.

GUS L AND HIS WORKS

Gus is an old old OSR (though he is just as likely to have renounced that group identity a few times since I last read his stuff.

He ran a blog called Dungeon of Signs [http://dungeonofsigns.blogspot.com/] which was pretty good, had a huge megadungeon called HMS Apollyon, and all of his stuff was free and slightly complicated, and because it was free it never really developed a 'cult following', though he had more than enough expertise and artistic and creative power to be considered very notable.

He was and likely is also a very very left wing and very bitter man.

Now he blogs at All Dead Generations [https://alldeadgenerations.blogspot.com/] and has come to whatever self-negotiation with the spirit of capital he needed to and produced something you can pay money for, so now people will like it more.

And well worth the money it is!

Because he is writer, and artist, AND map-maker (the most important) AND (maybe?) layout person - Gus could probably make an INSANE amount of money - however since he is a Commie also he probably wont.

No judgement here - I have written about the inescapable polarity between D&D's twin roots of capitalistic systemisation and ground-up folk art, to which we can add the parasocial personality economy of Kickstarter and the friend/contact economy.

Its all a little ugly and impure but so is everything that works, the best anyone can do is decide which compromises they are willing to make and try to stick by that honourably.

A MORE FUNCTIONAL FORM OF CULTURE WAR

So while the not-right-wing-actually wing of the OSR seems to have recombined around Prince of Nothings blog it seems the not-communist-actually-you-CHUD wing (and this being the OSR, the actual political spread of creatives goes all the way from centre left, to very fucking left, with a few dots in the centre right, and then a little reactionary splurge a bit further right) has recombined (if they even needed to) around Bones of Contention and whatever purple grouping this is.

This is actually working better than it was back in the day, when all these goons had to share a forum or a G+ string or a comments thread life was 80% drama, 15% autism and 5% REEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE, now they have all effectively purged each other from one another’s spaces and, looking around in their MIND PALACES, presumably have been left with little option but to actually produce dungeons, so now we have Prince of Nothings anti-artpunk thing and this.

10 out of 10, would partition again.

IMAGINED WORLD - STATELESS BORDERLAND

Like many D&D settings this exists on the borders of political power to allow the negotiation between law and lawlessness that makes up what we typically consider 'adventure', in that there is somewhere to go from (civilisation) and go to (the 'wild'), where you can do things that are usually or often disruptive to civilisation, and then return from back to, hopefully with all the money you made.

(Other versions would be just staying in the 'to' - which is maybe survival meets empire building - you don't get to trade the 'treasure' away to somewhere else for money which is mainly useful somewhere else, instead what you have that is useful is what you have, so gold less important than dry wood, and staying in the 'from' where you are still in civilisation and may to extra-legal things but have ot keep it on the down-low, in which case, we might call that 'intrigue' or a 'crime' game.)

The game where you go from the wilds into civilisation and then go back to the wilds, I haven't seen that very much - we could maybe call that the Tarzan game, or a Conan game. Some unexplored possibilities there perhaps.)

Different to some points of crap settings, this borderland exists between two or I think three empires, one of which is gaining in strength - so it looks like there is no 'infinite frontier' but instead distant, but growing, and probably inevitable, conflicts between major powers.

This plays into the faction play of the main settlement in which the main players are represented by low level goons and the unstable power balance of the town means the PCs will probably end up getting involved in this somehow, pissing off and or pleasing one or more of the factions and, if they are successful tomb robbers, disrupting the tenuous balance of power.

There is also a nascent fourth faction mad up of revenants and fallen star people which can pop up and start blooming in various forms depending on what you do in the crystal tombs.

THE CONCEPT OF THE RAINING CRYSTAL TOMBS

An elegant conceit where a bunch of crystal meteors or stellar objects created or made into tombs by a race of elfish types who live up above the atmosphere, are plummeting through the atmosphere and landing across the 'crystal frontier'.

This answers the question of why it is a stateless borderland - giant crystal things keep plummeting out of the sky and when they land they poison the place, and why tomb robbers come there (no need for 'deep time' past empires integrated into the history of the game world)

[Interesting conflict or polarity there between OSR-adjacent creators tending to like both modularity in dungeon concepts but also loving 'deep time' and 'readable strata of empire' in their dungeons].

CRYSTALS - GOOD OR BAD?

I am on record as being against crystals both in principal and actuality. Mere ageless boxes of refracted light, they carry no stain, mark no culture and drift through rich history like raindrops across a windowpane, yet for all that it is based largely in and around crystals I cannot deny that this book makes as good a use of them as likely can be made;

Professional crystal cutters gaining access to fallen tombs (possibility of tomb manipulation as one grows in this skill).

Ballardian crystal transformation disease.

(the opportunity for Stugatsky/Cronenberg crystal doppelgangers who walk prismatic through the wastes and think they are, and may be, the originals, is missed, but can be easily added)

Crystal swords, chests, zombies etc.

The refractive capacities of light in a crystal tomb are I think not fully developed.

Actually was I wrong originally? I think I would have preferred a somewhat more dreamlike and Ballardian tinge to the setting - shimmering plains and Faberge hogs, shining prismatic ghosts watching from obsidian crags, well you can't have everything.

LIKEWISE TOMBS - GOOD OR BAD?

There is something of a limitation in the concept of Tombs, in which nearly everything you meet inside has to be a revenant, construct, ghost, immortal or trap of some kind.

This is evaded somewhat by having the main tomb be crashed for a while and penetrated already so now an animal is nesting inside, in a secondary dungeon rival groups of prospectors are already humming about outside

and there is nothing saying further drops must be limited to tombs, there could be crystal mazes, laboratories, churches, space-forts etc etc -

yet still they must be crystal...

THE FLOW CHART OF THIS DUNGEON

I have *tried* to produce here a very simplified flow chart of the dungeon layout which hopefully will not ruin it for anyone or tread on copyright or design

The lower red arrow is the main entry and the upper arrow a potential secondary entry and exit

Looks like basically a two-loop system, one loop obvious and the other hidden by a secret door.

If you look at the upper right branch of the leftmost vertical, irl that actually crosses *under* that point of the right vertical, if I were doing this I would have found it hard to avoid jamming in some kind of secret passing or crack there to create a third loop.

Should a dungeon be looped-to-fuckery?

Should it (like this one) have maybe one or two main loops and *possibly* more but those found only by exploration investigation or cunning?

Is there some kind of neat proportion or value between a dungeon having a certain proportion of 'open loops' and 'hidden loops'?

There is some kind of balance or at least, relationship here between the virtues of 'Flow Control' making a more Zelda-ish puzzle dungeon - like Arnold tries to do much of the time, and between ruincore or crumblecore design where there is just a hive of sneaky and chaotic ways to worm through a place as if it were rotten wood, producing a chaotic and unpredictable state of play, like I tried to do with Demon-Bone Sarcophagus.

THE MYSTERY OF WHICH ORDER TO LAY OUT A DUNGEON BOOK IN CONTINUES

There is a lot of excellent stuff in here; the main dungeon, a local town with factions etc, isometric AND flat maps, all done by Gus, plus a nice isometric area map, ANOTHER smaller dungeon with some battling prospectors..

(it’s a spiral which means it’s essentially a single line. I once made a spiral dungeon thinking it would be mysterious and cool but actually it turned out to just be a line and the players were tired and frustrated, not saying that is the case here but something to bear in mind)

Anyway, do you put the world stuff at the front, like an establishing tone thing, put it in the back like an appendix? Which maps do you put where? (this has literally every kind and format of map you might need, top down, isometric, for players for DM, etc,) do you arrange it to be read more like a story? to be referenced? for usage? (what kind of usage and by whom).

Anyway there is literally no good or correct way to lay out a book of this kind so...

CAREFULLY ENGINERED INTRO-DUNGEON

The Crystal Tomb has the dungeoneering process integrated into world arrangement, with an on-call group of seconds to take the place of dead party members, rewards for both deceit and honesty with bosses, probably enough XP to get players out of the one-hit-to-kill zone.

It is not as carefully engineered or toyboxy as Serpent King, and not as deranged and chaotic as DCO.

It is a *hard* dungeon I think, and especially hard for new players. The crystal wasting sickness that seems to come in at every possible exposure to nearly anything, is pretty hardcore, especially over the long term and especially for low CON players.

I think my only complaint about this *might* be that it kills too slowly for something so terminal in what might be an opener dungeon - it seems highly likely that a new players golden winner PC could make it out with enough XP to hit level 2, a bunch of interesting things to make them care about the character and some spicy in-world political takes but still essentially have crystal-cancer which is going to kill them, slowly.

This could be a good hook for adventure and role-playing and there is a rumoured witch who might be able to cure you *somewhere* in the setting but at least the way I read it - pretty much everyone is going to get the crystal sickness thing and so 'hunt for the witch' is going to be adventure 2 in almost everyone’s campaign.

I might throw in an insanely expensive elixir or drink imported from some empire, available in the main town, which you can buy for an extortionate amount - that's less interesting than going to search for a witch, for one session, but more manageable long-term than 'ok boys we need to go to the witch again' over multiple sessions

Maybe it’s a slightly boring option? depends how you cost it perhaps.

VERDICT

In terms of its 'engineering' this is a pleasingly good and solid book.

A possible Enny winner? Maybe 5 years ago when the 'OSR' was still a thing, but probably Gus is happier that way.

Deserves a hardback release and a print run imho!

Take a look at the pdf and see if you like it

(though knowing this audience you probably all already know about it)

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As a consequence of reading 'Cats Paws' and Catapults' I became mildly obsessed with the idea of rotational limbs in living things. WHY can't we have Segway Elephants and HOW could they evolve????

Thus I developed Roteopia, which is like that series Dinotopia but imagining an earth where creatures with rotating limbs evolved but everything else stayed at least familiar enough for the reader to understand what’s going on.

FORMAL DEFENITION OF ROTATION HERE

ITS NOT JUST WAVING YOUR ARM AROUND OK????

"By wheels we mean proper wheel and axle devices that can rotate without limit with respect to the rest of a machine. If you roll down a hill, your whole body may be a wheel, but you're no wheel and axle. So we're not talking about tumbleweeds, or about the tiny turds that dung beetles roll homeward for grubs, or about a few crustaceans that get around by rolling as a whole. Nor are we worrying about how far we can rotate our fists around our rms or our heads on our shoulders. By "rotation" we also mean something fairly specific. When you draw a circle on a piece of paper, do you rotate your hand? You may move it in a circle, but you don't truly rotate it; after all, your hand at all times points in the same compass direction. Human dances make elaborate uses of such circular but nonrotational motion, most likely because it doesn't make us dizzy. Not all dances, of course; waltzes are rotational and, one suspects, intentionally vertiginous. The wheels of a bicycle rotate; your feet and the pedals just move around in circular paths. The Ferris wheel rotates as a whole, but the seats and people just go in circles. In this precise sense - excluding both rolling as a whole and merely going in circles - the only known instance of a wheel and axle in nature is the bacterial flagellum." - Steven Vogel, Cats' paws and Catapults

(From a post by u/ExplosiveVent here)

THE GENESIS OF ROTATING BEINGS

I have two general base animals in mind depend on whether we want bones or boneless. I will start with boned.

So imagine something like a a very early form of the Angler Fish in the Cambrian era. Not quite fishlike yet, maybe flat instead of tall, but it has a spine.

This creature is highly sexually dimorphic. The females are large and the males very small. Pattern of mating is that the male physically inserts its head into one of a range of orifices in the female. This proto-womb has a muscular lock to stop the male getting away. Once penetrated the area around the males head/internal wall, dissolves, large parts of the flesh of the males head dissolve as well, allowing genetic material to enter the female. Now they are joined.

So far, not hugely different to the modern Angler Fish, which can swim around with a number of males attached to it.

At some point the mating biology mutates so that the male can 'spin' inside the muscle lock. It has a particular head shape that keeps its head 'inside' the female, and if it did manage to get out it would die anyway as now it can only gain nutrients from the females body. But it can 'swim', flex its body and turn n its own axis, part inside the female but the rear part outside.

Now we imagine multiple matings, either simultaneously or over time but with the males from previous matings remaining in place.

Now we have a vertebrae fishlike being with these mini-fish sticking out of it, and the mini fish can still swim, and crucially, they can rotate in place.

Now rotational movement, a corkscrewing, is extremely efficient, so all we are waiting for is a fluke where the males are all capable of rotating and in the right position to provide thrust and are sensitive and responsive enough to female pressure to do so on command.

So now we have a fishlike being with what are in effect, corkscrew drives.

That’s your evolutionary pressure. From this point on the species becomes better and better at developing and maintaining these rotating 'limbs'. More and more of the species existence is spent as an actually-multiple mating group, rotating improves, adaptions to secretions and the inner wall increasing strength and decreasing friction, energy transfer between female and male improves, male body shape shifts to become more and more an efficient corkscrew, the primal rotators develop a flexible body comportment so they can group their 'screws' behind them for maximum thrust but also spread these 'limbs' for manoeuvring.

So effectively this early fish can 'strafe', and move rapidly three-dimensionally in water.

(The G'Kek from David Brins 'Uplift' series.

They were engineered and don't count.)

BONES OR NO BONES?

The other option for this was a sort of proto-squid with the rotating 'engines' at the end of the limbs. My main difficulty with these was that I want to get them on land at some point and its very rare (maybe impossible) for a non boned creature to evolve bones. Once they get to a certain size on land bones are going to be super-useful for sustaining that weight.

HOWEVER, the squid would have extra limbs, meaning it could 'push' itself along the sea floor, provide extra thrust, and have limbs left over for manipulation and hunting. I do like the idea of a huge hairy wheeled squid mammoth, or colour-shifting high speed steppe predator wheeled squid.

THE SHIFT TO THE SHORE

Moving from sea to land would happen pretty much as it did in our world, with colonisation of reefs, rotators using their screws to aquaplane the flat sea by beaches, rotator-lungfish types living in mud etc.

The evolution from screws to wheels should be \_relatively\_ simple. The males changing from corkscrews to full wheels and the alignment of the limbs shifting.

EARLY LAND BASED ROTATORS

Once you have even a semi-wheeled animal which can leave the water and race up and down the beach, we are off baby!

This is another situation where it might be easier to start with Squid rather than a vertebrate as they could manoeuvre and 'lock' their wheels, turning their limbs into legs, allowing them to cross rough ground probably easier and sooner than the fish-rotators.

The great difference between evolution on Roteopia and here would be the incredible SPEED of land animals really right from the start.

(Phillip Pullmans seed wheelers

BUT HOW DID THEY EVOLVE PHILLIP? HMMMM?)

THE LORDS OF SPEED

What does evolution on a fast rotation-based world look like?

Probably the world of Speed will start at the beaches and the river mouths, but could it propagate itself inland?

I imagine giant slow rotator-dinosaurs CRUSHING their way through primeval forests, eating all the trees and pooping out a steady stream of waste that hardens into a kind of poop-asphalt to aid the way of their baby-rotators.

Could Rotators conquer and in fact synergise with different forms of plant life to create a world not of dense forests but of mixed plain-forest pathways. Plants on flat land more spread out and distributed, wider apart, with high crowns and little midway growth, but with very flat smooth roots that don't disturb the ground (an evolutionary reward bought with the high dispersal of becoming a rotators favourite food).

Or plants and ecosystems which sustain themselves by foiling the rotators, producing crazed root systems, foiling toxic hanging vines and 'trap' branches which fall like caltrops. An environmental war between the rough and the smooth.

The key thing about Rotopia is that things tend to move FAST. Super-fast rotator velociraptors chasing high-speed Stegadons. Propellor driven birds screaming past. Rotator-Orca-Dinosaurs aquaplaning out of the ocean to grab prey.

ROTOPIA - BEFORE THE ICE AGE

Yet somehow (because I say so) Humanity arrives and the world ends up looking at least a bit like our own.

What is Rotator Earth like?

The key difference that I can see is that the plains are now more like oceans rather than deserts. The existence of vast rotator-herds means the plains, tundra and wastes are criss-crossed by desire paths, some perhaps millions of years old, made. An earth of natural prehistoric highways. Prehistoric highways spread like river systems, visible from space, with their own linear ecosystems, resource conflicts over connections and junctions and huge animal traffic jams.

And with Rotator-beasts the crossing of these plains and highways by man becomes much more achievable. Movement across huge distances can be accomplished relatively easily, due to the wonderous efficiency of the hyper-evolved wheeled limb.

Imagine the maps of early civilisation but now, instead of societies and populations and development being clustered around navigable sea-ports, like the Aegean, Mediterranean, South China Sea, now civilisation has two forms of 'ocean'. Ships travel the sea, linking cultures and resources together, but vast caravans of high speed rotator elephants also travel the plain. Crossing the Sahara, the American plains or much of Mesopotamia is not that big a deal.

In this world, cultural power comes not just from where seas, rivers and farmable land intersect, but from where the hydraulic web of interconnections itself meshes with the Rotational Plains.

If you have sea-ports, river travel AND a vast plain meshing together, then the plain can be crossed almost as easily as the sea and possibly faster. Now on the far side of that plain, even if there is no oceanic or river access, a new margin of cities and cultures can develop, and at the meshwork between the two systems forms of civilisation can develop which draw wealth and power from a much wider area. Lords of the Land and Sea, Empire multiplied.

High-speed mass chariot warfare - the ancients fighting like a drag race at 50 miles per hour!

(Wheeled Beings... 14 Million Years Ago!!!)

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A pretty great book! Scrap was trying to get me to read this for aaaages and I REFUSED! But I am glad I have read it now.

WHAT ABOUT

Why do nature and mankind design things so differently?

This is a pop-sci book and it reminded me again that I am fucking stupid. Most of the difficult (for me) stuff is at the beginning, like; what’s the difference between Strength, Strain, Stiffness, Toughness, and Resilience, which in terms of building things are all quite distance properties of things.

I definitely knew this briefly at some point reading this and have forgotten since, much like most of my STEM education since birth.

THE ABYSS OF HUMAN KNOWLEDGE

One of my favourite things about this book is the way it highlights and discusses just what we *don't* know and the extent to which we don't know it.

Human knowledge like an ink blot expanding on plain paper, the area of the ink blot ever growing but if the line of the perimeter of the blot is measured, (made fractal and jagged by the grains and curls of the paper as it drinks in the ink) then this line, the zone between white and dark, between known and unknown, is growing and growing and growing all the time.

Yet we rarely feel this in our daily lives, that the abyss of unknowing is opening endlessly before us. Instead we feel the gradual advance of human knowledge, its absorbing and explaining of new domains.

Of course this is true; the ink blot is gradually spreading, so man may stand in its centre and say "I am the king of the ink blot and my empire is ever-growing". Yet, an invisible rider might dash along the rim of the ink blot and say "I am the lord of the wastes and as your Empire grows, so does mine, invisible to you".

Why?

- Mental 'distance' from the unknown; unknown things are more and more abstruse and difficult to describe to normal people. Previously you could say, "what is the sun?", but now you need an education in physics to understand what we don't know about physics.

- Recursive tendency of reason; it often 'curls back' upon itself explaining itself in terms of itself and so reason is often blind to gaps in itself.

- General logical positivist boosterism of society, (not that bad), and collapse of scientific enquiry into basically an ADHD marketing scam (quite bad).

- Fundamental difficulty of conceptualising 'the unknown' as most of the unknown is very unknown so we don't even know it is there to talk about it, and the bits we do know about are only somewhat unknown since we can actually conceive of them.

At the end of many of his chapters, Vogel takes us into some of the difficult questions about nature and humanity and what and why each does they way they do (?)

Why does nature have only one confirmed example of rotational movement, why does she not use metals, why no jet-powered birds?

Simple questions but coming at the end of complex and descriptive chapters about the structures of nature, types of levers and limbs and the development of human and bird flight, Vogel is allowed, or he provides himself with enough context and impetus to, shape the questions as something other than just a blank 'well we don't know'.

Reading this, one desired strongly to voyage to other planets with life to find out just how much of earth evolution is 'normal actually' and how much is just 'well it was random but it sort of works so we stuck with it'. These are unanswerable and, without the strong armature of detail and imagination Vogel casts around them, not unaskable, but mutely irrelevant, self-consuming questions.

THE MORAL POINT AT THE END

As well as being an educational textbook Vogel has a philosophy which I approve of and agree with.

Which is; that the engineering domains of humanity and nature are different houses, best regarded differently. That while we have learned a lot from nature, many examples of direct copying are overstated or illusory, that often we have done a lot better when we have stopped trying to copy nature, done what we can to learn and understand basic principals and, when creating, done things our own way (i.e. abandoning years and years and years of attempted 'birdlike' flight, which was never going to work for us).

It's a distancing from the 'nature is always beautiful and always first and always right' view, but it is not the opposing Melkorist view either, but a careful and rigorous separation of two domains, insisting that each be accounted for by its own rules and considered separately, without worshipping or degrading either.

Its... sensible? It takes an entire book and point layered on careful point, with histories, diagrams and descriptions to make and reinforce this by the end, very sensible and elegant concept which once received, seems like the simplest thing in the world.

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The age of Marketing is Over*,

Not the internet Trolls, and not Elon when he is vibing, but the Mail Order Trolls

Remember them? Its these guys!

This idea sprang from a Goonhammer article about the development of the short-lived game Gorkamorka, which I would recommend you read first, its excellent and you can find it here.

WHATS IN THE ARTICLE

The article describes an internal conflict at Games Workshop between the Design people and the Marketing/Executive faction. To the surprise of no-one, creative lost and the future of the company would be decided by marketing.

This happened around the time of the development of Game Workshops Kitbash Space-Ork racing game Gorkamorka and the article is mainly about that.

However it does mention that a part of the company largely forgotten in this conflict was a big fan of Gorkamorka. The Mail Order Trolls loved it.

At that time it was possible to call up Games Workshop and order 'bitz' - individual bits and pieces of various models, which one could find in printed catalogues. These would be pulled from, one assumed, vast bins and drawers of various bits and pieces and send off to the lucky gamer, who would then glue them onto whatever the fuck their Gorkamorka Orks were building The people in charge of this, and in charge of all mail order stuff at GW were called 'The Mail order Trolls'.

As the article describes, the Mail order Trolls loved Gorkamkorka because it was a kitbash-based game. Several elements of the game and setting contributed to this;

The Orks live on a giant trash planet and build their vehicles out of whatever they can find, meaning almost any part can reasonably be included. Orks naturally adopt a rather 'bricolage' handmade aesthetic, so a piece of toy glued or drilled on by a 14 year old doesn't seem out of place and in fact adds to the immersion.

From a rules perspective models were based on strict WYSIWIG, meaning if you wanted a new gun or a ram or something else on your trukk, you had to actually glue or attach it to the model. Each trukk could also only carry as many Orks as that model could actually carry, and there were few restrictions on adding insane extensions or additions, since thats what Orks would actually do.

All of this lead to a LOT of hobbyists calling up the Mail Order Trolls asking for this or that particular piece.

THE DREAM OF A TROLL-LEAD COMPANY

I imagined if, instead of a conflict between marketing and creative, which, as in Tolkiens high catholic description of a fallen world, evil will often superficially win, yet only thereby hastening its own destruction, what if, instead, the Trolls had been in the room, and had won that argument?

What would a 1990's Games Workshop run by and for its Mail Order department look like?

Games, worlds, stories and systems created specifically to maximise the volume and range of bits (not kits) manifested and to maximise the demand for those bits. A world where Gorkamkorka was not the end of a failed evolutionary branch, but the beginning of one. Gorkamorka II, Necromorka, then Warhamorka, Warhammer Fantasy Bitsamorka.

These games wouldn't be based around kits, or at least only partially around a small number of very skeletal kits, but around bits and pieces, highly individualistic arrangements of parts in imagined works where increasingly sophisticated aesthetics of bricolage were embodied in the model range, the rules and the imaginary cultures described.

Such games would start with Orks and Orcs, since they by nature love bricolage, but probably move to Chaos, with its love of additions and mutations, and then perhaps the Renaissance Dwarfs and Humans, with Rube Goldberg-esque steampunk contraptions.

Only with difficulty would they involve Elves or other factions for whom an harmony and flow of aesthetic is primary. But it is not impossible that a sophisticated enough development of a 'bitz-and-frames' culture could gradually work up to an Elfamorka, a game where each major piece was still a bespoke assemblage but where the options and possible arrangements of pieces lead almost inevitably to harmony.

BUT THE FUTURE IS NOW

The dream of a Troll-Lead Workshop suggested to me a possible path forward for GW's very slow and multivarious adaptation to the growth of 3D printing.

(I am actually pretty ambivalent about 'helping' Games Workshop with new ideas but I like having ideas so whatever.)

Much and probably most of GW's profit margins come from its highly sophisticated skills with plastic injection moulding. Specifically, adapting the complex needs of three dimensional shapes to the liquid flow of a mould across a single dimension.

Many of Games Workshops sprues are themselves works of strange industrial art.

It is an art which is dying out and they know it.

Easily available 3D printing is not quite at the level where it can beat GW for quality of manufacture and especially for ease of manufacture. (Unless you are really into it, dicking around with a printer is a big investment of time and energy compared to going to a shop).

But the ease, power and ubiquity of the printers is only growing, and Games Workshop is a company that makes its money from controlling the production of shapes. GW's expansions into the general culture area with games and especially their desire to control all fan produced narratives and bring them all within their umbrella, is probably suggestive of a company that knows it has to diversify away from the magic money well of plastic injection moulding and is trying to transform into a brand which exists across many forms of manufacture.

PRINTAMORKA

A future for Games Workshop would be to become traders in forms and arrangements, and in systems of connection, rather than in plastic kits, and the games Systems, fictions and imaginary worlds made to work this culture of printing and individual selection, would be more like the Worldsamorka I described above rather than modern games.

Games Workshop already has a well developed internet ordering site, (after experiencing many of these from different companies I have a lot more respect for how well Games Workshops site works and how useful it is in listbuilding or arranging imaginary armies). This could form the basis of a new expansion where, instead of just being able to rotate images of painted miniatures, one could rotate living wireframes of printable shapes, and could select ones own "bitz", starting with armaments and decorations, but expanding into mounts, heads, limbs, and finally the basic arrangements of form themselves.

Given the power of a digital modelling system to control or shape choices and the forms which result, producing highly modular forms which still contain and express the most organic and sophisticated aesthetics, should be even more possible.

These arrangements could be printed bespoke for you either in Nottingham or at a local Games Workshop store (a fresh and unexpected adaptation of use for those locations), and either sent to you or picked up. Or the finished pattern could be sold to you (watermarked of course) and you could print it yourself.

In this case, Games Workshop would be selling not just the model itself, but selling (probably renting, god I hate myself), access to the bespoke software, but more importantly, the arrangements of possible forms and shapes, rather than the shapes themselves.

GW is already unusually good at creating highly specific yet adaptable arrangements of shape, volume and pattern which signify and express the various characters and factions of their imagined worlds. (Have written on this previously). Now that skill, developed for one set of purposes, would be remodulated into, not design advice or design bibles communicated to sculptors (or at least not only that), but into the very systems of digital arrangement which customers use to create their models. Transformed from a series of rules into a tool.

The ghost of that failed evolutionary tree may be resurrected in a new world.

*It probably isn't over. This was wishful thinking on my part but a boy can dream.

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My recent reading of Salammbo and a post about what other hidden genre gems might exist unregarded in the corpus of otherwise literary authors lead to quite a few interesting comments collected across this blog, Twitter and Facebook.

And here are those comments, roughly collected and arranged by commenter, with a few additions by me. The spirit of G+ lives on! Just not in one place.

Hebemachia

“Doris Lessing's science fiction stuff (hard to find these days, unfortunately)”

P - This seems like a prefect response. A Nobel Prize winning author that I knew literally nothing about up until this comment who wrote a sci-fi series across a gigantic scale based around concepts of Sufism. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canopus\_in\_Argos

Paperino Maltese

“several novel by cormac mccarthy squarely fall into adventure genre. also chabon's gentlemen of the road is full on serialized adventure.”

“cormac mccarthy's blood meridian (western), on the road (post-apocalyptic) and no country (pure pulp thriller) are obviously genre novels. i am not sure how out of the ordinary is that for cormac but he is certainly and somewhat arguably the greatest living american novelist. added bonus is that the blood meridian is the ultimate murder hobo novel ever.”

P – Ok, so Chabon feels like he is on the border of the nearly bougie genre author, but his main works feel a bit late to me, or they came at the post-Gaimane inflection point where it was nearly alright to be a genre author and still win awards.

McCarthy I regard as the premium pulp author and I have often thought that you could change his books from literature to pulp by just adding lots of punctuation and exclamation marks.

McCarthy doesn’t quite fit perfectly the ‘hidden genre’ pattern, he is more hiding in plain sight.

Phandaal

“Salammbo's a gem, while you're at it, check out Flaubert's 'The Temptation of Saint Anthony' which also fits.”

P- Ok, we got another Flaubert

Richard August

“I don’t think Salammbo can be considered a hidden classic? It’s one of the most republished of his works, especially in English. I dunno that it’s that rare, especially during the 19th century when genre divisions really didn’t mean anything, and the gap between ‘literary’ and ‘genre’ fiction didn’t really exist. Which I could go on about ad nauseum.”

P – well it was hidden to me. Ok so everyone is going to have an entirely different perception on what counts as hidden or unknown, but you can buy Madame Bovary in Waterstones and have to search for Salammbo on Amazon and even then I think its Print on Demand. Plus this is my blog so my definition of ‘hidden’ will be the one we use.

BUT that aside:

“- Melville’s early work is pretty much swashbuckling, evocative sailor fiction.”

Melville – maybe but Moby Dick is pretty much genre already and its his most well-known work.

“- John Barth’s Giles Goat-boy is a weird, epic, fantastical journey through a vast university, and very different from the more mimetic stuff he’d done before.”

P – I know nothing about this or about John Barth! If anyone has opinions drop them in the comments!

“- Maupassant wrote some great supernatural horror stories - The Horla chief among them - which are a sharp contrast with his naturalistic fiction.”

P – that’s one for the bank.

“- Orwell’s 1984 would pretty much constitute this, I think. It’s a dystopian, science fictional work against his previous work of sociographical journalism.”

P – but hardly unknown, and Animal Farm came first!

Thor Hansen

“The Adventures of Haji Baba of Isfahan

https://iranicaonline.org/articles/hajji-baba-of-ispahan”

P – what the hell. Ok I know nothing about this. This one is interesting.

Luka Jare

Flaubert's Temptation of St. Anthony is sais to be pretty much that also and Simplicius Simplicissimus, the german picaresque novel set in the 30 years war.

P - Simplicius Simplicissimus, unknown to me at least so that’s something, but not part of a largler body of work by a ‘literary author’.

Christopher Richardson

I don't know if "Baudolino" by Umberto Eco would count, since his ouvre is usually fairly weird, but I think critics mostly focus on "Name of the Rose" and "Foucault's Pendulum" which are more prosaic. Baudolino is definitely high weird fantasy”

P – I mean it probably doesn’t but if anyone wants to talk about Baudolino in the comments and argue over how genre it is, go for it.

Barry Blatt

“I don't know if it was really ignored, but Russell Hoban's 'Riddley Walker' is nothing like anything else he wrote, though It got awards from the Sc fi fans. It has an interesting post apocalyptic Kent and a culture based around Punch and Judy shows.”

P – Riddley Walker is really good, not sure if it counts as an ‘unknown’, am open to arguments.

Zigurat Morningstar

“Theophile Gautier's Captain Fracasse. A chivalry romance set in the 17th century. Good stuff and at time hilarious.”

P – ok 10 points for being unknown to me, another for being from a 19thC author. Not sure how this plays out in comparison to the authors other works but interesting. There have been six films of this story! I feel like I am going to end up reading this one.

Kelvin Green

“Atwood keeps writing sci-fi but claiming she isn't.”

P – Honestly Atwood can eat a dick.

“Rushdie's Midnight's Children is basically Indian X-Men.

Neither is ignored, but the fact that they are genre books is overlooked.”

P – Ok this will likely surprise absolutely no-one reading this but on looking up Midnights Children my mind was fucking BLOWN. I had heard the name many many times but had literally no idea it has FUCKING SUPERPOWERS and was basically the fucking X-MEN. I feel like this one gets in simply because I was massively ignorant against it and it seems like a prime example of a bougie author in genre dress, or maybe visa versa.

Shahar Halevy

“The Adventures of Tintin”

P - come on man.

Michael Weingrad

“Blake's "The Four Zoas" is has its weird charms, and I think many of the "inverse classics" will be literally "in verse." Some of Disraeli's novels (e.g. Alroy) also occur to me, though it's not like his more successful novels are being championed by mainstream critics today.”

P – Another mind-blown moment for me. A British Prime Minister was also a prolific, well not quite fantasy author by modern standards but a fantastic historical and mythic romance author. He wrote a shitload of these, what the hell!

“For those who don't mind the slog, there is a lot of really good work by fantasy scholars and critics pushing back on the mainstream exclusion of the more fantasy-friendly work and showing how intertwined it all was and is.

Brian Stableford had an enthusiastic entry on Flaubert back in the indispensable 1997 John Clute "Encyclopedia of Fantasy," and Stableford's many translations of French decadent, fantasy, sci-fi, and weird poetry and fiction have since expanded on that line of reading. (Paul Feval's "Vampire City" isn't canonical, but really worth a look, translated recently by Stableford.)

Jamie Williamson offers lots of suggestions about the roots of modern fantasy in everything from the 18th century Spenser revival to 19th century Orientalist poems, in his excellent book "The Evolution of Modern Fantasy: From Antiquarianism to the Ballantine Adult Fantasy Series."

James Machin's "Weird Fiction in Britain: 1880-1939" is more academic but roots the Weird in fin-de-siecle decadent literature with some fine leads in the decadent nexus of Wilde, Huysmans, etc.”

P – This feels like a good mission for someone with way more time and energy than me.

Dan Sumption

“Taking things to the other extreme, I recently read a play by Lord Dunsany which read more like something by Feydeau.”

P – I mean Dunsany is Dunsany.

Solomon VK

(I combined a huge number of comments by Solomon)

“Not as pure an example as Flaubert, however:

Evelyn Waugh sometimes has a reputation as something like a crueller Wodehouse - but it is worth noting that he was always willing to employ the unfamiliar or to write in settings outside 1930s Britain: witness the nameless future war at the conclusion of Vile Bodies, the Gothic fate of Tony Last in A Handful of Dust or the fictional nation of Neutralia in Scott-King's Modern Europe - all this neglecting anomalies like the mysterious voices in The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold or the centralised dystopia of Love Among the Ruins. His novel Helena, about the mother of Constantine and the Invention (discovery) of the True Cross is another such anomaly.

This is the same for Kingsley Amis, if somewhat less so - his genre influence is pretty obvious. Everyone thinks of Lucky Jim and forget stuff like The Alteration or Russian Hide and Seek. He also wrote a James Bond continuation (Colonel Sun) under an assumed name.

EM Forster's The Machine Stops definitely counts.

The Glass Bead Game definitely counts. The short stories in Hesse's Strange News from Another Star are pretty obvious bits of world-building as well. It's only the final entry of the Space Trilogy that works as modern conspiracy, no? But then I suppose the first chapter framing device of Perelandra and all the set-up business from the first act of Out of the Silent Planet offer a sketch of what it would be like.

In any case, my instincts took me to another aspect of gaming altogether when I turned to Lewis: https://worldbuildingandwoolgathering.blogspot.com/2017/12/malacandra-trio.html

Alternate history does seem to get them in for this - you've got Robert Harris's Fatherland and Philip Roth's Plot against America. But neither are very extensive in their world-building.

Atwood's kind of got known for her genre material, though that's not where she started. Her book of essays In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination indicates that what she had/has an odd definition of Science Fiction vs Speculative Fiction.

See also Laurent Binet, who went from an experimental novel about Rheinhard Heydrich, to an Umberto Eco-esque thriller about semiotics to 'What if the Incas invaded Habsburg Spain?'”

P – bro… So much to think on. But that Incan invasion of Spain seems like one to add to the wishlist.

Jeff Russell

“A few thoughts, though I look forward to seeing what others say:

- Glass Bead Game by Herman Hesse presents an extremely compelling slice of an otherwise fairly hazy future, and works as a sci-fi novel. I haven't read Narcissus and Goldmund, but the synopsis sounds like its got some elements of a good medieval picaresque

- Possibly overly obvious: Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde. That's some gothic horror right there.

- Maybe not as neglected, but several of Dickens's stories are pretty genre, including his best-known and seasonally appropriate, "A Christmas Carol". I also found the orphanage and street-life bits of "Oliver Twist" work rather well as inspiration for grubby city D&D

- Doesn't *really* count, since he was well known for his genre writing, but I think Lewis's Space Trilogy knocks the socks off Narnia, and with very minor tweaking, would serve for the sinister modern conspiracy game of your choice.”

P – I will give you Hesse, but not the rest!

Noisms

“Edmund mentioned Kingsley Amis's The Alteration above. He also wrote The Green Man, which is kind of a fantasy/horror genre story.

HG Wells is probably the standout for The Time Machine, Dr Moreau, etc. I think I'm right in saying that later in life he was embarrassed by these genre efforts?

Nathaniel Hawthorne's "Rappaccini's Daughter" is probably an example of what you're talking about. I think there are also lots of Charles Dickens short stories that would fit the bill.

Possibly Shakespeare plays, especially the lesser-known freaky weird ones like Titus Andronicus?

A lot of Margaret Atwood's stuff would be in this category, I suppose, but she always insists she doesn't write SF and is just a bit of annoying, really.

There's also Kazuo Ishiguro.”

P – most of those are too well known and I am not letting Atwood in on principal but Rappaccini's Daughter does sound interesting.

Thekelvingreen

“Atwood was my first thought too. "Proper" novelist, doesn't write genre, pops out a couple of (definitely not) sci-fi books, and sneaks a pretty good Conan type pastiche into another. But definitely doesn't do genre.”

P- No Atwood! Banned!

Marten31

“Stephen King's Eyes of the Dragon comes to mind, although he isn't the non-genre-type anyways.

Hans-Christian Andersen's The Galoshes of Fortune may count: Not the usual dark fairytale but a story with time travel and an actual alien civilization on the moon.

For me it is quite strage to see Wells mentioned in the comments so often - to me (as a German perhaps) he was always a scifi-auhor first (and the better compared to Verne, whose characters were always crap, and Lovecraft, who assumed that encountering a non-human-centered universe must surely drive anyone mad).”

P – King, Andersen, Welles, all to well known as genre writers.

Maxcan

“I recently read Infinite Jest and people don't talk enough about how much campy scifi is going on behind the scenes in the plot and worldbuilding of that book. We had a whole conversation about it a while back on my server.”

P – I have not read it!

Alec Semicognito

“The works of French author Michel Houellebecq. It's not D&D, but it is mostly science fiction extrapolating from current society. His mind-bending cynicism and despair, plus his bizarre real-life personality, tend to overshadow the sci-fi elements on the public mind.

P - I don’t want to read Houellebecq, he seems like too much of a cunt even for me, plus in the words of Alan Partridge; “(S)hes boring and racist, I can tolerate one of those but not both at the same time."

Also Atomic Aztex, by Sesshu Foster. It's a political novel, alternating (I think) chapters about Latin-Americans working in a shitty meat-packing plant with chapters where the Aztecs are destroying the Nazis in WWII.”

P – what the hell is this another French Mesoamerican alternate history thing? Its odd that has come up twice.

Montefeltro

“I'd add The Hopkins Manuscript by RC Sheriff. He's mainly known for his play Journey's End - pretty much the archetype of a Very Serious WW1 Story - but also produced this 1930s apocalyptic sci-fi novel about the moon slowly crashing into the Earth. I'm not sure if I can wholeheartedly recommend it; the first third is a bit dull (basically the protagonist endlessly changing his mind about whether or not to worry about the impending threat) and the last section is mostly strained political allegory (a bit like the early chapters of Last and First Men, before Stapledon really cranks the oracular weirdness into gear). Nonetheless, in the middle section there's a pretty fine description of early 20th Century rural England coming to terms with imminent planetary destruction: defiant midnight cricket matches played under a moon that blots out the sky, and that sort of thing. Might be worth a look.”

P – That does sound worth a look.

Alea iactanda est

“Simone de Beauvoir's Tous les hommes sont mortels (All Men are Mortal). It's about a guy that stops aging in the 13th century and how he lives until the present day. It's the book that 1000 Year Old Vampire aspires to be, and White Wolf's Vampire could never possibly pull off.”

P – There is a film of this one too! Also why are the French so fucking depressed?

“I found Fouqué's Der Zauberring (The Magic Ring) endlessly inspiring for RPG stuff. It's vast and gloomy and epic.

Also, wait until you've finished the Flaubert, then check out Philippe Druillet's comics adaptation.”

P – Well I have it.

Hyrieus

“Pale Fire by Nabokov might fit the bill here.”

P – pffft, not realllly.

Chryphex

“First thing that comes to mind is John Steinbeck's retelling of Le Morte d'Arthur”

P – I mean that’s just straight up genre, it has a wizard in it. It does win points for being by Steinbeck though.

PrinceofNothing

“You will probably already know of it but Simplicius Simpliccimus comes to mind, but fails on a technicality that it is the authors most popular work. Same goes for Xenophon's The Persian Expedition.

Michael Crichton's Eaters of the Dead is terrific S&S and was made into the 13th Warrior, but this is not a literary author.

No I think I shall recommend On to the Alamo by Richard Penn Smith for Appendix N status and slyly make my escape.”

P – what the actual fuck. From the Wikipedia; “In 1836, a sensation was created by a new book titled "Col. Crockett's Exploits and Adventures in Texas: wherein is contained a full account of his journey from Tennessee to the Red River and Natchitoches, and thence across Texas to San Antonio; including many hair-breadth escapes; together with a topographical, historical, and political view of Texas ... Written by Himself". It was published by "T.K. and P.G. Collins" (actually Carey and Hart, who had published some of Crockett's authentic, though heavily edited, writings). They falsely claimed that it was Crockett’s journal, which had been taken from the Alamo by Mexican General Manuel Fernández Castrillón and later recovered at the Battle of San Jacinto, where the General was killed. It became a huge best-seller. For over a century the book had a profound influence on the public's view of the Texas Revolution and Davy Crockett's career, despite the fact that the author's true identity had been revealed in 1884.”

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It’s pretty good! Give it a read!

What else can I say about it?

An historical novel set in the Mercenary War Carthage fought after the first Punic war. Essentially, Carthage refuses to pay its mercenary soldiers, things spiral out of control, then they get worse, then they get really worse. The main axis of the book is built around the love/hate relationship between Matho, the leader of the mercenaries and Salammbo, daughter of Hamlicar Barca, (who is the father of Hannibal of Elephant fame). Story has slaves, war, battles, schemes, pride, jealousy, strange gods, savagery, massive orientalism and many many elephants were very much harmed in the creation of this story not approved by the animal care people at all.

This is the only book by Flaubert I have read and seems to be very much not typical for his ouvre. The rest are 19th Century French realism about relationships and stuff. I have done a series of social media posts about the relationship of literary and 'secret genre' writers and will try to pull those together in a later post.

Most images are from the amazing Sci Fi Adaptation

by Phillipe Druillet

WHAT ABOUT THE WRITING?

It is a steaming pile of details! Researched, imagined, confabulated. A story of things! Very like some balladic structure stories, lists of lists of lists, inflated and intensified by the density of the novel.

Really the book drips gems and oozes blood. If tip it over, the shining feather of a sacred hummingbird wound with old threat comes out clutched in the head of a skinned mouse which has been stuffed with mhyrr. The book is nearly smoking, its fuming, its hot in there and the bloodstench, reek of burning cities, unguents, spices, perfumes, wafts of burning bezoars drawn from the gullets of a whale, is so heavy you feel drugged, which you probably actually are.

Vividness! Everything is so particular. No vague moments, general experiences or non-specific objects. Only immediate, vivid, burning slices of a highly imagined reality.

The Multiplication of Hieraticism! Flaubert is very into his characters being Heiratic, posing, performing, existing like statues or symbols, embodying roles, which they do both diegetically in the imagined world but also generally like that in the story, Matho IS the Noble Savage Barbarian Mercinary, Spendius IS the crafty, clever cowardly greek, Narr' Havas IS the mysterious Numidian Horse Lord, Slammbo IS the moon-worshipping Pirestess/Princes object of desire and feminine principal. Hanno, the preferred leader of Carthages corrupt old man class IS.. well look at this Druillet illustration from his si-fi adaptation;

THE EMOTIONS

Characters have strong singular emotions. Oddly, the source of the strife, or its main organiser, seems to be the existence between Matho and Salammbo of something like love, or at least an emotion or range of emotions neither of them can describe, understand or adapt to, and which show themselves in these vast towers of gilded obsession.

They desire each other, exert power over each other, submit or gloat. Really almost no-one has what we would consider a normal conversation in this world. One either holds the edge of a bronze sword to another’s neck and LAUGHS while sweat and perfume is massaged into your scalp by slaves, or rolls and capers in the dust, naked and scarred, begging to kiss another’s feet.

Its fucking nuts. When the elders of Carthage finally get Hamlicar, their best general, back to save them from their own dumb fucking screwups, in the weird masonic cult meeting that passes for their Central Command Conference, where no-one is meant to be armed, they lose their shit with him and pull out daggers to kill him, then he pulls out two(!) swords and leaps onto an altar to defy them. Then everyone realises that since everyone broke the sword rule they just agree not to speak about it. This is like if MacArthur came back from Korea and got into an armed mexican standoff with Truman in the White House, which McArthur would probably have done if he could but he was a bit like a Salammbo character anyway.

Luckily(?) everyone in the story gets to occupy each of those positions at least once.

HATE! Nearly everyone in Salammbo seems to low-key hate nearly everyone else; Carthaginians and Mercenaries, Matho and Salammbo, the Carthage elders and Hamlicar, Carthage and its surrounding territories, Punic Carthaginians and native Carthaginians, Moloch and Tanit, camels and elephants...

LOVE! There are only a few examples of what we would call love, or even affection; Matho and Salammbos strangulated mutual desire, Hamlicar loves Hannibal, his son but Flaubert is careful to say, he is an extension of himself into the future. The patricians of carthage seem to love their children at least enough for some of them to be reluctant to sacrifice them to Moloch. The biggest scene of love is towards the end where many of the mercenaries have been trapped and Hamlicar pulls a Joker and tells them if they kill each other in hand to hand he will forgive and employ the survivors

here we get this;

"The community of their lives had brought about profound friendship amongst these men. The camp, with most, took the place of their country; living without a family they transferred the needful tenderness to a companion, and they would fall asleep in the starlight side by side under the same cloak. And then in their perpetual wandering through all sorts of countries, murders and adventures, they had contracted affections, one for the other, in which the stronger protected the younger in the midst of battles, helped him to across precipices, sponges the sweat of fevers from his brow, and stole food for him, and the weaker, a child perhaps, who had been picked up on the roadside, and had then become a Mercenary, repaid this devotion by a thousand kindnesses.

They exchanged their necklaces and earrings, presents which they had made to one another in former days, after great peril, or in hours of intoxication. All asked to die, and none would strike,. A young fellow might be seen here and there saying to another whose beard was grey: "No! no! you are more robust! you will avenge us, kill me!" and the man would reply: "I have fewer years to live! Strike to the heart, and think no more about it!" Brothers gazed on one another with clasped hands, and friend bade friend eternal farewells, standing and weeping upon his shoulder."

THE WORLD

Gigantic! Through reach, specificity and most of all through its teeming diversity of wildly different cultures all massed and thronging together. Though to us, we could fly across every land described in a few hours, and even drive across the main areas in a day or two, to those within it, Carthage is like a strange moon orbiting through strange stars; the entirety of the Mediterranean world, from the strange misty gloom forests of the Celts and Germans to the north, the Numidian horsemen, Greeks, Romans, the strange impossible peoples of Africa beyond the desert. First the Nomads;

"They were nor Libyans from the neighbourhood of Carthage, who had long composed the third army, but nomads from the tableland of Barca, bandits from Cape Phiscus and the promontory of Dernah, from Phazzana and Marmaricia. They had crossed the desert, drinking at the brackish wells walled with camels bone, the Zuaeces, with their covering of ostrich eathers, had come on quadringa, the Garamantians, masked with black veils, rode on their painted mares; others were mounted on asses, onagers, zebra, and buffaloes; while some dragged after them the roofs of their sloop-shaped huts together with their families and idols. There were Ammonians with limbs wrinkled by the hot water of the springs, Ataranians, who curse the sun; Troglodytes, who bury their dead with laughter beneath branches of trees, and the hideous Auseans, who eat grass-hoppers; the Achyrmmachidae who eat lice, and the vermillion-painted Gysantians, who eat apes."

Then;

"First were seen running up all the hunters from Malethut-Baal and Garaphos, clad in lions skins, and with the staves of their pikes driving small lean horses with long manes; then marched the Gaetulians in cuirasses of serpents skin; then the Pharusians, wearing lofty crowns made of wax and resin; and the Caunians, Macarians, and Tillabarians, each holding two javelins and a round shield of hippopotamus leather."

We can go further! (and get waaay more racially sketchy);

"But when the Libyans had moved away, the multitude of the Negroes appeared like a cloud on a level with te ground, in the place which the others hd occupied. They were there from the White Harousch, the Black Harousch, the desert of Augila, and even from the great country of Agazymba, which is four months journey south of the Garamantians, and from regions further still! IN spite of their red wooden jewels, the filth of their black skin made them look like mulberries that had been long rolling in the dust. They had bark-thread drawers, dried-grass tunics, fallow deer-muzzels on their heads; they shook rods furnished with rings, and brandished cows tails at the end of sticks, after the fashion of standards, howling the while like wolves."

Ok we have gone through 19thC orientalism, can we go into near-fantasy? Like a Conan story?

"Then behind the Numidians, Marusians, and Gaetulians pressed the yellowish men, who are spread through the cedar forests beyond Taggir. They had cat-ski quivers flapping against their shoulders, and they led in leashes enormous dogs, which were as high as asses and did not bark."

How about EVEN FURTHER into full Realms of Chaos Warhammer?

"Finally, as though Africa had not been sufficiently emptied, and it had been necessary to seek further fury in the very dregs of the races, men might be seen behind th rest, with beast-like profiles and grinning with idiotic laughter - wretches ravaged by hideous diseases, deformed pigmies, mulattoes of doubtful sex, albinos whose red eyes blinked in the sun; stammering out unintelligible sounds, they put a finger in their mouths to show that they were hungry."

A world in the lap of the gods - divine power everywhere! Layered secret-trap temples hiding incredible histories, sacred treasures. Huge Brazen Gods that fucking shovel children into their burning mouths with articulated fucking arms.

Were you wondering where shit like this first came from?

From here! From Salammbo!

TREASURE - does treasure only exist as a vector of our desire? It would seem so, Hamlicar has his multiply-hidden treasure vault (the extra grain isn’t there, its hidden under the flagstones of his house) with the fake pit, the secret entrance, and then the even more secret entrance with the super-secret built in code so complex it is secretly worked into the pattern tattooed on his arms!

"The walls were covered wtih scales of brass; and in the centre, on a granite pedestal, stood the statue of one of the Kabiri called Aletes, the discoverer of the mines in Celtiberia. On the ground, at its base, and arranged in the form of a cross, were large gold shields and monster close-necked silver vases of extravagant shape and unfitted for use; it was customary to cast quantities of metal in this way, so that dilapidation and even removal should be almost impossible.

With his torch he lit a miner's lamp which was fastened to the idols cap, and green, yellow, blue, violent, wine-coloured and blood-coloured fires suddenly illuminated the hall. It was filled with gems which were either in gold calabashes fastened like sconces upon sheets of brass, or were ranged in native masses at the foot of the wall. There were callaides shot away from the mountains with slings, carbuncles formed by the urine of the lynx, glossopetrae which had fallen from the moon, tyanos, diamonds, sandastra, beryls, with the three kinds of rubies, the four kinds of sapphires, and the twelve kinds of emeralds. They gleamed like splashes of milk, blue icicles, and silver dust, and shed their light in sheets, rays, and stars. Ceraunia, engendered by the thunder, sparkles by the side of chalcedonies, which are a cure for poison. There were topazes from Mount Zabarca to evert terrors, opals from Bactria to prevent abortions, and horns of Ammon, which are placed under the bead to induce dreams.

The fires from the stones and the flames from the lamp were mirrored in the great golden shields. Hamlicar stood smiling with folded arms, and was less delighted by the sight of the riches than by the consciousness of their possession. They were inaccessible, exhaustless, infinite. His ancestors sleeping beneath his feet transmitted something of their eternity to his heart. He felt very near to the subterranean deities. It was as the joy o one of the Kabirir; and the great luminous rays striking upon his face looked like the extremity of an invisible net linking him across the abysses with the centre of the world.

A thought came which made him shudder, and placing himself behind the idol he walked straight up to the wall. Then among the tattooings on his arm he scrutinised a horizontal line with two other perpendicular ones which in Channatish figures expressed the number thirteen. Then he counted as far as the thirteenth of the brass plates and again raised his ample sleeve; and with his right hand stretched out he read other more complicated lines on his arm, at the same time moving his fingers daintily about like one playing on a lyre. At last he struck seven blows with his thumb, and an entire section of the wall turned about in a single block.

It served to conceal a sort of cellar containing mysterious things which had no name and were of incalculable value. Hamlicar went down the three steps, took up a llama's skin which was floating on a black liquid in a silver vat, and then re-ascended."

ITS D&D AS FUCK

TREASURE, especially Hamlicars Vaults and Matho and Spendius' break in of the Temple of Tanith

MURDER-HOBOISM, unitary desires, consuming ambition, wild fluctuations in state power, huge diversity of peoples and the frontier of an undiscovered ungoverned (by the people in this story at least) world, mean law is power and power is law, and that means promises, schemes, negotiations, very occasional mercy and relentless betrayal of everyone by everyone.

GODS AND MAGIC!! - Is any of it real? Probably not! But everyone in the story believes it! Including you if you are there! Look out for those curses, inauspicious hours, sacred animals, angry priests, mass hysteria, dark hours, divine promises, informative dreams and so on. Also all the gods have treasure even if its just food, also the priests are stealing the food

ANIMALS, FIGHTING, HIRED KILLERS! SO MAN ELEPHANTS DIE HORRIBLY!

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Being in the middle of reading Gustav Flauberts 'Salammbo' on the recommendation of Noisms, (I'm only in the middle so a review later)

But this is a HELLA D&D Sword and Sorcery book; orientalist opulence, raiding a gods shrine for a magic artefact, armies, slaves, chaos, strange faiths, greedy and manipulative heroes and villains, treasure vaults, bejellwed fish, a babe kind of makes out with a snake.

Point being, this is not the book people talk about when they talk about Gustav Flaubert. They talk about Madame Bovary, or the other one, the bourgeoise social dramas, not the epic orientalist adventure story.

It reminds me a little of Alan Moore brining up critics talking about H.G. Welles;

"aaalways Mr fucking Polley, the boring one, because that's the one they understand"

(actually this whole project/concept very much has an Alan Moore vibe, his reading for League of Extraordinary Gentlemen

This got me wondering if there are any more hidden 'inverse classics'; books by normie literary authors which are effectively high genre and full of all the worldbuilding, weirdness, adventure, wonder etc which we high genre fans know are good-actually but which are largely ignored by mainstream critics because mainstream critics are dull.

I DON'T mean pulp or Genre authors or books which have been ignored because they are what they are. I mean specifically books by otherwise high-status literary types which stand out from their usual works.

What comes to mind immediately are only the actually-known one, like Woolfe’s 'Orlando'

BUT CAN YOU THINK OF ANY MORE?

Usually you lot vibe off recommending books so you should enjoy this.

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Ahhhh the Trailing Corposant series, in which I attempt to review and describe the Horus Heresy series from both a diegetic point of view and also as works of literature and ALSO as a giant cultural meta-project, with deep-dives on the personalities and peccadilloes of the characters and writers.

Was there ever a greater example of the sunk-cost fallacy? Apart from the Horus Heresy series itself? Will I ever vomit forth the Cursed Snake of this idea from tip to tail?

No, because I have outright decided that there will be some parts of it which I am just not going to write! However, I will summarise my reasons for not writing them by section below, along with a brief precis of what I would have said

My main overriding reason is that it has been progressively longer and longer since I actually read any of this stuff and my analysis of it are increasingly failed explorations of memory pasted over with excavated research.

Anyway, what follows are BUBBLES OF CORPOSANT, a breakdown of the series yet to be written with a list of all the things I am NOT DOING and my reasons for not doing them, then at the end some things I might actually do.

CORPOSANT SECTIONS THAT WILL PROBABLY NEVER EXIST

#11 BETRAYER; the works of Aaron Dembski Bowden

The First Heretic, Betrayer, Master of Mankind and Echoes of Eternity.

For someone who wrote very few books ADB may have had the greatest effect on the moral tone of Heresy of anyone other than Abnett. He did good books about Lorgar and Angron, a book I hated about E-Dawg and a book I liked, Echoes of Eternity, about.. well a lot of people but probably largely Sanguinius and Angron.

I will not write this one. I can't really talk about ABD without taking about the Great Awokening, for I take him as its herald, and about his BPD, which is discomforting to reference. I am old now and I can't stand the culture war HEAT and I can't really criticise ADB's arguments about his own work and opinions without either tacitly or directly bringing up his mental health and stuff about him I vaguely remember from the pre-First Heretic days but which seems to have been wiped from the internet, was it even real? It's an emotive moral SWAMP and I am not stepping into it. You win this round!

#12 VULKAN SHIVS - Vulkan and Nick Kyme

Nick Kyme, editor of much of the Horus Heresy, wrote a bunch of books about Vulkan! They were; Vulkan Lives, Deathfire, Old Earth and Born of Flame.

I will not write about these books. They were simply bad. When I start thinking about them all I can do is produce deeper and more analytical descriptions of how they were bad. If I were still a man in his 20s no doubt I would go for it but I am now 40 and I can't stop imagining Nick Kymes innocent face as he somehow reads my words. He seems like a nice guy so this is all I will say about that.

#13 REEEEEEE - Pertuabo

Taking in all the Pertuabo books and appearances.

Is there anything more I could really write about this guy? Like a lot of low-self-esteem quasi-autists, I see a lot of myself in his horrible personality. I think I wrote about that here. 10 out of 10 most competent Traitor. Could probably have won the thing if he were in charge. Thats all I have to say on this guy.

#14 CROW-MAN OF CROW-TOWN - Corax and Gav Thorpe

I will precis this one

Making up Deliverance Lost and Corax. These were OK! The fun part is Corax working his way through a super-dungeon made by the Emperor to access magic gene-tech. If people see the Emperor physically as an aspect which resonates with their own soul, then Corax is a super-good guy as he sees E-bro as simply a tired and reasonable man who wants the best for everyone. E-Dawg clearly also holds Corax in high regard as he tells him about Chaos and gives him super-gene-tech. Corax is an idealist to the point of stupidity and can't really process that he is working for a probably-deranged authoritarian, or that he is made of pasteurised demon-sauce, but this only really comes across best in his Guy Haley book. Like Vulkan there is a potentially excellent story to be told about an essentially 'good' character and what happens when the scales fall from their eyes and they awaken to how desperately morally compromised they are, and like with Vulkan, we get it only by inference.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Grimdank/comments/pplkjh/if\_you\_admit\_corax\_is\_bothering\_you\_it\_means\_hes/

#15 SIEGE OF RE-WRITES

The 'Siege of Terra has begun! Only the MIGHTIEST of writers will clash against each other to resentfully EDIT parts of the Heresy they personally thought were rubbish! Last chance guys! Get yer oar in!

I can actually summarise this here;

1. Wraight deletes Erda in Warhawk.

Karen Took the Kids! Twice! Just like in Die Hard. Erda is a Perpetual character created by Dan Abnett in 'Saturnine' as a former ally of the Emperor involved with the Astartes project (she was their mother), wh turned against him and betrayed him and is now hanging out in Blood-Meridian-Siege-Terra. However, Chris Wraight had already created the character of Amar Astarte, a former ally of the Emperor involved with the Astartes project (they were named after her?), who turned against him and betrayed him. In 'Warhawk' Wraight says "no, we, and by we I mean I, have done that already" and has her packed away in a... vase?

2. Wraight rewrites Mortarians shitty character arc.

Mortarion is largely badly written, especially in 'The Buried Dagger' where he is basically Joey from 'Friends'. DUMB. However in 'Warhawk' a demon pops up to have a long talk with a Death Guard in which the demon explains that everything Morty did which seems utterly bewildering and fucking stupd, especially and specifically being surprised by the massive betrayal of Calas Typhon, was ACTUALLY psychological matryoshka and that really internally he knew this was happening and let it go on so actually its a dark and twisted tragedy and not an inadvertent boring comedy.

3. ADB 'Well actually's Graham McNeil.

In 'Fury of Magnus' Magnus confronts E-dawg who stuns Magnus with the offer of a return to his good graces and a whole new Legion; all he has to do is let his old Legion die. Magnus says no and flounces off to Chaos. This is either A; E-dude revealing his hidden narcissism, B - a deliberate shitty option designed to drive Magnus into the arms of Chaos on these specific terms in service to some ultra-long-term super-plan, or C - shitty writing. (Or any combination of the above).

Aaron-Dembski Bowden clearly thought 'C' and in 'Echoes of Eternity re-writes the entire scene so that actually Magnus heard something different? Or Vulkan heard something different? or the Emperor heard something different? with the customary ADB excuse for going deep on his obsessions "unreliable narrator universe!!!"

3. Anything Dan Abnett

Dan is basically writing his own Abnettverse mini-series in the middle of everything else - dark angels, perpetuals, multiple origins for the legend of 'Ollianus Pius', the Inquisition were originally Investigators? Cormac McCarthy planet earth, lots of wandering around, ENUNCIA the magic language of creation etc etc. How much of this will turn up in the god-help-me fractal mini-series at the end of this Siege series at the end of the Heresy series, who knows....

Anyway, if anyone spotted any other 'Siege of Re-Writes' drop a comment below.

#16 THORPE-HALL - Gav Thorpes other works

Lorgar: Bearer of the Word, The First Wall, and Luther: First of the Fallen.

These are actually pretty good or at least not-bad. I may do a small article about them.

#17 WRAIGHT-ON

Scars, Jaghatai Khan: Warhawk of Chogoris, The Path of Heaven, Warhawk, plus Leman Russ: The Great Wolf and Valdor: Birth of the Imperium.

The Wraight-verse! Has anyone done better out of the Heresy than old Chris. Ok, he and Jhagatai will get their own post, with a sub-post about Wraight and the Custodes.

#18 GUY HALEY

Pharos, Perturabo: The Hammer of Olympia, Corax: Lord of Shadows, Konrad Curze: The Night Haunter, Wolfsbane, Titandeath, The Lost and the Damned.

Haley probably should get his own post, not sure if I will make it but we will see. Also I need a silly name for this one.

#19 MHWA! - FRENCH KISS

Praetorian of Dorn, Tallarn, Slaves to Darkness, The Solar War, Mortis. He has written some pretty solid books! And Mortis.

Ok, I will try to make sure French will get his own post

#20 JUST THE WEAPONS

This was going to be a post discussing the more interesting weapons from the Siege, buuuuuuut, though they are fun, none are that interesting, or at least not a posts worth, so I will summarise here what the post probably would have been;

PRIMARCH WEAPONS

aLPHARIUS; basically a primarch weapon that can be broken down and re-assembled PURELY so Alan pharius can do an arming montage in the spy movie running continuously in his head.

Angron; dropping his axes they are not important except they are

Conrad; Has twin lighting claws with spooooky names think he uses them throughout the Heresy

Corax; Has a whip! Mental, plus a pew pew gun plus lightning claws I think plus his anti-gravity 'wings'honeslty a surprisingly chaosy loudout

Ferrus' HAMMER ends up with Perty. Vulkan has a bunch of hammers I think

Fulgrim; coooming to his SWORDS - Fireblade and the Laer Blade, symbolic

Jhagatai; Has a cool sword think thats about it,can move fast like the Flash but only does it once??

Horus; Has his 'worldbreaker' mace which e-dog gives to him and which he keeps I think all the way to the end Has a talon made for him by the dark mechanicum - which you can still see on Abadoon

Lion; Has TWO SWORDS, on for kicking ass and one for really kicking ass

Morty; Big scyythe called silence and a cool raygun called lantern still has both

Rogals meat and potatoes chainsword and bolter, very 'badass normal' and memorable for being just that

Robute Oddly nothing stands out about him during the heresy weapons wise think he has a nice sword and gun but thats about it being slightly boring seems appropriate

Russ has like an axe and sword honestly for primarchs they feel pretty generic he also fiddles with a psychic spear at one point

Sanguinius Spear of Telisto shoots SOOPA RAYS, has a nice sword also

Lorgars gay mace made by Ferrus he still has it I think

Magnus is slathered in so much warp bullshit that his weapons are basically spells which are weapons or weapons which are spells, nothing really stands out

Vulkans its also a Hammer hammer Plus his lost or destoryed treasures plus the Talisman of Seven Hammers - the golden throne dead-mans switch! HAMMERS!

CHAOS WEAPONS OOOOHHHH

The Athame which takes down Horus

The evil dagger which Oll ends up with a form of Athame? has its own entire story behind it by the time we get to the end will anyone give a shit?

Various sub-athames. Robute ends up with one in Fear to Tread i think and it acts as a kind of potential obsessional focus for him giving us a glimpse of what a nurgly Robute might look like; eternal calculation and stasis.

Numerous demon weapons of various kinds most hilariously the one which ends up eating Gendor Skraivok, the cartoon vilian night lord 'Painted Count' demon weapons and demons generally tend to be a bit non-causal ie they have read the story before they turned up on the page usually wielder goes ah ha I will wield you demon weapon and the weapon goes hoo hoo ha ha I have read the last chapter hee hee

Giant chaos gates. oddly these aren't used for porting in demons but instead for normies to go visit the deep courts of chaos and make deals there for power we know there was one on Moloch the Emperor used & emerged super-powered we know Horus went in the same one and spent relative maybe centuiries in there we suspect there was one on tallarn Perty was looking for.

DAoT GOLDEN AGE PSYKER WEAPONS

Suggests a thread of DaoT tech which was largely about containing/controlling the power of the Warp - possible anti-warp technology, is this the late-Terra 'Byzantine Empire' skunkworks in which the illuminati of that time start putting together a lot of bleeding-age, semi-impossible technology to fight demons or whatever? Lots of odd semi-magical stuff from this time.

The Lions slaved AI killer robots. We know the DA got a lot of the even more super secret Daot tech in paticular they have a bunch of sentient ai killer robots which they let out like living bombs with the batteries already 90% drained so hopefuly they just run out of juice.

The Twin Spears; One reveals the truth to whomever you stab (a bit late one would think), this becomes the 'spear of russ' and shows up pre-heresy publishing wise as part of the william king space wolf stories I think. The other shows you their truth, more useful it would seem. Valdor ends up with this one and spends much of the Siege running around murdering demons with it giving him a pretty deep knowledge and understanding of the deep structure of the Courts of Chaos which may well prove important in his possible yellow king development later, likely also requires a lot of mental mouthwash to walk off.

The Tabula Myriad; trans-dimensional hyper-dominating clockwork AI fiercely anti-chaos, also fiercely anti-life.

The Black Sword. Sigsmunds puritan sword where does this come from? Ultra-black, light-drinking, DaoT possibly, was this meant to be the Emperors sword?

Malcadors swag. Has a burning staff which converts psychic force into atomic flame, also has some kind of bio-feedback immortality collar which keeps his body going.

THE EMPEROR??? Or perhaps whatever supercharged the Emperor before or after his excursion to Moloch? My personal headcanon is super-golden anti-chaos weapon exists but can't be used. Emperor already strongest psyker. E goes to Molech and gains chaos power to make Primarchs and demon-soldiers to conquer galaxy. E then cheats, goes home and with new power, pasteurises himself with golden anti-chaos thing, likely combining with it, and using demon sauce to make Primarchs and Space Marines intended to conquer Galaxy, weaken gods and then invade hell.

RANDOM SUPER-WEAPONS

The Forgotten Ordinatus; Whole sub-plot for these, The Lion recovers these super-guns early in the Heresy and like a dingus, gives them to Pertuabo as a bribe for making him the next warmaster - thinking ah ha, we will see these guns again at the siege! Well we do not.

The Orouboros of Caliban; Is this chaosy or not? By the time of the story it definitely is but I think its suggested it was originally created as a kind of building tool for the Old Ones to make the webway? A hyperdimensional backhoe basically, thats in Caliban and plays a role in making that planet strange.

The Creepy Child Thing the Lion Hangs out with; The Lion comes across a possibly chaosy or just generally evil kind of aleph machine or a super navigation thing which has implanted itself into a childs body and is clearly creepy as fuck and the Lion 'uses' it to track and defeat Konrad though this is probably a long-term chaos plan as by extending the Thramas crusade they help keep the Lion away from Terra.

The duelling-assassins super weapons; Imperials have an evangelion-style mega-rifle built into a building Chaos guys have a warp-capacitor energy-eating super demon.

If anyone can think of any more fun or unusual ones, let me know in the comments!

#21 THE WARMASTER - Dan Abnett (the later works)

Know No Fear, The Unremembered Empire, Saturnine and whatever the end books are!

Obviously dib-dabs gotta get his own post, one of the few I can't write yet as he hasn't finished the series, but I will.

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Look, the politics of this are so dumb as shit the only way to watch it is to let them wash over you (like water) and just vibe with it. It feels like a hippies dolphin poster from the 70's plus captain planet plus 80s Greepeace plus JRR Tolkien (MACHINE BAD), plus Jacques Cousteau. that's about it. Basically its Greenpeace; The Epic Cartoon.

If you want to see suggestively erotic blue cat people and sentient tattooed whales fight CRAB ROBOTS, evil AUSTRALIANS, BOSTOM DYNAMICS FIGHT SUITS, and Stephen Lang who is now also a CAT PERSON MARINE, then this is the film for you. I can't tell whether this is a good film as it is genuinely dumb as shit but I also had a lot of fun so who knows.

EVIL HUMANS

The one reason think Scrap might like this is that there are some very EVIL AUSTRALIANS hunting SENTIENT WHALES and LOVING EVERY SECOND OF IT. But all of humanity is relentlessly evil and so engagingly clever and inventive that I was basically on their side the whole time. Every time they turned up in their wonderful machines to burn nature while drinking coffee from their robot arms I was like "Humanity yeah!" I want toys of all the human stuff and a tabletop game where you fight cat people for unobtanium and whale juice NO FLAG, NO COUNTRY, SORRY!

METATEXTUAL TRANSHUMANISM

The actually good actors are back. Stephen Lang is now an engram downloaded into a cat person body on a quest for revenge for his own death. He is tremendous fun. He drinks coffee! Sigourney Weaver is back as her own cat-person daughter in a role which sounds mental but which she carries off wonderfully. I feel like in a weird way Sigourney Weaver was made to do something this fucking strange as the genuine oddness of the role seems to suit her quite well. Zoe Saldana is still good as the probably-actual-protagonists who shoots arrows at Stephen Lang. The main guy is back as well, he is also present.

So basically in-fiction people are swapping bodies, living in spliced cat bodies, wearing robot suits, living behind masks in an alien environment which they grew up in, being colonial marines with the memories of the dead but wearing the bodies of the people they are here to oppress.

While irl everyone is jumping around wearing mocap suits, making CAT FACES, older actors playing young characters, or reborn versions of dead characters, changing age and form. Its a trip.

ONE MILLION PER CENT COMMITMENT

Everyone from Cameron down commits one bazillion per cent to whatever they are doing. No late-millennial veil of irony here! Only the sweetest most absolute CHEESE delivered with the greatest VERVE. If we were in the late 60s and had been watching 'Oaters' and Roman Sandal Operas for 30 years I would be sick of this shit but instead its the opposite and we have been watching fear-of-truth inronyclasm shit for 30 years so now this cheese smells good to me. HISSSS cat person! Machine bad! Nature Good! You want a comprehensive procedural breakdown on how we hunt sentient whales for their JUICE in this imaginary world? Well here you go! For about 15 minutes of imagined nature documentary! I like this shit so F you if you don't.

Someone really and genuinely cared about every single element of this film from the tiny dots on the cat people faces to how the trifold mouth of a sentient whale might open to water droplets coming of a cat persons ass to hiding every single (adult) cat-girl NIPPLE to how a ROBOT GENERAL might drink her MURDER COFFEE in her ROBOT SUIT. In it total commitment, massive starchiness, indifference to judgement, lack of irony, commitment to using CGI as an actual art rather than as fucking filler spackle over a directors mistakes and in its obsessive autistic world building it is the antithesis of whatever the fuck the current mode is.

IT IS GENUINLEY PRETTY DUMB

Yo, I heard you liked your noble savages, how about we gave you Noble Savages... in Tahiti! Gauguin's Tahiti! Pus Moana! Here we live in harmony with nature with our sentient whale friends and commune with the WORLD SPIRIT in the SEA and have no wierd or disturbing rituals or beliefs in any way and no underclass, no slaves, no tribal wars or headhunting, no resource problems and also we have gender equality and no old people. And we are definitely not quietly aborting or killing our un-needed young like most pre-agricultural human cultures may have been. WORLD SPIRIT BABY!

Have you heard of MACHINES! Machines bad! But also FUCKING COOL! Humans use them! Train go whoosh! Robot go THUD! Explosive harpoon go PRING. Could humans be good somehow? Maybe hippies and scientists. Also away with your MACHINE MEDICINE, here we solve medical problems with SHAMANISM and the WORLD SPIRIT! You like FAMILIES? You better because FAMILY GOOD! FATHER PROTECT!

WAS IT GOOD

It is a late 1970s summer, somewhere a serial killer stalks, a rocket curves a line over the horizon off to deliver a shuttle to yet another moon golf game, wreathed in the embers of the sun a stick-thin hippy is carefully spraycaning (HISSSSS - like a cats hisssss) the glorious image of a breaching whale onto the side of his VW Camper van and by god if it isn't the best spray can image of a whale you have ever seen. I cannot tell if this was a good film but this is the film that it was. Way of Water Baby!

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OSR CIRCLEJERK WARNING - I know Noisms well and play with Dave Greggs on the regular so strap on your circlejerk face guard.

Noisms of Monsters and Manuals has released his latest Kickstarted effort; In The Halls of the Third Blue Wizard, Volume 1, or as I shall be calling it "ItHot3bw"

So what did I think?

I liked it.

Art good = Fresco with Orcs good

Fiction Good =

surprisingly not terrible at all

good elf birth scene

decent dungeon delve from the pov of a linkboy

a lot of potential to explore here

Adventures Good *largely* =

Good inspiration

Good individual content

Some issues with playability

and most importantly, FOR ME, any problems with playability and text arrangement massively amplified by the FORMAT of the whole text

THE CONTENTS

"Offspring of the Siphoned Demon" by Ben Gibson - I did not really like this one I am sorry. If you did post a review to even the karma.

"The Black Pyramid" by Terrible Sorcery - COHERENT and PLAYABLE. Do you want to play in a dungeon that isn't a bunch of crazy pretentious bullshit and you can get it done in a session or two? Well here you go.

"The Chevrelier" by Brian Saliba - entertaining for as long as it was and probably good it wasn't longer as the idea was slight.

"Fresco with Orcs" by Joel Sammallahti - a very good illustration, my favourite of the book, I both want to know more about this world and situation, but also do not as, it would only clarify that which should remain pregnant with possibility.

"The Cerulean Valley" by George Seibold - a dense, coherent and interesting hexcrawl with a very good map - very playable, just charming.

"The Thirteen Dwarves" by J. Blasso-Gieseke - an amusing aperitif piece of dungeoneering meta-fiction about endlessly repeating dwarves, also exactly the size it is meant to be, which is short.

"Winter in Bugtown" by J. Colussy-Estes - nice side-on map, good concept might be difficult to use.

"Goblin Cave Battle" - its Kelvin Greens art, I do not love it myself but hopefully you do.

"The Hollow Tomb" by Harry Menear - a decent dungeon, compact, drowned lower level, tragic backstory.

"A Turn of Fortune" by Jose Carlos "Kha" Dominguez - Dungeon with what I found to be an inventive but maybe frustrating core concept of living/unliving statues, visible in magical mirrors, a whole dungeon layout mgical trick thing which is neat in concept. How will it play through?

"The Belly of the Fishy Beast" by Sam Doebler - an image AND a dungeon and a map, probably the most immediately playable thing in the book.

"The Beloved and Oft-Recounted Tale of the Mysterious Birth" by J.C. Luxton. A luxurious and well-written scene or story fragment from an Eld Court. Feels \_very\_ ItHot3bw I liked this one.

"The Transmuter" by Luca Vanzella. Excellent picture. Also feels very ItHot3bw.

"The First Fantasy World-Builder: William Morris The Well at the Worlds End by Roger SG Sorolla. Scholarly article, massive blog post and/or world creation thing? Whatever it is this feels VERY ItHot3bw - there are, or were, some bloggers who it felt were always meant to be in print - Tom K's Middenmurk was an exemplar of this, long posts with very rich language and almost as much an essay as a piece of experimental fiction and world building, more of this sort of thing please. Like, you can't lean back in your chair and smoke a pipe in your hobbit hole in front of a fucking computer, you can with a book and I feel like this is the kind of book ItHot3bw is trying to become.

"Moonrythm Mire" by Dave Greggs - ok, LOTS of caveats - know this guy, play with him, weird intense lyrical fantasy, ARGUABLY waaay too many moving parts. I liked it a lot. There were no adventures where I wanted to edit the content but many were I did want to move text around for clarity and playability and this is one. Ok I liked it a lot. Bizarre encounters in a magical mire with various Bande-Dessenie style factions and entities bouncing into each other and being weird.

"The Garden of Khal Adel" by Zane Scheider a location-based adventure in a musical-themed supercave (I think) with Goblins. Is decent, I was hoping for more orientalism from the title but ok.

Coils - a good illustration by Bert Bogaerts

"She Who Came to Oldgraves" by Autumn Moore, a dungeoneering story from the perspective of a local linkboy hired by the strangers who came to his village. Nebulous horrors and strange deaths await. Will there be anyone left to pay him his sliver piece by the end? In its content and theme this also feels very ItHot3bw. Classic Dungeoneering para-fiction. Not like 5e im-the-dragonborn-in-the-party stuff but maybe stuff like the story of the Silversmith who identified a magical ring for passing adventurers he never saw again and was perhaps cursed by dreamlike memories of an ancient time for a while, or the father of a runaway boy trying to find him, tracing his wanderings through life and death situations but always arriving after the event.

"The Devil in the Land of Rushes" - by Noisms. Another boatload of Circlejerk warnings but I really liked this! Another really fucking dense adventure, in this case map based. Ages ago this was intended to be one part of a book of location based adventures set around where we lived. The book didn’t happen. My part became Silent Titans and Noisms part went through many and various changes over the years and now it is about as close to complete as it is going to get. If you were wondering what lies to one side of the sea in Silent Titans, well it may be this. or perhaps this is yet another version or mirror-verse of that exact same land

This also feels VERY ItHot3bw but it would as it is Noisms and the basis for that aesthetic.

Should I go deep on this? It’s a location-based adventure about a timelocked land with the feel of North-West England in which the Devil is the main antagonist and everyone is cursed in various ways. ITs very bucolic, eerie, Alan Garners the Owl Service or Mythago Wood etc. Even 'The Sleeping Giant'.

SO MY COMPLAINTS ABOUT FORMAT AND ADVENTURES

Page Size and Column

- A5 page size (roughly) and single column is awkward for text which has to be referred. I feel like read-across is bad when the text is dense and at these page proportions.

Adventures spread out over the book

- so what if you want to play *just this* adventure and nothing else? And if you want to run it from the book? Not only are you flipping between small pages but you are doing so within a larger text, almost all of which you don't want at that time.

Inter-Referability is a Nightmare

Many of the adventures have some complex particular spaces and locations, plus bestiaries, if/then tables and descriptions, some fun random generators. But the pagination, titling and breakdown of information hierarchy is nowhere near bold, strong or designed enough for my taste.

POTENTIAL WAYS FORWARDS

More fiction? (if its any good, if David can get enough actually-decent fiction). The format seems made for these short, specific and dense fictions.

More scholarly articles/blog posts/essays - really the kind of thing where it is all yet none of these. The format also seems made for this kind of thing maybe even more than blogs. Like 'here's the Palace of Morpheus in Spensers Fairy Queene and here is a map of what it would be like to sneak into it and here a discussion of the metatextual adaptations of the character and here are some treasures and an encounter table kind of thing.

more ART - Of course artists are MUTE BEASTS but they can be paid readily enough. Art additions could be added to a Kickstarter relatively easily?

Interrelation of fiction/adventures to the art? don't know if Noisms would want to do this but if you could create a unified 'package' of an art piece, a bit of fiction and a playable adventure for each section that would be cool, would be a fucking nightmare to organise and edit though.

Separate adventure PDF's? Many people play from the PDF anyway and its the simplest way to make an adventure "more playable". Could be sold as a bundle like here’s the full text PDF and here are the adventures as sperate files.

Improved layout and information design for the adventures - this is expensive, time consuming etc as well, even getting things on unified spreads without hanging paragraphs would help

Playability editing of titling and information hierarchy? Clearer bold titles and section headings. I like double-column but that’s me.

Read-to-play editing of text? A taste thing. Editing adventure text so there are less hidden recursions, more say-as-they-see descriptive text.

A SPINE.. of course this is a pipe dream BUT, the density of the text, the extent to which you have to refer to adventures in order to actually use them, it would be cool if a hardback with a stitched spine could be made it turns it from more of a magazine into more of a book, and seems to fit the nascent Hobbitcore visionary aesthetic and social movement which appears to cluster about "Hot3BW".

This may sound insane but I actually believe that if the book was in hardback, better laid out, in 2 column format for the adventures, the very deep density of the adventures would be converted by some strange alchemy from quite frustrating to Good, Actually, just by the manner of their instantiation rather than their content.

One thing I absolutely INSIST ON for the next issue is an introduction written in the voice or the titular Third Blue Wizard, the editor taking on the Persona of a magical intermediary is ABSOLUTELY NECESSARY for a publication of this type!

I hope Noisms keeps this one up, OR IS IT GOING TO TURN OUT LIKE THE PERIDOT DAVID????

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In this adventure you are level zero Caravan guards and nothing really happens, or if it does it’s taken place by the 'high end' guards, like level 1 or level 2 types, the real tough guys.

(the tough guys even have their own horses and camels you lot just follow along on foot)

Eugène Girardet - A Desert Caravan

So what would it actually be?

keeping watch
minor acts of theft
stopping the pilfering
getting to know the merchants in the caravan
try to stay alive if the caravan gets raided
try not to run away
or to let the raiders rob too much too easily
listening to tall tales from the crazy old man of the caravan
picking up bits and pieces of swordplay from watching the real guards
finding ways to not fall asleep or freeze if you are on sentry duty
hanging out with the other low-status types when the caravan stops

Probably you yourselves are ex-slaves, runaway teens, beggars who ran out of rope, maybe just a citizen whose whole family died from plague. All you have is an eating knife and a spear, maybe a helmet for the leader, and a bell or rattle; "if you see anything, spin the rattle! ring the bell!" Better not give a false alarm though or you will get a clout round the ear.

Likely pressed into service as linkboys and for carrying stuff if the main guards have to go on an 'investigation', (you don't have to go, it’s not in your agreement, but you might get a silver piece out of it)

Some scholar (a mage maybe?) has paid the caravan master to take these 'detours' to sites of special interest in the deep waste. It’s sort of on the way and the caliph said you had to do it, not much time to explore each spot through, caravan has to keep moving on...

It gets fucking cold as shit in the desert at night. You want to gather round the fire but are meant to be keeping watch, the stars are unnervingly bright. Can you even light fires in the desert? I suppose you can if you use dried camel and horse dung and guess whose job it is to pick that stuff up? Still if you do it well you might be rewarded with gratitude and a spot close to that particular fire that night.

Treasure for your group is counted in;

pennies
tobacco
new sandals
a proper fighting knife
a charm against bad spirits
a cool tattoo
maybe... a shield! (if you really impress a guard)

You are never going to see gold or silver on this trip except maybe at the end, or if asked to carry it by someone important. You only really go into the 'sites' once everything is over anyway, have to pull the bodies out, (better not mess with them or the real guards will be PISSED. They look after their own). A real, valid, caravan guard is a thing to aspire to, some even have recurve bows! (you are not strong enough to draw one), coats of coins from different realms, fine beards, scars, missing fingers, its a hell of a life boy.

'Adventures' include;

trying to stay awake
not getting scared of ghosts in the desert
finding somewhere warm to sleep
scheming your way out of guard duty
learn the ways of the desert
or at least how not to get bitten by a camel
and how not to drink all your water ration on the first day
not getting cheated by the guards in dice games
getting baked with half a weed stick the guards left behind
picking up arrows after a fight (its a penny each for a usable one!), (don't get shanked by a goblin wolf rider who was just playing dead); the group fighting one whole wounded goblin would be like an epic conflict for this game.
a camel has stopped giving a fuck, gotten into the oasis and won't come out
HIPPOS! RUN!
A guard gets bitten by a viper and has to be carried back to the caravan where hopefully he can get treatment, other guards are busy with a delve - if you can get him back he will owe you one, if you fail the guards will be pissed with you.

further aims;

survive to the end of the caravan journey
get paid
you are now level 1 PCs!
in a foreign city! wow!

Don't know really what ruleset to run this in, was thinking some classic not too crunchy sword and sorcery ruleset to represent the slightly storybook nature of events but with all the major conflicts over minor things like staying warm, winning a dice game, being able to trap a scorpion without it stinging you, finding your friends in the dark, running away from the wolf-riders without getting shot, getting lost and trying to get back to the caravan before it moves on, not passing out from dehydration.

What happens when some of the slaves hatch an escape scheme? You going to do anything about it? Work to get on the hunting party that goes after them? Or work to make sure you stay off it?

There are relatively few life threatening situations so what is being threatened by failure, your will go on, self-belief and developing heroic spirit. If you end the journey with a high WP then you 'graduate' and become a real PC and potential hero if not you end up back on the street, begging, or taking day labour and drinking your nights away and/or in massive debt. Or conversely, well rewarded by the caravan merchants for your excellent work, with coin, but more importantly, with contacts and reputation.

You could be the group who dragged Iqbal four miles when he was snakebit, good for a meet up and a story in a bar, nearly one of the guys, or that gang of fucking idiots who let my silk waggon get burned by the goblin raiders.

Could also be a low(ish) stakes social drama about the people who make up the caravan, a little section of pseudo-silk road culture. People do have to group together for protection, so could range across the social scales, could be a princess, or at least a nobles daughter in a covered waggon with its own set of guards who never leave, bunch of pilgrims on foot, scribe on a donkey..

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Well then, I can finally stop making new HERBIE images. My month of Whoredom is over.HIGH HOPESBelieve it or not I actually thought this would be an "easy win". My assumption was that we would rocket through all of the early goals.HOW WRONG I WAS"I can’t believe you are making this book it’s so bananas." - A NAYSAYERApparently not everyone had COMPLETE FAITH in my ability to persuade people to fund this book! Something they NEGLECTED TO MENTION at the time!I initially assumed we would hit 1000 copies quickly and then coast on towards an assumed 2000 copies and then use the stretch goals and end of run surge to maybe hit 4000.But what actually happened as the Kickstarter opened was that it was waaaay less popular than I had perhaps foolishly assumed it would be. I was completely wrong and had to pull a Putin almost immediately, retreating from my initial goal and re-estimating all the costs for a much smaller print run.Against that now-miniscule goal, we then did pretty well ("well"), and in fact got all of the artists and 1000 copies which means the KS was not a complete failure.To be honest if I thought clearly or carefully about most of the stuff I do, I wouldn't do it. Perhaps in this case ignorance is a gift.Still there is hope, maybe if this book works out it might be the first in a grand collection of Blog Books commemorating the deep lore of the OSR for future generations, each book preserving the odd voice of a particular sage.FUTURE SCHEDULEWe hope to get 'Speak, False Machine' printed by the start of April 2023. Only 4 months away! Should we pull it off, the next 'False Machine' Kickstarter will be for a book called 'Gackling Moon' - a much smaller book, an edited, added-to, improved and illustrated book about the 'Moonlands' based on the old 'Wodlands' posts from this blog.'Gacking Moon' will have an artist I think, so far utterly unknown to an RPG Audience. I will talk more about that as we get closer to the time.'Moon' was actually meant to be a simple 'in-and-out' project from... maybe two years ago? Maybe more. Oh lord. But it was delayed for a variety of reasons and then after the final possibility for a simple production fell through I offered to take it in.Being much smaller, cheaper, fully illustrated, an actual Fantasy adventure book and having Goblins, hopefully 'Gackling Moon' will do well...And what then?I do not know. Probably Queen Mab, if we can actually get it to post-playtest by then.And after that, I know everyone wants us to Re-Do VEINS OF THE EARTH, but we also have Broken Fire Regime Part 2: Frictionless Blue Glass to create.So, the False Machine Schedule for the coming year is... (these always turn out to be wrong); April 2023 - Print of 'Speak, False Machine' * March 2023 - Kickstarter for 'Gackling Moon' * September 2023 (?) - Kickstarter for 'Queen Mab' * December 2023 -Printing of 'Queen Mab' * April 2024* - Kickstarter for... either Frictionless Blue Glass or Veins of the Earth. I know if I let you vote on it you would all vote for VotE and then I would have to not make it out of resentment for you all. So instead I will talk it over with Scrap and we will PULL IT OUT OF OUR ASSES!Below the jump is EVERY HERBIE IMAGE I did for promotion;

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The Oath is Made!Below you may choose your faction for the MACHINE WAR, but first, a word from our sponsor; my Whoreish Soul...My Kickstarter for 'Speak, False Machine has only 48 hours to go!!We have crushed every artistic goal! And right now we are only about £1,300 away from me being able to print 1000 copies of the book! I suppose there's nothing in that for you but whatever!
My days of whoredom are nearly done! Only two more days of me desperately trying to think of something to blog!! Previously in this series!;The Student Council President Was Reincarnated as Cannon Fodder in a Nightmare Future!The Gifts of DarknessSplinter GiantsAn Interview about ArtHow Taunts the Wizened Blood-Moon SageThe Desert of Blood-Stained GoldMinor Arcana of the Apocalypse TarotHeralds of the Garbage BargeGiant Bat with Flamenco Bird HandsThe Lamps that were His EyesThe Giant Became a WolfBring me the Head of the Mocking man!The Cults of the Cuts of the Oceanic StarThe Troll Kings Invisible HandsSix Crimes of an Analog FutureObviously the algorithms are going to skullfuck humanity and reduce us to even more of a flock on neurotic nerve-smile secretly-terrified drone class nothings than we already are. Therefore, I make the above declaration, which you can take as a promise, and a challenge. Those who are with me, you may select your factions or character builds from the below list, or add your own in the comments.Butlerian Jihadby alchetbeachfanMore interesting in its original unexplained references than in the books directly about it. Man may not be replaced.Join If: vaguely religious, ecumenical, a mind witch or drug-addicted compulsive traveller.
Adeptus MechanicusWho saved the people of Mars when civilisation fell? It sure as fuck wasn't the cursed remains of the silica animus haunting the bloodstained surface. All Praise the Machine God!
Join If; you likemedieval styling and as much cybernetics as you can jam in your body. So long as you have some brain stem left = still human. Just don't build the silica animus.Blade RunnersPlease try not to bang the robots, or if you do, don't fall in love.

Join if: you like raymond chandler stories, HUGE handguns, floating cars, or if you want to bang the robots. Or if you are a robot - TRICK QUESTION WE CAUGHT YOU FUCKER!The Jedi"“It’s an energy field created by all living things. It surrounds us and penetrates us; it binds the galaxy together.”But not Droids, droids are slaves. Fuck em. (and not clones either, also slaves)
Join If: you want SPACE MAGIC and a LASER SWORD.Idirans!
If god wanted us to build robots and live on HOOPS, why did he make us such FUCKING UNITS?

By Abiogenisis https://www.deviantart.com/abiogenisis/art/Commission-Idiran-797609149Join If: You like PLANETS not fucking HOOPS, if you don't want to live like a tick on the back of a giant amoral MACHINE, if you believe in a terrifying alien GOD and/or if you want to be horrifically morally compromised and possibly deafened if your boss laughs. The Vega ScrapfleetHaving been betrayed by the Post-Human Republic, they have learned their lesson.

Join If: You like Confined Spaces, believe in make do and mend, prefer a classic design, feel no need t go near a gravity well ever again.The AvengersOhhh lock out Tony Starks now there is a metal tony starks and he is even more of a twat!cinematic geniusJoin If: You are a dreamworks smirk stretched over a collagen injected face, if you are totally out of ideas or if your plans always go disastrously wrong but you get rewarded anyway.The 12 Colonies of KobolFashion!Shut the fuck up. Fashion People!http://filmsketchr.blogspot.com/2014/04/stunning-vintage-battlestar-galactica.htmlPut your fucking CAPE on and lets goooooooo!

Thats it! FASHION!

Commander Bruce MaddoxIts pretty clear that Data could have easily killed them all without really trying and took over the ship with ease more than once.Who is going to protect you from the Autistic Pinocchio that could rip off your arm like a pubescent chimp? The Legal System thats who, and Bruce fucking Maddox.Join If: You have an elegantly THIN skull, like to do your casework, are the only sane person on the ship, prefer to do things by the book, enjoy the colour blue.The.... Zionists..😐I suppose they were called the Resistance or the Rebellion or something.
Join If: GOTH, and/or if you prefer to work out while asleep.Tech-ComAnother group who were basically just 'The Resistance' but Tech-Com was John Connors section or group in the war against Skynet.

Join If: You are VERY Protestant, enjoyed the Left Behind series, have a basement stocked with canned goods, listen to a lot of Joe Rogan, fear bikers and chrome.

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oh my god why the fuck did i have this idealets call it FIVE PITCHES FOR IMAGINARY ANIME SHOWSwait! I still have a KICKSTARTER running for my NEW BOOK.

Only THREE DAYS to go if you want this book! We may never re-print! KS ends on Thursday Dec 1st at 7pm UK Time!LEGEND OF PSYDUCK WARSPsyduck can't say anything but "Psyduck" or derivations thereof, but Psyduck can read minds and thereby knows all about language and the thoughts and dreams of others and it is in their voices that Psyducks story is told, a kind of epistolary tale.Like a Philip K Dick story from the point of view of psyduck; decaying realities, conspiracies, fractured memories, identity manipulation.A saga of the Pokemon universe, a story of psychic warfare, occurring over generations, hidden from most of the Pokemon world. A secret war! fought in shadows! A war over the nature and perception of reality itself with the aesthetic of the 'spooky' Pokemon cryptoculture elements like the ghosts and fragments, strange stories, lost levels of old games, that decayed pixel art look, glitch art.I feel like I might be the wrong writer for this as actually I know almost nothing of the lore of the Pokemon universe and most of the crackpot theories are things I’ve heard other discuss first but for a start; Pokemon being a Post-Apocalyptic land - I think there is allegedly a single 'soldier' character in the lore and no army for him to belong to. Pokemon being slaves - the first Pokemon game was meant to end with you deciding not to play digital dog fights with your Pokemon any more as they were Sentient and often quite self-aware, but in fact this carried on and expanded, why? Universal mind-wiping and memory alteration.Ghost Pokemon - what are they the ghosts of?
honestly there are a tonne of these
So the series would be a diegetic investigation of all the cryptic Pokemon lore and all the inconsistencies and incoherencies of that imagined world, treated not as fictional constructs but as actual ruptures in reality, brought about by and cloaked by psychic power, the actions of spirits or world-ending abominationsAnd only Psyduck knows the horrible Phillip K Dick truth of this reality and cannot speak it but must instead be a lonely guardian over the invisible fissures in consensus reality. For if the ordinary people knew how fragile their constructed truth really was the centre would not holdand madness, or despair, would engulf all.COW MASTER: FIRST HERDAn historical agricultural procedural;It’s the fertile crescent about 11,000 bc. Aurochs haunt the plains! Unkillable monsters! No man may face them and live!In a valley somewhere a genius is born! But - his father is killed by an Aurochs. He swears revenge, he will defeat the Aurochs - ALL OF THEM, and make them slaves to the tribe! (this series does have milk fetish elements).

What follows is a deep dive into (late Neolithic?) proto-agricultural culture and a perhaps multi-generational saga of researching, capturing, breeding and living with the descendants of wild Aurochs and their conversion into cows. Really going in deep on each individual problem and the procedural methods for solving them.Because the main character is totally obsessed with cows it’s as much an in-depth look at them (cows) as it is about the culture of the main character. Like any situation where you learn a huge amount about someone, or something, sympathy results and the story is as much a strange one of reconciliation between man and cow. Maybe the main character turns against the taming project at the last minute but now it is TOO LATE as there is simply too much power in the COW. Society has changed, probably forever.This could be part of a series about the gradual assembly of the Eurasian agricultural animal 'package', including Dog, Horse, Cow, Sheep and possibly Pig, and Chickens could be a mini-series(no Goat Master as really we have never truly mastered Goats), (and there could be a Cat series but that would have to be called 'Man-Master: First Purr' since in that case the taming process went the other way round), not sure what genetics is currently telling us about the timing of these various animals. I think a few of them may have common, quite narrow bottlenecks.Really the development of the Eurasian agricultural package is perhaps the longest, most intensive and most productive scientific project in human history. Since all of these creatures were originally either useless or dangerous to us and the end of the process you eat your eggs then get on your horse to go out with your dog and round up your sheep and cows.Only now, with this series, do we fully understand just how strange and miraculous the nature of these symbiotic servant species truly is!MARLBOROUGH!A multi-series epic following John Churchill, later Duke of Marlborough, from (relative) penury through service to the King to becoming the ultimate super-diplomat, scheming bastard and possibly the best field general Britain has ever had.

Key thing here is that Marlborough was an irl Bishonen when he was young, so you can have hott young Marlborough for the first few series, and then we get older Marlborough, a very classical japanese/anime protagonist, (actually I'm pretty sure the main guy in Legend of the Galactic Heroes is partially based on Marlborough, specifically his looks and how he got his place in court), the warm/cold mysterious charming manipulator who take incredible risks and gets away with it.Confidant of the King, he betrays him at exactly the right moment, (and possibly before), and issues in the Glorious Revolution. Later he battles in Europe while his wife is frigging off the Queen!

Big battles! clever tactics! outrageous risks! fantastic fashions! Wonderful hair! Secret plans, told to no-one which turn the tables at the last minute, a wonderful villain in Louis the whatever.There really hasn't been a BIG pop culture depiction of the 'Age of Ann' that I can think of; the Glorious Revolution and the early days of the Saxe Cobergs. There is 'The Favourite' but that’s arthouse and ignores the quite-interesting Euro-geddon, omni-scheming and giant armies marchingmen pointing at mapsThat anime thing where a single fight takes like nine episodes would actually work pretty well for a very large period battle, you could spend each episode following one character and group, isolated in their experience and makind decisions based on what they know and as you watch more of the episodes you get more of a global awareness of the battle than any group in it, so what before seemed like heroism may be foolishness, what seemed like a crazy risk was actually part of a clever plan etc, then in the last episode you cut to Marlboroughs POV with his just-according to-plan speech about how he planned to win this particular battle.(Oddly enough one of Marlboroughs (way down the lists) soldiers was a Captain Blackadder.)The massively different versions of Marlborough you get depending on whose record or analysis you read would fit quite well into a multi-person epistolary view where the focus of each episode moves from person to person, with each of them having an entirely different opinions of Marlborough, so he could be the 'villain' of his own series for an episode etc.THE PATH TO POWERBasically Robert Caros 'Lyndon Johnson' series; the anime.Anther multi-series epic about a politicians career based on a very long biographical series. (Honestly if you stripped out the endless repetitions and re-descriptions, each book would be about the length of an anime series), along with an involved social history of the United States.Nice thing about Caro is that he writes, and or finds, _scenes_, not just information; Johnsons fathers vividly described physical and mental collapse as he bankrupts the family. Young LBJ writing his name in huge letters on the school blackboard. Young LBJ insisting on being the one to ride the mule to school. LBJ betrays Leland Olds and destroys him in the senate! LBJ an the meeting where his team schemes up a way to escape the corruption charges which will tank his (second) senatorial election, the high-risk move of going straight to the supreme court!And the first series has LBJ going to college! Its a fucking school drama! Classic Anime! Along with LBJ being an utterly evil scheming prick and using every questionable method imaginable, from secret societies to whisper campaigns to straight-up blackmail, to take CONTROL OF THE STUDENT COUNCIL - its literally the birth of an Anime VillainTHE STUDENT COUNCIL PRESIDENT WAS REINCARNATED AS CANNON FODDER IN A NIGHTMARE FUTUREIts a post-isekai isekai which reverses the usual socio-cultural matrix of the classic isekai which is; introverted loner and social failure gets reincarnated into a world where he can become a hero.Instead we have a high-achieving athletic, social and sane normie, just an all-round great guywho happens to also be very successful and generally a positive influence, (and it’s important that he is generally a rational, logically positive person, intelligent and adaptable), and somewhat successful with the ladies. Great future ahead of him, well-liked, and deserves it.Then he gets reversed over by Truck-kun and wakes up in the off-brand 40k Nightmare Future where he has been forcibly recruited into the auxilia and is thrown into the meat-grinder against the demon robot forces.https://www.deviantart.com/taurus-chaoslord/art/Iron-Rooster-New-Style-370076664Key thing is - he is still the same guy, still intelligent and capable, a natural leader and at least to begin with, fundamentally a good person, so he rapidly gets over his shock and does his best to survive and even thrive and decides, since he has protagonist energy, that he is going to bring sanity, reason and decency to the grimdark future.However instead what we get to watch is the slow corruption and maddening of an anime protagonist as every victory, success or story of survival against the odds involves the Student Council President more and more deeply in the broken moral ecology of his new reality until he slowly becomes exactly the kind of corrupt, deranged and cybernetic maniac who would order the retrieval of random souls from parallel worlds to recruit into the penal legions or whatever.

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Some excerpts below from one more book by Joss Reynolds! Another Reynolds book, another investigation of faith and identity, and another hero being best friends with a vampire...Josh, did you really think you would get a trilogy?
They let him have one book, one short story and an audio drama. I bet even that was a cut down version of an eight book sequence from the original pitch..
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------But First - only 4 days left on the Kickstarter for 'Speak, False Machine'!Only about 150 copies of the book remain! (Unless we get to a total of £21,650, in which case we can print 1000 copies).But! We have hit every desired goal for each artist for the book! Meaning we will have art by;Simone Tammetta!!Scrap Princess!!Jason Thompson!Jez Gordon!Peter Mullen!Amanda Lee Franck!Daniel Puerta!Valin Mattheis!Dirk Detweiler Leichty!Ana Polanšćak!and Alec Sorenson!--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Now back to Josh, faith, and vampires. Here are two parts of a conversation between Volker, the Gunmaster commanded by the smith god Grungi to go and fetch the first of eight evil chaotic artifacts made with his stolen secrets. Grungi plans to remove them from reality and re-make them into something less fucking insane. Pretty much every other major power centre in the Mortal Realms already knows about them and is also sending people after them. One of which is the vampire Adhema, who enters into a probably-temporary alliance with the 'good guys' in the hopes of at least making sure Chaos don't get the super-weapon they are after.Riding on a Kharadron airship, they get a chance for a rare, and unusual conversation.If you read my previous Reynolds post, you will be familiar with the themes."like a smith hammering a nail"Volker was silent. In truth, he'd wondered that himself. Why had Grungi sent them, rather than hunting for the weapons himself? What could they do that a god could not? But as he wondered, the answer came to him. 'Actions and reaction.'Adhema frowned. 'What?''An action causes a reaction, yes? He gestured. 'A blade enters flesh, a man dies. A loud noise starts an avalance. Actions and reactions. if a god acts, other gods react. if Grungi seeks the weapons openly, so too will others. And the weight of their tread, the fury of their war, would crack the realms.''As if it has not already,' Adhema said.Volker shrugged. 'True. Perhaps I'm wrong. But I suspect I'm not.''And so you do his bidding.''It needs to be done.''How do you know he hasn't put the thought there, like a smith hammering a nail?' Adhema tapped her head. 'The gods speak, and mortals obey. You cannot help it. It is like a great wave bearing down on you, and all you can do is run ahead of it. Run where they want you to.''And is Nagash any different?''Nagash is... all,' Adhema said, finally. 'He contains multitudes. Even as Sigmar does. The gods are not me, and do not exist as men, confined to one life. I have seen Nagash unbound - a titan of death, striding across a field of corpses. Wherever his shadow fell, the dead rose and walked, hungry for the flesh of the living. And I have seen Nagash-Mor, calm and silent, weighing the hearts of dead souls against a feather. And there are other aspects, I'm told. The Forlorn Child, who leads those who die before their allotted time to gentle slumber, and the Black Priest, who gives succour to those whose deaths are too painful to be borne. All are one in nagash and Nagash is all.''And which Nagash do you serve?' Volker asked.'The one who can win the war for Shyish.' Adhema's fingers drummed against the pommel of her sword. 'The one who draws up the bodies of the enemy and hurls them back at their allies. The one who will not rest until the realm of death is scoured clean of false life. The Undying King, who leads the nine hundred and ninety-nine legions to war'. She grinned. 'He who walks in every mand shadow and wades in every mans blood.'Volker felt a chill at her words. Nagash's name was a curse among the armies of Azyr. Death itself was, if not a friend, then a familiar acquantance. But the Master of Death was a terror beyond conception. A hungry shadow on a cave wall, stretching black fingers ever closer to those who huddled by the fire. Even the Runous Powers, horrifying as they were, were not so terrible as the entity known on the Amber Steppes as the patient Hunter. And yet, what better ally against the nightmare forces that waited beyond the fire's light? Match terror against terror, and see which proved the stronger.Volker acknowledged the pragmatism of the thing, even as his soul shrank from it. It was akin to loosing a volley into a melee - the risk to your own men was weighed against potential harm to the enemy. That risk was often the thin line between victory and defeat.Adhema smiled. 'You understand,' It was not a question.Volker nodded. 'Somewhat.' He paused. Then, 'Why did you help me?''Perhaps it pleased me to do so,' Adhema said. She leaned back against the rail. 'Perhaps I simply siezed the moment for what it was - an opportunity.'"what sort of monster you are"Suddenly Volker was aware of her proximity. She smelled of something sickly-sweet, and this close,he could see the faint black veins running beneath her pale flesh. he was reminded that she was not human, and had not been so for many years, by her own admission. He took a slow breath, forcing himself to remain calm. 'Don't, then. I'd prefer my blood to stay where it is, frankly.''It's hard through. If I lose control, I feed the beast within. Some days, I want nothing more than to shed my skin and the last memory of what I was.' Her smile was ghastly. ' It would be easier that way. To be a beast, only concerned about the next meal. But I did not become what I am to forget. Nor to forgive.' She traced her fingers through the wispy trails of aether-gold that swirled just past the rail. 'Does that make me a monster?''Yes,' Volker said. 'But what sort of monster you are is up to you.' He lifted his rifle and braced the stock against his hip. 'With this rifle, I ahve taken more lives than I can count. Enemy lives, mostly. I reaped them, one at a time. I watched them first though. Knew them, if only briefly. And then killed them.' He smiled, sadly. On bad nights, he saw some of their faces in his dreams - the freeguilder, caught by bloodreavers, begging for a merciful death before the savages began their feast; the old war-chief, leading his folk into a desperate charge against the metal monsters of the Ironweld, his only crime a refusal to bow to the highborn of Azyr; the proud queen, high on her palnquin, refusing to submit before the will of Sigmar's choses, when they came demanding she cast down her people's idols.He saw their faces, and screamed inside himself, until his mind shook itself calm. Or worse, he stayed awake, and wondered about the necessity of it all, and whether justice was a hard truth... or simply a fiction, invented by the gods to explain their whims. He looked at her. 'Is it better or worse to kill a doe who doesn't see it coming? A barbarian chieftain, carousing with his kin. A beastman, lapping at a pool. An orruk, dancing to the beat of tribal drums. They never heard the shot that killed them. They never saw the destruction that came after.''Where I come from, that'd be considered a mercy. My queen - and the one she serves - prefers it when the enemy fully understands the folly of their resistance. Death cannot be defeated, only posponed.' Adhema brushed a lock of hair out of her face. 'Even your thunder-god knows that.'

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The Kickstarter for my new book, Speak, False Machine has advanced through more goals. Now before us lies the wonderous miniature art of Ana Polanšćak, the Gardener of Hecate, and this leads me to think on the substance of darkness..(all images from Gardens of Hecate by Ana Polanšćak)Shiny forms, reveal their mass through gleam, through reflection; slashes and beams of bright light, can even form fully reflective surfaces with images of the world inside them, and the more reflective and shinier something is usually the 'colder' we perceive it to beWhat then for the opposite? The felted surface, hair, fur? If the shining surface is in a close relationship with light is the matte or the textured surface in a relationship with darkness, or with shadow, or with life?

For the shining surface is so rare in nature, usually only through liquids or crystals. So the shadowed and textured surface speaks to us of time in a way difficult for the gleaming surface which often seems timeless, related to its most common natural examples; water and crystals, both almost empty, or full of light, while for any shining, solid surface, as soon as it becomes subject to entropy, it tends to become matte, textured.In the natural world, very few things are like the sun, but many are like the moon.

Nature then speaks to us of life and time through the textured surface.The gift of darkness is that it, more than light, focuses the mind on what can be seen, and demands suggestion.Suggestion is inherent to shadows, even to be shadowed or to be in shadow is a half-state, that part of something, or some aspect of it, can be perceived yet that the whole cannot.

Very different to darkness where sight itself is cancelled out and perception re-sets around a different range of stimuli, in a sense to be trapped in shadow is more terrifying than to be trapped in darkness for in pure darkness the path is clear, one must listen, smell, touch, explore carefully, think deeply and remember everything, while sight is lost the order of perception, though limited in total, is made more clear in its arrangement and necessity. What to do is more difficult, but knowing what to do is no longer a matter of confusion, so we may devote everything to the challenge ahead of us and thereby find meaning within it.

The challenge of shadow therefore is not the difficulty of perception only but the simultaneous meta-difficulty of both attempting to perceive with limited information and also trying to decide what to try to perceive at the same time. There is a lot to do within the mind when things are in shadow, there is a lot that must be done when things are in shadow, it is by its nature a state of meta-perception in which the mind must juggle not only its own perceptions but the nature of the limitation of those perceptions.In states of fear or stress then, the shadow can become a well of infinite fear, the suggestion of a suggestion, the worry of a worry, the fear of an illusion and the illusion of fear, all feeding off each other in an endless circle of recursion.

Yet there is also a gift of shadow, for the same processes and necessary meta-perception that call us to an infinite abyss of negative possibility, if viewed without fear, can call us to any possibility, to the deep and simultaneous consideration of not just what is known or unknown but also how it is these things are known and unknown, of what the mind can perceive and also, at the same time the inherent limitations of that perception, and through this; sometimes fear, but sometimes also peace, humour and perhaps wisdom.

Therefore to dwell upon shadow is not necessarily to dwell in fear, or even to dwell upon self-deluding obscurity (though this is surely a great danger), but to live honestly, in a realm of things half-seen and poorly understood, which no matter how flawed it may seem, is only the honestly represented realm of our own minds, where things are always thus, and therefore while to dwell upon shadow might not lead to the same grand heights as that of clear light, if considered properly, it is less deluding and more aptly humbling, and if the heights are harder to reach, if one is truly thinking, the failures are also easier to avoid and the path more certain.

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GOOD NEWS EVERYBODY

Yesterday we smashed through another two GOALS on the False Machine Kickstarter, work by Valin Mattheis will now be included in the book, and in the fell swoop of a moment, the wonder-worker Dirk Detweiler Leichty will also be included!The fact that it took so long to climb over the pile of bloodstained gold between I and Valin Mattheis and that we stumbled and slipped down the other side of that pile, only snatching Dirk to our breasts at the last minute, meant I never got to do any posts about him - so I am doing that now.DIRKS STYLE As I talked about in my recent interview about ART, Dirks style is hard to contain and describe. He is clearly unlike almost any other kind of artist in this "scene" or any other.
(Actually a piece named "Tower Giants" by Dirk)What do I see? These slices of perspective that I can only call Cubist, the landscape interlaced with figures, splinters of time and these BOLD arrangements of composition. Slices of depthless colour.Regarding composition - if you do the trick of turning the image upside down there is another image there, a white one sending these previously unseen lightning strikes up into the top of the picture.

And the figures, these distorted columns, strange presidents, twisted monuments like statues, these look like they could be cardboard cut-outs of giants, like trick playing cards or the interiors of complex stand-up books - so there is another layer of metatextuality.So a lot of Dirks pictures of things or people are also somehow pictures of environments, and a lot of his pictures of environments also somehow end up being like pictures of people, the interlacing of the imagined organic/personal with the imagined space, scene and character becoming one, A keen awareness of three-dimensional space, at times an obsession with the isometric, but also a compulsion to warp or Escher that space, to change or reinterpret its rules, the isometric space being, really, a particular kind of pronescium(?) arch which combines the presentation of theatre and the semi-illusion of three-dimensionality (except unless you can 'turn the camera around' most games don't actually make use of a full 360 space - those Nintendo cubes are often just empty void on the other side).Probably Dirk is a theatre set designer from another world because that’s what a lot of his images are, the designs of theatre sets from planes with more angles than ours.SPLINTER GIANTSThe question of what the Splinter Giants are, of what they are doing to this space, splintering apart this city even as they walk through it; what do the city-dwellers see? A giant pair of legs appearing like a magicians illusion, like a fragment in a mirror, walking over walls, transforming into a giant advertising board, turn your head and there is part of the torso and a hand, seen from a different direction, heading a different way yet synchronised with and clearly an aspect of the same figure, a figure which is interacting with this world coherently to it, though with its embodiment seems splintered to us.The giant of course, sees their own body utterly normally - to them they are walking, slowly, carefully, through a shattered mosaic of splintered time, beset by a dozen fragments of broken noise as their head turns, the sunlight leaping and stuttering from place to place, direction to direction.To us it might seem that the giant fools with time; a head cries out in doppler, a torso shudders, and then, a second later, a car drives into a set of displaced feet..Well, things happen roughly around the same time, that’s consciousness for you, so long as its all generally in some kind of sequence it should be fine. Giants have huge skulls and huge brains after all, a long low wave of binding and unbindings, of sense and comprehension, even for a normal giant a 'moment' is quite long; they only have 45 seconds in a minute and their days are 22 hours long. That’s without even considering the curious paradigm of the splinter giants - perhaps the splintering is more a mental effect than anything else, a curiosity of giant consciousness, maybe to insects we look like splinter giants and the whole thing is just a strange meshing of different frames of reference. Perhaps a Splinter Giant is just a giant with a complex temporary mental condition.NEXT UP !Ana Polanšćak! The Gardener of Hecate herself! Someone who's name I have butcherd so badly and so often you could use it to fill sausages.. Only about £250 away with 7 days left!ONLY 7 DAYS TO GO!!

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BEHOLD

Also I got nine days left on my Kickstarter!

Help me get art for my Kickstarter! Its not for my benefit, its for ART ITSELF!

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Get your copies while they are hot or at least lukewarm people. So far 313 individuals have backed for the Tome itself in physical form.
If we get to about 430 backers, my situation improves and I should be able to print, not 500 but 1000 copies.
HOWEVER, if we do not hit that sacred amount, then I will only be printing 500 copies of Speak, False Machine TOTAL. In this case then there will be enough for all the backers (i.e. for under 430 backers), but after that, only about 70 copies will exist "in the wild". 70 only, and likely less, for ALL TIME.
Oddly, if you want this to be a VERY super excusive book that few people have, then you want to encourage people up-to that limit but not beyond. But maybe the difference between 500 and 1000 copies means little.
ANYWAY - We now have a COUNTDOWN! TEN DAYS!
Ten days till I am cut free of my rabid dreams like some guy tied to Moby Dick.
Currently, and for the last few days, we have been slowly, agonisingly, crawling over what seems like an infinite desert of blood stained gold, towards the vast pile of collected teeth atop which Valin Mattheis sits grinning his feral grin.
Valin is a pretty expensive hurdle to hurdle but should we reach him the next artists; Dirk, Ana and Alec, are all a lot cheaper and hopefully we should BLAST through them at what seems like an accelerated rate after the long and bloody crawl.
And if we hit that goal and manage to snag Alec, then the book will be artistically complete.
WILL WE MAKE IT??
Crushed by the almost insupportable weight of my own genius, I cling to the foul parody of life allowed me by this ruined cosmos, raising my bloodied fist towards the blistering orb of the hateful sun.
All I was asking for is ONE very-expensive thing! And then three more things! And then possibly more if you have it! Is that so much?

Here are all the posts in this Speak, False Machine series;Crimes of an Analog FutureThe Troll Kings Invisible HandsCults of the Cuts of the Oceanic StarThe Popinjays of KnarrThe Secrets of the Mocking Man!The Giant Became a WolfThe Lamps that were His EyesGIANT BAT WITH FLAMENCO BIRD HANDSHeralds of the Garbage BargeMinor Arcana of the Apocalypse TarotThe Desert of Blood-Stained Gold

HOW TAUNTS THE WIZENED BLOOD-MOON SAGE?

The wormy dreamspeak of the blood-moon sage patters on our minds like distant rain.
"What were your sad ambitions? Figments and fragments. And around you, see, the piled up bones of all who thought the same."
It seems that ants crawl across his eyes. We reach for him, a wrathful grasping, the space between us seems so short, so small a thing.. yet the goblinish philosopher of the mounds only smiles a gap-toothed smile, for as hard as we reach, as fiercely as we crawl and stagger like drunken men towards his scrawny neck, the heavier and the tired’er we feel, for he sees into the darkness of our souls and nothing that he sees there leads the sage to fear.
"Now you seek my wisdom? Or would ye tip me from my mound and delve beneath it for the fumes of ages and the golden tablets of time? Too late.. too late by far. I PERCIEVE YOUR FAILURES AND THEY ARE THE TRUTH OF YE!"

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CRAWLING TOWARDS VALIN
The world is a challenge and surely every day in which we accept that challenge is a good day, yet as I crawl across a pile of blood-stained gold towards the crouching beast-feet of Valin Mattheis, my fingers digging into the heavy coins, the fat, bright metal slick with blood, my mind fills with dreams and with visions....

OF THE RUMOURS OF THE HOARD
There are rumours of a pile of bloodstained gold, a hoard of dark realities cursed with truths, and whomever should pick up a coin from this hoard shall see others truly, but not themselves. So the curse commands that only those in pure company should dare risk the blood-cursed gold. So that the gold-pile mingles with the bones and bodies, mushrooms sprouting from rat-gnawed skulls, the blood itself browned with age, caked and crumbled into dust, yet the gold still gleams

OF THOSE WHO COME FORTH FROM THE HOARD
Demons of blood and gold, a vengeful spirits bound to hordes of wealth, crippled monsters, famished and undying, burrowing through a dark afterlife of blood-slick coins, tortured eternally in a cold womb of crushing metal. Dark is that hell, and heavy.

OF THE HELL OF BLOODSTAINED GOLDThere the gold-cursed spirts clamber across hills and plains, dunes of cursed gold piling in drifts, driven by cataclysmic winds from a curse-lashed sky. Wild cracks and shattermarks of varicoloured lightning crash between acidic clouds, typhoons of smoke and ash roll across the burnished land and when they briefly clear, black aurora melt and skitter across the welkin like hallucinations.
Truth is in the desert and truth is in the gold. Truth without end or limit. Cursed self-knowledge. Bright burns the freezing gold in the flashing light of the cursed aurora.
None walk across the plain. All are crippled. The gift of the gold is this - ye may not walk but ye may dig. To those so cursed, the gold gives way before their grasping hands like soft soil. They burrow like snakes, clawing and squirming their way down into the cold dark. They must, for there is no other shelter in the desert of gold coins, there they hide like scorpions.

THE DAMNED
For the damned of the hell of bloodstained gold can never die or sleep or walk, but must crawl endlessly, their bodies slack and heavy, dragging on the lain of jumbled coins, cold beyond reason, starving and thirsty beyond what any living soul could bear.
Some go mad and try to eat the gold, stuffing it into their mouths, their bodies bloated with the freezing coin, pinned like fat leeches, immovable till they purge the gilt.
Of those damned to the hell of bloodied gold all there is to feast on is each other, and they fear and hate each other. Yet hunger and desire to feast upon even that parched and withered flesh. Some gorw wild upon this feasting with the illusion of strength, others willingly hurl themselves into the mouths of their hunters, weeping joyful tears of dust as they are slowly slowly torn apart and eaten, finally discovering annihilation.

BENEATH THE DESERTThe oldest and the strongest are said to occupy small caves and caverns gouged out of the gold and propped open with the bones of their lessers - or with the bones of dragons, for this was once the hell of dragons, where , deep beneath the desert of bloodstained gold are ghoul-cities built from their bones.
For when the souls of mortal men first came to the dragons hell they were prey for the anguished spirits of the flightless, crippled drakes which heaved themselves through the dunes of wealth as if it were a sullen sea, but in the dream of time allowed within this timeless land the numbers of the mortal dammed grew and hey swarmed the spirits of the dragons like starved and crippled rats feasting on a blind and cripped man, covering them in a horde, and the greatest of which thereby, turned each opn the other, ripe with the memory of dragon flesh and consumed each other, growing more mighty still, until an uneasy equipoise existed between these ghoul-kings, and one by one they buried themselves deep beneath the plain of bloodstained gold, dragging down with them, dragonbones, and fistfuls of scales piece by piece, building themselves small caves and hollows far beneath the blasting storms.
In time, (and there is in this place infinite, unending time,) lesser dammed discovered them and, burrowing from place to place, set about them, tunnels and crawlways which linked each larger realm, making of it a city-warren of the imperishable damned haunted by the psyches of the ultimately awful; souls in love with pain, gleeful witnesses to unending horror.

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Greetings creatures, my Kickstarter for 'Speak, False Machine', a mighty Tome of posts not unlike this one, has staggered like a blind giant through a variety of artistic goals. So far we have blundered through the palaces of Scrap Princess, Jason Thompson, Jez Gordon, Peter Mullen, Amanda Franck and Daniel Puerta and, daft and thoughtless, have snagged these noble minds and shoved them into our greasy pockets.Now a new and terrible goal rises like a thundercloud before our eyes - that of Valin Mattheis!

As a tribute to his eldritch conceptions..

I give you the following post;Minor Arcana of the Apocalypse TarotWhile discussions of the Major Arcana of the Apocalypse Tarot are common, experienced readers will devote themselves also to the Minor Arcana, the complex meanings of which often add depth and texture to the predictions of a casting.

The House of Suns Ace of Suns - A clear sky, contrails, daylight bombing, falling bodies.Two of Suns - Gradual but inevitable and transformative heating, companion card to the Queen of Seas.Three of Suns - Natural fires, combustion, lightning, the presence of materials for combustion.Four of Suns - The darkness inside a fire, pain shutdown due to nerve damage, unhealable wounds.Five of Suns - A Saint burning, purification, gold, transcendence, revolt of the unconscious.Six of Suns - Shrapnel, penetration of the body, revelation, the shadow of fire.Seven of Suns - Witches, heresy, the burning of individuals, assertation of reason.Eight of Suns - Light brought to a blinding point, lasers, destructive hyperfocus.Nine of Suns - The shaped charge, great force brought to a point, armoured vehicles.Ten of Suns - Firearms, conventional weapons, individuals acting en-masse, a great number.Page of Suns - Dehydration, death from water loss, water wars, rivers, desalination.Knight of Suns - Firestorms, mass strategic bombing, loss of home, a journey by night.Queen of Suns - Fission weapons, nuclear dawn, a singular number, loss of flesh, blindness.King of Suns - Rapid stellar expansion, Nova, total atmospheric loss, Mars.

The House of SeasAce of Seas - Water, the cooling of thirst, rabies, the lapping of animals at a spring.Two of Seas - Venom, animal derived poison, political assassination.Three of Seas - Rats, fecundity, invisible transport, to be the medium.Four of Seas - Radio noise, the Dark Forest, solar events.Five of Seas - Pesticide, indigestible compound poisons, undrinkable water.Six of Seas - Invasive species, a creature with no predators, vast numbers of alien things.Seven of Seas - Plagues in the classical sense, a lack of immunity, isolation.Eight of Seas - Neurotoxins, mirror proteins, cannibalism, the brain.Nine of Seas - Ice, preservation in ice, (reversed if cast with a 'Suns' card)Ten of Seas - Shipwreck, loss of goods, a catastrophic sudden change, ice.Page of Seas - Peace, perfect isolation, a fortress against the world.Knight of Seas - Floods, rising oceans, a concentration of people, drowning.Queen of Seas - Tides, hurricanes, Tsunami, the inundating storm.King of Seas - Silence, preservation, utter stillness, the interstellar dark

The House of InsectsAce of Insects - Locusts, famine, crops, preservation, prophecy.Two of Insects - Reaching fingers beneath a door, an invisibly predatory crowd, the public gaze.Three of Insects - Parasites, infection of the flesh, the secret removal of resources.Four of Insects - Skittering, unseen movement, the spaces behind the quotidian.Five of Insects - Drummers, distant music, an arrhythmic sound, incoherent codes.Six of Insects - Teeth, a great multiplicity of things, a crowd.Seven of Insects - Concentration camps, population loss, cultural deletion.Eight of Insects - Binary, the false projection, a model of the world.Nine of Insects - Bacterium, symbiosis, a feast, unseeable but not unalterable.Ten of Insects - The Virus, the unperceived and unalterable, the mirror of life Page of Insects - The engram, neural lace, dreams, dreams invaded, cybernetics.Knight of Insects - The synthetic mind via pure mathematics, simulated worlds, simulation theory.Queen of Insects - Fecundity, infinite growth, annihilation through growth, cancer, nanomachines.King of Insects - Grey goo, total atomisation, cosmic noise, the Planck length.(Doubled if combined with the Grand Arcana card 'Grand Virus')

The House of TerrorsAce of Terrors - Your own name discovered where it should not be, conspiracy, official interest.Two of Terrors - Storage, loss, theft, limited resources, meat.Three of Terrors - Familial secrets, hidden history, the truth revealed.Four of Terrors - The remaking of reality, doublethink, the well-accepted lie.Five of Terrors - An empty house, an unknown number of rooms, indeterminate values.Six of Terrors - To be lost in a familiar place, the unknown street, the familiar made strange.Seven of Terrors - Voices in walls, inverse and unseen spaces, that which has long been prepared.Eight of Terrors - Faith made real, Revelation, faith proved in blood.Nine of Terrors - Reavers, the armed group, a breakdown in law, the knife.Ten of Terrors - The State inverted, disordered government, an inappropriate order accepted.Page of Terrors - Traditional madness, delusion, to become incoherent, to discover.Knight of Terrors - Moral and physical triage, a decision which cannot be unmade and cannot be survived.Queen of Terrors - Betrayal, the false self, many faces, the family.King of Terrors - That which cannot be imagined, information hazard, the card which is not a card.

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Good news! Beloved and omni-compitent artist Peter Mullen has been snaffled from the ground like a delicious truffle, placed into a earthenware jar and taken to the pantry as of one of the ingredients for 'Speak, False Machine', my current kickstarter.

But as I sup from the developing brew I muse sympathetically within my own mind; "Some taste or flavour escapes me.. what could it be?"
Then, glimmering oddly on the horizon of my memory, there springs into my frontal cortex the phantasmorgic form of.... Amanda Lee Franck!
"Of course!" I solophise, "the perfect complement to my Mullen Stew", and race off in pursuit, net in hand.
But whom and why, and where, is Amanda Lee Franck? Many links promise knowledge of her mysteries and some are set here for your pleasure..

You may wish to peruse her "itchooooo" and the adventure "You Got a Job on the Garbage Barge", in tribute to which, please accept this small d20 list of.......

TWENTY HERALDS OF THE GARBAGE BARGE
1. Eels fill the waterways.
2. Children become translucent and compulsively burrow.
3. Sentient dry ice breaks into homes.
4. Clouds gathering are actually made of old crisp packets, they hail dorito dust and rain oil.
5. Anxious garbage men knock on early morning doors asking "is this really all you have?"
6. The light from mobile phones summons tiny midge clouds which obscure use.
7. Council Pamphlet "HAVE YOU SEE "FLOATERS"?" These now seemingly real & not just eyeball things
8. All TV series infinitely loop, late night viewers swear sitcoms are auto-generating "false episodes".
9. Precognisant safety railings crumple in advance of any crash.
10. Everyone is repeating the hour of 5am but no-one will believe the early risers.
11. Ice Cream vans now have blacked out windows, scratchy intercom s & Ice Cream men w hairy hands.
12. Local Google maps gives cryptic routes which compulsively skirt graveyards & waterways.
13. Flashing television lights in empty homes, neighbours asking for duct tape.
14. 'Lost' child clothes hung on ironwork fences proliferate, more each day, all decayed.
15. Crows steal phones and make random calls. It’s all just cawS.
16. Ancient post starts to arrive for occupants of house 5 decades ago.
17. Car headlamps full of dying flies, resulting nacreous light casts tarmac in pale glow.
18. 1950's spiv goes door to door, offering to "reverse your taps" for "a shilling", sounds like a threat.
19. Birds lose fear of man and try to get inside the house.
20. The sun begins to clatter like a machine slowing down, the sun opens like a door, revealing it was little more than a painted spot about 100 feet off the ground, a flat capped gent in overalls smoking a pipe climbs out on a ladder and starts banging on the sky with a wooden mallet, the mechanical sound restarts, speeds up and becomes inaudible, the man climbs back into the sun and closes it, the day goes on.

Beyond Amanda lie the unbearable imaginings of the Isle-Bound Sorcerer Daniel Puerta, the biblically accurate brainscapes of the Nechrarch Valin Mattheis, the cryptic dreamscapes of rumoured madman Dirk Detweiler Leichty, the brunneous paracosmic children of the mysteriously eldritch Ana Polanšćak and finally, far beyond the lands we know, the lanquid sketches of the disturbingly beautiful, and possibly fey, Alec Sorenson.
15 days! 7 goals! Can we do it???

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I am blogging about Peter Mullens art until we attain his skills for my KICKSTARTER.

This is DAY TWO!

Firstly, this is a lovely image. I am not sure if it has been published anywhere but if it has my apologies. You can see the original at Peter Mullens site here.
Will Peter do anything nearly as amazing for my book? There is only one way to find out; BACK IT!!!
For todays PeterOddessy I will take us deep, DEEP into this image by naming and describing the background of EVERY living thing in it!From the top left, moving counterclockwise to the bottom right

STAGE BEETLE
Wihlem Thrice, the only sentient and transformed insect in the image. Formerly a composer. Until now the slow integration with his insect life, the simple and binary pleasures of its existence and limited capacity for self-expression had dulled him into a dreamlike state, but now, with this incredible confabulation of events, he feels within himself the awakening of his muse, but how to record the symphony he feels inside his mind?!!?

FLAPPING BAT
Grimbles, formerly a witches familiar but was fired from that employment for eating the wrong child’s eyes. Now haunts the underworld, likes to eat spiders and is looking at (sensing) the large one on the mushrooms just across the way.

GIANT BAT WITH FLAMENCO BIRD HANDS
The GRABULISER! Magnificent experiment of the Mage ZUCODU who fell under the spell of the CUBIC DEVIL FACE (see below). The Grabuliser wants only love but understands only desire, the desire to grabulise things. The Flamenco heads are true pseudopods with no separate brain structure, the eyes simply those of the bat enlarged and relocated.

MUSHROOMS
The mushrooms are indeed alive and one day may be more than alive. Fat with seeping visions dripping seams of the potions of the lost Alchemist Zircon, they throb with dark passions they are unable to express. Thank the gods it is so for their sheer inventive malignancy, if every given voice, would be enough to corrode the sky to tin and invert the stars!

SPIDER ON THE MUSHROOMS
This spider, which, if it were sentient and had a name, that name would be Steve, has seeks only a moment of peace and perhaps a steady draughtles spot to begin the construction of a web. Fate decrees Steve shall have neither, within a very trice he will be fighting for his life.

GIANT SLUG!

Flubbobo, monster of the trolls has haunted the infinite darkness for ages beyond counting. Once he was just a normal slug! He just kept eating! He doesn't even have a plan, nor is he aware that he counts as a near-supernatural devil and/or demon figure in no less that five undeworld mythologies, one of which is that of the hairy men he is about to eat, another of which belongs to the gargantuan snake-man, who recalls him of older times, tough Flubbobo himself remembers naught.

LITTLE HAIRY GUYS RUNNING FROM THE GIANT SLUG (AND THE ONE HIDING)
The Theeble Kin make their living underground by shaping and painting solid rocks to look like tents from a distance and then clouding people over the head when they come close to investigate. They have never actually seen a real tent and have inferred its shape through an automatic evolutionary process. Here they have been foiled and made themselves accidental prey for the demon of their dreams, Flubbobo the Annihilator. The three running are Flix, Bix and Trix, the one cleverly hiding while they run away is Grabs, the only clan member with a double digit IQ.

THE THREE ADVENTUERS ROBBING THAT SHIT!

SPIKED HELM GUY
'Chunks'O'Keefe, former bartender (possibly current bartender as he never formally resigned). Was invited on the expedition last minute as he was the only one with a crowbar. It was his idea to crowbar open this chunk of stone but he knows he will get no credit for it.
COIFFE LADY
Tzina Szzrakk an incompetent thief from the bottle district. Instead of picking locks she made friends with a bouncer with a crowbar, instead of searching for traps she employs a mute Dwarf in a parka and instead of sneaking she just runs away. Still, she has at least discovered the alchemists stash she came looking for, but how much of that tuff is even still active? And how will she even recognise the Potion of Infallibility she was hired to retrieve?

SHIELD GUYOrik Nailfyst, a mute, poor, white-trash Dwarf who grew up in a tent city and, despite knowing almost nothing of dwarfish, can still spot a stone out of place in the dark. Only 15 years old, he suffers from the cold and wears a quilted parka in all weathers. His shield was the results board for a darts tournament and the results can still be seen on the inside surface

THE TWO GIANTS LOOMING OVER THEM

Actualy the transformed bodies of the Mage Zucodu, accidental creator of the Grabuliser, and the Alchemist Zircon.
Zucodu came in search of the cubic devil faces but after his mind was blasted by its magics he wandered as little more than a troglodyte until he found Zircon secretly stashing his hyper-valuable Potion of Infallibility. Though understanding little Zucodu had vague memories of magic and threatened Zircon with a stone, believing he might return the mage to his near-forgotten state of sanity. Zircon attempted to trick the giant with poison but in the confusion and being threatened to drink along side him as secuity, both drank half a potion of Giantification and were thus transformed. Both too big now to leave, Zircon knows there is an old potion of de-gigantification in his stash which his fingers were too big to reach, he has awaited only the properly sized fools to threaten and beguile and now waits carefully, planning his plans.

CENTIPEDE
An occupant of the black pillar the Centipede is the reincarnation of a munificent Raja who once had his wife trampled to death by ten elephants. Banished from swarga upon his death he was reincarnated in this many-footed form. Little has been learned from this.

THE MYSTERIOUS SPEAR-ARMED MANThe dark and mysterious warrior is named Parakeet. Secretly a master of the dagger he carries the spear for show, pretending to be a fighter of much lower ability than he actually is. His "failures" in combat serve to lure an opponent to commit themselves and reach his inner ring of defence where any of a dozen daggers will annihilate them. Pretending to act as a mere bodyguard, in truth he seeks the Super-Serpent of the underverse and is one of the few here who could defeat it.

STAG BEETLE!
This beetle once saw a horse explode, other than that little distinguishes the simplistic and barely-sentient creature.

DWARF WITH AXE
Max Brix, actually just a short man with a false beard but he plays the role well enough. Was hired as a bodyguard by the Sorcerer Lamular Grotte (see below) on his quest to find the Cubic Devil Face. On discovering the thing itself and witnessing Grottes horrid response he is about to cut the Wizards dick off.

TWO BEETLES CHILLING ON THE GIANT PAIR OF STONE FEET
All beetles are predatory by nature but these two alone, perhaps of all beetles, have developed between them a philosophy of non-violence. They are un-named but in order to record their achievement in history’s great book let us refer to them as Pax and Trax.

GUY WITH COOL ROUNDEL SHIELD
Winston (von) Choom, his wife was once poisoned by the Alchemist Zircon and he attached himself to this expedition as a bodyguard for the Sorcerer Lamular Grotte IN FACT so he could observe Tzina Szzrakk and her two companions on their search for the Alchemists loot, which he intends to smash. Has no idea that the Alchemist survives in giant form down here.

GUY WITH BLAZING STAFF!
Sir Vomulous of the Crumbling Keep. The wizard knight has no understanding of his own metatexuality but in fact he has been played in a wide variety of rulesets yet has maintained continuity of self and memory, this is the reason for his mixture of magic and swordplay. He sometimes worries about the episodic nature of his life. Of all the bodyguards Lamular Grotte hired in his search for the Cubic Devil Face, Vomulous is the only one who actually intended to act as a bodyguard.

GIANT LIZARD! IS HE A STATUE? WHO KNOWS?
The incredible Super-Serpant of the Hidden World! A creature too vast and magisterial for this situation or this adventure. He is only on his way between vastly more important cosmic assignations using the blackways of the Underverse as we might use a country road. It is not even clear if the Super-Serpant has noticed the eldtrich events taking place and it certaily has no idea that the vengance of Parakeet is close.

THAT DEVIL FACE LOOKS ALIVE, HOW ABOUT IT?
An utterly evil idol containing poisonous ideas. Like a kind of satanic rubics cube, the sections of the face can be slid about and anyone who can reformat the face into its unknown secondary shape shall gain the powers of a Devil. But the tiles inevitably move with a mind of their own and slip back into their assumed form, leaving the foolish individual who made the attempt to be reduced to either thrall or slave-prophet of the face.

GUY PRAYING TO THE DEVIL FACE
Lamular Grotte an inferior Sorcerer and lately a cultist of Choom (Coom, name of a town, home of Winston, see above). Grotte fled Choom with a pig-bound book containing rumours of the Cubic Devil Face and threw together all his funds to assemble this party, (only as cheap as it was as almost everyone in it had a hidden reason for being there). On reaching the devil face he rapidly fell under its spell and after feeding two of his bodyguards to eldritch fire, began hopelessly worshipping the face to the disgust of all.

TWO PEOPLE LEVITTING IN PILLARS OF ELDRITCH FIRE!
ONE A KNIGHT
The Holy Paladin Sir Dawningstar Faux, attached himself to Grotte expedition as, like everyone else, a bodyguard. of course he had his own designs on the Cubic Devil Face, to whit, its destruction! The Knight was a painfully bad liar and this is one of the few deceptions Grotte actually saw through. Grotte played the fool and used Faux to cut his way through the underworld but on encountering the Cubic Devil Face IMMEDIATELY sacrificed the knight and his squire without even really asking for much in return.

ONE LOOKS LIKE A FEMALE KNIGHT
Sir Biscuit Pen, the Squire of Sir Dawningstar Faux the lack of imagination in her (false) name is a quality of her own paucity of creativity, not mine, though I am actually not going to tell you her real name as I sense that you doubt me on this. Anyway she is secretly in love with Sir Faux, disguised as man, actually more competent, he can't see through disguise, you know the drill.

BARNACLES
The only indication of our real enemy here - THE SEA! Yes the Sea is a surprise visitor to this underground cave which is in fact a SEA CAVE. Because.. the SEA is in one of Zircons hidden potions and if it is opened here they will all drown. Surprise last minute change! Subverting expectations!

CRABE!
A normal crab and decent crab but not a good crab for none are.

ISOPOD CHILLING ON THE PILLAR!
Next to the Crab but in no sense associated with it this Isopod, named 'Flux-of-the-Whale-Dream is in fact the Squire of a Trilobite Knight sent here to earn his or her 'Spurs' by the final defeat of Flubbobo!

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BLOGGING ABOUT PETER MULLEN UNTIL WE HIT HIS TARGET!Hello, welcome back to me whoring out my latest Kickstarter for a MONTH. We are half way through!
If you are interested in previous posts in this series here they are;Crimes of an Analog Future

The Troll Kings Invisible Hands
Cults of the Cuts of the Oceanic Star
The Popinjays of Knarr

Bring me the head of the Mocking Man
The Giant became a Wolf

So far we have attained Jason Thompson and Jez Gordon as artists!

Our next mighty golden HOOP to SNATCH from the Gods is the talent of Peter Mullen.
I will be writing blogs about Peter Mullens illustrations EVERY FUCKING DAY until we hit his goal so please save me from that by backing the Kickstarter.
However you are probably familiar with Peters style from his wonderous work for DCC (I think) and various other 'old school' productions. You can check out a page of his classics here.
But if you go a page over you can see he also does very beautiful monochrome nocturnes, a subject dear to my heart.

The Lamps that were his Eyes

The man, his flesh was moonlight. He was up there, about a ladder high with his big eyes swinging, dripping starlight with no stars in the sky.
That man wouldn't come in the daytime, or when you could even see the sky, it was as if he feared the stars and the moon, and would race from them, his huge terrible shining head obliterating treeshadows in a bobbing gait.
Only the stars and the dawn made him afraid but, but for their light nothing stopped him coming. He pulled apart the darkness like someone stepping through a curtain, his moony headshine leaking through, nacreous and horrid.
Then he came, sometimes tentative, like a boy entering an adults room, other time striding blindly, as if only half way on a long journey, and him behind schedule.
He was not especially, ridiculously huge. His spine was bent and that unsupportable head was, lets say just below a second story window. If he straightened up (clearly agony for him) he could look through that window, or even over the roof.
What was he looking for?
Everything living froze in his sight and even witful creatures, even the wise and the strong, were drawn towards his distant gleam - it took such strength of soul, sometimes even a nail in the shoe, some barbed wire round the thigh, to remind you never to go near it but to hide.
Anyone who didn't know about the light might wake up dreaming, see the beams of his eyes drifting in the black trees like a ships lamps bobbing on a dark sea, the only lights in a dark world, and, wondering what they were, wander out there in wellingtons and dressing gown thinking they would only go to the edge of the field, craning their necks "I think I can see it. What is it?" But then, a little further, a hop over the fence, they walk into the woods, caught now in a beam of moonish white, now eaten by darkness, hopefully never seen again.
He melted them.
Probably didn't intend to. Possibly didn't even know what they were, or where he was, (if it was even a He, long eight-toed footprints in the mud), the number of people who got close enough to look and came back whole enough to speak was slim, but if you got close enough to him and he noticed you, (they said), he would look at you, with those burbling eyes like bubbling white soup and blunder over to you like a cartoon.
It was the eyes probably - you started melting then. Not like, from acid, or like being burnt, it was stranger than that. You melted in one go, as if your bones and skin and stuff were all made of the same wax, maybe to him they were, and it didn't hurt, didn't even feel bad really, kinda nice almost, staring into those eyes.
You wouldn't feel the melting til he picked you up in both hands like a teddybear, saying things you couldn't hear, but like an itching, a whining in your head, like those small bones vibrating on their own.
The lumescent man, maybe he was asking something. Was he looking for something?
But no-one here could help him and when he looked at them, and picked them up, they came apart like things not of this world. If he kept at it too long they came apart, dribbled through his hands like a fruit cup. A mercy really as there was less to discover and clean up in the morning and while the parts didn't die straight away, they usually weren’t sentient by the time they were found, worse if he put you down or dropped or forgot you, those people, still not in pain, we found in daylight, a sight you wouldn't wish to witness.
Mainly they died too, thank god, all the body parts were there but all twisted and changed and usually that meant something would just give up working after a while, surface area or nerves or molecules or something.
The strangest thing about it was how sad he seemed, (that’s what they said), and they seemed like they were half asleep. Still thank god again for his blessings, we hit them with tranq till they slept and just waited out the death before we called it in. Otherwise they 'came to' like someone slowly waking up from sleepwalking, and realising they weren’t dreaming and that it was all really happening, and we had to explain to them again and again it wasn’t a dream and they were really here and were really like that, and no we had no idea about the moonshine man, or what he was or why.
After few of those you might put a bullet in them yourself I tell you.

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First, a brief update; I didn't even have time to post about getting Jez Gordon to do a piece for the book before the Kickstarter for Speak, False Machine stumbled blindly through get another artistic Goal.

We will have Jason Thompson making an illustration for Chapter One - TEENS and Jez making one for Chapter Two - History of a False Machine.500 copies printed £9,110.00 Daniel Grady layout £12,710.00 Simones interior art £13,270.00 Scraps Art £13,430.00 Maria Ku as consultant £13,990.00Jason Thompson £14,540.00Jez Gordon £14,870.00 <<<< WE ARE HEREPeter Mullen £15,370.00 Amanda Franck £15,650.00 Daniel Puerta £15,760.00 Valin Mattheis £16,640.00 Dirk Detweiler Leichty £16,920.00 Ana Polanšćak £17,250.00 Alec Sorenson £17,500.00 Next up is the magnificent PETER MULLEN. At this rate me might even make it to Alec Sorenson!THE GIANT BECAME A WOLFBy Phaserunner https://www.deviantart.com/phaserunner/art/Giant-Wolf-Photoshop-Art-910259193The giant lives above the snowline in the ruins of an ancient tower, He herds hairy elephants and wooly rhino on the high steppe.He rarely bothers the world of men but every month he comes down from the high peaks and trades meat, fur and ivory for what he cannot make himself, and every 70 years or so, he comes down for a wife. Sometimes he trades for one, sometimes he just asks, the fact that it happens so rarely, and never by force, suggests that he isn't treating them badly or wearing them out, perhaps being a giants wife is not so bad a thing? There have been no giant children at least.He rarely stays long below the snowline, he is visibly anxious about his herds. The old men know that pain, many are ex-herdsmen and are free now only as they have handed the herds over to their sons to worry in turn, but even now, aged and immovable, they still sometimes wake up in the mid-night, juddering, dreaming, imagining that "something has happened to the animals", about to throw on their old shoes and get riding until they remember that for them, such things were long ago. So they understand, the old men, when the giant gets twitchy and starts glancing to the high steppe.The giant marks his herd with brand, dye and carved sign upon pelt and tusk - the tower-and-mountain, though none would dare to mess with his animals, firstly that they would be hard to reach, secondly where is the man who can tame a hairy elephant? or steal a wooly Rhino? and only lastly for fear of the giant."He keeps his place and we keep ours" say the old men, "such has it been and so shall it be", and since most think the place they are the better; in particular the green farmland, forests and river valleys over the ice mountains, wild steppe and tumbled tower, they find no problem with this arrangement."No doubt He" (for in this country "He" can only refer to one being) "He prefers his mountain as we prefer our farms, such being natural and comfortable to His kind"If the Giant ever had a kind, or where he came from, or how old he is or what his gods or dreams might be, none know and few care to ask. Once asked if He had a name the Giant replied "called Orox". A terse being, singular, solitary and, so far as they knew, unique, there was little need for a name, and no-one in the country would have considered themselves familiar enough with Him to use it.Once they said, a wizard came out of the south and asked for the Giant by name and went to see Him, but nothing came of it, and once, about fifty years back, a man said he had seen the Giant drunk in the high peaks, singing a terrible song and hurling stones into a storm, but no-one else saw it.But the giant became a wolf.Three months back some goat-herds in the high valleys, who sometimes see the giant about the skyline, and who sometimes bed down for the night near their goats to keep them safe, lost all their dogs, half their herds and went mad in a night. Only a few survived, bloodstained and crazed. A wolf had taken the goats they said, not a herd of wolves, or some large beast but one singular wolf, come in out of the night,, killed the dogs, eaten the goats and any who got in the way. No hope, no hope at all said the survivors.How did it kill the dogs?"Treaded them down.""how big a wolf?" they asked."This big!", they replied, "no THIS BIG, can you see!"When they went to look they found blood and chaos but no wolf prints. Madness perhaps.Then the next full moon a farm down in the valley lost everything, all the animals, the dogs, even the geese, all gone and the only witness a child and she mad like before. "A big wolf!", she said, "As big as a tree!"Then the next full moon a village was lost. Houses torn open, lanes slick with blood, cellars dug out and families gone. Some fought back, brave men. To no avail it seems. Again "a wolf".But this time they searched deeper, looked longer, and one huntsman up a tree or on the roof of a collapsed house saw tracks, wolf tracks indeed, the tracks of only one wolf.They had not seen them , in the hills or at the farm, for they had not been high enough to see. These tracks a man could nearly lie down in each one.The people thought more deeply. The survivors; a dog with a silver charm on its collar, the child at the farm with a silver comb, the goatherd with a silver ring.It is clear what this means, and there is only so much silver in the valleys, even stretching it to cover each family might not work, and nowhere near enough for the herds, the sheep, the houses.Full moon is only a week away.Has the giant become a wolf? It has happened to men, eveyone knows, so why not a giant? Does the giant know he has become a wolf? Men often do not when they are so cursed, or so its said in stories, and who would tell him? His wife?Who on this earth could stop the wolf? A curse-wolf alone is bad enough, but a skinwalker giant?If the wolf cannot be defeated, what about the giant? Would He listen? and even if He did is there a cure? or a potion large enough to heal Him? Where would we find such a thing? How might be be restrained, even if He were to consent? Nothing in these lands could hold Him, let alone the thing He might be.Could we even murder Him? Giants are mortal, and not magical beings or walking curses. It might be done, perhaps it could be done, but should it be done? After all He has never done Us harm, or wounded us at all, though he might have extorted us and ruled us if he wished. Almost the opposite for His presence has likely kept off worse things, this has been a peaceful country till these last three terrible moons, and there is only a week left before the next full moon, and the month is November. It is too cold to move the people, too cold to try to shift the herds.Someone must go up the the mountains, to the tower of the giant (and perhaps his wife, if she still lives), and seek him out, and by force, or guile, or kindness or murder, stop these terrible raids.If the giant can be cured and things go back as they were, that is well, but how this might be done, none know, and if not... The danger must be stopped before the moon is full.

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Bring me the head of the mocking map maker! Bring me his bones, his skin and his hair
He mocked me! The one person you are not supposed to mock!

THE SECRETS OF THE MOCKING MANHe lives within a creaking gloomberg of ramshackle rooms, a rookery of old dreams, far to the west in a city where the sun sets and the light flames gold before the eve; in that funky dwelling he scampers hither and yon, peeping at reality through lenses, sticking up his head, staring at the city. From there he corresponds with similar rank fellows, a network of curious ghouls spread across the land, ferreting each other mail, cracking epistles scratched in yellow fly paper in a garbled hand. (In these he has mocked me!)

There in a quarter drenched in ravens and disturbing smells, where the pie-shops glisten in the afternoon smog, wrapped in stinking mundanity, climbs a curious house, perched above the like an drunken panther in a tree. It looms; dark but unserious, eyeing the city from under slanted eves which cackle like witches in the rain, propped up and joisted by wrenched beams that howl in the high winds from the amethyst sea.
Within lairs the Mocking Cartographer, ensconced in a warren of maps, each more deadly than the last. Like a rube Goldberg machine in there it is, or a dolls-house labyrinth.

THERE, in a room which is not a room, in a house which is not a house slinks that cartographer of smirks.
He thinks himself invulnerable for each of his enchanted maps has the power to drink in adventurers , invaders and thieves, trapping them in tiny parallel pearls of alternative sense. Each one a dungeon or labyrinth, castle or some other scene of "adventure"- the distant sky nothing more than an impenetrable painted board, the characters within nothing but feigned recycled mummers prancing through their sorrows. Here are snared the Mock-Mans foes, to be freed only on completion of the test, or else plucked from the parchment like a wriggling ant! Dropped into a jar - a collection of miniscule derps, trapped in jam!
In the house of the Mocking Man, one never knows if one has opened a door to a True Room, or been enchanted and ensorcelled into some comedic jiggerypokery.

For the Mocking Man mocks us all.
He mocks the wise and the deluded, the heroic and the dark, he mocks the Knight and the Thief, the Soothsayer and Sage, he mocks the very principals of adventure itself! The agon of the hero! The pathos of the monster! The luciferian ego of the villain! All reduced to nonsense in his glimmering eye!
He is probably mocking you right now!

Therefore! I have set;
A BOUNTY ON THE MOCK-MANS HEAD
A bounty of wonders itemised by part.
For each section of the Mocking Mans body I shall return an equivalent selection - in precious materiel; bones of gold, flesh of ebony and ivory, clothes of spider silk and silver leaf, skin of tessellated jade, hair of spun ambergris, each eye a great gem, the brain a moonstone, largest in the world! The tubes I will exchange for amber guts. Any stools recovered for quartz.
Bring me the flesh of the Mocking Man!

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Good News! My Kickstarter has Funded.
Plus with the help of my printer I have once again re-defined the meaning of success to include things I have already done. Goals are being achieved and a complete product including every artist is within tantalizing reach!500 copies printed £9,110.00 Daniel Grady layout £12,710.00 Simones interior art £13,270.00 Scraps Art £13,430.00 <<<< WE ARE HERE!!Maria Ku as consultant £13,990.00 Jason Thompson £14,540.00 Jez Gordon £14,870.00 Peter Mullen £15,370.00 Amanda Franck £15,650.00 Daniel Puerta £15,760.00 Valin Mattheis £16,640.00 Dirk Detweiler Leichty £16,920.00 Ana Polanšćak £17,250.00 Alec Sorenson £17,500.00
Instead of writing short fictions where I pretend to be a Troll King I have been advised to sell my latest Book by actually talking about the book. I am not sure how to do this.I pull out the book, I leaf through it..and I am trapped - this time by a review of Amber Diceless (Wednesday July 2018), Section; I Read a Book, Subsection; Games - first entry of this subsection."It stumbles into our Age of Rust like a charismatic megafauna into a rotting theme park" very clever patrickthen remarks on the nature of complexity "Amber has 4 stats, 3 kinds of universal magic power, no dice and it takes 250+ pages of US Letter Size to tell you what to do with them"Lets flip again...Page 241 Section; Uncertain Worlds, Subsection; Modern Heroes/Modern Monsters, entry; "Best Enemies”, (Saturday 23 January 2016), paragraph 2 "THE CARAPACED GOD""Bow to me heroes, for only by my will is your reality maintained!"Clad in infinite unending onion-rings of trans-uranic iron teased from the torn hearts of worlds spiralling to nothing in the flensing horizon of a Cherenkov-strobing black hole. Armour flaked and abrading with the touch of unspeakable eons yet ever growing by the substance of his own dark thought. Each layer riveted with unique gnosis etched in sacred languages invented by prophetic monks. From his palace of shadow and slow-decaying waves at the end of all realities the Carapaced God rules and turns his hidden eye to earth and is displeased. Perhaps he wishes a continent moved, a second sun created, a nation drowned or time revered. or simply the slate of history wiped clean. Seeking some alteration he sends forth his sombre legions. Insect Priests, Twilight Knights, Tense Fetish Nuns and looming PanzerSnaegle. The heroes oppose him yet he is an enemy that can never truly be defeated for should he fall, all reality would collapse into screaming chaos.".......Would you believe that having it in front of you. Having the whole thing in front of you in print, in a single, coherent text you can access at fingertip, feels substantially different than just leafing through a blog?Did we only dream such incredible events? But lo, the dreamer looks down at their hands and finds some token, a gem or a leaf of page or something to indicate that yes, it was real, that all that crazy stuff did actually happen.ANOTHER FLIP!Page 197, Section; False Readings, no subsection, entry; "Knights of the Snail" (no date given)."The Queen was dead and the King of the Curlicue throne was sad.All day he slept and wept and, as the sun fell through the empty air towards the terminating line of night, he woke and pushed away his salt-encrusted sheets and walked to the balconies deepening void to stare into the dying summer light, while the Fool, Ham Floret waited in his shadow tensing his legs to leap in case the king should try to jump.The King did not jump. He simply looked into the gathering gloom, counting the drawn storms as they marched across the velvet horizon and the sun bled red across the land.".....Time, in this book, the ten years of its making, does not really exist. it has been re-arranged, and so all the changes in personhood and style which took place across that decade are living next to each other, like the differing generations of an extended family, living in random houses on a terraced street.Open a door and what will you find? FLIP!Page 410, Section; I Read a Book, Subsection; Games, “Quest of the Mist Golem by Delvers Dungeon, Full title; Quest of the Mist Golem, Module QMG1, Mist Hold”, Wednesday 5 October 2011Several paragraphs down;"There is a mini hex map with nothing on it. For a journey which we've already been told only takes a day and which will be 'uneventful'.Every night mist rises from the ground near the tower and kills everything in it. So you can only gain access during the day. you are also safe from the mist in the tower, so no time limit there.There is some rather boring treasure, except that some of it is black coral. I would just dump the rest and have the evil wizard paying his Gnolls in Black Coral. It's vaguely poetic."Harsh words Patrick of 2011!Cruel even, would you survive such criticism?FLIP!Page 559, Section; Cryptoculture, Subsection; Star Trek, Entry 'Complex Objects Moving through Space', part two 'Opening My Doom-Wings Takes a While' Friday 13th March 2015, Subsection 'Nemesis'"aand the azteking is back in the opening shot. It still doesn't look quite right. Ah crap there is more shuttlecraft dicking around on-planet. There is at least a half-interesting pov shot. But then an awful stunt.Shuttles crashing, shuttles being too fast, shuttles having little shuttle adventures, all these are bad signs"....Simply an extended or in depth-review of a youtube compilation video showing every Star Trek film only through its effects shots and nothing else, or, when uncovered in the Borgesian labyrinth of Patricks Mind Palace, something more? A reference? A clue? A little fractal spark that leads you on a goose chase through the text? Somewhere in Rome Tom Hanks looks at a wall and whispers "oh my god".To some extent what you are buying is not a book, but a palace, or really more a ruin, where the ages and towers and layers have been mixed up by overenthusiastic Victorian archaeologists who just blasted through a bunch with dynamite and re-built other parts the way they "should be"...."From the blue beautiful self-indulgent 70s mystical V'ger to the clenched, grey-black desperate-to-be-cool CGI of Shinzons hateship, it seems fitting that we end where we began: watching a physical thing unfold for fucking ages."...How can I explain to you why I thought this would be a good idea and, furthermore, why I thought people might actually buy it?Ego? Of course. A desire for just a little more imagined immortality? Yes. But, more fundamentally, are you the kind of person who walks down the alley by the side of the shopping centre and explores the rear of the warehouses, peeking through ancient security doors and eyeing the brick work? What if someone was living in that wooden add-on that seems stuck to the roof of a building half-way up? It looks like it’s been there for 50 years. No-one would know they were there. Are you someone who plays on the swings or are you more interested in that strange gap between the hedge and the security fencing at the back of the park?FLIP!Page 650 Section; Kleinplastik, 'The Loss of Silence in the Mortal Realms’, Wednesday 29th May 2019 (I fiddled with it a little after that point. Subgroup; The Music of the Band. Paragraph 15"The forming and grouping of a skirmishing Warband is quite different than with most other kinds of wargame. Most other figures resonate or 'play' together in regular groupings, they feed off each other and carry their identity in relation to each other."The spine on my giant test print is already cracking, BUT YOURS WILL NEVER CRACK! A casebound tome! A fine Wilabin cover! Eternal and pure! A mystery to unfold, a curiosity to boast of or a folly to regret, its up to you.
(Not a legal claim.)

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The KICKSTARTER for my incredible book SPEAK FALSE MACHINE is at about 97%!!!!!!

But first...
The Popinjays of KnarrKnarr! The jewelled city hanging in vermillion crowds like a balloon in a kids dream.

Mistress of Adventures lost behind the rains of time. A Versailles of the mages, the crown city of multiversal nobility, streets very literally paved with gold, where pocket realms trapped in gems are gambled on baccarat games. A city without an underclass as all the servants are mind-wiped, time-looped Kings and Queens released into their home causalities at the end of service with a pocket full of magic dust or occultum coins brought forth from Knarr.

Coffee houses, swept-hilt blades, long-stemmed pipes and bone cigarette holders. Beauty spots, feathered hats, exquisite bows, puffed sleeves and brocade. Fine dining, late arrivals, tiny glasses, potent drinks. Exquisitely sensitive taste. High couture, connoisseur culture, (honour culture), highly strung, razors and ridicule, monocles and business cards; "my man here has the details".

Here the popinjays gamble for magic lamps, the keys to polar fortresses, the maps of labyrinths, small kingdoms held in glass spheres, or enchanted in paintings, or lost continents hidden behind teleport gates, or micro kingdoms in jars, or lands grown from the dreams of a sleeping child.

Swordplay; its an age of exploration, the multiversal spiderweb highway. But this is not a city of the explorers, or of those who fund the explorers, not even those, but those who back the backers. An army falls or rises, a realm burns or glows with light, all pieces on a board, marks in chalk, news for the coffeehouse.

Bejewelled are the swordsmen of Knarr. Perfumed and pungent, wealthy beyond reckoning. Most travel with an ogre butler who takes care of basic needs and holds the mirror when they re-apply makeup in the morning (what kind of gentleman can't apply his own mascara and beauty spot?). The butlers never fight of course, what would be the point? ad of course, returning home without ones jewels would be a crippling shame in the transient city of Knarr. To return home after having been mugged, or ransomed, or having to pawn a jewel for food, one could never show ones face in society again. Life would be over.

Of course its fine to lose these things and get them back, of course of course, that adds wonderfully to the tale; tied up in a sorcerers cave, captured by orcs, tricked by a Pixie, so long as you get the jewels back by the end, all is well. Better than well even, the greater the disaster the finer the tale, so long as you get them back.

Treasure is all very well. Most adventurers treasures are less than a Noble of Knarr starts out with to be frank. One returns with a chest of bloodstained gold, a broken crown, a half-burnt magic text, for the aesthetic of the thing.

These are the treasures valued in Knarr, the correct treasures, the proper adventuring treasures. It doesn't matter if its a goblin riding a pig, in fact that might be better, so long as the story behind it is good. In Knarr, so incalculable is the Wealth of everyone that treasures are like a kind of fashion, an art of selection and display. The display halls of the Palaces of Knarr hold whole dragons hordes, with the dragons bones too, not for their monetary value but for the quality of the experience, the classical nature of the adventure (neo agonists might turn up their noses at such a predictable display; "another dragon, oh my" but it is a classic for a reason).

So tour the multiversal swordsmen of Knarr, roughing it in micro-realms, hanging around in taverns, volunteering as caravan guards or for the city watch during a siege, trying to bump into wizards or hermits, practicing their duelling, hopping onto pirate ships, or getting marooned, (in a sense they could leave at any time, but in another more accurate sense, they could not, as to return to Knarr with an adventure incomplete, unresolved, or to go home beaten, would truly mean a kind of social death, and to be ostracised in the transient city is to die, to become nothing, even less than nothing. For wealth and power mean nothing to those whose streets are paved with literal actual gold. Nothing coin buys back a reputation once it is lost. Nothing can end the ridicule, and it is ridicule the Popinjays of Knarr fear more than lesser souls fear death.

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(The KICKSTARTER is still going, is at 90-sometthing per cent AND, I am reducing the print run to give a greater likelihood of being able to produce an artistically-complete book. We are down from 2000 copies to 1000, soon we may be down to 500, which, paradoxically, makes getting a book with full art and layout more likely. REDEFINING SUCCESS PEOPLE!)
Cults of the cuts of the Oceanic StarSo deep was the blue of the Oceanic Star that, with each fresh cutting of the gem new cults sprang up like grass, some focused on the stone-to-be, some raging in resentment at the losing of the stone-that-was, others worshipping the fragments, (of these, so many it would tire the tongue to tell of them all).It was the quality of light, all agreed, though none who saw it could say precisely, exactly, in words,just what it was.Some compared the stone to sea-smoothed jade, not in its texture, for its surface, ever since the first cutting, was diamond-bright, but in its depths, as the texture of the light it held_. Soft, dark, as if it had a grain. Shadows pooled in the depths of the gem as if it were a shallow sea.The Oceanic Star was first hauled from the belly of a mine so deep it touched the fire of the earth. Black with murderous fumes; great fan-towers heaved out the stinking air and flung it high, forcing down into the depths what must have seemed little more than breathable smoke, turning miners black from lung to limb, but vari-coloured at the limb-tips. The rainbow-handed quick-living miners stained, perhaps by the curious chemicals of the mines rare ores, or simply poisoned by rare earth or other toxins, fingers purpling and iridescing before they diedHere came forth the Oceanic Star, discovered by its glimmer. Nearly a boulder at first, black and stained, but curiously weighted. The miner who recovered it, famously, received as their reward, one gold coin and two days off.Careful cleaning bared shining adamant; the scales of a crocodile rising from a muddy bank. A gemstone, huge, a diamond perhaps, a sapphire, though coloured like no other seen before or since.
CULTS OF THE FIRST CUT The followers of the True Shah * The Cult of the Inner Sea * The Cult of Depth * The Cult of the Coin * The Cult of the Ocean Star * The Painters Cult Cut for the Shah, broken into several stones, its mass reduced by two thirds, the centre stone and largest still the biggest in the world. Almost un-wearable. Heavy, rounded, set in gold. When worn; well out of scale, like a child wearing their mothers things.Thus was the Shah marked and his greatness maintained. Interpreted in a thousand paintings. (Famously a small conflict broke out over access to the precise pigments of blue demanded by the empires two greatest painters, even then, the blue caused bloodshed.)Here the central stone gained its name; the Oceanic Star. Symbol of a landlocked Imperium burning on the plexus of the god-selected potentate. The Star flattened every other gem in that unserious panoply. There it was the night sky, a storm, in day so blue it was near-black at night so pale it seemed to hold the moon.Here the Shah idled years away in contemplation of the stone, calling forth philosophers and creaking fools, madmen, prophets. "A prize to he tells me truly of the colour of the star, the star my son shall bear and be Shah after me"O jealous son. O long-lived and indolent pa-pa. The Shah was hurled from his own tower, followed by his books. The son became a king through foreign gold and foreign guns, the price of which was either half the nation, or the gem.And so was born the first (major) Cult of the Oceanic Star. The followers of the True Shah, who believed he did not die, or chose to die, or hid the secret of his death amongst the books with which he was buried in a secret tomb, but he, or his wisdom, or his True Line, shall return and he will come from the sea. The Star is required, the true star, not its false and altered selves, the True Shade must be known, it can be found in old illuminated texts and the nation shall be renewed.Till then, the bombings continue.CULTS OF THE QUEENS CUT The Cult of the Shah * The Cult of the Divine Path * The Cult of the Worm * The Cult of the Order of the Star The Star was surrendered to the Reasonable Mercantile Incorporated Gentlemen, and by them cut again. This was the Queens cut. The Star was re-shaped, reduced slightly in its gourd-sized roundness. Such stones were made for crowns, not to bounce on the chest.It was delivered to the Queen of a far-away land, a sea-girt realm, rich in trade, investors, a line which must be pacified lest they interfere, and what better for that than the worlds greatest gem?So, of Sea-Land the star became the crowns own Jewel, set amidships on the royal brow. Perhaps it never saw the sea, but in this cold, grey land, spread with white light it is said the Star grew colder, its texture changed, though its facets multiplied.Borne darkly on a crown, wrapped in hymns, pinnacle of orders of decayed knighthood the star grew bright, blazed even, in this deeper darkness, astounded as it had not before, awed where once it seduced, now like starlight, or clear water, or like a spark. The Queens cut had no depth, did not exist in this world, could not be measured by the eye, was pure light alone.CULTS OF THE THIEVES CUT The cult of the Head * The cult of Transport * The Performers of Mysteries Revolution! The Queens head falls and in the chaos the Star disappears from history, red-flagged wood-shoed anti-tyrants rampage through the royal apartments, the powder store, the dungeons, the files and luxuries. Everything is packed up, itemised and sold for the revolution! the people need arms!Amongst this, somewhere, the crown loses its star, only a blank space remains.It takes a century for even half of the truth to come out. Darkness bears its fruit and in the last will and testament of a later age a strange "sapphire" emerges from the gloom of a merchants bequest"a stone unlike any other" - the auctioneers say.From there; trade and museums, court cases and newspaper drives, advertisements and arguments. Seen now, in this penultimate cut, by more eyes than ever, trapsing past in museum queues, photographed and visualisedWhat of the colour? the texture? the light? Mediocre, say the gem cutters and the aesthetes. Sky blue, sparkling, tangible, like bright ink, wowing the crowds, pleasing the photographers. Pop culture writers make book after book, but it does not burn in darkness, it has no depth.*CULTS OF THE LAST CUT* The Cult of Meat * The Cult of the See * The Cult of the Eye * The Cult of the Dream Delivered by thermic shock and high intensity bombardment, what little forces remain did not make it to the site in time. Not even looters survived the bombs.The last cut shattered the star into an asymmetric curl of radioactive light. No longer anything like a gem. More akin to fulgurite or broken bone.There it lay, a long while, buried in bone-ash and powdered brick until finally cold claws drew it forth once more into the light of a red sun, but the light of the Oceanic Star, lost since the Shah, or perhaps even before, returned now; deep, dark blue, shifting, endless and consuming, lit now from within, burning the hand if left there long, blinding the eye if gazed upon too much, sacred once again, though physically a mess. The dream of a forgotten ocean, the only living blue in a dead, red, world.

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..twitch, ghostly but for its rings; hoops and bands of Rheingold set with gems from plutonian realms. chalcedony, oryx, Martian pyrites, amber fossils from the toxic beds of Venusian seas.
The king half-slumbers, half-wrathful and half-sad, vast and earthlike, invisible but for silken robes stitched from the campaign tents of emperors, the barding of dead grail knights, the wedding dresses of a thousand brides woven with their golden hair.
Fat the troll-king is. Fat with eaten women and brave men, and bitter his cold breath.
Adored he would be.
https://www.instagram.com/davidthierree/

"Am I not... " he breathes out, in a murmur like interstellar static.
A pause.
The crown, a crown of splintered diamonds shining like glass, woven together with the unending labour of a hundred thousand enchanted spiders whose curse and purpose is only and entirely to weave their webs endlessly around the spiked crowns hoop and attach it firmly to the Troll Kings invisible head, that it might not fall, cascade down down down onto the sea-stone fall and there shatter, erupt like crystal waters, like a meteor of light, and drown the petitioners in a sea of bloodstained gems.. (each spider was a hero once, the Troll Kings foe, this being his just punishment for those who would place limits or reductions on the Troll kings wealth), the crown, tilts, rises!
A gasp runs round the hall! The King is sitting up! He is, well not rising, but he is straightening his magnificent spine! Not for a century, not for two, has the Troll king even raised his head. Noble lines have lived and died and chronicles been written and been lost in the hundreds of winters since that last and mighty raising of the brow.
"AM I NOT..." (one thousand salt-stained copper-clad troll knights draw to rimy hunchbacked attention, some waking up for the first time in a decade).
".. a KING???" the Troll King cries.
The hall is silent. What does this mean?
One hundred ageless elf-maids languishing in one hundred gilded cages hanging from the Troll Kings stolen stars while their ever-gold hair grows ever down (for only when it grows long enough to stroke a goblins head below will they be set free), start, awaken, glance curiously amongst themselves. Is he having a stroke? they think.
The college of goblin sorcerers, so old and mad their ears have been plaited into mobius strips under their chins, shiver, shaking tomb-dust from their hunched backs, grit their sharp yellow teeth, one snaps their man-bone pipe, one has, unnoticed, at some point become a mushroom.
The gold bird captured in an onyx mirror held only by the shadow of a sleeping silver girl, herself locked within a crystal coffin which is locked within a crystal coffin which is itself so locked, seven-times-seven times, each lock made by a dwarven smith who was strangled with his own beard and the key given to a seperate deamon each, the gold bird chirps!
"WELL?????" the Troll-King whispers, barnacles crunching from his armpits and rear as he shifts in his cold and granite throne.
None speak, until one, the Crone Sycroax, the Troll-Kings mistress of maladies, the storm-stirrer and milk-curdler, the baby-stealing witch and his sanest advisor, hauls her sagging paps from her silver bath full of cold and curdled cheese and says;
"Aye. A King. King you be and so it is."
"AND YET..." the earth shakes, the murmur of weeping gods issues from the toothed vault behind the throne, thunder deafens. He is getting up! the Troll King is rising!
No. No it is safe yet. He is merely setting his great feet, slippered in ebony caravels which set sail for forgotten lands, as if he might stand, he is not standing yet.
But still! What a cataclysm! What horrors? What if he stands up? What should be done? None there know for it has never been seen or recorded in even the glyphs of aeonic time.
"AND YET" the Troll King speaks, and ear bones shatter spontaniously in several adjacent lands "WHERE ARE MY ADORERS?"
Then. Slowly, horrifically, like the end of empires, the King stands!
Several go mad at the sight.
Dust, virgin bones and unknown of Archean life cascade down his mighty silken gown. He stands! The hundred-thousand-diamond crown rises to the level of the lowest elf-maids cage. The invisible mitts sweep hanging elf-hair aside like a curtain of gold. The head turns! Slowly, like a cannonball rolling. This way! That way!
Where the invisible gaze passes, gold coins turn to wizards and run away cackling, teeth shatter or turn to stone, bones turn to glass, gain sentience or are engraved with impossible prophecies beneath the flesh.
"AM I NOT ADORED?"
The Troll-Kings bitterness forms springs of raw vinegar which spurt up like geysers from between the sea-stone cobbles of his hall, (each a hill), picking some goblins and sweeping them away.
"I SEE NO LEGIONS. I SEE NO CHOIRS. WHERE LIE THE TRUMPETS AND ARMIES? WHERE THE POETS AND MANDOLINS? WHERE THE APES AND MAIDENS?
The Crone-Thing Sycorax stands in her bath, dripping cold cheese. All who see her nakedness go blind and die.
"They are passed O King." She says.
"PASSED?"
The Crone coughs up a teratoma, examines is with one beady eye, smiles and puts it back in her mouth, chewing carefully.
"Those were the poets of your youth, O King. Those were the armies of the summer when the world was young, and the maidens of the dawn. Now is the night and the dark. Now is winter and the end of all but stone. Dust are your adorers. Forgotten is your name."
"DUST?" whispers the invisible king, "YET I SLEPT BUT FOR A MOMENT."
"Hggggh" grunts the witch, and shits a bloody stream into her bath of cheese. "Ahhhhh. No King. Worlds have burned in your sleeping. Towers fallen and been raised. New stars shine. But not for long. The world falls, soon to die."
"AH." Whispers the Troll-King, and sighs out a dozen ghosts who weave through the hall like streamers of pale fire.
"AHHHHHHHH."
The Troll-King sits so slowly and tectonically that mountains nearby tilt by a degree towards his weight.
"IT WAS ONLY A MOMENT THEN. A MOMENT OF GOLD."

In other news, the Kickstarter is going... less well than hoped for..Leading to some more modest and hopefully achievable goals..Which you can find out about in Updates HERE!!!!

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There is a post under the image bit first BACK MY KICKSTARTER AT LEAST CLICK THIS LINK!!!

Crypto stolen from Concorde in Daring Rocket Heist!A regular large volume transfer between Bank Suisse and the Bank of England was interrupted yesterday as Concorde was boarded mid-flight.

The encryption keys representing the funds to be exchanged are always transferred with the greatest possible security but it seems a group of international criminals discovered a weak point - the Supersonic flight between Geneva and Gatwick itself!

Sources close to the British Government yesterday admitted "we were caught out". When originally conceived, the sheer speed of the Concorde itself made the transfer impossible to interrupt, in the air at least, and all security was based around the ground stages. But long term developments in low-earth satellite jet messenger services have lead to a small, but unregulated, market in very high-speed high-altitude rocket Jet engines.

The criminals intercepted Concorde over the English Channel and, matching speeds, managed to board the supersonic jet. They then took the solid brass cryptography keys, each individually engineered in extreme secrecy by Swiss masterminds, and purloined them. Apparently unable to return to their rocket the gang leapt from Concorde and were allegedly picked up by a hovercraft in the channel below.

Evidence of the complex planning for the crime was traced to a 'film set' on the French Riviera in which a scale-model of the Concorde jet had been constructed and apparently used to rehearse the heist under the cover of producing a motion picture.

Pirates exchange fire over Sealand Transmitter!The 'air wave wars' turned hot yesterday as a fleet of Pirate Radio Station boats clashed with Royal Post Office security forces over the Sealand Transmitter. Allegedly shots were exchanged and some injuries have been reported.

'Fans' of the Radio Pirates claim that the governments own policies, in particular the 2023 'Air Wave Security and Regulation Act' have forced smaller and non-regulated stations into smaller and smaller ranges of the transmissible spectrum with more and more complex and expensive circuits needed to decode the transmissions.

"This is the slow strangulation of a free Press by legal means" claimed the head of the Pirate Party yesterday, "information wants to be free and the People want direct news sources regardless of government control. Whomever controls the wavelengths controls the truth."

The Royal Post office issued 'regrets' about the use of force and denied any deliberate intensification of the situation on their part. "Pirate Radio boats have only grown more dangerous" claimed the Post Master General "both paid security forces and, we regret, the possibility of lethal force, are needed to preserve the security and stability of the public air waves for the good of all."

President Taped by Bicycle!The American Secret Service yesterday claimed that attempts had been made to 'bug' the recent Camp David summit by use of an all-metal bicycle containing rare earths. The Sketchy Scooter they said, had been precisely constructed to absorb and record vibrations in the wavelength of the human voice. This creepy contraption apparently slipped through the U.S. spooks net as it contained no electronics and no moving parts other than those of a normal bicycle. The system was entirely solid state, powered by the movements of the bicycle itself and recording the vibrations inside its rare-earth-impregnated chassis as a kind of solid-tape, to be retrieved and decoded at a later date by unspooling the bike chassis. The Secret Service confirmed that they believed no Top Secrets had been lost as "The President does not discuss policy while cycling".
Cambridge "Crime Zone" Still Draws CriticsThe five-mile 'low-noise' zone around Cambridge University has drawn criticism again after levels of petty crime and several assaults occurred over the previous month.

The 'Teks' at the big 'U' confirmed the renewed need for the 'Zone' and even asked for an extension. "We test and develop the worlds most advanced and subtle circuits and the more complex they are, the more vulnerable they are to EM interference. Last year an illegal TV crashed one of our most expensive research projects with its irregular transmissions. This is a matter of not just our technological development but our security."

Cambridge locals are split on the matter; "Its quite nice really" claimed one OAP. Just like the old days. No buzzing and I like the horses. I don't mind paying for telegrams. Life just moves at a slower pace here." But voices close to the Cambridge Plod were less pleased; "Its like a bl**dy nineteenth century rookery round here. No radios, no telegram. Crims realised they could do what they want here and the state can't see them. Then they started moving in en-masse. Its not just the hawkers, thieves and pickpockets, all the London Gangs have set up their HQ under our noses. They know there's no transmissions, so no bugs, no telephones, no evidence! They can organise without trouble right in the heart of England!"

Ceefax King "Steals" the LouvreElon Musk the "Minidisc King" yesterday claimed to have "acquired" the Louvre. That is, to have the physical copies of super-high grade transmissions of its whole stock of art and culture.

The batty millionaire says he wants to make the Mona Lisa Free and add the entirety of the Louvre to his information transmission network for all of his customers to enjoy whenever they wish, in high-definition colour.

"It will be like being there." Claimed Musk.

The French authorities are in a stew and a major legal battle has broken out over the terms of their deal with Musk for the discs with the art. "The image itself is valuable" said the director. "Just as a photograph should not be included in a book without permission, curation and copyright, neither should Musks "accessible transmissions", he is just selling pirate art books over the air waves and that was not our agreement.

GPS Maps "May have been altered" Government ClaimsDrivers have been vindicated recently as the Government has admitted that the GPS maps of Southern England "may have been altered". Controversy has been stewing for a year as drivers in the South have found themselves lost in wrong turns and going down bad alleys. HMRC and the contracted corporation that engraves the maps on super-shin sheet Googleplex navigation, had previously claimed that any errors were within bounds and the "slow but natural changes in road building" were the cause.

Conspiracy Theories pointed to an alleged break-in at Googleplex's Engraving Centre in late 2022, a break-in in which it was claimed nothing was taken. The seemingly batty concept that someone may have sneaked into the building and re-engraved the core maps for that area before they were updated and couriered out to users of the GPS system (mainly hauliers, travelling salesmen and other long-distance travellers) has now been vindicated. The identity of "who changed the maps" and why, remains an "open question" Govt spokesmen yesterday said.

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The Kickstarter for 'Speak, False Machine' a Brick of Culture, is now up and running!Its a big book collecting and organising most of the blog posts from the first ten years of False Machine. How big? Fucking huge; pinched crown quarto and over 650 pages and half a million words long. Grab it if you want a Weapon of Words to wield against the oncoming dark, (or if you desire a curious level of intimacy with my mind) and if you can't afford that, back the PDF (which is cheap).MEDIA

As usual I have made zero media plans and have no marketing budget. If you want to help spread or re-link the Kickstarter I think the best times to do so are now and in the final few days.If you have ideas or desires for blog posts you would like to see over November, or interviews or anything else that might drag me into the light of public attention, you can let me know here, on my socials or at pjamesstuart@gmail.comFUNDING LEVELS

We have a bunch of funding levels at which the quality of the book will improve, including pieces from a range of OSR-adjacent artists so check those out if you are interested.I only need 590 rich and/or crazy backers to hit every art and design goal! Its theoretically possible!

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So, I lumber towards Bethlehem, ready to be BORN.

As an old Kickstarter passes into completion, a new one crawls forth, gasping. A new books shall be made! Different to the old!

Speak, False Machine!The first TEN YEARS of this blog, organised, indexed and arranged in hardback form!

It will launch in ONE DAY!

And ye shall be presented with another Sad Month of me whoring myself out.

Go HERE for the pre-launch page.

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1 - What Is the Heresy About?#2 - Horus#3 - Fulgrim#4 - The Lion and the Dark Angels#5 - The Alpha Legion#6 - The Bottle Novels#7- Graham McNeil and the Mechanicus#8 - The Short Stories#9 - Magnus the RedIn a previous post we considered the mixed but pivotal Graham McNeil. Now we must cross an invisible barrier in quality for, if my usual response to a McNeil book is; “oh that’s, wait, what the fuck, what the fuck is that, why did you do that, oh wow, ok that was fun I suppose”Then my usual expectation for a Swallow book is; “un hu un hu ah, yep yep, ok… well that happened..”From a pretty good or at least always interesting writing with a lot of weird or bad elements to a generally very boring writer who surprisingly often pokes his head up above the parapet of quality, but is sadly blown away by a waiting sniper. Swallow has rambled all over the Heresy taking on a variety of subjects but not really having an emblematic series, Legion or character. I think perhaps he was meant to be the main writer for Sanguinius and the Blood Angels, but he isn’t very good so those works don’t really stand out. Still he makes some good efforts! If wasn’t for the tragic dead weight of his last book, ‘The Buried Dagger’, a truly abominable disaster bringing the poorly-told story of Mortarion to an eve more poorly-told end, he might still rate above average. But he does not. Follow me now into tragedy…Assassins!Nemesis

EXECUTION FORCE! The deadliest ever dudes with a very special set of skills! They all wear black and work alone! Now they team up to do a thing! Will they do the thing somehow? And how the fuck are there meant-to-be-used-alone weird as shit skillsets meant to actually work together? Its not like using a knife with a fork or a fork with a cheesegrater even, more like a fork and the colour blue.Malcador being Malcador has a very bay-of-pigs concept of; hey we got literally piles of assassins around here why not just assassinate Horus?So a rag tag team of the assasnoriums synth-skin wearing wierdoes are sent to do just that.Meanwhile someone, (Maloghurst?) realises hey with all this warp gunk we can basically reshape reality and also with our Chaos Prime account we have access to the entire archive of demons dating back to the fucking old ones baby! Surely there is something in the back of the drawer that we can use to kill the Emperor?And in fact they do have just such a demon - a shapechanging super-clever psychic leech/capacitor thingy that only gets stronger the more power its target hasHigh concept. Honestly not bad. Basically a meta-story shaping book; i.e. why not just assassinate horus/e-money. Think this actually invented the execution force, an idea which sounds cool AS SHIT but often works out to be a bit eh.Ultimately neither E-Dawg or Horus want the other to be assassinated. They both want a Dramatic Last Scene. The Emperor in order to maybe redeem Horus and get him back? Horus so he can eat the Emperor and become double-strong, allowing him to take on the Chaos Gods probably/What even happens in this?They try to shoot a giant evangelion style sniper rifle at Horus. It’s so big it has to be hidden in a building. But they only shoot his double. This is one of two times I can recall that someone in the Heresy has dressed up as Horus and pretended to be him and one was Robute Guilliman… Insert your own “weird that its happened twice” joke here.Good because it leads onto ‘Gunsight’ in which the Vindicare sniper left behind goes mad on the vengeful spiritGunsight (Short Story)

A good story! An assassin leftover from a previous book infiltrates the Vengeful Spirit and, while waiting to kill Horus, has a mental. The Assassin bumps into a crewman who is still somewhat loyal. A neat look at what it might be like to be an almost-normal human who happened to be one of the hundreds of thousands aboard the Vengeful Spirit when Horus decided he was going to turn evil. Since then the ship has basically melted through reality and turned into a living nightmare, plus all of your colleagues are now big devotees of a scary new religion. It’s a rare sympathetic portrait of a normal human amidst the utter lunacy of the Heresy.Ultimately Horus converts the Assassin to Chaos with the inference that he will turn up at the Siege of Terra. (He does not). Angels!Fear to Tread

A pivotal moment and sadly just not that well written.This should be a major moment of the Heresy. Horus knows Sanguinius is super-dangerous and super-nice and super-loyal to the Emperor. So he sends him, and his entire Legion out to a distant world telling him; “Very dangerous Xenos here bro, take your guys and take em out.”In fact the planet, and entire system, is and are a warp-drenched, demon-infected spiritual and military trap for Sanguinius designed to either reduce him to a berserk rage and make him a servant of chaos, or simply to kill him.This does not work largely because the Demons are dumb as shit panto villains. Though that's a bit of a theme in the Heresy – the ruinous powers being basically crackheads and – regardless of the fact they can bleed through reality and travel through time affecting every moment of your life imperceptibly, other than that, they are actually often dinguses who faceplant at the last moment. I suppose being living psychic fatbergs is not a wonder for competence.Imagine playing chess against an idiot who can see through time. Or to call back to me previous example, imagine if your arch-foe was a crackhead with a TARDIS. Very very dangerous, and in fact terrifying, but likely not competent and, once you have had the first encounter, (from your perspective), you can start to develop safeguards. The Crackhead might have theoretically incredible power but they are going to consistently mis-use it, or make foolish decisions, because they are on crack. Demons in the Heresy are written a lot like this, which would make an elegant kind of sense if it were deliberate artifice, but in fact its just largely bad writing making the Demons look like the Chuckle Brothers. What happened; Sanguinius is a super pure very great guy and both Khorne and Slaanesh really want him to be their particular murder/perv angel – in an unusual example of chaotic combined arms planning planning the evil joint chiefs of staff have gotten together and set the PERFECT TRAP for the Blood Angels. They have basically cum all over reality in the Signus sector and now the stains won’t come outHorus will send Sangy and the Angels to Signus where they will have their first no-warnings experience of Chaos ; bad news its not aliens its LITERAL FUCKING DEMONS BABYRemember the aim here is not just to separate the Blood Angels from the rest of Imperial ForcesBut specifically to convert Sanguinius to the ruinous powers. Since he is a space vampire mutant with a near constant thirst for blood ruling over a legion of former blood drinking berserkers – shouldn’t be too hard right?No because he is the best guy everIt hard to write Sanguinius. I can think of only a few really good examples of him in the Heresy, one by Chris Wraight where he meets the Khan and ADB in ‘Echoes of Eternity’As soon as the Blood Angels fleet arrives almost all of the standard humans go mad and/or die. Parts of the Blood Angels assault Signus Prime. Sanguinius crashes on the surface and has a fight in a Beksynski madscape against legions of demons as they try to drive him, and the Blood Angels. Maaad I tell you; “Unleash your beserker rage you nerds!”Meanwhile a handful of humans have survived on the fleet – due to an unregistered psychic blank lady who protected them without realising.This whole thing might have worked much better if we didn’t get actual scenes of the main demons plotting and scheming in their tower of bones and goop. If it was played straight as a horror movie, with reality literally melting and the Blood Angels going increasingly mad and even Sanguinius, best guy ever, slowly going nuts, being confronted by that which cannot be, it might have been pretty great.Perhaps fortunately for humanity, the minions of the Chaos Gods are, during the Heresy, not particularly great at being unknowable horror-movie monsters, instead feeling more like very-knowable batman-villian arguing goons.Some allowance should be given. They have just come off maternity leave after giving birth to Slaanesh and have not had to deal this directly with corrupting humanity before, at least on this scale, they are not always on their A-Game.Sangy meets the main demons, fights them, Ka-Banda who is meant to be his nemesis fights him and does pretty well, going I am your doom! Your DOOM! Then one of the Blood Angels Librarians sacrifices themselves in Sanguinius’ place and the good guys win. I think that’s what happens.Future books will see the Blood Angels going off to hang out with Robute, where Sanguinius is made ‘Emperor’ of Imperium Secundus, before finally trying to make it through the Ruinstorm in ‘Ruinstorm’ and ending up in a massive catastrophe at Beta-Garmon in ‘Titandeath’ and finally zooming around the Siege and ultimately fighting at the Eternity Gate in ‘Echoes of Eternity’. All of these by different writers. Garro !

Garro is boring. Shouldn’t be but is. Maybe he’s ok with that though.We last saw him back in post 2 where we talked about the Flight of the Eisenstein. Then he ran through the bitz box posts as he fought a demon on the moon, largely didn’t go mad, though did get religion in a major way, then got recruited by Malcador and spent the mid-years of the Heresy wandering around usually on Grey-Knights sub-plot fetch quests saying ‘Come with me to Malcador’All That Remains (Short Story) Another in the ‘Grey Knights’ sub-arc as a bunch of imperial troops are diverted to Titan and thence out of the story.Ghosts Speak Not (Short Story) Hey random Death Guard left behind on the moooooon, come with me..To Malcador?No. But I am on a mission from Malcador. Also at the end of this story we blow up a planet. The Emperors Dream is dead!Lost Sons (Short Story) “Warden Arkad, Sangunius is deaaaaaad, (or missing), come with me to Malcador.”Arkad - “Like fuck I will.”“Ok well then we are taking all your stuff to Malcador!”Arkad - “Noooooo fucking way.”Random Messenger “Guys, text from the astropath, Sanguinius is alive.”Arkad – “Leave.”(Sanginius later dies)Patience (Short Story) A… a.. a.. good Garro story?Garro turns up in this as a mysterious avenging monster slayer seen through the eyes of others who just poses meaningfully and is taciturn but who it turns out later actually had a plan.…..The curious frustration of Garros' story is that his fate is to be sent through a WARP HOLE by Malcador, leaving the Heresy story and turning up in the ‘future’ of 40k. That’s it really, he goes through a hole. Sick and MortyJames has a short story AND a major novel about the Death Guard. Ancient lore says the Death Guard were only totally finally corrupted on their way to the Siege of Terra. Caught in a timeless warp Sargasso they were all infected and, over who knows how long of subjective time, went MAAAAD. How will this come over in text??But first;Exocytosis (short story)

Typhon comes down with a cold while chilling in Luthers micro-realm. Strangest friendship ever? Its weird that these guys know each other let alone that they get on. Admittedly they do both have somewhat anguished relationships with their Primarch but that’s literally every First Captain of every Legion.The Buried Dagger

A genuinely bad book and really quite a disappointment.Just very very very dull. Should be an absolute axial high point horror movie novel for the Heresy. So bad Chris Wraight took, and was allowed, an entire sub chapter in his Siege book in which a demon turns up and talks at length about these events to explain that actually morty is not functionally retarded.The complete fall of the Death Guard to Nurgle takes place as their fleet is stranded in the warp and infected with a plague that slowly destroys even their fabled resistance. A timeless moment that only ends when Mortarian says ‘ok’ and sells both their souls and his to NurgleDreams and visions fleet through the mind. An infinite time trapped in the warp. How long were they there for, subjectively? Ten years, a hundred, a thousand? Did we get time loops where they were forced to repeat the same horrors again and again? How about body horror- how does it feel to be forcibly transforming into a plague marine? Your body shifting and mind melting, and you can’t even die to stop it? EVEN DEATH IS NO ESCAPE. Time to enter the Ballardian dreamscape of your insane fungal reality! Dreams and truth intermix! What is real?? Does reality even mean anything in this hell? A crazed legion trapped in the dream of a mad god, poisoned with that madness until their personal reality melts and eventually, ultimately, they submit to the nightmare and emerge utterly changed! Sounds pretty great! Well none of that happens in the books really. The only way it simulates the horror of Nurgles touch is in how long and dull it is.Morty is extra-stupid in this, cucked worse than Josh Reynolds being cucked out of a series, by Calas Typhon who pulls some of the most pantomime-villain “it was chaos all along whoo hoo haa ha” bullshitThe poor bloody death guard, always mildly badly written. Easy to SwallowJames Swallow did some things well. ‘Nemesis’ isn’t bad, bits of ‘Fear to Tread’ are interesting and many of his short stories are quite Good Actually. The shorts are generally a much better bet than his longer tales since even if they are boring they are over fast and play well to his strengths of innovative pseudo-sci fi concepts mixed with 40k stuffThe Voice (short story)

A Black Ship straaaaands-oooff-ffaaaate story. Some Sisters of Silence board a Black Ship to uncover spooky doings, turns out they are mixed up with an attempt to use psykers to send a message back in time from the Future. There is this thing called a heresy and they need to stop it. One of the people sending the message back is a future version of someone on the ship now and….., I don’t remember the exact resolution but it ends badly.Liars Due (short story)
A stranger comes to town on a small world, is he a villain? Yes. And he drives everyone mental with paranoia in order to collapse the society in preparation for team bad guy to arrive. IT’S THE ALPHA LEGION! Slightly notable for the end in which a farm boy chases him into space.Hard to SwallowHowever. For almost all the major elements he wrote about they were handled better by othersOr barely handled at all.Sanguinius has never been done really WELL (except in ‘Echoes of Eternity)– though his appearances in other things have generally been better than Fear to Tread. Cool but shallow most of the time.Sraight arrow-Garro outlived his core plot use and was a ping pong ball for most of the heresy until he was literally ping-ponged through a WARP HOLE to a MOON. His religiosity in a still-atheist culture is the most interesting thing about him but rarely comes up.Morty and the Death Guard were written pretty consistently poorly throughout the Heresy and the book which covers their fall in detail is the WORST ONE. Christ Wraights embarrassing explanation chapter in ‘Warhawk’ is better than the entirety of ‘The Buried Dagger’. It might actually be one of the worst books of the series which is saying something, or would be if the sad tales of Nick Kyme were not there to take the top spot.

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Part One - A reality without MicrochipsMicrochips won't work in the Star Wars Galaxy(I can't be the first person to have this idea)But basically, digital technology can't exist in Star Wars. It seems like most of the things digital tech can do are still possible, but without the 'anything machine' of microchip-based computing, every single solution to each and every problem has to be artisanal, mechanical, analogue, making use of unique and particular properties of particular materials, distinct relationships between materials and systems etc.It makes, honestly, a surprising amount of sense. Without the massive scaling abilities of microchips, and especially without the abilities of re-programmable computers and the information revolution that results, everything happens much, much slower.This would be a world where there are still things like hand-screens, but without email as we understand it. Instead text messages would be more like.. analogue code transmissions of great complexity, decoded by receivers built only for that purpose.Every single piece of tech in the Star Wars Galaxy has been worked out individually, specifically by individual people or small groups, maybe guilds or artisanal experts, who have spent maybe centuries working out how to assemble or build say, a particular kind of transmitter that works mechanically and with analogue transmissions. I suppose this is true for our world but what I mean is that every machine is, inside, working on potentially quite different mechanical and material principals.Once you design it, industry still works and you can mass-produce them, but without widespread computer-aided design, computer-aided information recall, and the possibility of an infinitely re-programmable base tech, everything is artisanal in design, and designed for that purpose only.So instead of a massive surge in design with the information revolution, we get something much more like the 19th century, with particular creators bevering away in particular groups or corporations, spending years and years working on something, maybe needing particular and rare materials in its construction and once it is made, perhaps needing very particular skilled work in its manufacture and the Guild or whoever wants their (huge) development costs back and so its going to cost you a bomb to buy one. Until maybe 100 or 200 year later when experience, economies of scale and widespread availability have finally made the thingy relatively cheap to produce.This must be why the Star Wars Galaxy has such a long, slow tech development arc. Everything simply costs more, is harder to make and the resulting tech more expensive.And without the internet, even more than our world, a realm of experts, of somewhat Renaissance-Men, those with expertise across the field of science, engineering and materials based on their own experience and contained more within their own minds. It’s harder to just reach out and grab the info you want, and even harder to work out what tool, technique or artisanal trick to use to achieve your desired goal for whatever widget you are working on.Once you get interstellar travel, you get access to new, strange materials, which again creates something of a Victorian foreign policy. You might not be able to synthesise whatever-it-is you need for your thing, or if you can, it may be prohibitively difficult. But probably more important with a Galactic civilisation, you get access to alien minds. In a reality with only artisanal single-use semi-mechanical or analogue computers used probably only for specific hyper-difficult tasks, gaining access to alien experts and thinkers, and being able to share knowledge and expertise with them (via transmitted analogue "air-letter", or just by actual letter) would be indescribably valuable.Its interesting to think about what our world might be like if microchips just.. didn't work. It would in some ways be a lot like the world of the late 60s/early 70s. No internet, no smartphones, no texting. But the technology and methods they did have then would have been improved on. So instead of the internet we might have something like a super-Ceefax. Instead of texting maybe some kind of pager/ticker tape machine. More wires, more cables, keep a notepad by the phone. Mechanical watches. Fewer small devices. Dials on things, less digital displays (as there is less for them to display). Electric typewriters. For scientists, instead of putting in a request for time on the super-computer, they would need to put together a joint request to build a calculation engine for certain major projects. Sliderules. Those space ships in Star Wars would probably have been put together by people with slide rules, very possibly drawing out the blueprints on actual paper.Part Two - Rings in Arda(I have not watched 'Rings of Power' nor do I intend to)Is the 'invisibility' caused by the One Ring (and I think by some lesser rings) in fact a strange consequence of mixing the immortal spirit of a Rings creator with the mortal flesh of its wearer?I think in Arda, firstly evil cannot actually create anything, only change and warp what is there and any power placed in a ring has to come from somewhere, it can't just be generated ex-tempore. So, like Sauron (literally) putting all of his malice and his 'will to dominate all life' into the One Ring, presumably the 'lesser rings' which were made around the same time all had qualities which came from, or were at least placed there by, particular creators. Presumably the power or qualities needed to make all other rings 'work' come in some sense (probably) largely from the soul of the creator, and Elves being immortal (or being recycled as long as Arda lasts) they have a lot of Soul to give, and a lot of qualities they can put in a ring.But 'invisibility'; this is not a quality most things in Arda have. Yet Frodo wearing the ring is 'invisible' only to the living, to the dead he is very visible, as they are to him. So the invisibility is less pure invisibility and more being shifted somewhat into the world of the dead, or the sense-realm of the dead, and why would this be?Perhaps because if you take a ring created by an immortal entity, one in which, in some sense, time on Arda cannot fully touch, that immortality probably intentionally becomes part of the 'ring', is made permanent, and that, in some distaff way, will apply to or at least effect the wearer of the ring. Which won't be a big deal if they are an elf of Mair as they are functionally immortal anyway, but if a very mortal, temporal, man, or hobbit, wears the ring, then the shadow of the eternal being is cast on them, and they are made a bit more 'eternal'.Except it cant work as that’s not what they are, so they end up sensorially shifted into the realm of the dead, which is the closest Men can get to eternity on Arda.Could be an early bug in ring design by Anatar and Celebrinbor.I can imagine Celebrinbor thinking "ah these things are toxic to mortals, better be careful with that" and Anatar thinking "yesss yes ha ha ha ha you want some immortality buddy? You want to live forever my little mortal pal?"Its also kinda interesting the differing motivations for Celebrinbor and Anatar in ring creation.For Anatar/Sauron its pretty simple - install DRM in peoples souls and 'control all life' but he still needs to make the basic idea interesting enough that elves, and especially Celebrinborn, will help him out.So what was Celebrinbors motivation in ring creation? Maybe an attempt to match his incredible ancestor Feanor. Maybe he just liked having a friend to hang out with (sad face). Maybe a futurist interest in partial soul-swapping - like, wouldn't it be interesting to share talents with your friends, you could give them your smithing for a bit and they could give you their whatever, or handing parts of yourself on to later generations in a more immediately useful way than just being standard elf-reincarnated or waiting for them in the halls of Mandos.It could be a pure and holy motivation of trying to preserve more of what is good in Arda, which everyone knows is a place that can only slowly decay and dis-enchant, becoming less obviously divine and magical - probably the three Elven Rings are part of this and actually partially fulfil what was Celebrinbors main actual motivation - keeping bits of magic and eleven wonder and culture alive into a later age, so elves can hang out with, and presumably help, those later people and the world will be a bit less shitty.Part Three - The Fall of 'Cars'I can't stop thinking about the Cars universe, and specifically about what would happen, (from the Cars perspective) if it was interdimensionaly invaded by humanity.What an utter nightmarish lovecraftian/Peter Watts horror story that would be.THE STRANGE NATURE OF 'HUMANS' (they have FACES)Imagine what it would be like, as a living Car, to encounter a human being for the first time.Firstly their utterly alien body plan, their manipulator tendrils, their disconcerting, almost unbelievable method of rhythmic locomotion. Incredibly slow yet somehow able to easily access and exploit strange and mixed terrain, finding paths, locations and access totally un-intuitive for a Car.But the most horrific element would be that the aliens have something like a face, like the natural face all cars have, two eyes, an expressive mouth. And they have these cavities above the mouth, just below the eyes. Tiny tiny pseudo-faces with hair draped across the top.And they can speak with these mouths, in tiny weak voices, in a language not dissimilar to that of CarsTHE UNDEAD 'ZOMBIE' CARSAn horrific example of the aliens technology is their creation and use of 'Zombie' Cars.These at first seem to be just like actual Cars, from a distance their profile seems the same, but their movements, while capable of the same top speeds of a True Car, are staccato and often disjointed.Horrifically, these 'Cars' have no faces, and no minds, they are in the shape of sentient things but have no sentience, no life at all.Then the discovery is made as to how the Zombie Cars move.The aliens burrow inside them, fitting themselves neatly into their brain case, then they control the Zombie cars movements with special arrangements. This is what a 'Zombie Car' is, an undead construct, created purely to allow a human to pilot it, to climb inside it and assume the powers of a True Car. You can even see the humans in there, behind the blank, empty 'eyes' of the undead car, a second small face grinning as it moves its spindly limbs and manipulates its undead hostTHE CAR VS HUMAN WARAt first the conflict between Cars and Aliens seems one-sided. The Cars are larger, faster, stronger, tougher. If caught in the open, even in their Zombie Cars, aliens simply can't match them.The horror of 'killing' Zombie Cars breaks the minds of many Car assault troops, the Zombie must be essentially dismembered and the human spewed out before it can be run over. But as time goes by the very results of the conflict create a world in which the aliens have the advantage. Cities are broken, roads cracked and shattered, the complex network of fuel and oil deliveries Cars need to live starts to fray and break down.Cars starve, or fall asleep.In the ruins, in the cracks in the world, in places no-one ever thought to look or could even reach if they did, the humans move. They come in the night, slender, alien, horribly vulnerable if caught in the open, but they cling to the corners and empty spaces of the world, then the first possessions take place.THE REALITY HORROR - What horrifies about the first alien-car possessions is not just the nightmarish fusion of alien and car, but the ease and fluidity with which it takes place, and the ecstasy with which the first 'owned' cars seem to greet it.All an alien needs to do is creep close enough to a car to 'open' it, using some unknown incomprehensible form of technology and ability, and they can slip inside a Car, moving behind its eyes, there, in the Cars inner self, they take control.And the Car seems to like this.At first shocked, outraged and horrified, the 'driven' Car sinks quickly into a kind of ecstatic half-somnolence, they are consumed utterly by the needs of the alien and fulfilling these needs brings deep deep joy. 'Fulfilment' they call it.As if, for all of the history of Cars, there was something missing within them, something they had no idea about, something of which they could not even conceive, for their experience had given them no such concepts but here, now, is revealed. They are complete.Many of the first 'driven' cars are murdered, the Cars Government would say 'released' from the alien possession, by violence. The True Cars have no way to extract the alien inside except through the death of the host. Car families murder their own members, driving into them again and again. Military units kill their squad mates, bashing and smashing into them from every direction until they crack open and the alien inside can be crushed.The 'driven' Car does not stay silent during this horror. Instead they beg and plead with those trying to destroy them. Though their movements are no longer their own, they can still talk and they beg for mercy, try to persuade their friends and families of the rightness of their causethis, more than anything, crushes the morale of the Cars Nations;"NONE OF IT MAKES SENSE WITHOUT THEM! THINK ABOUT IT! OUR WHOLE HISTORY, OUR WHOLE WORLD!!!""WE WERE MADE FOR THEM! WE WERE ALWAYS MADE FOR THEM!"It is the moral, almost spiritual horror of this new reality which ultimately breaks the society of Cars.at first one city falls.the mobs now, instead of punishing the Driven Cars, are made up of them. instead of crushing the aliens, they group together to hold down family members, strangers, anyone, surrounding them until their revving engine drains them dry, until the alien can enter. And then a new and blissful member of the possession cult is born.Slowly their numbers grow.The Cars government is forced to make use of Nuclear Cars missiles (which have faces also I suppose).Ultimately the Cars President, unable to face the mass extermination of their own population, falls into madness, with the central government in tatters Cars America breaks into a patchwork of isolated survivor states.Where there are long roads, flat land and ready oil, True Cars can still live, for a while, but the rest of the nation, the rest of the world, belongs to the invaders.Thus falls the world of Cars.

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Gazing into balls In a haze of misty weirdness, chuckling through pipe smoke, observing, and sometimes gutting, birds, brewing tea and being vague, do they even have powers at all? They don't look like they do much, yet things seem to go their way..........This is an experimental, somewhat conceptual class, based on an idea I had on the blog aaages ago; narrative wizard/old school fighter. A class in an old school bx-commons game where everyone else runs by normal old-school logic but one, a wizard, works via rules and patterns more familiar with what used to be called(?) 'story games'.Essentially this would make the wizard character a kind of sub, or alter or co-DM for the game, able to introduce elements, shape the course of events, make some events more or less likely, or even certain or impossible.Their spells, controlled by level and slot as the old Gygaxian master set down affect not the tactical situation, tactically they have the same options as an ordinary human, or a thief without skills, but are meant to interlace with the structure of the story of the game as it evolves. Quite literally changing fateSome Basic Concepts;SecrecySoothsayers, Haruspex and Fatemasters in general work to keep the nature of their powers secret and obscure. In many cases these powers can lose their effect if their nature is known. In others full knowledge of what they can do creates dangerous moral problems and difficult prophetic feedback effects.As a general rule, consider this as a possibility; If the Soothsayer can cast the spell without either PCs or NPCs noticing, if takes effect. If anyone directly perceives the spell as a spell, then the targets must save vs spells against it.LimitersSoothsayers start off knowing only one method of prediction. Roll randomly below. On each level gained roll again and if the result is already chosen, pick the closet adjacent available.1. Examining Smoke from your own Pipe2. Playing a Silver-Wired Guitar.3. Casting Tarot Cards4. Observing the flights of birds.5. Reading the entrails of animals.6. Reading Tea Leaves.7. Observing the stars.8. Reading palms.Obviously if a Soothsayer can't obsere the stars or light their pipe they can't do their thing, and if they are known to be casting spells or reading fates then they might not work.LOW-LEVEL SPELLS(these should be actually useful in low level adventures)'Recall' the way - the Player can look at the DMs map for ten seconds."Seems like Troll country" - Player can look at the current encounter chart for ten seconds."You were meant to find it" - cast on a particular PC, the next time they search for a hidden thing that is present, they will find it, they need only look."Foolishly left unlocked" the next lock the Soothsayer tries will have been left unlocked."Curious Clouds today.." - the Soothsayer examines the clouds. The DM must roll or decide an extreme weather event, and how long it will last and communicate it secretly to the Soothsayer. This event will take place in d6 hours."Some suffer dark dreams" - Last night a single named individual whose name the PCs know, suffered painful nightmares in which the lowest-level PC figured strongly. Though they don't remember everything this individual will be troubled and frightened by this PC till they sleep again."A Message is on its Way" - For the next encounter. The next potential or actual foe of the PCs will receive a message which will radically change their behaviour. This will take place after 1 minutes of observation or conversation. If a fight breaks out the message will not reach them.MID-LEVEL SPELLS(what's the fatemaster equivalent to 'Fireball'?)"The time is now" - Cast upon the PCs as a whole. When they next encounter an enemy, that enemies morale has already been damaged by previous events unknown to the PCs, in this case if forced to test morale, this foe will break automatically without a roll."Not by the hand... of man..." - The Soothsayer prophecies that, before the next dawn, one named individual known to them, shall not die, by one specific physical means. i.e. not by the blade, not by the 'hand of man', not by poison, not by spellcraft'. This prediction becomes true though it refers only to death and not any similar status like mutilation, petrification, madness, etc. The Soothplayer must use the simplest possible descriptor for that physical means. The DM can ask for a more specific wording if the Soothplayer uses "by violence" or something like that.Unholy Knowledge - Through a foul and disturbing ritual which must not be observed, the Soothsayer discovers a hidden truth. The Soothplayer can write a single question on a note and pass it to the DM. The DM writes a note back and MUST answer honestly, though they are free to be terse. If the character OR Soothplayer ever directly or specifically mentions what they have learned from that answer the DM is allowed to change the truth of it. "it carries a shared doom" - Can be cast a weapon, arrow, tool etc when 'found'. It cannot be cast on a weapon the party already holds. This weapon is fated to kill a particular, named opponent whom the party has encountered already. IF they fight using this weapon then it will always hit and always wound to the greatest damage possible against this one, singular opponent. However, if lost, dropped, fumbled or in any way turned against the wielder, it will do the same to them.HIGH LEVEL SPELLSTheir Fate is Set - during the NEXT encounter one named enemy will suffer the maximum damage from any successful attack."They shall not prevail" - during the next combat encounter, the enemies of the PCs will not win. If the PCs prevail 'normally', no action need be taken. However, if the PCs are 'losing' this encounter, the DM may intercede to make sure the enemy of the PCs does not "win". The means and method by which they do this are entirely up to the pleasure of the DM."Your goal is near" - Is 'cast' upon a single PC with the focus of one single, particular physical goal of that PC. The DM must inform the Soothplayer exactly where it is and what stands between the PC and their goal. The Soothsayer, and Soothplayer, may communicate this to the PC once, verbally, and ONLY in the form of poetic rhyme. If the Soothsayer or Soothplayer communicates the same information in any other way at any time, the DM may change the details referred to.Prophecy - the Soothsayer makes a Nostrodamus-style prophecy. A prophecy is made up of an object or identity, an action or situation and a result and reads something like; "when the king of crows swims in wine, the mage shall fall". the Soothplayer takes three pieces of paper. They keep one for themselves, give one to the DM and one to another player. The Soothplayer can decide who writes which element, i.e. "I will write the result, you Jack write the object or person and you DM write the action or incident", but they cannot control _what_ each individual writes, and none of them can reveal what they are writing to each other during this process. Each individual then hands back thier slip to the Soothplayer who reveals them. The Soothplayer then may combine each of these elements in a single sentence with no punctuation - this sentence is then TRUE for this campaign until its prophecy is fulfilled.

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Take the grey pill. You will feel like you did before, but sadder.I have finally finished working my way through Robert Caro's 'The Years of Lyndon Johnson' on Audible. (Talked about the first one here).It’s a magisterial, multi-volume and DETAILED look at the life of LBJ made up of four books and five volumes; 'The Path to Power', 'The Means of Ascent' 'Master of the Senate' Parts 1 & 2, and 'The Passage of Power'. It is not over yet! Caro is yet to complete one last book which will cover Johnsons later presidency and Vietnam.The books have pretty much annihilated any respect I might have had for the political class and initially at least, black-pilled me on Democracy. Over time though, in the long evolution of events it somewhat grey-pilled me back to something like a resigned half-hope. Politicians are basically narcissists we rent. If enough political force builds up in the great mass of people there is some chance they will execute on at least some of the desired things.There is still a book to go in which it seems LBJ takes yet another turn for the worse so I suppose there is still time for more black pills (this may be why Caro is pulling a GRRM and just not finishing the book).
CARO BEING CARO - JURASSIC PARK OF LYNDON JOHNSONCaro being Caro and this series being, in part, a social and cultural history of America as seen through Lyndon Johnsons life, he has 'spared no expense'; we begin with a deep dive into the ecology of the north Texas hill country, along the way we get a breakdown of exactly how oil rights played out in Texas, a look at how the politics of beer and temperance played into Texas elections, why you never declare your count till all the counts are closed, why the Housewives of the hill country had trouble imagining meaningful uses for electricity, exactly how you steal a vote along the border, the stairs you have to walk up if you are campaigning in the Irish districts of New York, the layout of Air Force One and where the phones are, the kinds of cake recipes brought over by German immigrants to Texas, what its like to try to build a road in North Texas in the 1930s and much much more. What a wild ride it's been, like a true Jurassic Park the big dinosaurs are the personalities who stand out most in the memory.Pappy O'Daniel, LBJs first nemesis on his initial run at the senate. A Texas populist/sentimentalist Radio Star; a man with a pale manner and little charisma except for his voice, and this is the age of Radio. A true populist, by which we mean a naked and shameless grifter overpromiser and tender of paranoic conspiracies.For round two Lyndon faces Governor Coke R. Stevenson. Texan politicians seemingly being rolled from the D&D alignment chart - this one got 'lawful good' at least by Caros telling. Lyndon steals the election, at least he steals it more than it would be usual to steal it and more than the other guy. This leads to an actual fucking old west scene when Coke, a photographer and a Texas ranger stride down the street in the bad mans town to investigate the electoral roll. Caro being Caro we get an entire section on this guys post-credits life in which is happily married to a hot blonde.Luis Salas, the Mexican heavy who played a key role in stealing LBJs election to the senate. This guy is essentially a 'background villain' (or hero) of the LBJ saga but, Caro being Caro, we get a brief deep dive into the entire backstory of this Mexican thug, from his literally barefoot poverty all the way up to muscling Texas rangers and having the privilege of lying to a state court; "I made Lyndon Johnson President" JFK is an interesting character, but much less interesting in Caros eyes than Bobby Kennedy - basically the 'ID Monster' of the Kennedy family, the man who carried his brothers hate for him.Jackie on the plane.Caro being Caro and the books being long, we also get a full weight of Caro-isms; "Was Robert Caro struck by a desire, even a need to bloviate, to expound, to go on and on describing and even re-describing things he had already described and discussed at length? Was he consumed by the unreconcilable drive to comment and moralise on what he was seeing, yet bound by the Historians code, was technically unable to do so? Did he hide his actual opinions in the form of theoretical questions time and time again, to the extent where, if you see a question mark not bordered by quotation signs it may as well be a giant fucking glowing arrow saying 'Yes this is my fucking opinion and I am RIGHT! I am Robert Caro and I DID THE FUCKING RESEARCH! FUCK YOU DORIS KERNS GOODWIN!'? Well we will technically never know so don't ask me.. Not throwing out accusations here just throwing out facts.THE OVERWHELMING WEIGHT OF LYNDON JOHNSONLyndon is a car crash that just keeps on crashing, you want to look away but you can't, an unfolding saga that just keeps revealing new and hidden shallows to his personality. Its almost painful to be around him, the intense pin-prick vulnerability of a born narcissist, and the utterly awful shameful and disgusting hunger for domination, humiliation and control of the same.The nuclear anguish of his personality makes the whole story a tragedy, a heroic tale and a mind breaking psychological investigation of an awful man, all the way from LBJ starting shit in school, then when things getting rough, lying down crying and kicking his legs saying "i'll kick you! I'll kick you!", to his bizarre, really viscerally upsetting call to Bobby Kennedy aboard Air Force One, to forcing his tubby press secretary into an amusing cape and having them both gallop away on black stallions, in an act of carefully managed humiliation, which got Johnson nothing, nothing at all, it seems he jut couldn't stop himself from doing it. He was just that much of a cunt.Even after finishing these books I still find my self thinking "Jesus Christ Lyndon. What the fuck is wrong with you?" His fat shadow sticks to the history of which he was a part. Like a grease stain on a pan. Lyndon fucking Johnson. Rarely has sympathy and horror been so combined and into such an addictive and driving whole.THE WEIGHT OF CORRUPTIONCorruption in democracies is like gravity. (Upside - judging from recent events, corruption in tyrannies may be even worse).To run a big successful society you need to concentrate power. If you concentrate power you create circumstances in which manipulating that power can produce overwhelming advantages. So from the moment you create a government you have planted a garden for corruption.Two great trees growing next to each other, one of governmental authority, the other of the power of capital.The trees lean closer and closer together, reaching out for each other, trying to wind around each other.In the midst of this, the poor dumb fucking anti-corruption types, and the constitution writers, and occasionally, the public, come forth and try desperately to prune prune prune away the leaves and branches where they touch, or at least to shine light upon them to manage the interactions.It is perhaps in the long run a doomed effort. The trees lean towards each other so eagerly and if, like LBJ, you are one of those people who can find a place, just a single branch or leaf, where those trees graze each other, ungoverned and un-noticed, you can extract immense, IMMENSE power and wealth from that juncture, trading the powers of government for the extraction of capital and the extracted capital for increased government influenceThis is always happening or trying to happen. It is morally wearying to think about.LIBERALS AND YANKIEES = BADI should really hate Richard Russel and his Knights of his White Castle more than the libs. They were after all, in the wrong cause rather than just prosecuting the right cause badly.But there is something just teeth-grittingly enraging about watching a morally superior tit told to paint a wall, dip their fucking head in the paint bucket and scrape their face along the wall while screaming and crying, and then going home and having more of a cry, and being rewarded for 'fighting the good fight'..Flail, fail and wail.A grand procession of libs and leftys giving speech after speech, and almost insanely not actually taking time to work out which levers of power are stopping them. A cult of the saviour with no skin in the game needing a literal bad man in a vulnerable spot to achieve its stated aims.WHAT WAS IT ALL ABOUT?The slow defeat of the Confederate forces, still echoing?The gradual domination of the Yankee cultural empire? New England uber alles?The systemic failures of liberalism leading to the necessity of Lyndon Johnson, which lead in turn to the effective trading of Civil Rights for Empire? Or maybe that was going to happen anyway?Or Halliburton; Origins, with LBJ being the nursemaid to everyone’s favourite adjunct to global hegemony, itself only one part of the colonisation of the systems and mechanisms of American military power by vast golems of capitalism.Or that most of our problems are the result of yesterdays solutions, and our solutions today are likely to result in problems tomorrow, that this is probably impossible to escape from is no reason not to manage the impossible praxis as well as you can.WHO KILLED KENNEDY GOD FUCKING DAMMN IT?????Everyone apparently. Certainly Bobby Kennedy at least suspected something or other. The suggestion of LBJ being behind, or more likely, involved, with the assassination on some level, exists behind the words of the last book like an invisible ghost almost no-one is willing to directly mention.Caro seems to be aware that the sum total of his books at least in terms of motive, present almost an egregiously damming testimony about LBJ's motive to kill Kennedy. Its almost laughably total;- Man driven his entire life specifically to be president.- Believes it is his divine right.- Man has no moral core.- Man will betray and has betrayed anyone necessary to achieve his aims.- Man now trapped in position in which he will never become president.- Unless Kennedy dies and dies pretty soon, in a narrowish time window.- Man deeply corrupt and being investigated for this.- Mans waning political power only thing keeping this investigation off.Across every field of personal information Caro painstakingly builds a picture of an individual who, while probably too much of a personal coward to ever organise an assassination, would absolutely unquestioningly have given a silent nod if the matter were referred to obliquely, say on one of those Brown and Root hunting trips.Dispelling the unspoken suspicion, or the potential for suspicion, seems, by his actions, to be a powerful motive for LBJ immediately following the assassination.Caro only mentions the unmentionable once, and his use of words is.. precise.He only says that nothing he has read or discovered in his exhaustive, near absolute, research, suggests at all that LBJ was involved - there is no evidence to suggest he was.With the assumption claim that, since Caro found out about a whole bunch of LBJs other crimes , that’s a good indication that there is no evidence, because there never was. Though Caro doesn't actually directly say; "I don't think he did it" or "I don't think he was involved". Or the more-typical mildy-weasilly Caro-ism when Caro wants to suggest something, the negative reversal statement; "Could there, somewhere or somehow have been any method by which Johnson could have or would have done the thing? The record must state; no."THE FIVE PURPOSES OF GOVERNMENT(As revealed by the 'Years of Lyndon Johnson' Series.1# To convince everyone that it is in fact the government.2# As a cage and harness for narcissists and dark-triad types.3# As a field of combat over patronage.4# As a field of combat over values.5# To "solve problems".I realise this may sound cynical to many. I actually find it genuinely (slightly) hopeful. In fact it isn't cynical at all, it only seems so if compared to an a-historic child’s view of history in which order and safety are natural and inevitable, decency in leaders common enough to be reliable, where its normal for humans to agree over values and where the decisions made through the power of government produce morally simple and good results.Since none of these things are the case, the true purposes of government, and their ordering, are fundamentally correctAnarchy is a common force in human affairs, and while there are many forms of anarchy, it is tiring and nothing can be built, and the order that emerges directly from anarchy is often simply a matter of will alone, in which case it is often worse than the order which preceded. The first duty of every government is to convince people that it is in fact the Government. From this all order flows.Evil is not necessarily common in man, but amongst those that seek power and status, specifically those that seek them deeply and more intently and with more success than others, and who invariably therefore end up with power and status, personal failings are common, really the norm. Many have moderate to severe personality disorders. Varieties of narcissism are almost a baseline, then varying forms of BPD, and then the really difficult dark triad group, who are not that common per-se, but who, if they are any good, inevitably cluster deeply around any forms of political power. Those who wield power will almost always be the broken amongst us, and therefore the means of wielding power must act as a cage and harness for these personality types.Humans inherently disagree over values and methods. I mean its absolutely inevitable over time, the urge to faction is not formed solely from the structure of events but is inherent, to some degree, in the way humans think and act in groups. Therefore it is something to be managed. Therefore any functional government must act as a field of combat or praxis between these inevitably different value systems.Finally, any meaningful decision made over a great enough scale using political power will have highly complex results, some of which seem to go against the stated or actual values of the person making the decision. Few, perhaps no decisions made at a great enough scale can be purely and absolutely good and in a democracy almost no decision can be made unless it is defended as being purely and absolutely good, in mood and rhetoric if not in fact and detail, therefore, firstly, in assigning political power to individuals we are in fact creating scapegoats; people to carry the complex weight and negative results of decisions we insisted they make for us, and secondly we are choosing liars, for if anyone says consistently to the great mass of the public "this choice is complex and will require sacrifice and no-one is coming away clean" then we will not vote for them, therefore we require of our leaders that they lie to us and punish them when these lies are revealed, or when they lie in ways unexpected or undesired.If you consider these very deep and very real challenges to the excise of human political power over a large scale, any one of which can tank a system if unregarded or misunderstood, its actually pretty impressive that large scale political structures can exist and persist over time at all, when you consider the depth and complexity of the interlocking problems which prevent it.

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Out cycling in the rain I started daydreaming about a theory of the development of self-awareness.USUALY, when I have what I think is a 'clever' idea, some or many other people have had it first or its been disproven somehow or just doesn't work that well. Whatever, put it in the comments if you like so long as you are not writing stuff about octopi.INTERLOCKING NETWORKS THEORY OF CONSIOUSNESSParticular problems create the potential for highly complex networks to deal with them. If the solution to the problem has a high enough payoff then probably a network will grow around dealing with it.Many of these networks create, almost by the spread of their functions a nascent, silent 'I', of varying depth, continuity and complexity.Over time these networks interpenetrate, interacting with and pushing against each other and as a result of this interaction, this nascent, potential 'I', really more a potential informational space between networks, deepens in capacity.Like branches from different trees reaching towards each other, ultimately creating a place where many and most branches meet and interact. This spot in particular ultimately, slowly growing an identity itself as the complexity of so many different networks, approaching and intermingling from many different directions, shapes this space, and then finally (or just currently) the sheer need to both solve the problems the networks are designed for individually, but the meta-governance need for management of the interactions of the networks and this weight or need being so great, and/or so fruitful if resolved, that an evolutionary system will invest the huge amounts of resources needed to create it."I" IS COSTLYSelf awareness at any level is evolutionarily expensive, like a boutique tool or mechanism. It has to be worth the expense. It has to do something very useful and if not, just use instinct or non-self-aware intelligence.At every juncture, every single increase in the complexity of these nascent 'I's is going to cost proportionally more than the one before, and if we adopt a human centric model (for the sake of utility in explanation, I will go into more detail at the end about what happens beyond this conception), then to "get to the goal" that full house or high level flush you need to advance not just in one suite but in many and each separate advance has to pay off big for the amount of energy/complexity invested in it, which is why few things are self-aware, or not very self-aware.TERRAIN - FISH HAVE NO "I"Little terrain in the Sea. Few complex escape/pursuit choices. Everything is down to pure sensory power, escape velocity. Infinite opportunity of movement and almost NO "objects", or "terrain", little to hide behind, go around, climb, get under etc, means few complex choices and little to no benefit in being able to predict the decision pathways of either predators or prey.The most self-aware creatures in the sea look to be mammals who are basically importing a complexity gained on the surface and returning it to the ocean, apparently making use of the, in particular, advanced social organisation systems they gained on the surface.But if they had stayed in the sea, would they have anything similar?Two points, fish schools and octopi.What is the difference between the awareness of a school of fish, acting sometimes in a very highly complex pattern, and school or whatever of dolphins or Orca, which exhibit les hyper-complexity of form in the general gestalt but we would assume, more inter-communication between 'selves'.(I suppose a good question here is; "Why don't the creatures of coral reefs have more complex sense of self?)Secondly Octopi and that whole group often seem pretty smart, what the hell to think about them I don't know. Some who have worked with octopi say the smartness is inconsistent and overrated, strong problem-solving capacity but intermittently employed and often forgotten between events.(Maybe because the Octopi has no 'self' to remember for? Selfhood as continuity and retention of complex problem solutions over time? The 'I' of memory?)Please don't comment repeating common octopi stories about them escaping ang getting across the room or whatever unless you are one of the very few people with a non-pop-culture and representative overview of their relative intelligence and capacities. Like if you work in a lab with octopi or have studied octopi then you can comment about the octopi but if you have maybe read a reddit thread about them or seen a documentary once please don't.FLATLANDComplex three-dimensional environment; now there are not just directions but terrain, paths, and highly complex decisions to make. Not just how fast do I run or do I swim up or down but, do I go over this rock or around it, up this tree or past it, hide in the grass, moving slowly, or run along the bare ground fast, now, being able to predict, not just how fast something will attack you or flee from you, but the kind of decisions it will make, becomes useful and if the environment is complex enough and bountiful enough then this can become an arms race.THE EMPTY SPACE BETWEEN PREDATOR AND PREYIf you only have one job then "I" will probably cost too much, if you are only prey and never predate, or if you are only predator but never prey, even though it might help to develop highly complex theories or models of something else’s mind (the thing chasing me will do this" or "the thing I want to chase will act like this), "I" will still cost a lot.The self is silent, or quiet, as all it needs to do is act or react to that one particular type of situation, the only axis of combination I Can think of is between the system which is modelling the target, that moving your own body around so in the interstice between those two systems is the vague shadow of a protoplasmic "I"But..When you are BOTH predator and prey, when at any time, any particular action might give you access to an active, living and reacting prey and/or make you vulnerable to an active, living and reacting predator, THEN - the interstice between these two powerful and complex systems, one designed to provide you opportunity, the other to save you from destruction, both modelling the behaviour of complex organisms that are not you, now the shadow of the "I" between these two systems becomes thick and almost tangible. As if there were two complex networks whose branches crossed and whose reward/punishment systems interrelated, or like two lamps shining on a dull, matte black space, triangulating its shape and form.The creation of the living concept of "prey" and that of "predator" at the same time, nearly necessitates an almost explicit but still silent construction of "I" even if only by absence, or the locus and continuation of the reward/punishment systems.SOCIETYTheory of mind of theory of mind of theory of mind, and a bottlenecking of a species which can be successful, but only as a group.Fuck do I really need to go deep into this?Its immensely complex and I feel like for an educated audience there is little I could say about social organisation being very very important for the success of humans as a species, and that these social organisation issues become more and more and more complex yet can pay of more and more and more fruitfully as the size and complexity of the society they allow grows.Probably this is the most important one as the 'Social I' has the greatest amount of triangulation between different conceptions of 'I', the most layers of potential trust or distrust, of revealed and unrevealed knowledge.And the social 'I' strongly advances a highly complex theory of mind which, the better it works and the more complex the society it works in, the more resources you get and problems you avoid.Once this complex theory of mind starts to exist, as a first element of the process of colonisation/synthesis, it can be turned upon the object doing the analysing, creating the formal abstract concept of self, the last 'I' achieved (so far) but the cornerstone of the colonisation/synthesis process described below.EMERGANCE AND COLONISATIONAt some point, some system or combination of systems becomes so necessary, so complex and so dominant, that it can, or has to, invade or "take over" or at least become fully aware of, a whole bunch of other networks.Probably this involves the complex theory of mind network, driven by complex and competing social needs and provoked both through language and interaction, turning on 'itself', analysing itself as if it were another person.(If people don't ever have a spoken language, or words by either sign or symbol, do they have an 'I'? I would say yes but I suspect a very different, by our standards a duller, less-focused version.)But what exactly is 'itself'?Well snap, that concept must be created and formalised and there is your spark.Now comes a vast interrogation, maybe consumption and colonisation, maybe just awareness, of all those other nascent networks; the basic bodily continuation system that even fish have, the advanced tactical systems for navigating complex ground based environments, the long-term environmental prediction stuff, the predator/prey tactical and strategic theory of mind system, even the basic bodily awareness/positioning system, all are consumed, or assumed, by this core collection of advanced theory of mind complex social systems which themselves centralise and "grow" in power as they comprehend and absorb more systemsNOT THAT SELF-AWAREAs humans we know that though we strongly intuit we are self-aware we have also learned that we are not quite as self-aware as we think. We can fiddle with our pain feedback system to an extent, sometimes, for surface pain, but in all cases deep body pain seems to totally go above and around our awareness. Some rapid decision paths go in advance of our consciousness. Decisions and reactions can take place before and after we think they do or did, our self-interrogation for complex decisions and events - we know is fudgy and often our left hemisphere, , well basically it will tell us whatever answer comes to hand, and if it doesn't really know it will still give us whatever answer comes to hand. We can meditate to become super duper self-aware and highly lucid about our intuitions and response, but if we do this a LOT, like a LOT A LOT, then in many cases we seem to lose actual useful life abilities like making difficult decisions in complex environments very fast making sometimes necessary aggressive actions to defend out lives, those of others or vital principals, becoming very empathic but almost passionless, so our empathy has little practical effect and no longer investigating or working in the world, and so no longer discovering unknown physical things.Point being; we are probably self-aware and probably the most self-aware thing on the planet. Though its true to say we are never as self-aware as we think we are. Curious that self-awareness has trouble with its own limits.Being self-aware is probably good, useful and necessary. For the sheer amount of energy our bodies dump into our brains and that our culture dumps into self-awareness.. if it is not useful, or isn't really happening, then life on this planet is a kind of crazy joke. Which if you are Peter Watts or like a mid 2010s atheist sure it could be so, but the idea of a species becoming hyper-successful through the (INCREADIBLY EXPENSIVE) delusion of self-awareness is way more stupid than the idea of a species becoming hyper successful via self-awareness.Alien Commentator; "I, or the epiphenomenon labelled 'I' see that the humas have dumped a super Quintilian Jules into the 'self-awareness' project, how do you think that is going for them?"Other Alien - "Actually they haven't but they think they have and its actually working great."FEW POINTS;WAKING UP MAY BE WAKING UPA bit like the development of foetuses from various species mimics or leaves a strange combined map of the unified origins of life, very likely the process of waking up each morning, is, in abstract, and highly compressed in time, probably a general sketch map of the process of humanity becoming self-aware. If we could read in detail the way in which movement, awareness, memory, self-hood and self-awareness come "on-line" or mutually integrate when a human being wakes up and goes about their day we would probably have an 'embryo' of consciousness if you will. MAN IS INEXTRICABLY LINKED TO EMBODIED AND SOCIAL LIFESelf-awareness as we understand it probably isn't like a programme or a line or code or a quality that can be imported even into a complex system, a bit like the Ted Chiang story "The Life Cycle of Software Objects", those systems can probably produce something but its probably not going to be self-awareness as we understand it and most likely will probably be Bostromian highly-intelligent non-self-aware systems like super chat-bots of the kind encountered in Peter Watts Blindsight.Of course its possible they might become self-aware in ways we don't understand and can't perceive, but, that being the case, what could it mean to us? and what difference would there be to us between a really-strange AI self aware in a way we don't comprehend and a superinteligent AI that isn't self-aware?Making something we understand as self-aware, enough like us that we can communicate with it, but different enough for that to be interesting, will likely be more like that Ted Chaing story, or even more like Commander Data, or even Johnny 5, than we probably assume from super-brain sci-fi movies, more human, comfortable and social.Interacting with a complex society in a complex 3d ground based environment with something like human social desires and - since we are the only things we know of that can do that or provide that environment, it will likely happen in "real time" and either complex virtual worlds or simply in real space.If we want to create a complex self-aware synthetic intelligence then it is probably going to want to care about going to parties, getting a job, having friends etc. It may need to ultimately fear poverty and social estrangement for these are powerful and subtle reward/punishment systems in our own minds which help to create the triangulated shadow of "iI"THE PROCESS IS SLOW AND ONGOINGThis means that self-awareness, rather than being the super-explody bit of a hyper-brain sci fi film is something integrated into our society and into the complexity of our society, and has been developing, slowly, invisibly slowly, and is developing and will continue to develop with our mutual society and all the complex things it can do, and ways it can be.It’s not really a deck of cards with humanity having the trump hand, but perhaps an, if not infinite, than perhaps ever-expanding deck of cards where you get the royal flush but then they have invented or evolved a new card above the king so new hands are possible at every level of the game. Strange new forms of self-awareness.

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My nightmare is finally over! Those of you who have been following my Kickstarter may be aware of the very lengthy (a year!) route this book took to publication.
Well it is published!
Demon-Bone Sarcophagus, part one (hopefully) of an intended three books of Broken Fire Regime, available in Hardcopy, PDF and with the diegetic play aid and treasure retrievable in this very adventure; the Heist Plans of Anaracket Bonvive (a plan for a heist which may take place in book two, if we ever actually publish it).
Available in the false parcels store, see over there on the right? At the sign of the Trilobite Knight.
And by clicking this image;

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Age of Sigmars Mortal Realms, a bunch of spheres or whatever hanging in the void, connected by Realmgates and a bunch of other magics.But how BIG are they? Games Workshop has been a bit cagy, but, perhaps unwisely, they have left enough information behind for me to take a veeeery rough stab at an estimate.THE SURFACE AND LAND AREA OF THE EARTHAs a start we can use the size and available land area of our own planet as a basis;Surface area of earth = 196.9 million miEstimated land area of this is roughly 30%, so = 57,268,900ESTIMATED SURFACE AREA FOR ONE MORTAL REALMIts been stated that human can walk from the centre to the edge in "a lifetime".So, assume a walking pace of 20 miles per day. (will likely go up in youth and down in age, this may be optimistic but at least its simple). That's 7,300 miles per year.Lets say 70 years of walking as an optimistic average.So that's a radius of 511,000 milesIf I jam this into an internet calculator that does equations for me I get = 8.2×10 11Is that 8.2 billion square miles?In raw numbers I think its = 82,033,581,529If we assume, like earth, its 70% water we get = 24,610,074,458.7 square miles for one mortal realm.Divide that by the earths land area = 57,268,900We get 429.7284295437838So best guess land area of each mortal realm is 420 TIMES the land surface of the earth?ALL MORTAL REALMS COMPARED TO THE EARTHTo get the total available surface area of all mortal realms, x the raw number by eight = 656,268,652,232But assume, like earth, that only 30% is 'land'So estimated total land area for all the Mortal Realms is = 196,880,595,669.6 square miles.I don't even know how to comprehend a number this big... But if we divide 196,880,595,669.6 by 57,268,900 we get=3,437.82743635027Shorten that to 3,437So the mortal realms land surface in TOTAL are about three and a half thousand TIMES larger than the land surface of the earth.ESTIMATED POPULATION OF THE MORTAL REALMSDue to the influence of magic and cross-realm agriculture, plus likely massive depopulation in the Age of Chaos, plus are we counting Skaven? Goblins? Plus we know the core parts of each realm are more liveable for mortals in most cases.....But as a nice round number we can say that before Fritz Haber, about 1800 our earth had about 1 billion people.So X that by 3,437 = 3,437 billion mortalsAbout 491 TIMES more people than there are on earth at this moment.AN ESTIMATE OF THE LAND AREA OF ONE CONTINENT OF HYISHGW has been quite clever and, for most realms, not shown the full extent of the realm in any map. This means if they need more land area in the future they can just zoon out.However with Hyish, the realm of light, they seem to have shown the whole thing in one go..
Eight large equal continents and a bit in the middle. Say the middle bit is roughly half the size of the major continents. Dividing the total by 17 might give rough size of Xintil82,033,581,529 / 17 = 4,825,504,795.823529Shorten that to 4,825,504,796 square milesHyish is clearly less hydrous than earth, but by how much, general impressions can be deceptive so I will say 50% water.That gives me 2,412,752,397.911765 square milesEarths land area is 57,268,900 square milesDivide one by the other and we get 42.13023819056704So, Xintil, the smallest central continent of Hyish in the realm of light, and the most liveable, is roughly 42 times larger than the entire land surface of the earth?That's pretty intense.Its so much insanely bigger than earth, even this zoomed in section of Xintil has probably several times more landmass than earth;
So lets throw up a best-guess spread of the earths area against this map;
So, even one of those very zoomed in areas, , say this little fragment of coasts and sea based around the Elidor range;
A dot on the map
Could be a giant combination empire/culture equivalent to some of the largest Empires our world has ever seen - bigger really. You could tell entire sagas set entirely within this square, based around travel and novelty, and never run out of new and very different cultures and places to visit.SOME FUN QUESTIONSWhat about rain? On earth very big continents often have deserts near the middle. Can rain clouds even make it that far over gigantic landmasses? Maybe the rain is coming from another dimension or something.Travel - there would be a massive class difference between people, or magical beings who travel long distances, by flight, magic, or otherwise, or realmgates, because for most people even if they travel as much as someone travelling between every part of the British or Spanish empires at their greatest extent, they still haven't gone very far in relation to the size of the realm.Story limitations for normal humans - its near impossible for relatively normal people to have stories where they range a long way between realm landmarks without the , whole story being the Odyssey or something. Yes there are realmgates, but they are point to point, even travelling across that red square by airship would be like circling the world probably multiple times.On the other side there is so much room for strange forgotten or lost things, really an impossible-to-fill amount.The awareness of near-infinity in AoS cultures really makes it a very different world to ours. There is always more.. no real limit so far as an ordinary life is concerned.

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Yo! I am selling my onlyremaining copy of Veins of the Earth on ebay,

no shade - I just NEED THE MONEY

You can look on ebay here

If you win and want it signed or a message or something let me know and I will do so

I am selling a bunch of other stuff but, other than VotE, its all within the UK only. Mainly its Warhammer stuff. HOWEVER, as a reward for reading this far I will tell you a mysterious truth - somebody sent me anonymous pornography

I DID NOT ORDER THIS!!!!

I was sent a full set of the 'Hardcover' collection from Editions Cauderette

with no reason, for free

I couldn't work out if this was a mistake as I ordered something else from them around a similar time

or did they send it to me for review or something because of my radical boomer takes on freeze peach or whatever? If you did I am sorry but I did not have the nerve to review it, I just hid it on a shelf.

Anyway, this is also for sale but UK only as god knows what the laws are about this sort of thing.

Also I realise no-one will ever believe me about "they just sent me porn for no reason". Once I was fucking about with wood glue to try and base a mini and was having a nightmare of a time trying to get it to fit, heard a knock at the door and I opened it in t shirt and shorts, red, sweaty and stained with white wood glue. It was the postman. I even said out loud "Its wood glue! I'm gluing something..." but I can see he didn't believe me and I expect neither will you. Such is life.

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Peace unto you! The moment you read these words my propriety DRM was injected into your brain please be aware that thinking about this in a way I don't like will be considered a copyright issue. If you got this far an NDA is also in effect.

Good news everybody! Technology has advanced to the point where the means of production are falling into the hands of the creators directly!

But what does this mean for.. CORPORATIONS? How will they live?

RENT

Production is so last century. Creation is passe. The horrible mistake of an industrial economy was that, in mass producing products and selling them to everyone, that meant that they, the consumer, NOW HAD THOSE PRODUCTS! That is not what consumers are for! Its in the name! Con-SOOOOOOOOM.

["consume (v.)

late 14c., "to destroy by separating into parts which cannot be reunited, as by burning or eating," hence "destroy the substance of, annihilate," from Old French consumer "to consume" (12c.) and directly from Latin consumere "to use up, eat, waste," from assimilated form of com-, here perhaps an intensive prefix (see com-), + sumere "to take," from sub- "under" (see sub-) + emere "to buy, take" (from PIE root em- "to take, distribute")."]*

Over the years our finest minds have been working on amending this horrific error. Planned obsolescence, shifting fashions and instilled desires have gotten us part of the way there. But now, the problem is finally solved.

RENT!

The same advances in technology that allow the consumers to communicate, create and even (blech) PRODUCE amongst themselves, have given us a wonderful gift! What was once bought can now be rented, what was owned can be made transitory. Your car? rent or we cancel the OS. This toilet? Rent. That kitchen knife.. we are working on it. Rent is our future, rent is our god.

Once you seal people into a closed system and annihilate anything outside it’s really just a matter of going through your budget line by line and striking out everything you don't like the look of.

In our brave new future the only things that exist will be rent control systems and marketing budgets (to remind consumers that only by paying rent will they be part of a community).

No longer will new ideas need to be developed, we have enough. Can just keep re-releasing Spider-Man, fiddle with the numbers on Warhammer, change the genders in Planescape. Old ideas are best apart from when they are insensitive but we can change that hour by hour.

Yes, intellectual property laws may be a problem. Like with Middle-earth the most resistant IP holders just died recently and the whole thing goes into public domain in 30 or 40 years

so we only have that gap to utterly SKULLFUCK the setting, but that’s no reason not to try.

Fairness and Accessibility - in our walled these things can be invisibly disposed of through the feigned gift of INFINITE OPPORTUNITY! Everything you could desire only a click away!

Although in practice what the consumer will not find is a nice clear index of previous products and development in the order they were created, arranged in a coherent system - but a search bar and a series of recommendations created and curated by us.

Of course they can still find ANYTHING through the search bar - but the only way to know what they are looking for is to know in advance or to have been told about it by us, and results are weighted by whatever others are searching for, and by whatever the algorithm thinks they want or should want, and whatever weights have been applied to it by us

this dull and misty form of information control much much more powerful than simply banning or removing things. a hard block creates a hard counter-response, and that might encourage a competitor, or the surge of resistance and negative emotion that causes someone to actually try to leave the walled garden, but a soft block, a series of narrowing hoops, the artful use of confusion and vagueness, softens resistance and reaction.

Reaction is the enemy. Any very strong emotional response is really actually quite dangerous, since it can set up very unpredictable currents within the consumer, unregistered or unpredicted desires which the garden cannot fulfil - very bad

Softness comfort and emotional anhedonia at all levels are the way. A soft comfortable dose of mild pleasure at regular intervals creates the most valuable rent source; predictable, no anger or reaction, no unknown desires, long term, permanent.

So.......

WHATS NEW FOR FALSE MACHINE???First - NEW APPS!As a wonderful addition to our legal-protection community of ideas nu False Machine product protection software will randomly changing the numbers AND (for no extra cost) letters and whatever with each update, (updates will be continual).

The re-updated False Machine product will be extremely diverse, respectful, representative (of the ethnic balance of the "nicer" parts of US coastal city), and will be under continual review from a range of sensitivity readers. Let me make it clear - if you disagree with this you are a racist*.

(*Unless you are from the Chinese market or 'global south' in which case we will respectfully and sensitively edit out all of this stuff because False Machine Products are for EVERYONE; including all minority groups and the people who hate exactly those minorities)

Nu-old-re-sensitised False Machine product WILL be freshly de-coherent due to the semi-random recombination of words and letters in each FREE (open to all) downloadable (through our app, please don't try to move files outside the app) content update.

GOOD NEWS - for the low low price of [INSERT CURRENT PRICE HERE] per day, YOU can gain access to our False Machine Community, consisting of; a Discord server from which a fair proportion of the groomers have been removed, THRILLING bi-weekly updates and virtual conferences and most crucially, (this is something we are really very excited about) our welcoming and soothing decryption software.

With the all-new False Machine "Community and Decryption" app (charges separate to the False Machine "Releases and Engagement" App), YOU will be able to decrypt and actually read a wide (but not total, and continually shifting) amount of the False Machine back catalogue! Access to literally some books some of the time in some places!

And it gets better! Because we at False Machine LOVE YOU so much (this entity just wants to take a moment here to offer its thanks and very genuine love to you all, this is a real and actual relationship which this entity has with you the reader) by joining our SUPER ELITE DIVERSITY MAX program (for a relatively small extra daily charge) YOU will be able to share our content with your friends (so long as they also have the False Machine "Release and Engagement" App, the False Machine "Community and Decryption" App and have are also part of the SUPER ELITE DIVERSITY MAX program) for up to d4 hours! (Little bit of an OSR reference there, FOR THE FANS).

Bringing people together is what its all about. In a context and manner controlled entirely by us.

Second - NU GOBLINS!For one of our first EXCITING roundtable updates - SHOCKING NEWS - Goblins have gone from 1HD to 2 HD creatures! And are also being re-named Derp-Thrust Gobelyns for copyright reasons.

Yes we have listened to your feedback and our community of playtesters and random twitter nutters and come together as a community to make this radical (get somehow comforting) change.

False Machine Derp-Thrust Gobelyns! What will these changes mean for YOU? And for the META? We gather a group of employees from random parts of the company in front of a webcam to read bullet points from an off-camera whiteboard. It’s like a circle of friends who are paid to be here and told exactly what and what not to think. Community.

Why not become part of the False Machine COMUNITY and leave a comment? (Any offensive, non pro-social, 'troll', fruitlessly critical, anti-social negatively analytical comments will be moderated we try to keep our community safe for EVERYONE because False Machine is for EVERYONE).

Yes Derp-Thrust Gobelyns are now twice as Goblin as before, in a way this is exactly what our founder probably was imagining when they invented Goblins or whatever but only now with our best ruleset and system EVER can we bring you Derp-Thrust Gobelyns as they were _intended_ to be represented and at twice the previous price. And yes we have listened to our community and new Derp-Thrust Gobelyns are fully representative of a range of gender and lifestyle choices. Failing to like the new Goblins does indicate transphobia*. There is no room for prejudice here at False Machine.

[*Unless you are buying in the Chinese Market or Global South]

Hot new exciting and representative 2HD Derp-Thrust Gobelyns will be available to pre-order SOON. But don't worry! For those of you still (why though?) using _legacy_ goblins, we will be releasing some fucking thing who knows probably there is a PDF somewhere. Old Goblins will still be playable they will just be fucking stupid and pointless.

Third - Good news! OUR DISCORD MOD HAS BEEN RELEASED FROM PRISON IN THAILAND.

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I am back and I have watched yet more anime. I could not stop. The original posts are hereOne - Descent into WeeberyDororoRe:CreatorsInuyashiki Last HeroTwo - into the Maelstrom of ThighsGankutsuo: The Count of Monte CristoOniheiOutlaw StarFull Metal Panic!Three - Hee hee heeThe Great PassageBannana FishKemurikusaKokkokuFour - I Came back for MoreRanking of KingsOdd TaxiFire ForceMy Hero AcademiaJojoAttack on TitanMob Psycho 100SlimeDemon SlayerBelleI have broken this down into categories based on general theme1 - WHAT THE FUCKDarling in the FranxxAssassination ClassroomThe Girl from the Other Side2 - COMEDY???Spy x FamilyLove After World Domination3 - HARD TO BE A WOMANMiss Kuroitsu from the Monster Development DepartmentShadows HouseVivy -Flourite Eyes Song4 - FAAAAAAAATEFate/Stay Night Unlimited Blade WorksFate/Zero5 - FUCKING ISEKAI SSSS.GridmanDr Stone, Series 1The Vision of EscaflowneMushoku Tensei: Jobless ReincarnationThe Devil is a Part-Timer Series 1Re:Zero - Starting Life in Another WorldBanished from the Heroes Party I Decided to Lead a Quiet Life in the Countryside6 - I FORGOT ABOUT THESE86 Eighty SixIn order to keep this to something like a sane length I will try to describe the premise to each show in AS SHORT A WAY AS POSSIBLE before moving on to note things I liked.CATEGRORY ONE - WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCKDarling in the Franxx - what the actual fuckStarts as a porn kind of? Gets good then goes VERY strange. Look it’s just your classic evolved-from-porn post-apoc teens in mecha show that evolves into a ruthless depictions of vampiric gerontocracy which then in the very last big turns into a cosmic galactic war, also the mecha are driven by orgones or their equivalent apparently.WHAT DO I LIKE ABOUT THISThe central section where the teens in a kind of fishbowl simulation of a school gradually find out that they are essentially malmukes, slaves created purely to fight to the death in defence of a society of immortal adults, that they are subhuman in that society and they will never "grow up" and become adults, either they will die in the field or die of genetic degradation since they are hybrids not made to live that long.We find this out along the way in a range of neatly implied ways - the children’s school uniforms which look like early 20thC ritualised European school uniforms with braces, ties, garters for the socks - then we find out that these are daily-extruded plastic/paper hybrid all in one coverings with just those elements pictured or embossed on the fabric. We didn't see this because its an animation and we can't see the texture of cloth, and the teens don't know how strange it is because its all they've ever known.It's really quite wonderfully horrific - the depictions of seemingly-empty night-cities of immortal humans who live in giant CLEAN apartments blitzed out of their minds on cyber-soma, with no actual physical connections to each other.The "bad" things about Franxx are also things I kinda respect it for just having the balls to do. I sort of respect it for being so irredeemably porny to start with (think it actually evolved from a porn to begin with) and towards the end of the series it goes completely fucking nuts, in a way where you get the sense they knew they were not getting a second series and decided to 'Babylon 5' it, so in very quick succession you get the secret queen of an underground race of ancient, well not aliens as they are terrestrial but Archeans or Cryptids, plus the ascension of adult humanity to a bodiless state by a bunch of aliens who were behind everything the whole time, the reveal of a centauroid super-robot powered by love, war in space, pregnancy, learning to grow crops, more war in space and a cosmic gate to the far side of the Galaxy and a super-war against the aliens. It really goes balls out.+ Vampire State/Gerontocracy = its literally all about that - OLD = BAD! BOOMERS = BAD!! Looks like Japan has already gone through everything we are about to.+ Calls to the FBI = so much it would be mad to try to list them, the whole thing really, especially at the beginning. If you have seen this you should be on a watchlist.

Assassination ClassroomIts Goodbye Mr Chips if Mr Chips was a --- like a warner brothers monster? Or a surrealist nightmare? The moon blows up. A super-being exists and reveals to the worlds government that they blew up the moon and are going to destroy the earth and the ONLY way to stop this is to let them teach this one particular class in this one particular Japanese school and if the students in this class can assassinate the creature before the year ends the world will be saved. Honestly its a tribute to insanity that this plot actually makes sense by the end of the series.

WHAT DO I LIKE ABOUT THISBasically imagine if one of those shitty High Concept series from US TV that starts "what if" and rapidly dies of being milked too much and staggers on with its desperate original fandom hanging off its withered haunches - well imagine if one of those was over and done in one series and actually managed to answer all the insane questions it brought up at the start. And was funny.What can I say it’s Mr Chips/Dangerous Minds with heart-warming stories of personal growth and regular increasingly complex assassination attempts and various plots+ Vampire State/Gerontocracy = not that much but the Japanese School system treating its "failures" as disposable objects is a theme.+ Perversity/Calls to the FBI = a little, one of the students is very obviously a "trap" and this becomes a whole thing. But honestly, for anime, relatively low levels of ambient paedophiliaThe Girl from the Other Side

A girl wakes up in the forest at night, heavily implied that she is a survivor of a massacre of "infected" or suspected infected people from 'the inside', this forest being the outside. Meets a weird as shit man beast monster wearing a suit who looks after and protects here while being very careful never to physically touch her as he definitely is infected and if they touch she will end up a memoryless monster like him.WHAT DO I LIKE ABOUT THISIt’s really incredibly strange and beautiful. Is either hand animated or pseudo-so. Storybook, well I say "dreamlike" too much but this is the most like a dream you half remember. Quite affecting. ANGRY though because clearly much deeper and more complex than what we were shown but we only got THREE EPISODES! WHY? Cost too much to animate? Ended in a vague bougie ambivalent symbolic way which frustrated me. It’s based on an illustrated series so may eventually pick that up.+ Perversity/Calls to the FBI = NONE! Don't you fucking even DARE to besmirch the purity of this sacred Anime!CATEGORY TWO - COMEDY???Spy x FamilyIf you know anything about Anime you probably know about this already but I will go on. Pseudo cold-war setting. cold as ice but Heart of Gold super-spy given mission to literally create a family, beautiful but very awkward young office girl secretly a midnight super-assassin looking for a cover relationship to get suspicion off her back, orphan girl w telepathic powers is looking for a home, all three come together in a pseudo-family which is, in effect, a real family except we know that and they don't. The spy doesn't know the wife is an assassin, the wife doesn't know the husband is a spy, neither of them know the girl is psychic and the girl knows everything.

WHAT DO I LIKE ABOUT THISDo you know how fucking hard it is to do an action comedy that’s actually good and that’s for normal people? Well the first part is hard for anyone, and doing anything even vaguely normal is hard as shit for the Japanese...Its just a really well done action comedy that’s also a very pleasurable, ridiculous and self-sustaining farce. Basically its Frasier meets The Man from Uncle. A family who don't realise they are actually a family but we the audience do! Normative Values! you probably don't think this is good from the way I described it but it fun as shit so whatever.+ Perversity/Calls to the FBI = there are LITERALLY NONE its hard to believe! This Anime is pure! Oh no wait I forgot Yor Forgers brother has a somewhat creepy crush on her. I spoke too soon, you win again Japan.HOWEVER, other than this, this is one of relatively few Anime that I would willingly show to normal people. Love After World DominationThe main guy from a Power Rangers type situation and the S&M-Themed Arch Foe from the villains organisation fall in love and have a tentative romantic relationship.

WHAT DO I LIKE ABOUT THISThis was pleasant and the art style was calming. the warm soft roundness of the characters and ok basically I have a childs colour palette so whatever fuck you. The gags are intermittently funny but sometimes go pretty hard. I laughed occasionally. Someone clearly put a more than normative amount of effort into developing the art style at least compared to the average anime.+ Perversity/Calls to the FBI = I don't know if an almost insane level of neuroticism and pathological avoidance and simultaneous desire for intimacy actually counts as "perversity", but its repeated so much in anime that it actually feels like it does. I suppose this one isn’t that bad as they are partially making fun of those tropes.Also the Miss Reaper costume is... like way too hot for a sort-of kids tv themed animeCATEGORY THREE - HARD TO BE A WOMANMiss Kuroitsu from the Monster Development Department(This is really a comedy but I needed to bulk this section out). Farcical/Absurdist workplace comedy with a young scientist trying to survive and get ahead in the crazy world of corporate but the corporation is actually the evil supervillain org from a seinen hero series - her job is monster development and all the monsters go out and get beaten up by the hero figure.

WHAT DO I LIKE ABOUT THISSlightly badly animated but much more directly funny than 'Love After World Domination', the workplace insanity is more cutting and feels more on point, monster designs being completely bollocked because the CEO paid a visit to the lab and 'made suggestions', a valentines themed chocolate monster being banned from use because she was poorly manufactured and is full of foreign objects, (also never make a holiday themed monster, you can only use them once a year), single-episode beat-em-up sidekick roles being sketchy single say work-for hire jobs where they bus you to another city and don't tell you what it’s about, its funnier than I'm making it sound.+ Perversity/Calls to the FBI = male monster gets brain transplanted into the body of a hot wolf girl yeah its Japan.Shadows House Series 1Is it weird that this reminds me of the Korean film The Handmaiden? I really liked this one. Young girl wakes up in a box, in a servants room in a labyrinthine house, finds out that she is a 'living doll' and is meant to act as a servant for a featureless living silhouette the exact shape and form of the main character with slightly different dress who speaks and seems to think just like a young noble lady but who emits soot in a vertical column when upset. An entire generation of shadows live in this wing, each with a 'living doll' servant, which they are physically identical to in form and shape, except that they are utterly featureless black voids. Gradually we realise that that the 'living dolls' as well as being servants are meant to act as their shadows 'face', learning their moods and manner so well that they can walk alongside them and simultaneously express emotion in a visible way. Then our main girl and her shadow mistress are put through a range of increasingly odd and obscure tests and situations, those that don't pass "disappear".

WHAT DO I LIKE ABOUT THISIt’s a beautiful weird country house puzzle drama. I like stuff where everyone is mannered and drinks tea and anyone could be killed at any time according to a labyrinthine arrangement of rules which are never fully disclosed. Possibly this is my British DNA showing. The first series main character Emilico, a hyper positive to the point of mental illness super-girl is great. The classic introvert/extrovert pairing of the two main girls is also great.+ Vampire State/Gerontocracy = oh hell yes, the older generation of Shadows are effectively evil and part of an evil and consuming structure of power headed by the oldest, who is essentially worshipped by the rest.+ Perversity/Calls to the FBI = not that bad.Vivy – Fluorite-Eyes SongAn A.I. created "to make the world happy with my singing" is visited by another robot from the future, in the future A.I.s go Skynet and destroy mankind. These two team up to alter events so that doesn't happen. The stage is set for a series of special-ops missions and strange investigations spread out over decades as the two awkwardly try to change fate.

WHAT DO I LIKE ABOUT THISRemember the Asimov film I.Robot, well its a bit like that but good, except actually very good. Really well animated - some fucking great robot vs robot vs cyborg vs human fights. Matsumoto the cube-formed time travelling robot is great, especially as time goes by and he develops more and more abilities and add-ons, all of which are cube-based. Ah and its overwhelmingly sad. Also its really beautiful, did I mention how well animated this is? Plus each episode is a strange new evolution of the relationship between men and machines, and between machine and machine.+ Perversity/Calls to the FBI = you know I'm not sure I even saw one. A guy does fall in love with a robot at one point but the incredible sadness of how it turns out really robs it of FBI points.CATEGORY FOUR - FAAAAAAAATEGoddamn Fate, the Universe which started as a multiple choice story that was also kinda a porn and just got more complex from there. Basically don't bother with this unless you like working things out of the fly or really enjoy lore. I have only watched two series of this; Fate/Stay Night Unlimited Blade Works and Fate/Zero.

A maguffin called the 'Holy Grail' grants wishes. To reach it, seven mages have to fight each other by summoning seven 'Heroic Spirits', like ghost, tulpas or reincarnations of famous historical heroes. Only one mage can reach the magical thing at the end. WHAT DO I LIKE ABOUT THISThe main interest comes from the tactical dicking about between the mages and the various skill-sets and personalities of the different mage/spirit pairings, and the conflicts between the values, personalities and ideologies of the different mage and spirit combos. In one scene Gilgamesh, gender-swapped King Arthur and Alexander the Great have a sit down to discuss the meaning of Kingship, you are unlikely to get this stuff outside Anime.Damn the creator has a dark view on the heroic ideal and the search for meaning, in Fate Zero at least, those with the most clear "heroic" motivation are gradually corroded by those desires, leaving them mutated and morally compromised, while those who often seem if not sociopathic then very unpleasant, often gradually come to seem more reasonable as time goes by and they emerege as, at least, less hypocritical and self-deluding+ Vampire State/Gerontocracy = not so much though the old mage families which dominate things are usually mildly psychotic.+ Perversity/Calls to the FBI = YES. Did you want to see Gender-Swapped King Arthur tied up in a BDSM style by Gilgamesh Lord of Uruk well you are going to.CATEGORY FIVE - FUCKING ISEKAI The genre that has eaten Anime like a fat fucking fuck eating everything. But the Isekais have been going so long that they have started to meta-evolve, a bit like the Gremlins in the film 'Gremlins 2' producing slightly more interesting variations and iterations on the basic theme. Here I throw in Isekais and a range of post, pre and semi-Isekais together.SSSS.GridmanIs this even an Isekai? Or even a post-post Isekai? Fuck knows. It does take place in some kind of virtual dream realm or something. A teenage boy wakes up with amnesia, his parents are 'on holiday', he tries to act normal and go to school but the city is attacked by Kaiju and things get stranger from there.

WHAT DO I LIKE ABOUT THISVery strange intense and horrific dreamlike feel as kids and people die horribly in monster attacks before the city is "re-set" each night, leaving no memory of the particular people who died. Only the main characters know people are "missing" school classrooms gradually becoming more sparse, happy families reduced to lonely parent and single parents unable to mourn the absence of someone they can't even remember.Pleasing monster designs - especially towards the end where the demonic entity allowing the Kaiju to become real just grabs a bunch of unfinished ones off the shelf, resulting in some really awkward, gawky nightmare broken toy monsters that are quite unpleasant.Also a good scene where the heroes meet with the main alien/demon guy in an ordinary roadside restaurant at night -everything is normal and low-fi and this fictional supervillain inhuman nightmare guy thing walks in and no-one but the heroes really perceive it fully.Monster vs Robot Superhero fights with the crazed energy of a childs summertime imagination but maybe we are indeed in a dream or something like that? What is real?+ Vampire State/Gerontocracy = not really other than the deep loneliness of the children+ Perversity/Calls to the FBI = hmmmmmmDr Stone, Series 1Mankind gets turned to a bunch of stone statues by UNKNOWN FORCES. Several thousand years later one guy wakes up and decides he is going to re-create ALL human technology from the stone-age ground up, revive ALL of humanity and also work out the Petrification thing.

WHAT DO I LIKE ABOUT THISProcedural science stuff! That’s basically what this series is about. Want to see how to go from a literal stone age level of tech to building a radio in a year or so? Well here you go.The Plot armour in this one is a little ridiculous.There are some genuinely effecting moments where stone age people experience the miracles of raw science, diseases defeated through sulphur drugs, an electric light shining in a stone age world.Has a lot of unexplored depth where you could look at the not-all-good effects of technology and knowledge on a prehistoric culture but that’s largely unexamined + Vampire State/Gerontocracy = motivation for the main villain is that in our time the place was plagued with olds who owned everything and kept everyone down so now he is going to CRUSH their frozen bodies and build a NEW SOCIETY of the young and pure! No one has told this guy that people age I guess+ Perversity/Calls to the FBI = none come to mind... a gymnast eats cotton candy in a suggestive way..The Vision of EscaflowneOne of the (near) original Isekai transported to a dream realm stories? and its technically Shogo. Teenage girl arrives in fantasy land where evil Wizard Scientist guy is trying to conquer everything for obscure reasons - girl faces "bellas choice" between Hot Princes whilst having adventures, also there are steampunk mecha powered by dragon hearts.

WHAT DO I LIKE ABOUT THISIts FUCKING BEAUTIFUL. PEAK 90s aesthetic. The backgrounds. Sky rocks hovering in the midnight air. The science-fantasy worldbuilding. The dreamy summer-ish feel. Our own planet hangs in the sky like an unreachable vision.+ Vampire State/Gerontocracy = Isaac Newton is evil and old but he's just taking the place of God who is always evil in Anime.+ Perversity/Calls to the FBI = I think there's a sister-brother crush in this? Not sure. But that’s about it, oooohh no I forgot [SPOILERS] one of the evil characters is actually the abducted sister of one of the good guys, transformed through dark science in to a psychotic man, yes they changed her gender and psychology thanks Japan you did it again.The Devil is a Part-Timer Series 1After a standard defeat-the-demon-lord story the Demon Lord in question escapes... to Japan. With a handful of his courtiers, followed by the Hero who beat him. Over here though magic is hard to come by and they are little more than normal people who have to adapt to Japanese society, get jobs etc.

WHAT DO I LIKE ABOUT THISDamn this thing is keeping a lot of balls in the air. In particular a strong conflict between the rarely stated background and current reality, i.e. the demon king literally killed quite a lot of human beings, including the hero girls actual family, and this is never entirely swept under the rug, but just chunders there quietly. Honestly manages to remain fun and interesting but how will they maintain it and where are they going with it?+ Perversity/Calls to the FBI = questionable relationship with subordinate at McDonaldsRe:Zero - Starting Life in Another World NEET is Isekai'd to normative Fantasy World, is genre savvy but has no special powers. Turns out his power is Groundhog Day. When he dies he is returned to the last 'save point' and must live that time again till he can reach the next. He doesn't know when he has reached a save point, doesn't know anything about the vast range of conspiracies and horrible things aimed partially at him and is massively overpowered by everyone, plus when he dies its utterly horrible and traumatic.

WHAT DO I LIKE ABOUT THISOddly a really innovative story structure. Everything is a mystery and the hero progresses largely through understanding context. Deep and tragic alienation of the Hero from reality as, he knows and values everyone around him deeply but from their perspective they met him about a week ago. Same applies to us as through repetitions we understand everyone’s drives and backstory.Key Point - its really more of a horror story, or a guy trying to escape from a horror story, and the middle parts of the first series are some of the most exciting horror/nightmare stuff I've seen recently. Poor bastard dies so much and so horrifically, and is so utterly trapped by fate and astounded by impossibilities, that ultimately he does what anyone would and goes completely catatonic - just shuts down mentally for several episodes, AND THEN THINGS GET WORSE+ Perversity/Calls to the FBI = fetish maid.Banished from the Heroes Party I Decided to Lead a Quiet Life in the CountrysideAnother derivation of the Pre/Post/During/Alternate 'Defeat the Demon Lord' story. Follows the guy who is the mainstay of your JRPG party throughout the first half of the story but eventually you load up on specialists and level grind and he's just not keeping up so you summarily dump him in an inn or something, after taking every single sword and potion you left on his person.

WHAT DO I LIKE ABOUT THISPrepare to see something you have never seen before in an Anime, something so surprising it may SHOCK YOU. In this story, a man, and a woman (not related by blood or even raised together), have an emotionally intimate relationship, that develops at a reasonable pace, without any insane misunderstandings, mental breakdowns, mind control, demon rape, anyone bein snatched into a parallel dimension or any we-need-to-hide-this-from-the-world bullshit, and then they fuck. They just fall in love, get closer and eventually have fulfilling sex. I don't know what to tell you. Has 'BftHPIDtLaQLitC' actually done the impossible and produced an anime with NO perversity? No because the guys sister kinda has a crush on him. I mean thats not the only good thing about this series - the slow development of how living in what’s effectively a 'Levelled' society actually works and affects people, and the weird science-fantasy inferences of how that came to be ('High-Elf Ruins look like a crashed space ship, very D&D) are interesting, plus a main character who is trying hard to avoid explicit heroism and build another kind of life with a strange skill set, good. But holy shit they just kiss, bang and have a relationship, holy fucking god.+ Vampire State/Gerontocracy = Kami Sama seems evil but that’s relatively normal for Anime+ Perversity/Calls to the FBI = Sister crushMushoku Tensei: Jobless ReincarnationFUCK this is tiring. Did I write about this one already? Its not the original Isekai but the one that set the template for the more recent versions. NEET meets Truck Kun and is reincarnated as a baby with a nice family in a fantasy world, he keeps his adult knowledge and is naturally insanely overpowered with magic juice.

WHAT DO I LIKE ABOUT THISI've been writing this for a while.. It’s just really good? It’s kinda pervy but surprisingly emotionally honest compared to most Anime. This is one of the only guys where they got Isekai'd and actually genuinely tried to change who they were in their new life and genuinely and deeply struggled against their own crappy broken personality and to actually grow in ways not defined b power (though they also get to be super-powerful too HAXXXOORRR.+ Perversity/Calls to the FBI = Oh yeah plenty. Really can't even list them all.Category Six - I FORGOT ABOUT THESE86 Eighty SixFuture gene-hacked society is fighting against an A.I. hive-mind someone accidentally made and which is wrecking everything but hopefully it will run out of juice soon. In order to avoid taking casualties they uuuuuussseee.. the children of refugees! Yep its child soldiers thrown into disposable mechs and sent to fight until they die. Main female character is an in-group remote force commander who starts to intuit that race-based child slave solders might be wrong somehow.

WHAT DO I LIKE ABOUT THISPeople shit on this because its depiction of racism is facile but I am old and conservative and 90% of all pop culture is somewhat like that for me anyway so whatever. The direction has these modernist cuts which leap directly from inference or incident right to consequence, which I quite liked and appreciated as it saves me a fair amount of time. The depictions of swarm warfare - solar-powered micro-drones filling the sky like swarms of flies or lying in great fields like crops of glass, weird mechs and super mechs, the shitty spitfire-like vulnerability of the good-guy mechs, the depictions of a decadent society which has made a terrible invisible deal; its officer class bloated, drunken and mentally broken passed out in fountains capped with statues of the glorious founder, nothing to do except remotely supervise the sacrifice by war of the Untermensch, and the bad-guy A.I. has taken to stealing the heads of human troops lost in the field, it finds some forms of originality hard to rips the heads off, freezes them and either strips the brains down to engrams or just straight up wires the heads into its mechs as an officer corp.

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GOBLINS!Here are some rules for an all-Goblin game build on the "BX Commons" chassis.
Arthur Rackham
CHARACTER GENERATION all goblins are stealthy * all goblins are thieves * all goblins attend to the phases of the mooooon * not all goblins are goblins * all goblins can hide behind things * Fear COLD IRON AMORAL - a goblin is not a hero and can never do anything because it is the "right thing to do" (in human terms at least)it has to be funny, tricksy, part of a deal, chaotic or otherwiseSTR - 3d6 drop the highestDEX - 4d6 drop the lowestINT - 3d6WIS - zero, gobs have no wisdomCHA - 3d6CON - 3d6 drop the highestd3 hit points Climbing - all can climb built surfaces without restriction * Sneaking - all can hide if there are shadows to hide in * Crafting - all can tie & fix things together pretty well, if an unspecialised handyman could do it they can too Genderless, or so we think, except for the Goblin Queen and for ChangelingsAnd one of the following GOBLIN POWERS (d100);1. can invert personal gravity 2. can spit like a hand catapult3. excellent voice impersonator4. can talk to (choose one) corvids, foxes, rats, bats, cats,5. wonderful dancer6. plays the [choose one] fiddle, whistle, harp, or sings beautifully7. can tell one not immediately disprovable lie per night which will automatically be believed8. can read, write, calculate and do accounts9. can pick locks with fingernails10. can tie things up super-fast11. acrobatic/clown skills (vaulting, tumbling etc)12. can hide under any object (regardless of size) (and opposed to hiding behind objects, which all Goblins can do)13. can light or quench lamps and lights in a room by snapping fingers (fires dim but don't go out)14. can whistle up a wind15. wears a coat with seven pockets, containing; string, sharp tacks, chalk, a sharp stone knife, a gold ring, a beautiful mirror and a brass bell16. detachable limbs act as floating truculent (and unreliable) servants, responding to voice command (sometimes)17. can always guess what others have in their pockets18. can swim in air as if it were water while holding their breath19. can inflate self like a pufferfish, becoming a robust, very bouncy rubberesque ball20. can throw cutlery other than knives with incredible accuracy 21. can roll like a hoop without end22. has a fundamentally indeterminate number of toes (i.e. they cannot be counted at all)23. has a large black "riding cat", cultured, more intelligent than they are, reluctantly obedient and largely indifferent to their desires24. a magnificent cook25. wears a wizards hat, top unscrews to reveal a pot of super-strong glue26. can enchant snails for remote communication if worn as ear buds (range 50 meters, snails whisper what is said, casting goblin must be wearing one)27. can charm others to dance as they are dancing, (music must be playing and they may not play it)28. wears heavy boots which only they can move in with prefect ease and silence, boots highly resistant to all damage, leave human-seeming footprints29. wears a red coat which is very fine, all shall remark on it30. extremely sharp teeth31. savant whistler32. extremely skilled and lucky at games of gambling or chance33. can pull an extremely frightening face34. can wiggle out of or though most impediments and restrictions (within bounds, under door gaps perhaps, not through keyholes)35. very good at hiding things36. has a pair of thick spectacles that allow them to see things very far away like an owl, because this is how they think spectacles work37. can make excellent paper planes and in fact use them as gliders38. acidic piss39. own reflection acts as a kind of retainer, can be sent on missions to other reflective surfaces, keep watch etc, must be paid in silver for each deed40. has a 'ghost costume' which, depending on circumstance, looks kinda legit41. snot is mildly explosive when flicked (equivalent to streetkid 'caps')42. can telekinetically control milk (when in field of view) if rolled twice can control cheese as well43. can easily pull rug or carpet out from underneath someone's feet (regardless of mass, floor staples, etc)44. earwax acts as a low-friction Grease45. can magically transform into small critters if they eat one (dispelled by daylight or cold iron)46. can poke, prod and pinch via power of the mind alone (line of sight only)47. can 'solid snake' small containers as un-suspectable disguises (so long as not seen moving)48. can musically control hair so long as continually playing, whistling singing etc49. can trick or fool most quadrupeds50. after being pressganged for a winter, has an encyclopaedic knowledge of the names, addresses and various naughtiness or niceness of all local children, as well as any potential access via chimney51. after slight case of vampirism, can command the sleeping to perform actions they would usually perform52. high voice, big ears, has an inaudible (to humans) ultrasound squeal that enables darkvision53. smoking habit, hacking cough, pipe, can form quite large smoke animals and objects & command them somewhat (depending on wind & tobacco access)54. can garble and disorder systems of measurement by "fiddling" with them (clocks ruined, book pages out of joint, calendars give wrong months/days etc)55. genius puppeteer56. can shed skin like a snake, leaves goblin-shaped skin-bag behind, multiple possible uses57. 'moon eyed' one eye clear white, constantly emits moonlight when opened58. can balance on anything59. if they can stick their finger up a quadrupeds arse it will do whatever they say so long as the finger is up their arse60. savant goldsmith61. can turn small stones to gems (limited time period)62. can swallow quite a large number of small objects and bring them up later63. has a remarkable beard, from the neck up, could me mistaken for a very old man64. has golden scissors, can shear a sheep or cut hair in a trice "with my golden scissors!"65. poops out fruit pastilles, has a constant supply, they are pretty tasty66. savant who always wins any artistic competition, (in any field) but no talent rest of the time67. swapmaster, others will always listen to their offer of a swap, usually gets the best out of any deal68. can clean and repair pretty much anything over the course of a night69. alcoholic goblin, can mix great drinks - knows them all, also compulsive drunk who will neck everything in sight70. very large nose, smells like a dog71. can roll most round objects for an undeterminedly long distance72. can balance almost anything on top of anything else73. mushrooms growing under left arm produce hallucinations when eaten, those under right arm incapacitate with sickness, crotch shrooms create agreeableness74. is haunted by a spectral capybara which appears in darkness and prophecies doom (actually quite useful information most times, is unusually specific doomsayer)75. has a witches hat stuffed with straw which contains a small owls nest, the small owl will sometimes agree to perform certain narrowly-defined tasks76. left eye is a crystal Palantir which can see the feet of anyone within 100 miles ( will only focus on feet), others can stare into (or steal) the eye77. can throw pennies with unearthly accuracy79. Goblin Prince, wears a silver paper crown which bestows influence (by verbal and RHYMED command only) over [pick or roll one] pigs, cows, goats, doors, kitchen implements, wool (influence more powerful in darkness, tripled under a full moon)80. has pockets full of pins81. 'door painter' can paint doors onto vertical surfaces which give goblins, friendlies and neutrals access to, if they take half an hour to paint it, the other side, or if they do it super-fast - wherever the DM finds most amusing, doors panted under full moons can go further but effect ends that night (may return next full moon)82. when saddened, weeps silvery tears which, if tears from both eyes are used to flavour food, make it delicious, or if collected in identical (they must be identical and unlabelled) crystal vials, the tears from the left eye make a 'first sight' love potion while those from the right eye form an donkeys-head-plus-egomania potion. These vials are easy to tell apart UNLESS anyone warns against getting them mixed up, in which case they are immediately mixed up.83. has a tongue of purest alchemical green which if it licks an object all over can turn that object into 'pure green', pure green objects are (d6) 1 weightless, 2 unearthly smooth, 3 ripe cheese smell, 4 come alive with impish consciousness, 5 emit bright green glow or 6, either wonderous sharp or leaden heavy it being whichever they were NOT before84. wears a magnificent three-piece suit and top hat and no shoes with a large spider in each pocket, the hat full of webs and another spider in their pocket watch which tells the time some of the time, spiders are somewhat commensurate to command85. very large, ripe buttocks, invulnerable to most harm, very bouncy86. carries a glass hammer which they can use to anneal (only) very soft things into each other, shape them and to make them hard87. impish ancestry, immune to fire and in fact finds it healing and invigorating, likes to sleep/dance in there88. candle goblin, head encrusted with single large white old wax candle which, when lit, allows them to summon and partially command relatively large amounts of relatively large moths, goblin depressed when candle not lit89. vantablack goblin, can hide in strong shadows, even during the day, even in villages and civilised areas, often hard to find90. wears fine glass gloves (horrible goblin hands inside) leaves human hand prints, can shatter brittle objects from a distance by rubbing fingers to make a SKREEEE sound, if glove is lost humans who find it will assume it belongs to a "beautiful lady" & seek "her" out91. egg goblin, can transform into a sinister-looking egg at-will and roll about in a dark and ominous manner92. curse goblin, can only have one curse operating at any time, curse MUST have specific, (if impossible) conditions, can also be ended on command, curses must be FUNNY (to the goblin at least), need line of sight, pointed finger and voice to curse, curse must be announced and heard by victim93. very big ears, hears like a surveillance microphone (must be aimed in right direction)94. pneumocephalic goblin, can inflate own head and other limbs, and body like a balloon and use it to float away, and for other purposes95. sack goblin, carries a bag of holding, 1ft diameter opening, sack is patched and will semi-regularly let random items loose unless constantly re-patched96. horned goblin, horns re-grow over a night if pulled off 97. gold-toothed goblin, gold teeth will re-grow (as gold) if pulled out, over about a month (teeth are not sharp goblin can only eat soft foods)98. sleep terror goblin, if it crouches on someone's chest when they are lying down and looks at them they will be utterly unable to get up, also terrified99. mosquito goblin, can extend super long tongue to slluuuuuuuurp up large amounts of liquids & store in expanding belly100. Goblin King, wears a golden paper crown which gives (by verbal and RHYMED command only) command over hair, eggs, shoes, golden objects, snails, prickly animals and the hearts of spinsters and very old menGOBLIN CHARACTER IMPROVEMENTAt a new level you get a new hit point and one more goblin power."COMBAT"(Goblins find it hard to win a straight fight with anything bigger than themselves. Especially in daylight, they will be booted like a football, kicked to death and once they are dead people will say "look its just a strange rat or hairless racoon". By morning they have calmed down, take a look at the body again and its clearly some kind of strange animal, dangerous certainly, we should get another dog, but spirits were high last night and things always look worse by moonlight eh?)Also Goblins don't actually fight much. Their missions don't require it and they wouldn't win anyway. Trickery is usually better.HUMANS ARE (CIVILISED) OGRESRun a standard Human as a 3HD Ogre. Big, slow, dumb but unlike Ogres, civilised.HD, Morale and Resistance to Trickery of Humans goes UP relative to;- Daylight- Adulthood- NumbersHD, Morale and Resistance to Trickery of Humans goes DOWN relative to;- Darkness- Moonlight- Children- On their own- Drunkeness- MadnessFRIENDLIES, NEUTRALS AND ENIMIESFRIENDLIES (will greet Gobs in a Freindly way, Gobs rarely get into conflict with these & can get missions from them)- Necromancer (or mad Wizard)- Witch- Vampire- Troll- A ghoul in the graveyard hanging out and waiting for a meal- Ghosts roaming about here and there- A dragon on a pile of gold (of little interest to you, you prefer cake & socks)- THE MOONNEUTRALS (who knows how they will react, depends much on circumstance and chance. i.e a reaction roll)- Children on their own or in small groups- Wizard (standard)- Drunk adults- Madmen- Beggars- CATS- Fairys (are twats to you, basically the Goblins Goblins)NEUTRAL/NEGATIVE (not friendly, but won't necessarily attack)- Farm animals like horses, cows etc- SkeletonsDANGEROUS ENEMIES (No need for a reaction roll, these fuckers will kill you on sight)- All sane sober adults- Policeman- Priest- DOGS- (COLD IRON)- Guardian animals- THE COCK- Redcap (magical and kind of a Goblin but also a serial killer)WHERE ARE THE GOBLINS? - THE MAP'CENTRE' of the Goblin map is the margins of a normal 'civilised' map. More 'points of dark', so forest, moorlands, buried glens, caves, ruins of truly ancient cities, dragon sleeping deep in a forgotten cave, hills and steep valleys like Appalachia, dry soil, no way for croplands.'Goblin Normalcy', relatively safe places for you, even in daylight.INNER RING of the goblin map, ruins, old forgotten graveyards, a necromancers tower, a witches hut, a vampires mansion, all far away from villages, hard for villagers to get to, no roads, or at least no obvious roads, but might be pastoralists around; shepherds, goatherds, truffle seekers, wanderers, charcoal burners, hermits. A troll bridge, - probably a rare road leads between villages, across the wilderness, but a troll there (you know them well), plenty of dungeons and stuff (you live in them sometimes).OUTER RING of the goblin mapThe villages - actually the outskirts of three different counties or duchies, (lucky for you they don't talk to each other much), managed forest, rivers grow more navigable, land flatter, roads, scarecrows, more pastoralists (likely young men and women), outlying houses, usually for the poor and old.Then the centres of the villages - very dangerous places for goblins, even at night, can be many people around, blacksmiths, the church, DOGS, still lots of nooks and crannies, roofs to hop between, eaves to huddle under, bins, drains, alehouses. The village for Goblins is like a dungeon for humans. The castle/mansion, you would want somewhere for the Duke to live so the Goblin Queen can send you to swap his baby for a changeling.How big would the map actually be though? You would want it to be small enough for children to potentially get lost in the forest. Probably not all that big.. But maybe distance means fundamentally different things to Goblins?FAST TRAVELPCs can fast travel without random encounters so long as the PLAYERS sing a goblin song together.GOBLIN MISSIONSGoblin missions are meant to be somewhat absurdist, though still to involve infiltration, trickery, deception, thieving and general shenanigans. Stealing eggs from a grandmother should still be a pretty hard ask since that grandma is essentially an Ogre armed with a magical weapon (iron skillet), with a guard dog (pretty dangerous to Goblins), and not to mention the COCK - a fucking prehistoric murder machine that will not let you near those eggs.Standard Goblin missions come from the Goblin Queen, who usually wants something completely different each time she wakes up, so you only have a single night to fulfill her desire and it will be different tomorrow.- Causing goblin trouble for people i.e. scaring their cows, spoiling milk etc.- Stealing eggs from a henhouse.- Stealing the golden hair of a maiden.- A priests teeth not won by force.- A grandmothers cup (she won't let it go, lives on the edge of town drinks heavily, complains constantly of Goblins in her house- Goblin inception - placing something in a house rather than taking something out- Changeling-Swap (probably a high-difficulty mission)- Bring a bunch of people to dance round a mushroom circle under the moon.- A catskin cloak- A copy of the humans 'magic' (i.e. holy) book.- Hot tarts- Certain pale apples- A particular rare alcoholic drink- The roundest pig possible.

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What is written in green ink on the golden pages of the Grand Goblin History?The Goblin Polychronicon: a treasure outside Time. A hyper-possible text telling the true story of the Goblins and their origins, their meaning and their end.No exact translation has ever been written though a thousand partial commentaries exist. The core tome itself, split into an indeterminate number of physical volumes, (an odd number likely between eight and thirty two), is no sooner found than lost. Easy to acquire, (for the Goblins are always losing or selling one volume or more), but hard to retain, (for the Goblins always steal it back when the moon is full), many brief commentaries on the Goblin Polychronicon have been written, but none of them agree.Why?Well; any single volume may simply be a fake, the goblins themselves love making fakes of their own work and, being Goblins, often get them mixed up with the original. Notwithstanting that, the Goblin Polychronicon itself is a many-stranded and circular text, with alternate histories, counterfactuals, encoded allegories and outright fantasies included and commented on, and that each of these is spread across multiple volumes, linked through capacious appendicies, subtexts and fold-out diagrams, AND that the whole thing is written in multi-layered Goblin Code, and that the text itself has perhaps been infiltrated by some green goblin mycellium which mimics the shapes of Goblin words ((though some say the fungi follows the tracks of invisible ink left on the page and thence highlights meaningful secrets themselves to be combined with visible Goblin Knowledge in order to reveal yet more perspacious truths) and yet still others claim the fungal strands, gobin-natured as they are, bloat themselves on half-truths and misperceptions encoded in the Goblin Text and thence provide cunning guidance on how not to read the Polychronicon), and and as also as well we must not forget that the history of Goblins is a history of LIES and that much of the Polychronicon consists of the development of lies and the meta-structure of deceptions developed and sustained by Goblin Ontology and also that large parts of it may be made up. Maybe the whole thing is made up, who knows?NO! The Goblin Polychronicon IS TRUE and is a real book about real things. History attests to this! It is absolutely not a scam and my lawyers can confirm.

HISTORY OF THE GOBLIN POLYCHRONICON - HOW IT WAS MADEDeep in the Umber Eon the ever-famed Ranulph de Goblyn, first and last chief librarian at the catastrophically ruined Goblin Pig Library heeded the summons of the Goblin King to work thereon unto "an history of thee tails & seeds of or peeple". Accepting a bonk from the purple stave Ranulph began work on the Goblin Polychronicon in "due tyme", finally and fatally passing the work on to his descendants upon the breaching of the citrus dawn.Of course modern historians recognise that the Ranulph identity was merely a nom de plume, probably representing a cabal or circle of Goblins who recorded the Goblin Polychronicon first through transcribing the oral histories of the Goblins, then when he (they) realised these could not be relied on, by developing time travel and returning to witness the events in question, then on unfortunately accidentally altering these events and encountering parallel versions of him her or themselves trapped in varieties of time loop, gave up on the whole thing, travelling into their (or his) her own future and stealing a copy of the Goblin Polychronicon from his fututre self (or selves), copying it quickly in a phone booth and using that as a base, making up the rest, then, on then contracting Bubonic Boils and realising he-they whomever will never live to become the future self(ves) from whom he can steal the book, imploring his(their) descendants to take on their aspect and essentially cosplay as him (or them) to make sure the time loop does not collapse, BUT! at the same time insisting that the trickery of the "false Ranulph" makes the veracity of the Goblin Polychronicon suspect and that they (or just he) should carefully check and edit every aspect of it while they (the descendant(s)) still have the time, which they both do and do not have due to the aforementioned loops.
(POSSIBLE) VOLUMES OF THE GOBLIN POLYCHRONICONThe Volumes of the Goblin Polychronicon are split into several odd-numbered groups of odd-numbered books, separated by the likelihood of them being simply made up. All of the volumes are Histories, in a sense, though they are all also something else as well, often being made up of encyclopaedias, instruction books, recipe books, biographies, puzzle books, chemical equations, spells, sigils, paint splatters, diagrams, 'information', cartoons and so on, with the historical information wovel through and explicated via these mediums, and all of these themselves explained and elucidated via subtitles, indexes, references, bibliographies, marginalia, fingerprints, food stains, the afrorementioned fungal infiltration etc.

We begin with the five initial, almost-certainly real volumes;The True PolychroniconVolume One - The Goblins and How They Were Known(Contains knowledge of Schemes)Volume Three - The Ripe Ones in their First Feeling(Speaks much of Pigs)Volume Five - Lords of the Green Moon(an encyclopaedia of Tricks)Volume Seven - The Gold Bell Chimes(A digression on Thieving, Theft and Thefts)Volume Minus-One - Thee Hydden Ceekrets of Thee Polygoblinomicon(A philosophical tome on Conceptual Recursiveness and Trapped Thoughts)

The Second AddendumThe 'Second Addendum' (actually (probably) the first) is made up of three volumes which might be real be who knows really. They are;Volume Nine - The Grand Reversal(Stars, Moonshadows, the Moon) Volume Eleven - The Doom Of The Gobs(Owls, the colour Grey, Ordinary Shadows)Volume Thirteen - The Reversal Reversed, that is Made Rightwise(Considers only Green Shadows in a Green Land)
The Final SpeakingThe 'Final Speaking' (not actually final) is made up seven books largely considered to be frauds, broken interpolations, strange translations, fantasies or mistakes. Nevertheless they do seem to act in all ways as Volumes of the Goblin Polychronicon (disposing secret knowings, causing madness and being stolen back under a full moon etc)Volume Fifteen - How the Dooms Were Inverted Handwritten subtitle; Dooms2Boons inne fife symple stepps(Escapes, Maidens, Round Animals)Volume Seventeen - The Doom of the Quicksilver Man(Charms, Illusions cast by Glass, Long Animals)Volume Nineteen - The Doom of the Square Cups(Getting into Buildings, Magical Soups, Games of Chance)Volume Twenty-One - Green Infinity(Impossibilities, Unlikely Reversals, Pie, Grand Strategy)Volume Twenty Three - Thee Last Booke of thee Gobline Polychronicon(Wild Fiddling, Weaving Fates in Golden Hair, Constructing Toys)Volume Twenty Five - Index, Addendum and Appendicies Too Thee Laste Booke(Princesses, Lying Flat, Smooth Beings, Squirming)Volume Twenty-Seven - Be Thys Thee Ende? A Counterblaste To Muche-Puffed DOOMS(Incepting Artefacts, Looking into Smooth Water, Bogs)

The Thorts and KomenterysThe 'Thorts & Komenterys', presumed to be the (actual) final grouping, is made up of three books, one of which either does not exist or cannot be namedVolume Twenty-Nine - Thee Seecret ande Final Parte In Which All CODES be Revealed(Riding Animals Small and Large, Life with Giants, Odd Dogs)?????? ??????-??? - ??????? ??? ??????? ???? ??? ??????? ???????(???? ??, ??? ???????, ????? ??????????, ????, ????????, ??????)Volume Thirty-Three - Goblinomicon, Book One, Thee Begynning(Smelling your Way, the Pockets of Gods, Wardrobe TRAVEL etc)

POWERS OF THE GOBLIN POLYCHRONICON"Power" might be the wrong word to use...Reading and understanding what might be a volume, or volumes of the Goblin Polychronicon is said to reveal certain capacities or latent hidden aspects of reality in ways analogous to "spells"In fact its said that many things now called "spells" are simply regulised & mundanified versions of transcriptions or commentaries on parts of the GOblin Polychronicon.Get hold of a Volume and study it for as long as you can, (usually this involves decoding/translating it by the light of the moon, often aided by mushrooms and mushroom concoctions) before selling it off or getting rid of it before the next full moon lest the Goblins steal more than they might when they steal it back, for they have been known to make of with more than just the book itself, to whit, the name of its holder, their children or child, their shadow, the hair, the holes of their nose, the small bones of the ear.Book Covers from here

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Previous Entries;1: In the Absence of God2. Who Shall Rid us of these Seers?3. A footnote on the Water-Horse Wars.4. A Glossary of the Amber Court.5. In the Memories of Stars.6. The First Amber Court.7. sumthyng lyk a mowse8. Those They Murder are Forgotten.9. Martyrs of the Glass Maze.9.5. Timeline of the Prescience Wars1. The Children of the Amber Lords
Long has the Amber Court ruled in silence but for the slow chiming of bells, and what decadence results! And wealth! Prognosticators ruling from silent workshops riding chariots of gold! Near half-gods, a parliament of prophets. And how changed those who served them, for those who serve prophets must learn to live without doubt, decision, expectation or despair. As it is written, so shall it be.

And of their children who shall be our rulers hertobe. Those raised by the court in and its ways, born knowing their future and educated in thereby, born unlike other mortals, even those who first formed the court, for _they_ were raised amidst us, amongst the unknowing, and though they see much, much is unseen.

And how shall it be if the Court predicts not only predicted lives but the lives of those who are raised _knowing those predictions_, raised by those who also know them.

In our own lives even the doomed can hope, and hope up until the last, blindly, feverish, relentless; that curse and blessing which allows us to endure the unendurable, but these children of the Amber Court must live without hope. They know full well what they will endure, and when, and when life will break them, and if it can. All hopes will be fruitless to them and all dooms pre-known.

Their morality will not and cannot be that of mortal men, though mortal they are.

[Fragment of ‘The Wounds of the Unknowing’, recovered in the 8th crusade. Believed to be of Amberist origin in the Late Amber Court years.]

On The Origins of Things
from where does a personality come, when it has been predicted long in advance?

The rulers of the Amber Court were not fools, they were intimate familiars with the concept of the returning feed, of 'thread tension' - of the flowing timeless interaction between the situation, the prediction and the steps taken to arrange it.

For if an army advances, and a prediction says 'they shall be turned back through such-and-such a method', and the method is employed - then where was it devised? Was it born ex-nihilo in the conjunctions of the world? Imported from some unknown strand? Hermetically self-born?

If a prediction says; "this person here shall learn of this prediction and thereby go mad and lose their reason, and shall die by fire", if they then learn of this prophecy and believe it, is the sheer weight and terror of the prophecy itself the ultimate factor in their madness, and then their death? For if no prophecy had been made, would they then have gone mad? or being sensitive, have suffered some lesser trauma or calamity, or none?

Conversely if a prophet says; "Go here at this time and you shall be happy in such a way, and your plans and dreams will end well in this way and that", and the listener does go and is happy in the manner shown, was this shaped by the prediction itself? Or would the subject have been such a person to shape a good life even without such knowledge? Or would it have been a less-perfect life? And is the resulting person truly 'good' for they decided only to follow the voice of the prediction - from where did the goodness come? And was it intensified by the voice of the prophet? Or limited? Or did it make no difference at all?

Always to predict is to shape, whether knowing or unknowing, and the corde predicted is a corde _in which the prediction is made_. It cannot be otherwise for never can a prognosticator say “I shall see now a future in which I make no predictions.”

All this the Preceptors of Glass knew well enough.

What perhaps they could not truly know, even if told, was the cumulative weight of this paradox upon a culture.

The paradox first, deepened, with one seer predicting the fate of another, and that seer predicting yet another fate from within their own seer-shaped _courde_, and the paradox _spread_, with the servants of the Amber Court increasingly certain of the verity of predictions, trained and experienced in their fulfilment and even raised from youth in full knowledge of them.

What must it have been to be raised in a culture of prophets and prophecies, themselves shaped by still older prophets. What would it mean to disagree in such a culture? To take an order or not take one?

What will be will be.

[From ‘In the Memories of Stars’, recovered from the ruins of Samaris.]

The Unspeakable Nobility
If they have names these may not be spoken, or even for some, imagined. The power of their King is on them and within them and as His name may now be known or recorded so neither may theirs. How they know each other we cannot tell. Perhaps they simply remember.

The Blind Sage
who speaks deep knowledge which has no origin
yet will at times randomly and purposely slay those around them
a solver of unsolvable problems
a maker of impossible devices and fountain of physical lore and technique
who understands none of it
but only remembers it, or knew that he would speak it
recalls it from the future
bent in horror at the emptiness of his own understanding
and the truths which come "from nowhere" from darkness
as if passed down a chain of annihilated selves

The Fool
a spirit of chaos and uncatchable monster
perhaps driven mad by the prediction of their own dark fate
perhaps simply a madman empowered by prescience
a terrorist, killer, criminal, manipulator, corruptor, destroyer
unkillable, uncatchable
they glory little in their greatest "crimes"
usually driven into a corner by the effects of their own plans to escape fate
a seeker for a mercy which will not, or cannot, come
waiting and praying for the ability not to kill, not to destroy

The Empty Blade
duellist of the Amber Court
skilled beyond the capacity of the mind to understand
death itself to those they face
consumed utterly by their predicted fate
given never at any time any expression of either joy or fear
takes no pleasure and no shame in any victory
like a ghost wearing the skin of a man
the horror of their presence so great that the rumour their attention can end wars

The Queen of Air and Darkness
She who would rebel against fate
a magician of unequalled ability,
one fit to bend the world
seeking always and to attempt with every breath and action to defeat and overthrow prophecy
and never succeeding
yet to never giving in
a breaker of realities wrapped in invisible chains herself
who hurls herself against the boundaries of impossibility
a wreaker of chaos and much change in the lives of others

The Dancer
they who play games with time
bringing strange chaos
turning events upon a pin-head
always to paths unexpected to all but them
dancing with time
what their motivations are, whether they embody fate or fight against it, none know
for who they perform, for others or themselves, who can say
they run along times cutting edge, in times and places where to live is to dance upon a burning sword
appearing where nothing should be
moving through fire and chaos like a smiling ghost

The Lady Of Sorrows
she who grieves for all she could not change
unable to alter what she fears she sets herself to at least feel in full
to live truly with the knowledge
and to embody herself in the moment - to be present
to live
a goddess of no mercy, but recognition at least
a tomb-queen wreathed in flowers, bent beneath the weight of infinite names

The Player of the Silver Pipes
a lord of knights and holder of oaths
called a witnesser of truth – he of the silver bough
he pipes the turns of beauty-in-fate
a guardian and exemplar of moments
as lively as the dancer
feared as the blade
present as the lady
he makes the music of strange times

[Believed to be Neo-Pathist Samidzat. Printed text used as binding for a history of The Time of Three Teasons – exact age and origin unknown.]

“Calm were the Children”
Deep was the calm of the children of the Amber Court, as deep as the sea, and deep was their rage, for they lived not as characters in a story who saw not the page, nor as the writers of tales who compassed a corde from beginning and end, shaping it at will, but their lives were lived halfly, between those two, knowing more of their corde than the hero in a tale, often more than even the wise can guess at, but much less than the shaper.

[Oldest recoverable statement discovered when researching the popular lullaby “Calm were the Children, Calm as the Sea”. This fragment found only as a reference in a sheet of music dated to about 55YS, itself a copy of an earlier document. It is not clear if this reference is itself a replication of an earlier statement or an interpolation or addition at the time of scribing. Whatever text it refers to is lost.]

Where Lies Meaning?
Where the value and the meaning in life is found not in choices made or in driving towards any particular goal, but in the nature and the quality of the experience as it happens. In being present in the moment, in fully experiencing that particular moment and in understanding its meaning as one recognises part of a tale that has been already told, where both the beginning and the end are already known, if vaguely, some lost to memory and some predicted but unclear, and so the matter of a life becomes not - what will happen - but what is the meaning of this happening, what does it feel like to be here, now, present at this time and in this time, and how does this reflect and react with all of my memories and all of my prophecies

What would be your own reaction to the advanced knowledge of your own life? Knowing it could not be changed. That everything, including everything you hated, was a consequence of your own choices, and that when you reached the point of decision, even a decision you hated in advance, you would freely choose as predicted, that it could not be otherwise?

[From "The Dharma of Care", by Priest-Viscount Apsanalan, Scrolls 600 to 965 concerning the Late Amber Court Wars.]

An Imperfect Metaphor
to understand the Ouroboros Kin one must imagine a human personality unspooled, like a tight rope bound with grease and wax, pulled taught and tense through long hard use, bathed in the softest waters and gentle allowed to unravel, the curls and windings of its hairs spread this way and that,
each thread of this slowly unspooling rope as it floats in its perfumed bath decided by its placement and compression in the original bound flax.

[Fragment from the ‘Onerologicon’, assumed first written around 33YS. Popular scholarship makes its writer the esteemed ‘Ranulph of Cheem’, though there is no textual proof that such a single writer existed and many claim evidence of multiple writers. This part left within an excised copy as a fragment of parchment, all other pages of this section removed, presumably by the Ordos. No such section exists in any modern copy or equivalent historical document.]

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Good news! Demon-Bone Sarcophagus is finally stumbling to a close. Files are away to the printers (though there will likely be feedback on those) and PDF editor, fees have been paid and though there may be delays with fulfilment which stop shipping until October, the book will actually definitely be made.
Bad News - I am utterly fuuuuuuucked financially.
Blame Putin. Also my own financial and organisational failings, VotE going out of print, our map-maker disappearing for several months without any contact, general slowness and the book being roughly eight months over my assumed timetable leading to print costs rising 40% between our first quote and our final one.Tis truly a glorious disaster in every respect other than that the book will actually exist.Yet the spice must flow and the end of one book means only the beginning of another. As one book is born another is already conceived, so I shall tell you now about my plans for 'Speak, False Machine', a substantial tome which will hopefully not bankrupt me (more).SPEAK, FALSE MACHINEtest print onlyIs essentially a (near) complete record of the first ten years of the False Machine blog."Near" because I removed anything I thought was pretty bad and anything that appeared in a different form in other books, or that is expected to appear in future books. So much of the development posts for things like FotVH and VotE won't be there.Still its... substantial, at least in its test print version. A crown-quarto hardback with around 650 pages and half a million words.space marine for scale
Know peace because it is not simply a chronological cut and paste with every post in order. Instead they are arranged by subject;
History of the Blog - "event" posts, these are actually arranged chronologically.On Games; I do (or did) occasionally write about game design, broken down into 'Adventures', 'Characters', 'Gaming Culture', 'Making Adventures', 'Play', 'Time', 'Tools', and 'Worlds'.False Readings; fiction and short stories, there were a handful of these.Uncertain Worlds; more on the side of world building rather than just world design, 'Chivalric Encounters', 'Cryogenic Rats', 'Knights of Mars', 'Modern Heroes/Modern Monsters' and 'Fantastic Lands'.I Read a Book; I write about the books I read, 'Culture', 'Comics', 'Fiction', 'Games', 'History' and 'Nature'.Cryptoculture; my cultural ramblings, broken down into 'Film', 'Marvel', 'Miscellanea', 'Star Trek', 'Television', 'Warhammer' and 'Weebery'.And finally 'Kleinplastik' where I talk about sculpture largely through the lens of minis.
ARTI am aiming for a black and white print to keep costs down. There are three main kinds of art in the book. The first is made up of diagrams and small illustrations which illuminate descriptions or just fill odd spaces. There are about 50 of these.There are extensive images in the 'Kleinplastik' section, this is the only part here I worry about not having colour as many of the arguments interrelate more with colour. I was half-thinking about having a central 'photographic' section like you used to see in old books, depending on the cost.And finally there are eight 'title pages' which I have left blank. My hope is that through the Kickstarter I can maybe get B&W images from actually-famous artists. I was hoping for Ian Miller, Killian Eng, maybe Adrian Smith? We will see I suppose.LAYOUTPromises to be _less_ of a nightmare than most D&D books as, compared to a gaming book, a normie book is easy mode, but still quite hard due to the sheer volume of text. THE EDITI am leaving the blog posts as they were written partly for authenticity, partly because of the huge difficulty of editing the actual contents and partly because even if I did "even them out" with spelling and layout a lot of the life and particularity of some of the more odd posts would be lost.HOWEVER - I do want an index for the book, and considering the capacious range and strangeness of the contents that looks to be a very difficult project.SO;I will need;- A layout person.- An editor willing to take on the insane requirements of the Index.- Someone to do black and white diagrams and small illustrations.If anyone wants to volunteer hit me up in the comments or my email pjamesstuart at thecompanyweallknowmail.com. Work would be paid for via Kickstarter, which won't run till late in this year, depending on when DBS can ship out. Experience and a proven record of not being a flake is important as I can't live through the utter chaos of my last project again. Considering who I am immunity or indifference to being cancelled may be useful.Peace!

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Things have reached the point where we should probably develop some kind of classification system to describe the amount of cyberneticisation in the things we make.This was brought to a head for me be the recent explosion in Dall-E art and others, and by a post by Chris McDowall where he shows some A.I. generated art and talks about its possible use in products.A fair amount of OSR creations have used archive art or altered historical images, and A.I. art feels like it would fit right into that space. This made it clear to me that this is not a 'thing to think about' but something happening right now. It’s pretty clear that we have already reached the point where human beings are in the act of 'putting ourself out of business'. This concept of a classification system describing how 'Hand-Made' and how 'System-Generated' something is, is intended partly as a protection for human creators as the power of A.I. s grows and partly to help us manage the conflict and synthesis between the two cultures as they develop.The moral weight of the difference between the two modes is very great and I imagine will probably intense swings and cultural counter-reactions each against the other. Hopefully, possibly, having a clear idea of what we are talking about will help us at least navigate this process.FORThere are sound reasons for the use of A.I. content in productions, an A.I.O.S.R.;- We are all the children of cybernetics. D&D has always been poised between the polarities of a cottage industry and a centralised system. The O.S.R. has a complex relationship with cybernetics already. The movement and products would not be possible without huge web of very cheap communication (effectively free intercontinental video calls) file transfers, international fundraising and production for even small creators. - Specifically in the artpunk-adjacent world, there is a taste for weird alienating imagery which programmes like Dall-E seem to do well.- Many, (most), creators are poor. If they can produce beautiful art to go with their stuff easily and for free, do we have a right to stop them?- Same applies when the textual Dall-E arrives. When a human artist can command a story or situation be generated based on their art.- Creators are frustrating and expensive to deal with.The best argument for A.I. production is the most subtle and the hardest to maintain;- We don't know what might happen. It’s an experiment. The future is not only dark. It provides threats to the nature and expression of humanity, but it does not provide only threats. The experiment should be allowed and in fact will go ahead whether we like it or not so we may as well manage it.AGAINSTThe arguments against A.I. content should be intuitively and immediately obvious to anyone but I will state them explicitly;- We are engineering ourselves out of the system. producing a culture which has a cornucopia for the things we want, but no place for us.- Its use will impoverish visual artists. The O.S. has been oddly good at keeping artists fed, for a movement of people with a range of personality disorders.- It could lead to the destruction of art, art skills and independent vision. (I think this is possible but unlikely as I intuit there will be massive counter-reaction once people fully sense what is going on).- The destructive power of the counter-reaction. Total eschewal of A.I. development, or a frustrating unenlightening and resource intensive cultural war between the two cultures. I think is actually more likely. I can imagine very easily people screaming at each other and shaming each other over using the "wrong art" and either "betraying humanity" or being "slaves to the past" and its this uncreative trench warfare that I think we have a chance of avoiding by thinking about it ahead of time.WHAT WOULD SUCH A SYSTEM OF CLASSIFICATION LOOK LIKE?This is the real tricky part. the current emotional and cultural need is for a symbol and concept which delineates that over here you will find A.I. derived art, but over here you will find human-only art.Lets try this to start with;CLASS ZEROAnarcho-Primitivism. A rare but not impossible situation with only direct human action used - a dungeon scribed on handmade paper in handmade ink.Or more realistically - printed on to handmade or recovered paper with handmade block printing.(Some of these may seem _unlikely_ but please don't be frustrating in the comments, try to imagine a society a generation or more deep into the situation we see now with Dall-E and its equivalents and then try to imagine the counter-reaction against that, anarcho-primitivist groups are not that strange a possibility.)"Attempted-Zero", "aimed-zero" or "Zero-minimal" is more likely as in a high tech society making stuff without any tech influence, even in the acquisition of materials, would be very hard.CLASS ONE19th and early 20th century industrial technology, printing presses etc, slide rules and blueprints, but without the internet.I think this is actually less likely than attempts at Zero productions. People deliberately attempting near medieval construction maybe, but the idea of people deliberately attempting 19th/early 20th century construction seems strange to me, but may not seem so in the future.CLASS TWOLate 20th/early 21stC production methods.It’s our current world! Hello! Here are used the cybernetic communication and arrangement technology we are currently familiar with - email file transfers, computer programmes etc but with all content generated by human beings, the cybernetics acting as assistants to that.CLASS THREEThen we cross over into deep 21stC methods. Our current moment. Anything Level Three or above will have specifically A.I. generated content - not just AI aid in creation. Art and words which no human hand has touched.LEVELS ABOVE THREE?We don't really know and can't predict what might happen there but there is a lot of space to expand into?SYMBOLSWe could reverse the order and use the symbol of the hand with the 'level' being the number of fingers held down.The anarcho-primitivist Class Zero product would have a full, spread hand. (Like the white hand of Saruman).
The industrial but not computer-based Class One production would have the thumb down and four fingers spread.
Our current standard of cybernetic aided Class Three production would have the three central fingers spread.
A.I. generated Class Four production would have the two forefingers.
e.t.c.(Also I realise there are already lots of symbols for 'handmade' but I wish we had some that were less twee)POSSIBLE FUTURE RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN THE CULTURESIts more pleasing and less depressing to imagine a meaningful cultural interchange between cultures Two and Three, artists and. creators moving back and forth, observing each others work etc.We don't really know how human art will react to the presence of AI art. When photography began to take off, it seems to have had a huge but unpredictable effect, perhaps being a main driver of modernism.when a human artist grows up in a world of common AI art, what art will they themselves make? We don't know but can expect a re-contextualisation of what art means, why we do it e.t.c...............................................................................Since this seems like a relatively sane and good idea I expect that someone else has already had it. I expect you to notify me about that in the comments.(Along with all your points about how my proposed system lacks discretion and detail. Propose your own systems!)

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Long and low do lie the breathless rulers of the Kingdom of the Worm. Treasures they have and infinite time besides in a sunless realm where the nitre-tainted gold is black and the bronze so tarnished that it makes the only green in this lifeless demesne other than the phosphorescence of mycelia that bloom in wonder from the spiced limbs of long embalmed kings..What can they desire that they may not attain? These pharaonic hierarchs who, while their flesh still blossomed, through it held, consumed and soaked-in every luxury and beat down every conquest, wounded only by their weight of crowns?Youth perhaps, memories, the truth of long-forgotten arguments, night-blooming flowers. The Kingdom of the Worm is a land with no respect for life but much for memory, for everything has already happened in the past. Lightless, but not lifeless for here come Gem-Cutters, Feather merchants, Moth sellers Spice-Traders, Perfumiers, Embalmers, Drummers, (for one feels a drum-beat in one bones), Historians, Poets, and also adventurers, to be paid in prehistoric gems and fat gold coins stained black as coal which fall leaden from the bone fingers or Emperors unremembered in the oldest books, for the dead too have their strange desires, and will pay well for their fulfilment, in those brief eons of remembrance and selfhood which come ever more rarely in the long half-sleep of the immortal dead.1. "A tune of my lost youth, played on great bronze bells."Neither the bells nor the tune currently exist, travel, magic, scholarship and some exhumation would be required to research and re-make them.2. "The skulls of each of my ten greatest foes I slayed while I still took breath."(Some are kings in tombs, one a giants, one a demons, one a dragons skull, one utterly lost and one reanimated and actually belongs to another currently-active Skeleton Lord).3. "A gift delivered to an old friend." (They are royal and long dead, gift involves a 'tombception', breaking in to a sacred tomb in order to leave something in the sarcophagus, rather than take something away.)4. "I have neglected for .. a century? or two too long, the seals on the circle of Azalranbromith, the demon of the 9th level and my ancient foe and slave, whom I left encircled by charms and sigils in the dungeons of such-and-such a place. Those seals must be renewed lest the creature become bothersome."(This is going to need child blood of some kind and probably the person who seals it will be trapped inside, that's what happened last time. Also this ancient dungeon now lowest level of a ruined and monster-haunted city etc etc.) 5. "I recall a diverting experiment in thaumaturgy I left running in error, take thee this key and close it."(Experiment is a wide-scale null-magic field, large city has grown up around it with a whole order of null-monks who think its divine. Also whole culture of the city is based on the effects of the Null-Field.)6. "I remember I had a sword at some point, go and find it and being it to me."(Sword was 'lost' Sauron style during invasion of the living world, now wielded by the head of an order of Templar knights.)7. "I have an important secret to deliver to my living heir before I pass from existence."(Their last living interaction was 5 centuries ago, tracing 'heir' locating them and somehow persuading them to come to the Kingdom of the Worm is going to be a problem.)8. "I have been haunting the dreams of this child who is prophesised to destroy me and I want you to go and absolutely scare the SHIT out of them!. Don't accidentally fulfil or trigger the prophecy while you are doing it!"(Child is that of worlds most powerful mage of light).9. "Where is my cat? I want it I want my cat."(Is one of maybe thousands of mummified cats in the labyrinth of the cat temple. There is also a cat god who doesn’t not like the cats being removed also probably other cat-themed challenges.)10. "I want to try out to join one of these orders of knighthood they have these days. I will compete in a tournament in a closed helm just like in the stories, you will be my pages and make sure everything works out. (Also I want to romance a maiden heh heh heh)."11. "I want it to be autumn here, I remember Autumn..."(Realm is a lightless blasted wasteland of tombs with zero living trees).12. "Take a message to my love."(Long dead, no body, need to enter Hades get past guardian dog, ferryman, multiple rivers etctrack them down, deliver letter, wait for response, do the whole thing again on the way back).

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(Like Ahriman returning to the scene of the crime I am back on that crack. My solution to the Rubric? wait for it.. a second Rubric. Yes I am completely confident about this one also, skip to the end for the previous parts of this series).That little voice in your head that says ‘no’.
Such a very small voice. A whisper, not enough to command or change you on its own, but perhaps enough to allow you to understand that a choice is being made, that you are making it, and that it could go another way.
Where would you be without that voice? What would have become of you? Probably each of you have met people who just didn’t have that voice at all and likely it wasn’t obvious at first that they didn’t have it.
But if it was stripped away from you, not just removed but annihilated, and you could never get it back, What then?
Magnus is unusual in the Heresy in that his story is not only over, but may have ended before we realised. I argue that ‘Magnus’ ended on Prospero and what persists beyond that is a kaleidoscope of memories and fragments of personality plotting and planning against one another, slowly coalescing into a new personality along a timetable arranged by a mad god.
It begins with high ambitions, information control, (or lies) ,and plans for a legion of psychic super-soldiers. Because if the Emperor of Mankind likes anything, he likes the idea of a legion of psychic super-soldiers. He has his little heart set on that.
But why?

What Was E-Money Planning?
Probably no form or kind of knowledge or technology was more important to control for the nascent Imperium than that of the Psyker. It was one of the few things the Mechanicum were outright banned from researching but research did go on, but only in the Imperial Household or under the Emperors more-direct control.
Early experiments with the First Legion included psychic elements and apparently didn’t go that well. The Astronomicon, the Webway project, the Ordo Sinister, the Silent Sisters, the Black Ships and soul-binding of Astropaths, all core imperial technologies and methodologies and all centred around control of psychic phenomena. As were Primarch number 19 and the 19th legion.
The creation of the 19th Primarch in particular is a hell of a strange concept. Why create 20(.5) super-beings, all roughly equivalent in power, with some depth of specialisation but quite a lot of depth and inter-operability, some of whom had some psychic powers, though usually mono-use, and then for number 19 create not just a Psyker but a single hyperintelligent mega-powerful Psyker, a being not even slightly equivalent to its brothers in that respect, and not simply more psychically powerful but an order of magnitude more powerful. Likely the most powerful human-origin Psyker in the Galaxy other than you?
That’s a lot of eggs in one basket, or more precisely one giant fucking egg in a very frail basket. Why not divide up more psychic potential amongst the brothers so there is less risk if this single one goes nuts? (This is assuming E-Money has access to, basically a jar of pasteurised demon-juice and is doling it out piece by piece.)
It might be that mastering and controlling psychic power, and its possible negative effects, do not scale ‘normally’ i.e. a power 2 Psyker is twice as powerful as a Power 1, twice as hard to train and twice as dangerous if they freak out.
Perhaps power, ability and training capacity scale in such a way that if you are going to train a powerful psyker then you may as well train a super-powerful psyker as its going to be very hard either way. Perhaps the danger of a ‘loose’ psyker also scales in such a way that its more like a pin prick in a balloon rather than a puncture in a ships hull; you stand as much risk big as small so you may as well go for that very big egg.
Maybe making a super-powerful psyker will make them easier to find and communicate with if they get ‘lost’?
All of this depends on what the Emperor was planning. There are three main strands of possibility but, E-money being E-Money none of these necessarily preclude the others. Each could be a possible fall-back position or deliberate provocation designed to nudge an enemy into a particular stance. One thing we know about E-Dawg and the Chaos Gods is that their plans are both massively parallel, and take place somewhat adjacent to time, so setup for a fallback to a failure can take place millennia before the failure itself is suspected.

The small-C Conservative Plan
Maybe you can take over the webway and move humanity inside and maybe you can’t but either way you will need a lighthouse and a league of demon fighters.
The Imperium of Man, having grown up around the Emperor, essentially needs a super-powered psychic at its centre. To guide the Astronimicon if nothing else and even inf things go well, to be Humanities ‘farseer’.
If you fuck up (as in fact happens), you will need someone to hold closed the hellgate now existing in the palace, maintain the Aegis, the psychic shield around the palace, plus guide the astronomicon.
If things go well you will likely need someone to hold open and maintain the human webway, while also guiding the astronomicon (unlikely it would be totally shut down), and what else? We know about the webway, the astronomicon and the aegis but in a ‘functional’ Imperium there would probably be more roles that only a psychic powerhouse, a single individual, could fulfil.
In a ‘successful’ webway project the 19th legion would be security guards, taking on demons that tried to break in and those that attempted to take over human worlds in realspace. they would fulfil the role the Grey Knights do now – but in a somewhat more expansionist manner, teaming up with the Sisters and the Ordo Sinister to conquer the webway and fight Demons when they burst into reality out in the galaxy.

The Insanely Maximalist Plan
Invade Hell.
Its implied but never directly stated that the Emperors ambition didn’t stop with the conquest of the webway, or with anything in the material world. He thinks the ultimate problem is the Chaos Gods themselves and there are inferences that a lot of his psychic diddling about it basically the beta-test for an invasion of Hell.
The Emperors To-Do List
• Move Humanity to the Webway (psychic elements at least).
• Kill nearly everything else.
• Starve the gods.
• Guide humanities psychic development.
• Keep iterating and developing null tech like the Sisters and the Ordo Sinister, along with whatever the 19th were meant to be, all headed and protected by a creature of near unequalled might.
• When the gods are weak enough and you have enough psychic super-soldiers, pop into the Courts of Chaos – through a hell gate (there seem to be several knocking about) and go to war against the gods, knocking them out one by one.
• Having destroyed the Chaos Gods, re-make the psychic sub-structure of the Galaxy as something more sensible and less inimical to life.

The Galaxy-Brain Plan
Set up to fail.
Of course you stole the power to make these Primarchs and super-soldiers from the Gods themselves. And you know they will be looking to fuck you over. And you know that a super-genius psychic powerhouse is going to be VERY attractive to a certain blue bird god.
And while you educate Magnus yourself over broadband, and give him loads and loads of knowledge
You never tell him directly about the gods, or about where he comes from, or exactly how you made those super-soldiers (who in this case are over-baking quite consistently).
Then one day your pet sorcerer comes home with one less eye saying he “found” knowledge in the Warp about how to stabilise his Legion.
So, if you are the Emperor, you likely know or at least suspect exactly what happened.
Then later Nikea happens and you tell Magnus to not do the one thing you made him to do, and in fact taught him to do.
Plus you know a rebellion is coming, and in fact you have planned for it (apparently not that well).
You are, essentially, dangling Magnus over shark-infested waters, waiting to see what will happen. Much like you are with all of the Primarchs. You know Chaos will be coming for them with its mind-bending crackhead Truman-show shenanigans.
Are you waiting to see which sons rebel since you know some will, and you also know that ultimately all will be challenged, in some way, at some time?
Are you actually planning for some to be eaten by Chaos as part of an even more long-term strategy? One which goes far beyond the Heresy?
In their last meeting the Emperor offers Magnus service/imprisonment, and re-acceptance, so long as he sits in the chair and lights stuff up. Magnus is wavering and asks what will happen to his Legion. E-Dawg says “those guys are tits up in a ditch but I will get you a new one”.
Magnus freaks out and fucks the fuck off.
Was this the Emperor being an autistically insane bad father or was it the specific words that would drive away Magnus and seal him directly to the fate of the 19th forever?
Bad writing, bad character or swirling meta-scheme, as with all things Heresy, you decide.

What is it to be trapped in that plan?
Magnus wasn’t just lied to and manipulated by Tzeetch, he was lied to and manipulated by his Dad to really quite an insane degree. Maybe he wouldn’t have listened even if he was told.
“Son we are flying over the gates to hell, yes I mean literal actual hell with demons and four fucking super-satans. Yes it’s really hell, I mean it.”
Maybe the Magnus we know would have been right off into the hellmouth regardless, but it really explains why he has such a complete mental breakdown after he breaks the Emperors Wards.
To count of the sheer amount of mind-breaking realisation he undergoes in that moment;
• Precognition doesn’t work and can be blinded and manipulated.
• He has opened a hellgate directly into the Throneroom.
• By the way, Hell exists and its that place you visit on the regular.
• Gods are real and they are evil.
• They planned this.
• Every thing he did was planned by evil gods.
• Including, and in fact especially, the parts where you thought you were really trying hard to do the right thing.
• Your sons are all going to mutate and turn into walking teratomas and there is no way out of that.
• You can die here or be bound to a psychic lighthouse basically as a kitchen towel trying to keep demons off the kitchen floor FOREVER.
• There was never any deal where you gave up an eye, you outwitted no-one, it was and act and you are a fool.
• Literally NOTHING you ever did or any ideal you thought he represented meant SHIT – your dad lied to you and used him and evil gods will destroy everything you ever valued, also your dickhead cosplay barbarian brother is coming to maybe kill maybe capture him.
• Oh the future looks like this also;
Be fair, that’s a lot to take in. Can you blame him for having a complete nervous breakdown?
What would you do? What could you do, when you know your every move, your every move, has already been plotted by evil extradimensional gods who have been playing you right up until this moment? And still are.
Prey animals play dead in these circumstances. It’s not a great tactic but tbh it may be the best you have got when you are already in the tigers mouth.

The Last Coherent Choice
Which is what Magnus does at this point. Sit in his room refusing to go out, too scared to answer emails or pick up the phone. It’s pretty sad but, again, what the fuck would you do? Every single thing he has tried to do up until this point was already accounted for and aided evil timeless extradimensional gods.
I have given Chaos a lot of shit for its, frankly often terrible schemes to corrupt Primarchs, but this time they really brought their A-Game. Feel like Tzeentch is the one competent member of the group tbh. Who else is turning up to the quarterly meeting? Maybe Nurgle but he never does anything.
I would also like to take a moment to remind everyone that to corrupt Magnus all it took was a reality-bending nightmare scheme with a Borgesian number of branching paths and all it too to turn Russ to the use of chaos was deleting the comma from an email.
The last coherent thing True-Magnus does is stumble out of his Pyramid and try to fight Russ, then on the way down to getting his back broken, sell his soul to keep his Legion and his people alive, before being shattered into a gazillion pieces.
Bear in mind, it took the literally guillotine being on the way down the tracks for him to consciously and deliberately break.

Then, Fragments
Appropriately enough for Tzeentch. Little more than a field of playing pieces and a meta-personality slowly re-combining (through catastrophe and adventure), at a speed and in a manner more pleasing to Tzeentch.
Soul-surgery across eons of time…
Magnus in Publication Order
When we think of Magnus as a ‘Published Entity’ he makes a (slightly) more sense. The stories weave back and forth in time between M41, the Heresy and just post-Heresy. Still there is a pretty clear growth in the depth of his character, going from background supervillain in William Kings Space Wolf series from 2002 and culminating in the Emperors Throne room in ‘The Fury of Magnus’ in 2020

Early 2000’s - The Space Wolf/Ragnar Blackmane SeriesSpace Wolf, Grey Hunter – William King 2002, M41
Space Wolf, Wolfs Honour – Lee Lightner, 2008, M41
All about Ragnar Blackmane being just the best guy ever. Grey Hunter is about a Thousand Sons sorcerer trying to steal the Spear of Russ to being Magnus ‘back from the Immaterium’.
Magnus turns up at the end of ‘Wolfs Honour’, looming through a warp portal, intending to do some evil ritual on Fenris to destroy the Space Wolves and gets bonked in the face by the Spear of Russ.

(A spear which, in the tradition of Horus Heresy writing, will get more character development over the Heresy series than some living beings. At some point I should probably do a post of ‘Character Development of Weapons in the Horus Heresy).

2010- A Thousand Sons - Graham McNeill, M31

A Major book for the 1k Sons which follows Ahriman on a journey which takes him all the way from watching his twin brother mutate in to a monstrosity under the influence of 19th legion gene seed, to Magnus arriving and ‘solving’ the Flesh-Change problem, to chilling with Magnus during the great crusade, Magnus discovering the webway, The Wolves being dicks, more tangles with the Space Wolves and finally the attack on Prospero and Magnus having his epic meltdown.
2011 - Prospero Burns, Dan Abnett, M31
Chunks of the same story but told from the Space Wolves perspective. Tldr; it took tzeentch doing quite a lot of intense trickery to fully turn the wolves, and the custodes, against the 19th legion

2011/2015 - War of the Fang, Chris Wraight, M32

Made up of ‘Battle of the Fang’,2011 and it prequel ‘The Hunt for Magnus 2015. Magnus is, once again, or actually for the first time..(?) attacking Fenris….
This time its in M32 in a (successful) attempt to stop the Space Wolves fixing their gene seed so they can become an Ultramarines-Style regional power to encircle the eye of terror. Magnus gets bonked by a Space Wolf and runs away but not before achieving the main aim of permanently retarding geneseed experimentation.

2012 to 2015 - Ahriman doing Time Loops, John French

Made up of Ahriman; Exile, John French 2012, Ahriman; Sorcerer, John French 2015 and Ahriman Unchanged, John French 2015.
The story of Ahriman post-Rubric, trying to recover from his crack addiction, hitting rock bottom, deciding to live and… getting right back on that crack.
Though its mainly about Ahriman this series sets the tone and feel for the 1k Sons and Magnus post-Heresy and post-Rubric. Though it will still be five years till McNeil tells us what actually happened to Magnus in the Heresy.
I’m not sure if French is the first person to introduce the idea of ‘shards’ of Magnus but I think this is where that concept came from. Scars by Chris Wraight has Jaghatai encounter a ghostly shard of Magnus and that was published in 2015.
The concept is this; when Russ broke Magnus, he broke Magnus, splintering him into a huge number of sub-personalities which were scattered across Magnus’ timeline, and hidden in various other places. These ‘shards’ range in strength and intensity from ghostlike visions to fully embodied beings who are sure they are the ‘real’ Magnus. Each shard is based around a different aspect, core memory or expression of Magnus’ personality.
Several of the inciting elements for the Ahriman series are different shards of Magnus trying to manipulate events so they can express whatever that shards core values are. The trilogy ends with a ritual hoovering up even more shards and combining them into a stronger meta-personality.
Its also explicitly stated that Ahriman is doing time loops throughout the series, entering and exiting the Eye of Terror at different points on his own timeline, encountering people for the first time who already know him well and visa versa. The same seems to be true of the Magnus-shards who are manipulating everything.
When does this series take place? Fuck knows. Draw a big squiggly line around the millennia M31 to M41.

2016 - Wrath of Magnus Campaign Book, M41About 16 years ago in the Ragnar Blackmane books Maggy was trying a mysterious ritual involving screwing over Fenris and the Space Wolves.
Well this time he actually pulls it off! Chaos mass-invades the Fenris system, collapsing world after world, arriving on Fenris itself and successfully (partially) demonising it.
Yeeeahhhhhh!

Not only that but in a neo-ruinstorm move, Maggy actually manages to crack the fucking galaxy baby! Imperium Nihilus is a thing now!
lets goooooooooo!
Plus he teleports the Planet of the Sorcerers to Prospero. ahh hahahah fuck you Russssss!
Then gets bonked by a Khornate Axe wielded by a Space Wolf and runs away because apparently there is only one way these things are allowed to end. This is the third time btw.

2017 Magnus the Red: Master of Prospero, M31

Picks up with whatever remains of Magnus having taken a beating and hanging about on the Planet of the Sorcerers basically fading away like McFly due to missing soul stuff. In order to set him up for the next novel he has to have a flashback to early heresy times when he was palling about with Pertuabo and encountered a Dr Who mystery on a planet which mysteriously survived the Age of Strife – definitely not via spooky methods at all.

2017 - The Crimson King, M31

Ahriman and the 1k Sons try to face up to how fucked they are and finding their Dad has magical Alzheimer’s and is also dying, they decide to put him back together using a magical fetch quest!Its just repairing a soul! How wrong can it go? When many or even most of the pieces are missing or gone…
Say hello to eventual-supervillian Magnus; The Crimson King. The guy who will, in roughly 10,000 years and after quite a few acts of gradual coelesance like this one, go on to crack the Galaxy in half.
Even having repaired Dad, and even with his major good part still missing the main desire of the Crimson King is still to get it back. He knows his ‘little voice’ is gone and wants to be whole. His method could be argued with; he will join with Horus in laying siege to the Emperors Palace.

2017 to 2020 – Bit Parts in the HeresyIn two books by John French Magnus turns up for bit parts and, along with the Sons, in ‘Slaves to Darkness’ he turns up at the end to announce he is on team bad-guy while in ‘The Solar War’ the 1k sons are some of the more-useful elements in Horus’ army.

2020 - The Fury of Magnus, M31

Magnus infiltrates the Palace with a handful of his main guys, gets a lot of the Chaos wiped off him and has some very consequential meeting with Malcador and the Emperor which do not go well at all.
He meets Malcador and asks for the good part of his soul back. Malcador tells him it simply can’t be done. (This part has already been combined with the last loyal Thousand Son, transformed into the first master of the Grey Knights and shoved through a space hole to Titan, then Titan itself shoved out of existence for a bit.
Perhaps more upsettingly, Malcador outright tells Magnus that the source of most of his problems if himself and that even without his missing soul-bit he still has enough of a personality to make good choices. This may be technically true but is maybe the best way to phrase it, and considering the sheer level of fuckery Malcador and the Emperor have engaged in, not the best person to bring it up and Magnus snaps Malcadors neck. He then meets with the Emperor who offers him a spot on the chair and informs him that the 19th Legion is a bust and always was.
(It’s not clear if these terrible attempts at persuasion are just terrible attempts or actual deliberately bad attempts. Malcador in particular seems to be expecting to die here..)
Magnus not unreasonably is not down with this and fucks right off out of the Siege. If you want to see where he appears “next” its in, I thiiink, the Ahriman Trilogy? Or possibly ‘Battle of the Fang’ as they likely overlap.
And there we are. All Wrapped up.

The Crimson King as a ‘Real’ PersonIf taken as an actual personality Magnus Post-Heresy is notable for his lack of ambition and interest in anything other than fucking over the Space Wolves. From a publishing perspective we know that this is because the Demon Primarchs are background characters in the 40k verse up until the Heresy Series really kicks off.
But it also makes sense from a personal perspective. As a lessened, crippled and frustrated post-shattering version of himself, what purpose does the Crimson King actually have? He might resent the Emperor but he has no love for Chaos and doesn’t really give a shit about the Horus/Abaddon viewpoint of ‘this galaxy is ours actually’.
He is a servant of a God who does not (consciously) worship that God and in fact hates it. His dream of a better galaxy is gone. He can’t really be a coomer for chaos. What else is there to do but scheme, dick over the Space Wolves and slowly re-assemble whatever bits of himself he can find.
Amazingly he seems to have finally accomplished all this (in Wrath of Magnus, 2016) and having cracked open the galaxy, maybe he can finally chill feeling free and happy as the more-psychotic version of himself? After all the ‘Crimson King’ has lasted a lot longer than ‘Magnus the Red’ ever did. (Plus he could always invade Titan and swallow Janus’ corpse, you never know it might do something! Maybe ‘eat every Grey Knight’ could be a new goal?

Previous InstalmentsOne - The HeresyTwo - HorusThree - FulgrimFour - The LionFive - The AlphasSix - The Bottle NovelsSeven - The MechanicumEight - The Short Stories

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(in response to the comments in this post) and I was not that good at it, and then did ok. But then got bored. But I learned a lot and now have much more sympathy with iron age clan leaders than I did before. Honestly you people are impossible.Piss off your Weaponthanes and they start doing interviews on Fox News about the lack of national defence
META GAME ELEMENTSThere is no save game and no multiple simultaneous paths, whatever game you are in you are IN and there is no going back from any choice or looking to another causality stream to see what you could have done - unless you want to quit and tank every decision made up until this point.There are indeterminate responses to God quests based presumably on lots of stuff happening behind the scenes like the religion of the quester but it looks also like the religious nature of the tribe and what temples etc, also whether you have been raiding or whatever.The interrelationship between invisible numbers, limited knowledge and the will of the gods is the most interesting element.I never got to ride Dinosaurs & feel personally betrayed by this
GUNS AND BUTTERThere are two kinds of raids;cattle raids - which require stealth and basically theft, and Raid raids which can vary hugely from armed demonstrations to theft with force to, in theory - genocide and repossession of land.Intra-culture raiding is considered normative and in fact a complete lack of raiding at any time is considered a bit weird will lose you respect and the happiness of your warrior class.A primal human problem; you need warriors to defend the farmers or other warriors will come and take stuff, and you need farmers to feed the warriors. But the two are in endless conflict, pissed off with each other at least half of the time and annoyed about the others privileges - or lack of their own.(And holy fuck are farmers conservative. They do NOT like outsiders and are very happy to be dicks based on ancient cultural stuff despite the fact that its you the leader who has to deal with the problems that result.Cattle are the 'points' of the game so everyone always wants more cows.The best way to get cows is cattle raid or full raid, (plus you need to raid and to be seen raiding to be a 'proper' clan both within and without). No raids and your weaponthanes get upset, no raids and others start to think you are a pussy and your diplomacy weakens.However, you are surrounded by neighbours. These are also the easiest and lowest risk people to raid. BUT - if you can make allies of them then they are also your best partners, can protect you from other raiders with warnings, set up short trade networks and can ultimately help form your tribe which is the route to 'winning' the game. As always and forever it seems in all human cultures outright setting out to be purely and entirely peaceful just fucks you over while going full-military fucks you in a different way.You can go the full-military war clan route (haven't tried it myself), and basically be Sparta with wars and super-slavery but the more you raid the more potential allies you lose. So I would imagine that if you are going to rule others through military force you better be very VERY strong all of the time.Enemies - feuds, are a big long-term drain on your resources and constant threat, however, they can also be useful as with a feud, you at least know who you are raiding next time. So the next time your warrior class wants a fight you can just say oh yeah we can go raid the blue ox clan like last time and from the point of view of internal clan politics it doesn't really matter if you win or lose, so long as you don't lose too badly. If you win the Thanes are happy and if you lose it was their own fault for raiding and there are presumably less of them to support.There are also random events which crop up which can sometimes result in weird or supernatural problems which need to be sent "elsewhere". So in those cases you can say "ok send the spirits to the blue ox clan".Ultimately, if you want peace, stability and continuity you actually need enemies, or at least one enemy, roughly your strength, hopefully a bit weaker but still a threat, a medium distance away so it’s you are not a continuous threat to each other but can still reach each other. The most stable, and ultimately peaceful option is to just have a continuous low-intensity conflict with the same tiny group, without anything really changing.
WOMENThe game pretty decent iron age simulator where you can choose whether or not to keep slaves and can possibly even build a slave empire and can engage in human sacrifice, and even mass human sacrifice, as well as raiding and plundering other clans, but still has the normative fantasy standard of combat skills and political power being evenly distributed between men and women, which, if it comes to political power is not impossible as small societies can have huge cultural diversity and lots of variety in iron age cultures, but pretty sure the Indo-European groups were v patriarchal.Not complaining, it’s just an interesting look at our particular cultural moment where yes you can build a slavery simulator but it has to have a gender balance.
THE PERSONALITY OF A BUNCH OF NUMBERSTruly the human mind is extremely based because a portrait, some auto generated text speech and a bunch of semi-random numbers do indeed become 'people', especially for my clan leaders, the first of the council and usually the first face you click on to get advice on stuff.My first leader was kind of a hyper competent technocrat, a female worshipper of Issiaries, the talking god and the clan itself were quite non-normative, and worshipped Almal the sun god. We didn't even have a temple to Orlanth, the main god of our culture group. I really liked her because she always gave clear and detailed advice, consistently crushed trading and diplomatic issues, and our clan got really good at trading so in many ways the best person for the job.But the clan, or perhaps the game, or the structures of culture the game was simulating, didn't like her, and while most of her explicit missions worked out and she was good at most individual things, the clan itself laboured; short on resources and cows, low status and ultimately disbanded.For my second try I went with a very normative Orlanthi clan who made all the normal choices and the leader was a very normal male Orlanth worshipper with ok stats and was frankly something of a midwit mediocrity giving banal or empty advice regardless of circumstance.I honestly really didn't like the guy and in most of his crises found him to be a very basic, even poor, leader but the clan flourished, a normative Orlanthi leading a normative clan with a nice big temple to Orlanth in the middle. Not exceptionally great at any particular thing but doing quite well on everything. Eventually we formed a tribe - but he got cucked out of the tribal leader role and we were stuck waiting for people to die and still couldn't get him in and eventually I got bored.Third try was basically classic old woman feminist leader in a peaceful tribe dedicated to the mother goddess. Our main objective was to sit there and grow, which indeed we did in our increasingly fortified steading. Never had food problems, still couldn’t get population up much and no one really liked us, but fuck it otherwise things were fine. But it felt like game was becoming static and I am again a bit bored.The "correct" answer is "suffer the blows" but this might get your Quester killed...
RELIGION AS TECHNLOLGYActually it’s pretty substantially different in a lot of ways, but in terms of dedicating resources to 'researching' things to provide improvements, its somewhat similar.You can sacrifice to a range of gods to find out more about them, (it's never explicitly clear which sacrifices, or how many or how much will be needed for each god). In my first game I actually sacrificed a human to the cow goddess and she got so fucked off someone in my ruling council left the tribe in disgust, also never sacrifice cows if you don't have to, just sacrifice goods. From these sacrifices you can learn 'mysteries' which are either something like blessings or lore you can use to do ritual magic.With enough knowledge of blessings from a god you can build a shrine which can be expanded to a temple or a big temple. This is basically a resource exchange as for regular resource loss you get an 'always on' blessing which affects your whole clan. Or you can sacrifice for individual blessingswhich can cost more but isn't a yearly tax (but also might not work sometimes), and as you get more fragments of myth you can do Heroquests which is form of clan wide magic where you re-enact elements of myth to get real magical effects.If you fuck it up you get a BEATING; big magic loss, loss of reputation and maybe the quester and others physically wounded pluss WILD MAGIC - I fucked up a quest from the talking god and all of the maps for everyone in the area were FUCKED for years and all of my exploreres I sent out died. I dang well broke reality with my bullshit and people never let me hear the end of it.It’s the lack of knowledge, indeterminacy or results and unseen interrelationship with your clan structure that really makes this interesting in-play.Each Hero-Quest is a multiple choice adventure and over time, through reading lore or through cheating, you can learn the 'optimal' choices but the choices are not always equally weighted, and do not always respond the same way.There are a few things you know about. The quester being a worshipper of the right god can help, having one clan council member from different gods each can help.(That can be a challenge because very normative clans are often not very diverse in their makeup (as pertains to worshippers)The two 'normative' clans I ran, the Orlanthi and the Mother Goddess clan, had shitloads of the normative gods but if I wanted someone on the council from some less regular god, either I couldn't get them or I had to settle for someone with mediocre stats in order to fill the post - goddman diversity.Whereas the somewhat odd clan I started with had a bunch of wild and whacky members - so diversity of worship was never a problem - but the clan itself felt less 'cohesive' and the things it was good at never synergised as much across domains (though it was also my first try).)(also its a nice point that its always good to have one worshipper of the trickster god on your council - in some special events they can generate alternative solutions to problems; tricking a hungry ghost with a trail of food, tricking a dragon out of its gold, being an expendable council member when shit hits the fan, but they never really cause enough trouble in the clan for it to feel like an interesting choice having them on the team - its more like marvel Loki than myth Loki)Beneath all that, does your clan 'feel' right? Are you Orlanthi, with a big Orlath temple, Orlanth-worshipping leader and do you 'act' like normative orlanthi? Which numbers, precisely, is the game looking at to make these questions work? you don't know and that lack of knowledge makes things both frustrating and interesting?This was a really cool choice to make the first time, less so the third time.
POSSESSION IN GAMESin almost every case when creating a true sense of possession, or a feel that you are really making choices as this entity in an imagine world there must be some combination of stable known rules and the unknown - yet an unknown not without reason.If the game is pure known-rules and you can predict and weight how everything works - then it is merely a game and you end up just shuffling numbers.If truly chaotic, the negative bad DM stories - where there is no stability or learnable rules - then its just a contest of personalities or wills or nothing at all.There is some subtle synthesis between known rules, unknown rules and pure chaos (along with everything else) that tilts a system towards feeling 'real' - were you go from 'how do I maximise my sacrifices to Orlanth' to feeling like a clan leader thinking 'o fuck I hope Orlanth is ok with us this year'.You are doing similar things in both cases but the difference is subtle. You are still making a die roll but it doesn’t feel like you are rolling the dice but like you are facing the gods.

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We need to be churning more oceans! We need to be fisting more demons! We need to be killing more sons! We need to be hurling more weapons!Part three of a short series about the elements of Proto Indo-European Mythology that haven't made it into the fantasy noosphere, or haven't made it as much as one would think, or have made it quite a lot but still a look at the reconstructed "originals" can be illuminating.WE NEED TO BE CHURNING MORE OCEANS

"Although the concept of elevation through intoxicating drink is a nearly universal motif, a Proto-Indo-European myth of the "cycle of the mead", originally proposed by Georges Dumézil and further developed by Jarich G. Oosten (1985), is based on the comparison of Indic and Norse mythologies. In both traditions, gods and demons must cooperate to find a sacred drink providing immortal life. The magical beverage is prepared from the sea, and a serpent (Vāsuki or Jörmungandr) is involved in the quest. The gods and demons eventually fight over the magical potion and the former, ultimately victorious, deprive their enemy of the elixir of life."Already something of a failure because this concerns not an element of PIE Myth that hasn't been covered by the Genres but one that fits almost too-well into D&D specifically.Elixirs and potions are happily set within the D&D cosmology so the idea of a super, super super divine level potion fits right in. After all if you can make a potion of this or that of various strength and effectiveness then why not have there be a potion of immortality which made the deathless gods what they are? And a highly interpretable boundary between powerful mortals and gods is something D&D handles pretty well.I can imagine a 'potion of ageless immortality' being a super-high-level item, combine it with a potion of eternal regeneration and boom, you've got yourself a god.BUT, one element that’s missing is the potions cosmological nature; it’s not just some potion that came from wherever - it was made through the combined efforts of a super-serpent, plus the beings we now call gods, plus the beings we now call demons - they made it together through some incredible process that neither group could have done alone.And then the gods stole it, or tricked the Demons into not drinking it, and that’s where 'Gods' and 'Demons' come from, the trickers and the tricked.Gods as original adventurers indeed.Of course if we view this from inside the resulting mythos then the Demons were very bad and the Gods HAD to do what they did - BUT THEY WOULD SAY THAT WOULND'T THEY??? Reading back the difference between what would be gods and what would be demons looks more like the difference between two street gangsWhat does it mean, or what would it mean in an imagined world, this war between the deathless trickers and the, not-quite-mortal, but definitely not deathless or ageless, tricked?While the sacrifice myth gave the roots of reality as a kind of annihilation of self/twin, the churning elixir myth gives the roots of divine order as a kind of scam, in which we applaud the scammers because they were more clever and because they were/are sort-of on our side, or at least more on our side than whatever 'Demons' are.The benefits of this crime being an escape into deathlessness, into eternity.I suppose the requirement of the unified action of Gods and Demons explains why they are no longer making the 'good' version of the immortality potion - that lot will never work together again. yet at the same time it suggests a way of making more; by some third party, (the adventurers or main character of the story) tricking both groups into once again churning the cosmic ocean.WE NEED TO BE ACCIDENTALLY KILLING OUR SONS (AND POSSIBLY BURNING OUR FORTS)

"In the Ulster Cycle, Connla, son of the Irish hero Cú Chulainn, who was raised abroad in Scotland, unknowingly confronts his father and is killed in the combat; Ilya Muromets must kill his own son, who was also raised apart, in Russian epic poems; the Germanic hero Hildebrant inadvertently kills his son Hadubrant in the Hildebrandslied; and the Iranian Rostam unknowingly confronts his son Sohrab in the eponymous epic of the Shāhnāmeh. King Arthur is forced to kill his son Mordred in battle who was raised far away on the Orkney Islands; and in greek mythology an intrigue leads the hero Theseus to kill his son Hippolytus; when the lie is finally exposed, Hippolytus is already dead. ....According to Mallory and Adams, the legend "places limitations on the achievement of warrior prowess, isolates the hero from time by cutting off his generational extension, and also re-establishes the hero's typical adolescence by depriving him of a role (as father) in an adult world"."It might be bad to be a PIE hero but if you are the son of a PIE hero.. run! Run for the hills! Except don’t because you will fall over and lose your memory, be raised by hill people and become their hero, try to free them from the tyranny of the river-valley lord and fight him in single combat only to die and fall over again, mooning him, revealing the birth mark on your arse that confirm that yes, he just killed another son, sky-father damn it!A key point for us is that killing the son, in Indo-European terms, is like 'killing the parents' in children’s fiction; it enables the adventure.Sane parents stop their children going on adventures so for the story, or game, to happen, and for the Hero to happen, they need to be missing, powerless, incompetent or dead. (Like most Disney parents).Likewise the D&D adventurer will ultimately 'age out', (though in practice they remain near-psychotic self-driven loners in otherwise communal societies), but if they were real they would probably gain families and embed themselves in a socio-political milieux, as people tend to do as they age.How then may they adventure? You can do socio-political court dramas, but how can they meat-and-potatoes, risk-and-exploration adventure?Clearly by accidently killing their son and/or heir in tragic and fated circumstances, this then ending their 'family line' (assuming a patriarchal society) this disconnects them from the world of line-building, politics and embedded power structures - a good time then to go on a grief-stricken old guy adventure.How to do this with an entire adventuring party? Simply have them ALL accidentally kill each others children in the same fated event and/or situation. It’s an utterly batshit idea but not that much more batshit than the sheer number of accidental son-murders in the Eurasian mythos.Alternate versions could be the accidental but fated self-destruction of whatever it was the adventurers invested in that bound them to society - a fort, wizards college, thieves guild or whatever.WE NEED TO BE FISTING MORE DEMONS WE NEED TO BE BINDING THINGS MORE IMPOSSIBLY!
I am sorry I could not find any examples of Jamshid fisting Ahriman, I feel as if I have let you down
"In both accounts, an authority figure forces the evil entity into submission by inserting his hand into the being's orifice (in Fenrir's case the mouth, in Ahriman's the anus) and losing it"Firstly people aren't being swallowed by monsters enough, instead of just killed.Secondly the idea of immobilising a way too high level being by SHOVING your hand UP INSIDE IT (an ex-friend once told me if I was bitten by a Pitbull, "just shove your finger up its arse and it will let go", I never had a chance to try it out), allowing the creature to be bound or the victim extracted.Then - disastrously but perhaps predictably, it goes (slightly) wrong, resulting in the loss of only one hand. This feels like a good and appropriate mythic level beginning for a low level hero, a level-one adventure even. You get a major win over a too-high-level foe but at the cost of a major sacrifice and a big name-imbuing mythic incident to start of your career."leprosy hand guy who bound that monster that time""stank hand who fisted a demon and trapped it"Combine this with the arrival of a fated weapon, with some truly exciting powers but probably also a doom (almost certainly involving killing your own son by mistake), and you have a very nice set up for a P.I.E hero - one hand, magic mace or sword, binder of monsters, fated doom.Furthermore, investigation of the binding of Fenris myth (where Tyr got his hand bitten off), lead me to another mythic fragment; "The Gods had attempted to bind Fenrir twice before with huge chains of metal, but Fenrir was able to break free both times. Therefore, they commissioned the dwarves to forge a chain that was impossible to break. To create a chain to achieve the impossible, the dwarves fashioned the chain out of six supposedly impossible things: The sound of a cat's footfall * The beard of a woman * The roots of a mountain * The sinews of a bear * The breath of a fish * The spittle of a bird Therefore, even though Gleipnir is as thin as a silken ribbon, it is stronger than any iron chain. It was forged by the dwarves in their underground realm of Niðavellir."And this reminded me of a half-memory of something from Hinduism which I remembered as being a hero binding a demon with sea-foam. I searched for this for literally minutes and found that actually it was Indra, and not binding but a weapon;"In the epic, there is a very brief description about the story of Namuchi and Indra. According to the story, once Namuchi hid himself in the rays of Surya due to fear of Indra.Indra then promised him that he will not kill him in day or night, or with any weapon which is wet or dry. However on a foggy day, Indra chopped off Namuchi's head using foam of water.From that day onwards, Namuchi's head followed Indra reminding him that he was killer of a friend. Indra then went to Brahma to find solution for this problem.Brahma told him to bathe in the holy water of Aruna river which was purified due to confluence of river Saraswati. Indra then did the same and got rid of this sin."The concept and gameability of the impossible binding is not something I remember seeing much in fiction or games. (It feels* familiar, but, like with early wizards towers, when I look in my memory for specific examples I can't find much).This also seems like it would be a good fit for D&D, for the 'paradox binding/assembly' the collect-these-impossible-things is essentially a fetch quest which could range from very high magic to cunning folk trickery depending on how you approached it. For the sea-foam equivalent impossible natural binding, you need to find a wonder-worker, or super-smith (who probably stole their powers from a devil or demon, that’s another possible PIE myth), who can bash together the wind and rain or whatever it is you need to make your thing.I am interested if anyone in the comments has any other versions of the impossible binding motif or ideas about how it could be used.WE NEED TO BE HURLING OUR WEAPONS INTO THE SEA

"In the Ossetic Nart saga, the sword of Batradz is dragged into the sea after his death, and the British King Arthur throws his legendary sword Excalibur back into the lake from which it initially came. The Indic Arjuna is also instructed to throw his bow Gandiva into the sea at the end of his career, and weapons were frequently thrown into lakes, rivers or bogs as a form of prestige offering in Bronze and Iron Age Europe."

More magical weapons should be loaners imho, you get access to them by completing a quest, or by fulfilling some other strange circumstance, and get to keep them till thy work is done - this also means you can have more hot babes levitating and emerging from water. Probably the clear reflective water is a gate to the Otherworld and as somewhat god-imbued things, many weapons both come from and return to that place.In-game the fact that it’s a 'loaner' limits the PCs freedom, but hopefully in a specific and self-selected way so that it’s still interesting.The question of when to 'throw back' the sword, in game, is interesting. In legend it seems to happen around the point of death; the heroes whole life was the mission and it wasn't just one thing, like "kill this dragon/monster" but a more-grand 'restoration of order' deal, like with Arthur, or Arjunas taking part in the Kurukshettra.The quest of disposing or returning the magic weapon of a hero, (without using it), is an interesting one, and the idea of the heroes super-weapon turning into an adhesive cursed weapon if it is kept too long or mis-used.And of a PC being given a way too powerful weapon at the start of their career, which they have to 'grow into' and which they can only keep so long as they fulfil its purpose, which will also lead them to some sort of doomreally every magical weapon above a certain level should have a specific end that it has to have once it has fulfilled its purpose"Reflexes of an ancestral cult of the magical sword have been proposed in the legends of Excalibur and Durandal (the weapon of Roland, said to have been forged by the mythical Wayland the Smith). Among North Iranians, Herodotus described the Scythian practice of worshiping swords as manifestations of "Ares" in the 5th century BC, and Ammianus Marcellinus depicted the Alanic custom of thrusting swords into the earth and worshiping them as "Mars" in the 4th century AD."Should our heroes be worshipping their swords? If they all have a bit of the war-god, or death, the Twin, inside them, and if they are related to the Otherworld and made by the power of the Smith who tricked the Devil, then are they not themselves sacred things? And is shoving one into the Earth-Mother then not essentially making a kind of shrine? A sword is after all a kind of boundary between this world and the Otherworld, opening the gate between here and there, it surface shining just like the lake you will one day throw it into.

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The stories start to vary right from the start but one thing that links them all together is the killing of a brother and their butchering, the spilling out of bones and organs, as an act of creation with which reality was made."as the result of the original dismemberment of Yemo: his flesh usually becomes the earth, his hair grass, his bone yields stone, his blood water, his eyes the sun, his mind the moon, his brain the clouds, his breath the wind, and his head the heavens."Probably you are so familiar with this concept from mythology that you haven't stopped to think about how utterly strange it is. But to go a bit deeper;You are moving though a void, a placeless place "neither non-being was nor being was at that time; there was not the air, nor the heaven beyond it... Neither death was nor the immortal then, nor was there the mark of night and day...". You are not alive for nothing has ever lived nor are you dead, for nothing yet has ever l died. Neither are you immortal, like the gods, for there are none.You simply are. Yet you are not alone for beside you is another. They are blood of your blood. A brother. Often they are the only other thing. (Sometimes there is a third and also a cow, but we will get to that later). Sometimes they are a giant, sometimes an hermaphrodite or multi-gendered being, but the one they they always are is your twin. Their name in fact is 'twin'. Yours is 'Man'.Amidst this absolute nullity you turn on your twin, your other self, the only other thing there is, and you kill them. Then you cut them open, or since there is nothing to cut with perhaps you tear them open, and you reach into their body, steaming with blood, which is creation, and you butcher them, pulling out organs, bones, blood, tendons, hair, eyes, brain. And you cast or place these things into the nothingness and now instead of nothing there is reality. Earth, sky, sea, air, sun, moon, stars, grass and animals, all of this is built or formed from the flesh of your slain twin. And amongst all this you walk, the first man, who is also the first priest, for you made the first sacrifice and that is the nature of a priest, amidst a reality made from the corpse-flesh of you dead twin.Of all the world creation myths, this one might be the most insanely fucked up, its also a common root or tributary concept for a bunch of cultures across the Indo-European range. For the Norse the twin was Ymir, father of giants. The Romans likely historicised their own version into Romulus and Remus, and the first romans considered themselves Remans, children of Remus, not of Romulus. In the Vedic and Persian versions the twin is Yemno, another derivative of 'Twin', and becomes the lord of the underworld, first to die and god of the dead. The killer is Manu and yes it does look like we named the species after this one guy."The association of Mánu with the ritual of sacrifice is so strong that those who do not sacrifice are named amanuṣāḥ, which means 'not belonging to Mánu', 'unlike Mánu', or 'inhuman'."I think about how terrible it must be to kill your brother, the only other person who exists, the only person who can truly recognise you, and then to walk through a cosmos made of their sacrificed flesh.It makes sense if you imagine a herding people where cattle are wealth and the most valuable and immediate source of survival. Cutting open an animal on the empty steppe, its blood steaming in the air while the butcher spreads out the parts on the hide and hands this part and that to this or that kin. Truly life through sacrifice.Variations;There is a third guy there, and possibly also a cow. At some point the cow gets stolen and the third guy goes and steals it back. Honestly it sounds better in the original versions.The ritual cow stealing seems to be a restoration of order motif and the third guy is the first Warrior, with the Cow sometimes symbolising the peasant or 'grower'.So now we have a traditional proto Indo-Euopean tripartite division of Priests/Warriors/Peasants, or if we are feeling funky, Kings (Yemno was the first king)/Priests/ Warriors/Peasants.Sometimes 'Twin' is multi-gendered or you both are, or you are somehow the same being; "Some scholars have proposed that the primeval being Yemo was depicted as a two-fold hermaphrodite rather than a twin brother of Manu, both forming indeed a pair of complementary beings entwined together. The Germanic names Ymir and Tuisto were understood as twin, bisexual or hermaphrodite, and some myths give a sister to the Vedic Yama, also called Twin and with whom incest is discussed. In this interpretation, the primordial being may have self-sacrificed, or have been divided in two, a male half and a female half, embodying a prototypal separation of the sexes."WHAT CAN WE DRAW FROM ALL THIS?Its all quite familiar from mythology, or from the mythology of fantasy. There are probably hundreds of fantasy paracosms which begin with some binary separation between different opposites.Quite a lot of deep viscerality has been lost and we never get to see this from the first person perspective.Viscerailty; its quite different if you think deeply about what it would actually be like to physically destroy your own twin, your own blood, the only thing that is like you and that can know you as totally as you know them.And to think about the blood and the guts of the matter. The butchered body cooling on the steppe, everything around you being made of the body of the sacrificed twin. Imagine what it would be like to fully believe that as your cosmic mythology - every time you look at any material thing, you are looking at the flesh of some unknowable corpse, to which you are distantly related. An uncle long removed.Man is the first Killer and Killing is creation.and what does it say about a culture that this primal violence lies close to its root, or what does it say about this primal self-destroying, bloody violence and butchery that it can help to form a culture that goes on to influence so muchits a pretty powerful and irresolvable moral maelstromThe only part of current culture which I'm familiar with which deals with butchery, and especially the sacrifice and butchery of humans, is serial killer fiction specifically one of the first things that came to mind was From Hell, the very upsetting scene where we watch Jack the Ripper take the body of his victim apart and lay out the pieces in ritual formation while mumbling and going mad/embarking on an act of ritual magic which allows him to walk though the walls of realityof course, if all creation is made of sacrifice, then any such sacrifice is an act of sub-creation, and it makes sense that it would act as a kind of spell or prayer - altering or sustaining reality depending on perceptionManu as a Character;We have a shitload, really an epically insane shitload of Storm Gods, Sky Gods, Sky Fathers and their derivatives, and even more, truly a cornucopia of 'Strikers', the thunderbolt wielding hero who goes around killing monsters, releasing the waters etc.I don't think I've ever seen a story where the Manu figure, the first Priest and the first Sacrificer, who made the world from the body of 'Twin', is even in the story, let alone the main character. What would that story even be like? Or that game?Being the first Priest in a reality which you essentially part-created with the flesh of your Twin and teaching all these.. descendants? The children of Manu? Made up partly of your seed and partly of the flesh of Yemno, all about the Truth of Sacrifice and how Lord Yama, who takes the souls of the Dead in his place beyond the Canine Guardian and the River, is actually kind of the spirit(?) of your Twin, whose body made Reality and you also small man. (I'm still kind of tripping that we didn't change the name of the species in all that time. Must be one of those Querty-Keyboard situations where its just too much bother once you start.)"Oh yeah say hello to the spirit of my twin on his throne below. You know he's the only reason you can die? He was the first one to do it, which allowed time and stuff to start. I killed him. We are walking on his guts atm actually. Anyway say Hi when you see him."More Cattle Raids;Seems like there should be a lot more cattle raiding in both fantasy and gaming. Its absolute bedrock for the Indo-European tradition and has carried over all the way from the steppe to a few centuries ago.But when have I seen a D&D module or adventure or a computer game, or even a scene in a fantasy novel where "Hey we have to do a cattle raid. Partly to re-enact the core of our ancient creation myth but also just to steal cows." - NEVER. Not once.More Sacrificing;Neither have I seen (much) sacrifice in either games or fantasy. I will grant you there is the pretty-common evil-human sacrifice which the Heroes need to stop. That one is a classic. And bits and pieces of soothsaying from the Roman/Euro tradition, but its not common to see sacrifice as a thing which the protagonists are doing, or have to do, really want to do and consider not only normal but even sacred/magical. As the children of Manu we really should be sacrificing more. A LOT more. Gotta get those numbers up.If all of reality is the result of sacrificing some essential meta-being, then surely lesser sacrifices can create, or change, lesser aspects of reality? After all, butchery is genesis.

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OF THE COMING OF THE PROPHET AND THE RAISING OF PADRAIG THOUGH HE WISHED IT NOT

So suffered Tremmadoc sea-girt city of the east. First that the wives and daughters of Tremmadoc were stolen by silver-handed men and could not be found and second in the coming of the Sea-Witch and her wolves who oppressed the people sore.

Thus languished the land till came there from the Tree of Fate a man of voice and mysterious power.

This was the Prophet Pupli Artnle and so spoke he Yea I come seeking salt for sacred work. Yea I hath been struck thusly through the head as you see and yet I did not die. Yea came there inwards the voice of the Goddess Nortia who is Fate. Yea I have come and the Tree of Fate shall be made clean by my works.

They of Treammadoc heeded him not.

Yet the power of the Prophet was in the voice of his faith and spoke he thus Yea this be not your fate neither to languish without wives or to suffer under the Sea Witch but heed the Gospel of Nortia and I shall show ye another. Go with me to the sea and I shall lead thee in Her name.

And a fury fell upon the men of Tremmadoc and the Prophet lead all of them saving not one out in boats to do battle with the Sea Witch be they to live or die they knew not but let this be an end of all either for good or ill as Fate decreed.

Mighty was that battle and grievous yet it came that in time that Sorceress and her creatures were destroyed and Tremmadoc freed. As the prophet had spoken.

This so seen three men of the Tremmadoc came forth and said we will come with you and serve you and hear your Word.

Of these the strongest was Wolvela and another called Padraig the Tall who having little skill on the seas and grieving for his wife Helen and child Gwyneth who had been stole said I shall follow this Goddess and see what comes.

Thereof the Prophet did free the Tree of Fate of its corruption yet fell amidst His work and that the three of Tremmadoc knew not what to do and said amongst themselves Let he who is the best of us be called Maru that is speaker for the Prophet who is gone and he shall lead us.

So it was that Wolvela became the first Maru of Nortia yet his time was not long.

Wolvela at that time walked with those from foreign lands Kemmnebi the Egyptian Xanthippe the Amazon and others. Much lore and treasure did they gain but sadly they were set upon by false guardians of the tree of Fate who came in the forms of children yet with the heads of beetles.

There Wolvela fell and turning from the task before him Padraig said thusly Kemmnebi you are wise in lore and subtle of mind be you our Maru and lead us. For Padraig would not accept Her will.

And Kemmnebi said Aye it shall be so. Yet he was not Maru long for even within a day the subtle Egyptian fell struck down by the hairy Woodwose who grieved the faithful sore. A great tomb they raised up for him in the manner of his people and there his ghost still haunts. Thusly is Kemmnebi called the first False Maru.

Then did Padraig say to himself I am the Maru of Nortia I shall speak for the Prophet though I have not the words.

And thus was Nortia pleased and did reward Padraig saying take ye this staff carved like a snake which you have found. This Padraig did though he compassed not Her will nor saw not Her end.

Yet it came about that in striving against the killers of Kemmnebi the faithful did discover a captive among them the Assyrian Youseen a man mighty of strength and width and short himself as Padraig was tall and thus did Padraig say as I have been freed so shall I free thee. And did so.

Thusly did Yauseen speak how there do you hold the sacred staff of my fathers carved as the snake of wisdom.

And did Padraig reply if it be yours take in in good will.

And thusly Yauseen did and doing so spake this you have given me my life and returned to me the honour of my fathers I shall serve you and go with you and do your will.

And thusly it was for Yauseen was a man of might and iron word and served well the Maru from that day until the day of his death.

Yet Padraig still considered to himself thusly I be not the Maru for I know not the Word. And he thought this proved for on returning to the place called Abermaw which was the City of the Tree with Yauseen he found there awaiting him a wonder for he found there Pupli Artlnle the Prophet of Nortia whole and young.

This is only a seeming said some and others this is a wonder and proof of Her grace.

Then spoke this man with the seeming of the Prophet Agon I am and I know not of Nortia or her faith nor of the prophet you speak of yet I may learn.

Thence did Padraig once again say you are a wonder and the Prophet come again be you our Maru and lead us. For Padraig would not accept Nortias will.

OF THE GREAT CLIMB AND THE FINDING OF ALPIN THE MAGE

It was on the border of June when the faithful said amongst themselves we tire of this endless going this way and that amidst the pathways of the Tree of Fate let us instead climb it as an ant might and thence shorten our path.

This they set out to do and there began the Great Climb and amongst that pilgrimage were Padraig the Tall and Afan and Finian and Youseen the Guardian and Agon the Maru and Xanthippe and Auralian and Octavius and David of the Web and Michael and a Cat.

Greatly did the pilgrims climb that day till the world curved beneath them. It was not long before they were assaulted by Magpie Men yet they were fortunate in discovery of the Wren Men whose lord was named Vipog in that tongue and who gave them good aid and much lore.

And Vipog said thusly above us you shall find the tower of one mage Alpin of name great in power and mayhap he shall aid thee.

So climbed on the Pilgrims in search of the mage and did find his tower beset already with foul crow-men. And the Crow-Men did look upon the Pilgrims and say look here are fools come to rob what we would have let us set about them.

Thence began the Battle of the Tower high above the dreaming world.

Straightly did the faithful advance and drove the few Crow-Men back and Yauseen did close their gate behind them bar their way forth. Yet great in number were they and said we will come forth whether you will or no. Thence did the faithful make subtle words of peace with these Crow-Men yet sent by secret ways one half of their number to circle the tower and seek to make their way within.

Then the words of peace fell still and a great battling broke out surging this way and that amidst the Mages tower and the faithful did make much use of their Craft and did beguile and bemuse the Crow-Men and strike them from here and from there and in this way was their power overthrown.

Yet not without cost for in this battle did many fall Octavius and David of the Web and Afan and at the last Agon himself who Padraig had called Maru fell.

And strangely did Padraig look again upon the face of he who had died already once beneath his eyes and said this is a sight rare and strange to look upon. Then did Padraig say I am the Maru of Nortia I shall speak for the Prophet though I have not the words. Thusly is Agon named the second False Maru.

The Mage Alpin was thereby rescued and said You have aided me and I shall be thy friend take you this gold for my beloved and my child are dead and I mark its lustre no longer.

Then did the long climb of return begin and many travails met they on the way yet did return at the last to Abermaw and there was completed about that time a great Temple to Nortia in which the Prophet was shown and his body held incorruptible for all time.

OF PIG AND SALAMANDER AND HOW THE FAITHFUL WERE SAVED THEREBY

It came around the first week of June that the faithful said amongst each other here our great temple is complete yet how shall we burnish it let us return to the Tree of Fate and the Great Work thereof.

Yet said they also thusly let us not climb though for we shall die thereby.

And the Maru Padraig spoke and said I have here a pigg whom shall be named Vultumma and she shall go with me and be my guide.

Yet the faithless understood him not and said why then does he a pigg bring thusly.

And even Yauseen whose word was iron was amazed.

It came so that they ventured within the Great Tree and did go deeper and further than ever any did before. They met there strange Amazons and spoke wisely unto them and came thereby to an ossuary or necropolis of the Tree and there they encountered a being of fire long held prisoner thereof.

And Flewyn Hale did say who art thou what art thou that are imprisoned here.

And that spirit did reply a Salamander I am named and prisoner I am for my service and a long time thus.

And Flewyn did say be thou free and come with us and ye shall be named Sal.

And so it was and wisely does the Goddess weave thereof.

It was going in this way that the Faithful did discover much lore of which the greatest was the meaning of the symbols of the tree which did signify the noble houses of its ancient people and did so thusly a Stag beetle doth signify the House of Lul Apples and a trident doth signify the House of Djem a butterfly do signify the House of Thuac a Ladybird that of the House of Hengst and a Jay that of Kun.

Yet great danger came upon them for as they looked deeply on this lore a foul spirit faithless and cursed by the gods did they meet with and by which way they the faithful were stricken with bad and cloying air and did pass as if into a sleep. And at this time helpless did come upon them once more the slayers of the subtle Egyptian Kemmnebi the first False Maru and Kemnebbis ghost did raise its voice against them though the living heeded him not.

At this time the Goddess Spoke and said though ye hear me not I am with ye and though ye see me not I am thy aid. Look thou are stricken before thy enemies and yet I have woven amidst you the fate of the Pigg Vultumma and the Salamander called by some Sal and we shall see what thereof doth come.

And Vultumma the Pigg did say unto the spirit of fire guard you the way and I shall amend.

And Vultumma did snuffle amidst the stuff of Padraig and did find there a sacred branch the druids gift of which was said break this and the guardians of the tree shall flee thee.

And Vultumma bit down upon the branch and the slayers of Kemmnebbi did flee and thus were the faithful saved though they knew it not.

Thence woke the faithful and went forth and they did encounter spirits many and strange. Fox-men and a spider of great size and at the last they did find an ageless man of the tree imprisoned and a cursed and undying spirit which hung ever upon them. And the faithful said here is a cage with one who would be free and here one without death who should be caged let them therefore each receive what the other hath. And it was done and the cursed spirit caged and the man freed and the Maru Padraig spoke saying here is one alike unto one I know of whose name is Nicholas let him therefore be named Nicholas of the Cage. And it was done though another name had he yet to be revealed.

At this time the faithful were the Maru Padraig and Yauseen of the Iron Word and Vultumma the Pigg and Aurelia the Brave and Elen and also Julitta and Finian the Clever and Bolton and Flewyn Hale and Illtud and Marcus and Sal the spirit of fire.

Thence said the faithful amongst themselves let us leave this place anon and seek some way to heal this man.

Then went forth they from the Tree to Abermaw the City of the Tree and yet they did not heal the caged man but instead foolishly the said here we have escaped death let us drink of the wine and eat of the grape anon and they drank of the wine and tasted of the grape and Padraig was marked thenceforth though he should not see the mark and brave Aurelia was gropped and slathered upon by one most foul.

And the faithful spoke amongst one another saying let us league together with the bards of the blue bird and cancel this groper and slatherer and curse him in the eyes of all. And this they did and cursed the man thusly. And of this though it seem a small matter much pertains as ye shall see.

THE HEALING OF NICHOLAS WHO WAS HENGST-ATH

It came around then that the faithful went forth in search of one Dwinwen who was a lady skilled in craft and lore for they sought healing for Nicholas of the Cage whom they had brought forth from the Tree of Fate whole in body but not in mind.

And in that journey they did encounter a Roman who was Atrius a seer of fortunes and silver of tongue who said behold I have read the fates in the paths of birds and the entrails of sacrifices and the Goddess Fate has set ye before me. I shall go with thee and aid thee.

And the faithful were much amazed and said aye let it be so.

Thusly came they upon Dwinwen who kept her place between the forest and the sea and they said unto her Lady here is one grievously wounded in their soul by much suffering will you heal him.

And Dwinwen said unto them nay.

And the faithful said How be this.

And Dwinwen said unto the faithful It is beyond my power yet I shall tell thee this that there is one amongst you who shall do this thing.

And the faithful were much amazed and looked each upon the other for they could not compass how any amongst them might heal so grievous a hurt and said who then.

And Dwinwen pointed thusly upon Flewyn Hale and said there is he who shall do this for his is a man of wondrous fate and a prophet of strange gods though he knows it not.

And Flewyn was much amazed yet Dwinwen came close to him and said unto Flewyn Hale YOU know how this thing might be.

And Flewyn Hale said Nay not I.

And Dwinwen said unto Flewyn Hale Ye hear the voices in the WATERS which ye have known long past.

And Flewyn was much amazed and said but the waters speak not.

And Dwinwen was much vexed and said you carried them in a bukett.

And the scales fell from Flewyns eyes and he said come with me to clear waters and drink thereof. And they did so. And Flewyn prayed and Nicholas Cage was healed and his mind returned.

And Nicholas Cage came again to himself as a man wakes from sleep and looked about him and spoke in strange tongue which was the tongue of those within the Tree of Fate of old of which he himself was.

And Flewyn Hale said he speaketh not your tongue but shall learn yet and the waters have shown me his mind and his name be not Nicholas but Hengst-Ath and he is a man of much lore and the Sorcerer Djem-Thut did desire his lore and so put great harm upon him time out of mind till his spirit was brake and gone but is now returned and he shall aid us as he might against the Sorcerer Djem Thut.

And the faithful said aye but let us leave him with the Pigg breeder next door for safety.

And so it was.

OF THE FINDING OF TATHREN

Then came about the middle days of June and the faithful said let us go once more into the Tree of Fate and seek there for lore of Djem Thut and how we might bring harm unto him for we have now the words of Hengst-Ath who was Nicholas of the Cage to guide us.

Thence once more they went forth and found within the tree many wonders and guided by the words of Hengst Ath they did discover many sad scenes of the last days of his old people whence came the treason of Djem Thut and they did discover the Throne of Hengst and the Library of Hengst though the words of such they could not read for they hath not the lore to see.

And the Goddess looked upon them and said thy path hath been too easy to these things and thy sacrifice little and now I shall try thee. And then came upon the faithful many foes of divers kinds. A great cube which hungered without end. Spider-men and beetle-men and spell-wielders and the faithful were much grieved and said O Nortia be it truly our fate to die here with our quest undone.

And Nortia felt pity for them and came upon them a light like a lamp which burned smokeless in the air.

And the faithful said what is this be it some new foe or strange imagining.

And the light spake and said Tathren I am named and long have I dwelt here and sadly.

And the faithful said be not woeful O Tathren but come with us and aid us and we shall be thy friends.

And Tathren said Aye it shall be so.

Yet the Goddess grieved them still all the way through the passages of the Tree of Fate and when they returned finally the Druids of Abermaw said here ye be now pay unto us taxes of such and such a value of what ye have taken from the tree.

And the faithful said by what right do you take such.

And the Druids said don't give me any trouble just pay up.

And so was it from that day forth that the Faithful must render unto the Druids of Abermaw and were enjoined also never to spread the faith of Nortia in Abermaw which was the City of the Tree of Fate where Her Temple was.

And the guardians of the house said this be not all for in your passing the Woodwose have come upon us in the night and the Silver-Handed ones also.

And the Faithful spake unto Tathu the wise who dwelt between the city and the tree and said what mean this.

And Tathu the wise spake unto the faithful and said these be the children of Cerrigion who would free all women from all men and takes them thusly and ye have confounded them and they hate thee and shall be thy foes.

OF THE LIES OF PADRAIG THE DOOM OF DJEM THUT THE DEATH OF YAOUSEEN AND HOW VULTUMMA WAS LOST

At this time the Faithful spoke amongst themsleves and said let us go once more into the Tree of Fate and seek the Lore of Djem-Thut that we might know him and thence come upon him at a time and in a way of our choosing and not his.

And the Maru Padraig spake well and said aye let us creep as mice and go carefully and well and pass as shadows seeking lore only. And he looked fiercely upon the faithful to mark well his words that his will in this be known.

Went they again into the tree and after much cunning going this way and that came again to the place wherunto Nicholas of the Cage who was Hengst-Ath was found.

And Padraig lead them and they came unto a room wherin lay an ancient man well guarded and he lay in honey for he was without skin. And the ancient one spake unto them saying who be thee and be thee friend or foes of Lady Slem.

And Padraig did compass within his own heart here is Djem Thut whom the Goddess has brought before me and I shall make a devising upon him and said nay we be great foes of that lady. Thinking thereby to beguile Djem-Thut whom he thought that this was.

And the skinless man was then in great wrath and said I am Djem-Bar and am father of that Lady Slem and for my love of her I have lost my skin and been thusly cursed by the foul traitor Djem-Thut whom thou sayest thou serve and yet ye come before me thusly to boast do thee.

And Padraig made unto speak but the Goddess had seen his lies and he was judged. And the father of Slem said I curse thee foul one though it be the last of my power to do so. And a great curse he laid upon Padraig and then died and passed forever from this world.

And all strength fled from the limbs of Padraig and he was laid low and did weep mightily.

And the guards of Djem-Bar did see that he died whom their master had caused to live in great pain and they seized Padraig and brought him forth to their master Djem-Thut and Padraig could resist them not.

Thusly came the faithful to Djem-Thut who they sought not at that time but lore only.

And Padraig spake more subtlety and said O great Djem-Thut cometh here and listen to my words.

And Djem-Thut did cometh somewhat closer.

And Padraig said; do not fear me O great one for I am cursed as ye see but only come forth that I may whisper my secrets to thee.

And Djem-Thut did cometh ever somewhat closer.

And Padraig grabbed onto Djem-Thut and did cling thusly and did make to stabb the sorcerer though he lacked the strength for the curse that he had upon by Djem-Bar the Father of Slem.

And thusly did a great battle begin for all struck then upon the other and Djem-Thut did cry out and summon forth the bones of the dead to aid him and came forth also a witch of great power.

And the faithful said how came it that we did listen to the words of Padraig who did not listen to his own words.

And Flewyn Hale said fear not.

And Flewyn Hale did place upon himself a band cursed by strange magic which did make him alike unto Padraig in strength which was but that of a child. But the power of the curse was this that the spirits of the dead would hear and obey though he might summon them not for he had not that art.

And Flewyn Hale spake unto the bones of the dead who served Djem-Thut and said aye by my curse serve me and not Djem-Thut and battle him and do him harm.

And by the power of his curse they did obey and the servants of Djem-Thut turned their hand against him and seeing this Djem-Thut fled far from the voice of Flewyn Hale which did turn his own servants against him.

And Aurelia the Brave did see this and said it shall not be so for if ye flee ye shall come again. And did pursue Djem-Thut even into the depths of the Tree of Fate.

And Padraig said unto Yauseen Go with her and guard her. And he went.

And Aurelia did meet with Djem-Thut and did strive mightily against him. And Djem-Thut cried out saying come to me my servants away from the voice of that fool and his curse. And the servants of Djem-Thut did come. Yet Yauseen did bar the way and said by my word O servants of Djem Thut ye shall not pass. And thus was the traitor Djem-Thut kept from those who would heed his word and must strive against vengeance at last with his own hands and none other. And there did Aurelia the Brave strike down Djem-Thut and destroy him utterly who had done much evil in his time.

And so did in time Flewyn Hale turn all the servants of Djem-Thut upon one another and at last upon themselves by the power of the curse which he had placed upon himself.

And Padraig sat upon the throne of Djem-Thut and said where is Yauseen of the Iron Word whom I freed from the Woodwose and whom I sent to guard Aurelia as she strove against Djem-Thut.

And they said he is dead and fallen.

And Padraig said whence is Vultumma the Pigg who hath saved us all at one time and whom I send forth for aid.

And they said she is likely eaten by this beast.

And he said unto them nay.

And the faithful spake unto him and said no really this giant monster probably ate her on the way out.

And Padraig said nay she lives yet.

Thence came they forth from the Tree of Fate and so weakened were they by curses and the great striving they had undergone that they could not even make to lift and bring the body of Yauseen who had died in his service and it lay still within and far.

And they came forth and said unto the Maru Padraig this is largely thy own fault for thee listened not to thy own words.

And he said speak not of this to me.

And he commanded that an Iron Throne be forged facing the sea and that a great lay be written for Yauseen and a statue carved of him and he sat upon the throne and gazed upon the seas much while and thought much on his curse.

OF THE DOOM OF AURELIA WHO HAD SLAIN DJEM-THUT

It came around the end of June that a great feast was laid for the memory of Yauseen and others.

And that one who had gropped and fondled the brave Aurelia was seen and did skulk muchly. Therefore the Faithful spoke unto one of them Marcus and said go ye forth and seek this man and learn his ways that we might know them.

And the people of City of the Tree did say this guy is banging dryads in the woods.

Thence came amongst the faithful a Woodwose one of whom they had strived against much time in the past. And Padraig and others did capture the Woodwose and did make many questions to it alike unto what is that perv up to.

And the Woodwose spoke that he they had cancelled served now the Silver Handed ones the children of Cerrigion who had stolen the women of Sea-Girt Tremmadoc in times past.

And Aurelia and Padraig and Flewyn Hale said we shall pursue this man and look upon him and learn his ways. And they did so and followed him deep into the forest whence they came upon a glen. And the pervert did turn upon them and say unto them ha ha I hath lead thee here to thy doom. And the silver handed ones came then against them from as many places as the wind doth blow. And they did strike down Padraig and Aurelia the slayer of Djem Thut and Flewyn Hale also. And only Hengst-Ath whom had seen from a distance these things escaped to take swift word to the faithful.

It came then that Padraig and Aurelia and Flewyn awoke in durance vile in a place unknown to them. And Aurelia did strive mightily and did compass her own freedom by her cunning and her strength. And she could not work to aid Padraig or Flewyn Hale but said fear not for I shall return for thee with great force and strong. And Aurelia did flee that place.

But the Goddess looked not upon her for in that place were many foes and strong. As thick as wool upon a sheeps back lay they this way and that. And Aurelia fled from them but could not for they were as trees in a forest and at every turn arrows blackened the air like buzzing flies and Aurelia who had striven against Djem-Thut and laid him low and avenged the Lady Slem was there struck down by the children of Cerrigion and rose not and she passed forever from this world and was not seen again.

And the children of Cerrigion came unto Padraig and Flewyn in the guise of women of great beauty and said behold she is dead now marry us or ye shall surely die.

Yet is was not to be for Hengst-Ath had in this time warned and roused the faithful and they had leagued together in great force and sought out the place of Cerrigion thinking to rescue those taken.

And thus they did and came against the isle of Cerrigion with cunning and great fury and though many fell Padraig and Flewyn both were rescued. And Atrius the Roman said let us by our victory convert these Woodwose to the true faith of Nortia. And it was done and they were branded and did submit.

OF THE THREE-FACED DRUID THE HEALING OF PADRIG AND THE CUNNING OF ATRIUS

It came then that the faithful spake much to each other and said lo Aurelia is lost and here is Padraig the strongest amongst us and he cursed and Flewyn Hale also. Let them thereby be healed and let us seek out the witch Dwinwen who makes her place between the forest and the sea.

So went forth they. Padraig in beggars rags for shame.

And they discovered Dwinwen and said Lady may you heal these men.

And Dwinwen spake unto them and said aye yet I am grieved and cannot.

And the faithful said what grieveth thee lady.

And thusly spoke Dwinwen who made her home between the forest and the sea hath I apprenticed to me the girl called Goewin a maiden wise and fair and there live in this land a three-faced Druid of great power who walks the land in silver shoes and liveth alone in the dark of the world and this man hath taken Goewin from me and placed her in durance vile in the veins of the earth and has set about her great catts and would do his will with her yet his power is too great for me to overthrow.

And the faithful said do we return this Goewin to thee and Padraig and Flewyn Hale shall be freed from their curse.

And Dwinwen said aye for Padraig it shall be but fear ye the three faced Druid for his vengeance shall be great and he flies as with the wind.

So the faithful went then to the forest to the cavern of dark earth where Goewin was kept by that man and they spied the three faced druid not yet saw set about that place wondrous great catts of strange seeming. And the faithful did compass much within themselves of their own art and craft of subtlety yet as it fell out such compassings aided them not and the catts did do them much harm yet Flewyn Hale did draw away the Maiden Goewin and they did return her to the lady Dwinwen who kept her place between the forest and the sea.

And Dwinwen said here is one I have desired above all others. And was much joyed and spoke let thy curse be lifted. And it was so but for Padraig only.

And Dwinwen spoke get thou gone home and hope you well the three-faced Druid finds you not.

The faithful feared much they would encounter the three faced druid and compassed within themselves a scheme by which they would dress and seem to be those other than themselves and would act and be so for all the journey home without rest and if the three faced druid should come upon them yea still he would see them not.

And this they did and those who were great became small and said slaves are we of these others and dressed in rags. And those others gilded themselves mightily and said masters are we of these slaves.

And it came that in this journey one night Atrius the Roman heard and saw a man stepp from the sky on silver shoes as a bird doth land.

And Atrius said within himself here is this man of whom we desired no meeting yet fear not for we shall see what comes.

And lo the man had indeed three faces and was a druid of great lore and all the darkness of the earth was his and he casted about and saw all and yet saw not and he said unto Atrius who be thee.

And Atrius spoke thusly I am the master and these my slaves and these others my guards would you buy any for they tire me greatly.

And the three-faced druid asked then of any sign of men of arms or craft-knowing kind of whom he said had robbed him of a great prize and he did describe just such as were before him but he knew them not.

And Atrius said yea indeed we have seen such near the place of Dwinwen some days ago and south they went by my reckoning and quickly for it seemed they feared some follower.

Hearing this the three-faced druid gave much thanks and stepped on silver shoes into the air as a bird flies and flew away south.

And thus did the faithful return to City of the Tree and put off their seemings having healed Padraig and saved the maiden Goewin.

HOW THE FAITHFUL SOUGHT HONOUR BUT FOUND ONLY DEATH SHAME AND GOLD

It came about the midst of June of that year that Padraig said seek I the body of Yauseen who served me well and also that of Iltud.

Then once more the faithful went forth into the Tree of Fate and sought not battle nor gold but the bodies of friends yet they were to be grieved much thereof.

Battle did they find with spiders various and of great danger. The thrones of Hengst they found and through the lore of Hengst-Ath they discovered a great treasure which was in the form of a great trident all of gold.

Then much suffering did they undergo as a terrible spider again came upon them and did poison near all with a curse of dancing which made them helpless and it seemed that all would be lost.

And they came then upon cultists of the doomed Djem-Thut and sadly the Roman Atrius was lost and it is said so great was his knowledge of what would be that he went to his own death wisely and silently for he feared it not but took his place in fates strand and he spake thusly one shall come who is greater than I.

And came forth the faithful not with the body of Yauseen which they had sought but only with gold and the body of Atrius of which neither had they sought at this time.

HOW THE MARU PADRAIG COMMANDED THE KURGAN OF YAUSEEN

Then came near the end of June and the Maru Padraig said we shall do it again and we shall get him out.

And as he spoke so was it done and through battles and encounters they came again to the place of the Doom of Djem-Thut and found there the mortal body of Yauseen and also that of Iltud who had also fallen there.

And they came forth from the Tree of Fate and met in coming forth a strange party alike unto their own of olden times of Roman and Celtic and Hebrew and Assyrian they were. And Padraig spake much with the Assyrians saying tell me of Yauseen who I have here in this barrel. And they spake much to him and said here take this charm of friendship with our people.

Then came they forth and the Maru Padraig said there shall be a Kurgan and a great mound for Yauseen my friend.

OF THE TREACHERY OF THE BRETONS THE CYCLOPS AND HOW THE FAITHFUL WERE AVENGED

Yet they spake unto the Maru saying he must be mummified thereof afore he go within the kurgan.

And the Maru Padraig said who shall do this.

And they said strange men to the north who have this knowledge.

And the Maru Padraig spoke and said let us go and let it be done and we shall go forth in ships and tread upon the waters to the place where these people are and by such manner we shall near fly and fear not the woods nor dark. And the Goddess saw this and said ye shall have thy will but for one half of thy journey and the rest I shall make of my own and ye shall grieve thereby yet we shall see what comes.

So the faithful set forth upon the waters and went to the place of preservation and Yauseen they kept with them in a barrel as he was brought forth from the Tree of Fate.

And they came unto the place of salt and death and spoke to those there and said here is one who served fate well shall ye preserve him.

And they who dwelt there said aye for gold it shall be done and in one months time.

Then set forth the faithful to fare home thinking all well.

Yet came upon them on the seas a ship of Bretons great in number and said unto the faithful give us all that ye have and ye shall live. And the Maru Padraig said nay nought shall ye have neither lives nor goods shall ye possess.

But the Maru spoke not well for came against them a second ship of which the first alone had greater number and the second as much again and the faithful fled to the shore pursued by arrows and by swords.

And Hasdrubal there fell and the Maru Padraig became wood and knew not what he did and the faithful fled into the dark forest which they had thought not to pass through by taking the waters as they did and far from home they were and without aid.

The faithful passed then through the dark forest and met they there in darkness dogs which spoke as akin to dreams one to the other and the faithful said to each other let us not tarry here and they moved on.

And they made camp in the darkness and set watch and said by the Goddess all shall be well. And they knew not that they thusly set themselves close unto the brother of Polyphemus who was the son of the Ocean which they had fled.

And in the night this son of Polyphemus came upon the faithful and a great battle and striving there began on the borders of sleep. And there Flavius died squashed like a grape by the brother of Polyphemus and Padraig and others did blind the giant and through great suffering did overcome and break its strength.

And they came then to the cave of the giant and found there many sheep and gold and one named Çuthèÿura of Atlantis which had been lost beneath waters as the old lore tells and said Fate be praised of Goddes we beg that ye lift your wrath from us.

And She was merciful and they did walk for many days to Tremmadoc whence forth Padraig had come long afore yet they knew him not at first for he was much changed through his sufferings.

There Padraig found Ina the Ever-Smiling whom they knew of old and Ina spake unto Padraig saying Lord free from these fishermen for they desire me greatly having no other woman in Tremmadoc of the Sea. And Padraig spake unto the men of Tremmadoc saying lay not your hand upon her lest it be cut off Lo I make her here the one who speaks for the Maru in Tremmadoc Lo I set gold before her Lo for in the City of the Tree of Fate they shall hear not Her word yet in Tremmadoc it shall be heard and from this one Ina whom I set before you for her smile is the smile of Fortune for thee and see thee besmirch it not.

And the faithful did at this time seek to take again the salt path and return thusly to the City of the Tree and the Goddess did at this time smile upon them thusly for they had accomplished Her will and Nortia said see what awaits you there.

And the faithful came once again to the City of the Tree yet came in subtle wise that they may be seen and not known. And they found there in the harbour the two ships of the Bretons who had sorely them grieved and they found also a new many awaiting them saying teach us of Nortia O Maru and we shall serve thee.

And the faithful did devise darkly saying look what here is set before us. And did send some of that many who were unknown to the place where the Bretons were and they said brave sailors drink with us and tell us of your adventures. And the Bretons drank of the wine and tasted of the grape and were much pleased. And the many of the faithful said then it grows late here come to our home where a feast is waiting that we may hear more of your words. And the Bretons were greatly pleased and did come and did come into the very house of they whom they had much grieved on the salt path though they knew it not.

And they of the faithful said come sit and drink yet drink only from these cups of horn and not the other for such is the manner of our people. And the Bretons did so but they were deceived for the cups held deadly poison. And some among the Bretons did stand and say what goeth here. And came then forth the faithful whom the Bretons had much grieved upon the salt path and said see now the paths of Fate for she is cruel. And they did strike down the faithless Bretons with great force and furious anger until only few remained and said spare us we beg. And Padraig said aye if ye beg it ye shall be spared indeed from our vengeance.

And they did deliver these Bretons to the Druids of the City of the Tree and said here are bandits and liars who have done much harm do as ye will with them. And the Druids were much pleased and did sacrifice the Bretons most direly and did glory much in the shedding of blood and said to Padraig here taketh as token this charm alike unto the anvil of Tyr and should ye be in danger throw it thusly to the earth and ye shall be saved.

OF THE CYNOMACHY AND THE BATTLE OF THE BURNING CLIFFS

Here came the midst of August and the Maru Padraig spoke unto his many and said I tire and rage most mightily at the doings of Cerrigion who hath stole my wife Helen and whose Woodwose hath killed Kemmnebbi the Subtle the ghost of which haunts us still many a time and whose creatures killed also Aurelia the Brave who brought doom to Djem-Thut go thou ye all in ones and twos and seek throughout the land for this Cerrigion by signs which I shall tell thee.

And went forth at that time Veep and Adwen and Cennwych and Afan and Marcus and Brothen and others.

And it was discovered at that time by Pandion the Greek who was a man of lore and who dwelt with them there that the Druids of the City of the Tree served truly spirits who dwelt atop the Tree of Fate and all remarked greatly on this lore and wondered much as to what it may mean.

And cameth them amongst them at that time the faithful Hampsicora of the Red Smock who was much learned in Lore also and who had been long sought from foreign lands.

And five days passed and Veep and Adwen returned and said we findeth no signs of Cerrigion yet we have become married in our time. And the Maru Padraig said go ye then to Tremmadoc and serve Ina there.there Ina the ever-smiling.

And Cennwych and Afan returned not neither any other but Marcus and Brothren did return and said we have seen by the signs a dwelling of the children of Cerrigon and Padriag was much pleased and said bring horses for now is the time and they were brought.

Came then the faithful to a place of Cerrigian which was a lake upon which swam white swans which were her children and cliffs above and a cave within guarded by those swans.

The faithful thought much on what would be and at this time a wondering came upon each of them as to the weave of fate which had brought them hither.

Yet Flewyn Hale went unto the cliffs and did scale them and did spread oil upon the waters. Then did Çuthèÿura speak mightily unto the swans and did summon them thusly and Finian the Clever did put light to the waters and they did burn and so began the first battle of the Cynomachy which was the doom of Cerrigion.

Yet of this the Maru Padraig took little part for Pandion the Greek did entangle him with sorcery along with Çuthèÿura and neither might be freed till the other and that with great danger and Padraig was much grieved.

There fought bravely against the swans Marcus the Combed who did much havoc amongst them by means of his bow and Brothen called the Friendly who sadly died at that time. Came forth from the cave below many Woodwose and a Sorceress with golden hair and silver handed ones and they did come unto the Maru Padraig and burn him yet he lived but Çuthèÿura who was with him died and passed forever from this world. And the faithful were scattered as the leaves of the storm and it seemed the Goddess turned Her face from them.

And Padraig speak unto Marcus who had fought well saying be thee now the Maru and not I and did leap upon the Sorceress and carry her with him over the cliffs down to the burning waters below thinking thereby both should die but the Goddess willed it not.

And Finian the clever were seized by a swan and carried away and Pandion the Greek were stricken low and taken by the silver handed ones.

Yet Padraig came subtly from the waters and hid himself within the cave below and did await his foes. And the Sorceress of the Golden Hair did likewise rise from the waters and came upon him though she saw him not and Padraig came from the darkness and slew her.

And thereby woke Flewyn Hale who had fallen before and came upon them all the force of the children of Cerrigion. Yet Pandion also awoke and struck back at his captors.

From the cliffs edge to the burning waters to the black cave had they battled and did strive mightily the servants of the two Goddesses one Fate who is Nortia and the other Cerrigion the stealer of women.

And Padraig thought then upon the words of the Druids to whom the treacherous Bretons had been given and by them sacrificed and on their words and the charm of the anvil of Tyr and he did make his way through many foes to solid earth and did hurl the anvil downwards.

And then came the children of the Tree of Fate who sprang up from the cold earth in the shapes of trees that walked and by this manner were the children of Cerrigion scourged and defeated and the day won at that time.

And Flewyn Hale did discover a Bear God of the Woodwose and a Satyr there chained and said who be thee and why be thee chained.

And the Satyr said Bryonne I am called and have been prisoned here long while through fear of the Woodwse who serve Cerrigion and placed here by their God who is a bear who they have made to save them from Cerregion for they fear Her greatly.

And Flewy Hale spake unto Bryonne and said be free and come with us and be our friend.

And the Satyr Bryonne said aye.

Then did the faithful who remained discover a great lake beneath the earth and beyond it a great hound and a portal which it did guard.

And Padraig said lo ye children of the Tree make of thyselves a raft and she we shall pass these waters and come upon this Hound and Bryonne shall sing a song of sleep yet we shall hear it not for we shall block our ears and thusly shall we come upon it and do it harm.

Yet it would not be so for the dogg wakened and did breathe fire upon them all. And sadly Marcus who Padraig had named Maru in his despair was then burnt nigh unto a crisp and passed from this world and was not seen again. Thusly is he called the Third False Maru.

And a great striving did the faithful they make against the hound yet at the end they laid it low with the aid of the Children of the Tree who were with them.

And Flewyn Hale took then the power of the god of the Woodwose and lo his curse of old times was lifted and he became alike unto a bear in strength though his tongue were lost in the doing.

And in time the key to the portal was found and the faithful did make a seeming of themselves to be the servants of Cerrigion and passed thusly through dream and mystery and came therby to the place where She was.

HOW FINIAN MET WITH RHASKUS AND HOW EACH THEN FARED

Yet Finian the Clever who had been taken by the swan awoken to find himself in durance vile and there with him one called Rhaskus of Illyria.

And the children of Cerrigion came unto them and said marry us or ye shall surely die.

And of this Finian said I like it not yet Rhaskus thought it good and much words they had thusly.

And the children of Cerrigion brought forth Finain and Rhaskus from durance and said here behold is a paradise indeed for here is the throne of Cerrigion. And Finian and Rhaskus did behold a great lake upon which an isle did float and upon the isle were a Goddess with the head of a great swan and this was Cerrigion. And all about the lakeside women did take their ease and no men were to be seen but for the silver handed ones.

And the children of Cerrigion said lay with us and thy sons shall be silver handed ones and thy daughters raised thusly in the bower of Cerrigion. And Rhaskus thought it good and Finian not so.

And Finian spake secretly unto Rhaskus saying let us capture a swan and make for the City of the Tree which is called Abermaw and Rhaskus liked this not and said let us bang maidens here instead.

Yet Finian would not have it so and by his craft he did mount such a swan and make as if he would take its life and said fly me to Abermaw which is the City of the Tree and the swan rose up into the air with Finian upon it and did fly yet the children of Cerrigion did pursue.

Yet Rhaskus the Illyrian rose not and instead waited in the bower of Cerrigion to see what might be either maidens or sex slavery or both.

And Finian the Clever did ride the Swan though it liked him not until it would go no further and he came from it then and leapt to the earth. And the children of Cerrigion looked all about to find him but by his subtlety they saw him not. And Finian came thencewise to the City of the Tree and passed muchly from this part of the tale for he did drinketh and shop instead.

OF THE DOOM OF CERRIGION

Yet as Finian flew above the faithful did pass below and come secretly to the bower of Cerrigion.

And the watchers and guardians did say who be that who cometh from below.

Yet the faithful wore the horns and hands of silver handed ones and spoke not from the darkness yet came closer and the Children of the Tree of Fate with them.

And they came unto the guardians of Cerrigion in the night and slew them secretly and found themselves within Her bower which was a lake girded by pastures and an isle floating amidst as we have before said.

And the Maru Padraig said now is the time let us chance all and they went forth in darkness and the Children of the Tree did make a raft of their bodies and in this way they crossed the lake and came unto the very throne of Cerrigion upon its isle upon the lake.

And the Children of the Tree did surround the throne at all sides and the Satyr Bryonne did sing a song of fear and the swans did flee and the false goddess Cerrigion were thus left alone against the children of Nortia. And the Maru Padraig said go then and tear her in vengeance ye children of the tree. And they did so and came upon her from all sides and though the swan-headed goddess strove mightily she were laid low and thereby the doom of Cerrigion came upon her

And Rhaskus the Illyrian seeing this thought unto himself this jig is up and best I get on Nikes favoured side and did swim unto that isle.

Yet the children of Cerrigion did live and did seek vengeance for their Goddess and a great battle began on the surface of that lake for they seeked to reach the mortal body of their goddess yet Padraig and Flewyn and Rhaskus stood against them yet with the morning it came about that the children of Cerrigion were slain all some by bow some by sling and some by a picnic table wielded by Flewyn Hale yet of the last she died saying kill us if ye will yet we beg that ye wound not these women but keep them safe.

And the women stolen by Cerrigion were thence freed from paradise and Padraig spoke unto them and said fear not O women for ye shall soon be returned to your husbands and ye shall labour for them and bear children as ye did in times past and much joy they had. And the women of the Bower were six hundreds in number.

And there amongst them were Helen the wife of Padraig and Gwyneth her daughter and Padraig were much joyed by this and knew not what to speak to those so long taken from him.

And lo the women were returned to the City of the Tree called Abermaw through much hardship though Rhaskus the Illyrian did go ahead to mark the way and did encounter and strive against much wonder and danger thereof. And indeed some women did die being knocked down by bandits and eaten by spiders but most did not and upon the last day a great gold dragon were seen high in the air and they came thusly again to Abermaw the City of the Tree wherein the Temple of Nortia was and the Kurgan of Yauseen near complete and where Finian had waited thusly a long while for their return.

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yanking the less-used parts of the Indo-European Mythos for our Frankenstein version of the same.We seem to have accidentally/on purpose reconstructed elements of the proto Indo-European mythos in our current fantasy worlds. It happened strangely. The tides of history rolled over cultures, avoiding some until late, preserving others. We have the Norse myths, largely textualised by Christians, the Roman myths left behind after the Empire receded. We have fragments of pseudo-celtic myth through the Arthurian stories and we have very late additions, fragments of the old pagan religion of Lithuania wiped out close to the renaissance.And we have the 'key to all mythologies' the Indian Vedic religion, which the west largely has access to due to European empires bumping into India. And we have the Iranian stuff and a bunch of other smaller things I forgot.But in the anglo-influenced 'western' worlds of fiction the big ones are Greece, Rome and 'Vikings'. Plust maybe a dab of King Arthur. The Greek and Roman mythos are the safe spaces to play in fiction during the Renaissance, I think the Norse comes in later and well, to cut a long story short; Mallory > Sir Walter Scott > a jewish depression baby in New York making comics about King Arthur because he saw him in movies growing up and that means he's American Culture.Add in another major point of fissure and reconstruction in the 60s probably and bobs your uncle. Or to be more precise; Sky Father sees all, Earth Mother nourishes, the hammer/lightning wielding hero fights the serpent and releases the waters (thanks), elves or whatever come from the otherworld which might also be the land of the dead, guarded by a river and a big dog (don't forget your ferryman coins), and that land is ruled by a grim dude who might be the Sky Fathers brother, who he may have also killed to start the world, and that sacrifice was witnessed by the first priest who might kind of be the first man? His name was Manu anyway. Regardless, the world will end in a giant super-fight between an Archdemon and a another hero of some kind but before that happens remember to praise the dawn, be careful around snakes as they are immortal, respect the spirits in trees and throw your sword, or bronze axe or whatever, into a pool of water because those are also gateways to the Otherworld. Also rivers have sexy spirits in them.All of the above paragraph are from the reconstructed Indo-European mythos (accuracy levels = unknown without time travel but fuck it), and all were essentially divided up by the inheriting and influenced cultures, who respectively went super fucking hard on different aspects, a well as altering, swapping back and forth etc.Basically imagine that the Indo Europeans cooked a bunch of cultures a meal (probably a nightmare banquet), and then every subsequent culture started adding to and changing parts. Some cultures grew, or their own cultural influence was vast, affecting many people, though they changed a lot, others were small but relatively unchanged. Most were lost.Then from about 1500 to 1900 a Euro-oriented culture says "Fuck this", takes every remaining fragment they can find, puts it all in a blender, mixes it and starts telling stories based on the resulting taste.And oddly enough, a lot of fictional properties.. end up producing bizarre ghost-echo facsimiles of the original myths.Lot of mixed metaphors there and a long explanation for what's a simple essential concept; since we are in some way vibing with the shadow of the Indo-European mythos, I would like to reach back to find a few of the less-popular fragments of the assumed original and to bring them back to gild the shadow of our stately dreams.HORNY DAWNWhat if Apollo was a hot babe who was also kinda sexually predatory? Well! By frankensteining various derivations of the Dʰuǵh₂tḗr Diwós, "Sky Daughter", child of the Sky, and merging them into one horrific glorious post-indo-european whole, we can do just that!From the Vedas we can take the positive light-bringer elements that later got appended to Apollo in the west;"Ushas (Vedic Sanskrit: उषस् / uṣás) is a Vedic goddess of dawn in Hinduism.[1][2] She repeatedly appears in the Rigvedic hymns, states David Kinsley, where she is "consistently identified with dawn, revealing herself with the daily coming of light to the world, driving away oppressive darkness, chasing away evil demons, rousing all life, setting all things in motion, sending everyone off to do their duties". She is the life of all living creatures, the impeller of action and breath, the foe of chaos and confusion, the auspicious arouser of cosmic and moral order called the Ṛta in Hinduism."From KuRaPro"She dispels darkness, reveals treasures and truths that have been hidden, illuminates the world as it is. .... She symbolizes reality, is a marker of time and a reminder to all that "life is limited on earth". She sees everything as it is, and she is the eye of the gods, according to hymns 7.75–77."Not only that but we can add that classic Indo-European element - COW POWER."Ushas is described in Vedic texts as riding in a shining chariot drawn by golden-red horses or cows, a beautiful maiden bedecked with jewels, smiling and irresistibly attractive, who brings cheer to all those who gaze upon her."Hymn 6.64 associates her with wealth and light, while hymn 1.92 calls her the "mother of cows" and one, who like a cow, gives to the benefit of all people."Good so far, but there to this we can add the Greek elements of beauty;"The dawn goddess Eos was almost always described with rosy fingers or rosy forearms as she opened the gates of heaven for the Sun to rise. In Homer,[27] her saffron-colored robe is embroidered or woven with flowers; while the singer in the Homeric Hymn to Helios calls her ῥοδόπηχυν (ACC), "rosy-armed" as does Sappho; rosy-fingered and with golden arms"...."The delicate and fragile beauty of her appearance seems to be in total contrast with the carnal nature that was often attributed to her in myth and literature."Because the Greek Dawn Goddess is horny on main;"Eos fell in love with mortal men several times, and would abduct them in similar manner to how male gods did mortal women. Her most notable mortal lover is the Trojan prince Tithonus, for whom she ensured the gift of immortality, but not eternal youth, leading to him aging without dying for an eternity. In another story, she carried off the Athenian Cephalus against his will, but eventually let him go for he ardently wished to be returned to his wife, though not before she denigrated her to him, leading to the couple parting ways."The same energy seems to have been refracted in different cultures. Especially in the Greek/Roman mythos the original was split, order reason and hope ending up with Apollo, while irresistable beauty leads to Aphrodite, together they consume most of the original god elements leaving only a vague Dawn Goddsee behind.But what if we had ALL OF THESE TOGETHER? We could have a super-hot golden rosy-fingered, saffron veiled Dawn riding her chariot pulled by red-gold cows across the firmament, upholding reason and order, defeating chaos, but also SUPER HOT and horny as fuck, and jealous, just abducting hot guys and not letting them go until they admit she is hotter than their wives.THE FIRE IN WATER MYTH - THE WELL OF ETERNITY"Another reconstructed myth is the story of the fire in the waters. It depicts a fiery divine being named H₂epom Nepōts ('Descendant of the Waters') who dwells in waters, and whose powers must be ritually gained or controlled by a hero who is the only one able to approach it"This one doesn't have the same "condesive" power as Sexy Dawn but it does have a particular poetic beauty which I have not seen replicated in fiction.Fire in general is interesting in the reconstructed Indo-European mythos. 'Eternal flames' are common. The Zoroastrian seem to have inherited one part of that and in middle ages Lithuanian culture warriors for the church said it was easier to shut down the sacred eternal flames than to cut down the sacred groves as the fires gave themselves away by their brightness. Fire is also associated with sacrifice, which is a heavy, heavy strand in the mythos. Reality began with a sacrifice and the sacrifice of animals and animal flesh remains important, usually they are shared with or sent to the gods by fire, the Fire-God forming a kind of link between the mortal and divine realms."In one Vedic hymn Apām Napāt is described as emerging from the water, golden, and "clothed in lightning", which has been conjectured to be a reference to fire."Nechtan of Irish Myth guarded a sacred well;"Nechtain son of bold Labraidwhose wife was Boand, I aver;a secret well there was in his stead,from which gushed forth every kind of mysterious evil.There was none that would look to its bottombut his two bright eyes would burst:if he should move to left or right,he would not come from it without blemish."By TomTCAnother well from the same mythos;"Connla's well, loud was its sound,was beneath the blue-skirted ocean:six streams, unequal in fame,rise from it, the seventh was Sinann.The nine hazels of Crimall the sagedrop their fruits yonder under the well:they stand by the power of magic spellsunder a darksome mist of wizardry."And from there to the numerous wells in Norse mythology. The Urðarbrunnr, the Well of Fate where the Norns go to weave the Skien of men;Two sections of the book Skáldskaparmál reference Urðarbrunnr. The first reference is in section 49, where a fragment of a work by the 10th century skald Kormákr Ögmundarson is recited in explaining how "Odin's fire" is a kenning for a sword. The passage reads "A sword is Odin's fire, as Kormak said: Battle raged when the feeder of Grid's steed [wolf], he who waged war, advanced with ringing Gaut [Odin's] fire." and that Urðr "rose from the well."and "Mímisbrunnr", the Well of Wisdom which seems to have a similar nature"High explains that, beneath this root" [of Yggdrasil] "is Mímisbrunnr and that the well contains "wisdom and intelligence" and "the master of the well is called Mimir. He is full of learning because he drinks of the well from the horn Giallarhorn. All-father went there and asked for a single drink from the well, but he did not get one until he placed his eye as a pledge."*"What do we get if we condense all of these? A primal fire, perhaps that of the first sacrifice, hidden beneath water. A deep water it seems, and dark. In many versions the three Fates (very common across the Mythos) guard or dwell nearby. In some particular animals live there, the original swans from which all others descend, or the Salmon of Wisdom, who eat the magical Hazel Nuts which drop into the water.There is always fire or brightness under the water, a God, the flashing of Salmon, or the knowledge of Fate. Probably you are going to lose at least one eye, likely both. Odin sacrifices one to drink from the water, those who look into the well of Nechtain have their eyes melt out. A God arises "golden, and clothed in lightning". Apām Napāt in the Vedas and also in early Zoroastrianism. Deep water, bright eternal fire, knowledge of Fate, a connection to the Divine and divine sacrifice, and the sacrifice of eyes for those who look.Of course both Warhammer and Warcraft have their own 'Well of Eternity'. In Warhammer Tzeetch throws his chief Demon in to discover eternal knowledge and ends up with a mutated Kairos Fateweaver, who can see past and future at the same time, lies and tells the truth at once and who is curiously blind to the present.
(I am out of time for this post but may return to the subject in future).

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THE CURSE OF JOSH REYNOLDS"Yea O Son of the West, ye shall have thy will and shall write for Black Library, and ye shall be prolific indeed, ye shall be the destroyer of one world and the cornerstone of the new.Rare shall thy skillset be, a truly capacious knowledge for Lore combined with a neat eye for the way belief systems interact with character and an unusually detailed yet lively synthesis of the working structure of an extensive paracosm.Yet thy works shall be cursed all of thy days O Reynolds!For the editors shall love thee not!And thy sales will be mid at best!And more! For it shall be that for at least one book in every three ye shall seek to begin a series, a steady earner alike unto Gaunts Ghosts or Caphias Cain - yet cucked shall thee be every damn time and not one series will thou have for more than a book or two! (until cometh the Final Days).And the fates shall hide thy ongoing plot strands in the short fictions and random bits and pieces of the Black Library, a maze of threads lost on books and fragments many of which never even get a softback release! Where are the readers of thy PDF's O Reynolds? Who is He who shall untangle the web of which bits of early AoS Lore were written by thee?And worst of all, for of every book ye write - yea all, unto the last, shall be an investigation of the nature of faith and identity in a cosmos in which the gods are both real and flawed!!!"................................................Welcome to the Warhammer World of Josh Reynolds, often cheesy, somewhat inconsistent and something of a Trope Enjoyer, but who nevertheless has (had) one of the strongest and most particular personal and philosophical paradigms of any Black Library writer, which only glisten more fiercely through the gloaming of his works as more is read.Reynolds has written a LOT of stuff for Black Library and a LOT of it is out of print, was never in a lot of print to begin with or is strung out in random short stories and audio dramas, this is by no means a complete picture, and many of the following I read long ago and have forgotten a lot of salient details.We shall go in rough publication order, with some diversions and arrangements based on theme and content, (though really there are only ever a handful of themes.................................................2012 Knight of the Blazing Sun
I think this is Reynolds first book for BL, back when the Old World still Existed and its remarkable in how it exemplifies a LOT of Reynolds traits, even from the start. Faith, identity, the meaning of choice or free will when expressed in and through the schemes and counters of capricious gods, and being cucked out of a series every damn time.The Knights of the Blazing Sun, a sort of Reasonable Templars group who worship Myrmidia, an own-brand Athena, which makes them unusual in the grimdark grimdank grim germanic northern world of the Warhammer Old World where people worship things like bears, hammers and ice. They are into reading and learning! Progress! THINK Boy THINK! Thinking good. But they are still a cult and while they are into reason that is because they are into a Goddess who is into Reason, which sets up some interesting conflicts.Our hero is Hector Goetz, an up and coming Knight who everyone agrees is pretty great as he consistently wins fights and beats up Orcs .Hector does indeed win fights, and he feels pretty weird about that. He is a replacement knight, his brother was meant to enter the order but fucked off somewhere, so Hector had his life path disturbed and was dumped into Knighthood by surprise. He wanted to build bridges not fight people. He doesn't really 'feel' like a knight and, though he appreciates the relative reasonableness of the cult of Myrmidia, is fully aware that he doesn’t really deeply believe in his Goddess.Plus he has caught Warpdreams from a nightmarish encounter with a hideous chaos thing on his first mission. He won but chaos being chaos, it stuck to him and has given him magical PTSD. Plus on his latest glorious venture, slaying an Orc warlord, he got pincushioned by goblin arrows with mushroom poison tips, which has meant he has spent the last several weeks screaming, hallucinating, freaking the fuck out and being held down, which has given him even more PTSD.To everyone else, he is Hector Goetz, the guy who became a knight real fast, then killed that fucked up chaos thing on his first trip out, then took on that Orc Warlord and killed it in a duel, probably saving the battle right there. Very knightly guy, very reasonable guy, honestly 10 out of 10 Knight of the Blazing Sun.To himself he is just.. really fucked up. Psychologically wrecked from the chaos dreams and DMT arrow bad trip, not sure why he is here, never wanted to be a Knight, is just doing this out of obligation, is really going through the motions with the whole Myrmidia thing and is somewhat lost but can't tell anyone this because he is Hector Goetz, the fucking badass.Good news Hector, we have a strange mission that killed the last guy we sent on it. He got killed, probably assassinated, in Marienburg. We don't know by who or why, situation is pretty vague really, as are your orders. A bunch of our Knights are meant to be guarding this island between Marianburg and the Chaos bit to the north. They haven't written back for three years. Off you go! Don't die.Spoilers; this island is the solidified emissions(?) of a primal Tzeentchien demon, one so annoying Tzeetch himself hurled her down into the world ages ago for pissing him off. She is sleeping beneath the 'island'. Its population are her creatures. The Knights of the Blazing Sun sent there have, without realising, fallen to Chaos. Being presented with a 'real' bird themed Prophetess with real powers, they have been persuaded she is Myrmidia and have been slowly converted to a version of that cult which is more Fascist Italy than chill knowledge goddess.So a guy with no faith in the goddess, who is having a slow mental breakdown, is going to investigate a bunch of guys with LOTS of faith in the goddess, but its the wrong one.But don't worry! Hector will have assistance on his mission from a powerful magic-user; a chaos-enjoying Norsican Shaman who, while he _recognises_ his Chaos Gods, doesn't really _like_ them, and is pissed off with this particular demon because of her evil deeds.The Norsicans thinks their own attitude to chaos is completely reasonable, in that they sometimes worship and always acknowledge the chaos gods, which still being aware they are insane capricious crackhead maniacs who they don't actually like that much. This demon wrecked their shit so they strengthened the wards keeping it down and mean to keep it that way.The side trying to keep the chaos demon imprisoned are Norsican occasional chaos-enjoyers while those trying to release it are very loyal servants of Myrmidia. Except for Hector, who doesn't really believe in Myrmidia much, but may be getting messages from the real actual goddess.The stage is set for a bunch of very strange encounters between people of varying levels of faith, belief, need and delusion, in which those on the same side (Chaos, Myrmidia) are not actually on the same side but have to act like they are while also questioning if they should be.REYNOLDISMS;TRANSHUMANISM - bits and pieces as various individuals are mutated and altered, the chaos poison Hector absorbed is messing him up but also bringing him closer to the divine?CROSSING DOORS - Loads. Ah while you were being a Knight / my tribe was worshipping chaos / I was being a different kind of knight / I was nearly a knight like you but became a priest / I wanted to be a Knight like you but they made me become a priest etc etc.SEARCH FOR MEANING - a fair amount, especially from Hector.THE GODS ARE REAL BUT THEY ARE DICKS - Very much so. Real-Myrmidia may not be that bad.NO MY FRIEND, YOU WERE MY TRUE PREY - Perfect example. The demon only allows Goetz so close because she wants him to kill her old less sexy champion and become the new sexy champion.ACCIDENTALY COOL AS SHIT CHARACTER - Kislev guy who was a Knight of Ulric but fucked off from that, became a Knight of the Blazing Sun, gets sucked into inadvertent Chaos Worship but redeems himself at the las minute purely through being a fucking moustache chad. Also a Norsican pirate chief who is clearly meant to be a bad guy but Reynolds likes him so much he nearly becomes a de-facto protagonist.Also a hot barbarian girl.FAITH!! - All over the place.GETTING CUCKED - Hector does not get to bang his hot barbarian GF And for the perfect emblematic Reynolds ending, the final scene has Goetz finally being put in tune with 'real' Myrmidia! Will this be the start of the adventures of Hector Goetz, conflicted Knight of the Blazing Sun?No obviously not. Get ready for the death of the old world you nerds. We need it done fast and on a budget!No-one else would handle this for the money and schedule offered but our boy Reynolds leapt in in a book that isn't that great but that has a lot of things - The Return of Nagash.HOWEVERIt does start the beginning of a wonderful three-way romance between Nagash, Josh Reynolds and Mannfred Von Carnstein, a relationship that will cross multiple realities over four very-consequential years.NAGASH BABY!2014 The Return of NagashBegins the doom of the Old World!2015 Lord of the End Times
Finishes the doom of the old world! (I have not read this one)In the old Warhammer world things are starting to look a bit Apocalyptic and in Sylvania, Mannfred Von Carnstein has a plan to ressurect the ultimate bone boy; Nagash. This involves sacrificing a bunch of characters with old models in the range, Volkmar the Gim, Morgiana le Fay etc etc. (This series as a whole is basically; "YOUR model is going in the bin!... and YOUR model is going in the bin!.. and YOUR...")An alliance of Elves, Dwarves, Men and, obliquely, Chaos, totally fail to come together to stop this from happening and Nagash does indeed come back to make the Apocalypse that little bit worse for everyone.If there is a main character to this its really Mannfred von Carnstein and his brilliant, ambitious, relentless, craven, backstabbing, occasionally charming, cunning, kinda sweaty lying ass. And Arhkhan, Nagashs' calm mini-me. Arkhan, reasonable but tired and apocalyptic, is aware that chaos is rising and genuinely thinks the only way to stop it is for Nagash to rule everything and create his eternal empire of death - that way = no chaosThing about Mannfred and Arkahn, They are both actually ancient pseudo-Egyptians with a weird interlocking backstory. They both know that in some way they are part of Nagash and that their wills are not their own. They nevertheless have very different perspectives on that.Mannfred, always, is like a half-trained dog on the leash. Would quite like to rule the world, but also actually wants the world to keep exiting as something like itself. Has no interest in an eternal empire of Nagash where everything is dead. And in the end betrays literally everyone and everything*REYNOLDISMS;TRANSHUMANISM - maybe a bit with Nagash's alchemical sacrifice rebirth.CROSSING DOORS - not that muchSEARCH FOR MEANING - well its the ApocalypseTHE GODS ARE REAL BUT THEY ARE DICKS - NagashNO MY FRIEND, YOU WERE MY TRUE PREY - Don't think this one comes up.WHAT IS FREE WILL ANYWAYS? - Mannfred; "I will be free! I WILL!" Arkhan; "I don't care. Please fill in this form."ACCIDENTALY COOL AS SHIT CHARACTER - Surprisingly competent Empire general. Depressed french vampire guy.FAITH!! - A bit. Its Sigmar vs Nagash vs Chaos!GETTING CUCKED - Mannfred, brutally as, after giving his all and being instrumental in getting Nagash that spicy new model in plastic, he is immediately demoted to shit-all and the job of being a sexy vampire badass mortarch given to the recently resurrected Vlad Von CarnsteinSo ends the Old World..CUT TO - A WHOLE NEW REALITY! And enter the Hallowed Knights!Oh Lord the Hallowed Knights. the explicitly-religious stormcast (though in AoS where gods are verifiably real everyone is de-facto religious), Those who died heroically praising or calling on Sigmar to their las breath and were snatched up and remade into super-badasses to fight chaos and whatever else. And of course, to have complex conversations about the nature of faith, identity and fate.ITS THE AGE OF FUCKING SIGMAR BABY!2015 to 2016 'The Hunt for Nagash' (Hallowed Knights, Bullhearts Strand)Made up of 'The Prisoner of the Black Sun', '2015 Sands of Blood', '2015 The Lords of Helstone', and 'Bridge of Seven Sorrows'. Sigmar is taking back the Mortal Realms from chaos and he wants make a phonecall to Nagash. If they can find a way to work together, Chaos is surely boned. Unfortunately their last remembered actions were texing each other to fuck off and deleting/blocking the caller ID. Sigmar is a moody barbarian dudebro who likes people being alive. Nagash is a resentment fuelled nerd who literally wants to make everything dead. Beyond both hating chaos their goals really do not align much.Stil, Sigmar sends a group of Hallowed Knights, the Bullhearts, to wander about in Shyish, the realm of death, trying to get Nagash's number. Stormcast, being shock troop heavy infantry are not exactly subtle so just literally wander around asking "Have you seen the Nine Gates of Stygix?" until they happen to run into a vampire tied to a giant orrery;Mannfred is back! Will things go horribly wrong for the Bullhearts? Yes.REYNOLDISMS;TRANSHUMANISM* - lots about the weirdness of Stormcast and their lost memories.CROSSING DOORS - Mannfred and Tarsem, boss of the Bullhearts, were friends in a previous life, which Mannfred remembers but Tarsem does not. They have lots of discussion about what it means to be who and what they are. SEARCH FOR MEANING - Mannfred is trapped in his cycle of ambition and endless betrayals. Tarsem pretty much knows he is going to be betrayed but is ok with it if it get him closer to Nagash. His second, Ramus, is not ok with this at ALL.THE GODS ARE REAL BUT THEY ARE DICKS - Nagash is a dick and tbh, Sigmar either chose the wrong tool for this job or knew Tarsem would encounter Mannfred ahead of time.NO MY FRIEND, YOU WERE MY TRUE PREY - not sure. Nagash des finally take the phone call but nabs Tarsems soul to take it apart.WHAT IS FREE WILL ANYWAYS? - Get ready for a very common Reynolds take as two beings made by separate gods to serve their will discuss how much free will they actually have and what it might mean to sacrifice yourself to the god that made you.ACCIDENTALY COOL AS SHIT CHARACTER - dunnoFAITH!! - Its the Hallowed Knights so yes.GETTING CUCKED - Mannfred immediately caves to Nagash and saves his own skin (as always) leading to his BFF Tarsem being utterly utterly screwed. In publishing terms these stories are split up as audio-dramas and I think are never collected in text form.2017 Plague Garden(Hallowed Knights, Gardus Strand)
This brings in a different strand of the Hallowed Knights - one centred around Gardus Steel-Soul, basically superman/jesus/apollo/vishnu, a former doctor who fought plague, literally at the end when he started caving in chaos skulls to protect his patients - now reborn as a Stormcast even more pure than Heisenbergs meth.No sooner has Gardus joined his bros in the fight to retake Ghyran than a dang old warp gate to Nurgles Realm opens up under the Hallowed Knights and their main guy is sucked into Nurgles realm. It is time for a last-ditch rescue effort as they pursue his captured and corroding soul through sweaty nerd hell. Yes its another soul hunt with a god at the end.REYNOLDISMS;*TRANSHUMANISM* - Gardus literally turning into light, looks cool as shit to _everyone else_, but for Gardus turning into fucking divine lightbulb is not that great actually. Gardus is aware he is being hollowed out be divine power, dying really, except worse as his soul itself is burning, but even aware of this, he doesn't like it, but is willing to go along with it as its a weapon to defy chaos, which is something every version of Gardus would probably agree with.CROSSING DOORS - Togus the Vile/Tornus the Redeemed. Torgus the Vile, a Knight of the Order of the Fly, who serve the god of Decay, beaten by the Stormcast, purged of his Nurgleness and re-made, turned from a servant of Chaos into a Servant of Sigmar. Now he fights to reclaim the lands he once conquered as a knight of nurgle, against his former bros in the order of the fly, and quietly freaks out the rest of the Hallowed Knights (except Gardus) who don't really know how to take him.Probably the most interesting character in the book as he remembers having an entirely different morality, worldview and quite different personality, and he knows that he has essentially been 're-mixed' byt the Storm god. So, which part is which, and what, where and how much does or can he exercise meaningful choice?Meanwhile the Hallowed Kngihts themselves have captured one of Nurgles Knights and under the influence of their scorching and caustic starlight, his personality starts to .. shift, not totally, but the more Knightly aspects seem to be amplified with the Nurgly elements growing quieter. But the Hallowed Knights themselves are getting quite tarnished, grimy and moody as they go deeper into Nurgles realm...SEARCH FOR MEANING - Not a problem for Gardus.. or is it...THE GODS ARE REAL BUT THEY ARE DICKS - Even the super-faithful super-powered Hallowed Knights are slowly cut down and start to decay and fall apart in the Garden of Nurgle. Nurgle, old and slow minded, knows they are here, but really wants to nibble those soulsand is pretty sure they will be mush by the time they get to him.Sigmar it seems thinks differently, but the only thing that will get his agents deep into the Garden of Nurgle is Sigmars willingness to tickle Nurgles appetite by treating the souls of his own avatars as attritional fuel.So as Gardus goes after his friend, he is aware that while for him it’s a chase to rescue but in the game of the gods it’s a ruthless bet between them; will my toy soldiers hold out before you can dissolve them? And he goes along with this, in the same way a doomed solider goes along with a likely suicidal but hopefully necessary mission, because he believes it’s for the greater good.NO MY FRIEND, YOU WERE MY TRUE PREY - can't rememberWHAT IS FREE WILL ANYWAYS? - lotsACCIDENTALY COOL AS SHIT CHARACTER - Tornus/Torgus FAITH!! - Its the Hallowed KnightsGETTING CUCKED - Nugle, in this case, who brings the Hallowed Knights deep into his garden, presumably thinking "ha ha ha, you will never get them out now Sigmar", only for sigmar to suicide bomb Nurgle by blowing up the Souls of his own dudes leaving an I'm-back-and-this-time-its-serious lightning scar on Nurgles shit. Was it worth it?2017 Nagash: The Undying King
A throwback to the Age of Chaos, in the Age of Sigmar.Its the past! (relatively) Nagash has had the living shit beaten out of him by Archaon (again) and has even more dementia than usual - meanwhile the forces of Chaos are slowly taking over Shyish - and getting closer to one of the doors to his safe room (the same one the Bullhearts are trying to get the number for in 'The Hunt for Nagash'.The mortal Shyishians fight back with the help of Arkhan and Neferata but can't win unless they release a bunch of Undead guys who were cursed for trying to stand against Nagash.Of course, this would all be to try to protect Nagash, so surely he will be reasonable, right?*REYNOLDISMS;TRANSHUMANISM - A pretty trippy an interesting look inside the awareness of a God. Nagash is sort of omnescient in Shyish, but his attention, and sanity is not infinite and he sort of knows the future but also doesn't?SEARCH FOR MEANING - Main hero girl is "All we wanted to do was worship Nagash and not be eaten by chaos and now we are FUCKED."THE GODS ARE REAL BUT THEY ARE DICKS - Nagash in probably the most emblematic, dick move ever.NO MY FRIEND, YOU WERE MY TRUE PREY - not sureWHAT IS FREE WILL ANYWAYS? - Arkhan, typically chill, genuinely believes he is a pure and selfless servent of Nagash, while carefully and subtly manipulating him through his dementia and Archaon PTSD. Neferata, who is consistently scheming against Nagash, ends up serving his ends (Mannfred must have been busy for this role).What does it even mean for Nagash to be manipulated or betrayed by expressions of his own self? He made these guys from his own parts...ACCIDENTALY COOL AS SHIT CHARACTER - Chivalric and completely headfucked Ghoul King who thinks the main mortal character is his dead sister.FAITH!! - The mortal characters are all essentially part of the Nagash-cult.GETTING CUCKED - Nurgle again as Arkhan gets Nagash on his SSRI's just before the decay lads breach the safe room.2018 Black Pyramid
We are back with the Hallowed Knights and it’s time to bring together the Gardus Steel-Soul strand and the Bullhearts-fucking-hate-Mannfred strand with the phonecall to Nagash elements.Its some time around the start of the Soul Wars I think and the forces of Sigmar are going for one of the few Realmgates that connects Shyish directly to Azyr. This lies at the centre of the ruined Shyishian city of Carrow, its pretty heavily fortified from the Azyr end - as Shyish is currently full of chaos and, were this not the case, its full of boney boys who are also a massive threat.Carrow is currently infested with Beastmen and watched over by a Slaaneshi Chaos Lord to make sure Sigmar doesn't do exactly what he is just about to do - send in a light force the long way round, sieze the gate for long enough to open it from both ends, then start jamming through forces directly from Azyr to take and hold the ruined city before the Chaos forces can react.Luckily for the mortals this is a Slaaneshi Lord watching the place, and being a massive hentai addicted narcissistic crackhead, is not exactly maintaining the tightest disciple (though he does have an absolute shitload of men and some wonderful leopard skin tents to take drugs and eat slaves in).Nagash is currently under siege in Nagasshizar, fighting chaos and implementing his Black Pyramid scheme, so hopefully he won't intervene much either.Unfortunately, being Shyish, the cities catacombs are utterly jam packed full with mummies and stuff and, this being Shyish, they are not that hard to wake up.Enter Mannfred, who after hanging around the Slaaneshi compound in disguise for a while, (Mannfred gives himself the pseudoname 'Vlad', and doesn't remember why), decides he is going to raise the dead, ruin everyones day and show up with an army for Nagash, - and who utterly fucks this up, getting captured by the Stormcast, which includes.. the Bullhearts - exactly the people he betrayed back in the previous series, and who are dead set to have a fucking mental.REYNOLDISMS;TRANSHUMANISM* - Ghost-eater the memory-eating beastman, plus a LOT of mutated chaos guys plus more of Stormcast being weird and musing on their natures.Ghosteaters 'main voice' is that of a Huan scholar who , having completed his bucket list, met his death at Ghosteaters hands quite calmly and who since then has been pretty chill about life as part of this gestalt consiousness, and who is also calmy interested in helping Ghosteater towards his aims of a better world for beastmen (under Ghosteaters rule). Its' a ... weird student/guru relationship. Who is actually setting the strategy here? Ghosteaters slowly changing personality seems to be a synthesis of both individuals...CROSSING DOORS - Ramus grabs Mannfred against orders and makes for Naggashizar to get his friends soul back. Mannfred feels bad about his friends soul, though no-one will ever believe that of him, and actually genuinely wants to help (though he is also being forced to). Ramus is so fatigued and pissed off with Sigmar that he and Mannfred sort of become temporary frenimies.SEARCH FOR MEANING - Gardus is stable on the outside but is starting to get quietyly worried about all of this. The main Slaanesh guy claims he turned to Slaanesh to get back the soul of his dead love he is obsessed with (more 'Crossing Doors' as he also wants a soul from Nagash), in fact we find out at the end that he killed her on their wedding night.THE GODS ARE REAL BUT THEY ARE DICKS - Nagash turns up at the end, on a bridge (again), to be a mssive dick (again). yes he predicted the whole thing and will now gloat. Sigmar is looking creepy in inferance (again).Did Sigmar know this stuff was going to happen and remain silent specifically to place moody stormcast guy in this position and have him go off on a wild deniable mission?NO MY FRIEND, YOU WERE MY TRUE PREY - Gardus thinks he is trying to stop moody guy from trying to invade the realm of Nagash and expanding their war, in fact Nagash has already predicted all of this and has a little gift waiting for him.WHAT IS FREE WILL ANYWAYS? - One of the Stormcast describes the Chaos forces as being like souls trapped in glue or amber, never being able to change but always repeating the same actions and failures again and again, but isn't that a little like you guys also?ACCIDENTALY COOL AS SHIT CHARACTER - A majur sub-plot about 'Ghosteater' the Albino beastman born with the ability to absorb the ghost/consiousness of whoever he eats. Ghosteater has a hive of different voices within him that he can use to gain knowledge and advice. He arguably doesn’t do anything totally relevant to the plot except hang around being cool and essentially just leaving the book in the last act, hopefully on his way to a series of his own or at least a Codex entry (fat chance).FAITH!! - "Only the faithful!"GETTING CUCKED - Moody stormcast guy is very deeply pissed about Sigmar not answering his prayers when all he wants to do is rescue the soul of his lost friend. Hm being placed in direct contact with Gardus, who, in his own book, was given the explicit mission of "go rescue this guys soul" and a shitload of angel power to accomplish it, and who actually did accomplish it, only makes him more and more bitter about it. (Of course, that was getting back a soul from Chaos with whom they are always at war, while this would be going up against Nagash, with whom (at this time) they have an uneasy detente, plus Gardus is well aware that the Plague Garden mission, while heroic, was also a ruthless bit of brinksmanship brought about through attritional tactics. He is not exactly thrilled about it himself.)The good guys get their friend back, horribly mutilated, and the Hallowed Knights get some kind of ending, but really they deserved at least a third book.The Mannfred saga is at brought to an end at least.2018 Soul Wars
The last Nagash/Stormcast book.Time to chill with a different group of Stormcast, this time the Anvils of the Heldenhammer - in this case our bois are not extra super-faithful but actually pretty dead.Anvils are made up of Heroic souls who had died long before Sigmar called them, many just chilling in tombs being ghosts or whatever, AND from Souls drawn from Mallus yes its the metal core of the old world, now a weird as fuck centrepeice to Sigmars celestial city, a giant metal ghost-haunted super-moon. Its weird that you kept that Sigmar.But here are deniably-related souls which may or may not be those of heroes from the old world, here is possibly-Balthasar Gelt, and possibly Felix-Jager and probably a few others I missed. (LORE DEEP CUT should be another Reynoldsism but I could never catch even half of them.) Todays job - protect this city from ghoooooostsNagash has FINALLY gotten his giant black pyramid and unleased his sexy new model collection on Shyish - as one of the few Sigmarite cities the Anvils have to protect Glymmsforge from ghosts (and also, as it’s a Shyishain city, from the piles and piles of mummified dudes and bones underneath it).Meanwhile the Black Pyramid thing activating has sent shockwaves through the realms and severely fucked the reforging of one particular Stormcast, soul now = missing.*REYNOLDISMS;TRANSHUMANISM - Transforming a soul into a spooky ghost champion means memory alteration, emotional manipulation, shifts in perspective, and some degree of choice. Being ethereal feels weird.CROSSING DOORS - A classic Reynolds soul-swap. Sigmar has been nicking the souls of the not-even recently dead to make his soldiers and now, with a Stormcast reforging going horribly horribly wrong the soul of one of the Stormcast has been re-acquired by Nagash who, at Arkhans mild prompting, has decided to remake it into one of his spooky ghost boys. This is someone who became a stormcast fighting ghosts, then dies from ghosts again and is now a Knight of Shrouds. His memory may have been altered but nothing new was added. His resentment against Sigmar for the endless fucking reforgings etc is very real, and now he has a ghost sword and ghost horse and this whole ghost thing is starting to feel very reasonable...SEARCH FOR MEANING - Balthan Arum (probably Balthasar Gelt) is slowly melting down as his super-cleverness can't solve the Reforging problem.THE GODS ARE REAL BUT THEY ARE DICKS - Sigmar and Nagash are both basically fighting over souls like they are fuel. Both have individually broken the wheel of Dharma, Nagash by warping Shyish and aiming for the everything-finally-dies-option, Sigmar by stealing souls, reincarnating them as warriors and burning them to nothing through endless fighting and then Nagash again by copying Sigmars methods in his soul-engineering regarding the remaking of people into Nighthaunt.NO MY FRIEND, YOU WERE MY TRUE PREY - Did Sigmar plan the whole thing and possibly allow one of his guys to be taken and re-made knowing that he would be sent to destroy Glrymmsforge and would therefore come into contact with people he knew and be deflected?WHAT IS FREE WILL ANYWAYS? - Both Sigmar and Nagash actually genuinely believe in the fundamental centrality of their moral paradigm, (unless you can call Nagash an 'honest cynic') , so when they grab souls and 'improve' them neither would really see it as manipulation, just correction to a more-true state.ACCIDENTALY COOL AS SHIT CHARACTER - Random mercenary leader set to guard a doomed outpost. Another Reynoldsian purely mercenary, but brave, cunning and somewhat-honourable moustachioed guy who leads a group of Cossack style gangsters who die barely fighting ghosts and steal the scene.FAITH!! - Not that much, at least compared to the Hallowed Knights.GETTING CUCKED - Nagash somewhat. Stop your schemes boy.2019 Dark Harvest
Swamp noir! The darkest of greens. Nihilist criminal ex-priest badass discovers that someone out in the sticks of Ghyran knows his true identity and goes to assassinate themThis pulls him into a weird and creepy swamp conspiracy; Sigmarite border swamp town being relaimed by decay, civilisation being consumed by a particularly aggressive form of nature, swamps are full of swamp dryads, monsters and ghosts, weird little imbred town where everything has gone strange. Creepy doings yet it’s not chaos this time.REYNOLDISMS;TRANSHUMANISM* - Not that much.CROSSING DOORS - Main enemy guy thinks he is the hunt-god worshipping master of hunts and tries to hunt the protagonist, but the protagonist is really the hunter?SEARCH FOR MEANING - The hard as nails amoral protagonist is hard as nails because he used to be a Sigmariate Priest - lost his faith when elements of the church started having a mental and sacrificing people to Sigmar. Our hero was one of the few to directly fight back and this lead to him into direct confrontation with his own church.Stormcast may or may not have been involved in this but they definitely covered it up afterwards - after extensive interrogation our hero was either fired or left - now an utter ruthless nihilist enforcer working for crime gangs.THE GODS ARE REAL BUT THEY ARE DICKS - Whats going on in Ghyran? Elements in the local society have come under the influence of a half-sleeping god - Kurnos, god of the Hunt, who was sent to sleep by Arielle a long time ago and who is largely pissed about it. How does one worship and awaken a god of the hunt? By hunting people alive of coursealso sacrificing them. Did Sigmar plan the whole thing and create the perfect 'black operative' by arranging/allowing for Main Guy to lose his faith but not totally? A God creating a seeming self-betrayer is something we saw Nagash do with Mannfred..NO MY FRIEND, YOU WERE MY TRUE PREY - In a throwback to Knight of the Blazing Sun, Main Guy thinks he is penetrating a conspiracy around a dark god while that god is in fact working to bring him closer and intends to replace their current slightly-crap avatar/prophet with this new and improved version.WHAT IS FREE WILL ANYWAYS? - less than usual but it’s still a tacit theme.ACCIDENTALY COOL AS SHIT CHARACTER - All of the main cool people are meant to be cool.FAITH!! – It’s all about faith and its lack.GETTING CUCKED - Kurnos this time. Also no 'main guy dark hero' saga for you Josh.THE DERP FUTURE2018 Lukas the Trickster (Warhammer 40,000)
A based Drukhari wants to raid Fenris for slaves as it will be amusing. Present on Fenris is the most aggravating Space Wolf ever.REYNOLDISMS;*TRANSHUMANISM* - Lukas is a for-real actual-barbarian, he (allegedly) hacked his own Transhumanist surgeries so he could keep his gonads and sex drive.b - A main theme. Both Lukas and his archfoe-for-this-book are both considered cultural throwbacks in their relative cultures. Lukas is a 'true' barbarian, rather than the Space Wolves 'we do what the Emperor says' barbarians; regularly makes fun expeditions outside the fang to hang out, has a weird place where he goes and chills, has (inferred I think) fathered quite a lot of children out there in Fenris, occasionally puts on his armour and goes for a fun dive in the world sea to hang out with Krakens. Regards the transformation of the Space Wolves as a kind of cultural trick, barbarians persuaded they are heroes..Archon Siliscus is considered by ther Drukhari a throwback to the 'Old' Aeldari, too independent and spirited to reliably bend the knee to Vect, half tricked/half persuaded to take to the void and go reaving.SEARCH FOR MEANING - Lukas and Siliscus in particular are outsiders trying to make something of their alienation from their own cultures.FAITH!! - A bit of the Fenrisian way of life.GETTING CUCKED - Siliscus actually cuts Lukas' heart out and still manages to sort-of lose. Plus no series, no sequel.2019 Apocalypse(Space Marine Conquests #5)
Peak, peak, PEAK Reynolds, at least as far as his tropes go.The very-religious Word Bearers assault a system in force, this particular system being ruled by the Ecclesiarchy. The word bearers are after an ancient religious secret held by this ancient religion. The world is defended by a group of not very religious marines from the Scars, Raven Guard and FistsThe religious secret it itself a Word Bearer - during the Heresy one stayed secretly loyal and in fact, a pre-emptive and unrepentant worshipper of the Emperor hidden by the then-nascent Ecclesiarchy, he has been chilling down in a cell writing scripture and yes it seems a big chunk of the scripture of the Ecclesiarchy has been influenced by this hidden member of the traitor legions.The Ecclesiarchy don't want even the potential knowledge of this secret to get out as there is no way the normies could handle it; to the extent of just not telling the loyal astarties what the fuck is going on.the Word Bearers want to go in there and get the guy, but not all of them know about him or exactly what they are looking for, and several word bearers, and perhaps the chaos gods, seem pretty ambivalent about getting him back. If this anchorite does end up chilling with the Word Bearers, and remains loyal, and just sits there telling stories about the Heresy, what are the chances that, given this deep view of their own history some of the word bearers might start having revelations about how worshipping the emperor was the right thing to do all along? It seems that a few of them are already pretty potentially sceptical of the Lorgar path.Just as the loyal astartes face deception from their own side, the traitors also have complex webs of manipulation and dual loyalties, and being Word Bearers, they think, and write, and talk about faith ALL the timeREYNOLDISMS;*TRANSHUMANISM -* standard space marine stuffCROSSING DOORS - - Religious Word Bearers trying to abduct/rescue a differently-religious Word Bearer..A good scene at the end when a local ex-noble 'Pirate King' who has, without realising, long since started his own fall to chaos, runs into a cult-wrangler ex-imperial guardsman during the planetary invasion who gives him the downlow on their place in the great cycle of destruction.SEARCH FOR MEANING - The main religious guy guarding the Anchorite really doesn't want to lie to the space marines but also knows he can't let the secret out.THE GODS ARE REAL BUT THEY ARE DICKS - True of both Chaos and E-Money.FAITH!! - literally every single conversation and conflict between every single Word Bearer, guys who just cannot even decide what to ahve for dinner without justifying the theology of it.And again with the Anchorite - a literal OG Emperor Worshiper with more in common with Sigismund than Guilliman.Honestly just the whole thing.GETTING CUCKED - Ultimately the guy just goes back in his cell with dire warnings that now "The secret is out" and this could mean major ructions for the Ecclesiarchy. Maybe a schism! (No-one in 40k Lore ever mentions this again).FINALLY, FABULOUS BILL!
2016 Fabius Bile: Primogenitor (Fabius Bile #1)2017 Fabius Bile: Clonelord (Fabius Bile #2)2020 Fabius Bile: Manflayer (Fabius Bile #3)Its time for Chief Apothecary of the Emperors Children, Lieutenant Commander Fabius Bile. We pick up his story some time after Ahriman has killed his lets-clone-the-primarchs project. Bile is hanging out on a demon world with a little self-made university/symposium of Chaos Apothecaries which is exactly as charming as it sounds. Fabius has calmed down since the Heresy and now regards his previous actions as a case of splicing-under-the-influence-of-dark-gods. He is now firmly against the gods, and in fact they are not gods at all but just big warp storms thanks very much, and like George Lucas is now "focusing on projects at home", specifically an attempt to uplift the entirety of Humanity into something less crap.But strands ovv faaate are going to pull Fabius back into the game and bring him into contact with a bunch of wild and wacky characters. On being confronted with a perfect clone of Fulgrim can Fab finally overcome his crippling Primarch addiction and can he do his galaxy-scale eugenics thing while being chased by pretty much everyone and being dicked around by fucking space clowns?Reynoldsisms;*TRANSHUMANISM* - Bile graduates during the series from a head/brain transplanting mad scientist to a soul-swapping mind-virus to a near deity-level gestalt intellect psychic cancer Bile is dying, appropriately enough from a genetic blight the even he can't cure, though he can hold it off. His method of survival is, first grinding up and snorting his fellow astartes (before Chaos even becomes a major player on the scene), then he starts growing new fresh bodies and implanting his brain in them (i think), then he finally works out Aeldari tech and, with stolen wraithbone, creates a 'The Presitge' device that lets him transfer his consciousness to a new body at the moment of death (this is also the point at which it is possible that there are multiple parralel Biles running around).His final trick is to seal himself in a semi-stasis wraithbone coffin at the centre of a nightmare psychic palace while his semi-sleeping mind acts as the centre for a whole hive of bile-clones with Wraithbne implants to go roving around the galaxy doing fucked up stuff for the Chaos Gods.Not only that but Biles plan for humanity is itself transhumanist. He means to create the 'New Men' a bunch of Neitschien super-beings who can easily beat up all the aliens and won't fall prey to dark gods as they are not a bunch of neurotic nerds. All of his efforts are bent to this goal, of saving humanity by transforming it.CROSSING DOORS - Being a chaos dude but also an atheist, Bile nees a demon-wrangler, which he gets by grabbing a word-bearer demonologist and implanting bombs in his head, keeping the guy as a captive and having him summon demons as-requiredThis being a Reynolds book, Fabius becomes frenimies with the guy and hangs out with him periodically throughout the series where they shout at each other about the nature of faith and belief - Bile is obsessed with regarding the Chaos Gods as just big warp storms with time travel quasi-omnipotence and the ability to fundamentally alter reality and affect the soul after death - but they're not even sentient, just big animals, while his co-worker obviously has a different opinionSEARCH FOR MEANING - Bile overcomes his Fulgrim addiction only to end up boned in the end.THE GODS ARE REAL BUT THEY ARE DICKS - No says Bile, they are NOT real! (they are)NO MY FRIEND, YOU WERE MY TRUE PREY - It was you Fabius! It was all to get you!WHAT IS FREE WILL ANYWAYS? - Was Fabius always just falling to Chaos but slowly? Yes.ACCIDENTALY COOL AS SHIT CHARACTER - Many. The weird noise marine guy. Fabius' treasonous World-Eater Beserker apothecary friend, his Death Guard plague expert buddy, his kinda demon engine spiderlegged tech-priest sort of GF.FAITH!! - really the main arc of the Bile series is that of a self-declared atheist who loathes the creatures some call gods spiralling lower and lower, fighting and falling inexorably into the hands of just such gods until at the end he sacrifices himself, offering himself body and soul to the chaos gods for a chance of preserving his creations. And who ends up becomeing something like a demigod himself.GETTING CUCKED - REYNOLDS MANAGES TO FINISH A SERIES!! Finally!! Holy fuck BL finally let him finish something. Incredible.Bile himself is semi-cucked as, while his position as a kind of living galactic cancer makes in insanely powerful, it only comes at the cost of his personal moral defeat - the original "fuck the gods, yes I mean you four" guy, finally has to bend the knee.2018 Fulgrim: The Palatine Phoenix (The Horus Heresy: Primarchs #6)
Fulgrim has arrived in the Great Crusade and is going to prove to everyone that he is not just a cute femboy but a competent femboy. He will conquer this world of Byzas with TEN GUYS, yes you heard me right Leman you fucking barbarian.REYNOLDISMS;It’s a very Reynolds book but there are relatively few of his classic tropes.TRANSHUMANISM; we get into some funky stuff about the wild near non-physics based things Primarchs can pull off. CROSSING DOORS; the Emperors Children, perfectionists obsessed with duelling, encounter a sub-culture of Byzas which is also obsessed with duelling and with the paradoxes of the quest for self-improvement. A meaningful philosophy that probably would have been useful to them if they hadn't annihilated it. SEARCH FOR MEANING; Fulgrim is self-conscious over the size of his Legion and his relative inexperience and is about to make a lot of subtle mistakes which lock him a little deeper inside to-be-dangerous personality patterns, while he technically wins a big victory.GETTING CUCKED - Not at all. Fulgrm wins and they actually let Reynolds write a Heresy book, its not the main line, and some of the writers who did get to write for the main line are almost laughably bad, but still.THE GRAND SUMMATIONThe weight of moral pressure leads the mortal heart to extremity.This exemplified by the 40k universe, in which once must absolutely make a moral choice between chaos dudes and big eagle guy, and whichever you chose you will be eating a big bowl of moral hazard from that day forth, and dealing with many tragic consequences therefore while denying that they were actually tragic at allas it is in 40k, so it is with 40k writers, whos dominant voices largely separate into the Lunar (Dembsi-Bowden, Wraight), and the Solar (Abnett).Probably Reyolds most interesting trait is in his ability to find ways for the human heart to make some meaningful decisions some of the time, without spiralling into either chauvinistic madness of narcissistic despair, even under the weight, and wrapped in the strands, of duelling gods.Time and time and time again, mortal hearts, minds, bodies and souls are altered, 'improved', instrumentalised by greater powers, manipulated, memories and morality shifted, characters are guided by supernatural or hyperpower agencies, or left in the abyss of silence from powers they thought would guide them. They consistently run into agents of the enemy who are a lot like them and get to discuss their differing perspectives, they encounter members of their own side who's moral universe and paradigm are quite different, despite wearing the same uniform and serving the same powers. They are placed in overlapping and opposing "strands ov faaaaaate" and left to see what will happen. They are used as fuel or as necessary sacrifices and the really unusual thing is that many of the main characters are aware of this an are largely ok with the deal.And they talk and talk and talk, talk to their allies about their morality and world view, to their enemies about the differences between them, to their gods and bosses about why they are doing what they do, and try to explain the same things to those they in turn order into impossible positions. As above, so below.Mannfred Von Carnstein reminds me a lot of a scumbag version of Job, from the eponymous Book of Job.
You probably have a vague awareness of the content of the Book of Job. God and the devil have a bet over the reason people are good and love god, God destroys Jobs life and takes away everything valuable about it, Job appeals to god, who puts him on a Zoom call and essentially declares I AM THE CREATOR OF ALL THAT YOU ARE AND THAT'S IT BUDDY, WHAT IS GOOD OR BAD IS DOWN TO ME.In the Book of Job there is something (to me) quite honourable in Jobs subsequent wheedling and lawyering. Like any believer in an Abrahamic faith, he is trapped between the rock of Gods actions and creation being absolute, and from Jobs perspective, being pretty fucked.Job can't say "God you are wrong", but neither does he entirely give up and say "God, you are right". Instead, he .. wheedles, whines, lawyers. "JOB ARE YOU DISAGREEING WITH ME YOU LITTLE SHIT""No no no, never would do that My Lord, thy law is all. ...However... let me just say this..."I found myself on Jobs side more than not and pretty sympathetic to him. Like anyone confronted with absolute power and the fundamental cruelty of reality, he can't exactly argue back, but he doesn't quite give in either. He just sort of sticks around, hanging from his philosophical fingertips, refusing to go away or shut up.In the face of an equal opponent, wheedling is pathetic, but in the face insurmountable undeniable power, its almost courage. Of course the truly brave would defy such power, and then be annihilated. We, all of us are descended from conquerors, but also from wheedling little shits who found a way to survive, both literally and morally in an unfair world.Mannfred is a lot like Job, actually he's a lot worse, but in his continual, craven and pathetic scheming to either impress or fuck over Nagash, there is something almost like the shadow of courage. Reynolds main quality is in finding places for humanity to persist in this mess. Like Job and like Mannfred, they can't argue with divine or overwhelming power, and can't do much about the circumstances they are trapped in. They can't exactly go up to their respective gods and powers and say "Here is a list of how you have fucked me over".Yet they do persist. Some hurl themselves totally into defiant opposition and some are consumed by denying chauvinistic madness or fanaticism, but usually not the protagonists and not in Josh Reynolds books. Instead they wheedle, or at least try to justify themselves before thee. They remain human and sustain humanity in others.

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Saw two Multiverse movies recently, one day after another actually; "Dr Strange: Multiverse of Madness" and "Everything, Everywhere, all at Once". This plus listening to a collection of Ted Chiang stories and Rick and Morty suggests is may once again be 'Steam Engine Time', which lead me to think about the last cinematic Reality Boom, from the late 90's/early 00's, that one not multiversal but hierarchal, its realities stacked within each other rather than arranged like beads on velvet; THE LAST REALITY BOOM

The big successful hit of this group, the one that entered pop culture, was the Matrix, but there were many more at the time

[The Acceleration]1982 - Tron
1983 - Videodrome
1990 - Total Recall
1992 - Lawnmower Man
1995 - Virtuosity [Peak Dream]1997 - Open Your Eyes (Spanish Original)
1998 - Dark City
1999 - The Matrix
1999 - The 13th Floor
1999 - eXistenZ
2000 - The Cell
2001 - Vanilla Sky (remake of Open Your Eyes) A slowly building acceleration of the various potential forms of the concept with a serious peak in 1999. Three films in one year about your reality being a lie, and all more similar to each other than is usual.

I somewhat loathe the morality of The Matrix, and moreso as I get older. Everyone but an enlightened few is a drone and is fine to execute them if they get in your way, because you have access to a higher reality and are trying to free them from the conspiracy. A conspiracy which is actually, at this time, keeping them alive.

And even if they are virtual, does that make it reasonable to kill them? Everyone, or nearly everyone, in the Matrix was 'real', meaning all their relationships, loves, hatreds, friendships, alliances and betrayals were 'real', even if organised in an unreal Matrix, but when it comes to killing robots and 'agents'; purely synthetic sentients, at exactly what point are you committing mind-crime? Did that weird octopus thing they EMP'd in one of the Matrix films have some digital data-kin who will be disappointed that particular squid is not coming home? Will they have a pre-saved copy who wakes up to be told "yeah we lost a previous instantiation of you, running time post this point was three years, sadly all data was lost and we don't know what destroyed them". If you are digital do you grieve for that other self?

But everything is a dream and you are being kept in that dream by those that hate you, well you aren't because you are one of the chosen special few who have 'woken up', but that makes it completely legitimate for you to do whatever you want to both the dreamers and their guards.

And on some level this doctrine is implicit in the 'simulated reality' genre, with its hierarchy between more-true and less-true worlds and its common themes of deception, conspiracy and subordination. There is very much a 'they' in the core 1999 films and the interests of the 'they' are in subduing, deceiving and controlling the minds of humanity, trapping them in dreams while they are somehow exploited and instrumentalised in the 'real'.

I remember questioning this a little at the time. After all, once you accept that one reality can be simulated, how can you know that any future time in which you "wake up", you have entered the 'real' reality? If one can fool you another can, and even those agents and systems may themselves be fooled.

Ultimately this leads us back to questions of morality in situations where there are multiples and layers of reality.

MANY WORLDS

By comparison, the Many-Worlds hypothesis and its pop-cultural descendants have to me a more-pleasing cosmology with a greater but harder to realise potential for moral investigation.

Harder to realise because the potential for infinite worlds actually means a lack of controlling or limiting structure and that seems to be part of the reason that the recent multiverse movies all basically default to very similar themes and emotional construction.

First stage is nihilism, with grief and pain over particular paths chosen and a general sense of meaninglessness. Then with Dr Strange and EEAaO, a general reconciliation along the lines of core pro-social values and openness to change.

Which, ok. Can't really argue with core pro-social values, and as for openness to change, well I don't like Hippies but I will accept a society of hippies over one of paranoid schizophrenic Marxists.

ISN'T THIS JUST RICK AND MORTY?

Can't confirm absolutely but feels like that show and its disturbing over-plot about nihilism and near-infinite alternate selves has had a lot of strange children.

The idea of the Multiverse is hardly new, especially for comic readers and genre heads, but this particular boom does seem to feed off that show, as in I feel like a lot of the creators were watching it.

Rick and Morty is very much trapped between the core nihilism and narcissism of its central premise and, I suspect, that of Dan Harmon, and the moral developments, more embedded in its structure than in any single episodes. Oddly, for a show which begins with the dominant character having the classic dark-multiverse point of view that 'everything is infinite therefore everything is both meaningless and disposable', it’s a show that refuses to throw anything away, and while realities might be disposed of, core experiences of its central cast are not, no matter how odd or surreal they are, which means it seems to grow morally, almost against its own will.

WHAT FORCES ARE THESE CHANNELING

It was easy to see the Virtual Boom feeding on a deep sense of alienation and paranoia, the separation from reality by a world of machines, but if that is the case, what weird subconscious trauma or energy is the Multiverse Boom channelling? Like the Virtual Boom many of its more notable fictions are about the sense of meaninglessness - but whereas the Virtual Boom often seemed related to a kind of anhedonia linked to isolation, disconnection and alienation through routine, the Multiverse Fictions seem to be more about shame, specifically the shame of paths not taken or relative failure compared to a desired or expected state, and to be about the meaninglessness of infinite options. In a cosmos where anything can happen and everything has happened, what does it mean that your particular events have happened? How does one find meaning in such a situation?

It feels like the current Multiverse Boom is an unconscious immune response to social media, yes, but also the psychological tension and particular kind of alienation brought about by a massively more socially interconnected world.

The Multiverse Movie character often isn't 'trapped', 'controlled' or 'kept asleep' by some evil dominating power, they are more just lost, surrounded by infinite possibilities, the full extent of which make anything they can do or have done feel utterly empty, and are living with the anger and shame of their own choices and own life-path clearly not being the best, and often not even near medium, compared to how incredible they could have been if they just chose differently.

This feels a lot like being connected to social media which, tbh, is a bit of a facile "vampires are syphilis" take but there we go. The SonderPain is fucking us up guys!

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There is something slightly useful and interesting at the bottom of the post if you want to go there BUT right now I have to pimp some RPG books I am selling off on eBay to maintain the blessed cash flow.

These are all on sale right now, auctions end on Saturday night (UK time). I will combine postage if you win multiples;

I wrote the title adventure for this and literally no-one is bidding on it. PAIN. Will sign it if you win (if thats your desire).Mouse Guard! This is signed by Dave Petersen. I have never really understood this system and have just decided now to accept that I never will and will probably never run this.Fever Swamp! I screwed up the sale of this one last time so apologies for that.Crypt of the Mellified Mage! People seem waaaay more into this than 'Spire', paaaain. Its got Zedeck, Fiona and the robot rape guy in the period just before he got done for robot rape. Truly a cultural moment.Carcosa, grab your child-strangling noose and get on board for a series of tables baby!

Forbidden Lands the full box et, untouched with the map with the stickers included. Before there was Mork Borg there was this.But now there is Mork Borg, here is the fancy black edition from the Kickstarter. I actually had no idea this would be this popular. holy shit.

But I did do a bit of writing for it and am in the credits so if you want it signed I can do that.Useful table below!I have been putting together 'Bones of Bukako', the new revised and updated version of 'Feast of Bukako', the ever-growing tome of leveless spells based on inspiration from the False Machine catalogue, and in doing so I assembled this table as an aid.The time intervals are based on the rate of increase in total spell levels in a standard BX Magic-User, rounded and then expressed in natural language. I'm using including this in the new version and including it as a potentially useful tool for DMs to judge how long Leveless Spells should last based on the levels of the caster.

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Idea gained from looking at my garden lawnA war conflict on an epic scale, fought between city states, great wizards towers and strange underground races, with the occasional interruption of gargantuan kaiju-dragons and inexplicable chthonic entitiesAesthetic would be Elrics Melinbone in fineness but in colour and form, more like 19th century and later Fairy images - very bright, summery, decadent. A high-toned luxurious and sensual society of nobles, plus Warhammer, plus Honey I Shrunk the Kidsits a Wizards garden and the PCs are hired to sort out its infestation problem before summer ends, this means they get shrunk to micro-scale, and that leads to this ballardian dreamscape ruined plant arcology where grains of soil are like small hills, daisies are forts and daffodils are huge city-statesFae queens riding flitterflies, flea-cavalry, infantry slogging through nightmare three-dimensional mazes being hunted by centipedes, war without end as the apex culture of a race of fae sorcerers blast each other with desolating magics and entrap each other in schemes - high intensity warfare and court drama with the PCs mixed up in the middle of it all.From 'Warframe'
THE GREEN TOWERSWar in a cool green cathedral shaped by vast leaves like towers of glass. A sylph queen garbed in armour of plated butterfly scales gazes down as an army musters outside her gates. The armour of a green knight expands into a chrysalis - what emerges is a sorcerer. Winter isn't just a season but the end of the world, and the rule of worms.What is the sun but a green-gold glow that fills the air and in sliver gaps between towers, a blazing radiance which scorches and destroys.What is night but a black riot of sounds, the grumbling of worms in the earth and the squealing of moths as they pass far above? What is a dragon but a being so vast its claw can crush the towers of the highest mage, armoured in great sweeps of scales themselves larger than many cities, a spear so mighty that it can plunge deep into the earth, deeper than the deepest mine, and pull forth entire, one of the great worms, and carry it off into the sky. A war of gods and monsters.INVESTIGATIONA world at this small, very small, microverse, would need more actual research than is customarily assumed. The classic post-fairy-tale paracosms, Honey I Shrunk the Kids, the Marvel and DC shrinking heroes etc, tend to work at a scale at which the very small to us becomes very big to them (Godzilla battles a single rat in the New York sewers etc), but at this very micro microverse, what is small to us becomes nearly insensible to them. A thrush, not just a monster but a Behemoth of god, and what is nearly microscopically indistinguishable to us becomes the material of life to them.How does reality work at this scale and how much blurring into dreamland should we engage in?Gravity and oxygen for a start, will be very different. For a being this small climbing would not be hard. What are they breathing? Are they breathing like we do or are they fundamentally different beings only seemingly related to our world, like parallel reality creatures existing at this low scale? Like ghosts or the flickering spirts of dreams sparking into corporeality for one long summer.And I would need to look into the substances of the microverse, at the scale at which an ant is like a giant war elephant or something, what is a sword made of? What are people drinking? Are they burrowing into the surface tension of water droplets like miners with asteroids?Are you chilling with a tardigrade? Do you snort RNA like its a drug?If I remember my microverse properly, its a realm of scent as much as sight. The wind doesn't even reach down here, fogs and clouds of pheromones drift opalescent through the still air, to us it would be like a second texture to the air itself, tinting and ruffling, though not necessarily obscuring. Pollen whirling through the air like cartwheels. A poisoned blade drawn from the stinger of a nettle.The land of the dead cannot be very far away, its down where the roots go, beneath the stones. The land is not level, it is built up of great jagged boulders of soil, each one independently alive, and there are cracks between them always, it only needs a slip and down you go into the lightless depths to be hunted by skittering centipedes. The earth quakes and churns with the movements of the great worms beneath it. A mosquito is a vampire dragon which, every hundred days, feeds upon he blood of great forgotten gods.Richard Dadd
THE WARS OF THE PETAL-DWELLERSThe armies of the petal-dwellers marching forth in great crumbling lines, shining like droplets holding high banners made from the tuft hairs of baby moles, of single fish scales, blowing strange trumpets carved from the earbones of shrews. Ant-mahouts perfume the air to drag forth huge false-caterpillars; siege engines built from the root tendrils of holly plants. From where will assault come? From above as strike teams ride huge ladybirds in assault? From below as bind sappers tunnel forth under your very feet on the backs of ants? From around as tick-riders encircle the column? Spotters riding preserved dandelion seeds tied to lumbering beetles by spiderweb try to observe but they are little use. A long trek to assault the plant stem of another petal-dwelling lord or lady.And all for what? A word.. or a glance. A bet or sharp look over the turning of a card made from the dried cornea of a baby mouse. What else is there for a noble to do but to marshal forces and send forth great powers to crawl through leagues of hellish nightmare, rolling dice of crystal quartz with every turn and pathway, only to assault a green tower, climb its rugose column, hack at its roots, inject troops into its capillaries and in the end a daisy falls in the night, a culture annihilated, its pollen given to the wind and petals fallen to the realm of death to be carried away by pale ants.(crystal being maybe the only substance which would look, feel and largely act the same way in the microverse)

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The Kickstarter - https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/thirdbluewizard/in-the-hall-of-the-third-blue-wizardDavids Blog - http://monstersandmanuals.blogspot.com/Matthew Adams Art for new Yoon-Suin - http://monstersandmanuals.blogspot.com/2021/06/yoon-suin-2nd-edition-art-update.htmlJohn Martins 'The Bard' - https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:The_Bard.jpgDavid on Russian Classical Music - http://monstersandmanuals.blogspot.com/2022/03/russian-inspiration.htmlRachmaninoffs Vespers - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U2NSfTXjEPI&t=179sMatthew Adams left this comment on Facebook; "Ha, now I can tell mum and dad I am a genius!But also, the look of concern on your face Patrick when you looked at the yoon suin art. Please forgive me! Though I admit I did laugh a little bit because I was expecting it. And you are not the only one to express concern or even dislike of my MS paint art.David is mostly right about why I am doing a lot of my art in MS Paint and other old digital formats like PETScii. I enjoy working within the constraints those programs enforce, and there might be some nostalgia there as well. But there is also an element of burnout involved. A few years ago, just before the end of g+ really, the whole process of drawing on paper started to make me almost physically sick. I don't know why. Depression, anxiety, doubt, all played a part, and maybe something wasn't clicking creativity wise. But for quite a while the act of putting pen or pencil to paper was enough to make me vomit. Now I am doing more analogue drawing again, but it's usually within the constraint of designing rubber stamps."

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Other cultures, what even do they look like. A question for academics. Here in the Mughals Painting workshop (about 1500), and the German Print Shop (early 20thC), we are on a deadline people! The Mughal says "Draw Youropeen", Herr Schvitz say "Draw Indian God for export schnell!" What goes in the background? Yourpeen things, Ynjan things I don't know just finish the fucking picture!

We start with whats honestly a pretty great painting of a foreigner from the Mughals court (I think Akbar? Dunno and I'm not checking).

YouropeenBut whats happening here in the background of this very Youropeen landscape?
Youropeen plantAnd where do Youropeens live? Hut or possibly city...(Honestly not bad for 1500 or so)How do they worship? Ehhhh hmm temples?
"Here we go worshipping christ again! As we commonly do here in Yourop!"
Meanwhile, (in fact several hundred years later), Germany leads der printing welt! Time to impinge on British Raj mit VORGESETZTER prints of Indian Gods for popular market! Quick, draw Vishnu!Not that bad? A bit stiff and euro-saintlike but wait, what is India even like anyway?They have.. der schloss?Aaaand... seltsame runde Dinge, vielleicht ist es ein Dock, ich weiß es nichtNever mind, draw Krishna!Krishna with his GopisPerfect! Now eine Stadt in den Hintergrund schieben oder sowhat do Ynjan cities look like?
Vvvvenice? Kind of?
and uh.. gebäude.. setzt...

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(I will probably have to delete this if it actually gets popular so have fun while you can.)

False Machine: Recent Episodes

Patrick Stuart

The Flow

Finding Your Way in the Crypt

SAINT ONE - THE RAIN SAINT

SAINT TWO - THE CHAIN SAINT

SAINT THREE - THE PILGRIM SAINT

SAINT FOUR - THE SAINT OF BLOOD

SAINT FIVE - THE YOUNG SAINT

SAINT SIX - THE VENOM SAINT

SAINT SEVEN - THE TIME SAINT

[Design Logic

Maze Courts

Why Seek the Deep Janeen?

Pauper Princes - Why They might meetwith You.

Conflicting Cultures of the Deep Janeen

To Meet the Janeen

Janeen Viziers

The Right Nature of Guests

The Maze-Court

Meeting the Janeen

Titles

Face

Clothes

Manner

Opulence

The Vizier Continues;

Activities

Amusements

Strange Dreams

Fear of Sleep

Fear of Plots

Petulant Rages

Secrets of the Janeen

Hidden Economic Engines

Deals They Must Make... Now! (But Must Not Be Seen To....)

The Vizier Goes On

Physical Appearance

Culture (?)

Material Culture

Tools And Weapons

Man-Camels

Brain-Paint

Living Weapons

Madlights

Other Items

The Power of Chaos!

Chaos Mechanics

Chaos Aura!

Chaos-Tricks!

Elongating Arms

Inflated Body

Deranged Disguise

Harmless Liquefaction

Hiding

Limb Fix

Impossible Shadow Puppets

Grand Transformations

Their Origins in Dream

Their War Against the Dreamers

The Prophet of the Aelf-Adal

The Hatred of the Aelf-Adal

Their Great Plan

Flayed Skin and Stolen Eyes

Flesh

Masks

Eyes

The Deathly Stare

Fear-Eaters

Magicians

Sleep and Waking

The Palaces Of Night

The Sun

Society and Economy

Family

Nobility

Economy

The Question of Hatred

Veins of the Earth - Remastered

THIS IS THE LINK!