I imagined a book set within the crazed city of the Dero, layed out like a garbled choose-your-own-adventure book, with no index and no contents, and with at least some looping paths (the book would never tell the DM or the players when these had locked into place), some places and encounters simply images, tables, lines of text, single questions - an old man approaches and looks at you with a queer look. An automated service which would text your phone from an untraceable number, asking for information from the Dero city, which you could then text back and which would lead to new combinations of possibility.
A character in the book whispers to the player and asks them to make a call..
Trapped inside a city of the mad, layered with conspiracies, illusions and false realities. Stage sets, brain engines. Both the DM and the Players would fall into an indescribable relationship of exploration, deception, fear and mutual suspicion. (but always with the promise, the temptation, the possibility that you could perhaps escape) "Give me the book!" a player would cry - reach out and take it, making themselves the DM, but quickly becoming utterly lost in the text.
And yes you could turn the book upside down - differing encounters and an alternate page system, the sense of being trapped in the city of the crazed mind-wizards and the frustration of dealing with this impossible and nightmarishly obscure text, all merging into one glorious whole.
Such dreams I had of the artistic utility of incoherence
It was a different age, a time both darker and more pure, and I a different man.
Fritz Schwimbeck
I have a strange relationship with obscurity. Its only really that stygian shield that makes something special, notable, rare; the rites of the Orthodox church, happening behind a screen so you can barely see them. Without that, we decay into Critical Role, into 5e, a system which I don't loathe, but the perceived culture around it......
In fact I need the stygian shield of obscurity, even as I try to throw it off. Peering out of the shadows before slinking in again, gesturing mysteriously with a pale finger. What a performance.
I really wanted to make books that people actually used. I fetishize real-life books and fear PDF's because I am dogged with the fear that they will become dead files simply resting in a drive somewhere and doing nothing. As I currently have a tonne of unread and unused files cast across multiple drives.
So I wonder now, if more people have actually played old DCO rather than new DCO? Probably yes - partly because new DCO is designed specifically for in-person play and in-person leafing through - and that is a situation which will rarely be occurring becasue of Corona. My imagined perfect state of play cannot take place. But even without that, what if it becomes simply a fetish book for the shelf - the physical version of the lost and hidden PDF?
In furtherance to that trouble; a querying lance of light; questions for YOU, yes YOU, the reader reading this..
Horacio Salinas Blach
1. What games are you actually running or playing in?
2. Are you playing in person or online?
3. How many people?
4. How regular?
5. If online, how long* is each session?
>6. And what combination of digital and material tools and sources are actually being used and HOW?
The title was a trick, this is actually a review of the book 'The Wood Engravings of Agnes Miller-Parker' but I knew if I said the words 'wood-engravings' and 'review' then you probably wouldn't click.
But now there is art to look at so you don't need to think. Just scan onwards.
Some of you may remember her from one of my 'Artists of the Faerie Queene' posts, as that is where I encountered her. She was an artist working mainly in wood engraving book illustration and largely in the inter-war years for private presses in the UK.
This is my review of a rather fancy and quite large book of her work.
This was published in 2005, written by Ian Rogerson.
Its a brave effort and a good book. Rogerson has discretion and sensitivity but sadly lacks vividness and imagination, which leads his assessment of quality to be totally utterly wrong.
Nevertheless, these are only the faults of his class and neurotype and can be easily amended by me, now, so we should award him at least the silver for effort and intention.
And I did find his brief view into the history of Private Press publishing in inter-war Britain fascinating. Thank Christ for the internet, the old ways seem specifically designed to annihilate artists and creators in order to fatten a managerial class. What a terrible waste.
The only thing Rogerson and I can agree on is that AMP's Aesops Fables pictures are really good.
Scan quality is imperfect but look at that frog!
Beyond that, her best images are for The Forest Giant and the Faerie Queene. These are also the images where AMP's vorticist leanings collide most energetically with nature and form.
Rogerson likes the boring images, made with skill and a medium emotional range but fundamentally AMP was a genre illustrator, the more intense and gothic the situation the better she generally does.
Rogerson John Clare is a fair shout. I am not super-familiar with his poetry but AMP being more obsessed with the hyperreality of objects than their symbolic meanings makes perfect sense. More precisely - shes really really interested in focusing on the object in particular, in the beauty of that precise form, and because everything is black and white, light and shadow and shape are all there is.
Vortex Mole
Beasts Rotating
AMP really likes animals. Aven a poor AMP animal is usually pretty good.
From Welsh Folk tales
These animals often appear in pairs or groups, usually crossing each other in the image, facing slightly different directions, with different sides and dimensions and aspects showing. I get the sense that these are in a way, all the same animal, (though there are a few cases where they are clearly not), but, in the way that animals in heraldry are flattened and invisibly twisted so more of the animal 'presents' to the viewer than would ever naturally be seen from one point of view and in the same way that cubism fractures the view of something so that, in a different way, you see it from multiple directions and multiple fragments of it at once.
So these are post-vortcist animals maybe? Done in a naturalistic way. Not that she was trying to save time or cheating but that she was so totally absorbed by the animal as a living breathing object-form-being, that she was looking for some way to hyper-represent the creature but without going into modernist techniques. So we get these pairs and crowds of animals moving around each other showing different sides, different aspects of movement and in-sense.
Shadowed Faces
I do know know why AMP was so much into shadowed faces. Faces turned away. It is as if she was uncomfortable with faces somehow. She can do them, and pulls them off a handful of times, but in almost every case if there is some possibility that she can occlude a face, she does.
Storms, Water, Light, Forest, Hills
What is a storm but a dangerous series of sky-things
about to fall upon you like the toys from a shelftop box?
The wonderful thing about light, weather, forests and anything in the background of a good AMP image is that it is a field of forms.
I think Scot McCloud said US superhero comics were like a cornucopia of objects, and AMP makes a world, not necessarily of mere objects, because her objects live powerfully,life is central to her work, but or forms.
I feel as if I could reach into the image and run my hands across the hills, pick up clusters of buildings like lego blocks, smooth my fingertips across billows of wind like fine clay and grasp crystal shards of light.
Our old friend MVTABILITY
Tubular Clothes
Apparently there were some complaints that her clothes for poverty stricken characters weren't ragged enough? Thats because her clothes were tubes, shapes before they were textures or material.
Floral Explosions
These are pretty great.
The really great thing about AMP is how she smashed together the world of forms and that of living breathing emotion to produce an intense hyperreality.
From 'The Forest Giant'
That is not best shown in her later works which are merely literary.
She should have been given more weird shit to do, and should have been paid a lot more.
Behold, I hath read (much of) Chris McDowalls Electric Bastionland and tweeted about it, often while drinking. Below you will find my often-incisive analysis and commentary while my brain rockets back and forth between alohol and the effects of antidpressants.
(I left the mis-spellings and insanity in. Headings and sub-headings added by me.)
We Begin
Ok I'm gonna drink and read Chri's Electric Bastionland and tweet it now
Jealousy
everyone has better design skills than me
"Other game say Gamesmaster, Referee or MC but this is Bastion and we do things differently" -
differently, even to the last version of this game, in an acceleration of the rule that every rpg deign head must ritually kill gary in their mind by renaming the DM into something new to symbolise their new dawn
A Starting Party
a sandwich is SIX POUNDS - like, actually that is possible, like an M&S sandwich
Huh so there is starting group debt and even a starting Belloq rival figure with more hit PROTECTION (not points) than you - so the game is very absolutely and directly about doing this particular thing right now
and you also have a failed career
and dying adds to the groups debt - so if you die, even doing something heroic and useful to the group and Basionland as a whole, you are still fucking the rest of the group and your own future self
there is something extremely british and of its generation about the quiet background sadism of that concept
so you start with lamps and batteries, climbnig and camping equipment and food and water - presumably because its boring getting those things
one other thing you might add in - and this comes of gaming with the Fallen Demiurge whos name shall not be spoken - is in a city game no one ever has a car to start with - so I would add in, considering the ambient britishness - a bus pass or family ticket
So in other versions of ItO the crapness of your stats got you better stuff, and good stats got you rubbish stuff - a concept I enjoyed - is that still the case here? For it seems not..
Chris Betrays Gaming
multiple attackers are NERFED - no longer do numbers count for all, and one man can indeed hold off an army
what will this mean for adventuring
no doubt much flop sweat was dropped by Chris over this arguably non-diagetic rule!
HAS CHRIS MCDOWALL BETRAYED GAMING?
LIKE WHEN THAT D&D RUYLESET HAD DAMAGE ON A MISS?
THE JURY IS OUT
AND IS ALSO ME
it makes EB an essentially interpersonal adventure-world and sets a hard - or flattened curve limit, on tactical thinking
so - big ass rooftop ambushes etc or hiring a company of dudes - all flattened, both against the players and if they try to use those methods
a sandwich and a drink gets your hp back but riskes a random encounter- curiously specific
You Will Play This Game The Way Chris Says
Also - 1st mention of Greggs
fuck Electric Bastionland is like being kicked out of your parents house in your 20s and trying to survive off your overdraft while sleeping on a friends couch and begging for a job in Greggs
carryig too much shit reduces your hp to zero! Ruthless!
And effective
rules here are bascially chris staring at you thru the page & saying "the game is not _about_ that"
so there is no 'persuasion' rules - just save CHA to avoid a *negative* reaction and to *stop* your peons running off
that still doesn't get people to *do* things for you - that is all down to gameplay
ah so in fact one map cannot hold off an army as they would be a detachment and roll a D12, while he would roll a d4
HOWEVER
one man could popssibly hold off an armies worth of INDIVIDUALS provided they do not fight as a detachment
'vehicles take no damage for running over soft targets like people' - dark, since everything else is an exchange of risk - time for some hit and runs!
A Complex Relationship with Risk
SCARS - what are scars in EB? Are they gud?
They are a reflection of the creators complex relationship with risk and its role in gaming
you get one if you go to EXACTLY 0hp
not a likely event
and if you get one, there can be good and bad effects (though since the standard response is death, any intermission of chance is 'good'so we may account scars as mercy if we wish
scars are a kind of high risk high reward routlette game you get accesss to for being damaged to juuuust the right degree but not dying
they are interesting enough that I wuold have got rid of the 'death at 0 hp rule, and just made the damage suffered a modifier on an extended
Exemple of play has differing corridors having differeing smells and winds - an adaptation to the generational praxis of high resources but limited time - corridors only gain meaning thru context which the modern gamer may not have time to create and so they must breathe and live
example of play - everything broken down into either/or risk decisons - the essential binary of meaning creation
say w your friends, or run away? fight, or flee? risk w reward or safety with life - the essential dilemma of entropy bound forms
hmm, no random roll for targets in multiple pc situations - a ruthless and heavy burden on the DM - orr CONDUCTER
and classic mcdowall fair declaraion of in-world risks, even if that level of perception not necessarily diagetically justified - a very prodestant mind. All the information will be given to you and you will decide, and FACE THE CONSEQUENCES.
curious that we can creat nothing complex without embedding our perception of morality into it
ok a new page has happened
ok weapons are basically
- how much damage d6, d8, d10, d12
- is it bulky (can't carry too much
- does it do BLAST (and so harm detachments)
and thats the deal
THA ART
lol Alecs art has started to come in and the text is so Gen-X british and the art so US Zoomer/Millenial that the combo makes a whole new thing
Old ItO was a lot like watching a british sitcom from the 70s, a halrold pinter televised play or an episode of Dr Who -
what will the asethtic of this version be??
'Board' meaning somewhere to sleep - costs £10. More than the d6£ you start with - so you better get working day one
fuck Electric Bastionland is like being kicked out of your parents house in your 20s and trying to survive off your overdraft while sleeping on a friends couch and begging for a job in Greggs
also - why is Greggs not in this Chris? UKFAIL
Hospital and Leasure are free, but slow - spending money only speeds them up
taking an 'improvement course' lets you re-roll a stat, but you have to keep it whatever - an accurate representaion of british education system
'luxuries ' include a medal ceremony for yourself, a sanctioned duel, a legitimate funeral (10k, really you should be leaving at least 1k for your inheritor to clear the expense of your death) and a radio station
ahhh so he has dealt w the transport issue - public transport is available with sliding scales for distance
A NEW THREAD BEGINS!
OK new thread as we are on to 'failed careers' -- which aaaare about 215 pages of this 333 page book
answering the question of how do you turn a rulselight system into a fucntional money making product in our global times
answer - fill it with art and make char gen also worldbuilding and make there be a LOT of it
so this is also our map to Electric Bastionland, through the failed careers of its economy and society
which are also options
(look out for a shit neutered version of this in D&D 5E(b) <<<< A PREDICTION
£10,000 is the group debt - so game assumes that by the time you have done enough shit to make that, you will have embedded yourself in the world and caused enough trouble to be essentially self-generating adventure machines
The Mysteries of Publishing Exposed!
Interesting that this is *not quite* black and white
for anyone who doesn't do pblishing - B&W is much cheaper, and so the profit margins are highter
so every creator notices this and thinks "wait, I'll just do B&W art w high quality, charge the same and make a mint"
BUT
then they think - "hey this thing is going well... maybeoooone colour wouldn't hurt.. just one..."
and then you end up w a full colour book
those are the beans which I just spilled
Cultural Background
so from one career we have sci-fi, sci-fantasy, terry gilliam, touch of 40k, edge of dr who
terry prachett - a 'loot office'
o there is some of the old school ItO evening out of capacities thgrough the money and hp system - w lower money & hp granting cooler stuff and higher worse etc
3. Trench Conscript. What was your role?
£2 -Recon. Take paints and a portable canvas.
So for anyone who did NOT grow up wathing british TV in the 80's/90's
So while up to now was lite sci-fi and Blackadder, this Dead-Shoresman is pure Gaiman. Not only are you back from the dead, but no-one believes you.
So there's this invisible backwash of generall 'oddness' (hook in the title) that flows through market towns at night, moterway service stations, the BBC at odd times
and EB is right slam in the centre of that
I Complain about 'Hipsters'
This book will be popular w hipsters and people who care about 'design' because its easy to read, text tlight and has good art
it is worth caring about for other reasons
I am just making it clear that other, more attractive and succesful, but shallower people, will enjoy this for the WRONG REASONS =and they need to be jidged for that
"Threatening Stave - has no fucntion but glows and vibrates in a way that suggests that it could be used for distributing extreme pain"
what can we say about art?
So - first ItO felt VERY british, 19tC industrial in aesthetic
Here the people and style are clearly not that - more idk definitely US, maybe futuristic/current - from a different social milueax
& sadder - more human - but also more beautiful
definitely the people I saw walking around the hipster area of toronto - thin, golde, multi-ethnic, rather than the dense potato people I know from my youth and environment - 1 of which I am
so for me there is a very slight tension between the art & text
but not necessarily for the first reader, for whome the whole will fall a new whole <<< PARTICULARLY BRILLIANT PHRASING HERE PATRICK, THAT'S HOW YOU GET THOSE SILVER ENNIES
I gotta stop because its nearly 10 heere and I drank everything in the room
got up to page 37 though, so you no i did an in-depth reaed
back tomorrow maybe?
More Cultural Influences
K I bought more cider and am back to read Chris McDowalls Electric Bastionland again
'Verminator' gets a combination of Cronenberg castoffs
'Lost Expeditioneer' is in debt to the Elephant Reinbursment House, which is a post-singularity sci-fi story right there
Wall-Born more 'infinite city' vibes and more of a China Mieville feel
Cities demorph and arrange themselves neatly for game designers shaping space w random generators and tables - maybe because they are already organised on human-useful lines anyway - as much information as arrangments in space
'shoe throwing' - thats not an object Chris, you have broken your own rules. Inspired by Austin Powers or that guy who shoes George Bush?
All the places Aliens can come from are worse than Bastion. makes sense I guess.
BONE MAGNET! My old nemesis!
The next drink is for Chris for having to come up with 1200 items and elements
"Dog rifle" is one of those fragments which tells a.. _tail_..
Face with tears of joyFace with tears of joyRolling on the floor laughing im dying inside
'Roadside Picnic' is probably the best tonal match for the technology. Reality-bending, semi-useful, not understood, often one-shot and clearly not meant to be used for the thing it is being used for. Humanity as scavenger.
This definitely feels more like 'Dark Toronto' more than decayed England.
(I have been outside the UK a handful of times in my adult life so my field of reference may be limited)
In the absence of a frontier or a singular unnatural incursion, the adventure takes place 'in between' islands of various elements of order which, if seen from afar, could be mistaken for a whole
See the book 'the insurgent archipelago' which was about no matter how dominant modernity becomes, its very complexity keeps creating new webs and cracks and elisions of chaos betwixt its endlessly moving parts
There is always a little microdrama or a little worldbuilding in the back of Alecs art
main figure, often a crowd, often a single individual that doesn't quite fit, often crossing eyelines, and something in the background, a wreck, a cable car
so depending on what PCs you roll in EB, you could be playing a Neil Gaiman urban fantasy game, a near future China Mieveille sci-fantasy, straight sci-fi or just victorian social drama
Urchin pack - think Arnold was the 1st person to have this idea. I always wanted to use it in a Frostgrave RPG
Classes
Wizard - magic & in charge but can take no action
Merc Company - as in the whole company, can do stuff but no authoity or money
Dog - is a dog, can smell. A good dog.
Barbarian etc - more like standard characters
The advert and the celestial sphere is very "Electric Bastionland", whatever that is
I fully support this movement! #HumanityFirst
If warhammer has taught me anything its that if you really love humanity, you need to kill anything that isn't human
and most of the things that are - because they are getting it wrong
Char Gen is also NPG gen, society gen, plot gen, rival gen and item gen
efficient
'Masked Horrorist' is very Ramsey Campbell, so we can add that to the stew I guess
Chris you give away being able to see in the dark too easily, have I taught you *nothing*?
of course you can basically hack your own 'bastionland' by making maybe 20 character gen packages of a particular tone or diagetic implication
oh gooood people are going to do that - they are going to release _zines_
if you imagine Electric Bastionland as a real place, life there is largely about intuiting the use and meaning of any one of a million potentially powerful but *singular* items, talents or situations, encountered near-randomly in the mosaic of order
The Absence of Moral Chaos - a personal failing in Chris McDowall????
There is no moral chaos is the decision matrix of EB. Risks may be unfair but they are always signalled. It's rare you make a choice without knowing the consequences. My impression is that mad streaks of luck or doom are not an intended part of the game.
Which is a major character difference between Chris and I
It does take some balls to just say "Yes there are Muppets in this"
"They are not aliens or androids. They are Muppets. And they even sometimes act like you are in a Muppets Movie"
But "Monstrosities" are still an element and you can recognise immediately that they are monsters, even if verbal and self aware. This does seem to nudge slightly against the moral axis of much of the rest of the book.
Hmm Chris and his cult of information again.
Information is not the be all and end all Chris! If we never have to gamble with limited, poor or deceptive information then ARE WE NOT MACHINES?
I skipped a lot of the failed careers. May go back to them later
"If you get into the habit of giving the right amount of information to your players, they have more agency in their decisions, and are less likely to be unpleasantly shocked by the consequences of those choices.'
No. Negative affect, boredom, frustration and *some degree* of unknown unfairness are vital and necessary organs of FREEDOM.
These advices are good but they cannot be held to be absolutely true
If I am a contrarian, what of it. I drove to that forest to test my eyes! I was acting legally and ethically!
I have been drinking yes
heuristics of efficiency
It's tomorrow now
Reading this book on vision confirms that evolution is as obsessed as Chris McDowall with cognitive offload, heuristics of efficiency and more minimising time on unnecessary decisions
So the obverse of Chris's risk/reward hypertransparency is the severity of impact once the choice is made
No "minor" fuckups and few "learning" mistakes? Is that how it actually plays over time?
Ah ha! "Like your Tomb of Horrors style deathtrap dungeon might be full of hidden traps that don't announce themselves, but you're breaking that rule as a specific exception for this particular dungeon"
A paradox of performed secrecy in films is that the actor (& film) communicate simultaneously to the audience that they are lying &/or keeping a secret and..
to other characters in that fiction that they are telling the truth.
A dual signal
So in EBlnd can there be *real* geographic secrets? Like a secret door?
*People* can keep secrets, but are not likely to have more than one, if at all
But can there be a secret place which does not communicate it's existence
but which can still be discovered?
The doctrine of information and risk and the iteration of the game world may interact strangely over time to produce unpredictable cognitive lacunae of particular types
Maybe
giant ants and the attention economy
Look giant ants are not uninteresting as a concept - they are basically the Borg - but, ants
The city as starting area seems to be as common a concept to whatever the current gen is as the wilderness was to whatever older gens were
The difference may lie partially in the shift in the attention economy and social groupings from the 70s to now
70s issue I imagine being more like " how do I spend these extra cognitive hours in a world without screens and internet" and "what do I do w my geographically close sustained friend group for 6 hours'
Modern problem being more like "how do I keep their attention for maybe 3 hours max" and "how do I adapt the game to a shifting attendance group and online interaction"
The city can present a flowing matrix of challenge, information and adaptation more easily than the imagined wilderness. << I SAID ALMOST EXACTLY THE SAME THING ABOVE BUT I WAS DRINKING AND FORGOT I SAID IT
Characters/Players can be brought in and out more easily too.
Amusingly, if PCs and NPCs have actual jobs in the imagined world, that explains why they weren't present at the game or scene - they were at work.
In the next edition Failed Careers might be "Unstable Careers" or "Gig Economy Trap Careers"
Future Bastionland would definitely have twitter in it
"9. Dark clothes, lone wolf, won't work with any other hirelings. Thinks they're so cool." - Chris I feel attacked by this remark. Neutral face
Cosmic Angels - are these 40k Primarchs?
So you can have Kermit the Frog and a Primarch in the same world?
Lack of Ghosts
Actually if this was REAL British Paracosm role playing it would have more ghosts in it CHRIS
Fuck you could do a Gerry Anderson "Supermarionation" source book for EB. Hidden humanoid mockeries rocketing forth to save Bastionland in bright primary vehicles
Have fun trying to work out which internet personalities these are based on
A Mass Coffin Auction does sound like fun.
The fact that cremation doesn't seem to exist in this megacity pretty much guarantees a gothic logistical structure of trains and necropoli.
The Bureaucrolabyrinth is good. Advancing d20 rolls remind me of Gardens of Ynn
Alien Kung Fu meta dice games - lol I would probably have based the whole game around these
Lets be honest, you're all garbage people incapable of useful or concerted action or decision unless being simultaneously terrified of, and enthralled by, a manically deluded magus-figure on whom you can focus the black energy of your churning resentment and desire.
It’s been a while since you've been screamed at by a narcissistic loon and I am, once again, out of ideas, so its TIME FOR A WITCHUNT. THE ORDO HERETICUS HAS MADE PLANETFALL.
I know full well that ALL OF YOU are Traitors, one way or another. I look aside only for a moment, and return back to discover that a 2d6 Apocalypse World roll is "essentially the same" as the holy d20, that fundamentally, what were all engaged in is "telling stories".... that system matters.
WHAT WASTE HAVE YE MADE OF THIS HOLY COUNTRY AND WHAT CORRUPTION STIRS IN YE?
... NO SEA MAY HOLD MY TEARS, NO SHORE ENCOMPASS MY SORROWS AND NO STONE GUARD AGAINST MY WRATH
Now is the time brethren, for the End Times are upon us all. Speak now or forever be confined to Discord.
HOW HAVE YOU BETRAYED THE OSR!??
FOR YE MUST KNOW IN YOUR HEART, THAT SURELY, YE HAVE SINNED AND FALLEN FROM THE TRUE WAY
Was it actually playing 4E? Are ye a delver in the corpse of that ancient and defeated God? KEIL .. WHY???
Are you hanging with Storygamers now, maybe dabbling with narrative control? RAM I KNOW IT WAS YOU, I KNOW IT WAS YOU AND IT BREAKS MY HEART.
Are you shopping like you believe in yourself on Itchio? ITS JUST BLOG POSTS YOU PAY FOR YOU FOOLS!
Are you staggering through incalculably-long threads on RPG.NET like a man who crawls through thorns, both teared by and tearing at that which restrains you? OH YE SUPPLICANTS TO THE PURPLE CITY, KNOW YE NOT THAT IN THE LAST DAYS EVEN YE SHALL BE CAST DOWN?
Have you been starting shit on Twitter and hoping against hope that a Cop or a Fascist turns up so ye may cast the bitter ashes of your heart upon them? (Actually that is pretty classically OSR, ye are forgiven for that).
Now is the time my rebellious Kine. Ye may confess your sins and face the fire, at least with a shrived soul.
(You can name yourselves Traitor but anyone naming others Traitor proves themself to *be* a Traitor Most Foul and will be deleted.)
So, not quite a bullet in the head, but no triumph with laurels either.
So for anyone who has tried to actually run it, what parts did you find worked and what didn't?
Also if you have questions I will try (?) to answer them.
Also please be civil, I realise experiencing these intuitive differences in perception can be frustrating but the intention here is more of a neutral forum.
And I meant be civil to each other but now I think about it be civil to me as well please.
So I asked the 'Community' question mainly because of my own feelings on the matter.
(Yes this is my yearly Doom Saying Post)
Deleted my G+ when they shut down notifications, but that had been dying for a while for me.
Tried the OSR Discord, kind of a 'Greetings Fellow Kids' situation.
Facebook is pfft.
Twitter - NO.
Instagram is for minis.
Am in a handful of less-visited Discords where not much happens (exactly how I like it).
So there is silence. Which I both like, and is slightly discomforting. I genuinely have no fucking idea what is going on with the 'scene' or if there is even still a 'scene', sometimes this is a relief and sometimes it perturbs me somewhat.
I feel old and essentially out of place in a way I haven't before. Seems like the Zaklash combined with the death of G+ really does mark a new age of sorts. Like most historical moments, this is a culmination of slowly-growing historical trends reaching a kind of tipping point, not that different from the moment before but crossing some kind of line where you can reasonably say 'yes, this is a new thing now'.
The age of Wizards in towers is over, or at least, in permanent decline. (Wizards in towers kind of half-like being in decline though, so it might remain that way for a looong time).
But the twin gods of loneliness and capital have formed a Kaiju for the new age and its has risen from the deeps and is roaming loose.
The Community.
What is a Community?
The community is integrated, and has rules, the rules are for everyone's benefit. It is emphatically not just a group of random people who happen to share an interest in something, its this other thing, you can buy a T-Shirt for it.
I've been looking at pictures of the crowds for stuff like Critical Role and its derivatives and yes, that looks like a 'community' (and holy fuck there are a lot of people). DCC definitely has a community. LotFP almost doesn't. Possibly more people may or may not play LotFP, but, even though they have T-Shirts, they are not a community, they are just a group of individuals, you can't see them together in a crowd in facebook photos, if you asked them to chant something it would take a while for them to work out what and it might get bleeped out. The Gauntlet is definitely a community. RPG.NET is a community, even though they don't have a T-Shirt.
Deep in my heart I am an alienated man who sees a community as a group that I will fail to fit into and that will silently judge me and freeze me out when I can't match its gestures and noises. Then slowly and invisibly turn on my and destroy me. That is why for me, freedom from community is more important than right *to* community.
And I am probably the worst community actor in whas is/was the OSR, silent, irregular, unsupportive, carping, diffident and not willing to make friends.
And I have a dark mind so I'm curious about the paradoxes.
A thing about communities is that they repeat again and again and again that they are open to everyone, its really important that they be open to everyone, and that everyone feel safe. But in effect, the views, gestures, behaviours and usually politics for getting in and staying in are, while often intuitive and unstated, really fucking precise.
So these things which are 'for everyone' are actually prefect filters catching a really specific band of people.
Which - nothing necessarily corrupt about that. Every group on earth is for a particular range of people, that's why its a group, and not just 'humanity', but the unrecognised conflict in narrow groups of cognitively, socially and political similar people strongly maintaining Universal values is interesting.
And I'm interested in the interaction between groups and capital. Sometimes it seems like human groups are like these schools of little fish that like to hang out, and that capital is a big shark hunting them, and if too many of them hang out in too big a school, they are going to get Capitalised. So they scurry away and disperse.
But it also seems like Capital often aids people in making connections, like it wants and doesn't want people to be friends, it has this schizophrenic relationship with society where integrated groups can make money, provide markets, do marketing, even create product, but it also makes people less lonely and capital really needs people to be a little more lonely so they buy more. So there is this continuous push-pull situation with that.
And the extent to which we have adopted the values of Capital as our values without realising - "support marginalised creator buy buying their stuff". What if you wanted to support them without buying their stuff? It almost doesn't make sense as a statement. Without deeper connections the money relationship becomes the dominant, maybe only relationship.
This began as my attempt to put together a project that took advantage of Christian Kesslers multi-level multi-coloured three-dimensional mapping system that exchanges colour for depth. Its the same one that I mentioned in 'The Glass Dungeon'.
It slowly turned into something else, probably not anything better than 'The Glass Dungeon', but a different mood and feel at least.
For a while I've had the vague feeling that I wanted to do a game or an adventure that was set in, and mainly about, the feel of evening, darkness and dusk.
Now this is a terrible idea for an adventure, especially a D&D adventure, which is better if its about activity, movement, anarchic restless scrabbling striving and desire, but I continue with it none the less becasue if you don't create anything at all for a long time then if you feel the need to write anything at all then of course you have to write it.
THE GLASS ROOKS
Rooks do an interesting thing. At the end of the day, when evening falls, all the Rooks in an area will fly to one particular field or flat area near their roost. They will gather in there from many miles around and they will pool themselves, sitting on the ground together, waiting for the last to gather in.
They wait there cawing to each other and then, after the last Rook has arrived, at time, they take off almost as-one and, in a huge stream of black birds, they flow across the darkening sky to their roost, usually a copse or wood of tall and ancient trees.
No-one is sure why they do this, or at least why they do it this way.
The idea is, a wizards tower or secret place made from, or accessed through, a gigantic flock or murmuration (that's starlings really I think) of rooks.
Obviously you can only get there at evening, and maybe the place itself exists slightly outside time so that it can access any evening in that place.
The ghost of a sorceress, a memory of a woman, moving over the fields at dusk and through dreams at dawn.
Something like this poem by Louise Bogan:
"The woman who has grown old
And knows desire must die,
Yet turns to love again,
Heats the crows' cry.
She is a stem long hardened,
A weed that no scythe mows.
The hearts laughter will be to her
The crying of the crows.
Who slide in the air with the same voice
Over what yields not, and what yields,
Alike in spring, and when there is only bitter
Winter-burning in the fields."
And knowledge of birds or of the patterns of birds somehow being important. The paths and patterns of birds in the air, Geese, Starlings, Gulls and Rooks, forms and kind of maze or history book, repeating and renewing itself, even if the environment changes. Paths in the the air and in time itself. An ancient pattern in the skies.
THE ROOKS
The Rooks are of black glass, they are prisms and under clear white light each carries a spot of rainbow counter-shadow at its core. At night, under moon or lamplight, they have an iridescent rainbow sheen. From a distance you can barely tell that they are glass, unless you're looking for it.
They live in the hinterland, dull country where nothing ever happens, and that slow. Maybe in an alarmingly flat fenland, a place with no hills, riddled with invisible dykes and brooks that trap travellers, with the unearthly stillness that flat land brings. Over maybe twenty miles of land, a handful of villages. They fly around and eat just like normal rooks. It's not clear if they breed, no-one has ever found a glass rook egg, so presumably these are still the original ones.
The glass is pretty tough but can be smashed. You need to pin the rook down on a blacksmiths forge and swing a heavy hammer straight dead-on, it shatters into fragments of of clear, white crystal glass. Feather fragments in the glittering mess. But the Rooks are valueless, hard to catch, most blows jut glance off and they enjoy escaping cages, in which case they simply fly back to the flats and roost.
THE PLACE ITSELF
It's a little like the webway from 40k except its like a cave whose walls are formed from a cloud or tessellated circling black-glass rooks and the whole thing is hanging in a kind of prismatic or incredibly bright-white dimension so if the rooks are ever damaged or removed then this terrible light shines in. A shadowed pilgrimage through the realm of the Prismatic Demons. Shadow and evening in this adventure always being good, and bright white light being bad.
A prison of radiating light. A gateway between worlds might be broken into from both ends.
The idea is that the palace, or tower itself, changes shape and configuration depending on what you do. So the whole thing is about the size of a comic that you can lie flat on the table, with a map on the right page and encounters on the left page.
Each map is multi-levelled, using Christians colour method rather that a diagrammatic method. If distances don't seem to match perfectly then that's just becasue it exists in non-space so its invisiblly non euclidian, but still accurate relative to itself.
So depending on what encounter you have, or what you do, you turn the page, in the game this means the Rooks forming the structure of the reality briefly fly apart and you find yourself momentarily hanging/falling through this terrible dimension. Then they come back together in a different format, which roughly measures up to the one before, so room 12 is still room 12 but now its a dining parlour with dense escher-rook wallpaper instead of a glass cavern, so the things you will find there will have to match the nature of the new reality.
And you need to master and understand the kind of ways the environment can change to win the adventure, so you can make environmental changes to, for instance, suddenly trap a threatening monster in a room with no immediate access to yours, or trap it in a locked room, or drop it down a shaft.
But every time you change the environment there is the possibility of something from outside getting in. And the nature and form of the outsiders re-interprets itself according to the perceived nature of the environment.
It could become any of these:
A cylindrical tower or keep in which the outer wall is an impenetrable storm of permanently-circling birds.
A country house - layered, square, maybe the rooks are its wallpaper and in the grain of its wooden floors.
A Theatre - big central open space & lots of little rooms arranged in rings around. Maybe the rooks are like bird-masked stagehands that invisible assemble the theatre-set around you.
A dungeon - made from stone birds, or the birds are embossed into the stone, or are fossils in every stone.
A river / waterfall.
NPC'S/Monsters
Crystal lepers like escapees from Ballards Crystal World book.
Likeable comedy nuns
Sun monks, wolves with robes and masks like moons that let them speak but force them to obey.
Ape Roundheads with masks like burning suns that force them to act as men, lead by Gorilla Cromwell.
At the centre is a Prismatic Demon imprisoned there by the Sorceress. This is its domain and only its imprisonment by the Rooks allows it to exist at all. It's trying to outwit the PC's and escape but they need it for something. And in true Ggardner Fox style, it needs to be outwitted or trapped in each configuration of the place for them to win. It only needs to win once.
I started thinking about a theory of filmed violence and, in brief, its this -
The symbols of violence that tell the story well on film are almost always bad things to do in real violent situations.
Maybe its simpler to say 'accurate violence is a boring story'.
Lets go through it one by one:
Sword fights. Fighting with swords for real would be like boxing with knives. Fast, brutal, ugly and difficult to discern what’s happening from the outside.
In any real physical fight both sides will work very hard not to signal what they are doing or about to do. The movement between any two positions or actions will be as short and fast as possible. There will be no unnecessarily wide arm movements, no unnecessary body movements. Short, clipped controlled movements that return quickly to their originating position and rarely 'follow through' or carry the weight of a contestant far from their centre of mass. Blades will rarely clash.
This looks dull and crucially, *doesn't tell the story* of the fight visually on film. On film all the movements will need to be extended, emphasised, made particular. Always over-extend your arm, always follow through with your body weight. The audience *wants* to see your body move. The shifting of your body tells the story of the act, the more it moves and the more visibly it moves, generally the better the story.
Boxing. I don't know much about this but I think its pretty true that in boxing attritional damage is a bad thing and you would almost never let an opponent 'wear themselves out' on you before you come back in force before the end of the fight*.
In real life, damage is bad. In boxing films, damage is excellent. You *want* both fighters to be visibly damaged. specifically you want the hero to be the more damaged fighter because every visible example of pain makes them more heroic for resisting it.
The boxing hero has to be beat-up towards the end. if they were just very good and won intelligently without being visibly physically hurt then it would have no visual or emotional impact. It would be like throwing away the language of film.
What goes for boxing goes to some degree for all other forms of physical damage. Getting shot is very bad and probably effectively incapacitating for almost all normal people no matter where you get shot. On film the hero *has* to get shot. Or at least clipped. it has to be physical and it has to be *visible*, without the visible example of danger and pain the hero isn't heroic.
Gun fights. Any time after WW1 if you are facing machine guns or artillery then you have to be some distance from each other. You need to be far enough away from each other that if someone opens up on you with a machine gun and walks it down the line there is enough time from the person in front of you dying and falling down and you seeing this for you to get into cover.
The trusty grunts dive into the trench or foxhole. They are all there, lined up and *in the same shot*.
"We're pinned down, we gotta get out of this Kowalski!"
Sure you do, but the reason you are pinned down is not because of tactics, its because the director of the film needed their principal story-carrying characters near each other, in direct danger, *in the same shot* so they are interacting socially just by being there and the audience can *see* this happening.
The trusty grunts will *always* end up pinned down together in a foxhole, or behind a wall, or in a room. The only thing you can say for sure about the place that they are trapped in is that it will be somewhere where you can point a camera at the whole group and *see* them acting together, exchanging glances, being in each others social space. That shot tells the story of coming together under pressure to achieve something difficult. It tells it better than simply filming the real thing would.
If everyone has machine guns really you want to be behind someone, in cover, at long-medium range so you can shoot them in the back. This looks terrible on film. Film wants everyone in the shot.
Archery. In Game of Thrones they actually lampshade this.
"Never hold your bow drawn, it loosens the string for no reason." - Also it tires you the fuck out because bows are heavy to draw and you are wasting energy. Just draw and loose in one movement.
Then later in the series during a siege *they do the same fucking shot*, a row of archers, arrows pointed up for a ballistic shot, even though the enemy are below, all holding their bows drawn for a really fucking long time.
I think the arrows are also flaming too.
Why? Because it tells the story of the violence better than the real violence would. The bow held at the draw gives the human body a powerful and tense visual signature. The muscles are literally held in tension, all they can do is release and you are just waiting for that to happen.
Having a bunch of archers in a row? Fucking cool, gives the image depth and perspective. Plus the sight of a bunch of people holding themselves in a uniform tension multiplies the signal of the single archer.
Adding flaming tips? Of course. Always do it. A more powerful visual signature. As well as that, always chase escapees and light your castle with flaming torches and never with candles or lanterns. The naked active fire on the torch is almost a character in itself and the fact that the person holding it must hold it like a weapon, upright, away from themselves, body in tesnsion, makes it better dramaturgy. A lantern hangs, a bare candle must be moved with slowly (always have candles in the scholars study *and if it’s a ghost story*, candles slow physical action down, torches speed it up.)
Weapons. Always too big. Real weapons have to be light enough to wield continuously for a long period of time. Warhammers and picks are small. The head has to be small to concentrate mass and force. A big wide head is dumb, a big wide sword is dumb.
Fantasy weapons have to be oversized so they can tell the story of the weapon better. Conans sword was so big and heavy only Arnold could actually wield it. The sword of Goderick Gryffendor was designed originally to be held by children and looked big in their hands. In the final films, in the hands of adults, it looked too small.
Guns don't always need to be super-big but they should have all kinds of extra crap bolted onto them like laser sights and extra magazines and little pointless clips.
Guns and swords both need to make much more sound than they do in real life. Guns in films clatter like dice bags every time an actor even touches them.
Helmets. Helmets are the most important piece of armour that anyone will ever put on. Except maybe a mail shirt or kevlar. But in general, if you are wearing armour and not wearing an helmet then you are fucking insane because you keep your brain in there and you need that.
Yet in film people are continually losing their helmets. Often they get shot off or lost in battle some other way. Sometimes the main hero becomes such a super-soldier that "helmets just slow me down maaan". Generally if a film can find any way to get the helmet off, they will.
Why? I think because it fucks up the transmission of story energy from the face. Helmets (and hats) surround the face, change the profile of the skull. They look dorky in real life. They look even more dorky on film because a huge amount of information about the way someone’s body and personality and presence impacts the world is simply missing from a film image. What you have is the visual in a box and helmets fuck badly with the proportioning of informational space within this box. Heroes don't have wide faces. Heroes don't have small features. They have large expressive features that fill their often-narrow faces. They are full of information.
Some hats do and some hats don't. Top hats do, Sherlock Holmes rarely wears one on film. Even in old films he's usually taking it off. Cowboy hats don't. probably cowboy hats are ok because they are a *lateral line*, they go *across the screen* and make the screen feel wider, not more dense. A top hat goes up and down and on a film screen thats awkward as fuck.
Neither surround the face and make it look bigger, Sherlock will NEVER wear his deerstalker with the flaps down. Even on the moors when it’s probably cold as fuck and he is literally stalking something he will keep his flaps tied. Marge from Fargo can have her face-surrounding hat, it makes her look plumper and more heavy and that *tells the story* of Marge and is accounted for in that stories structure.
- Over Signalling.
- Taking damage.
- Grouping up when in area-danger.
- Being highly visible.
- Partial armour use.
- Holding a position of dynamic tension.
- Oversized weapons.
Maybe this is another thing like dungeon traps, a signal inverted or somehow turned inside out to make is useful in a fiction about a thing, to make it a useful piece of mental architecture, a transmissible idea, rather than a piece of the real world.
Ways to end a marvel film that do not involve a giant fucking thing hovering above the earth
Extra points if it stays away from the whole grimy industrial city aesthetic
First options comes curtesy of Nathan Ryder:
1. The North POle during a solar flare. The Northern lights are going crazy, there's a huge tunneling device drilling into the ice for (sorry nathan i forget exacty why but there could be all kinds of shit down there, I'm going with ancient city).
Solar flare radiation keeps glitching Iron mans armour, presumably also communications so that means NO ONE IS COMING TEAM. Ice is alleady beautiful and cinematic, ad amped up aruara borealis, a gigantic vertical tunnel in the ice and whatever the fuck a giant tunneling machine looks like.
2. Giant redwood forest, cyclopean pillars of nature streatching off into the distance. Secret ninja tree-base. Everything quiet, maybe TOO QUIET, then armies ninjas attack by running vertically down the trunks of the gigantic trees. The trees get set on fire, turns into a crown fire and whole thing looks like a scene straight out of hell. Villian starts laughing at captain america cause at least he fucked up one of Americas WONDERS OF NATURE.
I can just imagine the Red Skull chortling: "this tree was older than your 'Declaration of _Independance_, and YOU destroyed it Captain _America_. Cap freaks out, gets Thor to summons storm to stop fire. Thor freaks out, accidentally brings on tidal wave. Fire drowned then brutal showdown in the half-drowned ruins of the forest with everyone leaping between the burned up trunks floating on the surface. Ninjas are undead and climb out of the black ooze. Team wins but Thor cries at the end.
3. Microverse. Ant-Man shrinks everyone and they battle an army of robotic ultron-ants. maybe the Avengers just have to make it across New York when they are the size of pinheads and it starts funny but turns into a surprisingly-serious ODDESSY and hawkeye dies saving everyone from a Godzilla-Rat in the pharonic tomb-complex of the New York sewer system. The earth mightyl heroes learn an important lesson in humility, Thor questions meaning of heroism & summons tine lightning. In the end team saved president, gets tiny medals, returned to normal size by Reed Richards in SHOCK COURT CASE as marvel get the FF rights back.
4. Hell. Cap DIES saving LOKI in a shock twist in the pre-credits stinger and Hela takes his soul. They have a funeral but Thor CANT TAKE IT and twists Lokis arm (literally), swears he will INVADE HELL and recover the soul of Captain America. Team seems up for it. Meanwhile in hell, Cap finds numerous souls of discrased soldiers from every human conflict, decides suffering has gone on long enough and turns this rag-tag bunch of misfits into a team to escape death itself.
Stage is set for a WAR IN HELL and Marvel can afford the rights to Wayne Barlows paintings so it actually looks good. Avengers win, in the end of credits stiger Cap stops Nazis leaving hell, "Sorry Gunter, you guys have to stay." Audience laughs.
5. Europa. DAREDEVIL investigates what seems to be a simple case of kidnapping but is surprised when THOR shows up and things rapidly escalate from there. Turns out is SUPER ALIENS trying to awake an ancient army hidden deep in the europan ocean. (Yes exactly like that Warren Ellis comic though marvel can probably afford the rights to that too). Team ends up on Europa fighting a HIDDEN ALIEN FEET and WAKING SUPER RACE. All seems lost until Thor summons unexpected help from a nearby storm: Jupiters RED SPOT. Lightning leaps between Jupiter and its moon destroying alien fleet. credits stinger: on earth an ancient hero wakes from his slumber: HERCULES. Messing with Jupiter has upset ZEUS. Sage is set for HILARIOUS SEXY GODWAR in next Thor film.
6. THE SARGASSO SEA OF STOLEN SHIPS. Kang the Conquorer (Joseph Gordon Levitt) has stolen shitloads of ships from all over history and brought them together into a kind of armada-city in a timelose sea (totally unlike that China Mieville book) the Avengers follow him there with the help of his future self (Joaquin Pheonix), but which of the timelost sailors will help or hinder the team, and what will the Mexican government do when a new city of ships from every point of human history turns up off its coast?
Taskmaster loses his memories with all the shit he learsn, what better foe for the Avengers than a Hawkeye-style 'normal guy' who still manages to take them all down, with the help of an underclass that they ignored? TOPICAL.
8. The White House. Time for some DARK REIGN shit. People finally get tired of the property damage every time the Avengers do anything and the government authorises NORMAN OSBORNE to start a government-sanctioned Avengers team. The Avengers are ON THE RUN. But then it turns out the predsident is a skrull and they need to expose him, except doing that looks exactly like an assasination atttempt leading to the Avengers fighting the US ARMY on the streets of Washington. Thor fights the USS Nimitz battlegroup. The Avengers can win, but will they kill US soldiers doing it? And will Cap spaz out if they do?
9. Avengers Tower? (O.K I'm running out of ideas) After the MASTERS OF EVIL detonate an anti-powers bomb over New York the Avengers are de-powered. HAWKEYE is now the most competent member of the team and has to lead the rest on a DIE-HARD type tower runaroud to use cunning tactics to take out the still-superpowered bad guys. Turns out its your heart that makes you a hero after all.
10. Thors Well Oregon
Becasue it has the word Thor in it and looks amazing. And there the Avengers fight THE X MEN. Come on, get the fucking rights back Marvel! Maybe Professor X is down the hole.
You should all share this and add as many as you can in the comments ond on G+ as maybe someone from Marvel will see it and we will not get ANOTHER FUCKING FLOATING THING THAT IS FALLING.
Heeeey, I'm still unemployed and I got depression sooo Here's a mini module based on an off-hand comment made in a game two days ago.
Turns out cereal mascots map almost perfectly onto D&D monsters, this is built of of those, placed in one of the Isles of California. I used the Monstrous Manual dice rolls wherever I could, threw in some extra stuff, added some of Dyson's maps. It pretty much turned into an exercise in minimalism, trying to cram as much useful info into as small a space as possible. The stuff in there is what I would need to run a game so it has some standard D&D info most of you probably wouldn't need. I used an a5 page size, big 12 point Georgia font for readability. It's meant to work good on a reader like a kindle, or an Ipad. Two page view should work best. I'm telling myself this in an exercise in information design for Veins of The Earth, rather than just low-level aspergers and avoiding useful work. I haven't put in an index or bookmarks yet, I intend to. The NPC name generator is now a link on the right. If you use it, let me know how it reads and if it works ok.
John Ruskin
you mad, creaky Victorian bastard. You may think the use of iron in buildings
stops them being architecture, but you can write like a motherfucker when you
want to.
“There is a
marked likeness between the virtue of man and the enlightenment of the globe he
inhabits – the same diminishing gradation in vigour up to the limits of their
domains, the same essential separation from their contraries – the same
twilight at the meeting of the two: a something wider belt than the line where
the world rolls into night, that strange twilight of the virtues; that dusky
debatable land, wherein zeal becomes cruelty, and faith superstition, and each
and all vanish into gloom.”
I think that’s one
fucking sentence? Usually I loath long sentences but I cannot deny he makes
every part of that one sing.
