Showing posts with label Reviews. Show all posts

Tuesday, 17 March 2026

Take This You Fiends

This is the story of an encounter with Tunnels and Trolls by a guy who did not know that much about Tunnels and Trolls and still doesn’t, so if you are a T&T maven and don’t want to hear some half-interested newb bang on, then stop reading now. (Also; they are bringing out a new version of this soon, and by god my post has nothing to do with it! I literally stapled together the rules that I used from ancient box-sets and a PDF, and I ignored most of them.)

7.5

Somehow, I have the boxed set for the 7.5 edition of Tunnels & Trolls on my shelf. I must have bought back around 2009-2011 when I was getting interested in RPG’s . Yet more curious; I have a vague sense impression that I actually read these rules. I remembered nothing of them, but if sitting un-played on a shelf for fifteen years makes an RPG guilty then I don’t want to be innocent.

More recently I was listening to Chris McDowalls ‘Rule of Three’ podcast, where he interviews game makers about three favourite works, and he brought up the story of encountering someone at an Old-School meetup who had only ever played Tunnels and Trolls, and in fact, had only ever been in one campaign of Tunnels and Trolls, and had been gaming for years, this one game, this one world.

Clearly there is something going on with Tunnels and Trolls, I thought, and, foolishly, brought this up in a conversation with the Artist; “maybe that’s the secret, maybe we all should have been playing Tunnels and Trolls all along.”

“Oh, you should run it for us.”

Thus came the curse. My smallest statements are literally engraved on Votans Spear, and I am a pussy, a clock was ticking; could I read and absorb the Tunnels and Trolls ruleset AND develop a dungeon for Tunnels and Trolls in time, and well enough to run an actually functional game? (Watch my reality TV series to find out.)

(tldr; I can. Comments from two of the players, the ‘Rogue’ and the ‘Leprechaun’ are scattered through this post.)

Long hours of digging through this ruleset, producing documents to make sense of it, and writing dungeon ideas on the back of till receipts at work, which provoked some consternation when colleagues looked down to discover that I had been scribbling about Moon Mice and “THERE IS A COUNTDOWN”.

Character Generation

T&T Char Gen begins in a space broadly adjacent to Dungeons and Dragons, with Seven stats (in 7.5 at least) rolled 3d6 and in my case, down the line. Add Gold, a ‘Height and Weight table and so-on. When complete you get essentially three Core classes; Warrior, Wizards and Rogues. (There are more but I won’t get into those). So far so D&D.

What’s different?

TARO

“Remember, triples add and roll-over. This rule always applies in Tunnels and Trolls.” – Ken St Andre

It doesn’t always apply; one of a number of ways the 7.5 ruleset seems to be written by someone with an irregular supply of amphetamines. However, this fascinating and distorting rule probably should apply more fully across the ruleset.

If you roll a triple in Character Generation, you add everything together and roll again, adding the resulting value. If the second roll is also triples, you add and roll again. If the third roll is triples, you add, and roll again.

This means that while the general range of stats for an opening character is likely similar to D&D, it’s possible that one or more players may have one or more stats that are insanely ridiculously high, creating an utterly distorting effect on the game.

And in fact this did happen in the game we played, with one Rogue rolling an insanely massively high CHA score and very mid scores for everything else, resulting in one of the party being or a youngish Matthew McConaughey, roaming around the dungeon just charming the shit out of everyone.

This is important because, like a lot of things essential to T&T, it strongly effects the tone of the world in which you play, the nature of the challenges you face and a range of other things. The wilder the dice curve, the whackier the reality.

The Leprechaun – “T&T produces lawless, erratic game outcomes, but *appears to be* rigorously designed. There are a lot of rules but they don’t really work. The depthless complexity acts as a wax seal that legitimizes the game outcomes. In combat, you do a bunch of calculation and roll a big pile of dice, which is a ritual act that irreversibly moves the game timeframe forward one increment.”

Liz Darnforth

Kindred

Kindred is ‘Race’ in old D&D terms, and while it looks like earlier editions had a relatively narrow range of ‘normal’ Kindred you could be, the 7.5 edition has gone utterly loopy and included stat tables for a gigantic (literally, you can be a Giant), range of possible races, from Skeleton to Vampire to Dragon.

Almost all of these Kindred are measurably better than standard humans. Even Skeletons are a bit better. There are no gates or limits on what Kindred you can be. This means, if you are playing 7.5 as written, you can be literally almost anything and that almost all of these are better than standard human stats.

If you include one or two of these ‘hackable’ or ‘optimisable’ elements in a game ostensibly dedicated to a balanced experience then they are flaws, but if you flood the game with them, then you fundamentally alter the expectations for what kind of game it’s going to be. This is one of a wide range of ways in which Tunnels & Trolls is protected from the negative effects of being Tunnels and Trolls by the fact of it being Tunnels and Trolls, the games own anarchic spirit keeps it… stable?; if you are the kind of person who wants to min-max and powergame, (which you could theoretically do easily in T&T), why on earth would you be playing this loosy-goosey game?

I set bounds that no-one could play a Kindred too large to actually fit in the dungeon. We ended up with one very charismatic human rogue, one Leprechaun (size and weight reduction tables are included) and one Star-Obsessed and (below average for his people) strong dwarf with a BIG AXE.

Talents

Every PC gets one ‘talent’; a particular thing that they do, and this could also conceivably be power-gamed but generally is not. They roll a d6 for their talent value and add this to the stat being used when rolling for this particular thing.

Level

Your Level in T&T provides a number of benefits, and is based explicitly upon your highest essential stat. This means you can start play at Level Zero, Level One, Two, or even possibly Three, and that as your stats fluctuate through play, you can possibly change Level, back and forth, within the range of even one adventure. (NONE of the specifically-designed character sheets I saw online were built with the essential changeability of the PC stats in mind. You are better of just using notepaper.)

Loony Tunes Adventure Gang

It’s clear that through the 7.5 editions it took to reach me, T&T had been through a lot of rules changes and additions. As I will describe later, I think many of these are errors, or at least, non-optimal.

Two things I agree with fundamentally are TARO and the more-recent extended-Kindred chart. I actively want a Loony Tunes Adventure Party with a bunch of whacked-out and distorted stats and a range of weird presences in the game. (How would a Leprechaun react to hanging out with a Vampire?). I think it’s generally fine if someone with crap stats inflates themselves with a Kindred, so long as they actually play that role (remembering they are still a below-average member of their own Kindred). I didn’t set it as a hard rule but I would probably state next time that anyone who gets a TARO roll and a massive single stat, should stay human, but everyone else can pick a Kindred.

In its simplicity, adaptability, broadness of concept, lightness and gonzo-feel, T&T feels well-adapted to the ‘Island of Misfit Toys’ style of play. It also seems to suit well a ‘play whatever/whoever you want’ ethos. So long as you stick with it, and take it seriously (coherent and sustained), though not seriously (with tragic gravity). [The two forms of seriousness will prove a vitally important distinction going forward.]

(I also made the PC’s buy clothes out of their initial gold store, which kept them all relatively poor. Though gold doesn’t matter that much in T&T. (Also, TARO applies to your Gold Roll in Char Gen too, so one PC may just have ‘being loaded’ as their core trait.))

The Rogue - “I liked having to buy my own clothes using the gold generated by character creation, it was like starting out in Oregon Trail or something. I appreciate that the clothes list was long and carefully priced out and if I was in charge I would add even more carefully described clothing choices which could be used to define the character you are playing. What if you sunk it all into one really great jacket, no mechanical effects. Could you describe a jacket in such a way that it is really tempting even if you are gonna have to put that arbalest back on the shelf?”

Liz Darnforth

The Combat Sequence

Farewell happy fields, where joy forever dwells. Hail, horrors, Hail! The Tunnels and Trolls combat sequence makes no sense. Attempts to fix have made it worse.

Conceptually it is brilliant. Once it was simple, intuitive, somewhat baggy and clean to play. I think years of people asking questions (filthy nerds) has ruined it. I tried to boil it back to what I thought was the core; a battle is on, both sides roll all their dice; whoever gets the biggest number wins.

Adventurers and Monsters calculate these differently; Adventurers have Combat Adds derived from their physical stats, and whatever weapon they are using. Monsters have a Monster Rating, which breaks down to their dice rolled (The Monster Rating divided by 10), and their own Combat Adds (Half their Monster Rating). Confusingly, some posh and special Monsters can also have stats like Adventurers, but let’s not even get into that.

Everyone has a big pile of dice. Everyone rolls. Bigger is better.

Over time additions have been made, (as a result of questions). Some wise, most I think not.

One positive addition is ‘spite dice’; every roll of 6 on either side, always counts as damage. I think this was made to amend the horribly brutal attritional effect of these massive dice pools contending over multiple rounds, and it works ok.

Other additions are complex arrangements of specific damage set aside and re-integrated during the round to account for people sniping ranged targets or similar, and specific arrangements of spellcasting where damage from certain spells is accounted like a weapon and the effects of others are placed before-this-and-that etc.

I Ignored Almost All of This

I ran combat description-first, rules-light, quick and high consequence. It ended up not unlike a storygame or a Dowlain modern ruleset.

Surprise Rounds are a slightly weird thing in T&T, (if rounds are truly meant to be around 2 minutes long), and thankfully I was able to ignore them. Likewise I ignored sniping in or out of combat.

How I conceptualised it was like this;

First; describe fully where everyone is and what is going on as combat breaks out, be above all vivid, quick and physically exact. Go round the table asking, quickly, what each character wants to do, or “what do you want to achieve in the next two minutes”. PCs can combine actions, do tricks stunts, etc or anything they like, but they can’t take too long thinking about it Tunnels and Trolls does not respond well to planning.

Second; everyone rolls their dice and we add them all up.

Third; whichever side won inflicts damage, and I describe the events of these two minutes turn out largely as they intended. However, the T&T ruleset does say that the losing side of this can decide who on their own side takes what damage. This infers, and I applied it as such, that the losing side gets some vote in how exactly things turned out in these two minutes. They don’t achieve their aims but they do get to choose events relating to damage to their own side (though not whether they take damage at all).

Last; I tried to go for big, consequential swings in the description of events that would rapidly lead one side or the other to be disadvantaged, to flee, surrender, negotiate, be trapped etc, I did not want this shit going on too long.

Liz Darnforth

Why Ignore the Details?

The game does not seem to want to be played that way.

I think the inclusion of Ranged and Magic attacks being, at some points, their own special thing, is ultimately fucking stupid, as you are rolling to make these special pre-attacks (each of which requires their own segment of the round to work in) and then counting them towards the total value of the HPT? And then at the end, you focus special damage on the specific targets of the magic or Ranged attack? At this stage why are you not just going person-by-person?

Even the rules seem confused about this as the details seem to change from edition to edition.

It looks like the simple, basic concept of the opposed, simultaneous, dice rolls, has been subjected to so many tactical questions and faffing about that over time, it has developed so many exceptions, set-asides, layered sequences and so on that it has, in effect, become exactly as, or even more complex than an equivalent D&D combat turn.

But D&D has the saving grace of being sequential-by-person, so at least while you are faffing with big numbers you are doing them one after another. T&T has the elegant conception of simultaneous action, but that then divided, excepted, specified and detailed so much that now the DM deals with an equivalent cognitive weight to D&D and the initially non-intuitive simultaneous action of T&T at the same time. It seems to me the worst of both worlds.

I forwarded description, and tried to keep it forward. Everything that happens can only be allowed to make sense in terms of what has already been visually and spatially described in natural language. The results of dice rolls feed into this and are fed back out as more description. The vivid description of events fills the need for specificity that the rules either ignore or don’t do well. Most of all its meant to happen light and fast.

The Rogue - “I remember way back starting a D&D game with some friends who had never played before, and at first when we got into fights they would say all these wild ideas of what they were gonna do (’I’m gonna put my bow over his head and grab the string and shoot the arrow in his neck that way”) and then get discouraged as the rules generally would at best penalize for you for trying something different than: hit with sword, watch hp go down. Doing the combat as narrative first, even if that did not have very much to to do with the dice rolls, and then narrative again after all the rolls (deciding how the damage gets doled out) was kinda nice. I am surprised at feeling this way as I do not usually like story game rules.

Everyone goes at once feels more nervewracking & unpredictable as a player: instead of things slowing way down you are all making immediate guesses about what would be best to do, which feels more real than if you have to wait your turn & can adjust your actions based on what happened to the person who went first. On the other hand, every time we got into combat seemed to end after a single dice roll: either we got crushed & ran away or the opposite happened- which on the one hand is hugely superior to sitting around waiting for your turn to hit guy with sword, but sometimes made things seem anticlimactic: players all do one thing each, roll dice, cool that’s it evil is defeated. I guess one has to lean heavily on narrating what’s happened (either on the DM or player side) to make things properly impactful? It’s possible this was just on account of lucky rolls & combats could have taken longer? It seemed like our characters were appropriately balanced to the dungeon though (the leprechaun died)”

Rob Carver

The Leprechaun – “T&T combat as written is almost pathologically bad. We generally want things to be useable and simple; if a ruleset has complexity, each complication should justify itself in producing a better play experience. Instead, the rules work together to produce an appalling result. Rolling a large pool of dice that’s the same every “round” makes it likely that there’s a consistent result, so that combat is guaranteed to feel samey and yield similar outcomes from round to round. But there’s also a disastrous feedback effect: damage reduces your Strength, which gives you lower combat adds and less weapon access, so you roll fewer dice, so you lose faster and faster, and you have to do a bunch of paperwork to figure out how much worse you’re going to do each round.”

Running the Dungeon

it all began to go wrong when they re-named Ralph

Play Time

I came up with a relatively simple 12-room dungeon with a lot if diegetic ‘safety rails’ and potential in-world guidance. The Rogue told me that a normal group will only handle about four rooms an hour, if that, so I planned for two possible sessions of up to four hours each. In fact they cleared the thing in just over two hours. Apparently I run games ‘quickly’(?)

The Rogue - “Patrick DMs like he is driving a bus with a bomb on it.”

Rob Carver

“Take That You Fiend!”

People seemed to like the principal of ‘Saying the Spell Names Out Loud’. I felt like it kept the tone right.

The Leprechaun – “I agree that saying the spell names as though you’re casting them yourself is a splendid idea. You can’t cast a spell without literally saying the magic words.”

Post-Adventure System Issues

I only had to make a single, one-shot adventure so I was saved any of the scaling complexities of ‘how much gold is there’ or ‘what do you do with the gold’? Or any worries about ‘what happens after this adventure? T&T (at least in 7.5) bases advancement on ‘Adventure Points’ which you hand out regularly, mid-adventure, and which can be used, mid-adventure, to improve PC’s stats, which effects what level they are. Gold or treasure is mainly used for buying spells or equipment.

The Leprechaun – “The one idea I was interested in was gaining lots of XP and spending it incrementally whenever you wanted. It really changes the texture of the game to be getting these drips of XP and feel like you could realistically, in one session, change something meaningful about your character. This is also a place where narrative and ruleset dovetail nicely: players can spend their XP to level up a given stat *right before they need it*, which feels like the character rising to meet a challenge.”

Rapid Monster Improvisation

T&T’s Monster Rating is a raw, single number from which are derived both the number of d6’s rolled and the ‘adds’. The ‘adds’ are reduced as the Monster suffers damage while the dice are not. This is perhaps even simpler than the Hit Dice concept and makes inventing, moving and shifting around monsters for change and improvisation relatively easy. It does result in some big dumb dice pools though.

Big Dumb Dice Pools

Everything is based on the d6 and everything is Dice Pools, rolled in big piles, simultaneously. The PC’s add up theirs and the DM adds up the monsters. It’s a lot of adding up. I am not sure how this will actually work once you get into the Monsters with really big numbers or the really big amounts of monsters. I think I recall in some Ken St’Andre ruleset, seeing his rules of thumb for managing huge dice pool numbers, which was essentially multiplying smaller pools, which is fine, but also; it’s your ruleset dude.

The Leprechaun – “3d6 * 6 is a *dramatically* different roll from 18d6 and would totally change the texture of the game. I kept finding things like this in the T&T ruleset. Most early TTRPGs seem “game design naive”, even most modern TTRPGs do. This can make them characterful, or introduce some loveable features by accident, but can also lead to miserable gameplay patterns.”

Liz Darnforth

Growing and Shrinking

Probably inspired by the ‘small’ and ‘large’ tables for character generation in 7.5, I included a shrinking rules in the dungeon. While I may have intended to use some complex coherent system based on alterations to the core stats, in fact I just eyeballed it, using patched together rule-ideas that were systemically inelegant but procedurally quick and functional; I made it up. T&T’s super-simple core stats make it easy to adapt things relatively quickly.

‘Lightness’ and Speed

They re-named the Dragon Continent :-(

It seems to me that the speed of T&T combat, combined with the relative lightness and light comedy of its setting, are key to how this is supposed to work.

The description of events plays a huge shaping part in deciding what seems reasonable to happen in a fight, i.e; is it reasonable that one guy might hide out in a corner and try to snipe with arrows? Is everyone going to end up in a big melee or are they spread out or separated? Is the environment going to do something odd?

The enormous potentiality of this simultaneous-resolution roll is only moderated by a mutual, vivid, lively and quick description of events.

Put simply, this shit falls apart rapidly if you are autistic or power-gamy about it, and gamers do tend to be autistic about everything. There should never be arguments over numbers or spazzy autistic D&D arguments over precisely what the rules should allow – if it seems like it makes sense then it can be done, or tried with a Saving Roll, or if not just a flat ‘no’. If this decision or roll didn’t go well, there will be another along soon! Very soon! And another and another and another.

Conversely, if you are lively engaged, largely trusting, and more committed to acting out an adventure than managing risk though careful play, then you may get a great boon; of a rapid, complex unfolding and multifarious range of combat events which might never happen in another game.

There must be a rapid, and easy exchange of description and descriptive power between the Players and DM, especially in combat. It’s like dancing. It only works if you go in moving and go forward. If you hold back and try to plan and limit risk, or hyper-plan, you fail.

The Leprechaun – “Despite working on TTRPG systems myself, I think the ruleset barely factors into how good a given game session is. I had a wonderful experience playing Mausritter a few years ago and that game is rancid. My actual play experience with T&T was excellent, because you’re a great DM, and [The Rogue], [The Dwarf], and I are good players. I still think I would have preferred a system where every single outcome was decided by coin flip. But then my choice to be a leprechaun wouldn’t have been legitimized by doing a bunch of arithmetic with tables!”

The slight silliness of the setting, along with the ridiculous range of possible ‘Kindreds’ (I can play a Leprechaun with a Bardiche), and the slightly light tone, all help to control and manage the kinds of personality drawn to the game and the way that they play. (A meta-game effect like a Gonzo X-Card).

I feel like getting rid of this (slight) silliness and trying to make the setting and the game answer more ‘normie’ Fantasy questions actually ruins it. The absence of tangles and argument is just an effect I can describe of a cause it’s hard to define; it is the spirit of the game. It’s why the Dragon continent is shaped like a Dragon and (should still be) called ‘Ralph’. If you don’t like the idea of running, or playing on, a ‘Dragon Continent’ shaped like a Dragon, and called ‘Ralph’, or of a Skeleton teaming up with a Dwarf, a Vampire and an Elf, then the game has done its job.

The Rogue - “Maybe it is not so important that a game system have any particular level of seriousness as that it have like, any discernable character at all? While there’s a utility in basic fantasy tropes ( everyone knows what a dwarf is like so it is easy in your personal character to subvert or exemplify it) most world building in game systems ends up just being like the collecting of influences listed on such as a Kickstarter page as a reassurance that you won’t find anything too surprising or new here.

Anything in the games rules/setting that is discernably created by a real idiosyncratic human ( whether that is being unfashionably comic or having edges that are not sanded off entirely) is a chance to have an actual experience of art that’s your own interaction with another real person not with a corporation or like sales goals and it’s worth forgiving a lot of shakiness of rules and so on to get that.”

This is also built into the nutty world-creation of ‘Tunnels and Trolls; Trollworld is literally built on wizards. Or at least, huge numbers of whacky wizards have inhabited it over time, burrowed into its crust and disappeared under the earth, building their own strange ‘magical realms’, which form the nuclei of, one would assume, huge tunnel complexes. In in-world history is literally ‘a wizard did it’. Gonzo dungeon design is the actual geology of Trollworld. Gonzo, or a Toybox, or very ‘Dungeony’ gamified non-naturalistic dungeons work well with this ruleset and play experience. It’s not a ‘flat’ game, either in its aesthetic, or the probability curves that underlie it. I am not sure if its modern re-creators have grasped this.

Saturday, 10 January 2026

A Review of 'Soliloquies in England' by George Santayana

“Only the dead have seen the end of war.”

Remember that Plato quote? Well it WASN’T Plato, it was George Santayana! In one of the better parts of one of his better essays; ‘Tipperary’, in which he observes a group of British soldiers singing in a coffee shop after the Armistice is signed and they realise they don’t have to die.

A grim riposte but, in responding directly to his living circumstances, these singing soldiers manage to focus his mind, at least for a while and thus produce an unusually coherent, analytic and downbeat sequence of thoughts.

(All quotes severely broken up. GS does not use paragraphs much.)

From ‘Tipperary’

“They are hardly out of the fog of war when they are lost in the fog of peace.

If experience could teach mankind anything, how different our morals and out politics would be, how clear, how tolerant, how steady! If we knew ourselves, our conduct at all times would be absolutely decided and consistent; and a pervasive sense of vanity and humour would disinfect our passions, if we knew the world.

As it is, we live experimentally, moodily, in the dark, each generation breaks its egg shell with the same haste and assurance as the last, pecks at the same indigestible pebbles, dreams the same dreams, or others just as absurd, and if it hears anything of what former men have learned by experience, it corrects their maxims by its first impressions and rushes down any untrodden path which it finds alluring, to die in its own way, or becomes wise too late and too no purpose.”

GS goes on to (correctly, but surprisingly ruthlessly) say that there is no reprieve in this armistice. The other nations may be at peace, but the Germans definitely are not. Nothing is over.

“Be sad if you will, there is always reason for sadness, since the good which the world brings is so fugitive and bought at so great a price; but be brave. If you think happiness worth enjoying, think it worth defending.

Nothing you can lose by dying is half so precious as the readiness to die, which is man’s charter of nobility, life would not be worth having without the freedom of soul and the friendship with nature which that readiness brings.

The things we know and love on earth are, and should be, transitory; they are, as were the things celebrated by Homer, at best the song or oracle by which heaven is revealed in our time. We must pass with them into eternity, not in the end only, but continually, as the phrase passes into its meaning; and since they are part of us, and we of them, we should accompany them with good grace: it would be desolation to survive.”

This might be true but such words count for more with me if the speaker themselves is visibly willing to claim ‘man’s charter of nobility’ (i.e. get shot). Coming from a man behind an orchard wall, it strikes a little different.

I have no exact recollection of why I first got my hands on this book. I think it may have been Georges Essay ‘Queen Mab’, about fiction and the British character, (I was working on Queen Mab’s Palace’ about this time). But my interest was redoubled, initially, by the largely warm viewpoint of this exquisitely civilised man going though a spate of pre-War Anglophilia.

From ‘Grisielle’

“England is pre-eminently a land of atmospheres. A luminous haze permeates everywhere, softening distances, magnifying perspectives, transfiguring familiar objects, harmonizing the accidental, making beautiful things magical and ugly things picturesque. Road and pavements become wet mirrors, in which the fragments of this gross world are shattered, inverted, and transmuted into jewels, more appealing than precious stones to the poet, because they are insubstantial and must be loved without being possessed.”

...

“In England the classic spectacle of thunderbolts and rainbows appears but seldom; such contrasts are too violent and definite for these tender skies. here the conflict between light and darkness, like all other conflicts, ends in a compromise; cataclysms are rare, but revolution is perpetual. Everything lingers on and is modified; all is luminous and all is grey.”

…

Its always slightly pleasant to see one’s home through the eyes of an admiring foreigner, though in this case, sad, because Santayana is describing the last flower of pre-war Europe and England, a culture which, culturally, and largely environmentally, is now overwritten and essentially gone. (Though the sky does still act like that.)

From ‘The British Character’

“What is it that governs the Englishman? Certainly not intelligence; seldom passion; hardly self-interest, since what we call self-interest is nothing but some dull passion served by a brisk intelligence. The Englishman’s heart is perhaps capricious or silent; it is seldom designing or mean.

There are nations where people are always innocently explaining how they have been lying and cheating in small matters, to get out of some predicament, or secure some advantage, that seems to them a part of the art of living. Such is not the Englishman’s way: it is easier for him to face or break opposition than to circumvent it. If we tried to say that what governs him is convention, we should have to ask ourselves how it comes about that England is the paradise of individuality, eccentricity, heresy, anomalies, hobbies and humours.

Nowhere do we come oftener upon those two social abortions - they affected and the disaffected. Where else would a man inform you, with a sort of proud challenge, that he lived on nuts, or was in correspondence through a medium with Sir Joshua Reynolds, or had been disgustingly housed when last in prison?

Where else would a young woman, in dress and manners the close copy of a man, tell you that her parents were odious, and that she desired a husband, but no children, or children without a husband? It is true that these novelties soon become conventions of some narrower circle, or may even have been adopted en bloc in emotional desperation, as when people are dissident and supercilious by temperament, they manage to wear their uniforms with a difference, turning them by some lordly adaptation into a part of their own person.”

…

As with almost everything Geroge says, he layers positive and negative, the one implying the other, or counter-informing the other, layer upon layer, till one receives, never a judgment, (George would make a terrible Judge, his cases would never end and no final opinion would be reached), but more a rich, deep, painting of whatever he apprehends, in this case a culture, mixed with and informed by its environment, and its good-bad qualities mixed among its bad-good errors.

This is also the opinion of a very much a slightly anglicised, but still very Spanish Latin Man, (from a culture that knows how to feel and how to live) dealing with a horde of strange Anglos (who live and feel mysteriously, if at all, but sometimes know how to do.)

From ‘Death-Bed Manners’

“That a desire to ignore everything unpleasant is at the bottom of this convention seems to be confirmed by an opposite attitude towards death which I have observed among English people during this war. Some of them speak of death quite glibly, quite cheerfully, as if it were a sort of trip to Brighton. “Oh yes our two sons went down in the Black Prince. They were such nice boys. Never heard a word about them of course; but probably the magazine blew up and they were all killed quite instantly, so that we don’t mind half so much as if they had had any of those bad lingering wounds. They wouldn’t have liked it at all being crippled you know; and we all think it is probably much better as it is. Just blown to atoms! It is such a blessing!”

The precise, living, vivid yet ironic voice of the past springing briefly from this quote, highlights what, (for me, if definitely not for him), if part of the tragedy of George Santayana; that he spent a huge amount of time thinking deeply, but mysteriously, and elliptically, though beautifully, about those wise and high generalities in which the limits of philosophy and cognition are defined.

Head in the clouds, where nothing is accomplished. With a mind as precise, sensitive, knowledgeable and tolerant as his, and a pen as brilliant and expressive, the world lost an incredible reporter and probably a great novelist (he wrote one but I fear it is a novel of ‘ideas’), while GS dedicated himself to the sky-castles.

Eventually, George seems to have had enough of England. Perhaps, in part of the long cyclic back and forth of admiration and alienation which any traveller feels when dealing with a foreign culture for a sustained period, he, after dealing with what I call ‘England England’ (home counties, oxford, misty fields, hidden wealth), he gets a view of what I would consider (to me), the ‘real’ England (mad councils, housing estates, public transport, mediocrity and depression). Here he writes an essay about how terrible the Hegelians are and how wrong, bad and inappropriate it is that England is filled with them, (who should not be there). I am not really fully familiar with what exactly an Hegalian is, but based on Georges writing I am willing to accept that they are very bad.

From ‘The real England’

“In the real England the character I dreamt of exists, but very much mixed, and over balanced by its contrary. Many have the minds of true gentlemen, poetically detached from fortune, and seeing in temporal things only their eternal beauties. Yet if this type of English character had been general, England could never have become Puritan, not bred so many prosperous merchants and manufacturers, not sent such shoals of emigrants to the colonies; it would hardly have revelled as it does in political debates and elections, and in societies for the prevention and promotion of everything.

In the real England there is a strong, if not dominant admixture of worldliness. How ponderous these Lord Mayors, these pillars of chapels, these bishops, these politicians, these solemn snobs! How tight-shut, how moralistic, how overbearing these intellectuals with a mission! All these important people are eaten up with zeal, and given over to rearranging the world, and yet without the least idea of what they would change it into in the end, or to what purpose.”

They have not changed, but this leads us into GS’s alienation from whatever modernity is becoming in England during and after the war, and while his ‘final opinions’ on anything are as misty and negotiable as always, he does have a lot of interesting things to say…

From ‘Liberalism and Culture’

“... Fortunately, liberal ages have been secondary ages, inheriting the monuments, the feelings and the social hierarchy of previous times, when men had lived in compulsory unison, having only one unquestioned religion, one style of art, one political order, one common spring of laughter and tears. Liberalism has come to remove the strain and the trammels of these traditions without as yet uprooting the traditions themselves. Most people remember their preliberal heritage and hardly remember that they are legally free to abandon it and to sample any and other form of life.

Liberalism does not go very deep, it is an adventitious principle, a mere loosening of an older structure. For that reason it brings to all who felt cramped and ill-suited such comfort and relief. It offers them an escape from all sorts of accidental tyrannies. It opens to them that sweet, scholarly, tenderly moral, critically superior attitude of mind to which Matthew Arnold called culture.”

....

“Culture requires liberalism for its foundation, and liberalism requires culture for its crown. It is culture that integrates in imagination the activities which liberalism so dangerously disperses in practice.”

Reading this from the far end, in a sense, from the other end, of a great age of Liberalism, where the Liberalism still exists, but the culture has run out, feels a little spooky.

From ‘The Irony of Liberalism’

“... the transcendental principal of progress is pantheistic. It requires everything to be ill at ease in its own house; no-one can be really free or happy but all must be tossed, like herded emigrants, on the same compulsory voyage, to the same destination.

The world came from a nebula, and to a nebula it returns.”

....

“It admonished the dogs not to bark and bite, even if, in the words of the sacred poet, “it is their nature to.” Dogs, according to the transcendental philosophy, ought to improve their nature and behave better.

A chief part of the liberal inspiration was the love of peace, safety, comfort and general information; it aimed at stable wealth, it insisted on education, it venerated culture. It was wholly out of sympathy with the wilder instincts of man, with the love of foraging, of hunting, of fighting, of plotting, of carousing, or of doing penance. It had an acute, a sickening horror of suffering; to be cruel was devilish and to be hardened to pain was brutal.

I am afraid liberalism was hopelessly pre-Nietzschean; it was Victorian; it was tame. In inviting every man to be free an autonomous it assumed that, once free, he would wish to be rich, to be educated, and to be demure. How could he possibly fail to covet a way of life in which, in the eyes of liberals, was so obviously the best? It must have been a painful surprise to them, and most inexplicable, that hardly anybody who has had a taste of the liberal system has ever liked it.”

When GS is not talking about England, Politics or, really.. who can say truly what precisely a lot of his essays are essentially about? He does not think in categories. But at least some of them are lean more into what we would call cognition, thought, the experience of the world and what it is to be, think, sense and exist.

From ‘Cross-Lights’

“... Things, when seen, seem to come and go with our visions; and visions, when we do not know why they visit us, seem to be things. But this is not the end of the story. Opacity is a great discoverer. It teaches the souls of animals the existence of what is not themselves. Their souls in fact live and spread their roots in the darkness, which em-bosoms and creates the light, though the light does not comprehend it.

If sensuous evidence flooded the whole sphere with which souls are conversant, they would have no reason for suspecting that there was anything they did not see, and they would live in a fool’s paradise of lucidity.

Fortunately, for their wisdom, if not their comfort, they come upon mysteries and surprises, earthquakes and rumblings in their hidden selves and in their undeciphered environment; they live in time, which is a double abyss of darkness; and the primary and urgent object of their curiosity is that unfathomable engine of nature which from its ambush governs their fortunes.

The proud, who shine by their own light, do not perceive matter, the fuel that feeds and will some day fail them; but the knowledge of it comes to extinct stars in their borrowed light and almost mortal coldness, because they need to warm themselves at a distant fire and to adapt their seasons to its favourable shining.”

In his views on the embedding of the mind in reality, and what ‘light’ and ‘darkness’ knowledge and ignorance, the known and unknown truly mean, GS is brilliant, Heraclitean, perhaps wrong, but holy shit can he write. Even if his arguments are wrong, his prose is correct.

From ‘Psyche’

“Long before sunrise she is at work in her subterranean kitchen over her pots of stewing herbs, her looms, and her spindles; and with the first dawn, when the first ray of intuition falls through some aperture into those dusky spaces, what does it light up? The secret springs of her life? The aims she is so faithfully but blindly pursuing?

Far from it. intuition, floods of intuition, have been playing for ages upon human life: poets, painters, men of prayer, scrupulous naturalists innumerable, have been intent on their several visions, yet of the origin and of the end of life we know as little as ever.

And the reason for this; that intuition is not a material organ of the Psyche, like a hand or antenna; it is a miraculous child, far more alive than herself, whose only instinct is play, laughter, and brooding meditation. This strange child - who could have been his father? - is a poet; absolutely useless and incomprehensible to his poor mother, and only a new burden on her shoulders, because she can’t help feeding and loving him. He sees, which to her is a mystery, because, although she has always acted as if, in some measure, she felt things at a distance, she has never seen and never can see anything.”

From ‘The Tragic Mask’

“Living things in contact with the air must acquire a cuticle, and it is not urged against cuticles that they are not hearts; yet some philosophers seem to be angry with images for not being things, and with words for not being feelings.

Words and images are like shells, no less integral parts of nature than are the substances they cover, but better addressed to the eye and more open to observation.

I would not say that substance exists for the sake of appearance, or faces for the sake of masks, of the passions for the sake of poetry and virtue. Nothing arises in nature for the sake of anything else; all these phrases and products are involved equally in the round of existence, and it would be sheer wilfulness to praise the germinal phase on the ground that it is vital, and to denounce the explicit phase on the ground that it is dead and sterile.”

....

“Under our published principles and plighted language we must assiduously hide all the inequalities of our moods and conduct, and this without hypocrisy, since our deliberate character is more truly ourself than is the flux of our involuntary dreams.”

“Our animal habits are transmuted by conscience into loyalties and duties, and we become “persons” or masks. Art, truth, and death turn everything to marble.”

From ‘The Comic Mask’

“Reason cannot stand alone; brute habit and blind play are at the bottom of art and morals and unless irrational impulses and fancies are kept alive, the life of reason collapses for sheer emptiness.”

....

“Where there is no habitual art and no moral liberty, the instinct for direct expression is atrophied for want of exercise; and then slang and a humorous perversity of phrase or manner act as safety-valves to sanity, and you manage to express yourself in spite of the censor by saying something grotesquely different from what you mean. That is long way round to sincerity, and an ugly one.”

This ‘long way round to sincerity’ seems utterly appropriate to the current poisoned moment of relentless mutual surveillance and censorship combined with reactionary, resentful and permanently ironic ‘freedom’.

From ‘Carnival’

“This world is contingency and absurdity incarnate, the oddest of possibilities masquerading momentarily as a fact.

Custom blinds persons who are not naturally speculative to the egregious character of the actual, because custom assimilates their expectations to the march of existing things and deadens their power to imagine anything different.”

Santayana’s ‘job description’ is ‘philosopher, essayist, poet and novelist’ – I am not sure how he actually got paid. The man writes like an angel, thinks like a cloud and rambles like a lost dog. There are no short, accurate Santayana quotes, because every single idea is lengthily toyed with, and even if you excise that, each idea is lodged or woven in with, sometimes an elegant tapestry, sometimes a foul slum, of other ideas, many of which contradict or cast shade on anything stated or suggested by the one you are looking at now. No-one can criticise Santayana’s conclusions because we do not know what they are.

“I notice that the men of the world, when they dip into my books, find them consistent, almost oppressively consistent, and to the ladies everything is crystal-clear, yet the philosophers say that it is lazy and self-indulgent of me not to tell them plainly what I think, if I know myself what it is.

Because I describe madness sympathetically, because I lose myself in the dreaming mind, and see the world from the transcendental point of vantage, while at the same time interpreting that dream by its presumable motives and by its moral tendencies, these quick and intense reasoners suppose that I am vacillating in my own opinions.”

You are vacillating in your own opinions! You are not getting to the point! You should have gotten a proper job where people would have made you do things! Being bound to some actual functional purpose would have sorted you right out, instead we get this.

Thursday, 18 December 2025

Count Belisarius by Robert Graves

An overwhelmingly sad book about the worlds most heroic dude. A study in ressentiment. Rome’s summer in the east, before its very slow descent, produces an actual hero; and absolutely everyone hates him. Ok maybe not everyone, but surely the core of the story is the staggering level of fear and resentment so many Romans feel towards their military saviour, especially the Emperor Julian.

Julian and Belisarius

The toxic relationship between Belisarius, (brave, rational, Roman, focused, moisturised), and Julian (cowardly, clever, fanatical, irresolute, possibly possessed by a demon, flaky skin), is the core of the story. The more of a Paragon Belisarius, is and the more capable, unbribable, virtuous and honest he is, the more Julian absolutely hates, resents, fears and despises him.

This core personal resentment of Julian, and the slightly deranged, almost inhuman passive acceptance of this by Belisarius, is just the axis of a wider and deeper resentment. People have always loved to hate their heroes, in some sense, the yearning for a hero is a product of the same weakness that produces the ressentiment of the hero. We must either become our own heroes or despise those we erect above us.

Never was there a society more desperate for a hero, or less willing to accept one, than the Constantinople of ‘Belisarius,’ - the man is adored when he is absent, hated when he is close, despised for his virtue, loved again once he has been shamed and ruined - it is the story of celebrity writ large, though, purely as-a-narrative, Justinian’s utterly deranged resentment does make this a much more interesting story. He is almost comically disruptive to his own schemes when they go too well, it does give the book a central ‘villain’ (most of the Gothic generals aren’t really up to it), and the later relationship between the two, with Belisarius,’ almost perverse levels of aggressive loyalty, almost increasing the more badly Justinian treats him, adds a tone of dark comedy.

Likewise; doomed

One reason ‘THA WEST’(tm) cares a lot less about Byzantine/Eastern Rome history may be because it is inexpressibly sad for a long long time. Its hard to inhabit long a story of reversals and ruination. Julian’s war in Italy destroys much of the old Roman culture it was there to save, making the victory nul. The material and moral erosion is gigantic.

Constantinople itself, and the culture it represents, is craven deluded, hysteric and obsessed by the most deranged trivialities (no-one and nothing on this earth will ever make me believe that it actually matters exactly what view of the Trinity you have). The moral quality of its people; backstabbing and short sighted to an extent you would not believe was actually sustainable, (long term it wasn’t), seems deeply current. This is an age after the big dreams have fled. A lack of idealism is one thing but no-one seems to actually genuinely believe in anything. (This may not be a true history but this is the sense of the book.) I know Byzantine became a byword for crazed levels of intrigue but good god they earn the title.

Above all, no-one has any ideas, at least not ones related to reality. No-one has any sense of the Christian world as a unified thing and no sense of a future for the Roman Empire. Even if Belisarius, manages to tape bits of it back together with raw charisma, effort and intelligence, they no idea of what to build, anywhere, except fortifications in the wrong place and a gigantic (admittedly, insanely beautiful), Cathedral in Constantinople.

The constant ethnic changeover creates a slight air of cosplay, of varied peoples adopting older patterns, with more or less effectiveness or utility, and putting on the clothes of a fallen culture, while the ethnos that made that culture lies quiescent, utterly indifferent, ready to be ridden over. Belisarius is a Perfect Roman, from the old stories, but he’s not actually Roman, or even really Greek, instead he is an Illyrian-Roman or Thracian-Roman. The actual Romans; in Rome, just want to be left alone, so their future, and the future of Rome will be decided by a contest between a Thracian and a German, both of whom have reasonable claims to be defenders of Roman culture.

Obviously has nothing to do with modern Britain. Neither does the character of Justinian; clever, manipulative, inconstant, idealistic about all the wrong things and treacherous and vague about all the important things, have anything to do with any U.K. leader, either in the 2020s or 1930s.

Ambivalent Military History

Robert Graves combines experience, interest in ambivalence to fascinating effect. It feels as if he has, in some ways, a distinctly un-military personality, yet, as a scion of the Great War, he has more actual direct military experience than 90% of other historical authors. He knows a lot about military affairs and he knows a lot first-hand, yet he is not very ‘pumped up’ about them. This intelligent awareness and emotional ambivalence is mirrored in the character of the narrator, through who’s eyes we see the hero - a Greek eunuch slave.

I’m reminded of the line from Frieren where someone asks the great mage Frieren if they actually enjoy magic; “only somewhat”.

The image of war that emerges is at times, like that of an epic; glorious, brave, deadly, magnificent, but combines this with a world-view which is not quite cynical, (the narrator is quite compassionate to most of his subjects), but detached, and through this we get an image of deep historical contingencies, of miscommunications, strange events, odd ideas, of people going the wrong way and getting the right thing, or doing the right thing and getting the wrong result - much is chaos.

A key story; in the attempt to conquer Carthage, Belisarius arrives by ship in Africa. He sits down with his generals to discuss what to do next. The Generals want to advance along the coast, shadowed by the ships. Belisarius, disagrees and, using calm reason, persuades them to his own plan of advancing inland. Now, ultimately, the Roman army encounters the Vandals they are there to fight, and in fact they win, but the way in which this happens, is utterly chaotic, disordered, comic, strange.

A random encounter leads to the death of a figure in shining armour. The Romans advance, are cut off, the Vandals advance, miss the Romans, find them. They find the body of the man in shining armour; he is the son of the Vandals king. The king is so distraught by this that he breaks down in grief and becomes totally unable to command his army. During this grief, Belisarius, attacks, wins, re-unites the Romans, advances on Carthage and is let into the city.

On considering events, Belisarius, realises he made exactly the wrong choice; his army was broken up and if the Vandal King had not been grief stricken, the Romans should have lost, so he should have advanced along the coast. However, on examining the defences of Carthage, he realises that if he had advanced along the cost, he would have run into them, and there would have been nothing he could do against them - so he still would have lost.

There were no good choices, logic failed, he won. Strange for us, but for this most rational and reasonable of men, who bent enormous energy into making a sane, disciplined fighting force, and using them calmly and rationally, truly troubling - none of his ideas actually worked, or if they did, they did not work in any way he expected. There is a fundamental chaos under human affairs, which no plan may outrace.

The Strange Character of Belisarius

He never betrays the Emperor, even when, perhaps, for the good of Rome, he should have. Likewise he never betrays his wife, his men, or stabs anyone in the back. Eventually he suffers the final humiliation of a circus-trial for crimes he did not commit, (if he actually had, perhaps Julian would have been able to tolerate him), and is blinded. The general suffers, at all times, in quiet self-possessed dignity. Truly moisturised and unbothered. Its a bit creepy!

It is perhaps the fact that for Belisarius,, the question of the meaning of his life was a solved one, that makes him, when he stands alone before the viewer, a slightly un-interesting character. Like Galahad, since he is already right, and knows what he must do, the only interest comes in how, and in the rogues gallery of people around him, of which the most captivating is his wife, Antonia;

Antonina

She is perhaps the actual Protagonist of the book. (Though if graves had called it ‘Antonina the ginger witch’ I doubt sales would have been as high.

Since the slave who tells the tale is hers, we hear her story from the start, the dancing girl daughter of a man betrayed; here the strange, intense, pseudo-ethnic and religious resentments of the Coliseum crowd, and their curious effect on Imperial History, come into play. Antonina’s father was a Green, (or possibly a Blue), betrayed by the villainous Cappadocian John, he turns to the Blues (or possibly the Greens), and loses everything, linking Antonia in this with the Empress Theodosia, the resolute wife-to-be of Justinian, and setting a deep, deep resentment of both the Blues and Cappadocian John.

Graves springs more fully into life describing the life and dramas of the court, the lives of these clever, shifty, practical, sometimes insincere women. Antonina meets Belisarius, as a nearly-naked dancing girl and is set up with him again, later in life, by Theodora. This subtle, brave deceptive woman forms a politically-practical shadow to Belisarius. (An odd mirror to the relationship of Justinian and Theodora). They are never better than when working together, it is sad when they are parted, (Antonina being slutty and unwise), and their reunion later in life is one of the few purely happy moments in a story otherwise set against a fading empire.

"‘That evening I sought out Belisarius at his mean lodgings. Though weak from a return of his malarial fever, he rose from his couch to welcome me. With a smile that concealed the depth of his feeling, he asked: ‘And are you not afraid to visit me, Eugenius, old friend?’

I answered: ‘No, Illustrious Lord. With the message that I bring I would have risked passing through fire or a camp of Bulgarian Huns.’

He grew a little impatient: ‘Do not address me by titles of which I have been deprived. What is the message?’

I related, as from myself, all that I had agreed with my mistress to say. He listened most eagerly, crying ‘Ah!’ when I told him that his wife had asked pardon of God. Then I showed him the State papers in which Photius’s confession was recorded - having bribed the copying clerk to the Assistant-Registrar for a day’s loan of them. Belisarius read them hastily, and then again with great care, and at last he beat his breast and said: ‘For my jealous rage and my credulity I deserve all that I have suffered. But alas, Eugenius, it is too late now. our mistress will never forgive me for what I did to her at Daras, even if I make her a full apology.’

I urged him to be of good courage: all would yet be well. Then I repeated my mistress’s message, which at first he would not believe to be authentic. he said: ‘If your mistress Antonina will indeed listen to any words of mine, tell her that the fault was wholly on my side - but that it was only an excess of love for her that made me guilty of such madness.’

That night Belisarius and my mistress met secretly at his lodgings. Nobody but myself knew of it. Both embraced me, kissing me on the cheeks, and said they owed their lives to me.”

Tuesday, 25 November 2025

A Review of 'Local Heroes' by Amanda Lee Franck

"put on a mysterious hat or a wizard robe or a regular robe"

(Disclosure; I am friends with the creator so you can add this review to the ever-expanding ‘OSR Circlejerk’ sub-category).

…

Local Heroes - is a 16-page PDF game that Amanda Lee Franck put out on her Patreon, so far you can only get it there! (Or on her Comradery, which is communist Patreon.)

A single-session game about about a single night; the players play themselves, the game-world is their own. They are given gifts and sent to fight a multidimensional monster which must be dead (banished) by dawn.

Imagining the Known

Character generation has already been done. In rules terms this means (unless you have that Fireman/Marine buddy) everyone has relatively ‘flat’ characters, and that everyone knows who everyone is, and that everyone knows what everyone can do. A basic exchange system exists to discourage inane min-maxing or self-delusion, though, since its near-assumed that the players will be a semi-familiar friend group, the honour system, and embarrassment, will be the more effective restriction.

The game begins (in-world) at midnight and the creature need only see the sun to win. Thankfully is is bent on wiping out the heroes opposing it and won’t just get a taxi out of town, and hopefully you are playing in Winter and dawn is many hours away.

What remains is planning and manipulating the environment and a small selection of magical tools. You get an hour of lead time - all those fragments of local knowledge can actually be utilised - zombie escape plans, the locations of building equipment and industrial machinery, of train tracks and ruined buildings, unfilled pits, canal locks, teetering long-term structural collapses, places that might be set on fire, walled gardens, funnel spaces, dead zones in the middle of vast roadworks, strange places difficult to get into or out of, water mains, electrical junctions and pylons, barbed wire, hardware stores, fire axe locations. Its a memory-and-play game for local residents.

As it pulls on local memories so much, and as the honour system and mutual knowledge are quite useful in shaping ‘character generation’, this is not a good ‘Con Game’ and therefore mildly unamerican - it is not highly systematised, depends on local knowledge, is not great for a mixed group of strangers meeting in a place unfamiliar to all, and might not work well in rural America, the south, or anywhere where gun ownership is common or widespread - your average game with a bunch of enthusiastic gun owners might be pretty short. (Or might not, the Monster is not always vulnerable to bullets).

The Multi-Stage Problem-Monster

There is only one enemy and you know its coming. It has a range of ten, or sometimes more, possible forms. Each form is that of a hero who opposed it in the past. It can change forms five times until it ‘slinks back into the void’ and and most forms have specific win conditions. (Though in most cases you can still beat it to death or smash it to bits.) One of the possible ‘transformations’ is a tower with three archers and a series of complex traps and environments inside. If the creature kills a PC’s it might take on their form.

The monster transforming into a place, then back again, is I think, new, (though if someone else has come up with it, I am sure you will tell me in the comments, or would have if this was 2015 and people still commented on things.)

Few of the forms can be straightforwardly fought, but then the special relics gifted to the team are barely weapons at all, but curious tools with strong specific game effects.

Parlour Game

While its not a ‘Con Game’, Local Heroes feels much more like something like ‘Werewolf’, a parlour game of problem-solving you could play with normies. They barely need to imagine anything at all, only recall who they are and where they live, and the Aristotelian compression of time and space, and single, set, obvious and declared win-condition (defeat the multidimensional monster in five of its forms, before sunrise, using these particular tools), hopefully nukes most decision paralysis. Its quite Dowlian in that sense.

Thursday, 6 November 2025

A Review of 'All Tomorrows' by C.M. Kosemen

C.M. Kosemen; as he might say; "kind of a (lip smack) weeeiird guy.... kind of a dream cormorant.”

‘All Tomorrows’ is an artbook super-scaled in time; multi-millennia, then multi-millions of years pass in the spaces between pages. The book tells the story of mankind’s ascent to space, transformation and galactic spread through slower-than-light genesis pods, then a kind of soft galactic dominance, then the arrival of eldritch super-aliens, the Qu, who are pissed off to find the galaxy full of genocidal space-apes (that was their job).

Annoyed and offended by the weeds, they transform humanity into an hundred thousand twisted forms, more akin to the punishments of Dante or the geography of Herodotus than the blank ‘scientific’ scourings of more common sci-fi vibes.

Then ‘Qu’ then just... wander off, off to another galaxy, leaving the ruins of twisted humanity behind. These altered men, mainly fall extinct, but then, over a million or so years, fragments evolve, into wild, highly different strains.

But that’s only half way through the book, and the book is not super-long. We still have several cycles of super-races, terrifying galactic genocides, remaking’s, falls ascensions etc, before we reach the end.

‘All Tomorrows’ is a book of mutations. It takes a lot from speculative evolution, but also feels a little medieval in a way; partly as a ‘book of curiosities’ (look at this weird little guy!), partly due to playful aspects (a post-human at a rock concert, a snake man jiving to some snake-jazz), and partly due to its slight shades of moralism, punishment through transformation, ascension through time.

The book speaks in the language of (speculative) evolution, meaning reaches of deep time so great, and changes so massive, that for any single sentient in the midst of them, the journey as a whole would be so vast it was invisible, even irrelevant, and, like with evolution on earth, horrible, terrible terrifying bursts of brutal and near absolute extinction. Like if two thirds of the way through Anna Karrenena, literally EVERYONE in the cast died, and every city was destroyed, except for one side character that wasn’t really mentioned before, and the book just carried on looking at this one side character; what is this guy up to? Look, he’s trying to survive, look at him eating dirt for a couple thousand years. (Because the civilisations are galactic, all the extinctions are deliberate genocides, no meteor or pulsar could be big enough to wipe out everyone).

Like any book of deep time, from Hallidays ‘Otherworlds’ to one of Forteys books on Geology, the moral challenge it sets is subtle, mysterious, vast; great and terrible things will happen, mighty alterations, dark galactic crimes, cruel perverse punishments, utterly random and meaningless death. Can all of these things even be said to be a ‘story’? or just a record of events? The reach of deeds so vast that over the incredible eons, the meaning of these things for any particular individual is... little? Like the man who carefully raised his child without reference to particular colour linkages, simply to discover what the child would describe, and then one say asked him; “What colour is the sky?” only to be told; “The sky doesn’t have a colour.” For it was truly a vault of light and not a ‘thing’ at all; so, in a way similar to Stapledon, we are left just kind of vibing.

Stories call for villains, heroes and adventures, and this book sort of has these; after all, what are a bunch of entirely mechanical black spheroid genocidal super-science post-humans who canonically want to ‘kill all life’, if not villains? But Koseman oars his way into his own text to remind us that in the grand scheme of events, they are not, nor can there really be, ‘bad guys’, and indeed you might quite like black mechanical genocidal spheroid if you sat down with one. It’s no crime to speak both in the language of epic time, beyond the concerns of daily man, and also in the language of comprehensible adventure, in fact you might call this a central polarity of the successful large scale sci-fi story, but though this is a fundamental axis of the form, it’s still a disjunction and should be noted.

Perhaps the only viewpoint which can synthesise and imbue with meaning such vast reaches of chaotic time is that of a god so gigantic and indifferent that even their existence makes little difference to the motes that float within its eye.

It would be cool to play a fantasy RPG where you got to encounter (and perhaps play as) all these varieties of humanity, (it’s not beyond the Qu to set up such a world for a laugh), and almost as cool to play some kind of Star Trek/Mass Effect game where you play as a federation of these whacky post-humans. Think about playing an asymmetric man and a composite guy and a snake lady on some kind of Star Trek away-mission; pretty wild. (It would also make sense of everyone having pseudo-human morality and having enough psychological similarities that they could actually communicate).

I suppose we can wait for the possible Adrian Tchaikovsky ‘All Tomorrows’ expanded universe or comic book series (’AT’ seems to spring from the same general noosphere as ‘Prophet’ and Calum Diggles ‘Humanity Lost’ - it will be 50 years r more before some boomer incarnates anything like this in film, they are so slow), though the Koseman-verse, despite its playful grotesquerie’s, is much more (relatively) low-fi and saves the actual FTL causality-twisting technology until deep in a species development, when it has already become so queer and clever that its mentality and viewpoint is deeply detached from whatever we might understand.

I did say the ‘language of speculative evolution’ and I think it really is a language, with wild swings from its ‘hard sci-fi’ branch (serious dudes imagining ‘what if this bird had a _slightly differently_ shaped claw), all the way to its ‘Fantasy-with-spec-evo- influences) branch. ‘All Tomorrows’ swings a little more towards the whacky end of the sci-fi branch of the sub-genre, (but will it stay a ‘sub’ genre for long? it feels like much of the intellectual and creative ferment is going on here). Dougal Dixon has a lot to answer for.