You will have a hard time doing so. Hussite Wars, Margrave wars, (armed men steal your pears but never get round to cutting you down, though they do with several of your kin) droughts, (you put a lot of effort into maintaining that extremely-even growth pattern), and plagues (lol, die monkeys), but you pull it off. At some point, an armed procession marches past carrying the Imperial Regalia, and ultimately, this is what dooms you.

The Nuernberger’s put these Relics in a box, (Oak, no relation), hanging, held by chains, above the congregation in the cities Cathedral. Every Nuernberger, almost every day, can see the relic box up there, but they can never see the relics. Only once a year can they be shown and the chaos this produces is deranged. Even out here in your orchard there are crowds, sheltering under your branches, eating your pears, going on and on about ‘did you see the relics’ and ‘I thought someone died in the crowd’ (they did, people get crushed every year), handing each other gingerbread and thimbles and boasting of the mirrors on their caps which, they say, have seen the relics, even the lance with a nail of the True Cross, the image passes on but the sacred power is held within the glass. Which they then wear on their silly hats.

This urge to freeze a moment still in time… They have pictures too, age, you are getting old, it’s true. How long can a Pear Tree live? You wither. Can’t get them up. Some years they don’t come at all. But the pictures, pictures on paper, they have these too now, more each year. These are not like the frozen moments they imagine trapped within their mirrors, nor have they drawn them for each other, they are some third thing, the mark of human hands is on them, but there are dozens, nearly identical, on fine white paper made from rags. Even the pear thieves can afford them!

But its late now, far too late. You can feel the end coming. Soon you will be bowls. Or possibly a flute, that would be nice. They chop you down and saw you up, and make you wait, for years again, hanging around dripping sap.

“This one.”

The voice is not a pear thief, not a priest, a knight, not a peasant either. It’s one of those other people, the Goldsmiths son. A ridiculous figure.

Sawn, set sanded. Smaller and smaller, flatter and rectangular. Barely even a plank. What use could you possibly serve? The pompous, flighty, silly youth, chatting to his mother, complaining about light, about lamp-black and curtains.

What is he doing? He is drawing on you. What is he drawing? Are you a painting now? What ferocious concentration. He seems satisfied at least.

More movement now, more men. Old men with knotted hands, old heads hanging over you, and beyond them, like the sun, bobs the Goldsmiths boy, he is talking talking talking, and they don’t like what he says. Here is the clicking of tongues and down-cast eyes you remember from Farmers saying something “can’t be done”. But the boy is capering now and still talking, gesturing, describing, describing motions with his hands, HE’S GOT A KNIFE! The boy cuts air as if he could kill it, hands twisting, turning, moving, layering, the old men are watching, uncertain, but thinking. The boy has coin. This seems to settle it. O shit, here come the blades.

As strange and horrid as this is, the common afterlife of wood is not so bad. The men are abominably careful, the lines they carve so light, so precise you can barely sense them, but you can hold them, of course, as a Franconian Pear, all that neat and regular Germanic growth, those tightly nested rings, you make a fine surface it’s true. Exact.

Now back to the boy, he is smearing you with ink. Well, again, you are pretty tough. You can carry that. Fitted into some kind of giant screw? What. A plain white, clear white, unmarked field, as white as snow-bright sky. But it grows darker as the screw grinds down, blackening, blackening, carefully. MASHED. HE IS MASHING YOU.

And then released. That screw is squeaking more as you are raised. What has he done to you? You see it now, resolving into lines. Made of lines, as nothing in nature is, for things are things, not marks, have their fullness, and this image is composed only of cuts, of cuts in you, you know this for you felt each one, and the only way to mark you is to cut you, for you are tough, even, clear and strong. But these cuts forge a simulacrum of nature.

This nest, this web of lines is growing now as you are carried far above it. Though lines, they make a World. A Saint. The illusion of a Saint, made only out of lines, composed of cuts in Pear Wood. So that’s how they do it!

“Good for fifty this year, and good for ten years more.”

For scenes of sacred truth and images of God, go to the church, and, in this be little different to ten thousand years of human beings, for the Images, of Gods, Monsters, Heroes, Kings and (symbolic) semi-naked women with amazing boobs, are placed somewhere sacred, they cannot easily be moved, and you must take your body to them, not the other way around. Anyone may see, but all must enter in.

But here in white-hot techno-city Nuremberg, the world is bound in shadows, stamped, replicated, set in pages, and exiled out, back into itself, a world within the world, gathering gold along the way, all for the carver of the sign.

As techne binds the seen world in replicated form, it looses hordes of greedy and inquisitive Europeans out across the wine-dark sea. The little bastards can get anywhere now! Pease Allah, find me a navigable river-mouth that doesn’t have a European living on it, sweating, sweating and surrounded by prints.

Now the world will be re-made in monochrome, in graven lines, and sent to noble minds, and low. The price of books is falling. Paper tech’s improving. They hang these things in taverns now; Eastern Seas, Tiger Hunts, the Bible, forms foreign and impossible, all neat in black and white, and for anyone, for everyone to look upon. Newspapers?

A new Mass Culture of the Seen worms its way out of the womb; radio-for-eyeballs. Prints.

The Complete Engravings, Etchings & Drypoints of Albrech Dürer, edited by Walter L. Strauss

He is such a weird guy. It can’t just be that he’s German and five hundred years in the past, the man is genuinely odd, all by himself.

This was the last of these books I bought but the first chronologically. I wanted to see more of the history of Engraving, of the pressed black lines, and Dürer strides the spring.

He’s so fucking odd. Grotesque. The engravings at least. There are no woodcuts in this book but I think I actually like the woodcuts more. The Old Pear Plank forces the armies of autistic detail back upon themselves, and forces Dürer to actually-design a page. The grain simply won’t let him chimp out like he wants to.

If the Italian Renaissance was; “The Bible, but sexy.” A world where everyone is slightly maybe gay and possibly bangable, then Dürers world is “what if I am surrounded by strange-fleshed Goblin People? What if even the hot people aren’t actual hot? I feel meat crawling on my bones.”

When he has access to Engraving, in particular, I found Dürers oddness, love of grotesquery, apparent hatred of human beauty, and frothing mania for detail, to be a kind of nightmare. Etching frees him from this a little and Drypoint frets him gently into a pleasing cloud of form, but the full-on burin-cutting, where he presses down into the copper, carving off these looping snail-spirals of metal with his Goldsmiths hands...

What about ‘Melencolia’ what about ‘The Knight, the Devil and Death’? Just Play the Hits Already! Yes. Dürer is a genius without compare, and his pop hits amaze the eye, but, you have never had to read through a whole book of ALL the engravings where you get the Hits but also, say, a very long sequence on the Resurrection? Have you?

Cyberpunk Nuremberg; perspective has been invented in Italy, but its secrets are well-kept. Someone pirates an Italian book and artists creep through the city at night, to secret meetings where the book, and its knowledge will be shown. Conceptual Horse Theft; Dürer makes extensive notes on the ‘Proportions of the Horse’ - oddly obsessed with horses, he will write the Core Text on his equine friends, but, someone steals the horse notes and makes off with them! They are never seen again.

Capital and Industry; perhaps as an anti-piracy measure, but mainly for his ego, Dürer incorporates his signature-sign not only into his pictures but as a diegetic item locked directly into the scene, like there is literally an actual physical sign in the image with ‘Albrech Dürer Did This’ in effect. He DRM’d his etchings.

The strongest single stamp upon my mind, from all the Dürer rambling, is the legend of Capital being born. From the moment mass replication becomes a thing, the business changes. Dürer insists on staying his own publisher - He controls the prints, the plates, the creation, maintains patronage links by handing out free prints, and even plates, to the most important people in the land. Market reach, investment and control. If you can replicate it, so can someone else, so now you are a lawyer too. And the stacking of artistic, industrial and business skills; you don’t just draw, you carve, etch, engrave and drypoint-cut, and you know how the press works. Perhaps you own the press. And you sell them yourself, (in fact your wife and mother do on your behalf). Now, instead of assistants in the studio, we have the goblin-men, those calm, careful and unrecognised men who fill studios and complete the work of the engraver on the plate. These workmen, who apply the lines with human hands, last five hundred years hidden behind the scenes of the scenes of the world.

Architectural and Perspective Designs by Giuseppe Galli Bibiena

The ink-scribed world expands, out into architectures that cannot exist. This, isn’t Bibiena;

Its Dürer again, building an Emperors Triumph out of imaginings. The real arch was never, and perhaps could never, have been built, but printing allows us the great, mad systematic dream of what it could have been.

This is Bibiena;

Operating several centuries after Dürer, but gifted with advancements in that bleeding-edge tech-philosophy perspective. Now we have multiple vanishing points, often located totally outside the image as it is intended to be seen.

Baroque Escher, mad experiments in the intensification of perspective, overwhelming in their detail, like a mad kind of paradise, a hyper-baroque Backrooms, wonderous yet awful palaces of light. More Baroque than any real building could possibly be, almost science-fictional, fantastical, with the slight tenor of fear behind the luxury.

I have no idea if these theatre designs were actually used, if they were, they would have been torn down quite quickly afterwards, but if they were, we now have another layer of simulation running, not just an abstracted stage-set, but a world.

What is happening in these densely layered, caked and colonnaded, ornamented super-columned statue-scattered palaces - I imagine being trapped there, I want to close my eyes and turn away, as if surrounded by a loud and constant noise, so much detail that only a mad-man could apprehend it all, everything seems to have a meaning but if everything in one image means something, every statue and ornament, then the verse or poem each image, each imagined space is speaking, is more like Black MIDI or some hyper compressed deep fried digital artefact than classical music.

The enormous fineness and terrible density is like a beautiful attack, like a cold fairyland made by a mathematician, an ultra-Europe or meta-court, perhaps humanist, certainly not sacred, but nothing human could survive or be noticed there –

Piranesi is the other equivalent, it is surprising to find that light can be more terrible than gloom, that finery can be more awful than decay, there is a kind of tension within these images, a frantic mania, as if we are in the juddering hands of an amphetamine addict. So different to the soft, nearly warm fear of decay, torture and the unseen that infiltrates the ‘Carceri’, here the nightmare is that we can never leave, that turning our way into these explosions of Baroque mania, we will find ourselves in yet another statue-covered hallway with about a million columns setting off into infinity, each with individual floriate tops.

Bibena is an employee, and the history of printing, and the mass replication of images, seems to be passed regularly back and forth between slightly manic Tony Stark owner/operator/artist figures, and honest decent clock-punchers, and it is very much a fey Iron Man figure that we hop along to next. The strange gift of perspective flows through Piranesi, John Martin, and finally emerges again into the popular stage. We have had the world most autistic German, an extremely Italian Italian, now prepare for the Frenchest man Alive;

The Fantastic Gustave Doré by Alix Paré, Valérie Sueur-Hermel

This is one of the best art books I own. Mainly because Gustav Dore’ was dedicated to smashing out absolute populist bangers and just never stopped engraving, and partly because the creators of the book manage to, first, select good pictures, and second, get the fuck out of the way of them, (which many art-book creators do not do).

Dore’ feels to me like the far end of a great tradition of engraving and printmaking which defined the renaissance, and certainly the enlightenment, more even than painting. The book gives us some lovely diagrams and information about the various methods of production, and these fascinate me with their use of raw materials like stone and copper, their graven lines, acid baths and the intermediate profession of engraver, a human being to transfer the artists lines to a new medium, and with the position of a print, being both proto-industrial, capable of producing hundreds or thousands of copies, but also pre-modern, having still a direct physical connection between creator and creation which is lost in our world of infinite dreams.

This visual world of lines, of sea, shadows, and of a global reality revealed not by colour but purely by light, of the careful delineation and distinction of light, and all of this delivered through the lines of pens and brushes, transposed into the scrapings of engravers, and all of this coalescing with the European age of Exploration, and the wundekammer collecting and organising of reality, of the globe, as seen by Europeans, a sphere of cartesian lines binding oceans themselves made of waving engraved lines, making little monochrome windows in walls of millers houses; here the Great Storm of 1773, here a Mighty Wreck, or Lucifer falling from Heaven, or a Mughal Prince hunting Tigers, tiny apertures in ink onto a collected and comprehended world.

This Great Age of Illustration was shaped, and limited, by advancement in technology. From the artist drawing directly to the block (we are back to wood now, the end grain of a boxwood block), then interpreted by the engravers, (involving similar dramas to those between Comic Book artists and inkers) to a photograph transferred to the block, but still engraved by hand, to finally, photography directly to etching, with no human hand interposed. The frozen image will devour the World of Lines, but the Tsunami happens slowly and there is much beauty in the belly of the wave.

Dore’s bible was so popular that Americans in the sticks projected his scenes with Magic Lanterns, (Franklin Booth was one such schoolroom preacher) it fed into theatre, into cinema, he shaped what it meant to tell an Epic Tale, you can find fragments of his light patterns and his grand scenes even today.

I don’t need to persuade you that Gustav Dore is great! But before we reach the our final stop, a brief detour into the completely innocent and universally beloved worlds best Empire.

Sea Pictures Drawn with Pen and Pencil by James Macauley

Made to be a window for its time onto the waves, making it now a window for the reader onto its time. ‘Sea Pictures’ is the image of a a liberal, positivist and Christian British Empire, just before the terrible precipice of the 20th century that will send Europe into Trench War, World War and Cold War, ending with the dissolution of the dreams which fuel this book.

The text and is set throughout with graven pictures of the deep. The most strange end excellent of these are the pure seascapes, images of wreck and storm, of ice, and of the strange technology of its time.

Materially this is fascinating because, set in the mid-point of complex developments in science, the book does not know, exactly, how deep the sea is, at its deepest, or how continents are formed. Deeper than this is a frame or way of seeing reality, and the ocean, as a kind of great device, or engine, and the things in it and part of it, all, are all dedicated to doing something.

“’The currents of the ocean’, says Maury, ‘do not flow by chance, but in obedience to physical laws ; they no doubt, therefore, maintain the order and preserve the harmony which characterise every department of God’s handiwork.”

...

“In the world as now existing these decompositions and reconstructions are so balanced in amount as to leave the chemical condition of the ocean substantially the same although the elements abstracted from it are inconceivable in amount. Still, the rivers continue to pour down the saline and other constituents to the sea water, to be there diffused and intermingled, and the different portions segregated and utilised for great geological and biological objects, leaving the composition of the ocean little changed, and ever adapted for its grand offices in the system of the globe.”

This beautiful, broadly innocent, and wrong conception lies, perhaps, at the far end of Dürer’s elaborate humanist cryptograms, or Bibiena’s infinitely receding perspectives. The whole world is now encompassed with the reason which they dreamed of. Explored, described, set down in lines. And Christ is still there, walking happily hand in hand, with Reason on one side and the British Empire on the other, with hardly a shadow between them. Nothing could possibly go wrong.

James Macauley is an intelligent, kind, well-travelled and deeply innocent man, and of course this lovely book of popular art was produced by the Religious Tract Society.

They did a damn good job. Over one hundred and twenty years old and, apart from some slight staining and discolouration; completely readable, opens well in the hand, no loose leaves etc. It is also visually beautiful and designed with some, occasionally curious and quixotic, but always pretty typesetting.

Broken into four sections, ‘The Sea in Poetry’, ‘The Physical Geography of the Sea’, ‘The Harvest of the Sea’ (inexhaustible, apparently), and ‘The Sea in History’, in each part ‘Sea Pictures’ represents the image of a decent, kind, soft, respectable, intelligent and patriotic Briton.

“To rancour unknown, to no passion a slave,

Nor unmanly, nor mean, nor a railer,

He’s gentle as Mercy, as Fortitude brave,

And this is a true English sailor.”

Perhaps one day I will add his ‘Excellent Women’ to my collection.

Now we must cross the boundary of the 20th Century and enter an age that does not yet know that it is Gold;

Treasury of American Pen and Ink Illustration 1881-1938 edited by Fridolf Johnson

(Also Pen & Ink Illustration Showcase by Steve Archibald, which had a wider range of images, though I made far less notes on that one.)

America!

Pen and Ink Bitches! The line is free at last! The relief zinc process means you can photograph the drawing right onto the plate and chemically etch exactly that linework, and the limits of the technology, and of the cheap, plentiful and now-industrial paper supply, decide what it can do and the world that will be seen via its artifice.

The rag paper used by Durer is gone, replaced by huge stripped logs of raw wood and Spanish grass being cooked in big pots, mixed with sulphite to keep it from tearing. (Early-modern rag paper prints from 500 years past can actually last better than the yellowing husk of newspaper, its made to burn out. True disposable culture. (Oddly, arguably, environmental too.))

But the Golden Age Illustrators largely didn’t work for Newspapers, the brute grey paper blotched their fine lines and demanded simple strength of form, perhaps not unlike the original Woodcut/Plate divide. These people work for Magazines.

Gibson Girls! This is the idealised form of beauty for the 20th Century Woman, and beauty is the sale; the fine-paper magazines that fuelled much of the Golden Age were sold below the cost of production with the profits coming from advertising. The Ads drove sales and made artists rich; the dream sold, just as it had in Nuremberg, no longer pfennig-Saints, but gags, drama, Gibson girls and product.

‘Treasury’ has a substantial and excellent introduction from Fridolf Johnson which gives a lot of context to the cross-development of printing technology and pen & ink illustration in the U.S. This is a good, capacious and excellent collection.

I am not sure if any image or cartoon ever published in ‘Punch’ has ever been funny ever. Certainly many seen here are, through close reference to a social milieu now long forgot, almost hieroglyphically strange, which pleases me. Others are arch and curious in a differently pleasing way, characters like ‘The Flapper’, ‘The Punch Sportsman’, ‘Huntliegh’ and ‘The Jazzberries’ crop up in a pre-war and interwar, international, anglophone high-status high culture.

What strikes me both artistically and socially is the curious flow of forms and fashions, lines and styles, between a formal, classical 19thC style and something that at times feels like a real interruption of the Modern. Some feel as if they would lie neatly alongside a cartoon of the Napoleonic War, others would fit fine in a modern day New Yorker.

Thank you to everyone who stuck it out this far. We are nearly at the end of the journey, or at least, of my book collection. We have one final stop to make.

Franklin Booth Silent Symphony by Alice A. Carter, John Fleskes

This fucking guy. Its like Clark Kent with Rumplestiltskin hidden in his shirt. They call him the ‘Painter with a Pen’, but he was more an engraver with a pen, because Franklin Booth was self-taught, and drew his first inspiration from the Bible of Gustav Dore. The lines he makes are an engravers lines, reproduced in pen and ink

(The opening essay/novelette about the life of Franklin Booth, by Alice A. Carter, is very extremely good.)

Franklin Booth had a ridiculously emblematic American (always cap the A) life. His father was a veteran of the (Confederate Side, he claims he deserted) Civil War, his mother was a beautiful Farmers Wife who loved poetry but never got to be an artist.

Franklin grew up on a Farm in Illinois, surrounded by brothers and sisters, literally husking corn, or stringing beans, or whatever they do on farms. There are many stories of Young Franklin sitting on his plough gazing at sunsets, forests, light and shade, vibing out. In Sunday school they projected imaged from Dore’s Bible onto the wall and Franklin got the job of drawing his bible lessons for the class. He literally built a log cabin.

This is the most normal man imaginable, and a true American Patriot. He doesn’t really seem to have had attitudes, or policies, or very much self-conscious political ideas - he has values and they are stamped in directly, like he came out of a press.

His climb from farm, to New York (corner, large windows) apartment and core member of the Society of Illustrators, is as emblematic and axiomatic as any story of the 19th Century; Farm. Dore Bible. Carving wood with axe and knife. Recognises all the trees by grain. Local paper. Multiple submissions - art and poetry combined. Art already good, poetry not so much. Twenty dollars. Father finally persuaded. Art class. Not great. Correspondence course. Art Institute of Chicago. No money. Back to farm. Chicago. Fail. Back to farm. New York. Fail. Back to Farm. Carmel. Back to farm. New York. Back to Farm. New York - SUCCESS.

He had talent, he had GRIND. True American hero. Boring? No - also visionary prophet of light.

Franklin Booth learned to draw but he never learned to draw like anyone else. Best I can describe is that when you zoom in, say, at the ink that makes a tree, (lots of trees), the linemaking reveals itself as truly very strange. That’s a simple version. Booth was the most normative man imaginable, on top, and the most ordinary corporate illustrator - Studebakers, Spoons, Etsy Organs (for anyone who loves music) Buy War Bonds.

His images are directly beautiful and anyone could tell that at a glance, its only when you dive into them, try to make sense of the lines the way shadow and light are amassed, the way he conceives of an object, a texture, a pattern of light, trying to work out what the hell is going on in this mans mind, that you begin to realise that, in crudely modern terms, Franklin Booth has hacked his own visual cortex and stripped out and re-wired large parts of the ‘world comprehension’ HUD, that he is, likely being due to being something of a genius, to being self-taught, to those long hours on the farm as a youth, to appending all of that to a titanic level of both inherent, and also deliberately years-long developed, skill, he is showing us the world through a completely different mind, and hence a different world.

Originally, the closest thing I could come to was someone like Ian Miller, but Miller draws grotesqueries with an arguably-grotesque line.

Imagine if, instead of being a weirdo drawing wierd thing, Ian Miller was actually a very extremely normal man, drawing very normal things, but still had that utterly different image-making software, but was also kind of a genius, but a genius that advertises spoons.

Then I thought, looking back, all the way back; isn’t Miller essentially Dürer? I mean an awful lot of his art seems to be inspired by the German. And if Booth is a spiritual inversion of Miller isn’t he really a spiritual inversion of Dürer?

The sensation of absorbing Franklin Booth and his visual world is historically, emotionally and sensually fascinating and maddening and slightly Lynchian, or dreamlike, with this vast calm beautiful pastoral and patriotic mind floating like a sunbeam across a world of cortical queerness and wonder. Very much a Fairytale guy. Also this is a very good book in a variety of ways. Would heartily recommend.

The End of Lines in Black and White

Perhaps not the end, but certainly a change. Remember, these wonderful translations of Pen and Ink are only possible due to the element of photography transposing them into the plate.

The engravers are disappearing, by 1930 they are gone. Those gangs of little goblin men, directly transmuting, by alchemy and by hand, the image into form, and back to light, all passed away like Fairies in the dawn. Now comes the age of the Photograph. Improvements in the photographs themselves, in the print, in the paper to show them, slowly and gradually all the in-betweens are overcome and you can finally, finally get a photograph looking good on the page, and then really good.

What use for the linesmen now? They were usually selling something other than themselves; Saints and Studebakers, Bible Tales and Gibson Girls. There are still illustrators but they no longer define reality. For about 500 years there, if you wanted a vision of the world outside your immediate sphere, you were looking at engravings, at lines in black and white, at human hands cutting wood or metal.

What changes once the Photograph deposes old-king-Line? The ‘Captured Moment’ finally does actually capture the moment, and transmit it. What fills our screens and pages is not ‘types’ but examples, a world of distinct particular things, all locked to a context in time and space. It’s notable that line work illustration survives in medical textbooks and in botany. Both areas where the physical thing under study is slightly fluid, irregular, and where a photograph of one particular example might not give you the platonic ideal version of a wound or leaf which you need to recognise something in the wild, and distinguish it from similar forms. Here the true, but slightly fluid nature of the world still holds itself apart; it cannot be captured, any more than a relics sacred power, it must be translated to be understood.

And the presence of the hand is gone, at least from mainstream images - though survives out in the world of pure illustration. In particular, the relationship between comic artists and their inkers reminds me a lot of Durer hovering over his engravers insisting on line weights and shading. But the direct transmission, via alchemy, of hand to physical form, to eye, is gone.

The age of photography may itself be coming to an end, at least as a vector of truth. There is no reason any more for anyone to believe a photograph. We are thrown back onto older forms of certainty, of reputation, direct testimony, physical presence. The information in an image now only really counts if there is a living person who will bind their reputation to its truth, mortal presence leaking back into the machine at last.

Use of the Machines

I made use of A.I. as a research tool in creating this post. Though all of the text is mine, many of the facts and some of the ideas came up in conversation with Claude.

Here is a link to a full transcript of every conversation I had with Claude on this subject.

If you have opinions on this, let me know in comments. These could range from; ‘Kill yourself’, to ‘Never use A.I. in any form ever’, to ‘Use but always disclose and credit’, to ‘Fuck it, we ball’ (though I expect few of those.

For clarity - I have promised generative A.I. will never show up in any False Machine product and I will maintain that promise. If you are a very very anti-A.I. purist you could say that this blog is a product, and that even A.I. for research is too far, in which case, I guess you got me there.

Again - any word, image or layout you see in any False Machine product will be the work of human hands.

If I use A.I. to research anything on the blog I will disclose in full.

Future Posts

In any case - I am going to have to knock off or reduce the size of my blog posts for a long while. Working on VotE; ReDux and Scrapworld Project and my day job is just eating too much of my time. I spent multiple days on this engraving thing which probably no-one will even read to the end. Future blog work will be shorter, though hopefully not slop-short. Maybe I can do a version of ‘The Order of the d12’? Are any dice not yet taken? Maybe the d7??

The current list;

• AntiPhoenix

• Arachnopolis Rex

• Archeans

• Atomic Bees

• Blackfoot Tapper

• Calcinated Cancer Bear

• Cambrimen

• Castilian Caddis Larvae

• Chaos Goblins

• Cholerids

• Civilopede

• Cromagnogolem

• Dead-Eyed Dwarves

• Deep Janeen

• dErO

• Egg Dead (PseudoOolites)

• Eigengrau

• Fossil Vampire

• Fungal Ambassodile

• Funginid Slaves

• Gegenschein

• Gilgamash

• Igneous Wrath

• Ignimbrite Mite

• Knotsmen

• Lamenters

• Mantis Shrimp

• Combat in darkness

• Meanderthals

• Mondmilch

• Olm

• Once-Men

• Oneirocetacean

• Opal-Winged Chiropterae

• Panic Attack Jack

• Phantom Hand of Gargas

• Psychomycosis Megaspores

• Pyroclastic Ghouls

• Radiolarian

• RayMen

• The Rapture

• ScissoFish

• Silichominids

• Exploration

• Substratals

• Soft-Heads

• Sonic Pigs

• Spectre of the Brocken

• Splinterlads

• Spotlight Dogs

• Still-Tor-Men

• Stormsheep

• Tachyon Troll

• Tetracharcarodron

• TitanSkull Hermit Crab

• ToRaptoise

• Trilobite-Knight

• Trogloraptor

• Ultraviolet Butterfly

• Zombie Coral

Encounters

A major part of the re-write is a focus on usability and part of that will include encounter tables. And part of that will be a discussion and instruction on just how encounter tables can work, with a very basic workshop for anyone who doesn’t already know about them describing, for instance;

• The way combined-dice rolls can produce probability curves and how you can use those to produce pseudo-natural encounter tables that might simulate the more interesting elements of an imagined environment - something that is carrying on without the PCs and which they happen to be going through.

• How you can make very ‘big’ tables of this kind for large volumes to give them a kind of identity, but also smaller ones for different more local environments

• Straight-roll single-die graphs of various sizes and how those produce a generally different tone of reality, something a little more ‘event focused’, and how and where in the game you can use those, and how often and where you can re-use them, based on what they are doing.

The aim here is to give people the tools to create their own ‘family’ or ‘toolbox’ of tables, ones they make themselves to suit their own style of game and a simple ‘starter list’ of encounter tables and similar, to go with the map-making and world-populating sections. I imagine the reader building and populating their map, making notes on it on another piece of paper, and creating a small, efficient, handful of tables to go with them.

COMMON MONSTERS

The question then becomes; is it reasonable for me to tell the reader about other common D&D monsters? And if so, how much of a description should I give?

I have taken out any creatures where I have basically done my own version and only included ones in the SRD

NOT IN THE SRD, DO NOT USE

• Beholder - a big loss, can I steal ‘Eye Tyrant’ from someone?

• Mind Flayer - Have ‘Soft Heads’ so fine.

• Umber Hulk - I will learn to live without you.

• Kuo-toa - I am sorry guys you are dull plus I have Olm.

• Githyanki - Too Planescape

• Githzerai - Too Planescape

• Slaad - Very cool but can live without them, also not very ‘Underworld-specific’

• Displacer Beast - as above

• Yuan-Ti - guys you are less interesting than you sound

• Carrion Crawler - Carrion Crawler I will miss you bro but must build a life without you

Is there an own-brand numbers-filed Eye Stalk Bite Globe guy I can use?

General Humanoids

We need these guys! They are the meat and potatoes of encounters! (Though I still took out ‘Orcs’ and their general family as I felt in an environment with big dangerous intelligent humanoids they don’t really have a strong identity in the underworld.)

• Grimlock - Blind humanoids. ‘Savage’. Have a really good illustration in the 3.5 Underdark book. Feel like these guys are a winner.

• Kobold - Petty lizard-dog things. Kind of boring and I’m not sure there’s any reason they should exist but they do. Famous trap-users allegedly. I suppose they can go in? Every paracosm needs something specifically lame as fuck I guess.

• Troglodyte - Colour changing, dumb as bricks super-stinky Lizard-people? I have never seen these in a game. At least slightly more interesting than normal Lizard people. Alive or dead they smell REALLY BAD. Very dumb. I think I like these guys?

Boring Fauna

Fire Beetle, Giant Centipede, Giant Bat - I mean fine.

Ambush Monsters

• Ettercap - dull, hangs out with Spiders

• Giant Spider & Giant Wolf Spider - The Wolf Spider will get off the web at least so there is that.

• Gibbering Mouther - honestly pretty cool, I may have mis-categorised this one but no-idea where else to put them except in ‘Weird Guys’.

• Otyugh - vital recycling, probably someone will complain if you kill this. Static I guess. More of a location.

• Phase Spider - annoying but interesting to fight.

Burrowers

Literally built for it.

• Ankheg - meant to burrow through soil so not fully appropriate but good to keep around for old times sake maybe? Will he be lonely without the Umber Hulk?

• Bulette - presumably having a great time underground.

• Purple Worm - technically a burrower but honestly deserves its own thing. A good Big Dangerous Monster

• Xorn - kind of basically like meeting a guy really? Just a guy who eats gems.

Dead and Dry

There are too many of these and many are dungeon-specific. I did imagine a lot of undead underground but also imagined them semi-civilised, part of society and subject to law in a way they are not usually and able to converse.

• Bodak - deadly gaze, ok?

• Crypt Thing - the ‘teleports everyone’ guy, but basically a skeleton, very Gygaxian, surely this guy would have an actual job in the Veins?

• Demilich - jewelled skull, no worse than meeting a millionaire underground

• Huecuva — ‘The undead remains of a faithless priest, cloaked by illusion to appear a living, robed cleric’ I guess we can have this guy. Is he still doing the predatory false priest thing down here?

• Lich - Classic. Again, just like meeting a Mayor or something.

• Mummy - classic, more like meeting a person than a monster

• Revenant - Revenge-based murdered corpse, possibly wet, but if in the Veins, maybe in some kind of existential mission, maybe more like meeting a weird guy.

• Skeleton - classic, in the Veins, should be like meeting a guy.

• Winterwight - what even is this? Is this new? A cold Skeleton I guess.

Dead and Wet

Feel like there would be proportionately less of these underground as they are made of valuable meat.

• Coffer Corpse — “A drowned or grave-cheated corpse that strangles the living; it collapses as if destroyed, then rises moments later to renew the attack.” Surely too annoying to have in the Veins. Feels wrong.

• Ghoul - I kind of have Pyroclastic Ghouls already, also, in the Veins, probably more like meeting a guy, if they are smart enough to last this long.

• Mohrg — “The animated corpse of a mass murderer, its exposed organs bound in rotted sinew; a lashing tongue paralyses prey for its raking claws.” Very cool and weird but probably no, not unless in special environments or circumstances.

• Penanggalan - As above, cool but probably no.

• Wight — Cool enough to probably go in the ‘dry’ list. Also like meeting a guy.

• Zombie - a poor fit this deep down, also I have ‘Cholerids’ already.

• Vampires! - Already have these. Definitely like meeting a guy.

Dead and Not There

• Caller in Darkness — “A roiling mass of death-agony born where many people died together in terror; it assaults the mind directly, drowning victims in others’ final moments.” Honestly very cool but I already have the Panic Attack Jack which is essentially this but the caving version plus corpses. So, maybe?

• Ghost - Classic. With living and dead communities being more integrated this will be just a dude who isn’t there.

• Mohrg — “The animated corpse of a mass murderer, its exposed organs bound in rotted sinew; a lashing tongue paralyses prey for its raking claws.” Knarly. Nearly wet. Probably a ‘No’ or ‘Nearly never’.

• Poltergeist — Not as bad as the Mohrg but limited use for you, sorry.

• Shadow - Honestly fine if they have some personality and reason for being there.

• Spectre - freezy touch, generic, absorb into ‘Ghost’, along with Poltergeist.

• Will-o’-Wisp - A classic but probably semi-tamed or at least negotiated with underground.

• Wraith - A super-ghost? Ghost boss? Lets just say this guy is the other Ghosts boss.

Dead and What the Fuck

• Atropal — “A stillborn godling risen as undead — a bloated, cosmic-scale horror whose touch withers and whose gaze slays.” What the actual shit I have never even heard of this. Keep I guess? Sounds fun.

• Devourer - “A gaunt, towering undead with a smaller trapped soul writhing in its ribcage; it consumes the spirits of the slain to fuel dark spells.” Never heard of them. Too wet and specific for General but might be fun to keep around.

• Nightshades (Nightcrawler, Nightwalker, Nightwing) - I don’t know anything about these guys! I guess they can stay? I am too scared to throw them out.

Fucking Annoying Lurking Trap Things

Cave Fisher, Cloaker, Darkmantle, Grick, Mimic, Piercer, Roper - fine fine fine. I think I kind of hate these things. They are traps not encounters really for me, but some are classics and they have A place, even if I don’t like them. I don’t think most should be on an encounter table but putting them in a place in a dungeon-equivalent map or something is fine. Can anyone explain how the fuck the Cloaker and Darkmantle both exist and are they materially different in any meaningful way?

Slime and Oozes

I kind of slightly hate these guys too but less than the weird trap things. They have their place.

• Black Pudding - corrodes metal, splits, fine.

• Gelatinous Cube - Classic. Keep. The best of the slimes.

• Gray Ooze - hidden, acidic, eats metal, sounds shit. Ok, keep.

• Ochre Jelly - bright yellow, acidic, divides, flows, ok?

• Shrieker - not a classic but a familiar type. Static, put with weird trap things.

• Violet Fungus - the shrieker but worse. Static, put with weird trap things.

Big Cool Main Monsters

• Aboleth - I can’t believe this guy is in the SRD! Thank you Wizards of the Coast!

• Basilisk - not very underground-coded but sure I can find a use for you.

• Behir - I have to confess, I do not find you very interesting but I am reluctant to throw you out.

• Chuul - Chuul you have no real identity for me but I will give you a chance.

• Drider - I reskinned Drow but I WotC is willing to hand you out, you are too cool to let go.

So!

What do you think of my scheme here? Is it reasonable?

Did I miss any actually-good and Veins-appropriate monsters (that are in the SRD)?

Should I go back through all my own books and make another list of my (and Scraps) own monsters? Or is that cringe?

Should I put in monsters from other independent creators books? (single-line descriptions with references to the books); probably still no, sounds shady & cringe. But if someone has done a really good one is it bad for me to say ‘check out the so-and-so from such and such a book?’ (Still probably a bad idea))

Did I miss any publicly available and good, Underdark monsters?

I was broadly demoralised by this damnn book, but to make it bearable to get through, I will make a list, from back to front, of everything I actually liked.

TOROG - The King Who Crawls

The Level 34 Solo Lurker Himself! (“Huge Immortal Humanoid, XP 195,000)

God of Torture, Imprisonment and the Underdark. A few concepts in here govery hard indeed and Torog is the best. Entered the Underdark to fight some primordial horror in the Dawntimes and was cursed even as he killed it. He cannot heal, cannot leave, and as a God, cannot die.

Trying to escape the Underdark, Torog crazily crawled his way through the whole of the planet. He was cursed to never reach the surface, but he could madly smash his way into other planes, so long as it was into the Underdark of those planes. His crazed crawl created a permanently bloodstained Godroad which curls and spirals madly through the Underdark, and even breaches the walls between realities.

Now his palace is the hewn corpse of the Titan he killed to get here and Torogs servants have to constantly chew and cut away at it to stop it re-growing. Bitter, wrathful and in constant pain, Torog tortures and imprisons people, turning them into wracks. Unlike other Gods, he does not share his power or trust his angels. If he wants to communicate he will either send some horrid low level servant with his words sliced into its back, or the big guy is coming himself, in person. He likes to take cities of people who piss him off, and pull them down into the Underdark. I imagine this happening like two mountain-sized hands rumble up from the earth on each side of the city, fingers like arcologies, curling over, then down, down down.

Torog is so depressed he may actually want to die, which would form a neat apex to a long campaign. The guy was just messing with you because he wants to commit suicide-by-adventurer.

If he does die, he horrible presence is the only thing keeping the Abberant Outer Realms from infiltrating and merging with the Underdark, which will end up with Mind Flayers, Beholders and Grell turning everyone into pâté, which is a neat piece of setting-sustaining divine engineering.

Torog is novel, functional, has a cool picture and really holds the book together. Its not surprising they made the whole thing about him.

The Incunabulum

Vecna-Worshipping sort-of humans defined by Mum-Ra Drip. Obsessed with discovering and recording secret knowledge of all kinds, they have “the grisly ritual of the Unveiling” which strips every piece of memory from a (dead?) subject. This involves the questioner eating the subjects brain, which gives them access to their entire experience. BUT, the interrogator has only 12 hours to write down parts before the memories fade. They keep these secrets on parchment, (which is probably made from the victims).

The Incunabulum are culturally defined by their wrappings. When they come of age they are given a set of wrappings derived from dead Incunabulum. These contain knowledge and memories, and once they go on, they don’t come off till death.

The lore says elements of these memories date back to the first Incunabulum. The nature of replication and dispersal means that, while there must be continuity, I’m sure there will be a lot of alteration, adaptation, splitting and drift in what feels like a ‘written genetic signature’, each Incunabulum having access to a kind of edited, pathed together palimpsest of memories, dating first to one or two predecessors, and from them, back and back and back, all the way to the first. The patterns created by the memories no doubt being stronger than the details of the memories themselves, each Incunabulum being a kind of evolved book of memories, as well as a person.

I’m already interpolating too much into a very sparse 4e text. These guys look largely human, they hang out in a Cavern-Venice City called Glimmer in the Shadowdark, worship Vecna exclusively, make a lot of use of (dry, never wet) Undead, and generally love secrets and being evil. Good villains with some unexplored Borgesian depths.

Blood Ooze

A bad Ooze monster with fragments of interesting elements. One - its made from Torogs blood. Two - if it manages to Ooze you it gets inside you and puppets you. Three - “A blood ooze has no allies.” A koan to place alongside “Giant Oysters are never surprised.”

Lathan, River of Souls

“The lathan forms where streams of souls join together in a crevasse known as the Vale of Sighs. Here the moaning torrent becomes a true flow as spirits funnel through the narrowest part of the canyon ... its surface and depths are made of a rushing press of intertwined and glowing spirits.”

“Devils frequently sail the Lathan to the Soul Slough to find souls that had been promised to them. They float atop the spirits in iron-keeled boats and fish spirits out with ghost catching nets.”

“Only at one place along the Latham does a permanent crossing exist: the Worm Bridge. .. Its master, Bragarra the Bridge Witch, controls it constantly to keep it from being dashed to pieces by the tormoil of the Lathan.

The bridge is crafted from the corpse of a purple worm whose long body forms a tunnel through the water to reach the other side. On either end stand a pair of nightmares chained to the dead beast, and dark stalkers lurk nearby, ready to obey their masters commands. Nearly frozen and unable to move more than its head, the purple worm must be pulled up and down the river to compensate for the water’s movement. The dark stalkers drive the nightmares to draw the worm taught for crossing, and sin its coils deep to avoid floating dangers.”

Bragarra the Bridge Witch is very Chris Avellone-coded.

Esaham, Graveyard of Demons

This is actually a pretty bad section, but the very idea of a graveyard for Demons, a place of binding and repose for what are meant to be sempiternal, extra-causal entities, is provocative.

Icegloom Chart

Bad name, good concept. A fat shard of ice. “Barely visible channels and bubbles in the ice constantly reshape themselves to resemble a map,”

Fire Pit

One very good fragment from an overall tiring 4e ‘Encounter’.

“This magic fire pit burns only meat and leaves wood untouched.” From an encounter in the Feydark. Excellent Druidic/Ent horror concept.

Deadtrees

“These four titans shed dappled shadows over thier realm while gods and primordials still warred.”

Four primeval and long-fallen Tolkienesque super-trees. Their roots though, still exist, and now form tunnel systems. Very fey concept for the Feywild, but interesting.

Sick Gnomes

The GNOMES are wilding the fuck out.

“King Finutar’s court magicians assure the people of Drochdan that the haze is a hostile sending from a rival kingdom - perhaps the formorians. In private,some gnomes whisper that it is a curse ...”

“In reality, this magical ailment is spread by contamination of the Drochdan’s food supply by fungal spores. This fact explains why entire gnome hunting bands are stricken by it at the same time - they’ve all eaten the same rations.”

Look, even mildly interesting GNOME CONTENT is rare.

Inbharann

A Formorian Kingdom that has learned how to mass-produce Sauron-Eyes and uses them as searchlights.

They also have a neat succession system; anyone can be adopted into the Royal Family based on competence. When the Monarch dies they all have to fight it out. The war is over when one is left standing, however, if everyone dies, a tribunal decides which one fought with the “greatest cleverness”, and orders his or her resurrection.

Resurrecting the leader from a dynastic bloodbath is fun, and having a commission to decide which was ‘cleverest’ feels very loony-tune-talmudic.

Primal Mud

4e combat chess idea with mud which you can use to heal yourself. Stated in the text, this dries out when you call on its power. Unstated is that, if this is a pool of mud, you just healed yourself and then likely trapped yourself by drying the it out, which makes for a nice combat decision. Even better, in a combat situation with multiple liquid pools, drying them out here or there could make the place more or less navigable for allies or enemies depending on circumstance.

Mherkrull

“Just as Asmodeus rebelled against the god that commanded him to relinquish his power, so too do devils and angels alike occasionally challenge their lords. Those wise enough to recognise their error before being destroyed have no hope of mercy. Their only succour is to escape divine notice for a time, and those who succeed most often do so by coming to the cavernous godless realm known as Mherkrul.”

That’s nearly all we get.

Xarcorr - Realm of the Aboleths

Some reasonably funky environments are sketched out;

“The area around Xarcorr tumbles and twits as if in pain ... stone shifts and mutates without warning ... Thoughts drift through the passages like smoke, choking the minds of the unwary with the nightmare imaginings of abhorrent creatures..”

These roiling rocks have islands of relative stability.

The Dripping Jungle; ”abuzz with glimmering creatures that make their own light. Ghostly insects glow in gemstone colours through transparent shells. leechlike rodents leave luminous slime trails behind their slithering bodies. Great behemoths stand on legs as tall as ship masts that shine with radiant blood, stretching their ruddy necks to reach ceiling vegetation”

The Stone Gyre; “the rock becomes fluid - the stone of the caverns ripples and moves while remaining in a cave shape ... Up is whatever direction air can be found.”

The Toothy Plains; “vast, flat expanses of ceiling and floor roughly 200 feet apart. .... massive crystal monoliths that resemble jagged fangs jutting from the ceiling and floor ... “glide along the surface from which they project..”

Then, once you enter Xarcorr itself; “a strange, still point, disorientating both in its contrast to the surrounding chaos and in the alien nature of the realm. ... Xarcorr overlays the place in the world that its area covers. it is both in the world and not, and what was in the world before its coming remains behind the unreachable barrier of Xarcorr’s existence. No mortal knows what lies in the world beneath where Xarcorr now rests.”

Within; Dreaming Vaults “in these long chambers the aboleths keep captives of many races alive in a shared dream state. ... Their captors observe the effects aboleth plans might have on the real world by looking at the reactions the captives have and how the sleepers imagine others would behave.”

The Warp Web; “rivers of slimy water from all over Xarcorr ... float out into the open air and split into a latticework of waterways that dangle down into the canyon.”

The Preserve, where the aboleths “modify the environment in extreme ways, hoping to scrape open a hole in the weave of existance and find a conduit to the Far Realm behind the flow”

Grell Colony Politics

We have a nice page here digging into the varying philosophies amongst a colony of Grells. I feel like these my have been written by a very angry, very cynical vegitarian;

The Byoll (”Opportunity for Use”) “Their philosophy permits captured prey to avoid being eaten by performing a dangerous mission of the grells devising.”

The Glatt “Equanimity of Harm”) “The Grell philosophy Glatt holds that harm to prey animals is a necessary part of life, but that the moral grell parcels out this unavoidable hurt so that no piece of potential food suffers more than other members of its litter, tribe or group.”

The Jrall (”Feasting in Knowledge”) “Jrall philosophy argues that it is acceptable to torment and kill sentient beings as long as they are ennobled by knowledge first. Thralls are kept in clean pens and taught the simplest rudiments of Jrall belief in anticipation of the day when they will be slowly devoured alive.”

The Kragg (”Consume the Willing”). “Like the Byoll - from whom they broke in a murderous conflict years ago - the Kragg send captured prey to perform hunting missions or other quests for them. The Kragg do this as part of a braoder exercise in bending future prey to their will. They use their psychic powers to make their victims want to be eaten. Philosopher Kragg asserts that this is the only ethical way to devour sentient species.”

Hraak Azul

A massive living multiple-fungus fortress/environment colony, slowly moving through the Underdark, going who knows where. Pretty similar to the Fungal Environment in ‘Forgotten Realms: Underdark’, but now mobile and with a nice image and some extra details.

Dark Lake Ziggurat

Its a big black Ziggurat on a dark lake. Neat element is that it is multi-planar, and perhaps multi-causal. The same ziggurat, built by different races and cultures, in different planes, in exactly the same place, and perhaps with multiple histories even within one plane.

Kind of basic Lovecraft tbh but a big black ziggurat standing alone above a dark lake, miles beneath the earth, is still a banger image. Its also mildly funny/das that the Lovecraft inspired Kua Toa have a colony nearby and keep sending Fishmen into the Ziggurat to perform what they think is ‘sacred work’ (they are being randomly hurled through other dimensions and driven totally mad.).

Maelbrathyr

Maybe the only part of 4e Underdark that keeps some of the old ‘Infinity Engine Location’ energy from Forbidden Realms: Underdark. Maelbrathyr feels very much like a city laid out in isometric graphics, with a dark and edgy backstory and a series of personally dramatic bossfights with Chris Avellone-style tormented bad-guys.

Story is that an Underdark City put together a team of heroes to rescue someone from Torogs Torture clutches. This they did, but the King Who Crawls was annoyed enough by this that he reached up and dragged the entire city down into the earth, leaving it a tiered collapsed city of ruins and levels.

He also cursed the heroes who ‘stole’ his prisoner, even the ones who didn’t survive. Now they are immortal horrors, mad and evil. One a half fire half ice slug centaur in undying agony, one given mega-schizophrenias by being inhabited by the souls of the comrades he let down, who don’t like each other or him, and who change his body when they take over, and one guy trapped in an eternal hamster-wheel/orrery torture device who can only roll around forever. Hilarious. Good one Torog.

This Image

Is this “4th Edition” in the room with you now?

Reading this was like suffering a flashback to an old, dull, war. 4e truly is a depressing system, with a kind of brutal, nasty, cognitive weight. Going thorough the text I kept wanting to argue with someone who wasn’t there, and who hasn’t been there for fifteen years.

Building your entire reality around a series of boutique grid-pattern ‘balanced’ combat encounters (which the PCs can’t actually lose without fucking things up), drags the imaginative potential of the human soul into a pit of mediocrity and tortures it - glistering pools of blood torn from a god who can never heal and never die and which still stain the passage of the King Who Crawls, give a +5 to fucking a fucking evoking surge but disadvantage on heals or some shit, its just the most depressing stuff. Torog would approve.

Even the really good ideas, like the Incunabulum, which have potentially fascinating concepts behind them, are all designed to be communicated via big dumb stat blocks, which are all built around combat-as-sport grid combat, its like watching fine French cheese be squeezed through a sieve onto the dirtiest burger.

Foaree Underdark also provides splatters of gaming advice, not so much wrong within itself, as the horrid product of post-apocalyptic mutational pressures producing something that approximates a previously health organism, but only through limb-splintering mutilations of an already horribly warped concept;

“One way to impress upon the players the dangers of the Underdark is tot talk about the deadly monsters that live there. But talk is cheap. I find that most players assume the DM will pit them only against foes they can defeat. They imagine difficult fights, but they also imagine winning all of them.

That’s great. D&D is at its best when its collaborative and everyone at the table has fun. Still, I like to put fear in the players and let them know that their decisions have real meaning in the game. If every choice has the same victorious result, the game gets dull.

I find the best way to do this is to call the players’ bluff. I’ll talk about some dangerous foe in a particular location, and if the players go there, they meet the danger. In effect, I put up a sign that says, “Here there be dragons!” If the players go past the sign, they meet a dragon - and not some wyrmling either.

The key to making this approach work is letting the characters get away. Some players might want their characters to run, but one or two often stick around to see if you mean it. (”Maybe that Mind Flayer is a doppelganger. He wouldn’t really have us face a Mind Flayer.”) This inevitably draws the others back to hep out, but after a few potent attacks from the monster, everyone should be looking for the exit. When they do, let them go. if you need a reason for the monster not to pursue, perhaps some other threat attacks it (the big fish being eaten by the bigger fish). If you do something like this in the Underdark, the players will give each other worried looks the next time they need to delve into the deep, dark caverns.

Using this technique has the additional benefit of teaching players that it’s ok to run from a fight. I’ve seen many campaigns come to an abrupt end or have to be saved by some deus ex machina because the players didn’t see a way out of a fight that went south. letting them run away shows them that their decisions have consequences, but that you’re still collaborating to make a fun game.”

Not a good book but there were at least some good things in it.

Julian

‘Julian’ is Gore Vidal’s fictional, epistolary autobiography of Julian the Apostate, last Pagan Emperor of Rome.

It’s an intelligent, well-researched, highly readable story which is still fundamentally less perfect than ‘Eagle in the Snow’, which follows a generation on from this, or ‘Memoir of Hadrian’, which remains the gold standard for ‘emperors telling their story’ stories.

At War With Christ

Julian is at war with Christianity, and so is Gore Vidal. From every source I could find he was utterly serious about his hatred for ‘Abrahamism’ and sincerely believes that something went massively wrong when the ‘death-cult of the Nazarene’ took over the West.

“I see nothing good ever coming of this religious system no matter how much it absorbs our ancient customs and puts to use for its own ends Hellenic wit and logic. Yet I have no doubt now that the Christians will prevail. Julian was our last hope, and he went too soon. Something large and harmful has now come into the life of this old world. One recalls, stoically, the injunction of Sophocles: “And ever shall this law hold good, nothing that is vast enters into the life of mortals without a curse.”

It is also significant that the death cult should take hold just as the barbarians are gathering on our borders. It is fitting that if our world is to fall – and I am certain that it will – the heirs of those who had originally created this beautiful civilisation and made great art should at the end be artless and worship a dead man and distain this life for an unknown eternity behind the dark door.”

The reign of Julian is perhaps the last moment in history when the rising tide of Christianity might have been reversed. We know this didn’t happen, and in the story of ‘Julian’, the gods themselves are as open as they can be about the fact their age is ending. The only people not listening are Julian, and perhaps Gore Vidal, who knows the inevitable truth but who is choosing to live through the dying moments of a millennia-long culture he grieves for, as.. not penance, perhaps in search of wisdom? I imagine him like a science-fiction time traveller traumatising himself by living though the final moments of a disaster he cannot change in the hopes that he can glean some slender fragment of wisdom from the conflagration.

What Does Gore Vidal Believe In? It’s not really clear and this is a flaw in the book. (I suppose in ‘being civilised’.)

Gay Gore

‘Hadrian’ and ‘Julian’ are both Gay Books. Margurite Yourcenar was gay and obsessed with Hadrian from early youth. (Hadrian was very gay.) Gore Vidal was largely-gay, wrote a very-open book about his Gay Love and, at least by his description, had his novels blacklisted by the New York Times for a decade, being forced to involve himself in Hollywood, until he wrote ‘Julian’, his best-selling return to being reviewed in the NYT. Vidal seems to have been very absolutely serious about thinking the Abrahamic religions were rubbish and wanting Hellenism instead, (though ‘Julian’ is popular with both factions), and his honestly very brave out-and-out true-love homosexuality, probably played a major part in alienating him from America, a country he seems to have instinctively considered ‘his’, and which he both desired and loathed like you would a charismatic ex.

“For the first time in history, a Roman emperor was mocked and thought ridiculous. From every corner of the earth derisive laughter sounded. yet except for this one lapse, I find Hadrian a sympathetic figure. He was much gifted, particularly in music. He was an adept at mysteries. He used to spend many hours at night studying the stars, searching for omens and portents, as I do. He also wore a beard. I like him best for that.”

(This paragraph would be perfect if it ended there but as with everything, Vidal, and Julian, talk too much, explain too much and leave little for the reader to do.)

These are songs of alienation. Vidal died in a culture where his homosexuality was pretty-much accepted, at least to an extent he would have never believed, but the high-WASP culture he loved was pretty much dead. Would an Hellenic world have been better?

Irreligious Gore

The man had, I think, not a sacred bone in his body. This limits the text. A book built around the conflict between two great faiths, two mysteries and two fundamentally different ways of seeing the numinous and the real, and the writer understands both, intellectually. Never did I feel that strange secret sympathy and vague numinosity I did with General Maximus in ‘Eagle in the Snow’.

Something BIG changed, and with it, reality changed. There was still corruption, bigotry, cruelty and sadism, but it was different, and even those arguing against it, or simply making characters who are against it, believe it; that something shifted in the soul of the (Mediterranean and European) world. They accept that it happened simply by arguing against it.

This might be why Jesuits apparently LOVED ‘Julian’, a novel about a main character who’s main deal is HATING FUCKING CHRISTIANTIY GET THESE GALLILIEANS AWAY FROM ME. Vidal is writing about that great change, the Jesuits are on one side of it and Vidal is on the other but they are both looking at this shadow tide of the soul. You can’t really look directly at it; too big, vast, vague and strange; the substance that thoughts float on, not what they are made of, but you can ‘see’ it by stringing together the substance of history and watching it quiver like a fat spiders web.

Vidal has his fingers on the web but he is absent at the sacrifice. He does not really believe and he is not very good at trying to.

“No matter what impels a man to pray to a god, the fact that he performs the ritual act is itself an act of worship and a beginning, even though his heart is false.”

Satire is an empty form. Vidal, or his characters at least, can war and flail against Christianity, dropping bomb after bomb, but they know they are not going to win, and Vidal knows he is not going to win.

“”Here are your latest crimes. Murders requested, and property requested ... oh, how you love the riches of this world! Yet your religion preaches that you should not resist injury or go to law or even hold property, much less steal it! You have been taught to consider nothing your own, except your place in the other and better world. yet you wear jewels, rich robes, build huge basilicas, all in _this_ world, not the next. You were taught to despise money, yet you amass it. When done an injury, real or imagined, you were told not to retaliate, that it was wrong to return evil for evil. Yet you battle with one another in lawless mobs, torturing and killing those you disapprove of. You have endangered not only the true religion but the security of the state whose chief magistrate I am, by heaven’s will. You are not worthy even of the Nazarene. If you cannot live by those precepts which you are willing to defend with the knife and with poison” (a reference to the poisoning of Arius by Athanasius), “what are you then but hypocrites?”

(Of course he know that hard-core Christians love this kind of thing. It is hardly going to put them off.)

But the ‘Hellenism’ Vidal and Julian discover/concoct to oppose and hopefully replace Christianity, feels in this book, very awkward and patched together, a ‘modern’ confabulation;

“Julian decided to make the ceremonial public. Everyone was shocked at the ritual scourging of an hundred youths by the priestesses. To make matters worse, the youths had agreed to take part in the ceremony not out of faith but simply to curry favour with the Emperor, while the priestesses were almost all of them recent initiates. The result was unhappy. Several young men were seriously hurt and a number of priestesses fainted at the sight of so much blood. The ultimate rites were a confused obscenity."

Both in the text and outside it, the answer isn’t very good. Vidal is yearning for something but he can’t quite commit to the bit. He is not engaging in the rituals with either Confucian sincerity or Wiccan bipolarity. We can see Julian experiencing his mysteries but we are never with him in those mysteries because that is somewhere Gore Vidal psychologically cannot follow.

"Yet from the beginning, there were always those who mocked. A senator of the old Republic once asked an auger how he was able to get through a ceremony of divination without laughing. I am not so light-minded, though I concede that many of those temples at Rome where certain verses learned by rote are chanted year in and year out, yet no-one, including the priests, knows what they mean, for they are in the early language of the Etruscans, long since forgotten."

Humanist Gore

An epistolary novel, ‘Julian’ is set with the accompanying text of two Philosophers; Libanius and Priscus, who both knew Julian before his death and are reviewing his autobiography, whilst arguing with each other about translation costs, passing acid remarks about this person or that or just complaining about age.

Priscus: “As to the famous Battle of Strasbourg, I can add very little to what Julian himself wrote.

Libanius: Then why do you? Priscus keeps protesting he can add little and then adds too much. He has aged. He always used to be brief, to the point of being laconic, but now...!

Priscus: my own memories of that day in August are quite vivid and surprisingly full, considering the fact that I have no memory of what happened last year, or even this morning.”

These catty, clever sections are the most Vidal-esque parts of the book, the most comfortable and also the source of some of its real virtues. Gore Vidal has never been a man to lust after the eternal or unseen, but he does quite like this life, and often has a fair amount of sympathy and interest for the people in it.

‘She rose heavily, with some difficulty. She steadied herself against the white marble wall of the tower. “Yes, I should have likes to have been Empress of Rome.”

“I doubt it. If you had been Empress, you would be dead by now. The Christians would have killed you.”

“Do you think I would have minded that?” She turned full on me and the large black eyes blazed like obsidian in the sun. “Don’t you realise - can’t you tell just be looking at me, my dear wise old Priscus - that not a day has passed in twenty years I haven’t wished I were dead!”

The speaker above is Macrina, mild autist girl philosopher and probably the closest thing Julian has in his life to an equal, happy partner and true love. He leaves and she never tells him she was pregnant with his child, which is politically and socially wise, but also destroys her, inwardly at least. In a tribute to Vidal’s humanism and curiosity, we meet her soon in pages but later in time, long after Julian is dead. This is one of the few occasions where Vidal rises above Yourcenar; he has an interest in the little people, and dropping into all the stories of all the little people left in Julian’s wake brings out much that is good and human in him.

Blindingly Obvious Gore

For the most part, having a prolix, relentlessly self-analytical protagonist, and two academic interlocutors going over every statement and event means that nothing is left to inference, making this actually a very un-literary book.

Julian’s parents are killed by his uncle and he and his charismatic, beautiful, confident, brutal, mad brother are raised by ever-watchful agents of that same uncle, in a state of simultaneous privilege and horror. A dark fairytale. This probably helped to crack open his brothers nascent madness and sadism, but we really don’t have a good psychological theory for what it means to be a king, or to be raised in murderous dynastic politics, in which the closest relationships are the most lethal. It’s a strange quirk of history that great polities become dark machines of death at their bases, where steel grind flesh, at their peripheries, where the Other is encountered, and at their very tips, where they consume even those who would rule them.

“You can never trust anyone, not even your on flesh and blood.”

I tried to protest loyalty at this point. But Gallus ignored me. “All men are evil. I found that out early. They are born in sin, live in sin, die in sin. only God can save us. I pray that he will save me.” Gallus made the sign of the cross on his bare chest.

“But it is a fine thing in an evil world to be Ceasar. From here,” he indicated a height, “you can see them all. You can see them at their games. But they can’t see you. Sometimes at night, I walk the streets in disguise. I listen to them. I watch them, knowing I can do anything to them I want and no-one can touch me. If I want to rape a woman or kill a man in an alley, I can. Sometimes I do.” He frowned. “But it is evil. I know it. I try not to. yet I feel that when I do these things there is something higher which acts through me. I am a child of God. Unworthy as I am, he created me and to him I shall return. What I am, he wanted me to be. That is why I am good.”

Probably there is some nascent or actual sexual element to Julian’s fearful, desiring love-hate relationship with his mad brother, but we don’t need to speculate, as Priscus and Libanius will directly point it out, in case we missed it.

The same thing happens when Julian, already semi-alienated from his families Christianity by the fact that they murdered each other whilst bleating about mercy, visits a range of prophets and magicians and, after witnessing some mysteries and getting some prophecies, becomes convinced that he may have a destiny to restore the old gods.

Or.. has this young and vulnerable prince, instead of randomly encountering mysteries and portents, actually been drawn into a well constructed conspiracy to manipulate him and convince him he is Alexander come again? Could it be possible?

Well again we don’t need to worry as Priscus and Libanius will tell us directly. No need to infer.

(An actually-good minor sub-theme of the book is that the sincere Hellenes, the true worshipers of the Old Gods who really believe, and their prophets, all constantly warn Julian that he is doomed, that their age is ending, that their voices are falling silent and that there is nothing he can do to prevent it, and he can perhaps only moderate the loss by civilising the Christians. It’s the goons, magicians and flim-flam men in the sparkling robes who keep telling Julian he is Alexander Reborn and is going to re-wind time.

‘”The bull moved unsteadily. One leg was weak. He stumbled. A bad omen. I took the ritual knife. I said what must be said. Then I cut the bulls throat in a single clean gesture. At least that went well. The blood gushed. I was covered with it, and that was also good.

... The mob was now quiet, interested I suppose, in and ancient ceremony which many of them had never seen before.

When it came to the augury, my hand hesitated. Some demon tried to prevent me from seizing the bulls liver. I prayed to Helios. Just as I did, the sun rose behind Mount Silpius. Light streamed on either side of the mountain, though its shadow still fell across the morning city. I plunged my hand into the entrails and withdrew the liver.

The omen was appalling. Parts of the liver were dry with disease. I examined it carefully. In the “house of war” and in the “house of love” death was the omen.”

Honestly, all the omens are accurate, and all of them are bad. Listen to your gods Julian!)

This anti-literary tendency to blinding obviousness and self-cleverness does get better as we go on. It feels like Vidal improves at writing his own book, in particular, the final act, in which Julian is stabbed in battle (by a Roman spear!) and dies at the hands of some kind of conspiracy. In a lesser book this mysterious conspiracy would be left wide open, but instead Priscus identifies one of the main conspirators, writes to him and is invited to his house where the man confesses to doing the deed for Jesus and, revealing himself as a petty mediocrity, is deeply desirous that Priscus publicise the act so he can go down in history, something Priscus refuses to do.

Vidal perhaps intended to valorise Julian but his deeper sympathies are with Priscus and Libanius, the tired, aging, upset philosophers who also hate Christianity and yearn for something else, but who, if they believe in anything, really probably believe in books and philosophy. (Though this is Julian himself);

“I seem to have missed the fault of avarice. I have no desire to own anything. No. On second thought, I am greedy about books. I do want to own them. I think I might commit a crime to possess a book.”

Hubris and Julian

The modern process of history was born complaining about Christianity; scholars complaining about stupid and bigoted priests. Probably Gibbon would appreciate Vidals ‘Julian’.

Largely they talk past the priests though. The scholars have no real answer for the strange, silent question of the Roman World; why did people stop believing? Why did the Old Gods fall silent? Why were they no longer enough? Why did people turn, and in such numbers, to such a strange, almost life-denying, cult?

Why could Zeus not survive the end of Rome? Its not like he even made Rome, Zeus was Greek first. Civilisations have fallen before. Why could not even Mithras survive? Perhaps the Empire, in its own long time, made a shadow to long, to deep and too invisible to its makers, for the Gods of the Empire to live on in its invisible dark.

‘Julian’ is not great literature but it is a good story, and as someone living through our own ‘slow fall’, and what feels like an axial point in history, a dying-away of what was, with everyone still in denial, it is a very prescient book.

But Rome is always falling in the Western mind.

‘There was a silence. Then John said, “Do you see no significance in our victory? For we have won. You must admit that.”

I shrugged. “The golden age ended. So will the age of iron, so will all things, including man. But with your new god, the hope of human happiness has ended.”

“Forever?” He taunted me gently.

“Nothing man invents can last forever, including Christ, his most mischievous invention.”

Eagle in the Snow

“Behind me I left my youth, my middle age, my wife and my happiness. I was a general now and had only defeat or victory to look forward to. There was no middle way any longer, and I did not care.”

This is a very doomed book. Childhood passes in a page. Thirty years of service on the frontier in a chapter or two, five years fighting in Italy are skipped. What remains is snow, blood and the frozen Rhine. Wagner would approve.

More than any of the other Romaboo books I read recently (’Memoir of Hadrian’, ‘Count Bellusarius’ and ‘Julian’), ‘Eagle in the Snow’ is a book explicitly about war. Perhaps it shouldn’t surprise me that the law-librarian Wallace Breem seems to take a deeper interest in the details of tactics and defence than the WWI Captain in the Welsh Fusiliers Robert Graves.

It is surprising that this is an existential novel of late middle age, as well as, and on top of, being a dark adventure story, a leap at historical transport and an excellent guidebook on how to defend the Rhine against a mixed confederation of Germanic tribes while being dangerously outnumbered and under-resourced, should you ever need to do that.

Breem may not have been a Captain in the Welsh Fusiliers but he was a military scout on the Indian North West frontier in the years just before that stopped meaning anything and, unlike Rupert Graves, he fucking loved it. His careful descriptions of the intermeshing powers and personalities of inter, and intra-tribal politics; the pride, charisma, Heroism (in the Greek sense), and deep instability of the tribal world, and the mixture of cunning, theatre, threat, deception, bribery and slim honour used by the Imperial Legate to hold this strip of order, depicted in ‘Eagle in the Snow’ may have its roots in the tribes of the North West Frontier.

“and worst of all, you have sacrificed yourself for everything”

The original is “Your worst sin is that you have destroyed and betrayed yourself for nothing.” But what happens if you take the opposite path, and relentlessly, adamandly and heroically refuse to ever betray yourself for anything, ever, yet still come to nothing in the end?

Ridley Scott stole a kind of image of Maximus for ‘Gladiator’, but it was only a superficial sheen; the Apollyonic, heroic aspects. What makes ‘Eagle in the Snow’ not just a good adventure story, but good literature, is all the other parts you wouldn’t put in a Hollywood film because they are a bummer.

The Maximus of ‘Eagle in the Snow’ is probably the Coolest Guy Ever (tm), which makes him incredibly fun to read;

...

“He bared his teeth. “For that some men would call you - butcher.” He smiled with an effort. “But I come in peace. May I see my sister?”

“No.’ but you have my assurance that she is alive and well.”

He said passionately, “You are a man who cares nothing for the feelings of others.”

I said, “So men have told me. I care. But my people are not your people.”

He hesitated. “Will you tell my sister I came?” Will you give her this?” He held out a small silver brooch, such as girls like to wear. Judging from the workmanship it had come originally from the east. “I will do that,” I said.

He nodded. “Thank you. “He turned to go back to the boat. I took a step forward, unthinking. He swing round towards me: his hand flashed into his belt with the speed of a striking cat. With the knife upheld to throw he stopped and stood motionless as I pricked him beneath the chin with the point of my sword.

I said, “I wondered why you came. A man who loves his sister would have come weeks ago. I wondered too, why you gave the brooch into my sword hand. Did you think to catch me with such an old trick? I learned that one from the Picts on the Northern Wall when you were - nothing.” I pricked him and his back arched and his chin went up as he tried to avoid the point. Blood showed on the blade.

He licked his dry lips . He did not speak.

I said, “I could kill you for that. It would be my right. But - butcher as I am - I will not. Your father would not have been so foolish. Go back to your people, boy, and take your shame and your treachery with you. So long as you remain king I have no need to fear. Who would worry about such a people, led by such a king?” I pushed with the blade and he overbalanced and fell back into the water. I bent down and picked up the brooch, lying between my feet. He swam, splashing frantically, towards the boat, and the men hauled him in, all dripping. They were trying hard not to laugh.

“Aquila said, “You should have killed him.”

“Perhaps. This tale will be all round their camp by nightfall. They may do it for me. It will save a lot of trouble.”

....

The absolutely based power fantasy of supreme male competence. The kind of man we would all like secretly to be, or at least to be recognised by. Even better; he is ignored till middle age, simply ‘doing his duty’, until doom and disaster thrust him into the axis of history where he can reveal that yes, he was actually very cool all along.

He is also a man in the long, slow process or losing everything. Born into an abandoned faith, like Vidal’s ‘Julian’ he is a sincere Mithraic, and one of the last. He marches into the future knowing that in his camp of thousands only fifteen or so will follow him into the mysteries, and soon not even that.

Heir to a dying Empire; like Belisarius, one of the Last True Romans. This man who has never even seen Rome, has sacrificed his life to the idea of it. Multiple times he refuses to betray the trust of his superiors, less out of his love for them, but his love for Rome. Several people try talking geopolitical sense to him; why not take his fresh-trained Legion and just settle in, and protect, Britain? He would be self-sufficient, isolated, and its damn certain that no help will be coming from Rome to Britain - the resources will be drained from the province to help sustain some Dynastic drama or repulse some tribal invasion. Well he won’t do that either; Rome is all of Rome and we are Romans and we are not giving any of it up. The slow economic and demographic collapse of the West is in full view; everywhere towns are shrinking, walls crumbling, civilisation slowly falling back. It has been invaded and restored before, but how many times can you keep rebuilding while the foundation crumbles? Worst of all, the aristocrats are cutting their thumbs off to avoid military service. They are doomed if the tribes invade, but still won’t fight. What happens if the ruling caste of a society won’t risk themselves to defend it?

...

“I left the room with their cries of sacrilege echoing about me. I had not expected their co-operation, but their bitter, blind stubbornness and obstinacy in the face of danger made me feel sick. Their indifference and their fatalism had about it a hint of madness. I had met it in Britannia and in Italia - this blind refusal to face facts and to accept the need for change in a time of change. It was not new to me. If the empire were to die it would be because the people in it who held posts of responsibility no longer cared. They could not govern themselves and they had lost the confidence to govern others.”

Same bro, same.

Maximus knows, he must know, that the culture that defines him, is passing away. Other members of the elite respond to this like British voters, he simply compresses himself deeper and deeper into an absolute plutonic core of nuclear Roman virtue. But the end is the same in either case.

Wife dead; one of the few sources of softness in Maximus’ life; “Three months later I was sent on leave and went to Corinium, which I did not know. I went to the officers’ club and I drank, and I hunted a little, for they were much troubled by wolves that Autumn. Then I met a girl with dark hair whose name was Aelia, and I married her. For a wedding gift I gave her some gold ear-drops that had belonged to my mother, and she gave me a signet ring with the likeness of Mercury stamped on it. She was a Christian, though more tolerant than most.”

The poor woman ends up being posted, with Maximus, to the end of the world, (Hadrian’s Wall), an utterly lonely spot. Their relationship must have lasted at least ten years but it passes in pages. She is lonely. The tribes revolt and they are separated. After the tribes are suppressed he finds her again, clearly having suffered sexual assault. She gets better, gets sick and dies. Her ghosts haunts the rest of the story.

First friendship ruined; Maximus has a brother, in spirit if not in flesh. Almost the first action of the book is his arrest and exile of this brother.

...

“One day Fullofades sent for me. He was the new Dux Britanniarum; an Aleman from the banks of the Rhenus.

“A part of the Legion at Deva has tried to mutiny,” he said. You will go to Deva at once with reinforcements and take charge until I have appointed a new commander.”

I looked at him in astonishment.

“The Legate” (Maximus’ Father) “is dead,” he said harshly. “I am sorry.”

...

‘Taking charge’ means selling the mutineers into slavery, apart from the ringleaders, who are made Gladiators, and forced to kill each other in the arena, one by one, until only one remains. This one, who revolted, failed, survived, killed and remained at the end with a wooden sword to mark his freedom, is Julian, Maximus’ friend from youth. He also returns throughout the book as a shadow of the past.

Second friendship mortally wounded; Maximus does develop another best friend, the cavalry commander Quintus, a devotee of the Mithraic mysteries who stays with him throughout Britain and Italy, and faces the snow and doom alongside him.

The bad news is, as revealed by Julian in the last act; Quintus was having an affair with Maximus’ beloved wife.

‘”One half of my life has destroyed the other half.” I said aloud, and Quintus flushed and bit his lip. He was too proud to make excuses, too honest to apologise for the things he had done, about which he could not be sorry.”

...

The depth and extent of the loss, the dark strange echoing sense around Maximus, redoubles and increases his enormous, even staggering, Roman Virtue. He is a man fuelled by duty above all, even when all the referents and living expressions of that duty are dying, falling, fading, gone.

The very extremity of his character makes him something nearly less than human. We find this out gradually throughout the book, and we do have to actively find it out, (this is part of what raises ‘Eagle’ above ‘Julian’). Its easy to see why so many people admire and respect Maximus; his troops try multiple times to raise him to the Purple and he has to trick them and fight them off to stop it happening. Its easy to see why his enemies loathe but also admire him, towards the end of the book, even they, the German tribes he has been fighting, offer to join with him and make him Emperor.

Its also possible to see he might be awful, even despicable. He ‘loses’ his wife during the tribal invasion of Britain. Only much later do we discover that he retreated from a besieged town, leaving her behind. No doubt it was the most militarily effective thing to do, but still, would Quintus have just left her behind, if she had been his?

Maximus is not sadistic, but neither is he merciful. Again, this is politic for the leader of a Legion, but leaves a vague sense of emptiness. He endures the execution of a traitor amongst his own men, not really believing in it, in fact despising the process, but ensuring that it happens, for the good of the Legion. He watches gladiators ‘very properly’ fight to the death, only being horrified when he has to hand the wooden sword to the single survivor and look him in the eye. After a captured Gothic princess tries to assassinate him, he promises the tribes he will crucify her above the Rhine the moment they try to cross. Its impossible for us to decide if he really intends to actually do this; he ends up buying perfume for her and treating her as a kind of non-consensual grand-daughter. In the end he does send her to safety before the invasion begins, but he refuses to tell even his closest officers and friends, right up until the last moment, whether he really will murder this woman in full public view, keeping them, and the girl herself, in an agony of expectation which nearly sends her mad. As the hero of our story, we feel nothing but relief when he finally sets her free, and once he does so, it seems impossible that he would have done anything else.

But he might have. A more sinister, and more accurate picture of Maximus is that he probably would have crucified this woman in full view if it had been useful to him. If it would get him an hour, a day, a minute longer before the inevitable tribal invasion, he might be willing to do anything at all. The implication that ‘Grandfather’ Maximus and ‘Ruthless murderer’ Maximus are actually the same man, and share the same body, is more interesting. Not an ‘evil’ man, in fact extremely honourable, more than most, honest, brave, clever, loyal, even imaginative, perceptive and subtle, not to mention strong-willed. But cold. Colder than he seems, colder than perhaps even he knows, though he starts to realise on the Rhine.

It is the coldness of Rome, and this sad, echoing, existential mercilessness, mixed with high virtue and great culture, makes this more a pair, in spirit, with ‘Memoirs of Hadrian’, a book about a great and virtuous man in the grip of a slow spiritual crisis he cannot fully see or understand. Something of Flauberts ‘immutable ebony’ - the spiritual crisis that leads to Christianity.

Conversely, ‘Duke Bellusarius’ is another militarily expert and virtuous general who is continually betrayed and dropped into problems, but, despite all his incredible events, he is a less interesting character than either Hadrian or Maximus, perhaps because he is spiritually certain of what he is doing and never changes in that. The material, and Mithraic, pairing, is with Vidal’s ‘Julian’. Both Maximus and Julian are sincere Mithraics in a time of Christian domination, both are, oddly engaged in fighting Germanic tribes on the Rhine, sometimes in exactly the same positions, (Maximus visits and defends several places noted by Julian in his own book nearly 50 years earlier in described time.) In a way they are doing almost exactly the same thing, and facing nearly the same challenges, material and spiritual, separated by fifty years. The two books couldn’t be more different in spirit and character and, at least so far, the hidden cleverness, cool inference, focus on a single individual and general taciturn subtlety of ‘Eagle in the Snow’ makes it a better, and deeper book, which actually makes you feel the moral coldness of the ancient world, this deep incohate worry which is really what ‘Hadrian’, ‘Eagle’ and ‘Julian’ are all about; ‘our gods have abandoned us’. Things no longer work as they did, or as they should, yet to submit to ignorant, superstitious and bigoted Christianity is either inconceivable, or impossible.

We built it, we cherished it and we renewed ourselves before the god in whom we believed. I stood there beneath the blue vaulted ceiling, while the light slanted like a lance through the open windows onto the upturned eyes, and the knife moved, and the Bull died. In that perfect moment when everything was clear I could see the way and the pattern and the world of no shadows; and I knew what it was like to be a child in the womb as I knew what it would be like at the moment when I died. I could feel the very skin that covered me age and wrinkle and see the nails grow upon my fingers. I knew then, without doubt or hesitation, that the things that mattered would come right for those of us who had the courage to burn ourselves in the sun.

--------------------

This book has some notable slop and a semi-regular patterning of some supremely boring ideas, which gradually frets like cloud to reveal increasingly good work in exploration, before dawning blackly into seventy pages (nearly half the book) of geographic information about the Underdark of the Forgotten Realms and in particular, of the period right in the middle of R.A. Salvatore’s ‘War of the Spider Queen’ novel series.

Prestige Classes, ‘Regions, Feats

These things are like dirty nasty crack to me, or cheap sweets I can’t help eating more of. With my heart and my soul they disgust me, yet like a low enslaved desire, some abandoned part of me yearns for them; what exactly would it be like to be a ‘Cavelord’ (a kind of Underdark ranger), and exactly how does that differ from a ‘Prime Underdark Guide’ (someone who helps others range under the dark). Perhaps these crystalline imagined alter-selves occupy something like the fragmentary dreams of other ordinary lives which sleet through our minds in quiet moments of the vaguest ennui; “What would my life be like if had Prestige Classed up to ‘Arachnomancer’? Sure there’s a lot of stuff I wouldn’t be able to do, but think of the spiders. At least then I would know who I was = an Arachnomancer.” O to be the guy who has a ‘thing’, and for everyone to know it.

A standout for its pleasurable ridiculousness is the ‘Illithid Body Tamer’ - for those who, not only want to play a brain-eating psychic octopus from a hyper-villainous made-for-crime cephalopod race, but want to play the buff , hand to hand focused version of that race.

These strong squid come with a range of whirling tentacle attacks; (Tentacle of Fate, Reaching Tentacle, Whirlwind Tentacle and Tentacle of Destiny) spiked tentacle attachments and a promise not to use their innate, deadly, and very easy murderous psychic powers. A promise which they will break if they feel like it;

“An illithid body tame is not slavishly devoted to its code. If using plane shift or mind blast is clearly in its best interest, then it does so, preferring to lose access to the benefits of abstinence than lose its life.”

This surely takes the already hypertrophied art of Prestige Classing close to the limits of its own absurdity. But perhaps its that very insane hyper-specifity that helps to cast the strange spell such thing have over a living game. The others in this book are more boring and lack the ‘tang’ of 3.5 hyper-absurdity. (The vision of a 3.5 influenced game where _only_ the most deranged Prestige Classes are allowed; Cancer Mage, Candle Caster, Halfling Outrider and Fochlucan Lyrist anyone?)

Though some still mourn the loss; “Multiclassing, at its best, is a biography expressed through mechanics.”

Nothing in the ‘Races’ section is as good as these images of them;

which are amongst the best art in the book.

You are not (at least here), actually allowed to be a ‘Derro’, which is disappointing for the book that introduced the Mind-Flayer Body-Tamer. Perhaps even amidst these often somewhat-villainous races, they were simply too Chaotic Evil.

‘Feats’ are as you would imagine them, apart from a few sparks of fun; ‘Elfhunter’ only available to Drow? Very sad. ‘Graft Illithid Flesh’ lets you play Squid Frankenstein, which has at least one very boutique use we will discover later on.

Magic and Spells

Spends an alarming amount of time describing the for-this-book ‘Node Magic’, a system of magic and advantage built around dicking around with ‘Earth Nodes’. This is the kind of deeply embedded rules system that, once you know someone is planning on interacting with it, you have to integrate it into your whole campaign, placing various NODES of varying level here and there; and what NODES you place where will have a big effect on play.

If anyone has ever used this, leave a comment or a link. Its hard for me to believe anyone could be as into something called ‘Node Magic’ as is required to actually simulate and use it for a campaign.

I did find a handful of spells I enjoyed, all of which do what they say on the tin; Amorphous Form, Contagious Fog, Drown, Rushing Waters, Viscid Glob and my favourite; Stone Sphere, which creates a five-foot diameter sphere of polished stone which moves under your control at a speed of 30ft. The Stone has Armour Class 5 and 500 hit points. One round per level and its a Level 5 spell. After casting, directing its movement requires a move action, so you can still presumably cast more bullshit so long as you stay in place, rolling your bid deadly marble about. A wonderful alternative to ‘Fireball’.

Equipment and Magic Items

Things improve a little more with ‘Equipment and Magic Items’, almost all of these are very or slightly impractical outside of a handful of uses, but isn’t that the pleasure of a tool? And of having this particular tool? Perhaps this granular imagining is the true spirit of 3.5.

It also has a pleasing image.

Various odd or conditionally useful weapons, some bizzarro additions to armour. ‘Blackwater’ which cripples water breathing creatures in a certain volume of water, (there have been occasions where I wished I had some), the Caveharp, (less interesting than it sounds), the blessedly-specific ‘Darkvision Invisible Paint’, wonderful SHRIEK PASTE, a ‘Spelunkers Kit’ which should be standard issue for all characters anyway.

Then a range of poisons and chemicals, including ‘Virile Madness’, which is PCP, and another curious obsession of this book; templates. Here templates for magical weapons made of this thing and that, including ‘Morphing’ weapons, which I feel like would be much more insanely useful irl than in game, where the physical/kinetic problems such things are made to solve are rarely imagined with the depth, fluency and regularity to make their use worthwhile.

Armours of ‘halfweight’, ‘Drowcraft’, ‘Illithidwrought’ and ‘Xorn’. Cortical mucusy armour that blanks your mind to foes, psychic armour and Drow Death armour that makes you invisible, gives you ‘disguise’ and ‘spider climb’, for if you want to fantasise about being the coolest most cracked ultra-high-fantasy protagonist EVAR - these are dreams and aspirations I think, more than tools, and its curious how much ultra-mega-high-fantasy begins to intersect with post-singularity science-fiction tropes. We will see this later in city design.

Rings, of which the most fun is ‘Antivenom’ (60,000gp), and just below it ‘Antivenom, Frugal’ (10,000gp), just for the image of a world that contrast creates. RODS always feel under-noetic, and Staffs (no room underground surely?). A Figurine of Wonderous Power that transforms into a giant spider you can ride around on, and I have always wanted to own one of these in D&D, the less romantic and perhaps more old-school ‘Figurines of Illusory Escort’ which cast an illusion of guards around you when you sleep. Some very boring Neutral-Themed items. Last; a magic tome so powerful its like carrying around a semi-divine limited-use A.I. (you must speak to it in a specific dead language or it eats your soul and makes you one of its pages), and the Illithid Grafts, finally, but they are mainly just sticking tentacles on things, apart from ‘Humanoid Skin’ which involves sealing up something (or someone, presumably horrific), inside;

“If the humanoid skin hides monstrous features below its surface (such as extra arms, tentacles or antennae), using those features requires thrusting them through the skins surface as a standard action. This act showers all nearby cretures with blood and deals 1d4 damage to the graft recipient.”

Monsters are not a high point, there are rules for crossing things with Illithid (add tentacles), crossing them with spiders (add legs), crossing them with Chameleons, filling them with ‘Faerzress’, rules to mineralise anything; none make anything more interesting, producing largely globs. Multiple creatures that ‘swim through earth’ for various reasons and in various ways. A minotaur with demon blood? The ‘Lith’ has a good silhouette;

The ‘Maur’ as a hunched underground giant has a pleasing mechanic in which, if it can find room, it laboriously and horrifically stands full upright, “an agonizing, joint-popping experience for the Maur, though it relishes the change” and takes on a little of the noble potency of its forebears. The ‘Ineffable Horror’ which I can only assume got its name as an Underdark joke, since it is the most ‘effable’ thing ever.

The only really very-good monster is still only half-good and that is the ‘Annihilator’, a kind of Abberant solo Rust Monster with extra tentacles which can disintegrate anything. “The annihilator seems to derive sustenance and pleasure from destroying things, especially living things.” It has no ecology, background, sanity or reason for being, and likely would not benefit from them, it just likes Annihilating things and that is all it wants to do. A twist in the tapestry of the world and a gleaming contextless ambulatory disaster. Not bad.

Exploring the Underdark

Things take an uptick here and its surprising, or unsurprising, how parallel to my own thought much of this is. We begin with a tour of underground features; Abysses, Caves, Dungeons, Gorges, Lakes, Rifts, Rivers, Seas, Shafts, Tunnels, Vaults and Volcanoes, which in this last section, does nothing to elucidate the Magma/Lava differentiation; what is lava encountered underground, but magma? What is Magma encountered in an open cave, but lava? Precisely when does water count as having left the tap?

From there into rocks and rock formations, including the classic trifecta of Sedimentary, Igneous and Metamorphic, to which we add MAGIMORPHIC rock formations - much could be done with the consequences of alternative geology and tectonics in a fantasy world, one far older than ours, and thus with a different arrangement of stone, or with magical warfare etc happening on the regular, with semi-regular portals to the Plane of this and that, D&D type Gods popping down to fundamentally alter reality for a certain place or time, and of the more Abrahamic, Tolkien-level God fundamentally changing the substance, history and nature of reality if, for instance, you sail too far West. (Discovering America is a sin.)

Then the Environment, climate, ecologies, plants and fungi, animal life. In almost every version of the Underdark the environment is still seperate from the solar cycle, as with ours, but is much higher in energy than our own cave systems. The answer is magic. The conception of the Underdark being ‘magically compressed’ appears in many tomes. This book imagines trees which feed on magic the way others do on sunlight. I can’t help but imagine what the leaf and branch shapes would be? Would the leaves have subtle dimensionally warped Escher shapes? The branches bend in directions you can’t go?

My own conception for this hyper-compression is that of the unification, compression and composting of multiple causal paths, the deeper in you go.

So for instance, if you go a mile down, civilisation is about 5,000 years old and modern humanity has only expanded since the last glacial maximum roughly 10,000 years ago.

But if you go two or three miles down, then there may have been 10,000 years of civilisation, perhaps even mutually-contradicting civilisational paths, either combined from alternate worlds or perhaps those paths wiped from ontology by divine hands, cannot be wiped down here, so if the world is ‘re-set’, this deepest layer of it cannot be re-set, and retains all the old programming and tombs and remnants of old dreams and old ideas, things which could never have happened, but did, but which are only remembered here.

Then if you go down four to six miles, you walk amongst the compressed relics of 20,000 years of civilisation, or 5,000 years X four, each semi-sperate yet interacting, interlaced and overlapping. This combined weight of time, experience and record, more than the surface could bear, is what creates the overwhelming magical compression of the Underworld. There is more down here than could be here, and more and more the deeper you go. Till if you go deep enough, perhaps the depths of all possible worlds combine into one vast realm of night.

That, at least, is my conception. We get ‘Underdark Hazards’, a limited but ok climbing and spelunking section, a bit on getting lost and then a long section on Encounter tables. I will be advising people make their own for Veins of the Earth

Finally for this ‘exploration’ section, we get into the once-again parallel conceptions of a somewhat ‘mythic’ underworld and the differences between this and the real-life underworld that inspired it.

A pseudo-natural aspect of the Forgotten Realms Underdark is that it is not contiguous, that is; it comes in patches and bounds, like islands, and its hard, sometimes impossible, to get from zone to zone. There are big areas of interconnection, but these are seperate to each other. Interesting and curious.

A classic situation for the ‘semi-mythic underworld’ is that its deeper than it should be, and the magma, water, caves and tectonics are much more spread out and interwoven than they ever should be. You can imagine our world like a densely layered cake, or lasagne, with interesting, but limited, layers of interaction. You have limestone caves, which were usually below, or on, the water table, but are now above it, then you have the water table, and its hard to explore beneath that underground, and then you have massively increasing pressure and heat, and then molten rock. Head to tail there is not that much actual depth to work with.

In the Forgotten Realms, and in VotE, there is way more depth and things are more spread out and intermingled, even at the cost of perhaps making less sense. Can you have a huge cavern beneath an ocean, with another (navigable) ocean in it? In our world, no, but in Fantasy, yes. Can you have navigable caves above, around, even below a magma flow? Not really, but in Fantasy, yes.

Geography - Faerun’s Underdark

A really nice piece of cartography and a slightly-frustratingly organised alphabetical section finish off the book, and much of it is this section. We are moving slightly more into a ‘Hasbro’s Invisible Cities’ vibe here; a list you can read like fiction, purely for the enjoyment of it. And its here that the propensity of the Forbidden Realms to build upon some very normative base concepts, but to keep building on them, to keep iterating and developing, and to bury the results of those developments deep in hidden corners of its world, helps it reach ramparts of innovative high fantasy you probably weren’t expecting going on. A lot of this is normative, some more interesting than you thought, and bits of it are very good.

Araaumycos - an entire kingdom-sized section of the Underdark is one fungal organism. It seems to be maybe possibly sentient, some of the time, and broadly neutral, or at least not expansionist. “On rare occasions enormous patches of Araumycos die, revealing ancient civilisations ripe for plunder beneath.” Even better, there is another, smaller, but aberrant and expansionist Fungal kingdom/entity/person.

Blingdenstone - A collapsed Deep Gnome city, but one of the ‘factions’ currently occupying it is ‘Ogremoch’s Bane’ a sentient cloud of magic dust. Its motivations are unclear but “In the back of the city, dozens of planar creatures of earth stand inert as the cloud swirls around them, whispering promises of victory and glory in Terran. Earth Elementals, mephits, Xorns, thoqquas, end even stranger creatures wait, still as statues.”

Cairnheim, Demense of the Dodkong - a lava tube village of giants ruled by a crafty 1,500 year old Stone Giant Liche with a magical crown, ruthless, but being very old, he still clings to an ancient Giant custom of hospitality, (limited, three days of safety). Of course you need historical knowledge to even guess this custom still exists and he’s not going to tell you.

Chaulssin; a ruined city, half within the plane of shadow, on a precipice above an abyss, now occupied by a House of Assassins. An Illithid city ruled by a council of Vampire Illithids who took over when their Elder Brain died - but they are all going slightly crazy from absorbing the thoughts and memories of so many other Illithids. Also home to the twisted Illithid philosopher Nurr’Korzahg who, after a moment of clarity, has started developing the notion that consistently trying to subvert and dominate all other forms of life might actually be not a great long-term strategy (several cultures and locations in this Map are made up of Illithid-hating ex-slaves, and they have at least two ‘Slave Races’ (Gythanki and Duergar) who ended up escaping and turning into absolute 100% Illithid HATERS, could our own policy of literally making enemies be at fault here?)

Deep Imaskar is a really neat addition to the legendarium; an ancient city of Wizards which hid beneath the earth after a major slave revolt. Now a self-sustaining pocket-kingdom with buildings growing from its gravatically-warped walls.

Imaskar is so secret that the glowing ‘sky’ of its cavern is a gigantic seal made specifically to keep it hidden, a seal so complex that studying and repairing it is equivalent to stargazing, a seal that affects reality so much that, wherever anyone is outside Imaskar, if they imagine Imaskar itself, the seal subtly and invisibly tugs at their thoughts, suggesting to them that the city is long-gone, if it was ever real, nothing but a rumour or fantasy. Imaskar is so secret that if people are chosen to leave, to complete some mission or for other reasons, they have the very memory of Imaskar erased from their minds, and are dropped in some random place far from the city; a true Wolfian hero, (or an RPG hero), who literally does not know where they are from, has a general sense that they have a mission, and at some point, will face a deeply buried command to return... somewhere, somehow. An interesting literary experiment.

Drik Hargunen; a city overwritten on every surface with the testament of a Duergar god, with complex runes of warding and subtle interlaced command phrases for the cities self-defence system interwoven in the ever-flowing words. To live here you must know how to read, know what to read and know deeply what not to read, which is why the Duergar allow no sighted slaves into the city-proper, instead they bring in blind Grimlocks, their hands tied to the handles of carts, so they can’t touch anything they shouldn’t.

Dupapen; a village of Aboleth slaves who, in the mental absence of their masters, have set up a thriving commercial concern. Some time ago the Aboleths ate a bunch of Gityanki and absorbed their minds and memories of intra-planar life. These memories are so vivid and intense that the Aboleths have been sitting around, blissed out and vibing for a decade. They tried breeding new Aboleths to manage the slaves but since each new Aboleth is born with the perfect memories of its parent, they had the same problem.

A near-extraplanar city made up of portals and spherical spaces in solid stone. If you can’t naturally swim through stone, don’t bother turning up.

Llurth Drier; Drow but poor and covered in mud.

Looblishar; a Kua Toa settlement overtaken by devotees of the Goddess of Darkness. Utterly lightless, only those with perfect Darkvision need even try to enter, though small this is the Axial point for a range of portals which reach to oceanic and above ground exit points all over the world. Creepy cultists of the Dark Goddess use Looblishar to move things and people and to engage their no-doubt whacky schemes. The kind of place you drop a patriot missile on as soon as you find out where it is.

Ooltul; a Beholder city forced into a surprising level of cosmopolitan toleration by an infestation of planar parasites who control the head Beholders; “Considering that Ooltrul is a city of evil geniuses dominated by monstrously unhuman aberrations, it is reasonably welcoming of outsiders.”

Oryndoll; an Illithid city dominated by a cult who’s modus-operandi is not only to acquire knowledge, but to specifically acquire knowledge that can then be removed from all other records or minds world-wide, so that this thing once known, now only they may know.

Reeshov; a Grimlock fortress town of former Illithid slaves who surround their settlement with complex traps, free slaves but trust no-one (the Illithids consistently probe their defences with mind-altered thralls and they know this).

Rringlor Noroth; “a city in only the most liberal sense of the word”, a city of Cloakers built into a gigantic bridge, part sculpted from shadow, crossing an immeasurable abyss. “The cloakers of Rringlor Nortoth spend much of their time continuously moaning and flying in great swooping orbits around a bridge of shadowstone”

“The entrance is a series of cracks and flat passages no more than 4 inches wide within the Shadowspan. Cloakers peel away from the circling mass at random intervals and wedge their bodies into the cracks to crawl into the city.”

“Sometimes, cloakers just lie on the ceiling and stare at the floor for hours;” - same.

One human sage ‘inhabits’ this ‘city’; “Saibh is not insane, but he is immersed so deeply into the cloaker mindset that he cannot easily return and carry on coherent conversations in Common...”

Undrek’Thoz; a Drow mega-city, a bunch of very different Drow cities connected by hidden portals and unified by a general government, though outsiders won’t necessarily know about the portals. The gates between different sections of the mega-city are set to allow no metal to pass through, (to limit the craze for assassinations), this has lead to a sophisticated arms-race in pets and poisons. Economically, the city is unified by vellum scrip. In a high fantasy setting, things like this portal-linked mega-city would be way more common; such settings, if allowed to run, would inevitably develop into something a little like high-energy science fiction.

Final Analysis; Adventure Locations, Infinity Engine, Nostalgic Emotions

A last section on ‘Dungeons’ lets the book down again; single entry, mono-path micro-maps with complex ‘trick’ enemies and substantial treasure. Nothing really like ‘dungeons’ and the section is not large, but it does have an entry for ‘Citadel of the Fiendish Slayer’ which is a great title if nothing else.

Of the differences I have with ‘Underdark’ at least some can be put down to preference in design. I am not of the Kind whom suffers for the Prestige Class, or who enjoys the ‘build’, let alone picking an absurdly specific Prestige Class and playing specifically towards that for god knows how many sessions. A ‘biography expressed through mechanics’ has no interest for me, I am not amongst the elect, yet, I cannot despise them. We are cousins if not kin and I have enough of the hyper-specificity autism tingle to refuse a wholesale rejection. Neither will I live in, or near their, ghetto of stats.

Of the monster section; it is simply bad. Of Underdark exploration and transit; parallel, and respectable.

The best part of the book is where it enters into the beautiful twilight dream of the Forgotten Realms, a place so normative in fantasy that it gets interesting again, there are lots of odd ideas buried here and there in this ‘eventide of gems’ (which I can never believe to be ‘lightless’, the conception of a true devouring dark and of adventuring for weeks within a fragile bubble of light is something this Underdark book, and perhaps every book of this type, fails at), and I see this dream, strangely, through the medium of the Infinity Engine and isometric RPGs like Baldurs Gate and Planescape: Torment.

Perhaps this is because such games were my only actual active interaction with 3.5 and its culture. Perhaps the physical design language of this engine seeped through into the worldbuilding for the entire setting. Wouldn’t be the first time there was conceptual counterflow. Deep Imaskar in particular seems set up for an ‘amnesiac protagonist’ RPG. The careful and quite charming visual design, including pseudo-crumpled ‘parchment’ edges, a boutique, or at least, rare, internal title font, and a handful of other things, speak of the fading edge of correct and comfortable warm and basking 1990’s page design. Summer.

Perhaps it is the sad, strange, isolated summer vibe I get from all these things and which seems to unify them. Of dreams engaged in darkened rooms while concrete bakes outside. Of a slight interior sadness and loneliness mixed with the deep possession of a fantastic land.

‘Stone Sphere’ is great.

(There is a side bar of ‘graffiti left around a portal’ so cringe it nearly made me want to kill myself.)

How Far Can I Get?

O’Toole impelled me to the work. I made the mistake of watching his performance as Henry II in ‘The Lion in Winter’, a hugely-chewy knockabout which includes the whole, damned Angevin family, from Katherin Hepburn as Eleanor of Aquitaine to Nigel (King Arthur) Terry as poor, sad John the cartoon lion.

After becoming something of an Henry-Enjoyer, what can one do but watch ‘Beckett’, in which Peter O’Toole also plays Henry II, a younger version, this time dealing with the extremely frustrating Richard Burton as the Turbulent Priest? I can think of nothing like it; the same man, playing the same historical figure at different points in that figures life, but in two unconnected productions, with quite unconnected themes. ‘Lion’ is a rip-roaring piece of dashing Broooadway(!) entertainment, full of spit and shoe-shine, while ‘Beckett’ is a nominally-brooding play about Catholicism and collaboration with tyrannical power by an anguished post-war Frenchman.

Once you have watched a reasonable chunk of British history via the raw charisma ride of Peter O’Toole, the temptation begins to set in; how far could I get?

I fudged things a little and included one Young-Adult history (A Proud Taste for Scarlett and Miniver), and one actual, (though popular), history (‘The Greatest Knight’ by Thomas Asbridge), then I can take us all the way from The Anarchy to the reign of Henry III.

What follows is a review of the Angevins, via the media of;

Cadfael; The Virgin in the Snow (TV Drama). Derek Jacobi’s detective monk deals with The Anarchy. Set in 1139, Henry II (Peter O’Toole) is about 6 years old during the events of this episode (though he does not appear).

Beckett, 1964. Young Peter O’Toole (Henry II), deals with an alarmingly metastasizing Moral Principal on the part of his best friend turned Archbishop, Samuel Beckett (Richard Burton). Set broadly from 1154 to 1170, this deals with the early years of Henry’s reign.

A Proud Taste for Scarlett and Miniver, (1973), a YA History book by E.L. Koningsburg tells the story of the life of Eleanor of Aquitaine. As she hangs out in heaven, waiting for Henry to be released from purgatory, Eleanor hears tales of her life from Abbott Suger, the Empress Maude and William Marshall, capping these off with her own.

The Lion in Winter, 1968, (Film). An older Henry II (still Peter O’Toole), brings together as many of his family as he can for Christmas, intrigue and snappy dialogue written by a New York Jew. Timothy Dalton plays the cunning Dolphin, who will return to bargle dumb John in Shakespeare and reality.

Various Robin Hoods. I didn’t fully re-watch any of these but the ‘Robin Hood’ mythos takes place during the Reign of bad Prince John. The Ridley Scott version has excellent scenes with Richard the Lionheart, John, Eleanor and William Marshall. The Disney cartoon has some bearing on the memetic power of John.

The Life and Death of King John by William Shakespeare. Written probably mid 1590’s. A genuinely not good Shakespeare play with a lot of fascinating elements. Full of mad Tudor stuff and a fun look at the Doom of John and his re-canonisation in fiction as the archetypal ‘Weak, Evil King’ in anglo and post-anglo mythology.

The Greatest Knight, The remarkable life of William Marshall, the power behind five English Thrones, by Thomas Asbridge. Asbridge re-tells the story of Marshall from his own biography; ‘L’Histoire de Guillaume le Marechal, comte de Striguil et de Pembroke’, and provides commentary on Marshalls life and times, filling in or highlighting elements where perhaps the Biography does not quite cover everything.

Cadfael; The Virgin in the Ice

I have memories of Cadfael growing up and would happily have watched the whole series all over again, but, time is a factor. Many reviews claim ‘The Virgin in the Ice’ is amongst the best so I watched it via mysterious Youtube means.

For anyone unfamiliar with the period; less than sixty years after William the Conqueror takes the English throne for his Anglo-Norman aristocracy, almost the entire youth of the Norman nobility get on one really nice white ship in Calais harbour and, utterly drunk, encourage the captain to go really fast in the mist. The ship crashes and capsizes, everyone dies except a butcher from Rouen. This wipes out the immediate heirs to the throne. Fifteen years later King Henry I dies from eating ‘a surfeit of lampreys’. With no clear heir, England is divided between the opportunistic and semi-competent ‘King’ Stephen and the Empress Maud (mother of Peter O’Toole).

(I remain convinced that actual, pure chaos plays a substantial role in human history, one invisible to analysis due to a kind of cognitive shadow; in order to understand we must organise, trace systematise, link in sequence, and that the very act of doing so hides the interior nature of chaos from the mind which seeks it. To seek for chaos in the record of history is like trying to find mice in your library by re-arranging your books about mice. Still, the White Ship and, to a lesser extent, the lampreys, do seem like Chaos wildly waving her flag for all to see. Everything we are about to experience, the dooms and dramas, all comes from those lampreys and that rock outside Calais.)

It is an English Civil (Dynastic) War! Neither side can win so they cut up the country and chaos reigns. Into this comes Derek Jacobi’s Cadfael; the mystery-solving monk, a pure soul sliding through the chaos on a trail of classical reasoning and Christian mercy.

Young Patrick huddled by the television; here is Derek Jacobi, maybe the kindest, nicest most reasonable monk ever. Each episode something terrible has happened and the there is an OBVIOUS FUCKING SUSPECT, but wait says Derek Jacobi, what would Jesus do? And maybe Plato? And have you heard about how bloodstains work? This certain fungus only grows on splotchy trees and there were no splotchy trees where the OBVIOUS KILLER was found rating madly about killing. Maybe this mad ranter with bloodstained hands didn’t do it.

Cadfael, says Terrence Hardiman (Prior Radulfus, though oddly for a young Patrick, he also played The Demon Headmaster in the BBC kids show of the same name), Cadfael you are out of whatever line monks are meant to be in of, however, even though I seem a bit evil, I trust you, I can give you until [arbitrary medieval time limit] but after that the OBVIOUS RANTING BLOODSTAINED SUSPECT will be horribly bargled and/or handed over to King Stephen, Cadfael you are on your own with this one! (again).

Thus with ‘The Virgin in the Ice’; a spooky winter full of Hungarian Snow and special effects. Throw in the body of a girl, a loopy monk who keeps saying things like ‘O God forgive me I DID SOMETHING’, a mysterious foreign knight, strange possibly evil Templars roaming the land and a lot of mixed motivations. Can Cadfael use facts and logic (and being nice and reasonable) to solve the case? Yes. Also some of his First Crusade backstory is filled in.

For me this was a very rich and sentimental piece of 90s television. As regards our history of the Angevins, this is when many of them are born; Eleanor and Henry were born just before the Anarchy, William Marshall was born during the civil war and enters history being placed into a catapult by King Stephen, ready to be hurled at castle walls, occupied by his (Williams) father. The Empress Maude is defined largely by the Anarchy, and though she cannot win it, she survives, and ‘her son shall be king’; Henry II, now played by Peter O’Toole so you know he must be a pretty cool guy. Maude will show up in the background of our later fictions. (Henry was known through much of his life as ‘Henry FitzEmpress’). The Anarchy is the darkness we are escaping when our story starts.

Beckett; 1964

A film about colonialism, religion, racial divides, collaboration and principal. Under its 50’s style slightly oat-fed granola heritage movie sheen, this has some meat on its bones.

Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised, written by anguished and intelligent Frenchman Jean Anouilh, first performed in 1959 and clearly drawing deeply on Anouilh’s memories of living under Vichy, ‘Beckett’ exists before the ‘high revolutionary’ moment of the late 60’s but in its miniver disguise it has a lot of that proto-revolutionary energy.

Anouilh’s vision of 1160’s England is of a brutal and explicit race line; Norman vs Saxon, and the film goes very hard, very quickly, in highlighting the immediacy and intensity of sexual exploitation and domination this involves.

The film is meant to be about Richard Burtons ‘Beckett’, a charming, subtle, brilliant courtier and best friend to Peter O’Tooles Henry I who, once made Archbishop of Canterbury, rapidly grows a conscience (and a degree of racial consciousness), and starts actually doing the job that Henry put him there explicitly not to do.

Peter O’Toole is so fucking cool and Henry is so well written in this film that it maybe becomes more of a two-hander than it was meant to be, but who can complain? Its Richard Burton and Peter O’Toole hanging out together, feuding and being lads.

This is a pro-Catholic movie, which is an interesting comparison with Shakespeare’s ‘King John’ in which the Catholic Church is only slightly worse than child murder, and it’s a relatively dark, sleazy, nasty, weak, lonely and decadent look at O’Tooles Henry II. Burton is good, holds the screen, even somewhat slightly persuades us he is at least not totally out of place as a young roisterer, but O’Toole is incredible in this role in particular - as a really genuinely terrible man he draws us along and even makes us sympathise with this lonely, ruthless, funny, anguished King.

The movie has great PROCESSIONS. I do love a procession, Medieval, Roman, Renaissance, I love them all, and we get at least two, well one, and an excommunication which is pretty great. It also has a young Sir John Gielgud as Louis VII, who I think gets cucked out of his wife Eleanor by Peter O’Toole before this movie even starts. I am glad to see in this film he does not get wet at all, (after seeing him, for some reason, perpetually bathing in ‘Prospero’s Books’ and ‘Caligula’) does Gielgud even age? I suppose as Whiskey ages.

This is a film from the 50s’ really, if the direction had been even a little more 20th century radical, or even early 20th century SUMPTIOUS and TECHNCOLOUR, then I think this would end up a very highly-rated film.

A Proud Taste for Scarlet and Miniver

By E.L. Konigsburg

Eleanor of Aquitaine! Later she will become Pamela Brown in Beckett Katherine Hepburn in Lion in Winter an briefly Eileen Atkins in Ridley Scott’s Robin Hood, but here in this young adult history, she is only herself.

Eleanor’s history reads like the Mary Sue of some Medieval fan-fic. She can’t keep getting away with it! Beautiful, wilful, highly intelligent. Heir to a huge chunk of Southern France. She marries Louis VII of France, goes with him on Crusade, possibly cucks him with her uncle. Makes at least one terrible military decision, (she lead the Crusade march from the front, with her gang of female ‘Amazons’). Totally fails to get along with her husband. Runs into a young Henry I (Peter O’Toole). Then, somehow, and I don’t know enough about medieval culture to understand how she finagles it, but judging by the absolutely terrible time all other women seem to have, she must have been cunning as a rat, she divorces Louis VII, runs off with Peter O’Toole, marries him, has I think five male heirs, betrays Henry multiple times, gets imprisoned, released, sadly survives all her children apart from the family idiot, and dies in the middle of the destruction of the Empire she helped to create.

This Empire;

This huge, ridiculous sweep of bargled-together lands and inheritances. Henry brings England, and the Normans retain their lands in Normandy. He also subdues Wales and parts of Ireland. Eleanor brings the Aquitaine. This mega-kingdom bigger than either England or France, is what people are fighting for, are dreaming of. The spell of this Empire hangs like a dream over the minds of generations of Anglo-Norman nobility up perhaps even into the reigns of the Tudors; ‘what if?’, ‘maybe..’, ‘it could have, it should have been mine, been ours..’

A dream to some, a nightmare to others. Angevin-maxxing reduces the Kings of France into an almost symbolic minority role within their own country. It is a threat, a mockery of the crown of France for as long as it exists. And, as a super-powerful trans-nation, it is not exactly popular with other smaller European nations. And it is separated by the Channel, the Channel that Henry I crosses each time, his fist raised to God, as if he saluted an equal Lord – and remember the White Ship, you can never be sure of La Manche.

Having built this mega-structure, two of the smartest coolest people alive have massive fights over maintaining it, and in the end their stupidest and most villainous son is the only one not to die of dysentery or war. The Angevin lands are lost. But what if…

Scarlett and Miniver is a much more warm and personal book than all of this Empire-Building. Everyone is hanging out in heaven after the events are done. They have had time to reflect and calm down. They also lean down over clouds to watch the projections of outdoor cinemas to catch the news. I hope observing World Wars One and Two wasn’t too stressful.

It is interesting to hear from Abott Suger, a rare look at a medieval churchman obsessed with aesthetics and gems who is not evil and scheming. Instead he invents the Gothic Cathedral as a gallery for European Gloom. I recall Umberto Eco dealt with a similar gem-enthusiast monk in ‘The Name of the Rose’, but that man came over as nasty and mendacious. Our post-reformation minds literally cannot comprehend adorning the Glory of God with a tonne of precious gems.

We also have stories from the Empress Maude/Matilda, and William Marshall; “during my service to the royal family, I had to switch sides to stay on the same side – the side of truth and justice.” CHAD.

An extremely sweet book. Good for Eleanormaxxing, which it’s hard not to do after watching ‘Beckett’ and ‘The Lion in Winter’ in succession. This is historical fanfic really, for when you get so used to a popular long-running character that you just don’t want to see them leave, so you go and write a YA history fantasy book about more of Eleanor’s adventures. I am not complaining, I also wanted more of Eleanors’ adventures, and for her to reconcile with Henry. Who wouldn’t? I wonder what Henry II got up to in not-heaven? Luckily he doesn’t seem too bothered by it.

The personalities of this book fit exactly those of the characters in ‘The Lion in Winter’, to the extent that if feels as if they were written alongside each other.

The illustrations are lovely and I am very happy that E.L. Konigsburg did them herself. I wonder if there are colour versions anywhere?

The Lion in Winter, 1968

(I already reviewed this once.)

It is the winter of 1183. Peter O’Toole, by power of his charisma, the depth of his cunning and the will of (presumably) God is Lord of the Angevin Empire. His wife Eleanor is currently in prison for betraying him. I think by this point multiple of his Sons have betrayed him multiple times. The only one he likes is John.

Peter O’Toole (Henry II), calls together his whole family and the Dolphin of France to hang out together over Christmas. Everyone bring your plots, schemes and resentments! Knives will be provided.

A labyrinthine brutal knotwork maze of intense and corrupted family interrelations where every personal conversation is a political conversation and where every political conversation is a conversation about love, desire, vindication or retribution. The savage angles of the human heart compressed by power.

The dialogue is dense. Ridiculous, sometimes overworked, word-play where double, triple, and quadruple meanings breed and fight amongst each other. It is a counterplay of words so neat you can barely force a thought between them and such a monumental masonry of PERFORMANCES (everyone performs in caps), that to look on them, one is standing always in the shade, making it hard to see the whole thing. Its tremendous fun and a bit overwhelming.

In spirit this has much more in common with ‘Scarlett and Miniver’ and ‘The Virgin in the Ice’, than with something like ‘Beckett’ or ‘King John’; ‘Lion’ is only set in History, it’s really about the people and concerned primarily with them. I don’t think this story has some grand historic point to make, it nearly doesn’t have politics.

Pauline Kael didn’t like it. It is very play-like, self-consciously clever and quite a bit cheesy. (One slightly out-of-world comedic line in the middle doesn’t work well, and ferrets the foundations of the empathic speech which proceeds it.) It’s a story that seems afraid the audience will stop listening if it slows down; too many clever words, the twists and involutions are too manifold, too much in and outing, twisting and turning, (a multiple-people-behind-tapestries scene hovers around farce), not a good ‘text’. It doesn’t even have a single clear subtext so how can it be any good?

Well, yes. It’s literally a comedy, and a Jewish family comedy at that. Now of course everything makes sense.

“The Lion In Winter is only apparently historical . . . it is a comedy but not the kind we’re used to seeing . . . it wants to be a vision of the world with tears but without tragedy, with passion, pain and funny things all caught in bright clear comic light.”

Fair enough James Goldman.

Varied Robin Hoods

Its already too much. I won’t make you watch Ridley Scotts murky Robin Hood, but be aware there are handful of scenes in there with Richard the Lionheart, and some great bits with Oscar Isaac’s John against Eileen Atkins’ Eleanor; “Spare me your faming metaphors mother, you know I don’t understand them.” William Hurt plays a lore-accurate William Marshall, leading a cavalry charge as he would whenever given a chance to do so.

All in all a bad film, but the Angevins are the best parts of it. Somewhere there is a 20-minute cut of Robin Hood, without much Robin Hood.

This is also one of very few films to include the Magna Carta, something that was very important, then wasn’t, then was for a bit, then wasn’t for a long time, then it turned out it was again and had been all along. Marshall is more closely connected with the Big Chart than many histories show.

In ‘Ironclad’ Paul Giamatti plays an extremely fun John, memorably setting pigs on fire. Always up for a scheme that lad.

In Disneys animated ‘Robin Hood’ Peter Ustinov plays a wonderful scrangy rangy Lion Prince John, his fat gold rings nearly falling off his hand.

I honestly can’t get too deep into the ‘Robin Hood’s’ as they are their own huge thing, but suffice to say, after various dynastic musical chairs, Henry II does eventually die, and the Kingship falls to Richard the LIONHEART, who then goes on crusade, is captured by the King of Austria on the way back, ransomed, revolted against by John, forgives him, runs around supressing revolts in France and is shot by a crossbowman. This leads us to;

The Life and Death of King John

By William Shakespeare

Read in text and viewed on Youtube here

‘King John’ is a dim and murky play about a dim man and murky time. It is a play about failure. The way it opens you would think we had just lost a war. It reminded me of stories set in post-WWII Europe, as if everything is happening in the lee of some great energy-sapping meaning-devouring disaster - but the disaster hasn’t happened yet.

In ‘The Life and Death of King John’, King John faces the challenge of an aggressive, ruthless and competent French King, (and the Dolphin), wielding a handily-named Nephew; ‘Prince Arthur’, with an alternate claim to the English throne. Facing down these problems, John largely fucks them up; schemes, lies, murders, dies.

The murk, weakness and disorder would make this period a fine subject for a better, subtler Shakespeare - everything around John is strange and fragile, weird, umbral and Nixonian – a weak, bad man you cannot help be false to, and false around, and this is nearly, or almost, a good play, with many of the dooms and subtleties mirroring things Shakespeare would later do better and in other ways. There are signs later in the play that John actually could be quite a good character if you let him cook; meek, mother obsessed, shifty, self-deceiving, play-acting even - John in King John is a little like a crappy proto-test version of Hamlet.

The really good ‘John’ scenes are; after the siege of Angers, he, using purely tacit and deniable language, effectively orders the murder of his nephew Arthur, ‘Oh if you could hear me without ears, see me without eyes’, then later once he believes the thing has been accomplished, blames the very man he ‘ordered’ to do it, for provoking him into it, in a sequence dramatically fascinating for its shamelessness and moral audacity ‘Hadst thou but shook thy head, or made a pause,”, and then towards the end when John is cutting deals with the Church, trying to nail down his barons, and finally, dying in the middle of bad news ‘I am a scribbled form, drawn with a pen, Upon a parchment, and against this fire, Do I shrink up.’, he has some excellent lines and behaviours.

There are other stand-out moments; Constance being told that she is in love with grief, actualises the grief by saying that grief ‘wears her dead sons clothes, puts on his happy looks’. Still, there is a lot of bad. ‘John’ is such a mid play you would think it was a test-bed - he makes Hamlet vacillating the centre of a play, which is in a form of Johns weakness, and he makes a ‘Bad King’ play in ‘Richard III’ where the answer is just to have the Bad King on stage all the time, constantly outwitting people, and talking to the audience about how cool he is.

But ‘King John it comes in the middle, after Shakespeare has already written several good plays. He knows how to do it, he just didn’t do it here.

Woke Play

Not in the sense that its politics are the same as the modern idea of ‘Woke’, in fact the play is nationalist, sentimental, bigoted and false, but many times watching and reading King John, I did get a similar feeling to mid-awokening corporate product, I think this breaks down to three ways it echoes those works; awkward aggressive politics, weirdly over and undercooked plot and structure, and pasting over all of this with and Edgy Badass.

The Awkward Aggressive Politics;

Can the catholic church be even worse than child murder? Despite existing in a very John-esque ‘post fall of Berlin’ psychological state where it feels like everyone has just left a smoke filled room to enter another smoke filled room, and the play being built around and dealing reasonably well with, these murky people doing murky things, it keeps trying to be patriotic in a very aggressively Tudor/Victorian way despite the fact that nothing happening on the stage would in any way impel anyone to thoughts of patriotism. Everyone is scheming, compromised, bigoted, false. Battles begin in manipulation and end in negotiation. Armies are mercenary, war aims are limited, and generally fail. John takes a brave stand against the Catholic Church for no politically adapt reason anyone on stage can name, then just as quickly submits. All of this leads on to;

Over/Undercooked Plot

It feels like a huge, and I mean gigantic, number of plot threads come from and lead to, nowhere - like a Disney production, a lot of stuff ‘just happens’

· the Siege of Angers, ended by a marriage deal - why?

· Prince Arthur imprisoned, then condemned, (to be blinded? killed?) then released, then thought dead, then actually dead in spontaneously jumping off some battlements? What?

· “Your mother and the other main female character died recently offstage my King. Sorry no-one thought to mention this.”

· “Lads, you are horribly betrayed by the Dolphin. Neither he nor the playwright thought to mention or even infer this before, and it seems totally out of place for the character we have encountered so far but I am dying like a melting candle so you have to believe me.

OK we will believe you.”

· “Our battle was disastrously lost offstage my King O wait you are dead.”

· “No it turns out the war is over and we have arguably won due to other offstage events.”

A play is naturally and inevitably a condensation of events and even the best will have loops and issues but Jesus Christ this feels like Disney Star Wars for how crazed and arbitrary a lot of it is. I wonder if you can come up with some kind of alternate ‘Noisms Law’; “the presence of known real-life historical events in the minds of the Audience does not excuse bad or inexplicable plotting.”

But don’t worry, we can solve all this by…

Pasting Over It With An Edgy Badass

What if there was one cool guy who commented on everything (not unlike a sotto-voice Michael J Fox character from the 80s). Literally just put one very COOL guy in there?

The figure of ‘The Bastard’ is fascinating as he is clearly the best character and also, in the same way an over-functional aid might cause a wound never to close, his presence is clearly preventing the play from getting any better

‘The Bastard’ is Faulconbridge, introduced in nearly the second scene as an older son being disinherited in favour of the younger son - the reason being that ‘The Bastard’ (which is how he is referred to in the script), is the illegitimate son of Richard the Lionheart - this is something agreed to almost immediately by John and Mummy Eleanor; ‘he is the very image of a Plantagenet’ - in return for being recognised as an official, unofficial, scion of the House, Faulconbridge gives up his claim to the family estate, becoming ‘Cuz’ to the King. From this point on, and likely intentionally, it is as if the resurrected spirit of Richard the Lionheart is haunting the action, standing in the eves, commentating, and getting threatening with the foes.

This character, who works well, and is fun, feels exactly like the kind of a figure a 1980’s TV executive would insist be added to a failing show; ‘a cool guy, a loudmouth, but a tough guy, with a heart of gold, and edgy, and he’s got jokes, a funny guy, and really tall and good looking, and hey let’s make him to son of [previous cool well-liked character], like a lost son, but he’s just like [previous well-like character], but he’s edgy, a bad boy who does things his own way, and he’s not like rich or anything, but he’s still rich enough to have good clothes, and he fights and kills the archenemy of [previous well-liked character], and is good at fighting, and doesn’t care about rules and orders (but does the right thing because of the heart of gold)’.

The Life and Death of King John doesn’t actually have that much King John in it because whenever the play flags, and it does constantly, William wheels on The Bastard Faulcobridge to say and/or do something cool and funny. This also means the play is not going to get any better, because every time the drama runs into its fundamental limitation (John), the solution (Bastard) takes over

The Life And Death Of Meme John

John as real-man has been, or at least people have tried to, historically revise his reputation away from being comedically awful loser to ‘less competent but difficult circumstances’

He still sucks though. Its deeply ironic that his loss of the Angevin empire in France helped, by dividing Lords from their lands, to create, to some extent, both ‘France’ and ‘England’. A lot of top guys lost their continental holdings and all they had left was the blessed Yookay - thus their interests converged a little more with those of the average Thane on the Thames. Though the Anglo-Norman Aristocracy would spend god knows how long fantasising about its lost European Empire to an extent you wouldn’t fucking believe .

I don’t know enough about the history to really comment on John as Man

John as Meme though...

By memetic effect, I feel like ‘King John’ has become much more powerful in death than he ever was in life. Being formed into the image of the ‘useless, craven, but cunning’ king by Sir Walter Scott, and that being carted almost directly into ‘The Adventures of Robin Hood’ - the guy is literally a cowardly Lion in Disneys ‘Robin Hood.

It’s probably the one-two of John crossing over between history, and (somewhat more) history aligned plays, on one hand, and being the perpetual and distant villain for the entire Robin Hood legendarium on the other, that lends him this repeated, memetic drive. ‘Scar’ from the Lion King is nearly ‘John’ again, Commodus from ‘Gladiator’, Joffrey from Game of Thrones may be the latest.

Sir Walter Scott;

“Attended by this gallant equipage, himself well mounted, and splendidly dressed in crimson and in gold, bearing upon his hand a falcon, and having his head covered by a rich fur bonnet, adorned with a circle of precious stones, from which his long curled hair escaped and overspread his shoulders, Prince John, upon a grey and high-mettled palfrey, caracoled within the lists at the head of his jovial party, laughing loud with his train, and eyeing with all the boldness of royal criticism the beauties who adorned the lofty galleries.

...

Those who remarked in the physiognomy of the Prince a dissolute audacity, mingled with extreme haughtiness and indifference to the feelings of others could not yet deny to his countenance that sort of comeliness which belongs to an open set of features, well formed by nature, modelled by art to the usual rules of courtesy, yet so far frank and honest, that they seemed as if they disclaimed to conceal the natural workings of the soul. Such an expression is often mistaken for manly frankness, when in truth it arises from the reckless indifference of a libertine disposition, conscious of superiority of birth, of wealth, or of some other adventitious advantage, totally unconnected with personal merit. To those who did not think so deeply, and they were the greater number by a hundred to one, the splendour of Prince John’s “rheno”, (i.e. fur tippet,) the richness of his cloak, lined with the most costly sables, his maroquin boots and golden spurs, together with the grace with which he managed his palfrey, were sufficient to merit clamorous applause.)”

• Lithe (not square)

• Fancy (not subdued)

• Femme (obv)

• Craven but not quite a Coward

• Manipulative and indirect

• High Power Distance (un-anglo)

• Insidious and Familiar (un-anglo)

• Disrespects Women (unnatural relationships)

Bad Play

There is a particular pleasure in watching and reading something you know is a ‘bad’ Shakespeare play. If you know its good, and it gets difficult or strange, then it is your fault for not understanding, but if you know it’s bad going in, if something doesn’t work, then why worry? William got it wrong.

Knowing the play is low-status makes it easier to accept and interact with.

William Marshall Is In This!

William Marshall is kind of in this one! As ‘Pembroke’ a minor hanger on and secondary character of no great consequence, bearing almost no relationship to the impression of ‘William Marshall’ we get from his own history. I wonder how many other incredible stories are hidden under minor titles in the background of a Shakespeare play

…

If you have made it this far; well done. We have had our Monk, Bishop, Queen, King, Outlaw and Villain, now at last, and at the last, a full-on chonking hero;

The Greatest Knight

By Thomas Asbridge

A history and historiography of “The History of William Marshal”, a 12th/13th century Knight who rose from being the cast-off son of a petty noble house to a magnate of England and a major part of the Angevin Dynasty. A man who served five Kings and survived four of them; Henry - the Young King, Henry II - the Old King, Richard the Lionheart, King John, and King Henry III, not to mention a period of service with Eleanor of Aquitaine.

The only reason we know all this is because a Frenchman dug up one of the few remaining copies of L’Histoire de Guillaume le Marechal, comte de Striguil et de Pembroke’ and managed to eventually investigate and write about it; one of the earliest biographies in Europe of someone other than a King.

It’s a remarkable story, simply on its own terms. In ‘The Greatest Knight’, Thomas Asbridge tells us ‘L Histoire’, but also provides a history of his times, and investigates some points on which the Chronicle has fallen silent, or been a little elusive.

William Marshal was born into a petty Norman family, holding the ancestral (and not that long since the Conquest), role of ‘Marshal’ to the King of England. Not being the first in line and not set up for a role in the Church, William is broadly ‘useless’, and is shipped off to Knight School in Tancarville, loses his horse in his first battle, is quietly demoted, leaves, sells his cloak for a horse, and joins the Tournaments. Rapidly becomes a Tournament Star, joins the warband of his uncle, Earl Patrick of Sailsbury, is dispatched as part of that warband, by Henry II, to guard his wife Eleanor of Aquitaine, as she tries to regain control of her ancestral lands, is caught in an ambush which kills Sir Patrick, but William holds out against many foes, securing Eleanors escape, is wounded, captured, ransomed, recruited directly by Eleanor, is given to the ‘Young King’ Henry, son of Henry II and first in line to the throne, as a tutor in knighthood and bodyguard, fights alongside the Young King in many tournaments and in two failed dynastic wars against his father Henry II, watches his young master die and fulfils his dying wish of taking his cloak to Jerusalem, comes back to Europe and joins the court of the Old King, fights for the Old King against his son Richard the Lionheart, nearly kills Richard at a crossing but kills his horse instead, serves the Old King till he dies of natural causes, is recruited by Richard the Lionheart and serves him until he dies from a crossbow bolt, serves King John, the crap villainous younger brother of Richard the Lionheart through some very dark days, outlives John and, with England invaded and torn apart, swears himself to the new boy-king, Henry III, son of John, turns the tide for the loyalist royalists against the Anglo-French invasion with a wild and daring cavalry charge through Lincoln town centre, saves the day (current age; 70-something), restores the kingdom, dies a few years later, peacefully, in bed.

“Churchmen are too hard on us, shaving us too closely. If, simply because I’ve taken 500 knights and kept their arms, horses and all their equipment, the kingdom of heaven is closed in my face, then there is no way for me to enter in, for I am unable to return these things. I believe I can do no more as regards God but surrender myself up to him as a penitent for all the sins I have committed and all the wrongs I have done. They might well wish to push me, but they can push me no further; either their argument is false on this score or no man can find salvation.”

John and William - How Should We Judge

John fascinates me. He is almost as ridiculously evil and incompetent as the Disney Cartoon Lion version of himself. Can you imagine how crap you have to be to live down to the Disney Villain version of you?

But what interests me about John is both the immediate and vivid disgust of myself and everyone else who writes about him, no matter how hard they try to counter it, and the invisible comparison of him with other Angevins.

Because all of them are bad. They all betray. The young King fights his own father twice and Richard hounds him to his grave, they all scheme relentlessly, the Young King uses depression era baseball scams to inflate his own tournament records and become the Prince of Knights, making money on the way. Richard is a clever brute. Henry II outright steals his wife and then imprisons her when she becomes too much. If you simply weighed out Johns bad deeds weight for weight, and compared them to any other member of his immediate family, they would be heavy, but not so much heavier that you would think him quite another thing. Why do we hate him so?

Incompetence, cowardice, sadism, greed, being not just a liar but a bad liar, being bad at war. Intemperate and inexact non-useful cruelty. All the bad aspects of all of his male line, but unlike them, not tempered, organised, used to some purpose, but messed up together in a bag.

All the Angevins are bad but they have class, they have some personal courage, they get some things right, they are like arrows, pointed, barbed and cruel, but organised impelled movements of force. The Young King rebels against his father twice and fails, and we don’t even mind it, in fact we even see his side. Richard hounds his father to death and we call him a brute and a bastard but an effective one. Richard even forgives his stupid brother, and sets about repairing the Empire with the one tool he trusts; violence.

John probably murders a teenage (younger?) rival for the crown, and we despise him for it? The crime sticks to him in a way it never would to Peter O’Toole. There are shades here of Nixon crushed by Watergate but Regan walking off Iran-Contra, an apocalyptically worse scandal. John just fucks things up, he is craven, shifting, weak. It’s not just a matter of optics, he genuinely makes utterly terrible decisions on the regular, and he is inconstant, twitchy, he is not an Angevin King you only distrust in the normal way (they may betray you if needed), but you have to distrust him twice, once in the normal way, and again because he might just chimp out and betray you even if there is nothing in it for him. He massacres the in-group (Norman Nobles), and not, like Richard, the out-group (Muslims), he doesn’t get the rules. His cruelty creates more contempt than fear, and every failure of war or peace, only digs him in deeper with his crappy behaviours. There is more, more subtly, wrong with John, than is obvious from his fuckups. The fuckups are only shadows from the branch, there is something off-kilter with the man. He cannot even be a coward correctly.

Yet, It Helps to be Big

Also athletic, smart, but not too smart, extrovert, confident, social and crucially (Hugh Cook understood this) to have a really good immune system.

At least some of the greatness of William Marshal, that doesn’t come from his family situation, comes from his genetics; he is a big, strong man, well-fed during his growing years. He is bigger than most people he meets and he stays bigger, even into his 70’s.

He is intelligent enough to learn and adapt from his failures, but perhaps crucially, not intelligent enough to be caught up in the world of ideas, neither is he inherently clever or duplicitous enough for (much) intrigue. He can learn the basics but it doesn’t come naturally to him.

Being very big and strong helps him a lot. It makes him a competent Knight right from the start, it means when he somewhat fails out of Knight School, he can hit the tournaments and become a Big Tournament star, something he does twice in his life. It helps him survive battles, and perhaps more importantly; infections. In his battle in Aquitaine after the death of Earl Patrick, he is pierced through the thigh and effectively crippled. Then dragged all over Aquitaine on a donkey. He does not die, the leg does not get infected, it does heal, he can walk and ride and fight again. None of these are givens in the Medieval world. Likewise, he can take a beating in the Tournaments and keep on going; one story has him unable to receive his award because he is kneeling over a local blacksmiths forge, getting his helmet carefully chiselled off his head.

Neither do the blows to the head give him concussion, at least so far as we can see, he maintains his mental faculties up to the point of death, even today that is not a given. Neither does he drink too much, die of overeating (lampreys or otherwise), get a venereal disease, get cancer, or his heart give out. He is not killed in battle and does not die of dysentery contracted at a siege. None are especially likely on their own but when you take them all together this is how everybody in his social group dies, he watches *four* KINGS die of things like this, and he does not. Eris seems to have no hold on him.

Be big, be strong, have a very good immune system. In terms of character; be confident, extrovert, non-neurotic, stable, rational, but not intensely idealistic; William Marshall had maybe three or four good ideas in his life, he was very good at using, and living within, those three or four ideas.

There is a reason WIS is a separate stat. Foucault was intelligent, any number of tiresome, self-destructive, self-deluding verminous men are intelligent; they do not know themselves and never gain the knowledge.

William Marshall was very good at using the person that he was, physically, but also morally, mentally and (for a worldling), spiritually. He had a simple coherent value system that gives his life meaning, he sticked to it, but it’s how he sticked to it that matters. He dealt always in the world of the Real, and only to some extent in the world of the ideal. He never breaks faith with himself, but he never really feels that he has to, he is extremely non-neurotic and self-accepting about being a Knight and a servant of the Angevin Dynasty.

He is not really much of an ‘English’ Knight; the dynasty he served was cross-national, Franco/Anglo/Norman and based around the descent line rather than national identity, but in his attitude, the way he took things; simple but not stupid, direct, sticking to his core values but rarely in a wild or self-destructive way; is there an opposite to Borderline Personality Disorder? Centre-Mass Personality Coherence? In this way, he was very ‘English’, almost the Paradigm. In fact he may actually have been the Paradigm. There were not many men like him when he was.

Historical Contingency

Nor can we ignore the relationship of character to the particularities of the age. Heroism needs catastrophe to bloom, neither too little nor too great a doom will do, and a man whose character impels him naturally to constancy works well with a rotating wheel of kings. Probably William Marshall would have done well with one king or two, but who gets five? (plus Eleanor), and a martial servant getting a continual string of military escapades and reversals in which to fight? And Kings of the same line as well, because it is this continual service to the same line which helps to set the seal on his Legend. His constant presence means that he represents the Angevins almost more than any single king, perhaps even more than Peter O’Toole-King himself.

We see, in Asbrdige’s careful dissection of the historiography, in the long nasty years of King John, a bad king and a bad settlement, what a more ‘normal’ William Marshall might have been like; still strong, a man of power and consequence, a notable courtier, sporting star, knight and military hand, still a Big Guy, but not the guy. Someone much more like the walk-on in a Shakespeare play (’Pembroke’ in ‘King John’) During much of Johns rein the main threat to the Kingdom is John, and the only realistic solution that does not lead to destructive civil war, is John. This is not an age in which heroes can exist and in it Marshall is the least heroic that he ever is.

He comes back at the end though, with a dang old cavalry charge as well. But that is because a hero is needed, without that need, he is nascent, a standard-issue gold-gathering land-acquisitive hungry courtier; a man who wants more damn land, he even wants to hold on to his French land.

There is also the matter of family. Marshall is minor, extraneous gentry for sure, one of the kind who can easily slip away into the margins and gutters of history, but he is still of the ruling class. He might flunk out of Knight school, but he got in in the first place, he might be crippled by potential debts, in danger in every encounter of a life-ending, or more likely, career-ending injury, but his uncle is still Earl Patrick, and he still has the surname Marshall, he grew up in a castle, not outside one. He was in position to rise and fall, but still in position.

I state genetics and contingency, not to war against character and decision, but to complement them both. Men do decide, though by the time their acts have entered centre stage they are more fruit of the garden of their old decisions than fresh plants, but William Marshall planted many choices early on; whether by luck or sheer charisma, to survive his initial encounter with King Stephen, to gaining training and employment at Tancreville, to even the conditions in which he lost his horse (fighting too hard, rather than running away - even the conditions of his failure served to shape his future choices), to his Tournament success, where, for the first few exchanges, surely fortune must have played some role – it’s very easy to imagine the poor knight ending up in staggering debt and having a very different life.

We cannot all be born big, of noble blood and with a great immune system, but we can perhaps learn how to use ourselves, to understand the thing that we are and place it on the board of life in a reasonable position, to be more like William, and, God help us, less like John.

….

So begins, and perhaps ends, my watchalong/readalong of British History. There may never be another entry! But if there is, it will be the omnishambles of the reign of Henry III in… Episode Two; Rise of the Celts!

This may be your last chance to back DotD for the low low price of £8 (or £40 for the wholesale version).

I have been interviewed about the project at the ‘Swan and Raven Studio’ here;

https://tricks-tales.blogspot.com/2026/05/patrick-stuart-false-machine-interview.html

The Dogge is the key to all this. Those familiar with hermetic readings of texts - I only need to mention Leo Strauss, will already understand the significance of this particular dogge in this particular 'wheel'. Rotatio, calcinatio, driving transformation while unchanged and unrewarded. The Philosopher's Stone's dark inverse. Pure process, no product.. But I have already said too much. The Kynicos will understand...

AND Amanda and I have been interviewed in video form by Max Cantor of ‘Weird and Wonderful Worlds’;

https://weirdwonderfulworlds.blogspot.com/2026/05/patrick-stuart-amanda-lee-franck.html

LAST MINUTE LIVESTREAM!

To celebrate the end of the Kickstarter for ‘Doom of the Dark’, the artist Amanda Franck https://amandalee.itch.io/ and the writer Patrick Stuart https://linktr.ee/pjamesstuart

We will be streaming LIVE for an hour or so (with 15 minutes added for assumed screwups).

Scheduled for;

- UK time - 31st May 10:45pm, ending 1:00am

- Chicago time - 31st May 4:45pm, ending 6:00pm

These will be the last hours of the Kickstarter. We will be talking about the Adventure and answering questions about Doom of the Dark, its art, and anything else (within reason) people want to talk about.

HERE IS THE LINK!

“Headstrong mortal, proud of that short dream which you call a lifetime, enamoured of your weaknesses and your miserable sins, and fascinated by death. Against such obstinacy even the gods have no power.”

…

Including reviews of;

• The Wages of Fear, 1953, directed by Henri-Georges Clouzot.

• Ulysses, 1954, directed by Mario Camerini.

• Sorcerer, 1977, directed by William Friedkin.

• Convoy, 1978, directed by Sam Peckinpah

• The Flash, 2023, directed by Andy Muschietti, and,

• The Running Man, 2025, directed by Edgar Wright

There is a man, and the man must move! Through time and space he thunders, by wheel, ship and racing feet. Where is he going?

“The purpose of the convoy is to keep on moving.”

The ‘Convoy’ and the ‘Running Man’, are defiant twins, both racing against ‘the power’. Ulysses has agonised a God, going home he loses men with every stop. He meets the shades of the dead, where he could easily have run into the characters of Friedkins ‘Sorcerer’ living through their own kind of Purgatory, I can see Roy Scheider stumbling from the mist to lick blood from the trough at Ulysses feet. Thus ‘Ulysses’ and ‘Sorcerer’ are also twins, or at least, connected through their world of visions and death, and a deep desire to go home.

‘The Wages of Fear’ and ‘Running Man’ are explicitly concerned with corporate governance (of course ‘Sorcerer’ is too, but the corporation of Sorcerer proceeds through visions and symbols while in both ‘Running Man’ and ‘Wages’, we get suits in offices talking, planning, desiring; they need the man to move and will pay to see it done. They may need the man to die, and they can pay for that too.)

Where is ‘The Flash’? Also a cursed myth, a tale concerned with inevitable death. The death of a mother, and a hero willing to shatter time and create Nemesis in a quest to free his father from durance vile, and return his mother from the world of shades.

The ‘Flash’ is probably the most insane film on this list, is mad, bad, and indifferent to observe except in a forensic way, in which case it is utterly fascinating, though its core story is truly Greek and, impressively, it is the only film which seems literally to have been cursed by its magical lead - the crazed spiral of Ezra Miller dragging both this, and the Snyderverse, closer to the cliff edge.

Wonderfully, Wages of Fear and Ulysses are nearly year-mates, - two wildly different dreams, while ‘Sorcerer’ is just the Bourgeois version of ‘Convoy’, again, separated by a single year.

Running Man was being written in the age of decadence that made the big truck movie craze, published in 1982, filmed first in 1987 and again in 2025, overleaping a whole age of Superhero movies which was falling slow, like Rome, with The Flash at its mad trailing edge.

Lets begin at the beginning, with the French…

Post-War Europe

1953 The Wages of Fear

A deadbeat town somewhere in South America (South of France stands-in). An American oil company. Four disparate shoe-leather whites clinging to the wet dead end of the old colonial scheme. There is no way out of the town! No train and the plane ticket costs cash no-one can get. This is all carefully explained while they idle out the time.

Much more than Friedkins ‘Sorcerer’, this is a social movie, a post-war Euro movie and its genuinely surprising how much of this film is concerned with male friendship and male sociality. Yves Montand plays the Corsican everyman ‘Mario’. Friends with perhaps the most Italian Italian man ever, Folo Lulli’s ‘Luigi’, Mario is seduced, not by sex, which he can get whenever (French), but by a man who knows the same streets of Paris, the shady flick-knife aging gangster ‘Jo’, played by Charles Vanel. Jo is a piece of shit yet Mario insists on hanging out with him. We’ve been this guy. (Its bizarre that this film has a Luigi who looks like Nintendo’s Mario AND a guy called Mario who looks a little like Luigi? Was Myamoto-san watching this as a kid?).

An oil fire. Utterly inflammable. A curse from Hades own hand! Except; the nitro-glycerine. Wrap it round the burning pillar like a wedding ring for god, and ‘poof’; out like a lamp.

The deadly Nitro is too far away. Long mad roads, and this stuff goes off if you breath on it. Someone needs to get it, and they have to be expendable, careful and fast. Luckily, there are the flotsam of the town; a testing sequence lets them prove their skills and its curious how nasty things get even then. The unwanted uncle-tickle of colonial race politics envelops like a smell. This film is either much more viscerally racist and/or just about more racist people, than Friedkins. There is lots of black people being artistically poor in ways I found broadly uncomfortable. Yes I do have ‘woke’ moments. The petty hierarchies of relative whiteness are unstated but observed, in a sense Mario (Corsican, so French, but not really), is ‘trading up’, by spending time with ‘Jo’ (French and Metropole, but not really).

Other drivers bullied, tricked and mocked away, two trucks remain; the shady duo Mario and Jo, and bold rotund Luigi, along with Bimba, cold mysterious nazi-loathing German with a nightmare past. Engines will be revved, cigarettes smoked and challenges encountered in this slow Odyssey

The conceit of ‘You have to do this quickly, but the package will explode if you do’, is so utterly perfect for drama I’m surprised they haven’t utilised it more. Yet, in both this and ‘Sorcerer’, we only get the death-drive half-way through. These are both films ‘about things’. In the case of ‘Wages’ its about a dissolute Corsican abandoning his Italian pal because a nasty piece of work from home showed up. Despite not visibly committing any crimes on-screen, like all of Friedkins main players, Jo is such a tangibly unpleasant piece of work that the only satisfaction I had in the last act was watching him fall apart, run away and get punched.

The ritual spell-summoning nitro scene is more beautifully terrifying in ‘Sorcerer’, but the moment when one truck explodes is stranger and more unnerving in ‘Wages’; a blinding, silent flash of light, the shockwave hits before the sound - tobacco leaves from an unfolded cigarette - then, nothing but a column of burning fire three miles ahead, and as remains, a hemispheric pit in sandy earth, the truck has been vapourised. Oil from a broken pipeline fills the earth, making a black pool of adhesive, clinging, flammable death through which the survivors must crawl.

The end is silly. Even a Corsican wouldn’t behave that foolishly. Yet, as Barry Allen and Ezra Miller will come to learn, Fate is Inexorable, this was never a story about surviving. No-one survives this Odessey, in every version every traveller dies, and yet they fight for life, and we see how they live. We never see what kills the jovial Italian, but ultimately he and the cold, mad German were more human, they never betray each other. Everything is mythic when you are driving a truck full of nitro-glycerine. Picking your nose is worth a chapter. We should add explosives to the Odessey. Hopefully Nolan is on this one, but trailers of his grim, over-clever, grey North Sea abomination impelled me to seek out almost any other Odessey;

1954 - Ulysses

(I watched this possibly illegally via a very low-res Youtube video)

From a French film about a Corsican in South America to an Italian Film about a Greek, played by an American, in the Mediterranean. It’s a Dino De Laurentiis production and that means LIFE and COLOUR! Both of these we get! Kirk Douglas IS Ulysses! He spikes every scene with an electric jolt of heroic energy. He really does encompass all the positive and negative qualities of Ulysses, his cleverness, foolishness, arrogance, incredible charisma, charm and wild drive. This may be his best performance! He’s great. For a man with very high hips, he sure likes fighting in his pants. I have seen his bronze, oblong body tangle many times upon the sand.

Silvana Mangano is magnetic in a dual role as Penelope and Circe. Utterly captivating. Of course the only thing stopping you going home to Silvana Mangano could be… sexy goth Silvana Mangano (plus the offer of immortality).

I would one day really love to see a cinematic projection of this movie because the scenes and sets in particular look absolutely gorgeous and the costuming is incredible; a wild combination of ancient Greek, bronze age Greek, ‘modern’ 1950’s and whatever they had in the cabinet. They even get Polyphemus’ eye to move! I wonder how they did that?

I want to see a real projection and, in an ideal fantasy world, I want to hear the original audio for the Italian actors because I don’t really care if the accents ‘spoil’ things - I feel like they were giving incredible performances (especially Silvana Mangano), but the dubbing chokes them off (this film also has some truly loony foley work) - maybe the Italian cut has the original voice lines by the Italian actors.

The scene in Circes cave where Circe tries to tempt Ulysses into accepting immortality, and the spirits of the dead come forth, some to aid her, some not, is one of the top ‘Odyssey’ scenes of all time (I mean in a meta sense). Here the basic conflict of every travelling man in every film in this post is laid out clear (writer Franco Brusati nails it);

Circe - This is my gift. The greatest gift that has ever been offered to a man.

Ulysses - No. There are greater gifts; to be born, and to die, and in-between to live like a man.

Circe - To live like a man? Filled with petty fears?

Ulysses - Only the fearful can know the value of courage.

Circe - And old age? That poor flesh will rot one day. And at the end, nothing but death. This is the terrible heritage of man.

Ulysses - I accept that inheritance. I no longer see myself falling in battle, or in the fury of a storm. It would take much less. A puff of cool air. A sudden chill one night. But even so, this vulnerable mass of fears has dared to battle with a god, and has not yet been defeated. If it should be that one day men should speak of me, I hope they say with pride that I was one of them.

Circe - Their pride will not serve to warm you in the kingdom of darkness. I offer you centuries of light.

Ulysses -I do not think that it will sadden me too much to close my eyes, when the time comes.

Of all these men racing against death, only Kirk Douglas’ Ulysses really rises to the challenge, and he is mythic. True, if we go by plot, Barry Allen also does, but that film is a godamn insane mess.

Crisis of the West

1973 - The Running Man (book)

Yes, published in 82 but the original draft was written in February 1973, under a dirty pseudonym in a single week of god knows how much cocaine. Running Man makes much more sense as a birth caul of the dirty murky 70s; poor, armed and amphetamine-slender. The culture that produced it feels a like the desert town at the beginning of Cluzot’s ‘Wages’; a desperate sick and lonely place where everyone believes they have been tricked. We are not meant to be here.

But this is not the 50’s and Stephen King middle America is not Oil Company South America. You can just get on a bus out of town. There are a lot of things you can do. Materially, its fine. The cage is spiritual instead, which makes for different tales.

I talk about Edgar Wrights ‘Running Man’ below, when we get to the 2020’s, fifty years in the future, but it seemed important for you to know and understand that its genesis comes from the 70’s, from the same oil-pond as our next two films; ‘Sorcerer’ and ‘Convoy’

(The Stephen King in Yellow - under his pen name ‘Richard Bachman, King wrote a clutch of scurrilous tomes, one of which; ‘Rage’, describes an armed student taking a schoolroom hostage, and between 88 and 97 was associated with five school shootings. Like Circe, Bachman was a spellcaster, and like Prospero, he abjured his book, for fear of its terrible power.)

1977 – Sorcerer

No one ever asks William Friedkin if he was trying to cash in on the ‘Truck Flick Bonanza of the 70s’, (maybe the whitest film craze of all time) but if you look at the box office and release dates, ‘Sorcerer’, the extremely arty, dreamy, psychological and catholic Truck film, is just part of a craze that includes ‘Duel’, Smokey and the Bandit’ and ‘Any Which Way but Loose’ they belong on the same shelf.

Regardless, we are back! The oil again. The greedy Shah won’t cough up the black stuff, trucks detour through our minds instead; fuelled by dreams. Back to fight oil fires and Star Wars, which will come out the same week as William Friedkins remake (or re-imagining) of ‘Wages of Fear’. Star Wars wins, conquering the world on a budget of 11 million dollars, while Sorcerer cost 22 million and made shit all. (Star Wars comes closer to being a cheap Indy movie, with Sorcerer the decadent Corpo flick….. )

We are doing Wages of Fear, but we are doing it pretty, and fancy, and psychological, with less explaining and more Catholicism, implication, and mud. And slightly less racism, arguably.

Trucks like monsters. Moody modernism - Friedkin makes a lot of ‘hip’ cuts that slice us through the story like a chopping knife. Incredible filmic moments, and specifically film and specifically film and physical events where the laborious physical creation and certain risk of the creation of this theatre looms behind each scene, adding to the dense gravity. Maybe the most gravatic movie of all time, maybe the most textured movie of all time.

While ‘Wages’ took its long sweet time being social realist, centring itself on the day to day lives of its cast of castoffs, scenes where they live, brawl, eat and explain their plans and backgrounds, all leading up to the TRUCKS, Sorcerer begins with four little groovy movies, showing the sins of its cursed quartet.

Somewhere in one of the anonymous rooms of Europe, one man kills another, Nilo, the Assassin (Franciso Rabal) exits to nowhere. Here is a man as a cipher. Manipulative, clever, dark. He goes to hell.

In Tel Aviv Palestinian explosives enthusiast Kassem blows some people up. In a series of scenes torn from ‘The Battle for Algiers’ he flees, last survivor of his group.

In exquisitely decadent Paris, the banker Victor Manzon admires his beautiful and literate wife (this is one of the last times a woman will talk in the film), she is reading the biography of a soldier in the Algerian war;

Blanche (reading) - “’The cannons were trained on the village..’”

Manzon - “Another Soldier poet?”

Blanche - “More philosopher than soldier. ‘Soon I would lower my hand and the firing would begin. Through my field glasses, I could see a woman with a jug of water on her head, walking slowly toward her home as she had always done. In a second, my simple gesture would remove her from the face of the earth. Whose gesture would remove me? When and how would it come?’”

Manzon – “And did he lower it?”

Blanche – “Yes.”

Manzon – “Then he was just a soldier.”

Blanche – “No one is ‘just’ anything.”

I do like it when a film tells you it is deep! That is how you know you are dealing with proper Art; when it tells you itself, (and makes no money). Manzon’s bank is shady, (or perhaps betrayed?). The cash is gone and this exquisite life has hours to run before he goes to jail. After a desperate last persuasion leads to his colleague blowing his own brains out in the car park to a lovely restaurant, Manzon pegs is, I mean he physically runs, in nothing but his fancy clothes, he disappears.

Finally, in gritfest NYC, Jackie Scanlon, Irish getaway driver (he begins the film trying to get away,) is trying to get away after his, (he’s more of a secondary member), gang robs a corrupt Italian priest of stacks of cash he shouldn’t have. Unfortunately for Roy Schieder, his car is full of IRISH MEN and in a scene from ‘Father Ted’, they start arguing over nothing and accidentally shoot each other. Crash. Leg wrecked and plastered with bloody money, Jackie limps away from the gathering cops and, much more dangerous, the Italian gangster brother of the church his gang just robbed.

They end up in The Town.

This is not southern France standing in for South America. This is proper, dirty, muddy, textured, beautiful tropical horrible sweaty poor corrupt actual South America. We have the budget for it. This being an ooogly boogly dreamtextured literary movie, it’s also clearly purgatory. In ‘Wages’ Mario was making it with a sharp-tongued barefoot coquette, in ‘Sorcerer’ Mazon bangs a borderline crone who silently arrives before the doom-drive starts, her face cauled with death, to return the golden pocket watch he used to pay her for a night, his wife’s sweet words still scribed into the shine.

Thence, the plot proceeds. The blaze (ignited here by radicals, rather than mistakes), the company, the Nitro – this truly Sorcerous scene is unquestionably better than the first, these Edgar Allen Poe explosives sweat, they nearly reek, they emanate doom. The trucks, pairs, the road, the doom. All similar, all different.

This is a very cool movie with some very cool trucks. The first films were good but these are literally part-designed by Phillipe Druillet, and which the original maximalist designs are subdued, made concrete by hot metal and decay, they still look cool as shit. I am surprised no lone Japanese man has produced scale model kits of them yet. They are works of art.

And everything about the film is very political and cool. And kind of slightly gauche, but looks amazing and hits hard, it flows into a double-bill with ‘There Will Be Blood’ on one end, or could form the middle of a trilogy with ‘Aguirre, Wrath of God’ on the other. The clawed oil company logo floats across the screen like the shadow of Cortez. In ‘Wages’ the gang blow open a great stone, here it is a tree; Friedkin says he called in an insurance scam gangster to show them how to set up the Dungeons & Dragons improvised timer.

Beautiful, less human. The protagonist dies. In ‘53 Luigi survives the death ride and gets himself killed in a car crash caused by a Mediterranean temperament. In ‘Sorcerer’ Roy Scheider makes it through the long, dark night alone, with only the corpse of what was probably a man sent to kill him. Picking up his money he stays in the bar a little too long, literally dancing with death, while outside a taxicab pulls up, containing the gangster brother of the priest Scheiders gang shot in the start. He’s not getting out alive. I was always the afterlife. What did it mean? Looks like Circe got one traveller at least.

The title is terrible, should have been “Super Murder Truck Adventure” or “2 X Wages, 2 X Fear” or THE “CASH OF DISASTER”.

1978 - Convoy

‘Convoy’ came out a year after ‘Sorcerer’, we watched it hoping for some comedic relief after the relentless tension of ‘Sorcerer’ followed by ‘Wages of Fear’.

This did not entirely work because SPOILERS, ‘Rubber Duck’ gets blown up at the end. The truck EXPLODES. God damn they got us again, except.. wait.. DOUBLE SPOILERS… it was a sneaky Odysseus Trick! Chris Christofferson faked his death and escapes disguised as a Dionysian priest, it was a Life movie all along!

I need to be clear, because I am going to be talking about a bunch of things that absolutely fascinated me about ‘Convoy’, that I do not actually think it was a great film and broadly did not enjoy watching it that much. The humour is gross and awkward, Chris Christofferson is an attractive cipher, Ali MacGraw is not much better. If there is a centre to the film it’s probably Ernest Borgnine’s corrupt Sherriff who effortlessly holds the screen whatever else is going on.

There in a huge and I mean gargantuan difference between what was happening in ‘Convoy’, in terms of pure cinema; image, light, movement and arrangement, vs the actual story being told.

The visuals, the editing and the strange tapestry of sound that underpins, and in a Nolan style, unwittingly alienates from the story, nearly make ‘Convoy’ an art film. The cuts of movement, cause and consequence, of sound and action, are wild. And dumb, with cutaways to ‘wacky’ comic goons. I genuinely can’t tell if this is Peak Artistry or Crude Comedy; it’s often both, and this is another thing that makes it feel like a very ‘white’ working class movie, because it has these wild swings of invention and touches of genius but it’s got no fucking class. Its dumb. Its anti-cool, a true flyover state truckers protest movie.

The story being told is kind of an archetypal working class rebellion tale and the script and voices and dialogue are crude, or off kilter, or dull, at least in the central performances, which just happen to be there, (apart from Ernest Borgnine). This might be one of those films that works better dubbed or in a foreign language, as there would already be a kind of dislocation there between the voices and performances and so people would more just be looking at the pictures.

What are they protesting? Even they don’t know. After a minor altercation with Borgnine’s shady Sherrif spirals out of control, ‘Rubber Duck’ and his gang just start driving. There is a vague suggestion they are going to Mexico, but they don’t seem have a location in mind.

The fact that the Convoy is protean, its meaning to be decided, almost pure, is one of the better through-lines of the film. (Ultimately the Convoy does gain a purpose; freeing a captured black trucker from the clutches of evil Sherrif’s. Unlike Ulysses, Rubber Duck does go back for his men, and unlike the shoe-leather Euro-migrants of ‘Wages of Fear’, he is a racial egalitarian.)

The Convoy metastases. CB radio brings in Truckers from wherever, adding more and more and more trucks to this infinite line of machines that sweep through the night like leviathans. The police watch; HELPLESS. Some towns put on parades. It’s All Fools Day, it’s a protest against the Power. It’s about freedom or something. Truckers Together. One of the best scenes in the film is Brian Davies’ senatorial apparatchik standing on the back of a moving flatbed, pointing a camera through the truck window at Rubber Duck, asking about his intentions, his political affiliation;

“What is the purpose of this convoy?”

“The purpose of the convoy is to keep on moving.”

Perhaps the purest and most emblematic dedication to the great cause of motion - the movement itself is the purpose. Perhaps the only protagonist truly unafraid of death. Self-fulfilling.

This is one of very few films based on a Country Song. It also uses that song as its theme, which is handy as the song directly describes what is happening on screen. A brief resurgence of the ancient balladic form that gave us the Odessey to begin with; “sing, O Muse, of Rubber Duck, the Southward-turning man, who drove his black-hulled craft across the Western Lands. Yet he mocked the Priest of the Five Pointed Star, who called down the wrathful God of State on his path.”

Our own path lies far distant, fifty years into the future and twenty three into a new, strange century, already tangled with cultural ruins.

The Waning of an Age

2023 - The Flash

leap into the distant future, of a cinematic world shaped by Star Wars rather than ‘Sorcerer’, and into the doom of a once-great, wait, no, it was never great, it was utterly mid always and at best. Let’s say instead, we journey to the doom of an absolutely garbage empire as it flames out, for the first time at least (the wheel will keep on turning); the DCU!

This film was brain melting. Truly, absolutely, one of the films of all time. A bonkers Aleph, a coagulation and concentration of a particular moment in time, impossible, inexpressible.

Remember the Walter Hamada style DC Universe before James Gunn came in to make it competent colourful and mild? My god what a strange wild run. R.I.P. THE SONYVERSE 2013 to 2023 (2024 if you count ‘Kraven the Hunter’). We had ten years in power CRYING FACE EMOJI. Rest In Plower, King. (& release ‘Batgirl’!) (Not to mention the Venomverse, Scraped together from Spider Man characters who weren’t Spider Man, that Sony still sort of had the rights to.)

The Sonyverse; a polished coal, into which we scry, like Doctor Dee, witnessing strange angels who will tell our fate & suggest we swap wives. It’s like a tarot deck, the entrails of a bird, of which The Flash must range above as some kind of Big Bird if you will.

Wait, there is a plot, its actually not bad. Barry Allen, already a Superhero and ‘The Flash’, discovers how to run through Time. He immediately uses this power to prevent his mothers death and save his father from being falsely accused of the crime. By altering causality, this Demigod crosses into the powers of an Abrahamic God, utterly fucks things up and creates, or gains access to, the, or a, Multiverse. (Also RIP Multiverse movies, we were… I guess about eight years in Power? Roughly 2018 to 2024?) This creates a world unable to defend itself from Michael Shannon’s ZOD, so Barry Allen teams up with Barry Allen, Sasha Calle and Michael Keaton to defeat Michael Shannon and Barry Allen (who was the real threat). The timeline is restored and Barry Allen accept his mothers death (but does manage to free his dad).

Not since Ulysses have we come so close to Myth; mothers, fathers, brothers, sin, fate, mortality

Batman comes back to life and dies, an Apollonian Sasha Cralle is released from Tartarus, and uh, aliens invade in the conveniently empty desert. Ezra Miller plays two roles (zhe probably wanted more).

I absolutely cannot look at Ezra Millers performance and see anything but Ezra Miller, and there are TWO EZRA MILLERS on screen most of the time! If life truly is a performance then what a performance zheres was, glorious ascension, diving straight into the Sonyverse and then the most magnificent and impressive systemic crashouts of all time. Truly living the mould of an Achaean Hero, touched by the Gods and sacrificing all for imperishable Fame. They do not make stars like this any more.

There is so much playdough CGI. It’s weird. An inadvertently Claymation journey into the past, and many alternate presents; Christoper Reeve, Nicholas Cage, BUSTER CRABBE! Wait, as proof that The Flash may be an Aleph of its age; I’m sure we all remember the Great Device of Giordano Bruno, renaissance theoretician and plump lion avoider, where he tried to scam a Prince with the idea of building an engine of thoughts, which would be like a huge radial room set with these semi-mechanical images like tarot card with each image having various complex layers of symbolism, and the images having attachments and relationships between them, moving, rising up or folding down, obscuring or revolving, all according to the schema of some vast meta-philosophy which this machine would both embody and, with human integration, understand. We all remember this.

Well! The big radial wheel of CGI shifting realities that the Flash enters into when he gets super upset and exceeds the Speed Force, does look an awful lot like Bruno’s Great Machine. Obviously Deep Cut about the paradoxical urge to systematise conflicting realities and the semi-corrosive touch of human memory which warps what it reconstructs even as it seeks to preserve what is most special to it.

And speaking of warping and reconstructing Memory..

2025 - The Running Man (Edgar Wright)

Fifty years since Bachman wrote ‘The Running Man’, the same time spent the other way takes you to 1923 - the end of the Ottoman Empire and the Munich Putsch. The 20th century casts a long shadow

But we are back....back and back again, to run. (This film was bad.)

You all must know the basics; dark future, class divide, gameshow culture, lethal show. Play and be hunted by the world. Survive and all your dreams come true, but no-one survives; the Running Man! We loved the crazy 80’s flick, we have not read the book.

There may be reasons for that. The book is dirty, grimy, nasty, weird. It ends with the protagonist suiciding a plane into the network tower. Do people want to see that? They will not get the chance. Despite its reason for existence being closer to the text, Wrights ‘Running Man’ flubs the finish, spazzing into a knotwork of crowd-test re-writes, and giving Glen Powells Ben Richards a happy ending that he may deserve but his world does not. This vague sense of pussiying out may be why the film is not good. It’s a nasty nihilistic story and Edgar Wright is not nasty or nihilistic and has nowhere to go with those emotions. It’s a fake homecoming and the emotional and moral dissonance embodied by this change weaves its way through the whole of the film, making everything shallow, silly, weak and small. Blessed soul-pure cringe millennials cannot comprehend Peak Bachman Cocaine nihilism. Are we kinder than the hero/demons of the past, or narrower, our virtues those of Bonsai Trees?

Team Bad Guy plays it well. Josh Brolin is wonderful as Killian and his screen conversations with Powells Richards have more drama in them than the rest of the film. The weaponisation of fame and the way public perception and private drama interact with each other, forming positive and negative feedback loops, and creating complex opportunities for whoever can navigate between the two systems best, is the most interesting part of the story, but ‘To Be Hero X’ already did that much better. Colman Domingo is piping hot as the Running Mans presenter. Lee Pace stands well and obscurely seems more comfortable in his mask than when it is removed. A commedia dell’arte actor born in a leading man’s body.

The remainder saddens me. The tech is imagined for a 70’s scene and the transmutation of mailed video tapes into rocket powered flying post-boxes, does not work. Digital technology is a leash around our necks and no Running Man could run for long if hunted by our world. Perhaps this could have been feathered differently or otherwise conceived, but the conception fails.

There is a scene where Powell disguises himself as an Irish Priest, another scene about ‘Zine Culture’, videotapes. DNA sniffers and drones. A 70’s TV show set. Its awkward. A mish-mash. Michael Cera turns up and is relentlessly Micheal Cera - the only point in the film where I laughed was during a the Monster Energy Drink product placement - and I can’t tell if that was a gag or not. Maybe the film did not know itself. Tonally all over the place. Cartoon people in a dark pseudo-reality or real people in a cartoon world.

…

So much, so early 21^stC. We have escaped the Multiverse of Memory, but are still enraptured by the Sirens of Boomerism, all while Pluto rages at our theft and the black curse of Oil pursues our boat. We must load it with explosives once again.

Also;

The DOOM of the DARK Kickstarter is still running!

You only have TEN DAYS left to back it!

Who knows how many we will print? I certainly don’t.

An improved PDF if we hit £7000!

Do you know that we intend to print in the US AND the UK?

Praise be to Hekaton and the children of Old Night, the Doom of the Dark Kickstarter smashed its initial funding goal within a few minutes and made ten times that by the end of the day, smashing another goal, meaning we can crank up the print quality as high as possible for all backers.

Fifteen Days Remain!

As well as increasing print quality I will likely also look into producing an interlinked PDF to make DotD more playable for those digitally bound.

Posts and Interviews

However, other than that, I am not super well versed in publicity etc. For the period of the run of DotD, I, and Amanda when available, are open to interviews, articles, posts, links etc etc. If anyone wants us on their thing, or wants text, questions, answers, opinions, we (me mainly, Amanda has a lot to do), are available till the end of May, so drop a comment or email me at pjamesstuart at googlemail dot com.

May the Turne-Spytte Dogge forever tread…

Also look at this video if you haven’t already. It’s very good! (Animation by Amanda Lee Franck).

I have been posting here and there about ‘Doom of the Dark’ for a while. Here is the full version;

After my encounter with Tunnels and Trolls, Amanda suggested that I publish the adventure I created for her and a few friends. This is that adventure, illustrated and layed out by Amanda Lee Franck.

Simple Zine

DOOM of the DARK is a 34 page zine containing a real-time adventure fit for an evenings entertainment. By the end of the night you will have either saved REALITY ITSELF, or doomed it to… the DARK.

The adventure is statted up for Tunnels and Trolls and designed for that playful vibe. Most of the working parts are built into the creatures and the location so anyone familiar with old school D&D should have little trouble running it in a BX-adjacent or Nu-OSR game.

Its not a super-difficult dungeon, though hopefully a fun one. Think somewhere between storybook and catastrophe.

U.S. and U.K. Print

False Machine is doing things a little differently with this one. We intend to print in both the U.K. and the U.S.A. One print will be sent to Spiral Galaxy in the United Kingdom and ship from there, the other will be sent to Flying Cloud in America and ship from there.

This means postage will hopefully be less of an insane nightmare for Americans and Canadians.

The Kickstarter will have options for the U.K. print and the U.S. print, so back for the print location most convenient for you! (& try not to screw it up!).

I am also putting in wholesale options for both prints, so if you run a shop and want ten copies you can back for one of those.

UnIdentical Twins

The two prints will not be exactly the same. The U.K. version will be an A5 zine and the U.S.A. version will be in ‘portrait’ (so a little longer and thinner). We (Amanda) designed the thing with this in mind so the difference in experience should be minimal.

If we make a lot on the Kickstarter we will crank up the print quality on both items, but the printers in the U.S. and U.K. don’t offer exactly the same paper weights etc. We will try to keep the quality of both zines as similar as possible.

50/50 profit split

Like almost all False Machine products, profits for Doom of the Dark will be split 50/50 between writer and artist, so if you are an Amandamaniac, or Franckophile, you will be supporting your artist by backing or buying.

A Real-Time Adventure

Vague concepts for single-night, Level-One, Real-Time adventures have been rolling around my head for a while. DOOM of the DARK is played in real-time; however much time the players take is how much the adventurers take, and there is a time-limit; you only have two to six hours to save the world!

There are also a bunch of diegetic elements included in the adventure to, bluntly, keep bumbling players doing what they are meant to be doing; SAVING THE WORLD IN UNDER SIX HOURS.

Hopefully this should be a fun time for two to six players running starting characters, and a relatively easy dungeon to run.

Quick Kickstarter

The Kickstarter opens on the 15th of May and runs for just over two weeks, ending on the 31st of May (U.K. time! So Mid-day for Americans).

If you want DOOM of the DARK at its initially low price of £8, or if you know someone who might, then you only have two weeks to back this thing or let them know!

The more backers we get the higher we will crank the print quality!

We hope for a print in mid-June and to start delivering towards the end of June.

CLICK HERE FOR THE KICKSTARTER

In fact only Douglas Niles in ‘The Dungeoneers Survival Guide’ and maybe Zedeck Siew in Reach of the Roach God came anywhere near to producing systems at this very grand scale, and only Niles addressed the problem of three-dimensionality, and he only partially, and via a complex but elegant method of isometric mapping.

Nevertheless, I feel like I did learn quite a lot from dragging myself through all these varied systems and the process did affect my plans and ideas for VotE;ReDux so I will go through my general sense of each method here, in alphabetical order, at least until I come up with a better method.

Carapace - by Goblins Henchman

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/261079/carapace-basic-version

An odd, complex little pamphlet I got, maybe directly from Goblins Henchman? Who knows how long ago? I found it in my box of Zines! This is an adventure built around some generation systems for having trouble in a giant ants nest (the nest is giant, and is the nest of giant ants, so I suppose for them it’s just a proportionate nest).

Three methods are proposed for the creation of the Nest; a Point Crawl, Labyrinth Move and an ‘Hex Flower’.

[I have photos but it feels wierd reproducing them here.]

Its interesting to me that two of these; the point crawl and the ‘Labyrinth Move’ both live neatly within broader methods of conceptualising and using underground spaces that we will run into later several times.

The Point-Crawl in this case is not a die-drop system and is based on a layered diagram, printed in the pamphlet, with semi-random ‘rooms’ and interactions.

The ‘Labyrinth Move’ uses a table and a progressive encounter roll, in concept, not that dissimilar to ‘Flux Space’, though I think this is more a case of convergent evolution than direct descent. (The text says this is an adaptation of Jason Cordova’s ‘Labyrinth Move’ for Dungeon World - something I know nothing about. I wonder what the background of intellectual connections is here? It also seems similar to Emmy Allens Gardens of Ynn and Stygian Library methods, though its been a while since I read those.)

The ‘Hex Flower’ seems to use a similar interior logic to the ‘Labyrinth Move’ but has it built into a little printed Hex-Map with the decision logic based on spatial arrangement. So far as I know, only Goblins Henchman has ever used this. This one also has a Hunter/Prey mechanic built into it, which should liven things up. Perhaps this is something to think about when considering other underground mapping techniques at any scale.

Corpathium

https://lastgaspgrimoire.com/in-corpathium/

(Ten years have passed and it’s all still there. The page even has a G+ link (;_;) )

So far as I know, the grand city-building project of Corpathium, which seems notable and unique, only exist via (very pretty and well-designed) web-page. What, not even a PDF? Surely this should have been a book at some point?

Anyway, the only part I am interested in is the city-generation system which could be easily subverted into a cave generation system

Its DICE DROP, which, honestly, is not that bad an idea for intermediate spaces.

Is non-representational, more diagrammatical, so that’s good.

Uses a 7-dice set, so I assume d4, d6, d8, 2d10, d12, d20

Uses the points (i.e. the corners) of the dice! Have not seen that before. If dice point to another they are accessible to each other.

So then we compare the numbers against a list of potential city-quarters with their own sub-rules about what is going on.

Then you have some interesting rules related to the concept of Corpathium as a place

Dice drop honestly seems like a really solid method for ‘intermediate’ zones between the ‘world map’ and outright cave crawling wilderness. It’s immediate, fast, coherent. Probably better and simpler than the method I used in VotE for generating intermediate cave systems. Reading Corpathium persuaded me to the use of a system of this kind and played a meaningful part in causing me to re-order my whole hierarchy of systems.

Deep Rock Galactic

https://steamcommunity.com/games/DeepRockGalactic/announcements/detail/4593196713081471259

Someone recommended I take a look at this web-page where the designers of this Space Dwarf mining game, (which I have never played), talk about their process

Even though this uses systems and crunch impossible for a human, some of the logic of cave-creation, at least the sequencing, is broadly similar; a range of templates with some ‘randomizer’ elements, combined in new, strange ways.

As the designer here sees it, there are a few key considerations in making a good cave: traversal, natural wayfinding, and dramatic experience.

One way this did affect me was that it made me re-conceptualise the ordering, arrangement and importance of the different methods I intended to use, in particular the primary methods. It was partly here that I started to crystalise the idea of there being three ‘layers’ of resolution, with lots of optional little sub-systems which could be added on according to taste and usage, but essentially a sandwich with three layers; Wilderness Scale, built on an interlacing paths pointcrawl, a medium scale, built on a die-drop method, and the idea of the ‘Adventure Cave; a cave made specifically to have adventures in, with maybe a ‘close cluster’ of nearby caves to add options.

I will look into this, in particular; combining the encounter-design ideas from Silent Titans with the 100 caves from VotE (though all this will be much later, need to work on ‘large scale’ now).

The Dungeoneers Survival Guide by Douglas Niles

The most beautiful and interesting book of all I considered, mine has been rabbit-damaged for a long time (something I will never forgive)

Douglas Niles is one of the only creators to directly address exactly what I was looking for; not a big dungeon, or a large cave system but an underground world - something at least the size of a small nation.

He even provides one in this book! Sketching out, through a series of lovely, layered, isometric maps, the ‘Lands of Deepearth’, made up of complex riverine systems and caverns, filled with all the wonderful creatures of AD&D.

However, almost to my relief, as I have read way too many of these already, he never actually deals with how to generate such a territory. He spent a huge amount of energy communicating his wonderful and only somewhat complex maybe even ritualistic isometric mapping system, that I think once you get that system, you can just vibe on it? Honestly a very reasonable concept in that, through achieving a sufficiently complex and expressive physical skill, by the time you have it, you will either intuitively know what to do with it, or experimenting with it is so simple and joyous an experience that the matter simply no longer presents a meaningful problem and you can’ in the words of the winged goddess of victory ‘just do it’.

But, for reasons given in my comments to the last post about this, I am not going to adopt this beautiful and coherent isometric late-analogue culture mapping system. Still an inspiring book though.

Flux Space

https://www.paperspencils.com/flux-space/

“This simple conversational back-and-forth is a good engine for producing fun, but it falters when the characters are exploring spaces which are Large, Samey, and Confusing. ... Other examples of large, samey, and confusing environments would be a winding network of caves,”

This is something I had considered when thinking about cave systems but reading Flux Space convinced me that I had not been thinking about it deeply enough. There really is a fundamental tension between the concepts of natural or pseudo-natural caves, which are, as stated above, often ‘Large, Samey and Confusing’, and the forms, shapes, paths and locations necessary for adventure, which are (while seeming not to be so), actually the compete opposite of the above; Small, Distinct and Clearly Organised.

“Traversing through Flux Space can be regarded as a type of Point Crawl, with the distinction that moving between each point is especially arduous. Once a Flux is solved it can be peregrinated through more swiftly, but solving it will be taxing.”

What ‘Flux Space’ is, is a relatively solid and only slightly over-complicated and over-specific method of abstracting the exploration of spaces that are ‘large, samey and confusing’ without specific, local mapping in real life. Instead the simulation is of the company slowly crawling their way about, spending time and resources, gradually encountering important elements of the ‘Flux’.

The basic time signature is ‘Turns’, there are 6 turns per day, so a 4 hour turn. Every Turn of Charting depletes resources, hits some kind of encounter/event, (Flux Space uses the classic overloaded Encounter Die) and crucially, grabs you a Point of Interest. There are a limited number of points of interest per ‘Flux’

There are ‘Shallow’ and ‘Deep’ rooms. At first you randomly encounter ‘Shallow’ rooms, and as you do, cross them out, Then, if you roll a shallow room encounter after its crossed you, you get a ‘deep’ room, and the deep rooms go only in sequence, one after another, and after the last deep room you are done and ‘know’ the maze’. You can move in and out of it however you like.

Some points of interest;

· It assumes you are burning resources, which is standard already for VotE.

· You would need the time and stability to note or record things, though, VotE wise you could use knots or muttered chants

· The Event/Overloaded Encounter Die has some cute elements and some meta-currencies.

Altogether a very useful and excellent tool which I wish I had invented

NOT a good tool for VERY large wilderness/nation-sized spaces, but very good for cave systems and mazes built around central concepts, inhabitants, purposes etc, between small dungeons and wilderness, an excellent intermediate tool. NOT a rapid, easy immediate generator, you will need to think & plan ahead of time.

Though ‘Flux Space’ would not be one of my ‘Big Three’ core generation techniques, (Large Scale ‘Lands of Deepearth’, medium scale Dice Drop and small-scale ‘Adventure Cave’), I am committed to using it or something like it as an ancillary cave complex generation method. It fits too perfectly into something like a Deep Janeens maze or an Alkalions Salt Maze. Though these would be things you need to think ahead to plan.

There is some excellent advice on filling out this simple and useful concept at the web address, describing more would be excessive. (Someone please write an extensive blog post about how Flux Space related to Gardens of Ynn and that to Dungeons Worlds Labyrinth Roll or whatever it was.)

How to Host a Dungeon

This is an entire sub-game and I am sorry I did not get round to reading or reviewing it. Just too big too complex. I will try to read it at some point.

In the Shadow of Mount Rotten

A 2012 PDF from Joel Sparks.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/100100/in-the-shadow-of-mount-rotten

This has a small, competent, naturalistic cave/lair generator.

It is fine and there seems to be nothing wrong with it but it has little utility for me as, first, we are talking about large scale generation, second, these are very much lairs, or naturalistic dungeon-like environments whose relation is primarily to an ‘outer world’, and last, their entirely reasonable naturalism, means they are largely wet, or drowned and either too small, too long and thin or too blocked off to be interesting.

A fine system. Not for me.

Inkvein by Murkdice

https://murkdice.substack.com/archive (There seems to be no single central site for this.)

This is an actual Megadungeon for Mork Borg by Murkdice.

Basic notation system looks broadly similar to VotE (addressing identical problems).

No 3d notation in the caves that I can see.

Has a nice Caving diagram.

Is already a megadungeon so has no generation systems at any scale. (These may show up in the final product, I only got a look at the Quickstart rules). Also this is so similar in broad concept to VotE that I am leery of dealing directly with it.

Lowlife by Sam Sorenson

https://lfosr.com/product/lowlife/

This little pamphlet has a LOT of stuff in it, very little directly related to the precise needs of my enquiry.

We got the basics of this are a die-drop method; where Corpathium used different kinds of dice and the angles of the ‘points’ on the dice to trace a network which produced, in abstract, the accessible paths of a cities layout, Low Life is explicitly aiming to create a tunnel network, uses D6’s and then uses the combinations of numbers to decide partially the connections between things but also the nature of the connections, it also engages the idea of just repeating the dice-drop method to produce a system of greater complexity and interconnection.

Low-Life also has a method for introducing three-dimensionality (!) though it conceptualises this as ‘dungeon layers’ rather than using the diagrammatic nature of the tunnel system to create ‘uppy downy’ not related to the concept of ‘dungeon layers’.

I will almost certainly be returning to ‘Low Life’ later on throughout the project as it covers a lot of very similar ground. A very solid product!

Reach of the Roach God by Zedeck and Mun Kao

(rest in power kings)

Most of Reach of the Roach god is about the Roach God and his reach, but at the end we get a little cavern-generation system based on TOYS. This is very millennial as it assumes that people buying this arty D&D book will have toys to throw around and yes I have them, shut up.

This is meant to be simulating the hollowed out bodies of dead gods so the humanoid shapes coming through the process are deliberate. It breaks down the toys into three sizes, two big, four or more medium and some small, and a bunch of ribbon to connect them.

How do you turn this into a map? In the style of The Dungeoneers Survival Guide; just be a good artist, or maybe actually trace around them? That would work if you had a big enough paper.

This method is different to most of the methods so far which tend to work on a principal of “room & route” – this matters as one thing you will notice about natural caves is they don’t have neat divisions between ‘rooms’ and ‘routes’, though, to some extent, this is how humans have to think about them; here is the bit you move through, here is the more round bit where you can rest.

The RotRG method produces large irregular, but linked caverns, which is something you might need, it uses the typology of the toys used to decide the location of world-relevant locations, the god type also represents special rules affecting that space, there are rules for using the ribbon as a river and instantiating that in the cavern system.

A much less technical system than most others, this still does something notably different, and it uses the layered information of its figure types in a range of interesting ways - I am sure a use can be found for this!

My Grand Result

My final analysis is, as stated above, to work on three ‘layers’ of map and location creation; the Large Scale Underground World, the Die-Drop cave system, and the ‘Adventure Cave’; the kind of place where its good/interesting to have an encounter.

The brutal truth of the modern reader is that, as well as being borderline illiterate (new), they sadly have very little interest in mapping or simulating complex three-dimensional spaces, especially using arguably counter-intuitive methods of paper-folding and cave diagram.

You have collectively, as a culture, let me down in this. You should have been more interested in three-dimensional space. Feel bad about this.

The ‘new’ version of ‘Underground World Generation’ will probably end up being broadly similar to the original VotE version, but without the paper-folding, and with relatively little three-dimensionality, (it’s hard and people do not understand it). It will be integrated much more with generators for Cities, Settlements, Rivers and Environments, but in core concept, still a bunch of scrawls on a page, just now with more interesting dots and names to the ‘wilderness’ reaches of hidden-swiss-cheese stone between routes.

It will be one of three main systems and all should be initiative, quick and not especially clever; the Underground World, the Dice-Drop System and the Adventure Cave.

As well as, and included around those concepts, will be some other optional systems, or at least references to them, in particular, something like Flux Space/Gardens of Ynn, and other perhaps more complex, or longer seeming methods for when you need variety and/or something special or specific. This might just end up with me saying ‘use Flux Space if you want to do this kind of thing’.

This was a useful experience, though perhaps the most useful thing about it, more than any particular method, was the global, or deep, view of how people arrange their generation and mapping methods for actual games, and the intuitions this feeds about what is most necessary and immediate.

This slender book absolutely captivated me. Over the course of the year of the moon landings, James F. Fisher takes his wife and goes to live in one of the most remote villages on earth; a place he calls Tarangpur high up in the Nepalese Himalayas, somewhere it takes a week of walking to reach.

Tarangpur (a pseudonym), has under 400 people and the closely clustered houses alone range across almost 1000ft of elevation. The terraced farmland that feeds Tarangapur has such wild ranges of height that different sub-strains of the same crop are grown at the various layers. The people farm terraces so narrow they refuse to plough with multiple bullocks;

“The plough used in Tichurong is found nowhere else in Nepal, not even a few miles away, nor anywhere else in South Asia. It is drawn by a single bullock, never by two, and never by a horse. The ploughman stands beside the plough (not behind, as elsewhere), and bends nearly double over it, using his body weight to force the ploughshare into the hard and rocky soil while the bullock provides traction. Virtually everyone has seen other ploughing techniques in Bhot, Khasan and the middle hills and Terai - horse-drawn ploughs, ploughs drawn by two bullocks, iron tipped ploughshares and stand-up ploughs; but villagers never experiment with any of these features themselves.”

The seasons shape not just the economy, but the demographics of the entire village. From Spring until Autumn, there is only enough light and water for one harvest and as soon as that harvest is done nearly every man in Tarangpur sets off down the river, or across the passes, to trade.

While the men are away, they are replaced, to some extent, by the inhabitants of villages higher up, closer to the border with China. These people come from places which get so cold and snowed-out in winter that they can barely support life, so they move down-stream, to Tarangpur, and do work and odd-jobs while the men are away.

When Spring comes and the snows melt, (though traders are sometimes caught between passes due to snowfall), the men come back to the village while those from further up return to their own. Over spring and summer, the women do the majority of the agricultural work while the men hang around and probably think about trading.

Tarangpur exists between two cultures, two languages and religions, and exploits this superpositioning to make itself a trading hub.

To the north is Buddhism, Chinese-ruled Tibet, high villages and salt, (vital for survival), down to the south is Nepal, Hinduism, railways and commercial goods. Tarangpurians are trilingual, and somewhat tri-cultural. They speak their own rare tribal language; Kaike, they also speak Tibetan, and Nepali. In their religious practice, when at home they are somewhat Hindu, somewhat Buddhist and have their own range of tribal mountain gods.

A Tarangpurian man spends about half of his time travelling, either north to Tibet for salt and perhaps animals, or south into Nepal. When he goes north he is Buddhist, and has those behaviours and language, when he goes south he has Hindu language and behaviours.

“All this time attempting to pass as someone else is not without its effects on the individual actors involved, nor, ultimately, on the society and culture of Tarangpur.

The most obvious effect is the psychological uncertainty characteristic of any “passing” behaviour. One can never be sure that the façade will hold; the mask might slip, and then all will be found out. This psychological uncertainty manifests itself as a cultural uncertainty in the clearly unflattering perceptions Tarangpurians have of their own culture.

..

“…villagers were convinced Kaike has no proverbs, although I ultimately recorded about fifteen that were spontaneously uttered in the course of conversations.”

...

“In the same vein, toward the end of my stay in the village I asked how many days of mourning were observed at the death of a close relative. The answer was “thirteen days,” but then my informant added, “Well, we should mourn for thirteen days, but we don’t really; that’s just what we normally tell people because that’s what proper Hindus do. But you’ve been here so long no I guess there’s no point in trying to keep on fooling you.” “

This settlement of under 400 people, which is the nexus for a cluster of villages making probably in total no more than 2000 people, has an almost egregious level of social complexity, both hidden and direct.

Firstly, the Magar (broad group name) culture is deeply visibly egalitarian.

“Tarangpurians do not use wealth to transform life-styles in ways which economists or development planners would describe as “raising the standard of living.”

...

For Example, a rich man will spend more for the celebration of his first son’s haircut than will a poor man. He will serve rice instead of chinu millet, and his supply of distilled liquor will outlast the capacity of his guests to absorb it.

Thus wealth is desired not to provide a better standard of living for oneself but for others. Wealth is sought not so that a man can eat better, but so that he may feed others better. This desire to provide high-grade hospitality, which is not so particular to the Magars of Tarangpur but which also characterises many other communities in the Himalayas, is the reason for converting so much time and so many resources into forms that can be stored more or less indefinitely and then dispensed. It is not the only reason however.”

Likewise, village life has some aspects which are fundamentally socialist;

“Other examples of this feeling of village solidarity include “pure gifts” to those who have suffered misfortune. one young man who had been away from the village for several years attending school returned to take up daily life. He had no bullock or fertilizer and his barren fields, which had lain fallow for so long, were difficult to bring under cultivation again. The rest of the village contributed fertilizer, bullocks, and ever labour to help the man make a new start. A feeling of gratitude and indebtedness results, but no-one who helped expected to be repaid. The same thing happens if someone’s house should burn. Even without a calamity of such proportions, help is extended without thought of repayment to those who need it.”

Work and life paths are rigorously gendered. Men trade, women farm. There are complex rules regarding Sin and Pollution which affect exactly what parts of farming men and women can and cannot do. Men cannot pollute themselves, and so never deal with manure, and likewise have very little to do with the day to day management of agricultural land. Women cannot Sin, and since using animals in almost any way, especially using them for ploughing, or to carry loads, both of which can hurt the animal, are Sins, these are left exclusively to men. Likewise, in the Winter, when the Magars major religious festival is held, the grown men of the Village generally are not actually there, and those celebrating are women and the seasonal Buddhist population.

The Magars of Tinrangpur come in four clans, three of which derive from the three sons born to the son of the escaped princess who founded the village. This Son captured an angel-woman bathing in a lake of milk and had three sons with her, each son giving their name to one of the clans.

“The origin of the fourth major clan is different. One of the three sons was a shepherd who kept losing the same female goat every day, so one day he followed her when she wandered away from the rest of the herd. He discovered she was giving her milk to a baby boy living in the hollow part of a bamboo tree near the present village of Tupa. He came home and discussed what he had seen with his family and they decided to bring the baby home. The boy became the ancestor of the Jhankri clan. ... To this day, the Jhankri’s, unlike the other clans, do not eat she-goats, because it was a she-goat who fed their ancestor in the bamboo tree. They do eat he-goats.”

As well as the four major clans, (and the Buddhists from the north), there are handfuls of low-caste Tailor and Toolmaker/Blacksmith jati living in the village.

The situation is this; rather than buying clothes, or tools, a family has a patronage relationship with one of the Tailor and Toolmaker families, and supports them throughout the year, and when they need clothes or tools, they go to this family and ask for them. The Tailors and Toolmakers are of the lowest level in the village hierarchy, you can’t even really eat with them.

Tarangpur also seems like a pretty ‘lively’ place to spend your time. The houses have low ceilings (if a ghost has to bend over to get into a place it won’t enter), and people thresh grain on the flat roofs, which often connect to each other.

“in Tarangpur, leadership is demonstrated, in day-to-day terms, by one’s ability to resolve disputes. The number of petty quarrels, misunderstandings, and insults - imagined and real - is very high in Tarangpur, and most individuals have a running feud with someone at any given time. Some people are more cantankerous than others and quarrel with more people than they are on friendly terms with. Others are quiet and mild-mannered and rarely engage in the public verbal battles - waged between rooftops at maximum decibel level - that are such a common feature of daily life in Tarangpur.”

Recent (for 1969) political changes in Nepal have meant more representative government; a boon in some ways as no-one liked the older government officials and now people can vote for representatives from their own community. Unfortunately, this has lead to outbreaks of Peak Democracy;

“With universal franchise at the local level, it is difficult to rig elections; if a seat is contested, the most competent and highly regarded candidate will usually win. But this is not invariably the case; in a village panchyat in Khasan, two candidates for pradhan campaigned by feasting the village. One candidate slaughtered one goat and the other slaughtered two goats and the candidate who served the most meat won.”

Goats mean Votes. In a manner familiar to anyone who knows politics on any level, the potential resources drawn from a political position, even the respect alone, mean people can go a bit far in a few places in their efforts to attain one;

“The combination of the vast sums required and vaulting political ambition has produced an intolerable strain on the finances of some individuals, who have had to resort to illegal activities - poaching musk deer and stealing religious idols - to continue the pursuit of political activities.”

‘Trans-Himalayan Traders is written, as much as an ethnography can be, a little like a thriller (Fisher and his wife spent their long cold winters reading, out loud, 60’s airport potboilers to each other in their rented room). In this case, the thrilling third-act reveal is that Tarangpur has another, secret, unstated yet fully known layer of hierarchy; the Marriage Class.

“Unlike clan membership, marriage-class membership is not publicly admitted; in fact, Tarangpurians do whatever they can do to conceal the very existence of marriage classes from those outside the system. Marriage-class membership is not a subject of open conversation among the villagers (at least among villagers of different marriage classes.) This is because the classes, unlike the clans, are ranked. The distinctions are therefore invidious in this society, whose people are so relentlessly egalitarian among themselves that any hint of inequality is immediately taken as an affront.

Giving everyone a clan name is, in effect, a way of masking membership in unequal marriage classes. ... Since the marriage classes are such unnamed and unspoken-of entities, their very existence is difficult to detect. It was several months before I was able to discover their presence. The first hint occurred when someone told me the reason he could not marry someone else was because their “mouth’s don’t match.”

The consequences of leaving your marriage class are immediate, total and virtually irreversible;

“To fall from a marriage class involves violating one of the two restrictions placed on membership in it: (1) eating symbolically contaminated food (i.e., food that someone outside the marriage class has shared); or (2) marrying someone outside the marriage class, since cohabitation would eventually compromise the purity of one’s food. Once these restrictions have been violated, there is no immediate way the damage can be undone. The rules or restriction are firm and the consequences of violation - disbarment from the marriage class - are irrevocable, at least over the short run of two or three generations.”

Fischer only stayed in Tarangpur for one year, and only found out about this secret level of society, that everyone knew about, but nobody mentioned, towards the end of his stay. It does make me think, first; what else didn’t he know, that would only become evident after three, or four or five years? and second; how necessarily shallow pretty much all travel stories and light ethnographies must by necessity be.

While genuinely egalitarian, in many ways, the Magar of Tarangpur are also stricken with Thorin Oakenshields gold sickness.

“Tarangpur women are famous far beyond the domains of Tichurong for the size of the gold earrings they wear on special occasions. Many hill women throughout Nepal store wealth in the form of thin but solid gold earring disks two or three inches in diameter, but the women of Tarangpur and neighbouring villages wear earrings about five inches in diameter - large enough to touch their shoulders. Forty years ago Taragpur women wore three-inch earrings, but as the commodities trading cycle became established, the increased earnings were invested in part in larger earrings.

...

Limitations imposed by human anatomy make still larger earrings an impossibility, but until recently this was an item of jewellery with “planned obsolescence” built into it. As the size increased, it became socially impossible to wear any size smaller than the largest size made.”

As well as, and on top of, their genuine egalitarianism and a general refusal to spend money on visible life-improvements, the families of Tarangpur are mad for profit, and profits are, (for some), very good. Some of these men are leading pretty huge convoys of mules and horses across the mountains, making a fair amount from either the salt trade or trade in commodities. Since they can’t show it, (except via ear-rings), what are they doing with it?

“Although a family will first of all hoard savings in the form of jewellery that can be displayed publicly on certain occasions, a family which has acquired as much jewellery as it can reasonably display at one time must find other ways of storing wealth. One method is to buy copper jugs, brass plates and other such kitchen vessels. These are then hidden away in back rooms of houses where they cannot be seen. ... Another way of storing wealth is to keep silver rupee coins, minted man years ago, in the metal vessels.”

As well as the free socialist village solidarity gifts for those down on their luck, and the arguably-optional gold-lust trading wealth, Tarangpur has a non-optional religious/culture tax in which certain households are randomly selected to host/pay for the Winter festival, something which is egregiously expensive. Manageable if you are a household with hidden silver rupees, but less so for the working poor.

“Tarangpur Magars have little sense of choice about expending wealth for these social and ceremonial purpose. To be a citizen of Tarangpur is to support and participate in these communal and life-cycle rituals, and it is in one’s pragmatic self-interest to secure the protection afforded by the sacrifices. There is no way in which a villager could opt out of the ceremonial cycles and still be a member of the moral community. Participation in ritual life is a way of affirming membership in the social order. In this elemental sense, these expenses are unavoidable. They are culturally constituted ways of disposing of wealth. For all the choices Tarangpurians have in their economic life, being a member in good standing of the village is not one of them. In the most fundamental sense, just as one can never chose to be born, one cannot realistically choose to reside in the village and not pay ones social dues. All these obligations just come with the territory.”

In conversation I think I called the Tarangpurians a bunch of absolute humans, and that still seems apt. I find their ethnic anguish about performing identity and being trapped between cultures, strangely hypermodern, their massively layered (and secret) society fascinating and their combination of outward egalitarianism, almost pointless gold-hunger and socialism, well, deeply human.

Fisher did return to ‘Tarang’ forty years later, and wrote a sequel, which I hope one day to read.

“Their main question was whether the astronauts had found a goddess on the moon. They were not particularly curious about the moon itself, and earlier cosmological queries produced little response. Tarangpurians had not thought much about the heavenly bodies. One informant said, when pressed, that because of the distances involved, the stars and moon must be bigger than they appear, a star being the size of a sheep and the moon the size of a yak.”

My plan isn’t to fundamentally change the methods from the first VotE, but to re-make them, to make the new versions more of a comprehensive generator, with a sequence of tools to systematically generate a large area, routes, cities, villages, trade routes etc.

Something else I would like to do in this version is gesture to or recommend alternate methods or other ways different people have tried to deal with this non-trivial problem of generating and mapping complex, *large* three-dimensional spaces underground.

My aim here isn’t to copy but to, in the spirit of a bibliography, directly point people towards alternative possibilities. (I am also planning on doing this with monsters so people can put together their own encounter charts).

So far the only other book I’m intimately familiar with which deals with this specific problem, is Douglas Niles Dungeoneers Survival Guide, which has a neat but somewhat challenging method for isometric mapping.

What other books or works, or even posts, are people familiar with that deal with, specifically; generating and mapping large pseudo-natural underground spaces?

(I know there are a million methods of dungeon and mega-dungeon design, that’s not what I am talking about here.)

2015 - Podecast

Back in 2015 Scrap and I played around with a ‘Podecast’ (i.e. each was at the antipode to the other), and ended up recording a brief run of unedited ‘conversations’ about a rather wild range of subjects which ranged from 2015 into 2016

Podecast 1 - The Experiment

https://archive.org/details/PatrickAndScrap1a

Podecast 2 - Monsters

https://archive.org/details/ScrapAndPatrick2a

Contents include; Rhiannas new video. Ghosts and why they hold candles. Skeletons and skeletor - egyptian theories of the dead. He-Man. Gas-Spores. Nazi Aurochs. “I’ve been around some pretty smelly subcultures.” Eating living things. Godzilla. Forbidden Planet. Imperialism and microbiology. Scrap fades in and out around this point for mysterious reasons. Possible collaborations. Natasha Allegri. Stephen Pyne. The state of modern poetry. The Art of Not Being Governed.(He wasn’t a poet.)

Podecast 3 BEAUTY

https://archive.org/details/ScrapAndPatrick3a

Contents; http://www.stuff.co.nz/dominion-post/news/72404517/judges-take-a-shine-to-wow-winner. Zak hates nature. Snails. “The child of love and war is sex”. A thick silky coffee with cardamon. Crepuscular Rays. kelvin helmholtz. http://www.pncc.govt.nz/media/32138/citizensadvicebureaulogo.jpg http://www.firstlighttravel.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/Maori-Rock-Art.jpg

Podecast 4 BEES

ttps://archive.org/details/ScrapAndPatrick4a

Contents; 1.20 Scrap starts rambling about chromosomes. - (seriously, think about skipping this part). 4.26 Gives up on that and starts again. Begins a very dark story about Bees. 8.00 King Arthur and Bees. 9.55 The Demiplane of British History. 13.25 Brief ramble here. 13.40 Other Planes, verticality. 14.50 Hook Birds. 15.25 Dinosauroids - http://povorot.deviantart.com/gallery/9348116/The-Dinosauroids. 15.35 The first few issues of Prophet. (I think these are in fact the same guy.) 16.35 “Bees, have to get this back to bees..” 17.20 Evolution of pollen, and therefore bees. 17.45 Exploiting colony organisms. Pretending to be ants. 20.10 We are colony organisms. 21.20 The nihilism of not cleaning your room. 21.45 Emergency coping mechanisms. 23.09 Sudden change in conversation due to girlfriend interruption. The Death of Avril Lavigne. 24.24 Schizophrenia. The voices are probably real. Believing you are in the matrix. 26.13 “That’s kind-of like a hive..” 26.45 In stories no-one can ever be competent. 28.15 Destroying a city with super-speed. 30.15 The delay between conception and creation. 31.00 Cut-Up

Podecast 5 relate-able and insightful points about a variety of role playing related conversation things

https://archive.org/details/Podecast5

Contents; 1.30 - Dark gods. 5.00 - FotVH Images. 8.30 - Please buy my fucking books. 9.30 - Making relate-able and insightful points about a variety of role playing related conversation things. 10.30 - Alchemy. 15.15 - First impressions of the OSR. 19.30 - Motivations are monsters from inside you. 21.30 - Choices in char gen. 31.30 - Cognitive silence. 33.30 - Traditional originality, fire, hirelings and dogs. 37.30 - Ten minutes on dark AI’s & nightmare futurism. 46.45 - Language, objects & baby psychology. 51.30 - Lard, the currency of agency. 55.00 - Stories, memory and experience, the grand conflict. 58.30 - Fail states.

Podecast 6 The Wonderful Kererū

https://archive.org/details/Podecast5RemasteredAudio

The Wonderful Kererū appears only once in this Podecast but exemplifies the spirit of both participants, a fat, pompous, ridiculous animal snatching a whole twig from the tree of thought, eating a single flower and then throwing the rest away.

Contents; 0.07 - VotE. 2.38 - Weightlifters with no penises. 3.37 - Do you want to talk about pre-history? (We do not do this.) 4.36 - I cut a huge amounts of blathering out here. 5.00 - Scraps game. 7.10 - Complexity and depth. 9.30 - Scrap has a moment of clarity about the nature of Complexity. 11.10 - Where it actually starts to get interesting. 11.50 - The capacity of a post-apocalyptic world to create its own context. 13.10 - A new place to put adventures. 13.45 - “What’s his face? The guy who does Udan-Adan? We’ll probably never know his real name.” 14.15 - Our regular obligatory mention of Zak. 15.50 - Who did invent ‘the dungeon as a living thing? 17.28 - A Ghost in my house. 18.30 - The ‘blank slate’ game world & identity. 20.43 - Eve as the first D&D player, Adam as a Storygamer. 22.28 - Rachel Pollack’s ‘Unquenchable Fire’ I got the name wrong in the podcast. 24.26 - Our other regular segment on colonialism. 26.16 - Mention of Potatoes causes internet to drop out. 28.10 - It’s ‘Henry Moreton Stanely’ and I may well be wrong about Cortez. Have fun with Wikipedia. 31.45 - “You’re treating those children like subhumans.” 33.41 - Scrap is confused by the moral exchange inherent to Government. Sarah Horrocks would probably agree. 38.15 - “If only one culture has reliable deep-water navigation, that culture is effectively playing D&D with the world.” 39.45 - Cowboys on Mars. 41.53 - We expand our mentions of Zak to include his sister? Anyway, X-Men school-style Character Gen. 47.39 - Communicating on a Meta-Level. Maybe our players are friends. 49.15 - MY SPECIAL SETTING!! 51.00 - We cycle back to, or around, different contexts in which to place adventures.. 52.00 - The ancient civilization of Dan. 55.09 - The Halfmen of O by Maurice Gee. 56.55 - The Changeover by Margaret Mahy. 58.45 - Does the Conspiracy Theorist have a D&Dish world? No, not really. 60.01 - Pre-apocalyptic D&D. 60.03 - Stealing & faking art throughout history. 60.05 - Dirtbag Greys. The Burke & Hare of space. 60.07 - Changes in scale. Insect wars. 60.08 - The Author was ‘William Tenn’ and the book is Of Men and Monsters. 70.45 - Giants would be very vulnerable, and likely peaceful. 72.55 - The wonderful Kererū or New Zeland Wood Pidgeon. (A bird that flies through the glass in your window is also playing D&D). 76.00 - “Birds would be good D&D characters.” 81.00 - Evil Dolphins.

2017

The Secret DM — Veins of the Earth Interview with Patrick Stuart and Scrap Princess

A text interview about the original ‘Veins of the Earth’.

http://www.thesecretdm.com/2017/04/veins-of-earth-interview-patrick-stuart.html

2018

What Would the Smart Party Do? — Episode 80

I am not even sure what we talk about here but hopefully Dirks art for Silent Titans gets a mention!

http://media.blubrry.com/thesmartparty/content.blubrry.com/thesmartparty/WhatWouldTheSmartPartyDo_80.mp3

https://smartparty.wordpress.com/2018/09/13/patrick-stuart-interview/

2018

The Great Crystal Debate!

The missing interview!!

Back in 2018 I was making my (negative) views on CRYSTALS widely known, when who should step forth to challenge me but the fool and creator of the BREAK! RPG, Reynaldo Mandarinian. To settle the matter for All Time, we got into a SAVAGE hour long verbal dual which, since there seem to be no copies surviving online, I will assume I won.

If anyone out there has any records or copies of the Great Crystal Debate, please let me know in the comments. The world deserves to hear my (assumed) victory, and how crystals were defeated for All Time.

2019

Ignite Liverpool — Talk on the Wapentake

I am slightly embarrassed to see myself physically incarnated in maybe my only physical in-person talk.

Those of you familiar with ‘Silent Titans’ will know about the ‘Wapentake of Wirral’ from that book, based on a real historical incident in which a corrupt lawyer got his hands on the medieval documents giving ownership of a dark age court and used them to form a criminal gang and extort the people of the Wirral.

The Worm Ouroboros with Tom Fitzgerald

In this interview the beloved creator of ‘Middenmurk’, sits down to talk with me about the excellent and under-discovered ‘Worm Ouroboros’ by E.R. Eddison. (One day I will read the Zimiamvia trilogy).

https://archive.org/details/TheWormOuroborosWithTomFitzgerald

2020

Loco Ludus

I have no idea what we talked about, but its 55 minutes long!

https://creators.spotify.com/pod/profile/loco-ludus/episodes/Interview-with-Patrick-Stuart-ebgc3h

‘Udda Ting’ podcast

Henrik Möllers podcast is still going strong. In this one I think we talked mainly about Veins of the Earth.

The Magniloquent Moth

I wish I remembered what we talked about…

Part One here;

and part two here;

https://creators.spotify.com/pod/profile/themoth/episodes/A-Conversation-with-Patrick-Stuart--second-course-ecd86v/a-a1rt9uf

2021

Appendix N Book Club — Episode 103: Mervyn Peake’s Titus Groan

I actually remember this one and it was fun! I finally got to talk about something other than my own books!

https://player.fm/series/appendix-n-book-club/episode-103-mervyn-peakes-titus-groan-with-special-guest-patrick-stuart

Zock Bock Radio

Apparently I am, (or was?) the Townes van Zandt of the OSR. I don’t know what that means but I will assume its good! Show notes in the link!

https://pesa-nexus.de/2021/08/29/episode-25-he-is-the-village-green-innovation-society/

Monsters and Manuals (Noisms) — Video Interview

I am horrified by the sight of my own face so will rush past this one.

https://monstersandmanuals.blogspot.com/2021/08/video-interview-with-patrick-stuart-of.html

Weird & Wonderful Worlds

Ahh blessed text.

http://weirdwonderfulworlds.blogspot.com/2021/08/patrick-stuart-false-machine-interview.html

Whose Measure God Could Not Take

This one covers the Demon-Bone Sarcophagus Kickstarter, Gawain and the OSR community:

https://whosemeasure.blogspot.com/2021/09/interview-patrick-stuart-of-false.html

Then..

Silence

Or at least, no interviews or appearances from 2021 to 2025 where I popped up in the ‘Weird Hope Engines’ zine fair.

Looking back on it, some of these bursts of extroversion were to help with Kickstarters, but it looks like the relative failure of ‘Demon-Bone Sarcophagus’ and the hangover from Covid really fucked me up more than I realised. I may have brought books out but I really didn’t leave the house for years. Damn.

Now, once again, I fitfully stumble into action, to prove to myself and the world that I exist.

(Seriously if anyone has a copy of the Great Crystal Debate let me know.)

The Ring of the Nibelung adapted by P Craig Russell

Everyone’s a cunt. That is one aspect the Nazis got right.

I saw this lying behind glass in a bookshop the U.S.A. I checked the price; extortionate. Then checked the price for a copy in the U.K.; staggering, nearly twice as much. Therefore, I bought this rare and heavy comic book, telling myself it was a good deal.

I don’t know much about Wagner. I have never listened to his music in full, or seen a full Opera. I am unfamiliar with any original Legends of the Ring of the Niebelung. This was my introduction to the story as-a-whole. I do know about P Craig Russel; I was a big fan of his Sandman issues, I had his Dr Strange trade, bits of his Elric and one or two of his Opera adaptations. Comics in the Western mode are hard to do well. Manga is stuffed with lone artist-creators but, at least so far as I am aware, they don’t do much modernism/pagehacking. (I await your angry rebuttals in the comments). What I loved about Russel was his synthesis of many of the arts of a classical illustrator, and his extreme ability regarding space/time page arrangement. Something you rarely get in comics.

I have mixed feelings, some of which come from Russel, some from Wagner, but it does have some very HIGH high points.

Russell Being Fucking Amazing

The Bravura go-fuck-yourself, actually-I’m-a-genius parts of Russells adaptation come through in his large spreads of clouds and nature, his abstractions of subtle musical themes into elegant arrangements of modernist tiles, Valkyries and magical women FLIPPING OUT and general comic-craft. These are the big hits we are here for!

Russell Being Subtle

The careful maintenance of what I assume is Wagners vision, and which I will complain about later, does some good in sustaining aspects of dramaturgy that might be lost in other hands. The flow of voice and image to synthesis the rise, fall, boom and anguish of Wagners score, is fluid, pleasant and expressive. He is probably doing even more stuff I didn’t notice, because it was done well! That’s the problem with subtlety, no one notices.

Russell Being Kinda Cringe

Some of the costuming, acting, and, for want of a better word; staging, feels slightly off.

In particular, it looks to me like Russell based his character designs either directly on Wagners stated intentions or on close-to-original costumes for Opera singers. This does not work. This is a tale of Gods, Monsters and BIG things happening in the sky. Russells ‘special effects’ come from the world of illustration and painting, they are huge and wild and hurl the action up into the stars or down into the earth, but the characters who go there are dressed like the actors of a play, or costumed as the singers of an opera. Yet they are not on stage, but placed directly into the drawn reality the music and the tale imply. This produces the curious effect not of seeing Votan striding across the clouds above the earth, but of seeing an actor dressed as Votan, but actually, literally striding across the clouds above the earth.

This costuming is necessary for some aspects of Dramaturgy; Siegfried taking Brunhilde’s armour and wearing it, the baddy from the last part being in a way, a dirtbag version of Votan, but there is a conflict in the image between the needs of fantasy and opera-recreation. When Albrecht turns into a magical dragon, it is a dragon from fantasy, wonderous and strange, but when Siegfried fights Fafnir, it feels like a stage play, and Fafnir seems like a school-play dragon with a bunch of guys inside holding him up. Likewise some of the horned helms, Votans questionable fashion choices, Sigfried’s bearskin spring-fit, all these things feel a little off in the grand and numinous world Russell has made for them. It feels a bit like playing with your Star Wars dolls in the ‘Volume’.

Likewise there are some closeups that maybe don’t work as perfectly as they should, and some parts where Russell maybe fades from ‘illustration’ pictures into ‘comic book’ pictures a little too quickly and gracelessly.

Chud Wagner

But most of the problems come from the source; everyone’s a cunt. This is one aspect the Nazis got right. In Wagner, everyone is vaguely nasty, dim, manipulative and self-interested. It feels like we are meeting everyone on the worst day of their lives. Siegfried and Votan are charismatic psychopaths who presumably do some good for someone, but this largely happens offstage.

The story is racist against gold-gathering dwarves, which people at the time read as Jews, but who I almost read as Germans; it’s ok to live underground and enjoy crafting. The heroes are creepy, clearly they are meant to be, but how much? Siegfried is a little bit of a soulless abomination, it’s not a surprise he got tricked easily.

This is not Shakespeare where “yes I’m a Jew, but I have a point” or even Demon-Slayer where “I did eat a lot of children, but do you know I was once also a child? And partially eaten?” - the villains only point of strength is fingering ‘heroes’ weakness, not in defending their own. This is not a humanist story and no-one in it much sympathy or interest in anyone else, (unless they are in Wagnerian and maybe incestuous Chud-Love, in which the partners literally merge and exult each other, till one forgets...).

Emotional isolation and the absence of love or mutual recognition will be a strange and curious theme which plays lightly in the backstage of the following Dooms. In a lot of ways these stories are about absences.

Wise Wagner

Votan in this is more of a cunt but also more actually-sympathetic than most Odins. He is a worse guy but clearly has big problems, not just from his own mistakes but from his own family, who are consistently demanding stuff from him then complaining about the consequences. A schemer and a shit, his clearly divided mind makes him a hypocrite, but a fascinating character. Oddly, he might be the least Fascist Votan; a sly little monkey who does seem to love his kin and feels bad about betrayal. Votan has mixed motives and moral anguish in a way Fascists are not meant to. If he has a mirror elsewhere in these Dooms, it may be the Pizzaro of ‘The Royal Hunt of the Sun’, a bold, manipulative murderer, but sane enough to recognise his own failures. Votan even gives the ring away, which is rare. I felt bad when Valhalla burnt to bits.

The arguments and problems that underpin the drama are much more complex, layered and subtle than I expected. My sense impression of Wagner was that it was dumber than this, but at least up until Siegfried arrives, everyone’s moral position, while flawed, is much more explicable and saner than I thought it would be. The conflicts between people lead to manipulation, escapes, dooms and long (presumably sung) claims and counter-claims. Maybe I shouldn’t be surprised that in a German story everyone has well worked-out positions. Votan just wanted a big house, (and to stiff his workers on the contract, truly the most bourgeoise of motivations) (his WIFE asked for one), and now look at the absolute mess he has gotten into, scheming even against himself and feeling rotten about it.

There is much more actual love in this than one would expect from Hitlers favourite epic. People are kind of shit but the story does contain a rich, romantic, even Pagan sense of genuine love, at least between Brunhilde and Siegfried (the two main love stories being incest and creepy I-loved-you-as-a-foetus, are more Chud Wagner though). The whole story is about sacrificing love for power and how this doesn’t work out. The Nazis did this and it didn’t work out. It’s weird how close they stuck to the text. They played this in the Berlin Opera House with the roof blown off as the Russians were entering the city. I feel like Hitler may have taken the wrong message from this tale of a resentful dwarf who sacrifices love for power and ends up dooming himself and his people.

They got the DOOM part right. The world of ‘Ring’ is a zero-sum reality where any attempt to do anything “great” (i.e using resources you don’t actually have, towards a goal you can’t afford), incurs some terrible debt on the spindle of the Norns, and the more you try to escape this debt, the harder comes the fall.

So many of these stories are about Empire, Domination and Great Order. Actually, all of them are and I didn’t notice until now. Honestly I just put together a list of things I had reviewed that generally involved “Doom” and only on looking down the list do I see that all of them are about trying to create, or to sustain, an Empire; from The Ring of the Nibelung and Votans giant Heaven-House, to ‘Dropsite Massacres’ Imperium of Man, to the para-Germany of Tanya the Evil, to New Spain and finally to Rome, I looked for Doom and found it under Golden Eagles every time.

The Fall of Otrar by Ardak Amirkulov

I have been forced to watch another soil movie.

This film went so hard an Empire fell on it. ‘Fall of Otrar’ tells the story of the intrigue and failures in one particular steppe-city which has come under the eye of the Great Khan. Will the people of Otrar and their tribal confederation be able to stand against the Mongol Horde? No.

Production Hell

The Soviet Union literally collapsed on this movie while they were making it. It was a government job (because; Soviet Union, all jobs are government jobs), and once the government was gone there was no-one left to fund it. I think Ardak Amirkulov bought his own film off the government in order to complete it. Many people speak of the subtle use of colour here and there instead of the sepia film; I think it likely they just ran out of certain kinds of film, or could only recover certain kinds. What’s left is gleaned from the soil of Khazakstan as much as the rare antiquities of Ortrar.

Broken Backed Movie

The first part and opening sequence has Dokhdurbek Kydyraliyev playing the worlds coolest guy; sent to scout on the Mongols, he has infiltrated them, learned their methods of war, and their intentions, and now, at great risk to himself, and substantial sacrifice, has returned to the Kipchak confederation to Tell All and deliver his Grave Warning; these are literally the most dangerous people on earth and they are coming here! We have a brief window of opportunity to take them on!

No-one believes him. The court is split between the Leader and his Mother, everyone is obsessed with intrigue and recent events. No-one sees the Mongols as a substantial threat compared to other nearby powers. Everyone thinks he is a spy sent to give false information. In fact they string him up and he is only barely rescued by even more intrigue.

(This bears a curious similarity to the fate of Atahualpa, the Incan Emperor who, when told that a small number of strange foreigners with metal weapons, riding giant animals, are snaking their way through his territory, decides to just let them come. It was perhaps inconceivable to the near-victor of an utterly savage civil war, that a tiny gang of odd aliens could be a significant threat. We shall see if that was true later in ‘The Royal Hunt of the Sun’. The theme of the immediate tactical situation blinding one to a terrible strategic situation comes up also in ‘Tanya the Evil.)

This first part of the film has really strong dramaturgy as various individuals and factions try to make the whole see sense, but are unable, or unwilling to sacrifice enough to force the point. There are deep, interesting and dramatic tangles of loyalty and resentment, and more importantly, Dokhdurbek Kydyraliyev (and yes I cut-pasted that in) is charismatic, captivating and on screen almost all the time.

But this film is a tragedy and the Kipchaks lose at the end, so the second half of the movie is that happening. The second part is still beautifully directed but is mainly Otrar falling, and has less Dokhdurbek Kydyraliyev.

It does have a lot of armour, beauty, light, Mongols, Genghis, gnomic sayings, donkeys, earthen walls and so-on. It is extremely sad, beautiful and long. Ardak Amirkulov knows how to place a camera - there are many shots and scenes of deep beauty. It is a very beautiful film.

Soil

This film reminded me a lot of the Eve of Ivan Kupalo. Even though this isn’t a formalist film in the same way, a huge amount of the mood, tone and techniques seem similar. Maybe they are both steppe movies? They are at different ends of the great grass highway from Ukraine to Manchuria but in a world-historical sense these are kind of the same place? This is absolutely a soil movie. I am not sure what people are building with that isn’t earth because it’s not like you are going to see a tree. The plain is vast, the horsemen are laughing, the cities made of earth rise from the earth and crumble into it, leaving scars of earth. There is a lot of texture. Like in Ivan Kupalo, there are also a lot of chickens introduced into scenes, and other animals casually or actively hanging out in the mid-frame, and one scene where the camera ejaculates donkeys.

In directorial terms there is a lot of (very good) framing of frames within frames and arches within arches and what have you, which seems a lot like Ivan Kupalo.

I also didn’t really love the people, or found it hard to relate to them for a slightly similar reason. This is a story where people either say like “your wife is fat as a pig!” resulting in UPROAROUS LAUGHTER from wide mouthed cackling plainsmen, or they say the most gnomic incomprehensible shit ever like “the fire of Allah lives in the shadow of the dream” and people just nod. The lack of signalling and oblique movements between scenes, either deliberately as a distancing effect, or just because they lost that footage with the Soviet Union, made things hard for me to follow.

Dropsite Massacre

Competent. and, like a zen garden, about nothing at all.

The Horus Heresy! The big space war that came before the main space war in Warhammer 40,000, the setting dedicated to space war and doom. The Dropsite Massacre on Istvaan V; a pivotal disaster for the Imperium of Man in which, lead by Ferrus Mannus, three Legions are lured into an all-out attack on the traitors, then trapped and massacred when their reinforcements turn out to also be traitors.

Exactly how did this battle go down? Well, we found out in the Forgeworld pseudo-history ‘Black Books Volume Two’, in the ‘Journal Tactica; Isstvan Dropsite Massacre – Part One’, and partly in the novels ‘Fulgrim’, ‘The First Heretic’, ‘Deliverance Lost’, and in a whole bunch of other articles, lists, fragments, books and so on.

But!! Have we ever had a novel (specifically), only about the Dropsite Massacre? Well, not quite, till now! John French has arrived on the scene so show us an historical fiction novel about a fictional history.

Competent Books About Things That Don’t Matter

Who is John French? He excels at these procedural zen-garden novels; less perfect than the stone spheres that make them up. but competent. and, like a zen garden, about nothing at all. French would be a perfect Alpha-Legion writer, his plans are magnificent and intelligent in the details, but pointless. Like a well drawn map with a multi-stage riddle sequence that unerringly leads you to the toilet in your own house.

In French’s ‘Cypher’, about the eponymous and extremely mysterious agent related to the Dark Angels, we get an incursion into an actual Cypher; no-one knows his motivation! By the end, we still don’t! A lot of time is spent musing over; what does this guy really actually want? What is his actual deal? Well, we didn’t know before and we don’t know now.

In French’s Fourth ‘Ahriman’ book about the mysterious, time-looped, god-bothered and arguably-evil space sorcerer, the eponymous Ahriman gets himself (spoilers) into a time loop and ‘wins’ by manipulating his own timestream so that he never enters the loop, becoming his own saviour and worst enemy. The narrative eats itself. Very appropriate for Ahriman the unwilling slave of Tzeetch. Really super on-point. And pointless.

From the guy who hangs around being mysterious and still is, to the book about a sorcerer wiping out the very events of the book he is in, making it a narrative dead-end, we come to the Dropsite Massacre. We have gone over all this TWICE at least. Now we are going to go over it again. And like those mentioned above, this is not a bad book. There is much to be said for it. But why does it exist? And are we, (god help us), going to get more and more and more books going over the SAME imaginary battles again and again?

I mean I did actually buy and read/Audible all these books so; spoken preference/ revealed preference, however I am still going to cope.

Granular Dumb Is Still Dumb

There is a strong tradition in Horus Heresy writing of the authors angrily re-writing each other because one of them did something dumb. And to be fair, some of them are genuinely pretty stupid.

In this case the ‘something dumb’ exists more in the text than in its writers, and is the now maybe forty year old decision by Ferrus Mannus to dominate the Raven Guard and Salamanders and bet the future of humanity on throwing enough military mass to conquer a spiral arm at one spot on one planet, knowing that it’s a trap but not knowing how much of one it is.

The policy of “this is clearly a trap” followed by “and we are going to walk right into it” happens mainly in fiction. In real life people do not walk into traps intending to overcommit and thus break the trap open because that is a dumb thing to do. If you can overcommit your opponent can too and so you end up in the same position. Ferrus, and the Imperium, did a real dumb thing.

People have done dumber things in real history. It’s not completely immersion or sanity-breaking. Now instead of the grand vague tragedy of ‘Then their doom came upon them’, we are taken into meeting rooms, cross-channel communications, men in rooms making plans about men in rooms. ‘Dropsite Massacre’ sketches in the details, impulses and drives of a big bad decision, but doesn’t make it any less dumb. People just not thinking clearly in 4k is still bumbling.

Dooms Various

The Warhammer 40,000 setting is built on many-layered Dooms. The entire Galaxy got Doomed even before humanity existed, the Chaos Gods doom it again, humanity rose and nearly met its Doomin the Age of Strife and the Emperors super-Nietzschean plan of covertly taking on those Chaos Gods Doomed his nascent empire, and if he hadn’t done so, it may well have been Doomed some other way.

Point being; of all these stories or fragments of histories, there are more dooms to choose from here. The core emotions we drew from ‘Ring of the Nibelung’ do not disappoint. Ferrus is so utterly maniacally obsessed with confronting his brother Fulgrim that he leads the expedition to destruction. Why is he so obsessed? Because he really really loved that particular brother more than any other (they are strongly influenced by the story of Guts and Griffith from Berserk). Love, poisoned, lead him to his doom. Why do Coraz and Vulkan let him? Corax is the most introverted man ever and his persuasive abilities are zero, Vulkan is a little different but, as delineated in this book, Alpha Legion shenanigans keep the brothers from communicating until all the major decisions have been made.

Though this is perhaps the most fictional of all these fictions, the basic architecture of the Doom are surprisingly coherent and mirror those of the others; personal obsession due to the quirks and vulnerabilities of one particular soul, breakdowns in communication at a vital time, a general but dangerously inchoate sense of threat, the sense that something must be done now. Now now now. How like the death of Atahualpa. A general, deep, almost unconscious but powerful sense of ‘fatedness’; a kind of abandonment of the self as individuals and the dedication of all present to what seems, but is never directly stated to be, a pre-ordained path. This un-stated argument more powerful because it is unstated, invisible, unspeakable. All who resist it are traitors, (and there are traitors everywhere, there is no trust), but any who name it out loud are also traitors. There is a deep sense of minds living very closely and very blindly to their unconscious. I am reminded of Rebecca West listening to Serbs describe the battle of Kosovo in ‘Black Lamb, White Falcon’; “we were not in our right mind”, “the nation had elected to die”. Perhaps it is the loss of absolute faith so necessary to commit terrible acts, a loss which must be shared by all, but held secretly, which no-one is allowed to see or say.

Good Art?

The question is; does John French doing a deep, granular dive on the decision process make good fiction, good pseudohistory, good art?

Somewhat.

There are so many fun an interesting bits; Corax hanging out in an empty room with only an antique grandfather clock, all the procedural dicking around as the Alpha Legion instantiate PLANS, Kharn feeling sad and having post-traumatic-demon-disorder, the birth of the Noise Marines. Because we already know what’s going to happen, and much of how it does happen, ‘Dropsite’ is given room to become more like a kaleidoscope social novel composed of all these smaller and previously un-regarded points of view, a scene of mass incredible events told through this constellation of vivid pinpricks. Everyone is better written in ‘Dropsite’ than they are in most other tellings of this story, and what they say and do makes more intuitive sense. ‘Dropsite’ is also consistently interesting to read, (though might flag badly as an audiobook, there is no strong narrative drive), ‘fills in’ and, let’s be generous, enlivens, deepens, and makes more detailed and therefore more emotionally telling, the great machinery of this titanic event.

It’s not good art because there is no reason for it to exist, it isn’t ‘doing anything’. It’s like a photograph of the model for the Mona Lisa, or more like a photograph of the scene outside Van Goughs asylum window, where he would see a starry night.

The Saga of Tanya the Evil

Nordic Race Gooning & Light Pedo vibes

Not ALL anime is about World War Two, some is about World War One (which turns into World War Two). ‘Tanya’ is an offbeat Isekai for weepy Japanese nationalists and artillery gooners which combines a host of standard Isekai and Anime tropes into something somewhat interesting. This is a review of the Anime, (original title is more like ‘Young-Girls War-Story?’) which only got one season and a movie.

In modern-day Japan, a cold-hearted hyper-rationalist, hyper-capitalist corporate salaryman is about to die and meets ‘God’ or some version. They get into an argument in which the protagonist refuses to acknowledge God properly and in revenge, ‘God’ (who the protagonist calls ‘Being X’), Isekais the him into the body of a baby girl in a war-torn alternative Europe. Here in this fantasy land which is early 20^th century Europe but-with-magic, the protagonist is a blonde, blue-eyed, small, pre-teen girl with magical powers but the drive and intelligence of an adult man. Thankfully there is no explicit loli shit.

For Tanya, life is an anti-spiritual struggle to survive and continue defying the will of ‘Being X’. Having adult intelligence, ‘Tanya’ learns the baseline magic of this setting quickly and, intending to get herself out of her orphanage and into a safe position in a war-torn world, volunteers for the army, becoming a hyper-patriot.

But she is a patriot for pseudo-Germany in pseudo WWI. Tanya is a brilliant military operator, (she knows much of the history of modern warfare), and, while ostensibly trying to get away from the front and keep herself safe, wins many startling victories. All her brilliant military successes, pull pseudo-Germany deeper into a war that strategically, it simply cannot win. This is a road to disaster paved by Nike (Goddess not Shoe Company). If Tanya doesn’t fight well, she might die. If she fights and wins, the war extends, and her victory fills the hawks who run the state, (pseudo-anime-Hindenburg and pseudo-anime-Ludendorff) with more and more confidence; more power to deepen the war! Another front my lads!

Even more interesting, ‘Tanya’ already knows the actual history of WW1 and continually tries to guide Isekai-Germany away from doomed temporary victories and towards some kind of strategic settlement, but everything she does only makes things worse. Given missions that will result in victory, mass civilian casualties and an intensification of the war, she pulls dance moves in uniform heels while mocking the logic, but obeys. The girl likes fighting.

I don’t know how the original Light Novel series ended, but if it stays on course things will probably end up with ‘Magical World War One’ transmuting into ‘Magical World War Two’, (something partially accelerated by Tanyas pre-emptive creation of advanced future tactics), culminating in the entry of pseudo-America and possibly the dropping of a magical nuke.

A chilly sense of materialist sadness and slightly whiney ‘poor-me’ism impregnates the story in which magical Germany, (as it so often does), carries the emotional weight of Imperial Japan in real life. ‘How did things go so wrong?’ Because you were fascist retards, it’s not that complicated. There is little Grand Tragedy to the fall of Imperial Japan; the people in charge propose something retarded, the libs say no, and are assassinated, and the hawks-who-can-read-numbers also so no, because; America = BIG, but ultimately shut their mouths to avoid being assassinated.

But Germany in WW1 is a little different and, while slightly mental, is nowhere near as mental as Fascist Germany or Fascist Japan will turn out to be. It is at least theoretically possible that some cold, German version of sanity might have broken out.

Was Votan a little like this, back in the ‘Nibelung’? So proud of his clever schemes and tactical intelligence, yet with every deal and scheme, more and more contracts and agreements spiralling round the shaft of the Odinspear, torn from Yggrasil, every word becoming cosmic law and every law binding closer and closer…

The anime has some pretty good military wank and some excellent Murder-Quiddich action sequences as mages fly on super-sticks and make their rifle bullets explode with fireball intensity.

The Royal Hunt of the Sun

A bad film of a great play.

Pizzaro! He was the cousin of Cortez. He knew the plot and set off to repeat it. Now.. with the Inca! Guys we can just do the same thing again and it will work out fine, it’s a stone age/bronze age culture built around a God-King, trust me guys…

Pizzaro and his goons wind their way into Undiscovered Country; a land of mystery, ruled by the Great Inca. Also a land at the end of a savage civil war between God-Kings over a hyper-centralised kind-of Communist Empire. When someone tells the Emperor Atahualpa that a couple hundred men armoured in metal, holding shining swords and riding mighty beasts, are clambering their way across the mountains, he barely worries at all. Why would he? He sits surrounded by an army of many thousands, one of several such armies, and has been fighting for his divine life against his brother for years, a war he has now virtually won. What does one or two hundred odd foreigners mean? Perhaps he will make them mercenaries, or steal their knowledge and their beasts. He could have killed them all at any time.

What actually happens is that through an insane sequence of events this gang takes Atahualpa, the Great Inca, prisoner, forces him to fill a room with gold, and then executes him, before ruining and overthrowing Incan culture and replacing it with their own. How could he possibly have guessed?

‘The Royal Hunt of the Sun’ was a great 1970s play about the relationship between Pizzaro and Atahualpa while one was captive of the other. The film is not great but it carries the bones of the play underneath it. Robert Shaw plays Pizzaro and sustains much. Christopher Plummer takes some BIG SWINGS as Atahualpa, playing him as a fey, sexy, screeching weirdo, and frankly misses but sometimes you have to go big and see what happens! It is not a huge surprise he does not talk much about this exquisitely racially uncomfortable role!

Filming in Peru was probably a mistake. The ruins are ruins, they add little to the tale. Peru’s sometimes amazing scenery doesn’t show up much. Neither does the film make use of the shitloads of Peruvian natives you would need to bring home the enormous scale of the Inca empire. The frames stay empty. Looking at photos of the stage play, it looks amazing, wreathed in shadows and well-arranged. The film is competently directed but its scenes are dressed and lit with mid skill and low resource. The horrific violence is de-blooidified, likely for cost reasons but if you put the historically-accurate amount of violence on screen it would turn off most audiences.

The fall of the Inca, and the related fall of the Aztecs, is perhaps the largest, real-life Doom in all this list. A true Doom must be massive, but how personal these two were, coming down to the precise relations between a handful of men and a cluster of chaotic scenes. It was a bacterial hurricane that collapsed Meso-America; the shape of things was ‘graved upon the Odin-Spear; it would have happened anyway, but it’s not hard to imagine an Aztec rump-state, or an Incan rump state, holding out, adapting, presenting a stronger opposition to Spanish rule, and perhaps maintaining a true opposition up until the present day. These things nearly happened anyway! The final redoubts of the Inca held out for ages!

Atahualpa was bound to his time, focused on the now; a worldling. We dream of alternate causalities; what would it have taken to produce an alternate result? At the point of fracture, only a rare genius in the right place might end up with something different, but such certainties and changes are hidden in the subtle weft of time, perhaps a slightly slower Spanish expansion, with a few more strange expatriates left behind, wandering in the forest, absorbed by native culture and passing on their skills, even passing on their bacteria, to make a slower, kinder plague?

Caligula; the Ultimate Cut

A Movie for sluts.

The Emperor Tiberius, (here played by Peter O’Toole), a man so rapey and paedophilic (according to Suetonius) that even the Romans were horrifically put off by him. A man not liked! His likely heir; Germanicus, is a rootin-tootin fightin’ man who does proper Roman things! The people love him!

Of course being the adored likely heir of a widely despised Emperor is not a low-risk position. Germanicus dies, as does almost every other possible heir, all except for Caligula; named ‘Little Boots’ for the military costume the soldiers made for him when he was just a child. Caligula even survives Tiberius’ Rape Island. He crawls, flatters, dissembles, acts, and Tiberius never actually kills him. And when Tiberius is mysteriously suffocated, Caligula, son of the ever-beloved Germanicus, becomes the new Emperor. What happens next? Watch this film to find out!

‘Caligula’ is another beautifully doomed production about a doomed situation. A script written by Gore Vidal, direction by arty sleazebag Tinto Brass, funded by Penthouse founder Bob Guccioni, with (incredible) sets and costumes by Danilo Donati and starring Malcolm McDowall, Helen Mirren and Teresa Ann Savoy.

Everyone involved in this film had a completely different sense of what it actually was and the result was more a series of relatively banned or un-banned re-releases over decades than an actual movie. Vidals first script was ‘too gay’, Tinto Brass was kicked out before the edit, the first released version was massively hugely cut down and received an 18 rating. Everyone is hunting for the ‘real’ Caligula. Now an ‘Ultimate Cut’ exists made up almost entirely of footage that wasn’t even used in the first version. It is fascinating, beautiful and not that good.

‘Caligula’ is horny, dirty, sleazy, film with Helen Mirrens tits and amazing sets, that somehow still manages to be boring. I have never before seen something so bad with so many good things in it. The crushing weight of this story is that, perhaps through the many metamorphoses of its making, or through some odd alchemy in its protean root, the expression is autistic, with literally no idea how humans of any kind actually emote. All that is precious is ground beneath a monstrous glacier of hyperborean Autism. This is a slog to watch, you might want to break it up into hourly sections.

Magnificent Stages; The sets and ridiculously widescreen scope shots are of a quality perhaps never before achieved. Huge, wide, wider than the eye, and packed, we see the action of the story through a series of panoramic vistas which strand all the characters in great sweeping structures of power, culture and decadence. The sets are really amazing. This does not work; it mutes the distinction and particularity of the performances and doesn’t serve the relatively subtle, or at least, intimate, script. You could make a film based on these sets, maybe a big alienating art film, or a dissonant funny hyper Wes-Anderson film, but the script and the story would need to be arranged for this particular form of wide-open, neck-turning where’s-wally storytelling, and this isn’t really done. Still, amazing, really amazing sets and scenes.

Probably-Amazing Performances; Malcom McDowall is older than he should be but has not yet experienced twink death, he more than manages to hold the screen between his wonderous thighs. Helen Mirren and Peter O’Toole are also very good, very strong performances. The poor girl who plays Drusilla wasn’t very good but she tried her hardest. This is yet another formalist film in which experienced Shakespearian actor Sir John Gielgud delivers an extended speech while in a bath, why does this keep happening to him? Does he like being wet? Or is he cursed? The weight and power of these performances is stranded in the screen and, as I already mentioned, crushed by a dissonant autism. Imagine here, someone who insists on telling jokes but who’s jokes never land, or a conversation over a staggered video service where people are always freezing and talking over each other. Everything happens at the wrong time and in the wrong rhythm! One sort-of functional aspect of this is, because we spend so much time focused directly on Caligula, and because everything that happens around him is awkward, muted, strange, and because he is a man who no-one can say no to, we do feel as if we are being sucked into his weird world, an intense illusory reality where anything is possible, nothing is real, everyone hates you, and you hate them, but everyone smiles to your face. This is what it means to tread the world beneath your little boots.

Echoes of what must have been a really good script; Gore Vidal wrote this! You can barely tell. Everything is crushed, smothered, distorted, overwhelmed, metamorphosed into something strange. Only fragments and inferences of what the script probably should have been like, remain. Caligula’s crazed stress-dancing where, as he sinks into madness, he compulsively performs his ‘little boots’ dance, actually works well. “take my horse to his room” is maybe the only joke left that actually lands like a joke.

Though perhaps not technically a formalist film, this shares many of the negatives of that type; visually gorgeous and inventive, autistic, only works if you already know the story (I did and it still wasn’t good), hierographic performances, makes you feel uncomfortable but probably not entirely in the way intended, bobs & vagany. Oh the Dave McKean opening is really good.

The DOOM of Caligula? A fey young man raised in a position of enormous status and expectation, massively privileged in some ways, in others; hunted to destruction as a slave in the night. His entire close family was murdered by his mega-rapist all-powerful great uncle. He was fighting to survive with the only skills he had; dissemblement and distraction; he fooled his way to life and, like anyone in his position, once you are forced onto the slope, the only safe place is at the top. You literally have to become Emperor or die and you don’t have much of a choice about it.

Vidals script, (if we can judge at all by however much of it survives) is about a young man taking horrific revenge on an Empire, (and especially it ruling class), for torturing him into becoming Emperor; he didn’t want to be there and there was no way out. Raised to survive a degenerate monster, he became one himself; sexual madness, mockery, degradation, torture, death and fear. What else could he become? He is Romes curse against itself for its many crimes, literally Dickensian; here is the whip you braided in life.

Of what links this to the other varied Dooms; Empire, lack of love, excessive power, the apparent strongest person being the least psychologically free.

Aguirre, Wrath of God

So many animals were harmed.

We are back with Pizzaro again! A different one this time, I think this was Gonzalo rather than Hernando. In any case, the main, big Pizzaro desperately needs to get a bunch of murderers doing something nominally useful and far off, sends a bold group of Conquistadors down from the mountains of Peru, into the Amazon basin, searching for a City of GOLD! And this is less stupid than it sounds; multiple somewhat-golden cities have been found. Pizzaro got a whole room of gold, Cortez lost his in a lake, but there are canonically large amounts of gold hanging about so who knows, maybe you could actually run into some native empire and take it over, its already happened twice.

Tired of finding nothing in the jungle, Pizzaro sends out a scouting party of forty men, lead by Don Pedro de Ursua, they are to go downriver, looking for natives and GOLD, and report back in one week. There is no gold, just water, jungle, arrows and Aguirre; the Conquistadors Conquistador. They may be from Extramadura, the rust-belt shithole of Spain, but Aguirre is Basque, that’s barely even Spanish at all, and, if Aguirre is any example, about five times nuttier. Even worse than that; he’s played by Klaus Kinski. This is never a good sign. If you see anyone around you played by Klaus Kinski, please stop what you are doing and contact the authorities.

This was a surprisingly great film. I had heard it was great, but having only seen fragments of it, the individual images didn’t seem that exceptional and Herzog can be variable, so perhaps I was expecting less.

‘Aguirre was everything I was hoping for from ‘The Royal Hunt of the Sun but which sadly didn’t turn up. Right from the opening moments, the detail, cinematography and storytelling-through-action were fantastic, disclosing almost all of its narrative through these fragments of moments, which I know is how cinema actually works but this truly felt like bits-and-pieces cinema, these shards of circumstance build up in an almost relaxed way to become the story and more than the sum of their parts.

The inchoate silence and confusion that surrounds real acts of violence impregnates this film - it feels exactly like something terrible is about to happen all the time and when something terrible does happen, it is not folded into the logic of cinematic drama but appears as if from nowhere, and is odd, which is how most real violent situations I have seen have felt.

Against the jungle, Spain recruits its strongest soldier; bureaucracy. Aguirre, Wrath of God is a surprisingly bureaucratic film; everyone is writing out and signing orders, contracts, lists and plans, battling each other with paper to enforce meaning and structure on what is going on, but nothing is going on. The Conquistadors were legalistic and litigious fellows.

Klaus Kinski is captivating to look at, simultaneously lazy, intense and pregnant with death, it feels like he is moments from murder in every frame, or has already done one offscreen; he just wants to kill everyone all the time and is barely holding himself back. Kinski looks nothing like the historical Aguirre (too German, though the German language adds its extra tinge to ‘Aguirre’; “DERR KAISER IST TOD”), but he is a perfect monster; we feel easily see how we might follow, fear, obey and utterly despise such a character. The scene with Aguirre just STARING at the guy playing pan-pipes was such comedic gold I was worried that it would lose energy when they Herzog repeats the gag, but no, still funny - please make me a threatening screensaver of Klaus Kinski STARING at a guy playing pan pipes.

(What about the horse? Was he ok? Aguirre chucks a monkey over his shoulder! What happened to the monkeys? Were they ok? Where did they come from? Did they just turn up? Were they union monkeys? Where is the Woke Mob^tm when you need them?)

Doing and Deciding

In all great events there is an emotional split between deciding what to do, which requires sensitivity, imagination, calm, patience, self-knowledge, world-knowledge and perception, and doing what needs to be done, which is often not as complex, but supremely difficult, requiring relentless, even near self-destructive focus, drive, ambition and a will to sacrifice the inessential.

If you have decided rightly, then all the energy and sacrifice dedicated to achieving that aim will be worth it. If you have decided rightly and, in the midst of the doing, quaver, pause, start thinking “hey, are we doing the right thing?” or “we could do this another way” or “maybe our whole frame of reference is wrong”, then these thoughts can really screw everything up.

I say this blankly because I think my audience will not get it and will be unsympathetic to this point of view; if you are fighting for your life, or hanging from a cliff, and dither, you are dead.

In all things the will to do prevails, for a while.

However. Things can get complicated, an no task or action is ever utterly sperate from other tasks and actions, they weave together in ways visible and unseen. So actually, in effect, you do need to be stopping now and again, or have the breadth and depth of mind to simultaneously do the things you need to do, and also to be thinking about whether you should actually be doing them.

Its this depth of parallel awareness that goes missing in so many of these tales of Doom. Votan is smart enough to realise his schemes have gotten him in trouble, he is strong enough to throw away the ring, but he can’t demolish Valhalla, or return his spear to the tree. The Kipchaks can see enough to fear each other, but not Genghis Khan, and when he arrives they do not unite like Tolkiens Crew, but watch each other fail, like Celtic Tribes, or like the component ethnogroups of Meso-American Empires. Neither Ferrus Mannus or Tanya can pull themselves out of their immediate need for supreme tactical victory, even though Tanya knows better than anyone else there that the enterprise is doomed. Caligula is All Gas, No Brakes, 4 Life. Even if you showed him his own murdered corpse from the future he still likely wouldn’t stop or slow down, he is perhaps the hollowest of all these poor fellows.

How strange that it should be the absence of love which voids the depth required to stop or slow down in so many cases. I begin by describing some kind of decision theory, and end up in the human heart; nobody loved these men, or if they did, they couldn’t feel it.

(Perhaps I am overstating; Atahualpa wasn’t that messed up for an Incan Emperor, he was just in a real bad situation. Likewise the ruler of Otrar was facing Peak Genghis, what are you supposed to do in that situation.)

Still, for at least some of them, it was the void inside that echoed.

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.”

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?”

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.

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)”

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

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.”

“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.”

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

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.

Five ‘Evolutionary Romances’; ‘Avatar An Activists Survival Guide’ by Maria Wilhelm, ‘Wildlife on the Planet Furaha’ by Gert van Dijk, ‘Predator: Badlands’, directed by Dan Trachtenberg, ‘The Dragon Masters’ by Jack Vance and ‘Prophet’ by Brandon Graham and Simon Roy.

Both the ‘Activists Survival Guide’ and ‘Planet Furuha’ imagine whole alien worlds, with complex pseudo-natural evolutionary trees (slightly more pseudo in the case of Avatar) encountered by a future humanity. The Dragon Masters and Prophet both imagine war; alterations of man, and strange alien flesh across illimitable scales of time, while Predator: Badlands is ‘Scavengers Reign lite, and makes a scary planet for an xenos-teen to fight and understand, it also, ultimately these deep strange themes of war and human doom.

Avatar: An Activists Survival Guide

This book did nothing to soothe my complex feelings about the Avatar universe, but did at least allow me to experience them with more granularity. A metatextual ‘pleasure’ of these films for me has always been the abhorrence and hatred for corporatism, militarism and technology of the story, combined with the obvious and intense adoration of these things on the part of the creators. It reminds me a lot of the alleged letter Milton received half way through the publication of Paradise Lost, from some country Squire; “I’m not sure who this Lucifer fellow is, but by gad I hope he wins.”

Made to be Destroyed

While ‘Furuha’ will show us, calmly, a whole ecosphere, with the human elements secondary and truly, no grand story or core central moral, here in ‘Avatar’ the biosphere is theatre, only one part of an opera.

Being the detail-oriented environmentalist industrialist hippy militarist pacifist artist he is, Cameron delved deep to engineer a paradise drawn from dreams for his dark (but very cool) vison of humanity to despoil.

And this is very specifically ‘Paradise’ in Camerons eyes, made to be ruined by mankind. Spec Evo in service to a Boomers Medieval Morality Play. The setting goes to wild extremes to maintain a vision of the RDA as an almost laughably and pointlessly malignant force; they are apparently supressing research into synthetic Unobtanium purely so they can continue the hideously expensive task of mining it from Pandora, a whole star-system away. The RDA elite is bringing home alien fish and flowers as high-status luxury objects while also researching the possibilities of Pandoran flora in bio-reclamation to rescue earths biosphere from pollution, while also for some reason, repressing the same research. Also, they hunt intelligent whales for magic juice, they are just kinda nebulously and generally evil.

(The vast array of Pandoran flora with possible bio-reclamation properties does strongly tilt me towards my ‘Pandoran Invasion of Earth’ theory, in which the Avatar series ends with Earth hosting varied forms of altered Pandoran life that united into their own ‘Eywa’ entity.)

Only one part of the book actually describes Pandora, the rest being a militarist pin-up book of exciting human technology, and the Pandoran section is heavily tilted towards the kind of charismatic megafauna you can fight, and in the case of Jake Sulley, (and chud-king Mile Quaritch), fuck. We will go to space and we will have sex with those aliens.

Compared to works of pure art like Furuha, the Activists Survival Guide might seem a little sophomoric, but oh how soon we forget our flawed but mighty ancestors; when considered to its purpose, this is a massively superior, detailed, wide-ranging and in-depth look at the columns of imaginary life. What other film would produce a sourcebook, a significant chunk of which is about relatively un-cool glowing plants? Or the Na’vi weaving song? (Being a Na’vi seems very dull - mainly you just hunter-gather and tell stories of Ey’wa and the Balance?.)

All in all an excellent example of detailed (relatively) hard sci-fi worldbuilding. Superluminal communications and an apparent ‘psionic’ element to the Avatar link are almost the only soft science elements of this otherwise hard sci-fi world. The enormous focus dedicated to Na’vi textiles, tools and crafts is impressive.

Hexapede Fetish

A curious similarity between Pandora and Furuha is the prevalence of Hexipedal life. I half-feel that the Hexipede is becoming the Parralel-World Airship of Speculative Evolutionary Fiction. Of course this is an alien world look at the legs.

I am not sure Hexipedal limbs make real sense on any of these creatures but if they are there, then surely the Na’vi should also be six-titted Hexipedes? Hopefully someone online has done some impressions of this. WAIT OF COURSE THEY DID THERE IS EVEN P*RN

Wildlife on the Planet Furaha

As if from nowhere; retired neuroscientist Gert van Dijk; a man whose name and profession seem so odd to me he may as well be made up (‘Wat noo?’ indeed), springs into being, fully formed, like a goddess from the head, or ‘thigh’ of Zeus.

‘Furaha’ is an imaginary world, it has a blog, and even a Youtube channel for everyone who was super-interested in the exact biomechanics of radially symmetrical space bugs. Now it exists as a book from Crowood press “A speculative biology guide to alien life forms.” And unlike every other entry on this list, the biosphere is not a stage, or a tool, theme or part of any other story, world or fiction; it exists for itself and for the pleasure of itself; world creation as an act of pure joy. Crystalline, jewel-like. A planet not to have adventures on. (Unless they are careful, scientific adventures).

Did you ever have a really precise dream? One where the precision was part of the pleasure? “We must imagine the clockmaker joyful.” I mean really vibing on those cog-teeth, absolutely in the mix like a dance DJ. ‘Furuha’ is colourful, vibrant, lively, and really really really carefully worked out, down to the smallest detail, down to the orientation of skeletal joints and the exact forms of varied radial symmetry. An act of world creation, in detail and in depth, as a perfect mirror to the world-discoverers of the 17th to 19th century. Really a calm book, of mild humours and deep curiosity. Very much an enlightenment text; this is not a demon-haunted world or an especially mysterious man, but one whose passions and intellect are fully synthesised. And he does have passions; one cannot paint, write, engineer and conceive a whole world of such depth, beauty and complexity, without being driven by strong, even overwhelming, passion. This is not the kind of thing a normal person does, but I suspect if one were to meet Gert van Dijk, one would not come away with the feeling one had met a passionate man.

For most humans, combining joy and precision is relatively rare, but not for this guy, and the metaphor of “clockwork” or clock-like action is probably wrong, limited; clocks are entropic, use-bound and wear down. They only do one thing. But for an act of exhultive* precision there are few metaphors. van Dijk takes the same pleasure in the deep mechanisms of evolutionary selection as a child does when confronted with a shelf of varied sweets, his is the joy of the naturalist, perhaps one from that borderlands period where a global awareness has become possible, but not yet splintered and degraded into micro-cults. He is a BIG MIND guy and his view and his pleasures are those of Darwin on the Beagle; getting out there and looking at a bunch of wonderful stuff and working out how it relates, except in this case, ‘out there’ is ‘in here’ and ‘working it out’ is literally building life from the ground-up.

And to some degree, a science-fiction sociology of a strange planet, populated by the descendants of scientists and explorers. Not quite an Eden, but an ascended world from the point of view of a scientist-artist himself; a world made the way they should be and perhaps not as they are. I wonder what kinds of stories one might tell about Furaha? This (comparatively) under-populated near-pristine wilderness where apparently the bugs and viruses of Furuha don’t immediately devour humanity, and where the bugs, bacteria, horses and factories of humanity don’t immediately ruin Furuha. It feels like the kind of place for murder-mystery, no doubt involving some environmental complexity or wonder, and with the motive being the kind of thing academics lose their toast over, like a love-affair wrapped up in the classification of a Ghnathocranium jaw or something.

Of course I want to go to Furaha, but sadly if I did, they wouldn’t let me do anything interesting. Maybe some very low-environmental impact Saffari’s would be available, or horseback tours.

Being who and what I am, I immediately find myself sympathising with whoever I imagine the Furuhan underclass to be. Some low-IQ non-academic types who don’t particularly care about animals or the environment, happen to have been born in this wonderland which offers nothing for them, and who just want to build a car-park or something. I wonder also, considering the nature of humanity, how long this tender softness in humanity can last. Surely there must be arguments over resources, or ideas, or something. I’m not trying to turn Furuha into 40k but someone at least has to stab someone, or lead them into the Pied Stickers hunting range at the wrong time of year (deniable). Who is the Furuhan Columbo? What are the Furuhan ethnic divides? Is everyone just upper-middle class? These are petty thoughts considering what the book is actually about, but they are at times, my thoughts.

An image of evolution on a massive scale, (van Dijk even removed his balloon-flyers when the physics didn’t work out), ‘Furuhan’ is also a kind of tacit commentary on evolutionary theories. van Dijk creates not one, but two species who honestly seem like they might be about to get intelligent; the Wardens and the Snafe. The fact that neither of these, especially the Snafe, despite superficially seeming to be smart, have not kindled into tool-use and self-reinforcing complexity, is perhaps a kind of joke, or mildly sardonic aside on the part of van Dijk; ‘we really still have no idea what makes it “go”.’

A great book if you like beauty, evolution, quiet wonder or long BBC documentaries about the sea.

Predator: Badlands

Another entry in the slightly-woke pretty-good Dan Trachenberg Pred-Renaissance ouvre. I enjoyed this and have mixed feelings about it. This film makes a lot of ballsy ‘big van Dijk’ calls, and is also rather broad and a bit Disney.

tldr; a young, weird predator who everyone thinks is a nerd (wait, is this guy a Disney Princess?), gets betrayed and as a last-ditch effort, goes to the most dangerous planet ever to hunt the mega-super monster that has killed every other Predator who tried; surely if he can behead this thing, the clan will stop calling him a loser. Once there, things go horribly wrong and he runs into two android Ellie Fannings; one bisected android is curious and adaptive, the other, whole and ass-intact, is a more pure expression of the Wayland-Yutani ethos.

It was ballsy to make an actual Predator the main character in the story. The inversion of a de-powered Predator having to adapt to a complex dangerous environment and a mechanistic enemy, essentially re-running the Arnold sequence from the original movie, is good. The bones of the story are good, the cross-relationship drama between the Predator-family and the pseudo-sibling relationship of the Ellie Fannings is dramatically very solid. Probably Dan Trachenbergs strongest single virtue is his sold, creative and capable grasp of what makes good drama.

This is broad though. It is very broad, with many more outright comedic elements and general goofiness than you would usually see.

Where this crosses over with the rest of this gathering of fictions is; this is unusually, but only slightly, spec-evo in its ‘world of monsters’, and, like Avatar, (which it could almost cross-over with), the ‘Dragon Masters’ and ‘Prophet’, this is in part about humanity facing a vast and mutable void. Crucially there are no humans in this film, but the presence and ethos of what feels like a corrupt, manipulative and dying race, impregnates everything humanity has touched. A species sending its expendable Android drones off into space, carefully organised and supervised to be certain that they stay on mission, all in search of, what else? Magic immortality juice. It’s the same exact motivation as the whale-hunts in Avatar 2 and 3; somewhere out in space there is bodily immortality, if we can only be evil, effective, corporate and extractive enough to get it. And in all this hunting out of endless life, the only truly immortal things humanity creates are its corporations and technology, which synthesise and sustain themselves, even without the core humans they were made to serve.

This implied world of ships traversing the cosmos, stuffed with A.I.’s and corporate law, serving entities technically ‘owned’ by a species that is dying, on-ice or may no longer exist, crosses over deeply with ‘Prophet’, which also has strong themes of worlds and cultures made by and from the abandoned weapons of forgotten wars. A society of abandoned AK 47s getting up and walking around, going to the shops, the school, making little bullet children. So.

I have a heuristic in my mind for stories from this paracosm, which is that these movies are either; icily cold, visually beautiful but ethically brutal Ridley-type panoramas, (which may well also be utter shit, but at least they look good) or utter garbage shlock. Predator: Badlands is neither, its normative - a little goofy, heartwarming, almost family-friendly. I think normies and Funko-Pop enjoyers will really like this one, I quite liked watching it but am ambivalent about parts, though I do have genuine respect for its general competence and willingness to try something new, and for being broadly ‘good hearted’.

But the Weyland-Yutaniverse is not a good-hearted place.

Most of my other complaints are partial, piecemeal; how is Predator Tech made, is it artisanal? That would make sense. Why don’t Predators often seem intellectually capable of building their own technology? This one is very young and others have been blank slates, so that might be a reason. Isn’t it odd that this and Avatar both seem like they are from the same Universe and have almost the same themes? Same with Blade Runner. It’s strange that these derivations of core ideas, even though they evolve, seem also to converge. There is a lot of smiling in this movie, though almost nothing in it has cause to smile. The drone-Synths seem to have an I.Q. of about 80, which honestly makes sense considering that adaptive intelligence itself is both a vital tool and dangerous corrosive for this mission, but I would have preferred if that was directly-stated at some point rather than perhaps-accidentally inferred.

We must come together to build a world that can accept Ellie Fanning’s incredible ass, a cinematic wonder brutally excised from this fiction via CGI. This is the wrong use for technology.

The Dragon-Masters by Jack Vance

(Fragmentary on detail as I read this on holiday and am writing some time after I actually finished it)

Not even a full book, this is a novella from 1962. There is so much I could say about this slight, thematically dense, short, flawed, book. What a pile of crossing themes in just one tale.

Texas Valley Family Feud

Set on the feudal backwater planet Aerlith (which might be the last surviving human world), the story is split between two Feudal families occupying different valleys and, for the large part, utterly stupidly consumed by thoughts of petty vengeance towards each other, even in the midst of genocidal alien war.

Vance’s emotional and social range to me often feels like it was sealed some time around the great depression and his fundamental weight of what-humans-are-like is brutally cynically material, Machiavellian, short-termist and greedy. To an extent this can provide a useful counterweight both to more idealistic views of history and to high-level ‘grand narratives’ which skate over the bit-rate of history, the dirty mire where so many things actually happen and where so much of what people are concerned with is petty and day-to-day. Over time it does become brutal, cold and depressing to read though. Not unlike the works of K.J. Parker; materialist and cynical to a chilling degree, simply through the relentless application of small minds who believe in nothing.

Humanity at-large is fallen, hunted to near-extinction by the queer philosophical lizardlike ‘Basics’, who use as their troops and slave-race; altered humans, warped and mutated into useful forms. Some years before our story starts, a Basic ship arrives on Aerlith with exterminating intentions. During this expedition, the Basics miscalculate and are captured by the charismatic Kergan Banbeck. Without Basic instruction the slave-man craze and perish, and the captured Basics themselves enter a philosophically uncomprehending state. (Souls and species trapped by their own heightened philosophy is one of many themes in ‘Dragon Masters’.)

This incredibly cinematic and exciting series of events is described briefly in the foreword and we cut to ‘Present Day’ Aerlith. The free humans have done to the Basic eggs just what the Basics did to man; bred, trained, subverted and made tools of them. Now their spawn are Dragons! (Or at least big somewhat-intelligent lizard-beast slaves of various kinds, some of whom can be ridden.)

The story is split between two families lead by two Dragon Master nobles, each differently obsessed; the wise, subtle, deep-seeing philosophical Joaz Banbeck obsesses over the return of the Basics and the final extinction of humanity, he plots and plans, digs and builds towards some future confrontation with the lizards in space. Meanwhile his neighbour Ervis Carcolo wants more Valley. The guy literally just wants stuff, land, tech, women, status, whatever. A little rat shit bastard, Carcolo is stuffed with Conquistador energy. He does not think; he acts!

Which is the more-true, most-useful, more effective vision of humanity? Being deep, subtle, philosophical and Machiavellian? Or being a raw dumb little cunt of a man? (These are the only choices). The book is about this.

Flesh War

With two opposed species at war, the Human Empire is gone, humanity has virtually lost. The main military of the Basics is made up of genetically and behaviourally altered humans reformatted to particular tasks, huge line breakers, trackers, weapons-wielders, all kept physically and mentally focused on a single function, overseen by small numbers of the Basics. The Basics have ‘won’ but have they become decadent in the winning? The few we meet seem to lack ‘virtu’, adaptiveness and raw thrawn.

Now mankind has its own incredibly creepy alien eugenics project; the war is flesh-v-flesh, each side in a war operationalising the very being of a species as a weapon against them. If we were to do a ‘realistic’ version of this theme, it would take place over huge stretches of time; ‘blood for the morrow, steel for the day’, technology tends to govern in the moment, but flesh rules the tide. In ‘Dragon Masters’ we only get this brief fragment of consequential time, but all the lore and development and background for the book practically calls out to be turned into some kind of massive epic, RPG sourcebook or something.

The Raw Power Of Stupidity

Joaz Banbeck; a smart, deep history guy who thinks about the past, is a calm but disconnected ruler and has some idea of the range, scope and seriousness of the human condition, is opposed by Ervis Carcolo, a clever, violent cunt bastard narcissist guy who is intolerable. The story is a good, if very cold, view on how smart people can lose (or nearly lose), to horrid little rat men, and oddly, conversely, a complement to the ferocity of the human spirit embodies in horrid shitbag Pizzaro-types.

Banbeck treats Carcolo carefully, outwits his first betrayal and, mind focused on deep history and long-term survival, largely forgets about him. Meanwhile Carcolo stupidly and ferociously attacks anyway, gaining a surprise victory, largely through doing something utterly irrational, at just the wrong time, (aliens are invading). Having broken his word the Carcolo then demands Banbeck join up with him to fight the aliens. This is actually, strategically and coldly the right thing to do, but Banbecks moral disgust at this stupid, lying narcistic self-destructive piece of shit, for once, stops him making the rationally-correct choice. Eventually, the two sides do end up sort-of accidentally teaming up, and win. Finally Banbeck orders the necessary execution of Carcolo, though he can’t stand to do it himself.

The push and pull between these two different kinds of souls and their concerns, almost between mind/culture and the feral atavistic shameless and awful body, is nasty but fascinating and has the tinge of reality.

Fate And Violence

There is yet another huge theme, maybe not so much between fate and violence, as activity and inactivity, or something like Jainism and Worldism.

Planet got Elves basically. Mysterious guys who wander around naked and live under the earth. Sort of human they have a forgotten technology, hidden ways and a strange intense religion/philosophy. The accepted ritual is that when they turn up everyone looks through them, that they don’t ever interact but if you do ask them questions they have to tell the truth, but they will always do so in such a way as to make the smallest difference possible. They wander in the dark and their philosophy is a shape, or nest of angles, containing layered meanings.

The elf-guys are waiting for humanity, and the basics, to go extinct. Once this happens, they will rise up, pure, unstained by blood or effort, and fill the Galaxy with pure, philosophical, platonic peace. This being a Jack Vance book, this does not work, but they are interesting as part of a kind of hierarchy of philosophical ascension within the book and also as a kind of image of Jack Vance, in that the only things he can imagine are a brutal, nasty reality and an escape from that reality through a philosophical ascension and deep disconnection that proves itself ultimately futile.

In order of ascending ‘worldlieness’ we have; Strange Elf Humans - naked, passive, sworn not to interfere. Basics and their Slaves - distant and dispassionate, so utterly convinced of their own inevitable rule that they literally cannot conceive of an alternative (which helps to ruin them), but still worldly enough that they relentlessly pursue mankind. Joaz Manbeck - a hero, a human concerned with deep history and the meaning of things, but fundamentally fighting for his tribe, his land and a future for humanity. Ervis Carcolo - literally just killing for his own relentless pride and domination, not only unknowing but even uncomprehending of the morals and desires of anyone above him in this scale, YET; this very worldliness seems to lend him a relentless, vivid, visceral DRIVE and will to exist and to just keep fighting in the face of almost any disaster, which is almost admirable in itself, and which leads him to at least some temporary but unexpected victories.

A three out of five book but thematically and in its potential depth of setting, five out of five.

Prophet by Brandon Graham and Simon Roy

A great but flawed Comic-book series.

A long-buried hibernation pod whirrs its way out of the earth on an unknown world. A solder crawls from the pod, assess his weapons and equipment, and begins a mission for a long-dead Empire.

The man is always John Prophet, a gene-line and to some degree, Psyche, cloned and re-worked in a million different ways, transformed into a soldier-agent for the long-dead Earth Empire. As John Prophet explores and adapts to a strange, alien environment, (which may or may not be a far distant Earth, or some other human colony), he encounters a range of strange alien species, meets complex, sometimes incomprehensible, moral challenges, and comes into direct contact with the high aims of the Earth Empire. The John Prophet then decides; will they remain a servant of the Empire, or turn against it?

Humanity is gone, and even the later derivations of man lie deep in the past. What remains is weapons; the Prophet-line, the psychic ‘Brain Mothers’, these were made as military tools to sustain an Empire. Now those who ruled that Empire are gone, but the tools remain, and are attempting to resurrect the rulership. Why? This is perhaps a deeper and more interesting question than the psychic re-plague, hyperdimensional conspiracy-thing that actually ends this series.

The core story occurs again and again. A new world, a new ‘Prophet’, all different, engineered for task and mission, each aim separate and each set of moral and physical challenges different. Each time the empty soldier must encounter again the world, each time the very act of exploration, of meeting complex problems, forces them to grow and change, and each time one way or another, they meet, or feel some conflict with the core mission they are set.

This is the story engine of the series and it’s a really really good one, that unifies immediate survival-drama, exploration of strong strange environments and the ‘higher’ matters of morality and politics into one. When ‘Prophet’ is doing this, it is doing well, and when it isn’t, it is doing poorly.

It’s almost a perfect conceit, you can truly do anything with it, and it plays to the strengths of the creators in world creation and wild imagination, but can go almost anywhere, while remaining comprehensible to new readers. You always know what is going on; John Prophet has a mission, and you never know where he is, what’s going to happen or entirely how he will respond. You also don’t know where the story will end.

When we get away from this core concept things get slightly rubbish, or at least, less clear. The complex interweaving fates of the Prophets is one thing, but the weird cross-laced plots and shifting final aims combined with the changing art styles, for me, robbed the story as-read of energy and drive.

The structure of the tale deals inherently in unknowns, in meetings, discoveries, disclosures of complex backstories, and when the core story-engine was still working, these pass reasonably, because we always know what the main character is doing, and what they want, even if we understand very little else. But when the story structure become much more complex and vague, its aims based on strange things we don’t yet understand, this mixes badly with the super-complex background of this absolutely gigantic deep-time cosmos.

Case in point; the two strands of ‘Troll’ (a character inherited from the original Liefield comic), now in utterly changed form), manipulating two opposed sets of Prophets to do something or other with the Giant Stone Men, turned into him provoking super-stone guy to emerge from subspace, then merge with him in some super-sex-murder thing, and then that plot strand gets drawn into the evil-red-glow plot, which involves a Brain Mother of the Earth Empire investigating the Red Glow, an insect captain getting devoured by it, then that guy getting abandoned by the Red Glow, which ends up with the Four-Armed Prophet, who is sort of enslaved by it but not really, then the Four-Armed Prophet and the Brain Mother get converted into sub-space, where the whole crystal plague thing is going on, (another sub-plot), and a giant psychic Wildstorm character is hanging around, they fight and/or devour each other, and the Brain Mother/Giant Psychic gets merged with the Red Glow and breaks through into realspace to do a megapocalypse, but then just doesn’t.

For a series that is already very weird, there is simply too much shit going on, and too much of it changing too often, which constantly validates, invalidates or alters the arcs or intentions of all the little characters following the plot around. I was disappointed long ago when I was getting this in comic form as it came out, as I missed the final arc and many of the explanation points, but now I have read the whole thing in one go, measured as a story its fucking mid.

It does have deep and genuine virtues; worldbuilding, speculative evolution, deep time, species change, deep history. At its best Prophet gives a reader a true sense of eons passing, of very long reaches of change and history, and of these immortal characters being in a sense, very lost and lonely, with memories that mean little to anyone but them. There is a deep melancholic sadness which comes from examining the dot of human-like life against reaches of Deep Time and Prophet deals in this emotion well. Memories so deep that even grief pales to nothing.

The Strange Deep Future of the Wildstorm Universe; I don’t actually know that much about most of the Wildstorm Universe but it at least seems to me like the creators here have done a pretty good job at building this crazed, cosmic extrapolation of galactic drama based on these classic adventure tales of largely earthbound superfellows. I am sure a lot of stuff that happens here would mean a lot more to me if I was actually familiar with these stories; and how many of the readers of ‘Prophet’ actually read the first Rob Liefelt ‘Prophet’? I mean I know who ‘Supreme’ is and I know about the ‘Bleed’ from Warren Ellis, but that’s about it.

I’m glad I finally got the last issues where the actual history of this reality is set out, and the fact that Wildstorm has this ‘future history’, makes me oddly more interested in the Wildstorm Universe as a whole now. I’m glad this happened, wish it could have been different, but I will treasure it.

[*Exultant? I made this word up.]

Do you like books? I have a bunch up on eBay. Sale ends in a couple days;

“You stop hearing it after a while.”

Streets cracked with frost, covered with salt or snow, steps crunch, nothing perfectly flat, everything gnawed by freeze-thaw and three million people on six million feet. Its a literate city, explicitly and implicitly labelled and always in rivers of text; US policy One; never use an image when a string of words will do - so looping lines of long official words to back up explanations on the street signs; a reading city, subtext and overtext, signs and where there is no sign; graffiti, graffiti everywhere, graffiti on the pizza boxes left as trash below the huge trash bins.

Chicago Lex Logos; you can graffiti anything if you can reach it, and they can reach anything, they climb buildings and rappel down like Nolanverse incursors or Bond in teasers, and like Batman, who also lives here really, they can get in anywhere. But Graffitisomo won’t obscure another’s tag AND, what’s this? Smears of blank brown paint? “The city will cover some graffiti,” maybe if its racist or political, or gangs dividing boundaries - So; there is “legal” graffiti, (lame), illegal graffiti (raw city flesh - its Jungian unconscious, basement level mind, (the Academic says; “two Jungians lived over here, the husband killed the wife”), and there is really (actually, we mean it this time), illegal graffiti, that has this special quality, and the city will know, like Koschei the Deathless hearing some steppe-herder whisper his name a dozen rivers distant, and will come, and hence the wide brown smears, on a bridge, behind a Jewish (likely) shop; the true un-speech, and later, atop the rectangles of brown, the logo’s back, creeping in, the city-mind reclaiming the edited space, in acknowledgment, perhaps submission, and this, personal-impersonal, reactive, truculent, eternally sustained rebellion of text, is legitimate, and none will write over it, because don’t you know there are laws?

Sweltering - huge, black winter coat from cab to train to plane; “Chicago is really cold, you will need to wrap up.”

It aint. I look and feel ridiculous. The old black drunk three feet across the L-Train thinks so too. He is the only republican; “I approve of I.C.E.; we gotta take back what they took from us.” Every other sign and shop and symbol (where they have them), screams its hatred for the Orange Man. The race line here is vivid, violent, strange, intense, the only shared spaces are municipal services, the trains, the busses, “Hey I’m your bus driver, hey! HEY! I’M YOUR BUS DRIVER, thank you, and the cable is broke so you gotta tell me when you want to get off ok?”, the low-key hipster spaces are a little beige but the city isn’t, its black, or its white, one or the other.

But Batman fights here, clearly, these gifts to the city, all aging, all from another time, kinda high-anglo, but the names aren’t; german, jewish, north European maybe, scribed on columns, laid in rows and, shock, this would never happen over here; stacked by value; so-and-so gave fifty grand, the mid-range giver, such-and-such is much higher up, up in the 250, 5000, million dollar giver range. Everyone will know how much you gave. The little public jewels; the Zoo, the Conservatory, the Cultural Centre empty but for the names of Philosophers, the battles of the Civil War and one small lonely woke exhibit saying U.S. might be bad somehow - they were all made like this, by wealthy men and fine families and then hurled randomly at the city to stick like shrapnel, wherever. You want to see Cacti in the Ghetto? Dealer cars with plates removed one-handing it down a street of philosophy professors; Chicago U, home to one by Frank-Lloyd Wright, a hunk of bronze from Arnoldo Pomodoro, mad fake Oxford on a massive scale, (U.S. in its post-Mao phase), all hurled at black Chicago like a spear; you think Mayor Dailey gave a shit? Take it and like it! Frank Lloyd-Wright built a mildly-cursed home here for the Robies; a dense, layered, exquisite hyperdwarf experience they managed for 18 months; he built the tables into the chairs so they couldn’t be moved and the lights into the tables so they couldn’t be moved. He made a whole wardrobe of clothes for Mrs Robie to wear in his (still Lloyd-Wrights) exquisite home; nothing must fuck the aesthetic. Its a gem, the Artist hates it; oppressive dwarven madness. Just across the street New Modernists have abominated in steel; Frank made this for the Open Plain, now it faces directly its own horrific spawn - a gargled chrome instantiation of everything Lloyd-Wright fought so hard to contain and control; face pressed to the glass as his retarded child gulps down the world, if he was resurrected here he would kill himself. (Perhaps deserved.)

But Batman could fight here as well; all these stage sets. Why? The scale, the grime, the gloom, the layered singularity of each space; its not like here; no jumble, little history, a place is a place is a place in the United States; shops too; three million people means a store front needs to be about One Thing; Ribs (honey flavour), pulled-pork burger (only), hot Yoga, huge revolving hotdog and hadean pizza, whats your thing?

And in the Loop, Batman could fight well. Skyscrapers in parallax, a brief beautiful flower of 19th and early 20th century design, fragments of Art Deco and weaves of ironwork by Louis Sullivan; mad magic from the old world studding the Tribune building; a shard of Westminster Cathedral, the Louvre? Many more jammed in the walls like a spell. The old ways are best, before the sacrificed God we put souls in the foundations of important things, even till late 19C Cornwall, John Masefield describes the sacrifice of a mouse beneath the door-stone of a farmers house. Any built thing is a threat against the gods, and they must be appeased. What threat then, Chicago? Perhaps ‘tis cursed. Trump Tower pierces the Loop, a shard of alien ego; the Artists eyes glide over; American Spellcraft, they have learned how not to see false gods.

The artist doesn’t like it here; “There’s nowhere to eat downtown.” How about the Russian Tea rooms, Starbucks, this Cafe? They meant; not too expensive, not touristy, but not common. Naturally a Chigagoan (or this one) would think this way; the field is infinite but everything on it is specific to itself. Only fools and tourists treat the city as a whole, as what they see, for everyone who lives here it is a network of known acceptable places, particular, specific. If not this, then what? Infinity each day? Too much.

And violently, aggressively insane; “The SPICS and NI**ERS are RAPING WHITE girls at the MARRIOT hotel!” he’s a rare full-spectrum racist, has it in for us all; “fuckin’ WHITES, you like that you WHIT SLUT” even the Asians, triggered by the sight of helpless women queuing under heat lamps for a train, (I mean he runs out of material for the Asians quite quickly, but clearly they are bad). The women shuffle, freeze, American Spellcraft again, he will become real if he actually stabs someone, or if someone intervenes, (is this the kind of thing I should have done? maybe ended up a headline, I could have at least asked the girls to shuffle down and stood between him and them, rigid with fear and rage, fantasising about hurling him off the L down to the street, or onto the tracks, bashing his brains out, I lack the Spell, the U.S. magic, I have not learned to never see the city, which all who see the city every day know well not to do), he disappears into the distance. The Artist says it was worse over Covid; no-one moved them off the trains, (all-day ride for $2.50, (incredibly affordable compared to here, America is rich), and the trains were heated), anyway the Artist cycles everywhere now, (Zeus rots metal left outside, another God-curse, bike maintenance is schmuck-faith - use ‘em up) I don’t ask if the crazies pushed the Artist off the buses and trains, the spell has been cast so how would they know?

Its not a Sea-City, nor an Inland City, like Toronto, its a Lake City, and that’s a slightly different thing. Maybe every Port City everywhere feels like it has one window open to the world, or inland, that its all about the Nation, but with these Lake-Towns, who knows? (Smaug approves this message. He nearly got Chicago once, but they came back.) Few things face the Lake and people don’t seem to think about it. Its flat, fine, abnormally normal for a mass of prime element. Always just the colour of the sky and always fading perfectly and naturally into that sky, so its more like being open to the void than the wild sea and whale-road. Chunks of petty ice float in the perfect azure hollow of the lake.

The cold returns and all those hours sweating in tubes are justified as I finally do up every button on my jacket (Britain has never required this); there are nerds on Michigan Avenue so my explorations are essentially; a line; Americas Oldest Occult Shop looks spooky from outside, but inside is crystals, frankincense incense and a desperately kind lady who looks shocked to see a customer. In Chicago they bolt the signs on then chain them down, everything is bolted to iron which is bolted to concrete which is torn, crumbled, abraded, replaced; nothing lasts - the freeze-thaw every year; two cities, one tropical, one cold. But really everything in Chicago is a line. It’s made of lines, of grids, a diagonal is an event, and here the wilderness is in the diagonals; like the axis of a grid all journeys are an ‘L’; latitude, and once you have that, and are exactly parallel to your destination, another trip for longitude. Far isn’t hard to find, diagonal is, the home-places, the hidden spots, are deep in the diagonals, not crow-flies far, but far-by-street, buried in corners of the chocolate box.

And the city is a Chocolate box. Maybe its been stamped on, sure, but the logics in the lots, and none of the Americans I ask can tell me how that works; why would you even ask? Row upon row of exactly parallel exactly similar sized lots, but what you build in them is different every time and the fates and fortunes of the families and owners is different too; some crumble, some are never built, some are made and re-made, different styles each time, brick, plastic slats, a mania for balcony-fire-escapes to each rear, (popular in summer when the city breathes out after the long cold), modernist, traditional, grimy, polished, bare; ‘FUCK ICE’, “Love has no Boundaries”, a fucking biography of your dog attached to your front fence? Are you threatening postmen or making an introduction? (but this is very Chicago; “Are you local?” people say, and when I ask the Artist about this they say this is the Lib-City equivalent to the blank-faced “WHUT?” or “Where are you from?” I got in Indiana back in twenty-seventeen; it means ‘Identify yourself’; they know I’m strange. How finely passive, the fatherland is proud of you, our brave retarded son) even fake brickwork painted over plastic and steel.

On this, my personal, diagonal, I wander. They have bookshops and I irritate the Artist by seeking out pulp and Chicago history; shameful behaviour for a native. The only approval I get is a guy next to me on the plane as I settle in for 20 hours in nowhere - flying forwards into time, losing hours, dumped back into my future; “Boss?” he says. I’m confused. “Sorry?”

It’s the title of the book I’m reading; “Boss: Richard J Daley of Chicago, by Mike Royko” (we saw Royko’s portrait in the Gotham-Hamburger joint beneath the city); “Stunning, astonishing, myth-shattering - Studs Terkel”. (And Batman could fight Daley too; he’s big and rough enough, though only half a villain, more of a Spider-Man foe.) Did you know all those Dick-Tracy-faced guys from the movies were just real guys but with a coat of paint? Myth shattered indeed.

“That’s a good book.” The guy says, and that’s all he says; spends the next eight hours underneath his hoodie, face covered like a corpse. This guy knows how to fly.

The idea came in at almost the same time that the Covid 19 Pandemic began.

2020- Covid and Genesis

The earliest file I have is “Queen Mab Base File 15072020”

I used to live in Birkenhead and take the train into Liverpool to work in the Library there. Slowly I began to notice less and less people working in the Library, and odd people wearing masks on the train. Eventually I was the only one left, masked up, working alone on an empty floor, then the library closed, then my gym closed, then oh boy my life got a lot worse.

Phobos

Actually, the ‘real’ earliest file I have on Queen Mab is from a project I conceived of around March 2020 called ‘Phobos’. One element behind this was doing a different or new version of ‘Maze of the Blue Medusa’. I only have two files left relating to this and one of them is just a blank Notepad document called ‘THE PHOBOS’. Here are the *entire* contents of the other file, and the total development done on that idea;

“A space ship

Inderdimensional Fey Techno-Vessel

3 Transhumanist Techno Angel Fey chicks

From a post singularity post apocalyptic futurepast

Titan-Children, or architects

psathyrella - th Infinite

(Weird space angels)

Some new arrangement

re-write of the opening area

factions and moving parts

Where am I to get names?

Science Fictional

Poetic

Memorable

Decks of a ship?

How to Introduce Concepts

Lizardmen are Zombie Engram Humans

A cylender ship?

a spiral, like a helix of DNA?

like a curl of smoke

sections - but they intertwine

but like a ship also, a tendril of sails

>> reflection of a cosmic solar-sail vessel on a midnight sea

seen through a dimensional mirror thing

Maybe you can enter through any painting in the ship?

or through many of them

More complex desires/actions for the factions

Lizardmen

Aurum Spectre

Critics

A repository of culture

like an ark

the ark of fear

holding humanities hopes, and its end

evolved past the need for

and you enter it maybe from a fantasy setting

like its a normal ship

but then you work out - or the player works out

its a space ship

or an interdimensional thing

or the PCs would think its an Elf prison

even though its supertechnical”

What remains from that concept into the final ‘Queen Mab’ seems to be; transhumanism, fey babes in space and the idea of a space ship entered from a fantasy setting.

We cut ahead a few months. By this point I must certainly have encountered August because she is mentioned here and our first formal agreement dates from a month before this. So we must have been discussing it. Here we are definitely reading a proposal for an Adventure;

“Concept

The idea for this adventure is that, depending on how you orient the page as you read it, it is both a fantasy and a science-fiction adventure.”

HOW THIS IS MEANT TO WORK IN THE PRINTED BOOK?

When you flip the book one way - with the spine on the right, as in western books, then its a science fiction adventure.

When you turn the book upside down and read it “backwards”, like a manga, then its a fantasy adventure.

BUT - the truth is that these are the same people and places but just seen from different cultural perspectives

the portrait-images of the main characters are flipped like those of playing cards, one half facing one, direction the other facing the other direction.

The Science Fiction adventurers will see it as a dimensionally-warped ship of perverted biomechanical transhumans.

In terms of adventure design, the context of the information they can get and are given will lead them to see it as a technical and material problem, and the very nature of their inquiry and the way they seen the people in it

will make the *mission* darker and more dangerous for them. Their technical abilities and the power of destruction and opposition that their guns etc give them means they are more likely to start conflicts.

BUT

If PCs enter this realm from a Fantasy Land, they will see it as a strange Eld Palace (Spenserian & Shakesperian elves rather than Tolkien) and will react to the beings there very much as if they were elves. They will (probably) not believe they have much of a chance of direct opposition so will fall back on the traditional weapons of the weak: courtesy, deceit, flattery, cunning and thinking ahead.

AND - most importantly, they will treat the beings in The Queen Mab *the way they wish & expect to be treated*.

So for fantasy characters it will be more of a dangerous social/investigation adventure, whereas for SCi Fi characters it might become more of a ‘run and gun’ shooty and/or running-away horror adventure. Either Alien, or Aliens, depending on how competent your PCs are

Wonder, or Horror. (Or both).

Format Of This Product?

I’m basing it roughly on Sean McCoys ‘Mothership’ and associated adventures. So I would say;

Size - US half-letter size, or A5.

Pages – estimate 42 pages, say 21 spreads inside.

Stapled booklet on decent quality paper.

Should be relatively easy to print and simple to send about.

‘Mothership’ is very dense and really a masterwork of layout. I doubt I can match that density but hopefully I can get close.

Aesthetic Concepts

My initial Aesthetic prompts are Alcopopstars “Ship of Theseus” and “Chernobyl Fairy Pool”.

So based on that - everyone is blue and female and there is lots of biomechanical porn/horror/beauty.

Which I am cool with - actually I am not cool with it - I really really like it and the strangeness, intensity and beauty of those images was a prime driver behind the concept.

HOWEVER - I am open to alternative approaches and the aesthetic is far from set atm.

Shelly

Another aspect of this ‘design doc’ is the huge number of quotes from Shelly’s Queen Mab;

“Unalterable will, quenchless desire

Of universal happiness, the heart

That beats with it in unison, the brain,

Whose ever wakeful wisdom toils to change

Reasons rich stores for its eternal weal.”

Which I must have read about this time. Shelly’s Mab is an extremely, almost hyper-progressive poem about human development, and while relatively little of the scenes and figures end up in the final ‘QMP’, this verse of helter-skelter revolutionary human potentiality does seem to affect the soul and background of what becomes a somewhat nightmarish Post-Human ‘Paradise’

“The restless wheels of being on their way,

Whose flashing spokes, instinct with infinite life,

Bicker and burn to gain their destined goal:”

“Sean McCoy Built this in a cave with a box of scraps”

Thusly, work begins! A SIMPLE (directionally flipped duo-adventure) SHOT (42 pages and 21 spreads!) product. Surely, this won’t take long!

“Logistically, how does this work? in terms of timeframe and revenue split?”

Timeframe - this is the hardest one to answer. The longest I’ve ever had, a huge project that got delayed a lot, was about 5 years.

For this I would guess at about a year, the majority of which for you would be waiting around while I did stuff.

Yes…. about a year

By the time we get to the end of 2020 the basic idea of what this place is going to be, has become a lot more clear, the High Ladies exist, and their courts are set; The Queen of Air and Darkness in Autumns Halls, the Pythian Three in the Court of Dreams, Elpozoi in her Grove of Joy, Nights Iron Chariot, the Parliament of Beasts (largely cut from the final text), the Nome Queen in the Symphony of Forms, Her Grace of Wyrms in the Wyrms Roost, ‘The Halls of Melinoe’ (a little different now), and Matterjack and Antijack.

And we have a little bit of (very sketchy, I hope August won’t mind me posting this), art for ‘Queen Mab’;

2021 – Peak Patrick Hours

Its 2021 people! Good news for Patrick; DCO Remastered comes out and is very popular. This is by far and away the most popular and successful thing I have ever produced since I started self-publishing, I think it nearly matches the sales volume of the rest of my catalogue put together.

I still remember the delivery of the final book to my flat; I had it sent to what I thought would be a more accessible location and ended up having to take an Uber to some industrial estate in the middle of summer, masked up, sweating and confused, and wandering around the place looking for my boxes of books. Can’t remember if I walked back or got another cab.

While I must have been pretty busy doing other things, 2021 shows regular, at least weekly, and often daily, growth in the regular drafts of ‘Queen Mab’. There are a bunch of things here which end up ‘on the cutting room floor’ and don’t appear in the final book, for instance, the Exo-Petitioners;

Exo-Petitioners

You Hear

Barks in an unknown language. A devil-box eats this tongue and spits it out in comprehensible metal words.

“Put your hands up! Who are you? Who do you serve?”

You See

Sun-Spears blind you. Lances of burning white light, carried by hunters who seem no more than black shadows behind the sun-bright lamps.

An older, calmer voice calls out, ordering the hunters, who drop the lances of their lamps.

As sight returns you, you see a strange conclave; an old hunter and his strange followers, circled and guarded by a league of blind men. All wear masks of glass strapped around their heads, attached to tubes which lead to flasks of imprisoned beneficent wind.

These are men, of a sort. Not quite as you know them.

The Petitioners

The Old Hunter

A grave gentleman with a lined, heavy face and hair like snow. He wears something like a hunting jacket with a slim silk scarf hanging in a straight line down the centre of his pure white shirt. His clothes are finely made, though in simple cut and sombre colours which match his strong and certain manner. Clearly he is leader of this group. Though he is dressed to hunt, he carries nothing in his hands.

[For August – the references to ‘hunters clothes’ or being ‘dressed like a hunter’ are meant to be someone with a middle-ages aesthetic looking at a modern suit, for which the trousers, short jacket and tie might seem like a strange version of the clothes worn by nobles when hunting.]

The Scrivener

A young woman in a fitted hunting jacket and skirt. she carries a case at her side and holds a tablet. She treads closely upon the old hunters heels, attending to his words

replying only with agreement, and scribing in her tablet.

The Priest

An old man with a long grey beard, wearing a fine robe embroidered with strange symbols, he walks with a tall ivory staff, topped with gold. He is deeply troubled by everything he sees.

The Mage

A woman, her hair tied and face unadorned but for glass lenses upon her nose. She wears a knee-length coat of purest white over a mans grey hunting suit. She glances about herself, like a bird, talking overmuch, though largely to herself. She carries a bulky case and holds the devil box which speaks the transformed metal words.

The Warrior

A warrior in a peaked cap, his face lined and serious, his chest bestrewn with medals and ribbons of many colours. His gaze roves about, dauntless and impetuous. He has a miniature cannon at his side and he shouts orders at the blind guardians.

The Blind Guardians

Strong and vital men wearing the black glass shades of the blind. Yet they look about themselves, glancing here and there, listening to the orders of the great warrior. Their sombre hunting clothes are like that of the Old Hunter, yet not as perfectly made. They hold small cannons and sun-spears which they shine about at any noise or movement.

The Plea Of The Old Hunter

In metal words passed through his mages devil box the Hunter tells his tale;

“I rule a far land.

One fall-time, strange things came. Flyers in the sky. Beasts, Satryrs and Dancers stepped from shadows and from water, like reflections.

Our tools turned on us. Our fighters fell sick, or were lost to dreams.

They took much. Winter came. They left.

Since then, many dream without sleep. More and more each day. Soon the dreamers will outnumber those who wake.

We can find no cure.

Autumn came. The leaves turned. A white Satyr came, and said; Come, King, beg Queen Mab, and she will heal your harm.

The White Satyr showed us a door in the shadow of falling leaves.

So I have come to find this Queen Mab. To beg her to lift her curse of dreams.

We are lost here. No food and water. Please help us.”

2022 - ‘HA HA HA I AM A GENIUS’

Bad news everybody! Demon-Bone Sarcophagus comes out and it is not well liked to put it mildly. (It actually sells not-too terribly, about half the rate of DCO, but unfortunately I had, lets say, a LOT of confidence in this project and its collapse was demoralising.)

This far in, the art for ‘Queen Mab’ is starting to look a lot more like the final versionand the file is starting look a lot like an actual book. We have tables like this;

One or two characters from which do actually show up in the final text.

By the end of the year I have… massively overwritten the idea. 2022 ends with 306 pages and nearly 79,000 words. Any idea of a ‘short adventure’ is clearly left long behind, but where am I actually going with this? While continuing to detail the people and places of ‘The Queen Mab’, I am also bringing in hyper complex concepts like the time-looped ‘Knights of Grief’, strange extra-causal ‘Messengers of Time’ and aspects of the adventure that include messages from your future selves and the idea of multiple plays as an intrinsic diegetic part of the setting.

This is all very innovative but this idea is huge, and growing ever more complex, and every form of complexity interacts with every other form, requiring more and more prodigies of explanation and contingency.

2023 – a Crowhurst Moment

Speak, False Machine comes out this year and does ok. A massive book at a high-ish price, and all little more than a testament to my own self-importance. The robots won’t be able to re-write me now!

But with Mab, clearly I have begun to recognise that I have fucked up severely. There are only eight updates for this whole year.

2024 – Wait, I Can Still Fix This

The year of Gackling Moon, another book whose publication history is… complex, and long.

With Mab, a sea-change has taken place. Clearly I have given up on writing an actual adventure module. Instead my drafts have been re-named ‘Queen Mab – a Guide’ and everything starts to be re-written in a very different manner.

“I find I must speak a little more to tell you first of the manners of the palace for its courtesies are so curious that, should I embark to tell you of this or that realm or court and you have not the way of it first, what might be held strange shall seem beyond understanding.

While it is said that the Palace is a Free Kingdom where one might rise or fall by ones own efforts, aye even beasts and the doors given voice, the dead walk and dreams made real, in truth the High Ladies rule all, and Mab rules the High Ladies.

The creatures and courtiers may be somewhat predatory, cannibalistic, homicidal and mad, but they are rarely impolite. Even the lowest; the Kroo and the Dwellers of the Crypt will make some attempt at forms of politeness. Courtesy does not preclude predation. The Palace hovers often on the edge of famine. In the Crypt one may eat freely of whomever one may take, save those blessed by Melinoe, or in a Night Market during a Saints day. In the Courts there is a different law; one should not predate, save by the will of whatever court one is in.”

This is the first existence of the voice of ‘The Scribe’; the narrator of a ‘Gackling Moon’ style Gazeteer, written in an Epistolary style, a visitor from a pseudo-medieval culture describing ‘The Queen Mab’ for… who exactly?

The first ‘Scribe’ is bodiless, nameless, even genderless, I never knew even what sex they were or what they looked like. But this will slowly change..

Around April, the drafts of ‘Queen Mab – a Guide’ transmute into ‘Queen Mab’s Palace’, and then into ‘QMP’, I am on a roll here and its during this grand re-write of 2024 that the descriptive ‘place’ sections are broken up, moved around and absorbed into particular recollections by in-world characters. The ‘Guide Book’ slowly changes into a ‘Story Book’. The ‘Scribe’ gains a gender, a form, and a strange and particular history. They even get their own drawing!

Most people who have read the final text of ‘Queen Mab’s Palace’ say something like; “It’s not bad, the first part reads kind of like a game and the end more like a novel” and I think I am ok with this. I could have re-written more, made it more and more and more like a novel, but I am fine with the presence of time and the development of the writer in a text, and I like the book the way it is, and of course, remember the “42 Pages” and “About a year”. By this point the phrase “and then Queen Mab” and “still working on Queen Mab” have bedded themselves so deep into my vocabulary that they are like automatic speech.

By August (the month) 2024, I have completed a ‘Draft Zero’ which is pretty much the text for the finished book

And in October 2024, we run a successful..

KICKSTARTER!

Yes everything is going ok and we will certainly have a finished book for you by….

Oh my god….

2025 - Did I really publish nothing this year?

Look, things just take a while.

Layout, discussions, firm and frank exchanges of views, art, more art. I know it seemed like not much was happening but in fact a fair amount was and I can prove this because we did indeed produce a finished book! It just took just over a year to get everything laid out and finished and the book actually printed.

But it does exist!

2026 – No-One Killed Me