Roadside Picnic Basket Book Club - 2 - Blindsight

For the second meeting of the Roadside Picnic Basket Book Club, Trey from From the Sorcerer's Skull played host, and invited me to discuss the dungeoneering aspects of Peter Watts' novel Blindsight. 

 

 

So despite the cold, pull up a blanket, pour a cup of hot tea from your thermos, and enjoy the club. You can read the first half of our conversation here, and the second half here.

My Brilliant Friends - A Conversation with WFS of Prismatic Wastelands and Barkeep on the Borderlands

My friend and Bones of Contention coauthor WFS is kickstarting a pointcrawl adventure called Barkeep on the Borderlands. I got added as a coauthor thanks to a successful stretch goal, and most of the Skeleton Crew will also be writing bars for the crawl, along with OSR luminaries like Chris McDowall and (potentially!) Luka Rejec.

As the final weekend of crowdfunding approaches, I chatted with WFS to ask him some of his inspirations and his feelings about real-world barcrawling.

 

 

Anne - So Barkeep on the Borderlands and the Raves of Chaos are obviously inspired by the widely owned, widely played, and widely criticized D&D adventure, The Keep on the Borderlands, and the Caves of Chaos adventure site. There have been a couple of interesting responses to the original Keep in the last few years. Alex Damaceno's Beyond the Borderlands zine and Greg Gillespie's Forbidden Caverns of Archaia spring to mind immediately.

You've actually written before about your thoughts on Keep, but if you'll indulge me, why did you decide to make your barcrawling adventure a kind of response to this classic?

WFS - Many of my best ideas begin their lives as puns, which was the case with Barkeep on the Borderlands. I typically have a few score ideas swirling around in my head at any given time, and in this instance two of those combined. On the one hand, I had been rereading some classic modules and found The Keep on the Borderlands very interesting - as evidenced by my blog post you referenced. On the other, I was nostalgic for a simple pre-pandemic pleasure that I had taken for granted, which is hopping from bar to bar with a band of friends. Somehow the two ideas slammed into each other and I thought of two puns, both the title “Barkeep on the Borderlands” and the more descriptive subtitle “a Pubcrawl Pointcrawl.” From the title alone, I felt like I had a lot to work with. 

I think combining two disparate elements into a cohesive whole is a really helpful creative exercise. It’s why the spark tables in Electric Bastionland are so genius. You have to figure out how the two ideas fit together and come up with something totally unique. For Barkeep, I had to figure out how a pubcrawl fit into the world presented by Keep on the Borderlands.

Anne - And why do you think it's such a popular adventure for people to respond to? Is it just that it was included in Holmes' Basic Set at a key time? Or is there more to it than that?

WFS - I don’t think one can discount its inclusion in the Basic Set, the gateway for so many into the hobby, but there does seem to be something special about the adventure itself. After all, they replaced In Search of the Unknown with The Keep on the Borderlands for a reason. And I think it is because the adventure is itself so basic that made it so useful to early gamemasters and so beloved. It has all you need for the core game loops of D&D: a starting town, a surrounding wilderness and a dungeon filled with monsters. 

But just as important as what it includes is what it doesn’t include. There are no proper names in the module: people are just called the Priest, the Castellan or the Taverner. The political environment is just a sketch: the Keep exists on the border of some civilized land to the west and untamed wilderness to the east (which sounds like the classic West Marches in reverse), but there are no details you might get in later products that tied themselves to Greyhawk, Forgotten Realms, etc. The motivations of the monsters and cultists in the module are also hazy at best. And all of this blank space allows for the gamemaster and player to project their own ideas onto it! After I wrote that post on the module, I heard back from a lot of people how they interpreted it differently, like viewing the chaotic bandits as a scouting party of some evil human empire to the east, or deciding to raid the Keep instead of the Caves of Chaos, or playing the adventure straight as Gygax seems to have intended. The Keep on the Borderlands’ flexibility to contain all of these competing narratives and motivations is its abiding strength.

Anne - I'm curious to know your thoughts on a recent drinking trend. How do you feel about amaro? I know that Brad Thomas Parsons is not single-handedly responsible for the rise of bitter Italian liqueurs, but he is more or less single-handedly responsible for getting me into them. I read his books, Bitters and Amaro, and that convinced me to try them, and from there I've just kept trying new bitter flavors.

WFS - I am really not up on any of the latest drinking trends; I prefer to stick more to the classics, old fashioneds, negronis, whiskey sours and the like. I have had a few amaro spritzes, but didn't find them particularly revolutionary. 

In terms of trends, I am of course aware of seemingly every brand getting into the hard seltzer business, but I'm not too keen on them. Something in that vein that I have enjoyed, however, are the Finnish Long Drinks, which to my understanding actually contains gin. It's no gin & tonic with a splash of St. Germain, but if I'm at a tailgate and everyone is chugging beers, it's probably my canned drink of choice. Any amaro drinks you'd recommend?

Anne - I actually would say the negroni is a good starting point! It's pretty easy to experiment with y swapping out one ingredient to see how you like the taste with a different spirit, or another liqueur instead of vermouth. Campari was my first amaro, then Aperol, then I discovered you can mix them, and by now, I've tried maybe a half dozen others.

I actually thought of White Claw and its cousins as a trend, but I almost never drink them, myself. Somehow almost all the ones I've tried have had a metallic aftertaste. That might just be a quirk of my palette though.

WFS - That’s exposes my ignorance - I didn’t know Campari was a type of amaro. I need to get on your level.

Anne - Admittedly, until I read the Amaro book, I didn't know the word, let alone any examples! I think bitter flavors have become more enjoyable for me as I've gotten older.

Okay, last question. Looking beyond Barkeep on the Borderlands, you named your blog for a campaign setting, the Prismatic Wasteland. You've mentioned before that Luka Rejec's Ultraviolet Grasslands was one of your inspirations. But could I ask you to pop the hood for a moment, and ask you to talk about another inspiration? What's something I could read or watch or listen to that would help me understand a part of the Prismatic Wasteland? And how does the source relate to the final product?

WFS - I’ll give you three, one being a science fantasy book old enough to be on the original Appendix N, the second being a children’s TV show, and the third is another classic D&D module - I have range. 

So the first (and potentially somewhat obvious) answer is Dying Earth by Jack Vance. The stories of the Dying Earth take place amidst the decay of an untold number of decadent civilizations but the stories are about wizards, and monsters and magic. However, what is understood as magic is really the ritual tinkering with ancient sciences and technologies that are no longer understood. This all rings true for the Prismatic Wasteland setting as well.

But the Prismatic Wasteland is bit less dark than the Dying Earth, which while light at times is not always so. I describe the Prismatic Wasteland as whimsical post-post-apocalyptic in genre, which aligns more with my second influence, Adventure Time. Adventure Time was a show that ran on Cartoon Network but garnered a following of adults due to its sense of humor. While it can read as just pure gonzo fantasy at first (with talking animals and a kingdom full of candy people), over the course of the series, it is revealed that the world is the way it is due to a series of apocalypses, and the remnants of the older civilizations, humanity included, are scattered and scarce.

For the third inspiration, we’ll move away from science fantasy and the Dying Earth genre entirely. The Isle of Dread is an adventure for B/X D&D and is only a few years younger than The Keep on the Borderlands. It is also one of the first adventures I ever ran. I have always preferred its flora and fauna (which includes dinosaurs) to the typical pseudo-medieval stock in most D&D settings and adventures. The Prismatic Wasteland setting is similar, but with a more science fiction spin: it takes place across an entire continent, which was terraformed by an advanced civilization to be the ideal vacation resort for an intergalactic populace. But now the island’s many spas, mega-malls, amusement parks, high-end dining and other amenities are unrecognizable, derelict versions of their former selves. And the AI-enabled robotic animals that were designed to be capable of reproduction run wild from the amusement parks in which they were once contained. I call these creatures “animaltronics” and they do include dinosaurs. So I guess I would be remiss in not also listing a fourth inspiration: Jurassic Park.

A book, a TV show, a TTRPG adventure and a movie. How’s that for a variety of sources!

cover art by Sam Mameli

 

Roadside Picnic Basket Book Club - 1 - Roadside Picnic

Welcome to the first in what I hope will be a series of conversations between me and Trey Causey from From the Sorcerer's Skull about dungeon crawling science fiction. Our first conversation, and the club namer, is about one of the most famous works of Russian science fiction - Roadside Picnic. So pull up a picnic basket, and enjoy our chat!

Anne - I wanted to chat with you, because I know you're putting together a sort of Appendix N for some adventures in space, and I saw you mention Roadside Picnic as a source to draw from.

I really enjoy Roadside Picnic but it also occurs to me that it's kind of "having a moment" right now. I feel like I see a lot of people mentioning it as a potential inspiration.

Trey - It comes up a lot. It's one of Humza's favorites, for instance. 

Anne - It's very versatile in that sense, because if I recall correctly, Humza's setting is a pre-colonial fantasy North Africa, while you're talking about off-world adventures in a spacefaring future. But I can see the appeal in both cases.

Trey - Besides being a good book, I think it appeals to folks interested in games of treasure-seekers exploring weird and dangerous places is because that's exactly what it does!

I think it's probably a better inspiration for the "classic play" style of D&D than say Raiders of the Lost Ark because the protagonists aren't particularly heroic types and the dangers are weirder and more fantastical. It has scenes that are perhaps the modern equivalent of poking around with 10 foot poles. 

Anne - In a way it almost surprises me that it's not the textual basis for classic D&D adventures. 

But it occurs to me that maybe we should each take a turn summarizing the book, in case anyone reading this is wondering what we're talking about. I assume there are a few people who didn't rush off to Wikipedia the moment they saw a book title they hadn't read.

Trey - Sure, let me respond to that point about inspiring D&D first, if you don't mind. I think D&D is how D&D is by accident. It's like Star Trek Monopoly, in a sense. They used only the trappings and widgets of things they liked but repurposed them to something their wargamer minds knew how to handle. I think classical play is an ahistorical attempt to make these accidents of history make sense. 

Anne - I think what we now call "classic play" is as much a creation of the OSR scene in the early 2010s as it is a revival of any way that people actually used to play in the 1970s. From what I can tell, there were a lot of different playstyles back then, because people who didn't learn the game directly from Gygax or Arenson had to figure it out for themselves, and what they came up with was usually different from one another. So the OSR style of inching through a trap filled deathmaze is more like the canonization of one version of the past than a recognition of a single best or most common experience.

Trey - I think that's correct. It has antecedents, but it was one choice of many.

Anne - I feel like some OSR people disclaim any personal creativity and try to say that Gary invented it all, but to me it seems obvious that they invented new things and made choices about what to carry forward from the past. 

Trey - That's true.

Anne - I want to come back to your Star Trek Monopoly metaphor in a second, but we probably should describe the book first.

Trey - So Roadside Picnic is a Soviet-era Russian science fiction novel by the Strugatsky brothers that deals with the aftermath of a strange, presumably extraterrestrial "Visitation" at 6 locations across the globe. These locations are left altered in weird ways. There are anomalous artifacts and weird substances. As the governments try to keep a lid on these "zones" and exploit what they can technologically, a culture of stalkers arises that sneak into zones and take things to sell on the black market.

Anne - I like how much of the Strugatsky's invented language you managed to work your summary! I see it as a story about poor criminals with no other options for a decent living going into a bizarre environment, filled with deadly traps, to seek magic treasures, in a world where everyone is shockingly blasé to the wonders and the horrors of the Zone / dungeon. Even the treasures they find, which should inspire awe, get called "swag," and some types are common enough that they aren't even particularly valuable. 

The D&D attitude is there, alongside a plot structure that mirrors the classic dungeon delve.

Trey - I think the "poor criminals" part is interesting. Red is initially working for the government. Does the government exploration end? Or is it just Red finds the idea of making more money off the risk's he's taking more enticing?

Anne - There's even a guy who's infamous for bringing in hirelings to get killed on his behalf.

Trey - Yep. He's got a nickname, as I recall - The Buzzard!

Anne - Yes! It's been a couple years since I read it, but I think he's also the guy who loses all the bones in his legs to an encounter with Witch's Jelly.

Trey - Yeah. But I think it isn't so much they have no other options, but that these blue collar guys see this as a quicker way to wealth. It's dangerous, but there's a hint some of them are sort of thrillseekers, too, as I recall. What they do is seductive.

Anne - There are really two kinds of Stalkers, right? There are the blue collar workers who are doing it for the government, and the black market criminals who just want to sell swag to the highest bidder. Plus the occasional scientific tourist who wants to actually learn more about the weirdness of the Zone.

Trey - And of course, we learn the governments are benefiting from the black market trade, too.

Anne - Thrillseeking is a good way of describing it. These guys are looking for adventure as well as money. They're adventurers.

Trey - Back to D&D again!

Anne - Okay, so a minute ago, you compared D&D to Star Trek Monopoly. Could you say more about what you mean by that?

Trey - Sure. It's my shorthand for the trappings of one thing, but the substance of another. Star Trek Monopoly pays lip service to Star Trek, but is really just monopoly. A game that purports to be about Conan, or Fafhrd and Gray Mouser, or Gandalf, but is instead about dying in holes in the ground, has a similar sort of disconnect. I hasten to add, this does not mean it’s bad.

Anne - That's worth pointing out! But right, Conan doesn't work in a team, Gandalf never got eaten by a Gelatinous Cube while trying to steal Smaug's gold, etc.

Trey - Neither carry 10 foot poles!

Anne - I think that's also what I mean when I say I'm surprised Roadside Picnic wasn't a conscious influence. Because D&D is kind of like the plot Roadside Picnic, but with the cast of The Hobbit swapped in to replace the Russian lumpen-proletariat. 

Trey - I think that's right. It also makes me think how it might be interesting to think about a version of The Hobbit where the desolation of Smaug was a Zone!

Anne - True, we could all certainly lean in harder to the weirdness of the dungeon!

Trey - I do think there are ways in which D&D isn't like Roadside Picnic, of course, besides the modern setting. One, dungeon environments are mostly new spaces to adventurers with unknown dangers. The zones (mostly) seem known to the stalkers we follow, it's just a matter of if they can avoid the dangers. Two, they never haul about large amounts of valuables. No hordes of coins for them. Three, there aren't really monsters in the zones: just "traps" and "hazards."  I think you could do a "rationalized D&D" that was more like a medieval-ish RP, but as it stands D&D is a little bit Roadside Picnic and a little bit The Hobbit. Awkwardly.

My Weird & Wonderful Interview with maxcan7

At the start of the year, or maybe it was the end of the last one, maxcan7 of Weird & Wonderful Worlds messaged me to ask if I'd like to participate in his ongoing interview series. I agreed, and in the last couple weeks we found a time to sit down for a chat.

That interview has now been released!, and you can read it here.

Thank you to maxcan7 for the opportunity to participate in this project, and for the chance to talk about myself and my views on the online RPG scene.