Robbing Pathfinder - Combat Styles - Bear Crane Dragon

For awhile now, I've had this daydream that a lot of Pathfinder material could be converted to slightly simpler rules-systems where I would feel more able to use it at my table. I like the idea of Pathfinder. It's one of my favorite D&D 3.75 editions (although Monte Cook's Arcana Unearthed might be my favorite). It's full of fun ideas, and it has lots of bold flashy art. Yes, it seems to largely be a game of fantasy superheroics, but so does most D&D, and in PF that means there are lots of interesting options for customizing your character.

My only problem with Pathfinder, really, is that its complexity means that neither I nor anyone I play with feels comfortable trying to run the thing. Which I don't mind, really, but I wish I had a way to use some of the cool character ideas that it includes. Hence my daydream of conversion.

So this is something of a thought experiment or proof-of-concept, to see if I can take something from Pathfinder and rewrite it so that I can use it. I want to start with the "combat style" feats that were introduced in Ultimate Combat. Each of these is a series of three feats that define a specific fighting style. One really obvious use for these is additional Mighty Deeds of Arms that DCC warriors could learn. Another possibility is as GLOG spells for characters like the adept class from A Blasted Cratered Land, or one of the muscle wizards from Goblin Punch or Ten Foot Polemic or Remixes and Revelations. In both cases, combining the feats into a single Deed or spell should hopefully provide some nicely variable results.

Sajan the Monk by Wayne Reynolds

Pathfinder Combat Style Feats as DCC Might Deeds

Boar Style - The warrior bites and scratches her opponent, tearing skin from flesh and flesh from bone, emerging red in tooth and claw. Although the style rewards a brawler who abandons herself to bestial fury, its moves were once carefully refined to inflict maximum horror and break the enemy's morale. Boar style is typically unarmed, but it can be enhanced with flensing knives, or by wearing cat-claws or metal teeth (as daggers). Its techniques are sometimes known to Orc bosses, Beastmen champions, and Hobgoblin sergeants.

A warrior can learn boar style by expending at least half her Intelligence or Personality score while in the throes of battle rage, by stealing a blood-soaked idol from the sacrificial altar of a tribe of humanoid berserkers, or by slaying a Giant Boar (combat statistics as Ogre) and eating its heart.

3 You bite and tear at your opponent. They must make a DC 10 morale check or flee in terror from your ferocity.

4 You bite and tear at your opponent. The wound bleeds freely, and your opponent suffers 1d3 damage each round until they use an action to staunch the wound.

5 You bite and tear at your opponent, dealing an additional 1d6 damage. They must make a DC 10 morale check or flee in terror from your ferocity.

6 You bite and tear at your opponent, dealing an additional 1d6 damage. The wound bleeds freely, and your opponent suffers 1d3 damage each round until they use an action to staunch the wound.

7+ You rip and tear, bite and gouge your opponent, dealing an additional 2d6 damage. Your opponent must make a DC 14 morale check or flee in terror from your ferocity. The wound bleeds uncontrollably, and they suffer 1d6 damage each round until they use a full combat round to staunch the wound.



Crane Style - The warrior stands on one leg, finding her center and balance like a reed that sways in the wind. Allowing her enemy to approach, she batters away her opponent's blows as a bird buffets the air with its wings. This is a measured and cerebral style that turns an opponent's strength against them. Crane style might be unarmed, or might utilize a quarterstaff or shield (shield bash deals 1d3).

A warrior can learn crane style by surviving a fight because her opponent fumbled what would have been the killing blow, by discovering a long-forgotten monastery among the mountain peaks, or by defeating an Air Elemental or an enemy wizard's Invisible Companion.

3 You sway to turn the force of your enemy's blow back upon them. The next attack that hits you, you automatically deal your current weapon's damage to the enemy who hit you.

4 You bend to redirect your enemy's strike against their own allies. The next attack that hits you also deals its normal damage to another opponent.

5 You bend and sway to absorb your enemy's might and turn the force of their blow back upon them. The next attack that hits you deals only half damage. You automatically deal your current weapon's damage to the enemy who hit you.

6 You bend and sway to absorb your enemy's might and redirect their strike against their own allies. The next attack that hits you deals only half damage to you, and also deals its normal damage to another opponent.

7+ You bend and sway, absorbing your enemy's might, turning the force of their blow back upon them, and redirecting their strike against their own allies. The next attack that hits you deals its minimum possible damage to you, and also deals its maximum damage to another opponent. You automatically deal your current weapon's maximum damage to the enemy who hit you.



Dragon Style - The warrior invokes the spirit of the dragon - her mind filled with the dragon's philosophy, her body emulating the dragon's movements, her heart aspiring to imitate the perfect being. Empowered by her own belief and ambition, the warrior is imbued with the nobility and sovereignty, the savagery and ferocity of the living dragon. Although rare, dragon style is sometimes practiced by entire tribes of Lizardmen and Kobolds, whose community life is devoted to reverence and awe for their sacred ancestor.

A warrior can learn dragon style by failing her saving throw against a dragon's breath and surviving, by establishing a hoard of unspent coins worth at least CL x 1000 gp to sleep within between adventures, or by intercepting a rival adventuring party of would-be dragonslayers and taking the dragon's revenge upon them.

3 The spirit of the dragon surrounds you like an aura. Your attack deals +1d damage, and you roll +1d on your next saving throw against magic (usually d24).

4 You strike like the slap of a dragon's tail. Your enemy must make a DC 10 Fortitude save or drop everything they're holding and roll -1d Action Dice until the end of combat (usually d16).

5 The spirit of the dragon surrounds you like an aura. Your attack deals +1d damage, and you roll +1d on your next saving throw against magic (usually d24). Then you unleash the dragon's roar. All your enemies roll -1d saving throws (usually d16) and their ACs drop by half until the end of combat.

6 You unleash the dragon's roar. All your enemies roll -1d saving throws (usually d16) and their ACs drop by half until the end of combat. Then, you strike like the slap of a dragon's tail. The enemy hit by your attack must make a DC 10 Fortitude save or drop everything they're holding and roll -1d Action Dice until the end of combat (usually d16).

7+ The spirit of the dragon surrounds you like an aura. Your attack deals +2d damage, and you roll +2d on your next saving throw against magic (usually d30). Then you unleash the dragon's roar. All your enemies roll -2d saving throws (usually d14) and their ACs drop by half until the end of combat. Finally, you strike like the slap of a dragon's tail. The enemy hit by your attack must make a DC 10 Fortitude save or they drop everything they're holding and roll -2d Action Dice until the end of combat (usually d14).

Crane Style by Dmitry Burmak

Pathfinder Combat Style Feats as GLOG Spells

Boar Style
R: touch, T: creature, D: 1 attack

Your biting, clawing attack deals [sum] damage to your target. The target must Save or become frightened and try to run away. An additional [dice] opponents also test their morale. The bleeding wound you inflict deals an additional [dice] damage to your target every 10 minutes until they receive medical treatment, typically in their own lair.

Some monsters' bodies have magical (or toxic!) properties when eaten. When you attack a creature with Boar Style, you may choose to consume 1 serving of its flesh. If you rolled doubles or triples, you automatically eat a serving.



Crane Style
R: self, T: self, D: [dice] enemy attacks

Your bending, swaying defense protects you from the next [dice] attacks that hit you. Set aside the Magic Dice used to cast Crane Style; none of them will return to your MD pool until after they are expended. The [dice] and [sum] devoted to this spell will diminish as its MD are expended.

When an attack hits you, the damage of that attack is reduced by [dice]. Then select one of the Magic Dice used to cast Crane Style. If the original damage of the attack is more than the amount showing on the chosen MD, you push the blow partially aside, and the attacker also deals [dice] damage with their current weapon to another opponent. If the original damage of the attack is less than the amount showing on the chosen MD, you reflect the blow back on the attacker, dealing [sum] damage with your current weapon to them. Finally, expend the chosen MD normally.



Dragon Style
R: self / 30' cone / touch, T: self / [dice] creatures / 1 creature, D: 10 min / 10 min / 0

The spirit of the dragon surrounds you like an aura. You unleash the dragon's roar and strike like a tail slap. This spell has three distinct effects: the first affects only you, the second targets multiple opponents at missile range, and the third affects a single opponent you strike in melee.

Until the end of combat, you have advantage on Saves, and all your attacks deal [dice] additional damage.

[Dice] enemy creatures are shaken with fear by the roar. They suffer [dice] damage immediately and have disadvantage on Saves until the end of combat.

Your stunning attack deals [sum] damage and causes your target to drop everything they're holding, to be too confused to cast spells, and to suffer disadvantage on all rolls until the end of combat.

Dragon Disciple Prestige Class by Jason Engle

Director's Commentary

Boar Style, Boar Ferocity, Boar Shred - When I opened the first summary description, I almost immediately regretted my decision to take this on. "Unarmed strikes deal bludgeoning or piercing damage." Oh, come on! Work with me, Paizo! Give me something, give me anything, that I can actually carry over into a system that doesn't care quite so much about damage types!

Fortunately, I kept reading, and there is more there, both in the overall description of the style, and in the complete rules text for the feat. My initial fears may have been a little bit of an overreaction. There are some additional effects to draw on, but what helps at least as much are the descriptions of what you look like, how you learn this, and how you can improve.

For the DCC Deed, I decided to use combine the three effects to produce an A, B, AC, BC, ABC pattern. Obviously, the A effect is the weakest and the C effect the strongest, so I had to think about which should be which. I suppose the platonic ideal combat style Deed would have five different effects, but this seems fine for now. Also DCC spells typically have a top effect that's quite a bit more powerful than the ones that came before it, and I wanted to include that feel here to emphasize the specialness of these moves.

It might be interesting if a Warrior had to "spellburn" Personality or Intelligence to use a style Deed, or if they risked some kind of "disapproval" if they roll low. The point of putting a cost on using one of these moves would again be to help it feel a little more special, and to justify them being a bit stronger than other Deeds.

I also decided to include a bit about how a Warrior could learn each Deed, which is something I first tried when I wrote for David Coppeletti's Class Alphabet, (expected publication date TBA). For these, I thought there should be a way to learn each style by having a particular experience during a fight, a way to "quest for it" on an adventure, and a way to learn it by fighting a specific monster.

For the GLOG spell version, I decided to just pile on all three effects to create a single spell. In terms of the damage dealt, this is like a variation on Magic Missile, and I'm okay with that. Magic Missile also hits automatically, and this one you have to land a punch first, so I think it's alright to add a little more power as a reward for making the hit. Also, since food-based campaigns seem to be relatively common among GLOG players, and since this is a bite attack, I added a culinary effect at the end.

Crane Style, Crane Wing, Crane Riposte - The original version is about reducing the attack roll penalty and increasing the AC bonus for "defensive fighting," and getting bonus counterattacks against an enemy who attacks you but misses. Neither DCC nor GLOG has a defensive fighting option, and reducing penalties isn't super interesting. What DCC does have already is a Mighty Deed that increases Armor Class, so I thought it might be more interesting to turn this into Damage Reduction instead. Having decided that, it's obvious that the counterattacks should happen if your opponent hits you, rather than if they miss you.

For the GLOG version, I realized I could make the spell feel a bit more cerebral by making the caster choose whether to deflect the attack onto another monster or reflect it back at their main opponent, so now you have to think about how to use up each Magic Dice you assigned to the spell, by picking whether to spend one that's higher or lower than the incoming damage. Since doubles are always bad in GLOG spellcasting, discarding a dice that has the exact same number as the damage roll does nothing. As you spend the dice, the power of the spell gets reduced too, so it's not like you're repeatedly Magic Missile-ing your opponent at full strength.

Dragon Style, Dragon Ferocity, Dragon Roar - Of these three, this was the hardest style to work with, because the mechanics are so gamey, and it's not necessarily that easy to visualize what's supposed to be going on. It kind of reminds me of a combo attack from a fighting video game. For the DCC version, I tried to avoid having to keep track of modifiers by using dice-size increases and decreases, which is a fairly standard mechanic for that game. For the GLOG version, I just awarded advantage and disadvantage on the rolls. That's also helpful because a lot of GLOG mechanics are roll-under, and this way you don't have to worry about subtracting a bonus or adding a penalty or whatever.

Overall, I think this went pretty well, although it took slightly longer to write than I'd hoped. Still, it's the kind of thing that makes a nice mental palette-cleanser in between other kinds of writing. There's no shortage of interesting Pathfinder content that could be converted, so I'll probably do more posts like this in the future.

Random Thoughts on Jane Austen

Over the last couple academic calendar breaks, I've spent quite a bit of time with a couple friends from work playing Marrying Mr Darcy, watching various film versions of Pride & Prejudice, and talking about our own personal fan theories of Jane Austen. Have you ever wondered what librarians talk about when they hang out socially? In our case, yes, it was books. Well okay, a boardgame about a book, and several film adaptations of the same book. But, still, booooks.

Here are some of my / our thoughts, in no particular order.

source

- Lizzie and Darcy want to smash. The plot of Pride & Prejudice doesn't really make sense unless you think that the two of them are strongly sexually attracted to each other pretty much from the moment they first meet. (And before you say "of course, Anne, it's a love story," consider that what I mean is that this is NOT a story about two people falling in love. It's a story about two people who are immediately in love with one another figuring out how to LIKE each other.)

Why does Darcy keep attending social functions and seeking out Lizzie to talk to, when by his own admission, he hates attending social functions and doesn't like talking to people? Why does Lizzie put up with Darcy being such an awful conversationalist and insulting her constantly, when by her own admission, every word out of his mouth makes her angry?

I don't think either character's behavior makes sense unless you accept this premise. The whole plot is about the two of them getting to know one another well enough to actually figure out some way to like each other and ignore or tolerate all the things they instinctively can't stand about each other. But why do they bother? Why do they keep spending time together before they like each other? Why do they continue to look for excuses to overlook one another's shortcomings? Because they want to bang. From the first time they lay eyes on each other, they both want to have sex. That fact is what drives the rest of the action.

This interpretation also helps make sense of Darcy's first proposal and Lizzie's rejection of it. Why does Darcy propose to a woman he doesn't even like? Because even though he doesn't like her, he does want to do her. Why does Lizzie say no? It's a little more complicated. She says no to Collins because she wants to marry for love. She's not willing to get married just so she can have money. For much the same reason, she says no to Darcy because she doesn't want to get married just so she can have sex. She's conflicted, because she does want to jump him, but she wants more than that too. She wants love, and it takes most of the rest of the plot for her to learn enough about him to overcome all her reasons for disliking him, even though she's in love with him from the start.

The different film versions don't all handle this point equally well. Lizzie and Darcy have an immediate emotional attraction and spend the rest of the story trying to reconcile that with their intellectual needs and social obligations. And although that reconciliation is hard work, they pursue it because their emotions won't allow either one of them to simply write the other one off.

To my mind, one of the clearest visual indicators of this kind of attraction
is when you can't take your eyes off the person you're attracted to ...

... when you can't break eye contact, when you can't look away.
That's attraction the audience can see, too.

- Muppet Pride & Prejudice needs to happen yesterday. Miss Piggy is clearly meant to play Mrs Bennett, and Kermit wouldn't make a bad Mr Bennett. Gonzo makes a likely Bingley, and Sam the Eagle would be a pretty convincing Collins. Seriously, how has this not already happened yet? Can someone please throw money at this problem?

source

- I really need to watch Pride & Prejudice & Zombies. Beautiful people in Regency-era ballgowns sword fighting with monsters?

I was hoping for "how am I not in that movie?"
But this works almost as well.

- Charlotte Lucas and Mr Collins feel remarkably open to interpretation. Not all the characters are particularly open. For example, Wickham is a creep. Oh my god, Wickham is such a disgusting creep. (More on this below.) Every time we played Marrying Mr Darcy, none of us wanted to end up engaged to Wickham, even if he was a "good match" for our heroine. But by contrast, Charlotte and Collins both feel open multiple understandings.

When you compare the Collin Firth mini-series and the Kiera Knightly film, in one version, when Lizzie rejects Collins, he and Charlotte end up engaged within a couple days. In the other, he leaves the house, embarrassed, to go for a walk, she meets him on his walk, and by the time he gets back to the house, like half an hour later, they're engaged.

In one version, when Lizzie visits Charlotte after she's married, and she's talking about how Collins is busy with his gardening and his devotion to the Lady Catherine De Bourgh, she seems so desperately sad and lonely, like "Lizzie, help me, I'm so alone, I didn't know what I was getting myself into!" But in the other version, when she tells her all that, she looks so wise and smug, like "Yup, he's outside, I have the whole house to myself, I'm alone all the time, I'm a genius, and I love my perfect life."

As an aside, in Marrying Mr Darcy game, Charlotte is the most "cunning" character. We made a lot of jokes about how "cunning" was code for "oldness", and then discovered that there are a bunch of really insulting traditional nicknames and sayings about how women above a certain age are considered un-marriageable because they're "too old" (no, I won't link to them here). You can probably guess what we joked "friendliness" was slang for.

Collins' two most distinguishing characteristics are his cluelessness about Lizzie's lack of attraction to him, and his comical over-devotion to the Lady Catherine De Bourgh. These two traits push in two very different directions. One is an interpretation I like to call "Neckbeard Collins". This is a Collins who is just an over-the-top parody of every trope of contemporary toxic masculinity. He has a neckbeard, he wears a fedora, he says "m'lady" and somehow manages to spew crumbs on you every time he talks. He's a redpillar, an incel, and a PUA in his own mind. And he's a joke, no one can take him seriously. The fact of his loathesomeness serves as a critique of all the qualities he exemplifies. (Wickham is a neckbeard too, it's just harder to laugh at him. Seriously, fuck that guy forever.) I would love to see a film version that leans into the Neckbeard Collins interpretation.

Another interpretation  is "Gay Collins", where Collins is as a gay man living in a time when he knows he can't live openly or love who he wants. He offers to marry one of the Bennett sisters because they're his cousins and he doesn't want to make them homeless, but if they're not interested, he doesn't really care. He has to marry someone though, because society and his patroness expect it. Enter cunning Charlotte Lucas. (More on her in a sec.) He likes gardening, interior decorating, and spending time with his women friends. Perhaps he's a bit of a queen, but that's fine. He's happy with who he is.

And Charlotte's happy with who she is too. In this interpretation, Charlotte is a lesbian. Theirs is a marriage of convenience. Does this Charlotte like Lizzie? Well, Lizzie is her best and oldest friend, they've been inseparable most of their lives. But Lizzie likes men, even if she's not ready to marry one, and Charlotte knows that her friend will never really like her back, not in the same way, and that she might after all decide to get married soon. So in this interpretation, Charlotte and Collins aren't in love with each other any more than they are in any other version, but they are each able to live with perhaps the only other person who can understand their situation. I've never seen anything like that in any version of Pride & Prejudice, but I'd like to.

One last thing about Collins, how does he not realize that Mary Bennett likes him?! I know that he's supposed to be so full of himself that it makes him unobservant, but seriously, how oblivious can one person get? Is it even possible for Mary be any more obvious about her affections? And yes, she's younger than him, but he's not that old, she's not that far off from adulthood, and it's not like there's actually a rush for him to get married. He could wait, if it meant being in a relationship with someone who actually likes him.

I don't mean to seem glib about the age issue in Mary and Collins' case, because age differences and issues of consent are quite serious in our last bit of fanon. If you want to leave on a funny note, this is your opportunity to do so. Seriously, stop reading now if you want to avoid thinking about what exactly it is that Wickham did off-camera that makes him so detestable.

You can leave by clicking a link to see The New Yorker's defense of Charlotte Lucas, or LitHub's defense of Mrs Bennett. Spoiler alert, when the alternative is homelessness and abject poverty, there might indeed be something to be said in favor of marrying for the money, particularly if that marriage can be companionable, and it saves your widowed mother and orphaned sisters, too.


- Wickham got Georgiana Darcy pregnant. Okay, I warned you. So you know how Darcy leaves to go back home to Pemberley, and it's a huge problem because Jane and Bingley are finally getting really serious in their courtship, then somehow Darcy persuades Bingley to go with him? How does he do that exactly? What could Darcy possibly say to Bingley to make him leave the woman he's falling in love with? And is it really just because Darcy's feeling bored and anti-social? No, I think it's because Georgiana is having a baby. Wickham's baby.

Georgiana Darcy spends practically the entire story on bedrest. When Lizzie (and the audience) finally meet her, there's a sense that she's quite fragile, that she's just barely gotten over some life-altering ordeal. When Darcy tells Lizzie about Georgiana, the timeline he describes puts Wickham breaking off his relationship with Georgiana about nine months before Darcy and Bingley ghost Jane and yeet back to Pemberley.

Darcy only ever hints about what Wickham did to his sister, but I think it's fair to say that he did more than just break her young heart. I think Wickham raped Georgiana, and she got pregnant. I don't like this interpretation, but I'm convinced it's correct. When Georgiana finally meets Lizzie, she's thrilled to see her, probably because she's been in seclusion for like a year up to that point, healing from her wounds and keeping her secret so that she'll eventually be able to re-enter society. A society that, if it knew the truth, would judge her rather than him. My most burning question is, what happened to her baby?

I remember watching Lost in Austen a few years ago, and for some reason, one of the things they're trying to do in that is to find an interpretation that rehabilitates Wickham. One thing that struck me was his complaint that whatever he might have done, he didn't deserve to be punished by getting shipped off to die in a warzone. It reminded me of the scene in Persepolis where the narrator's grandmother scolds her and tells her that even though a man was sexually harassing her, he didn't deserve to have her get him in trouble with the Islamist morality police.

I can intellectually understand the moral argument that says that state-sanctioned violence is worse than the crimes it's meant to punish, but emotionally it's incredibly frustrating to hear that we couldn't possibly hurt this man who hurt someone else, to hear more sympathy for what might happen to him than for the person he already happened to. "No criminal justice" shouldn't mean "no other kind of justice, either." If Wickham weren't being sent to the front lines to get shot by Napoleon, what exactly would stop him from repeating his same pattern of grooming and abuse over and over again? If every one of his crimes is kept hidden to protect the honor of the young women he's injured, and he himself never faces any punishment for them, (indeed if he's rewarded for with payments of hush money), then what kind of protection is there for the next young woman he selects as a target?

One thing my friends and I kept worrying about in both the Firth and Knightly versions is, is Lydia going to be okay? She seems happy, but she's also a child, and her husband is a child molester. She seems like she wanted to marry him, but also, everyone else wanted her to marry him to save their own reputations. Lizzie acts like the test of Darcy's love is that he was willing to spend a fortune to keep her family from being scandalized. But perhaps the real test would be, would he love her enough to marry her even if her family was scandalized? And does anyone love Lydia enough to keep her away from Wickham, even at cost to themselves?

Austen composed her story so that by fortunate coincidence, what's good for Lizzie is also good for Lydia, and as mentioned Wickham gets what amounts to a death sentence disguised as a career promotion, but I wonder what that part of the story would look like if the characters believed their silence helped Wickham more than it helped Georgiana or Lydia. If there was no fortunate coincidence and they had to make consequential decisions? I suppose I'm wondering that, not just because of the MeToo movement, but because questions about what moral courage looks like have been on everyone's minds lately.

Urzya Powderkeg 1 - Dreaming of Urzya

One of the first fantasy worlds to really make an imprint on my imagination was Magic: the Gathering's Ice Age setting. I love the frozen landscape, the taiga and tundra and glaciers and ice. I love the image of medieval redoubts holding on to the last vestiges of civilization against the unceasing winter night. That's probably why B/X Blackrazor's Land of Ice is one of my all-time favorite unpublished campaign settings.

I remember playing out in the snow with my sister, imagining a world so cold that magic sometimes froze when you cast it, and the land was littered with ice crystals containing frozen spells. (In retrospect, that part sounds a bit like unexploded ordinance leftover on a battlefield, which is actually consistent with Ice Age's status as a kind of nuclear winter following an apocalyptic mages' war.)

I remember dreaming once of a frozen land, where the royal court was ruled by psychic vampires, who could read minds and drink souls, where among the outcasts dwelt warmth vampires, who craved the heat of another's touch and could never, never drink in enough. (The lords in my dream wore armor like Babylon 5's Vorlons. The outcasts went naked in the wastes, but wrapped shivering in furs within any settlement; it was only HUMAN warmth they longed for.)

source: Zero Wing

So when Jack from Tales of the Grotesque and Dungeonesque published Dirge of Urazya, detailing a postapocalyptic fantasy Eurasia ruled over by a decadent and collapsing feudal hierarchy of vampires, the setting he described managed to touch on a very formative bit of my own personal fantasy mythos.

Jack also manages something that Eberron tries, and, in my opinion, fails at, which is to make historical conflicts between monster factions matter to the present day of his setting. Eberron has something like 40 thousand years of recorded history that takes place before the player characters show up and get to interact with anything. All the events of that history are really samey and easy to conflate, and they're also all just backstory with no particular relevance to the gameworld the players are interacting with. You could maybe argue that all that long history is intended to help gamemasters pick appropriate set dressing and treasures for the ancient ruins the player characters might explore, but it's presented in a way that does nothing to facilitate that goal.

In contrast, in Jack's campaign set-up for Saltmire, the waning vampire lords have two groups of unruly vassals who are jockeying for ascendance, and both are derived or descended from dragons. This in turn implies some prior conflict between vampires and dragons that the vampires won, but the war itself is never even mentioned, the focus is entirely on the present-day conflict. (Jack Vance did something similar in The Dragon Masters, with humans and aliens each breeding captured members of the other species to create fantasy monsters. Unfortunately it's one of Vance's weaker books; the idea is much better than his execution of it.)

Trey of From the Sorcerer's Skull has some really good advice for making setting history matter in your game. One of the key points for our purposes here is that history is useful when it helps define the parameters and scope of the present-day adventure.

Dirge of Urazya itself is much less a setting than an invitation to the reader to create their own setting, within certain parameters, and Jack's recent post about making a powder keg is another invitation, with Saltmire as an example "powder keg" campaign set-up along an unnamed piece of Urazyan coastline. (I don't know why, but I assume either the Black Sea or Caspian Sea.)

To make a grotesque and/or dungeonesque powder keg you need six ingredients:

• two ambitious noble houses with a bitter rivalry
• a fading imperial power that nominally holds the nobles in check
• a trading company or corporation wants to expand from economic to political power
• a religious sect whose members are more loyal to it than to any other authority
• a foreign barbarians who exist outside the society the other factions belong to 
• and finally, some scarce resource that all five factions are competing to control

Ideally, the scarce resource should be something the players want for their characters as well. That gives them maximum incentive to get their hands dirty and join the competition. As Brendan from Necropraxis advises, let the players decide who their enemies are. (Although they could, I suppose, like Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon, simply play each against all with the goal of creating maximum chaos.)

source: Babylon 5

Jack has successfully inspired me to make a powder keg campaign start of my own. I'll create an outline here, and add details in future posts. For now, I'll focus on the key elements. Names for things are a detail to be added later. (Also, since this is my own little thought experiment, and since I initially misread the title of Jack's zine, I'm going to be spelling it as "Ur-zya" rather than as "Ur-a-zya".)

Location: An isolated town in the far north of Urzya, possibly in what used to be Siberia. Based on details from the factions, it looks like the town was once some sort of vacation or resort spot, that it houses either a biological weapons laboratory or a biological waste dump site, and that it has a railroad running through it.

Imperial Power: An ailing vampire tsarina. She has a loyal court of aging suitors and their household knights, and the town has a sizable population of disinherited dhampirs. The tsarina holds court in a former grand hotel. She badly wants an heir, ie, a young person she can perform either brain transplant surgery or a psychic personality transfer on.

Noble House: The first noble house are dragonborns. Sorry Jack, I'm shamelessly stealing your idea here. The dragonborn were bred by the vampires either to fight their war against the dragons or as some kind of symbol of victory after the war ended. These days they're the more established noble house. I bet they love the petroleum spas in the town's old resorts. I'm not sure what they want besides knocking off the competition, but that's another detail that can come later.

Noble House: Stealing from Jack again, my second noble house is made up of dragonmarked humans. Their dark and gritty origin story also involves being bred as enslaved soldiers by the vampire elites long ago, and let's suppose that they're the more up-and-coming of the two houses. I'll need to look up what the different dragonmarks do to pick out the right one for these nobles. I do remember that dragonmarks come in different sizes, and the larger ones are more powerful.

So one thing they want is to find a child with the correct aberrant dragonmark to become their new leader. Probably the current leader wants to kill the kid, someone else wants her on the throne so they can be regent for a decade or so, and, I don't know, maybe there are revolutionaries who want her as a figurehead atop a democratic government. Three sects within the same faction feels like too many, so ideally I'll narrow that list down to two going forward.

Trading Company: I think that something like the Trans-Siberian Railroad ought to run through this town. Probably no one controls its entire length anymore, or at best there's a very fragile syndicate made up of dozens of local franchises who control the tracks in their turf. (Or maybe there IS a single company that runs the whole thing, and THAT level of control and ownership makes them one of the most politically powerful forces in Urzya?)

Anyway, there's a local company operating out of the old railroad station, and they control passage into and out of town on the only mode of transportation that will reliably get you to another bastion of civilization alive. In addition to controlling the food supply, they're probably also arms dealers selling to both the noble houses, amplifying the risk of conflict. I bet the foreign barbarians have been causing them trouble lately. What do they want that they don't already have? Good question! It'll have to wait until a future post for the answer though.

Religious Sect: My favorite Urzyan religion so far is Our Lady of the Drowned, but I don't think she's the right fit for this town. Instead, I want to use the followers of the Five Headed Empress. Tiamat was a literal weapon of mass destruction in Urzya's past. Let's say that she was defeated at the end of the war and her cult was outlawed.

There's presumably a mainstream dragon-worshiping religion that manages to fill the churches in a town with two different dragon-descended noble houses. In that case, the cultists are like followers of the left-hand path of dragon religion, hoarding banned books and forbidden scriptures, meeting in secret to worship a figure who acknowledged but despised by the dragon church's orthodoxy.

Tiamat was a biological weapon, so let's suppose the cultists are either searching for samples and research notes from her original creation or remnants of her that were buried as waste. They're probably risking touching off a plague by accident. Let's also suppose that they really want to find either a human vessel who can reincarnate Tiamat's spirit, or some way to raise her up in her entirety as an undead (or reborn) dragon goddess.

Foreign Barbarians: What kind of creatures live in the frozen wastes outside of town? Well let's start with some sort of feral life-drinking vampire type. The name "breath-stealer" has a nice ring to it. Let's also have some living spells out prowling amid the snowdrifts. These aren't a coherent faction yet so maybe some sort of winter elves would fit in here? I'm also not sure what they want, other than to raze the city and kill everyone in it. They sound scary though!

Scarce Resource: My first instinct is to say "enough food to last the winter," but that seems really depressing, even for a grimdark crapsack like Urzya.

A thought occurs to me that each faction might be searching for a specific young person - a vampiric heir, the bearer of an aberrant dragonmark, Tiamat Reborn. Perhaps, like in Dune, each faction's messiah is the same person? Each faction might racing the others to find the girl before anyone else, and place her on their preferred throne. The town's other children could probably also use a champion to protect them from being kidnapped by the various factions. (Wait, IS this actually any less depressing than the grain idea? I guess "town where children are disappearing" is time-honored plot element, often in stories intended for children, although it seems awfully creepy. But would this work for a game, or is this the kind of idea that works for book, but wouldn't be any fun to play?)

This part might require more consideration. If there's not any one single thing all the factions want, then there should at least be a couple desired objects with overlapping interest groups.

source: me

Secret Santicorn 2019

When I wrote about Secret Santicorn 2018, I was basically just working from my own sidebar, and noticing when people used that phrase as part of the title of a post, and I happened across a few more while looking up members of the GLOGosphere. This year, I had the benefit of being able to spot additional posts in the blogroll section on the OSR Discord.

Last year I counted 17 entries. This time there's almost triple that number. Approximately one year after the end of Google Plus, I would say that the health of the blogosphere is strong.

I should also note that Of Slugs and Silver scooped me by publishing their own Secret Santicorn compilation post. I was already collecting links when Ancalagon published their list, so despite the fact that I'm reduplicating their efforts, I still want to put mine up as well. Last year, there was no one else writing a list of all the Santicorn entries. I interpret Ancalagon's compilation as a further sign of the health of the blogsophere, and I'll happily pass the torch on chronicling the next one.

Unlike last year, it's not possible to assemble all of these into a continuous chain of requests and fulfillments, so I've organized the entries by the type of content instead. I'm not sure what it says about me that I've watched two of these from the wallflower seat without ever getting up to dance, but it's likely nothing flattering, so let's avoid uncomfortable personal introspection by diving straight in to this year's entries!


On the first day of Santicorn, the blogosphere gave to meeeee....

Character Options

Aura Twilight of In the Land of Twilight Under the Moon wrote "Fairytale Classes" for Pseudo Fenton

Iemcd of The Benign Brown Beast wrote "The Slipsoul - a Character Option" for Sky Seeker

Quietude wrote "The Succubus - An OSR Race-as-Class"

As a bonus... Rook of Foreign Planets ALSO wrote "Post-Apocalyptic Character Backgrounds"

Sofinho of Alone in the Labyrinth wrote "2 GLOG Classes - The Aviator & The Jazz Bard" for The Mimic's Nest

GR Michael of Numbers aren't Real wrote "Oberon and Titania - Class: Warlock" for A Swamp in Space

Ryan of Kobolds in the Sewers wrote "The Cryptozoologist Class and Nine Cryptids" for Throne of Salt

Kent Miller of Tropicrawl wrote "OSR Gothic"


Spells & Magic

400 Billion Suns wrote "So You Killed Santa ... What's in His Sack?"

Malcolm Svensson of Tales of Scheherazade wrote "D6 Body-Warping Magic Items and a Body-Warping Spell" for Unreal Star

Isaak Hill of Fallen Empires wrote "D66 Short, Utility-Only Spells" for d66 Classless Kobolds

Diaghilev from Diaghilev's Dice wrote "Field Alchemy!" for Meandering Banter

As a bonus... GR Michael of Numbers aren't Real ALSO wrote "A Sack Full of Toys - Merry Christmas to All"


Monsters

The Byzantine of Espharel wrote "They Came from the Moon! A Space-Breaking Monster" for Archon's Court

Martin O of Goodberry Monthly wrote "Flowery Orcs" for The Whimsical Mountain

Dan of Throne of Salt wrote "Troika Space Combat + d66 Ships" for Of Slugs and Silver

Spwack of Meandering Banter wrote "Creatures Amidst the Ash" for Ten Foot Polemic

Ancalagon TB from Of Slugs and Silver wrote "The 12 Birds of Christmas" for Kobolds in the Sewers

Velexiraptor from A Blasted Cratered Land wrote "The Shellcraze" for Archons March On

Ambnz of Ravenous Ambience wrote "Skyscraper Mimics - and Other Structural Horrors" for A Blasted Cratered Land

Type 1 Ninja of Two Goblins in a Trenchcoat wrote "Words for Monster" for Idle Doings of an Idle Doodler

Valker of Parasites and Paradoxes wrote "Ents and How to Prune Your Humans" for Wanderers and Willows


Campaigns & Adventures

The Goose and Pen wrote "Reinforcing Themes through Mechanics" for Was it Likely?

Vance A of Leicester's Ramble wrote "The Last City"

Luther Gutekunst of Archon's Court wrote "Sci-Fi Dungeon Fill" for Blue Wolf

Agile Goatman of The Man with a Hammer wrote "Drow Econ 101" for Goodberry Monthly

Jones Smith of Was it Likely? wrote "Post-Roman Pre-Saxon Tables, Generators, and Hexes" for Alone in the Labyrinth

Wizzargh of DMiurgy wrote "Pre-Adamite Minidungeon Generator" for Foreign Planets

Lejeune of The Young Dungeon wrote "Generating a Ruined Ship" for Quietude

Jim of d66 Classless Kobolds wrote "The Lounge Temple of Asavraki" for The Magic Spoon

Rook of Foreign Planets wrote "Societies, Gangs, and Cultures of the Post-Apocalypse"

Idle Doodler from Idle Doings of an Idle Doodler wrote "The Underground Caverns of Nodnol" for Same is Shark in Japanese

Journey to the Tomb of the Spider Princess wrote "The Trackless Peaks" for The Young Dungeon

Gabriel Hole-Jones of The Mimic's Nest wrote "The Temple of Lethe" for Princesses & Pioneers

Tamas Kisbali of Eldritch Fields wrote "All Aboard the Terrible Dogfish!" for Deus

Andy of Sword and Storytellers wrote "Herber's Expedition"

James Young of Ten Foot Polemic wrote "Tide-Flooded Caverns" for DMiurgy

Sven Weisserfuchs of Wanderers and Willows wrote "Three Funhouse Dungeon Rooms!"

Gorinich of The Whimsical Mountain wrote "Psychonauts - Courageous Healers or Conniving Thieves?" for Nick Roman

Cataleptic Kraken of Unreal Star wrote "Evolving Dungeons" for Goblin Punch

wr3cking8a11 from A Swamp in Space wrote "An Adventuring Economy" for Diaghilev's Dice

As a bonus... Ancalagon TB from Of Slugs and Silver ALSO wrote "The Secret Santicorn Compilation"

Mottokrosh Machinations wrote "Yuletide Haunting of TOMBS" for Mud & Blood

As a bonus... Iemcd of The Benign Brown Beast ALSO wrote "Crisis on Christmas"

Zoeology of Princesses & Pioneers wrote "Tarot Dungeon" for In the Land of Twilight Under the Moon

As a bonus... Sofinho of Alone in the Labyrinth ALSO wrote "A Gift from Mr Screw-on-Head to Us All..."

DG Chapman of The Graverobber's Guide wrote "Twelfth Night Heist"


... and a partridge in a pear treeeee! Phew!

Dystopian Fiction Review - "Travels in Nihilon" by Alan Sillitoe

Last year, Bombasticus from Future Sound of Lisbon lobbied me to start writing comic book reviews. He's going to have to keep waiting for those, but I thought I might like to occasionally write about some of the books I read. The first series of these will be dystopian novels, starting with Travels in Nihilon by Alan Sillitoe, best known to Belle & Sebastian fans as the author of The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner, and best known to everyone else as, {checks notes} um, {cricket noises}, well.

 
Travels in Nihilon was published in 1971, and the text represents itself as a non-fictional travel guide, assembled from the notes and reports of five correspondents by an unnamed editor. The editor gives us a taste of things to come in the introduction, when after extolling the excitement of freedom-loving, capitalist, nihilist Nihilon, he mentions that "it will be necessary to adjust the prose here and there, since the styles of the reports too often betray touches of panic and hysteria, a tone that may not commend itself to the general reader."

Structurally, each chapter follows one journalist with close third-person narration, and the viewpoint passes between them, although not in a strict order. The chapters are quite short, so we keep moving between the viewpoints. I would describe this book as a comedy, although it's not overtly funny. It is absurd. The events described are so extreme as to be surreal; the way the native Nihilonians instantly recruit the journalists into their various schemes gives each journey a dreamlike quality. Aside from the fact that the country itself is as dysfunctional as Freedonia in Duck Soup, the humor comes from the dry delivery of events that would indeed be "panic and hysteria" inducing to experience firsthand.

The journalists are right to feel overwhelmed, because they're each in over their heads from the moment they cross the border. The Nihilonian police insist each of them is carrying a fake passport. The journalists come with 2000 klipps each, and while I suppose 2000 dollars was quite a bit of money at the time, the prices they're charged suggest that a klipp has the spending power of more like a dime or a penny. It's also a problem that everyone wanting a bribe, and the name of the currency keeps changing, from "klipps" to "klopps" to "kricks" etc, which is either because there are multiple currencies in circulation, or simply because everyone is a liar and a thief. Nihilonians are also all drunk at all time on Nihilitz, which is about the only beverage it's possible to purchase, and sounds to be either a schnapps or a full-on hard spirit. They also all carry guns. Oh, and there's a war on, a revolution against the government and counter-revolution against the populace that starts up the moment the journalists arrive, and each of them gets swept up into it in their own way.

You'd be panicked and hysterical too, and perhaps ready for a stiff drink of Nihilitz, if you'd just survived a direct assassination attempt, indirect exposure to a bombing, you'd just spent all the money that was supposed to last you the whole two weeks of your visit, and you checked your watch and realized you'd only been there an hour. It's laughable how unprepared and out of their depths they all are, leaving for what they assumed was a cushy gig reporting on a free summer vacation, and finding themselves in a war-zone and conscripted into the action.

The journalists arrive by bike, car, boat, train, and airplane. They have somewhat distinctive personalities, with Adam being especially naive and Benjamin particularly grizzled. I kind of liked Edgar, who is relatively passive and ineffectual and ends up tagging along with a strong and stout-hearted Nihilonian lady who's instantly smitten with the poor dope. I also felt kind of badly for Jacqueline, because for her the danger is sexual peril and not just the usual mobs and explosions; she toughens up the most, the quickest. Adam, Benjamin, and Richard all end up heavily inveigled in the conflict, and they all prove relatively willing to let themselves be pulled into the heart of combat. (That aspect of the story is also a bit like Duck Soup, now that I think about it.) Ultimately, the story being told is about the revolution much more than it is about the journalist's individual trips, and so the book doesn't just end with them leaving the country at the end of their assignment, it also ends with the resolution of the war.

I feel comfortable calling Travels in Nihilon a dystopian novel, but it's almost difficult to describe what's dystopian about the country of Nihilon. It's not necessarily reducible to any simple, single thing. The government is a dictatorship masquerading as an illiberal democracy, but its control is not totalitarian. There are a lot of bad laws, truly insane laws with draconian prison sentences, like ten years for driving while not intoxicated on Nihilitz. But the biggest problem with Nihilon is its nihilism which seems to mean something like a combination of laws that enforce chaos, rapacious capitalism run truly amok, and citizens who are generally apathetic or complicit in one or both the other issues.

There's a town by a lake, for example, whose dam is failing, so that at any moment the town might be swept away by floodwaters and all the townspeople might be drowned. It's one of the nicest places in Nihilon, because the prices are so low, and because the mortal terror of being seconds from death every second of every day is considered relaxing by the Nihilonians who live there. That feels like a metaphor for something, but I'm not sure Sillitoe could have possibly been thinking about climate change when he wrote it. Maybe he was thinking of nuclear annihilation. Likewise, Nihilon itself seems vaguely Eastern European, and the fact that it's a failed state that's run badly by an incompetent strongarm thug while businesses at every possible level kleptocratically snatch up anything that's not nailed down feels like a prescient warning about the fate of former Soviet republics after the fall of the USSR, and the consequences of imposing of Reagan-Thatcher era free markets and austerity ... but could Sillitoe really have anticipated events happening 20 years after his book was published?

First, let's look at a couple examples of Nihilon's laws. These are both from chapter 25:

"I'm just out of prison. I was awarded twenty-five years because I exposed the manager of the factory I worked at for swindling. The factory was going bankrupt, so I made a formal complaint. I had irrefutable proof that he was ruining the firm, but when I presented it I was arrested, and given twenty-five years as a misguided idealist. Strangely enough, even though the manager kept on with his dishonesty, the firm did not go bankrupt. It even prospered after I was sent to prison, so I hear. People won't rebel against this government, because they see that God is on the side of the Nihilists."

"It's always been hard to get people to work in Nihilon. Naturally, nihilism and work are not compatible, but President Nil, damn him, came up with the following solution. A man was granted permission to kill somebody if he paid a hundred thousand klipps into the private account of President Nil at the State Bank. On receipt of this payment, the man was given a revolver and a Killing Certificate, with the name of the person inscribed on it whom he wished to put an end to. So everyone has an incentive to work, and save, because there is no one, in this country at any rate, who doesn't have someone he wants to kill. Many people fervently saved in order to get their hundred thousand, and therefor a Killing Certificate. There was no need to produce houses or cars for them to spend their money on. True, a lot of people die, and sometimes whole families are wiped out, but people are cheap."

Tldr; in Nihilon, murder is allowed as long as you bribe the president first, but blowing the whistle on corruption is illegal.

Next, I want to look at Nihilonian capitalism. One notable thing is the absence of any kind of insurance or safety equipment anywhere in the country. Even car repair kits are illegal for motorists to carry. It's an exaggeration of the idea that we can save money by not paying for preventative medicine, even though we'll pay a thousand times more later, after an un-prevented illness has become serious enough to warrant an emergency room visit. It's less like we're saving money, in fact, and more like we're paying extra to ensure that poor people suffer. Here's the safety announcement from Nihilon's airline in chapter 10:

"In case of emergency, passengers are kindly requested to carry on talking, reading, eating or sleeping, because though your lives are in our hands, and we will do our best to preserve them, there will be nothing anybody can do about it. Like all other airlines of the world we carry highly inflammable petrol, fly at a great height, and do not provide parachutes, so in the event of an emergency it is highly unlikely that either passengers or crew would survive."

There's also a kind of parody of the way we allow businesses to nickel and dime us with fees that are over-and-above the purchase price, that appear on our bills only after we agree to buy, and that are unavoidable, even if they're for "services" we didn't really use and don't really want. From chapter 20:

"The ticket collector apologised, and said that there had been a mistake. Instead of having the compartment to herself, she was to share it with another woman. He then demanded a supplement of fifty kricks because, he explained kindly, she would have company all the way to Nihilon City instead of travelling alone as hertofore, and all such extra comforts were provided at nominal cost. She gave fifty kricks to the ticket collector, who departed grumbling and swearing because she hadn't given him anything extra."

Sillitoe also seems prescient in anticipating the push for tiered services. After all, how can you really know that you're being treated well unless you can see someone else being treated badly? What does it even mean to be rich if poor people are still treated with dignity and respect? What good is all your money if it doesn't buy you the opportunity to watch someone starving to death with rickets in a sewage-filled gutter for your amusement? In Nihilon's airlines, second-class is what we'd consider "normal" service. On a first-class plane, there are no seats, you spend the whole flight ballroom dancing in formal-wear while being served gourmet food and champagne by naked flight attendants. And third-class? From chapter 10:

"Third-class tourist-economy night-flight in ten miserable hours? Yes, people are towed in huge gliders by obsolescent bombers, or so I hear. They sit on the floor with luggage at their feet and packets of sandwiches in their hands. A continuous tape of crying babies is played from stereo-speakers to make them feel more uncomfortable, and smells of fatty stew emerge from the end of a pipe near the tail of the plane as it goes through air pockets above mountain tops. Not very nice, I must say. During the flight passports are collected, and hardly distinguishable false ones are handed back before landing on an improvised field in some remote area fifty kilometers from the main airport, so that people have to make their ways to Nihilon City by a very irregular bus service on bumpy tracks, or walk through unmapped forest, if and when they get by the police and customs tent at the side of the field. Even disorganisation is well organised in Nihilon. The aim of our government is absolute chaos meticulously regulated."

Surely arranging this level of misery is more expensive for the airline than equality would be, but people are willing to pay extra to get the things they really want.

Finally, let's look at Nihilon's government. Unsurprisingly, there's propaganda instead of news and state-run media controls the airwaves, as seen here in chapter 18:

"Visitor to Nihilon! In order to find out about our country, you may wish to tune-in to the seven o'clock lies on Radio Nihilon. This is the most important information bulletin of the day. Regarding its curious opening of 'Here are the lies', tourists are earnestly requested not to be duped by it. They may be reminded, in fact, that the inhabitants of Nihilon take it very seriously. This National Bulletin owes its inverted title to the genius of President Nil, when he realised that the people of Nihilon were no longer interested in the News. He therefore proclaimed that henceforth all news would be lies. Thus, when people flocked to hear these lies they soon realised that they were, in fact, serious truth. But whereas before they had contemptuously referred to the News as lies, they could no longer do so, because Lies became its official name."

Also unsurprisingly, Nihilon gives the appearance of being a democracy, holds sham elections with fixed results, and insists that its dictator is really a president, as explained in chapter 22:

"Elections? Not any more, my friend. There were, at first, very early on, but the people were in such a euphoric mood of don't-care and don't-know, that vast deputations went to the government building and said: 'We don't want any more voting. We're happy. So after all, what does it matter?' And the government said: 'It does matter. It's democracy. It's your right to vote. It's your duty. So if you won't vote, we'll vote for you.' And that's how it's been ever since. At every general election the people get into great moods of excitement, wondering which way the voting will go, staying up all night to hear the results. And then at six in the morning, the government breaks the tension by announcing that it has got in once more, after which it declares a public holiday, so that the grateful people, secure in their very own and latest victory, can either go to sleep or continue their celebrations."

Maybe the most frightening, most dystopian thing about Travels in Nihilon, though, is the evidence throughout that the nihilists really have won in a very profound way. The ordinary people of Nihilon are by-and-large happy with their fate. Most of the people we meet don't just accept the arbitrariness of their laws, the thievery of their economy, and the brutality of their government - they like it, they prefer it to the alternatives, and they fight to defend it. Among those who dislike nihilism, a feeling of helplessness prevails before the revolution, expressed here in chapter 24:

"For years I've been disillusioned with nihilism, at having to get up every morning and invent more novelties of disorder for the pampered populace when President Nil forgets to send his own suggestions through. I've known for a long time that it was retrograde and immoral to live under such a system. My wife has often seen me breaking my heart at the waste and burden of it all. I've been secretly praying for a safe and orderly existence, but I was so influenced by President Nil and his philosophy, which said that life should be a great lawless adventure, that I never knew how to try and change it."

In the end, the revolution appears to be successful, but we're left with real doubts about whether and how the new government will be different, and about what it will mean to live in a country that is still filled with nihilists. From chapter 29:

"I like things to stay as they are, all mixed up and dangerous. That's normal now, isn't it? I'll always vote for normal, no matter what it is."

Appendix N - Unreal Literature

I've noticed a trend recently in literary fiction. I'm not sure that it can be used for gaming, but I don't want to let it pass unremarked. It's easy to suspect that the authors creating this trend are responding to a particular element of the zeitgeist, the vertiginous dizziness of unreality, the loss of balance as the ground falls away beneath one's feet.
.

image by Jing Wei

It is the feeling of watching the unthinkable become fait accompli, of hearing voices deny the obvious truth before one's own eyes. It's the feeling of watching one's neighbors accept the previously unprecedented as the new normal, and realizing that one has come to expect it oneself. It is waking up to discover that while you were sleeping, ten impossible things happened before breakfast, and the unconscionable has become the routine. It is the abolition of time, as every yesterday becomes a lifetime ago, as every today you cross another red line, as every time you look behind you, you see the past has calved off and fallen away, so that what was within yesterday' arm's length has today become unreachable. It is the feeling of watching the world come unbalanced, so that with every revolution, it tips a little further off-center, wobbles a little further off its base, spins a little closer to total catastrophe and collapse.

It is the feeling of learning each day of new disasters, disrupting and destroying lives - fires, floods, shootings, assassinations, invasions, massacres, family separations, downed airplanes, territorial incursions, children in cages - of knowing that these disasters are caused by people, that people could prevent them, but that instead they are being allowed to continue, that aid is being withheld, that these disasters will continue indefinitely because people have chosen to cause them to do so. It is the feeling of watching the future one once thought inevitable come unraveled, of watching the threads tangle and fray, leaving only a horrible suppurating void in their place.

It's the feeling Hannah Arendt described when she said "The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction and the distinction between true and false no longer exist," when she wrote "In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true. The audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow. One could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness."

This is the zeitgeist I think lit-fic and lifi authors are responding to. And their response has been to imagine scenarios where facts are not facts, truth is not truth, the past is rewritten to serve the needs of the present, and leaders who hold worldly power also hold a certain dominion of the fabric of reality itself.
.

The Book of M by Peng Shepherd, published June 2018

In Peng Shepherd's The Book of M, there's a plague sweeping the world. The plague's victims first lose their shadows, then start losing their memories. In addition to amnesia about their own lives and pasts, they start mis-remembering the world, and the world itself starts changing to match their mistakes. Someone forgot what deer look like, for example and now deer have bird-wings growing from their heads instead of antlers.

For the infected, reality is as maleable as in Nick Harkaway's The Gone Away World, but for people who still have their memories and their shadows, the world becomes a terrifying place that responds to everyone else's desires but not their own, a world both unchangeable and constantly changing. Because they remember the truth, they struggle to adapt to a world made of lies. (I'm indebted to Electric Lit's review for bringing this one to my attention by pointing out information that wasn't in the publisher's description.)
.

The Heavens by Sandra Newman, published February 2019

In Sandra Newman's The Heavens, only one woman has the power to change reality, or to notice the changes. Every night while she's asleep in the present, she lives a second life 400 years earlier. When her actions in the past change history, she awakes to a present that's different than the one she remembers. Her boyfriend thinks she's crazy. At the start of the book, the world of the year 2000 is almost utopian. Every change she makes in 1600 makes the present world worse, though, so that it becomes more and more like our own almost dystopian reality. Like Star Trek's Mirror Universe, the "darkest timeline" is our own timeline; the only way we can imagine a better future is by imagining the present is already better than the one we currently inhabit.
.

Famous Men Who Never Lived by K Chess, published March 2019

In K Chess's Famous Men who Never Lived, thousands of refugees have fled a parallel dimension where the world ended in nuclear apocalypse. The refugees try to understand a world much like ours, with its alternate history, and its citizens and nations so unwelcoming to outsiders. One refugee tries to create a museum to preserve the memory of the other world, including a science fiction novel that was famous over there but was never written here, The Pyronauts.
.

All My Colors by David Quantick, published April 2019

David Quantick's All My Colors is also about an unwritten book, also called All My Colors. An aspiring but talentless writer has perfectly memorized poems and novels by other authors. One book exists only in his memory but nowhere in the world. So he decides to transcribe it and sell it as his own creation. But doing so seems to unleash a kind of un-reality, and as the book he plagiarized becomes more popular, he experiences increasingly unsettling incidents.
.

This is How You Lose the Time War by Amal el-Mohtar and Max Gladstone, published July 2019

Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone have written This is How You Lose the Time War as an epistolary novel, an exchange of letters between two time-travelers from two different alternate futures. Each has arrived in their past, each is trying to ensure that their own future will come into existence, and not the other's. Like The Book of M, this too is a story about two people with fundamental, existential disagreements nonetheless learning to live alongside one another, without either giving up their truth or their morality, but also without either one ending up dead.

Another quote about M from Electric Lit: "We recognize 'the habit of testing everything by reason' is at best an incomplete goal - sometimes impossible. Bloody wars and public discriminations were carried out over the doctrine of transubstantiation; Catholics and Protestants didn't 'test it by reason' until one side convinced the other, we just learned it wasn't a question to kill each other over." 

That metaphor feels imperfect, because the questions at the heart of today's epistemic and are about our ability to live meaningful lives in democratic societies, or whether we will be immiserated and slain by poverty, autocracy, and carbon pollution. The war at the heart of Time War is truly a matter of life and death. If one side wins, the other will cease to exist. Their solution is compromise, mutual surrender. They have the advantage of symmetry and reciprocity, however. In the real world, we suffer from a lopsided polarization, where one side requests equality, and the other demands fealty.
.

The Memory Police by Yoko Ogaway, published August 2019

Yoko Ogaway's The Memory Police is like a more realistic version of The Book of M. The stage is one small island, not the entire world. Objects do not undergo surrealist transformations, they simply disappear. And the disappearances aren't caused by memory loss - rather memory loss is caused by the disappearances, as the majority of the population forgets that such things as hats, or ribbons, or roses, or birds ever existed in the first place.

The terror in Memory Police is more realistic too, it isn't the fear of hallucinogenic transfigurations, it is fear of the police, a terror that is all too real. Anyone who remembers an object that no longer exists, no longer ever existed, is subject to the brutality of the titular Memory Police, who will make them forget, or punish them for remembering. (I should note, Memory Police was published in Japan in 1994, but its reissue in America now is in perfect synchronicity with a developing theme.)
.

The Future of Another Timeline by Annalee Newitz, published September 2019

Annalee Newitz's The Future of Another Timeline is also about a time war, but one where feminists fight misogynists, and both factions have access to time machines. The feminists mostly come from the same timelines as the misogynists; they're trying to create a better future than the one they escaped from. The misogynists occasionally tamper with history, but their leaders come from a future of maximal male supremacy. Their goal isn't to make changes, but to destroy the remaining time machines and prevent changes from being made.

Newitz imagines a world where change is possible, but violence is unavoidable, a tool that can be used to accomplish many different goals. The morality of using violence, in the world she's created, is determined moreso by the morality of the goal it's in service of than by considerations such as severity and proportionality. Whether this holds true in our world as it does in the world Newitz has written is a question left to the reader.
.

The Memory Thief by Lauren Mansy, published October 2019

In Lauren Mansy's The Memory Thief, memory is again terrifyingly impermanent. Here memory does not simply vanish, here it is stolen. An elite minority are gifted with the ability to steal memories from others' minds, to keep them or sell them on to others. Here debtors have their minds stolen completely away as collateral, have their entire life's memories auctioned off in parcels to pay their creditors.

In Mansy's world, worldly power in government and business is built on the elite status that comes from the ability to steal memories from others. The thief from the title is not much of an elite though. She would prefer not to use her gift because she considers it immoral, and she is essentially blackmailed into using it to pay off her mother's debts to save her mother's life.
.

They Will Drown in Their Mothers' Tears by Johannes Anyuru, published November 2019

In Johannes Anyuru's They Will Drown in Their Mother's Tears, a time traveler arrives from a possible future, a time when Muslims and other ethnic minorities in Sweden are confined to ghettos. She arrives in the present to prevent an Islamist terrorist attack against a blasphemous artist, and fails. She is imprisoned and spends the next several years as the conditions leading to the future she tried to prevent begin to be assembled into place.
.

ieW gniJ yb egami

.
So how do we game with this?

In the CRAWL-thulhu game, when the players investigate Cthulhoid mysteries, the result of their investigations will help determine the fate of the world.

The player characters will be called in to investigate the cause of some sort of supernatural phenomenon. The cause will invariably turn out to be a Mythos entity making trouble. The characters can succeed or fail at their investigation. They succeed by figuring out what's going on and getting it to stop. They fail by not understanding the cause of the phenomena, or by allowing the entity to continue causing problems. In my ideal game, after the initial investigation, the players would follow up by taking the fight directly to the Cthulhoid entity in some way, putting the hurt on the Mythos monster to keep it from coming back to bother humanity again.

When the player characters fail at their investigation, things get worse. Natural disasters happen. Democratically-elected governments start getting replaced with dystopian regimes. The English government gets replaced by Big Brother, Russia becomes the One State from We, Canada turns into a brave new world. A successful investigation holds back the tide. Maybe bad things still happen, but not as bad. The consequences are less severe, or the progress of a given disaster are halted mid-way. Taking the fight directly to the Mythos can help claw back some or all of the bad changes. If the player characters fail badly or a lot, the world is going quickly to hell.

Where these recent books come in is by suggesting to me that I should employ a bit of dream logic in the unfolding of events. Disasters of this magnitude already feel unreal, so to game with them, it seems like the thing to do is to lean into that sensation and amplify it.

First of all, the cause-and-effect relationship between the monsters and the disasters should be intentionally ambiguous. It might be clear that failing to stop the monsters in some way contributed to the disasters. But were the monsters themselves directly responsible for the bad things that happened? Did their presence in the world simply make it easier for bad things to happen? Are the themselves monsters like the escaping inhabitants of Pandora's Box, something that only exists because of the evil that lurks in the hearts of humans?

There won't be a simple one-to-one correspondence between the events of the investigation and the state of the world. An investigation that goes badly carries a higher risk - you might get more or worse disasters. But things can still go wrong in the world even if the investigation goes relatively well. Probably just not as wrong. But ideally the players should be left wondering if there was more they could have done, or if that spell they cast or magic item they activated contributed to the deteriorating state of affairs, or if some of the things happening are just bad luck that no one is responsible for. Making that link too obvious and too direct would reduce the beyond-your-control feeling that disasters can evoke.

Secondly, the events should happen in multiples and in rapid succession. This shouldn't be a game where a single campaign event occurs between sessions. This should look like the "outbreak phase" of the Pandemic board game. It's not just that bad things happen. It's that lots and lots of bad things happen and keep happening. This is a flood that can't be combated or contained by trying to go after single events. They must be stopped at their supernatural source.It should feel like the world's a boat that's taking on water and sinking faster than you can bail it out.

Third, these books make me think that it's important to play with time. When a problem happens, maybe it doesn't just happen now, maybe what happens now reverberates backward through time so that instead of needing time to come to maturity, the problem arrives fully grown and fully fledged. If you defeat a monster and manage to undo some chaos, maybe it's not just fixed, maybe it never happened. It should all feel dreamlike and unreal, or what Daniel Sell calls "bumble logic". This has the advantage of letting complex geopolitical events occur and take effect on a timescale that corresponds to the rate of campaign advancement. It also creates some ambiguity around the question of which problems are fixable, and while must be endured.
.

ᴉǝM ƃuᴉſ ʎq ǝƃɐɯᴉ

Across the titles I mentioned above, we see themes of reality itself being over-written and OVER-over-written. We see competition to write the final version. We see memories of previous realities become fragile, or malleable, or a vulnerability or liability to their owners. We see artifacts from other worlds, especially books, manifesting in our own. We see premonitions of worse futures arriving like bad dreams, and foreknowledge as little protection against the coming dark.

And if you're like me, you see the "new fiction" section of your local bookstore looking like a new genre in speculative fiction has been curated by the coincidence of so many authors writing such similar books so close together in time. These texts are coming out much too close together for the authors to be responding to one another, but as I said before, I think they're all responding to the same real-world events, and I think they're all drawing on, adding to, and responding to earlier trends in scifi and lifi.

Time Wars: Two of the recent books are overtly about time wars. Time war fiction is a physicalization of the metaphor of the winners rewriting history. I would argue that the first time war novel is George Orwell's 1984. Here the war is over, at least internally - there is no longer any serious opposition within Oceana. And here the metaphor is still basically metaphorical. But we do see the victors multiply re-writing their own history, altering historical documents with scissors and glue and typewriters, cutting out articles from old newspapers, removing the names of un-persons, inserting text to assert their preferred version of the past within the archival records.

Next comes Isaac Asimov with The End of Eternity, which provides the blueprint for all the time wars that follow. Asimov imagines his time bureau working primarily to secure its own existence by safeguarding the history that leads to its founding, primarily against saboteurs rather than an organized rival faction. All future time bureaus look more or less like Asimov's. Fritz Lieber's The Big Time has a full on "change war" between two factions trying to erase each other called the Spiders and the Snakes, which has always made me wonder if he was mashing up Asimov with West Side Story, which was making it big on Broadway around the time he must have been writing. John Crowley's Great Work of Time has a single time bureau again, although their efforts to secure their own existence are made both more morally dubious by tying them directly to British colonial imperialism, and more difficult by the problem that changes to history also ripple backward in time, so that trips extending only hundreds of years into the past end up altering human evolution millions of years earlier. Charles Stross's time bureau from Palimpsest wants to ensure the maximum longevity of the human species, but splinters into factions over questions of what it means to be human, and whether humans must be maintained on Earth or allowed to travel to other stars.

The Adjustment Bureau keeps all of Asimov's trappings, but turns the time agents into angels, and transforms their "plan" into something completely unknowable. More recently, Primer dispenses with the well-funded bureaucracies and pits two men with homemade time machines directly against each other in an attempt to rewrite the final version of events since the moment the first machine was switched on - which is the earliest either of them can travel. William Gibson's The Peripheral imagines that when people travel to the past they inevitably arrive in an alternate past that won't lead to their present, then makes time travel the province of bored rich people, who treat these alternate realities they've created as little more than video games, and the living humans within them as nothing but pawns. Tom Sweterlitsch's The Gone World inverts Gibson's premise, locating his virtual alternate realities in the future rather than the past, and having them collapse automatically when the time traveler leaves. (Gone World was also so disappointing that I feel tempted to write a review just so I can catalog its most glaring flaws. The theory of "how time travel works" in Avengers Endgame is precisely the same as in The Peripheral, although Gibson explains it much better, and no one in his world attempts to re-merge the "stub" realities back into the main timeline.)


Alternate Lives: These stories are also a way of literalizing a metaphor. All of us sometimes think back on decisions we made and wonder what would've happened if we'd chosen differently. All of sometimes imagine what it would be like to have a different life. And occasionally it feels like you made a mistake, or the world made a mistake, and that other life is the one you should have. Liana Moriarty's What Alice Forgot has a protagonist who experiences a 10 year time skip and finds her life almost unrecognizable, and the decisions she made over the past decade inexplicable. In J Robert Lennon's The Familiar, the past explicitly changes, and the lead character finds her dead son is alive and her marriage transformed. These stories often focus on the relatively mundane details of one individual's life. Carol Anshaw's Aquamarine has three timelines instead of two, and the turning point is an Olympic swim meet. Heather McElhatton's Pretty Little Mistakes goes even further, using a choose-your-own-adventure structure to multiply her lead character's alternate lives. An interesting feature of Aquamarine and Mistakes is the sexual fluidity of the lead character, whose most important romantic relationships might be with men or women depending on the path their lives take.

Another set of these stories turn on the JFK assassination as a key point where realities diverge, the same way the parallel reality stories I'll talk about next center on WWII, perhaps because for people of a certain age, that moment is the one that feels like the moment things went wrong the same way that 9/11 does for a later generation. Here the changes to the world are much more dramatic. In Jo Walton's My Real Children, the narrator is an old women remembering two incompatible lifetimes, neither identical to our own. In one Kennedy was killed by a bomb but the USSR is more peaceful and more scientific; in the other Kennedy escalates the Cuban Missile Crisis the point of exchanging nuclear strikes, although he lives and steps down after a single term. Children also focuses on intimate family details and allows sexual fluidity across the two pasts. In Kathleen Ann Goonan's This Shared Dream, it's young adults remembering two different childhoods rather than an adult remembering two lifetimes, but again, the success or failure of the Kennedy assassination is the turning point. Goonan's characters are the children of a time traveler. In 11/22/63, Stephen King makes the time traveler his protagonist. But his determination to prevent Kennedy's assassination keeps changing the future for the worse, like a more literary version of the Butterfly Effect movie. Time travel also features in Elan Mastai's All Our Wrong Todays, where a time traveler from a utopian future accidentally ruins the past and gets trapped there. Like in The Heavens, the horrible alternative is our own real world. The trapped time traveler in Mike Chen's Here and Now and Then doesn't ruin the world, but he does start a new life in our time, and lives here for two decades before getting the chance to go home to another family in his original time, our future.

A couple early versions of this sort of story appear in the films Sliding Doors, where we see possible versions of a woman's life depending on whether or not she catches a train on a particular day, and Run Lola Run, where we see several possible outcomes of a single bad day. Most later versions, however, allow the characters to meet their other selves. It's possible that the rise of these stories coincides the ability, using editing and digital effects, to show actors interacting with themselves. Another Earth uses the discovery of a counter-earth to supply its characters with alternate lives. Coherence offers up a multiplicity of alternatives, most of them mundane, accessible by walking around the identical streets and houses of a neighborhood subdivision. The show Sliders and the comic Black Science both star teams of dimension-travelers who frequently run into unsavory alternate versions of themselves. Both are arguable at least as much about those alternate selves as they are about alternate histories. Both Fringe and to a much greater extent Counterpart are about single alternate universes and multiple instances of communication across the barrier, in a way that's reminiscent of Famous Men Who Never Lived.

Another way to literalize the metaphor of alternate lives is with uncanny duplicates without dimensional travel. These are sometimes clones, sometimes inexplicable, but they always lead a life you could have been living. Also sometimes they want to kill you. For some reason that's a really common feature of the film version of these stories that pretty much never happens in the books. The Double and Enemy opened the same weekend, making them uncanny doubles of one another. The One I Love and Living with Yourself both have the doubles appear as the result of a spa visit promising to turn the visitor into their ideal self. The One and Gemini Man amplify the killer replacement angle until it becomes their entire plot. And in very different ways, Orphan Black and Us expand from single duplicate to virtual armies of them.


Parallel Realities: These stories are maybe the most overtly political, because they inevitably imagine a reversal of real-world geopolitics. It's not just incidental like the previous subgenre; here it's baked directly in to the definition. And they're not just alternate histories, especially the recent ones, because they tend to imagine a reversal whose parallels go beyond what might be historically plausible, or even possible, and because they tend to posit that at least some characters become aware of an eerie parallel world, that is, they become aware of our real world, with our actual history. They also tend to be set in the author's present day, rather than taking place in the historical past.

Philip K Dick's The Man in the High Castle is the origin of this particular subgenre, and it establishes all the tropes I mentioned above. Those tropes are pretty much what makes this a separate body of work from the larger world of alt-history. Dick imagines the Axis Powers winning WWII, with North America partitioned the way Germany and Berlin were in our world. Norman Spinard's The Iron Dream focuses much more on the book-within-the-book than the world surrounding it. The Grasshopper Lies Heavy is a recurring presents in High Castle, but Lord of the Swastika takes up most of the text of Dream. Spinard imagines Adolph Hitler immigrating to America in 1919 and become a pulp-scifi sword-and-sorcery author, whose overtly fascist fantasies are well-received by American science fiction readers.

Matt Ruff picks up much later with The Mirage, about a world where the rogue third-world states of North America launches a Christianist terror attack on the twin towers of the World Trade Center in Baghdad, in the United States of Arabia. Lavie Tidhar, meanwhile, has practically set up a cottage industry. Osama takes place in a world without terrorism, where Osama bin Laden exists as a fictional character in a series of popular thrillers. A Man Lies Dreaming takes place primarily in a world where the Nazis never rose to power, Germany became a Communist country, and Hitler moved to England where he became a typical noir-fiction detective, still virulently anti-semetic, but rendered harmless by his circumstances. But this world is literally the dream of a Jewish man dying in Auschwitz during the Holocaust, who escapes his misery by reimagining his tormentor as a bumbling and ineffectual character in a detective novel dreamworld. In Unholy Land, a Jewish author of pulp detective novels gets on a plane to Israel and instead lands in Palestina, a Jewish state established in Uganda in 1903 after a politician had an accurate future vision of the Holocaust. Palestina has a similar relationship to the Ugandan people that modern Israel has to the Palestinians. The author experiences his visit to Palestina as kind of a waking dream.


Magical Plagues: Fantastical or science fictional pandemics have been sweeping the world at least since John Wyndham's The Day of the Triffids, where everyone who looks at a particular meteor show all go blind and the world is overrun by carnivorous plants. Jose Saramago wrote Blindness and won a Nobel prize for it, which I have to think is part of what inspired the lit-fic authors who started writing plague novels after that. One trend I see in the plague novel, though, is that the diseases keep getting more magical.

Charlie Huston's Sleepless, Karen Russell's Sleep Donation, and Kenneth Calhoun's Black Moon all deal with plagues of insomia. Huston and Russell both allow the transfer of sleep from the healthy to the ill, like some sort of psychic blood transfusion. (Again, I wonder about inspiration. The movie Sleep Dealer came out the same year as the film adaptation of Blindess. Its plot has nothing to do with this concept, but its name is evocative, and someone paying attention to scifi film reviews that year might have noticed the title.) Karen Thompson Walker inverts the pattern in The Dreamers, where the plague causes sleep, rather than sleeplessness. The plague victims in Ling Ma's Severance aren't exactly asleep, but they are almost sleepwalking, repeating common mundane activities compulsively in something like a fugue state.

Ben Marcus's Flame Alphabet and Alena Gradon's The Word Exchange both cross the plague genre with the premise from Mark Dunn's Ella Minnow Pea. In Marcus's book adults develop allergic reactions to the sound of children's speech, those who don't abandon civilization for solitude end up like plague victims in Severance. Grandon imagines a flu that causes people to forget words, a problem compounded by the complete absence of printed text and the total reliance on a ubiquitous internet platform that appears to be deleting language as well. It's only a short leap further to the more recent texts, where forgetting doesn't just cause the loss of a shared language, but the disintegration of all observable reality.
.

ᴉɯɐƃǝ qʎ ſᴉuƃ Mǝᴉ