News - Weird Hope Engines

An art exhibition/presentation is happening and I will be there! Along with much art from the world of RPGs!

Andrew Walter

So if you want to come and see me in 3D and tell me what you really think of me, or shoot me, now is your chance!

Weird Hope Engines is the name of the exhibition. It will be taking place in Bonington Gallery in Nottingham on Saturday 22 Mar 2025, and running till Saturday 10 May 2025.

https://boningtongallery.co.uk/event/weird-hope-engines/

A lot of people from the RPG art world will be there on Saturday the 22nd; Amanda Lee Franck (who had some art in 'Speak, False Machine), Tom K Kemp, (the artist of Gackling Moon), Zedeck Siew (of Thousand Thousand Islands and more, Scrap Princess and me Patrick Stuart.

Tom and I will be signing and selling copies of 'Gackling Moon', and I will have hardcopies of most False Parcels books to sell also.

It would like this to be a success, partly because if it is, they might do a second exhibition and there are more artists I would like to see included.

The Gravity of Cows

Over many a volume of forgotten Lore, through many an hour of Netflix and Disney dreck and many a meltdown over whatever Games Workshop is doing this week, I have pondered the interlacement of the Paracosm, the Corporation, and Autism.

Lets say instead, - 'autistic traits' or 'light autistic spectrum traits'. Strongly Autistic individuals have a very hard time and don't get to do much. Those of us with autistic traits, of whom there are many more, well we have quite a strong effect on, and relationship with, popular culture.

You might even say that we are the collective gravitational force of Genre-based popular fiction.

Part One - Evolution of the Paracosm

But first the Paracosm, the alternate world! Its primordial precursors; most religions, imagined tales of distant lands, stories of a legendary past, 

Then more recently; the philosophical disquisition given concrete form; what if there was an island where this or that happened? Or a country that was ruled this or that way? Lets imagine it in detail, not just the parts relative to the argument but the whole thing. a republic, a Utopia, a perfect king a most awful tyranny.

Then; what if we just imagined such a place but there was no (direct) political argument to it? Or at least, it did not primarily rest on such an argument. This is not, legend, history, argument or scripture, it is directly stated fancy, a fiction. A creation of the imagination, and called so,

but described as if it were a real place.

Then; when does it become a full Paracosm? When it is shared between multiple people? If so then the earliest I can think of is Glassland, the imaginary world cooked up by the Brontes. 

There must be a deep forgotten history of the Paracosm because it emerges so naturally from the play of children in friendship groups and families.

E.R. Eddison, writer of The Worm Ouroboros had one with his own brother I think, which is where many of his stories were set. The serial scientific and fantastic fictions of the late 19th and early 20th century were Paracosm, but owned by their author, and usually made purely as a vector for stories, the linked stories by various authors in 'Strange Tales' in particular

The vast, many-peopled Paracosm as we understand it I think really took root in the 70s and is closely related to D&D and corporate ownership.

Part Two - Corporate Power

for a Paracosm to be projected across a vast range of people, and for those people to be able to interact in a regular and systemic way with it, and for those systems to be unified and universally communicated, requires industrial production, complex communication and organisation.

A substantially large organisation must do this. Something bigger than just a small business, and for a substantially large organisation to do this there must be a substantially large reward. At minimum enough to pay for the industrial reproduction, communication and organisation. So the beast becomes something that feeds upon itself. The more industrial reproduction and systemisation spread the Paracosm, the more people interact with it, which feeds back into greater profits, which can go into more industrial production.

But more. As we consider the Paracosm though time, (and the most active ones have not been active that long), like land, if you want it to remain coherent, that is; stable in use and nature, then it must have an owner of singular identity, but one much longer lived than any individual person.

Historically the owners of land have been; an aristocratic family, the Church, a religious order, the King etc.

To which we may now add the corporation. The aristocratic houses of our modern day, and the Paracosm a virtual barony, which, like a stretch of agricultural land, can be conserved, developed, sold off, reduced to ruination and treated in many ways as a real place.

Now the Corporation, a 'virtual' aristocratic house, has its own virtual kingdom, a place sustained and made real by the interest and investment in it.

Something happened in the late 60's and 70s. Something to do with the growth of genre, the power of information technology and industrial production, free time for nerds and corporate interlacement with the imagination.

The 60's - Star Trek, Tolkeins major growth. Marvel and DC get a boost here and are re-integrated as Paracosms though they have been running for a while.

The 70s - Star Wars, Dungeons and Dragons

The 80's - the Warhammers 

So we have a synthesis; the Paracosm, an imagined barony, and the Corporation, an imagined and potentially immortal individual. The Corporation can own a Paracosm ... forever perhaps, and can theoretically maintain a profit on it forever, and it is that profit that allows the Paracosm to keep developing. The corporation is not an author, it has no single use in mind for the Paracosm

but far from it, desires as many uses as possible across as many systems of production as possible. 

Part Three - Autistic Traits

The interest in a Paracosm is not the same as the interest in an individual book or film but is renewed and remade through books, films, comics, television, animation, games, toys, models, props, bought costumes, embodied in acts of shared social play and through gatherings. All of these methods united by their shared love for and expression of, a place, or a reality, which is not real, yet is still shared and experienced by a great many people.

• DEPTH of interest.
• love of DETAIL.
• Love of OBJECTS.
• SYSTEMISATION of shared communion.
• DISCUSSION and ARGUMENT over details.

And chief and ruler of these passions, desire to be POSESSED BY THE IMAGINED WORLD

None of these are necessarily the product of light autistic traits, but as a whole they synthesise with those traits, and with the pressures and coping strategies they produce, perfectly.

And from hence comes the great and terrible danger and most subtle trap of the Paracosm, the need to MILK THE COWS, for the cows are we.

Four - The Milking Process

Those who are drawn to the Paracosm tend to have autistic traits and of those who are drawn, there is something of a curve.

Cows.

Cows is what we are.

But imagine you owned a field of cows, and some cows you could only milk once a day, or even once a week, and you had to go and round them up to do it.

But there were other cows, a minority, who you could milk twice a day, three times a day, more. And you don't have to go round them up. Instead they come to you, constantly, and in fact they get quite violent if you refuse to milk them.

So originally you start out with a Dairy Farm, as we would understand it, but what you end up with is quite different. It’s a milk factory . Which, yes a Dairy Farm is a milk factory. The difference is in the proportion of attention and resources you give to each part.

By the end, the factory is the main thing and you have forgotten you even had fields. There are fields out there sure, the cows live there, but most of your time is taken up with the very productive cows

and even more with those small minority of hyper-productive cows.

Really, as accounting goes, and as your milking operation improves, becoming more and more efficient, your fields decay, and this is inevitable.

Hence the life-cycle of the Paracosm

Five - The Natural Life-Cycle Of The Paracosm

Now, we don't know a lot of this for certain. The Paracosm that most neatly fit our definition have only been going since the 30s , so even the oldest are less than a century old, nor can we guess how they will respond to copyright laws which usually max out after about 100 years, but within that time period we can see a continual process, a pulse of growth and die-back.

Following the cows.

Always follow the cows.

............

(It’s beyond curious to me that after Marvel and DC essentially bricked themselves into the Comic Book stores, to milk the cows of course, and maybe 40 years later, Disney/Marvel finds itself doing exactly the same thing, bricking itself back up inside Disney Plus.

It costs less outlay, less terrifying risk and the cows come to you.

At the same time Games Workshop attempts its own Streaming Service.

There are echoes here of the Comic Shop but also of Apples 'walled garden', of a lifestyle brand where every widget and thingy integrates with every other whatever, and where you can charge people a LOT, for entrance to that garden because, in Apples case, you are essentially guarding entrance to the globalised middle class.

None of the Paracosm-guardians have managed that yet, and likely nor shall they, (because of the Autistic Traits))

............

I will venture this as a thesis; every corporate-owned Paracosm, (which is to say nearly every major Paracosm), is at any point, somewhere in this long orbit between states.

Its natural arc is to slowly decay into a nightmare milk factory.

Then once that collapses, the milk factory will be razed and the clean open fields of a fresh new farm to be opened (with the ruins still lingering beneath the soil).

Then the whole process will begin again.

At times Paracosm can be pulled back and forth between the poles. Sometimes they can totally collapse and be regenerated, either by being newly acquired or even through 'community action', but they are always somewhere between these two points and defined by the gravitational pull between milking the cows and luring more cows. Those are the tectonic forces of imaginary worlds. The Gravity of Cows.

The Makers Hand

Things have reached the point where we should probably develop some kind of classification system to describe the amount of cyberneticisation in the things we make.

This was brought to a head for me be the recent explosion in Dall-E art and others, and by a post by Chris McDowall where he shows some A.I. generated art and talks about its possible use in products.

A fair amount of OSR creations have used archive art or altered historical images, and A.I. art feels like it would fit right into that space. 

This made it clear to me that this is not a 'thing to think about' but something happening right now. It’s pretty clear that we have already reached the point where human beings are in the act of 'putting ourself out of business'. 

This concept of a classification system describing how 'Hand-Made' and how 'System-Generated' something is, is intended partly as a protection for human creators as the power of A.I. s grows and partly to help us manage the conflict and synthesis between the two cultures as they develop.

The moral weight of the difference between the two modes is very great and I imagine will probably intense swings and cultural counter-reactions each against the other. Hopefully, possibly, having a clear idea of what we are talking about will help us at least navigate this process.

FOR

There are sound reasons for the use of A.I. content in productions, an A.I.O.S.R.;

- We are all the children of cybernetics. D&D has always been poised between the polarities of a cottage industry and a centralised system. The O.S.R. has a complex relationship with cybernetics already. The movement and products would not be possible without huge web of very cheap communication (effectively free intercontinental video calls) file transfers, international fundraising and production for even small creators. 

- Specifically in the artpunk-adjacent world, there is a taste for weird alienating imagery which programmes like Dall-E seem to do well.

- Many, (most), creators are poor. If they can produce beautiful art to go with their stuff easily and for free, do we have a right to stop them?

- Same applies when the textual Dall-E arrives. When a human artist can command a story or situation be generated based on their art.

- Creators are frustrating and expensive to deal with.

The best argument for A.I. production is the most subtle and the hardest to maintain;

- We don't know what might happen. It’s an experiment. The future is not only dark. It provides threats to the nature and expression of humanity, but it does not provide only threats. The experiment should be allowed and in fact will go ahead whether we like it or not so we may as well manage it.

AGAINST

The arguments against A.I. content should be intuitively and immediately obvious to anyone but I will state them explicitly;

- We are engineering ourselves out of the system. producing a culture which has a cornucopia for the things we want, but no place for us.

- Its use will impoverish visual artists. The O.S. has been oddly good at keeping artists fed, for a movement of people with a range of personality disorders.

- It could lead to the destruction of art, art skills and independent vision. (I think this is possible but unlikely as I intuit there will be massive counter-reaction once people fully sense what is going on).

- The destructive power of the counter-reaction. Total eschewal of A.I. development, or a frustrating unenlightening and resource intensive cultural war between the two cultures. I think is actually more likely. I can imagine very easily people screaming at each other and shaming each other over using the "wrong art" and either "betraying humanity" or being "slaves to the past" and its this uncreative trench warfare that I think we have a chance of avoiding by thinking about it ahead of time.

WHAT WOULD SUCH A SYSTEM OF CLASSIFICATION LOOK LIKE?

This is the real tricky part. the current emotional and cultural need is for a symbol and concept which delineates that over here you will find A.I. derived art, but over here you will find human-only art.

Lets try this to start with;

CLASS ZERO

Anarcho-Primitivism. A rare but not impossible situation with *only* direct human action used - a dungeon scribed on handmade paper in handmade ink.

Or more realistically - printed on to handmade or recovered paper with handmade block printing.

(Some of these may seem _unlikely_ but please don't be frustrating in the comments, try to imagine a society a generation or more deep into the situation we see now with Dall-E and its equivalents and then try to imagine the counter-reaction against that, anarcho-primitivist groups are not that strange a possibility.)

"Attempted-Zero", "aimed-zero" or "Zero-minimal" is more likely as in a high tech society making stuff without any tech influence, even in the acquisition of materials, would be very hard.

CLASS ONE

19th and early 20th century industrial technology, printing presses etc, slide rules and blueprints, but without the internet.

I think this is actually less likely than attempts at Zero productions. People deliberately attempting near medieval construction maybe, but the idea of people deliberately attempting 19th/early 20th century construction seems strange to me, but may not seem so in the future.

CLASS TWO

Late 20th/early 21stC production methods.

It’s our current world! Hello! Here are used the cybernetic communication and arrangement technology we are currently familiar with - email file transfers, computer programmes etc but with all content generated by human beings, the cybernetics acting as assistants to that.

CLASS THREE

Then we cross over into deep 21stC methods. Our current moment. Anything Level Three or above will have specifically A.I. generated content - not just AI aid in creation. Art and words which no human hand has touched.

LEVELS ABOVE THREE?

We don't really know and can't predict what might happen there but there is a lot of space to expand into?

SYMBOLS

We could reverse the order and use the symbol of the hand with the 'level' being the number of fingers held down.

The anarcho-primitivist Class Zero product would have a full, spread hand. (Like the white hand of Saruman).

The industrial but not computer-based Class One production would have the thumb down and four fingers spread.

Our current standard of cybernetic aided Class Three production would have the three central fingers spread.

A.I. generated Class Four production would have the two forefingers.

e.t.c.

(Also I realise there are already lots of symbols for 'handmade' but I wish we had some that were less twee)

POSSIBLE FUTURE RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN THE CULTURES

Its more pleasing and less depressing to imagine a meaningful cultural interchange between cultures Two and Three, artists and. creators moving back and forth, observing each others work etc.

We don't really know how human art will react to the presence of AI art. When photography began to take off, it seems to have had a huge but unpredictable effect, perhaps being a main driver of modernism.

when a human artist grows up in a world of common AI art, what art will they themselves make? We don't know but can expect a re-contextualisation of what art means, why we do it e.t.c.

..............................................................................

Since this seems like a relatively sane and good idea I expect that someone else has already had it. I expect you to notify me about that in the comments.

(Along with all your points about how my proposed system lacks discretion and detail. Propose your own systems!)

What Reads Like Shit But Plays WELL?

 At some point this blog had something to do with Dungeons and Dragons or something,.. tum te tum the OHHH ESSHH AYR? I think I found those words scratched behind a pillar in a forgotten language in a sertaline dream I had.

In an act of remembrance for whatever this Blog used to be, and out of interest - plumbing, dredging the minds of my audience, and from my own curiosity, I have a query;

What reads badly but plays well?

Here is a picture for you;

Marcel Roux Offering to Moloch, 1908

(ripped off from the blog 'Monster Brains')

A few examples, largely from discussions I have had with friends who read and used things I didn't like the look of. Castle Xyntillan did not appeal to me at all from the text but multiple people have told me "No it plays like hot shit at the table, great fun." Likewise Ravenloft, the villain-is-ASDA-Dracula, sounds awful to me but again many many people say the opposite in play.

(I leave the definitions of "bad", "plays well" and the discussion of what we are talking about exactly (I'm imagining adventures but willing to accept a reasonably wide spectrum of 'similar things' around that), deliberately open. If you want to talk about what 'bad' means to you so you can define it better then do so, please don't argue with each other over definitions of what 'bad' is, its tiring for me.)

I AM PIMPING MYSELF OUT

 

The MARKETING BEAST HAS WHISPERED TO ME

I HAVE BEEN GIVEN THIS SACRED GLYPH

WHAT DOES IT MEAN? NONE WHO LIVE YET KNOW OR DARE TO DREAM

BUT WE WILL FIND OUT TOGETHER 

I AM NOW AVAILBLE FOR

 INTERVIEWS, 

PODCASTS, 

WHATEVER...

So long as it comes out before the Kickstarter ends in early September.

Contact me on the socials..

Facebook

Twitter

Instagram

another one

or at pjamesstuart aahhht gmail dot com

I NEED ATTENTION GOD HELP ME

I FEEL SLIGHTLY BETTER NOW

Numbered lists, it seems, are the key, and the chance to talk about your game. By this magic is the Engagement Beast, that translucent, slippery and protean creature, summoned to serve the needs of man. (i.e. this man; me).

Behold! You have sacrificed to me the hecatombs of your honeyed data, and as I sniff the sweet meat-stained ashes rising from your mundane material sphere, relax back into the vast and silken pillows of my own ego and rest my feet upon the cloud of my own glorious genius, I shalt not ignore thy fervent offerings.

 

INTERESTING MISCELLANY

Something that fascinated me was the strange ecology of virtual and IRL systems which, seem to be very common with online RPG people.

Flavio Costantini

I would half imagine that at this point there would be some sort of 'killer app' for running games, some combination of systems which does most of what everyone needs and which has become the 'main method', with other alternates occupying minority positions, but this seems not to have happened.

Instead there is a kind of ecology of varied sites, tools and methods which different people use in different ways, even the same people using different combinations of various tools and methods depending on the games they are running or the games they are in. I quite like the general feel and idea of this, though I would struggle to come up with an intellectualised reason for doing so.

Discord is a main channel, for voice play, some camera play, and for sharing documents and discussing the game, rolling via an app AND IRL seems not uncommon, shared whiteboards, google docs, google sheets, google slides, 'owlbear rodeo' 'rolld20', 'Foundry VTT', spreadsheets for tracking, pen and paper, shared pdfs AND physical copies of texts, sometimes sketch maps via shared boards and sometimes theatre of the mind.

An example comment about IRL play;

"Jack17 May 2021 at 18:03

6. I set up World Anvil to keep track of campaign information but almost immediately stopped using it. We organised sessions on a facebook page. I used a laptop to keep track of notes and play atmospheric music. We had a physical book for the rules themselves. I had a whiteboard near the table which I used to draw important info (maps of the situation, notes, clocks, etc)."

 

 

WHAT SYNTHESIS CAN BE DRAWN FROM THIS?

I suppose, for people like me worried about the virtual consuming the physical, (and if the comments given are representative, which = who knows), there seems to be a natural tendency for holistic virtual integration, which is bullshit phrasing but let me see if I can clear it up;

People are pretty good generally at finding and choosing the tools which will help them run the games they want the way they want

and it looks like they don't overuse them, or, taken as a whole, strongly prioritise methods into a 'one true way'.

Furthermore, its highly common for people gaming through a wire to strongly integrate IRL assets, (joyless language but); virtual gamers will often roll dice, buy books and use them alongside PDFs, even send letters and create little objects. Similarly, people playing in real life will pick up and ue a wide variety of virtual methods, from having a laptop open to play mood music, to a file and background sharing deal, to facebook pages for organisation.

So my Nightmare vision of 'dead file' pdfs stacking up in peoples hard-drives like the victims of a plague, seems, on the balance of evidence given, to be largely an illusion. People prioritising IRL play seem to be naturally adapting and integrating virtual elements without letting go of core IRL tactile and social interactions, and people playing virtually seem to have little trouble dealing with real dice, real books and sometimes developing more complex hardcopy exchanges which do not replace virtual alternatives but actually sit alongside them, and there doesn't seem to be any single dominating cultural force or True Format which sets that standards and rules everything else but instead a vast archipelago of means and methods which can be pulled from and integrated a number of ways

 

LEAVES ME HOPEFUL

Evelyn de Morgan

My ratty mind would have expected more alienation, for the virtual to have consumed the real and reduced it to sessile pseudo-activity - a mere mumming of gaming rather than the real thing, for pdfs to have eaten books, or for books to go unread, for there to be some quiet invisible dominating corporation with its fingers in everything, smiling falsely through the gritted teeth of the marketing beast, (which arguably does exist with content but not necessarily with means and methods of play).

So... I'm forced to say...

I...

I was wrong less correct than anticipated.

Instead of fulfilling my darkest visions, Humanity has, (THIS TIME, DON'T GET COMPLACENT), exceeded my expectations and things are not actually (AS) awful (as predicted - YET).

 

Gather round, my greybearded fellowship, come closer to the fire. Warm yourself a little, for I have a proposal for you. A quest, if you will. An expedition into the very depths. Don't be afraid, it is only... an adventure..

aleksander karcz

You like adventures don't you?

..

Its coming up on the ten-year anniversary of this blog, which was itself quite "late to the party" of the O.S.R. 

The OSR which has itself died and been reborn more times than a Hindu cosmos. The culture has moved on, from the ancient Forge through the age of the Purple City, still living but driven now to madness and a culture of purge upon purge, to the rise of the Red Bazaar, Constant-Con (does anyone remember that?) FLAILSNAILS, the rise and rule the Mad Titan and his banishment to the negative zone, the great migration to the Halls of Discord, Zuckerbergs Labyrinth of Pain and the Screeching Azure Cage.

Much has passed that was once known and much is forgotten that was spoken in ages gone. By the secret of the undying self-necromancy at its heart the OSR has lived many lives, died, and grown again from its own ruins.

Fritz Schwimbeck (thanks to Monster Brains)

In fact, we might say that in digital terms, the OSR is itself a Dungeon. A network of forgotten digital links and lost blog posts burrowed from the ancient forums and the old Forge.

I was there! I was there when arnold posted about a melon tree. But even that was not so long ago, there are much deeper relics, and darker halls...

The original Monsters and Manuals post references StoryGames Rules and RPG.NET!! 

Fritz Schwimbeck

But his second post quickly moves us to familiar ground;

"Let me explain why. I loathed, and continue to loathe, the 3rd edition of D&D and its bastard, scurrilous, spoiled and badly-brought up offspring, edition 3.5. They have no redeeming features for me; everything from the rules to the writing to the art makes me positively cringe to even think about"

Ah yes, classic Noisms.

Who now remembers Joesky the Dungeon Brawler?

Or Straits of Anian? (last seen 2014!)

How about Valley of the Blue Snails!  last seen 2010! We only had three short years!

Jeffs Game Blog goes back to 2004!, but there is  a tripod blog going even further back!

MY CHALLENGE

My challenge to you; go forth into the forgotten halls of the OSR. Seek the treasures of the ancient world and drag those glimmering shards into the nacreous light of our dying reality so that we, the mutated survivors of 'The Current Circumstances' may dance about them, flapping our wattled mouthparts, waving our stubbed and sore-pocked limbs as we chant praises to the secret powers of a forgotten ageof wonders we lack now the capacity to even comprehend! 

Yet still we may regard them, and paw them with our fur-matted and crook-boned hands, wishing hungrily for the might and power of that lost eon!

Delve too greedily and too deep! (be careful to mine around the antimatter corpse of the fallen Titan).

-

Fritz Schwimbeck

(one touch may destroy you)

Tell me! Tell us all!

What are the oldest posts you remember?

What should be known of the first posts of ancient blogs, made when the world was still young? And what things about them might strike the eye strangely to a traveller from current times?

What are the blogs on your blogroll with the most distant updates, yet still you cannot quite let them go?

Perhaps even mark those mouldering walls with a comment to speak of your passage and to tell those time-wreathed spirits, forgotten now even by the gods; "Ay, men, or things that dream themselves men, still live!"

Dare you enter a hobby which is itself a dungeon? A culture which feeds on death so that it may never truly die? The Ghoul Craft? Dare you enter..

 The Crypt of the OSR

Fritz Schwimbeck

The Poem Dungeons Revealed

 Honestly I kinda forgot you guys existed.

Richard Tennant Cooper

(thanks to Monster Brains)

But behold! Some people actually responded to my post, and literally everyone who did a dungeon managed to produce something closer to my stated intent than I did.

(And thanks of course to Dyson Logos, whose map was the basis of the challenge.)

I shall link them in the order of their comments.

(No, as of 04.03.2021 they are still coming in so I will link them in reverse order so the newest one is always at the top.

Ablution

By Matthew Schmeer of RenderedPress. Our boy did an actual poem! And it looks like if you read it to the end and took notes it might even be near playable!

Shelter 15

An adventure for Death is the New Pink (now on sale) or Into the Odd. Vagabundork (Chaos Magick-User) from the blog Chaos Magic User brings us our second (I think) nuclear bunker quasi cold-war interpretation. This one with a slightly different political slant than the last;

"The booklet “The March of the Pigs”. It takes 1 day to read. Once per adventure, you can create 1d4+1 Molotov bombs using improvised materials (1d6 damage per roud to all inside the area; one extra point of damage to cops, sheriffs, soldiers, politicians and other enemies of freedom)."

THE TOMB OF BENDAN FAZIER 

The oldest of the Old-School, JB from BX Blackrazor bestows upon us this. Terse, minimal, classical materials. Do you need a lot of fancy bullshit to run an adventure? This dungeon says NO.

The Tower of the Red Dome

That's not what its actually called (I don't think it has a title), but your boi James Maliszewski of the blog Grognardia, has produced an ultra-minimal dungeon for the famous, and by many, considered quite difficult to access, world of Tékumel. He applied himself to the challenge of describing every element in no more than three lines.

The Undercellars

A lovely gothic and highly playable dungeon by Joseph Manola of 'Against the Wicked City'.

Not just the only creator brave enough to put a sex-cult in his dungeon but also an excellent 'forensic' dungeon (you can re-build the final events of the doomed cult) which rewards historical investigation, an elegant balance of investigatory and deceptive alternate methods with trad dungeon bashing and also something which, with ne or two tweaks, could be easily integrated into anything from a historical setting to a classic D&D world. Also an excellent example of clarity, brevity and prioritisation in text description making something very playable.

Terpsichorean Sodality of the Bird People

Brought to us by long-time commenter Solomon VK from World-Building and Wool-Gathering. 

"Monedulus Alleline, a man with the head of a jackdaw, paces nervously.. If surprised he will jump. He may be reciting prayers. He will give a cold welcome to newcomers. He is deeply worried about the coming rites, and dreads Vansittart's proposed alterations."

Nice.

Degenerates Art

We got another long one boys, this one from Louis Morris. 

"Please find attached my attempt at the Dungeon Poem Challenge. Not only is it much too late, I've also managed to ignore pretty much every element of the briefing except the map and possibly the word 'art' in 'artpunk'. That means it's comically long, not especially poetic, and probably not very functional either; it's meant to be system-agnostic, though it only really makes sense in a setting that's close to 20th/21st-century Earth. Given all this, you should obviously feel no obligation to mention it on the blog, though if you did want to put a link in a small addendum to the last post then that would be fine by me. I enjoyed making it anyhow!"

Don't worry Louis, ignoring pretty much all the instructions of the challenge is the norm here.

Likelihood of this being Kent in disguise? I'd say 1 in 6.

All 5's and 7's

Dan Sumpton of Peakrill actually did a poem! Its all haiku!

The Vulnerary House

Nick of Daayan Songs Translated brings us The Vulnerary House in both blog post and PDF form.

"- Who else? 1-a noblewoman begs her son to come with her. His gaze is unfocused. 2-a pregnant wife kneels at the feet of an old man who tousles her hair, gentle, yet absent 3-A boy hands an enthusiastically fashioned, yet crudely painted toy boat to a distant seeming man. The man weighs it momentarily, before pressing it back in the boy’s hands . 4-A woman, expressionless, head shaven, kisses a crying infant. She gifts the wailing swaddling to an old woman who nods and leaves, cooing to the child."

Party Cove

Your boy Peter Webb didn't use the right map but sent me this and I'm putting it up because I like him.

SkyChasm

Holy fucking fuck. Her Christmas Knight, the guy who writes extended comments on my blog longer than the posts themselves, brings us a precis of the ideas from some kind of epic Jack Vance/Gene Wolfe collaboration. Heaving with concepts and blistering on the boundary of glorious but terrifying near-unplayability (or is it?) this truly fucks the frame of the concept of 'Artpunk', whatever the fuck that currently means. 

The Great Ghoul Market

From your boy right here. Massively overwritten. Arguably not that artpunk. Did I even do an encounter table? Kinda. At least its a PDF. Patrick should try to remember his own concept next time.

The Court of Hell

Enthusiastic Skeleton Boys brings us 'The Court of Hell'. Down to two pages! Original concept! An image post and some actual illustrations! Another good contender.

The Song of Snow and Sun

Zzarchov! Our Lost God King turns in his mist-wreathed bed of tattered finery and from his battle-scarred fingers drifts 'The Song of Snow and Sun'. Its two dungeons in one! He did a PDF! He put a song in it!

“for any peasant girl,
lonely in the mortal world
Take the twilight ship to elsewhere
for any noble boy,
born and raised a castellan
take the twilight ship to elsewhere
the bard amidst the burning hall
the smell of wine, the siren’s call
a devilish grin, to rule the night
they march on and on, and on, and on”

The winner? Possibly.....

(I will not be announcing a winner but you can pick one yourselves if you like.)

Generic Laboratory

From 'Coins and Scrolls'. Finally you have a chance to join the Skerples train.

The Manteion

'I Don't Remember that Move brings us MASKS! You know its artpunk if there are needless masks. "skinless pink things like cave salamanders stir in the oily water. They attack if you try to help him." As true today as it was yesterday.

A Peer Beyond the Alchemical Aleph Null 

From the blog 'Foreign Planets' a dark-alchemy inspired dungeon in two versions. A 'Light' version for easy usability and a 'Dark' version for maximum pretension.

Clavicarcerum of the Scribe Jamesus

From the blog 'Whose Measure God Could Not Take, the Magma-Marred Clavicarcerum of the Scribe Jamesus. Ahh I remember when I could crank out mysterious stuff. Feels like a long time ago. He even has ferric snail in his.

Ice Troll Moon Abbey 

From the blog Lapidary Ossuary. A classic one-page dungeon.

If you want to read some dungeons, read through, and if you like something, talk about it here or somewhere else. (Also people can keep submitting....)

Dungeon Poem Challenge

 Dungeon Poem Challenge

I had this idea of, not a Gygaxian Democracy dungeon, but a kind of blog-ring alter-dungeon challenge thing

Take one of the more interesting (and SMALL) Dyson Logos maps.

This one (I like it because it has a river on it).

Original here.

And anyone who wants to; make a dungeon of this map.

Thats; everyone use this specific map 

I am going to try to do mine and will attempt to post it by Saturday or Sunday, and if anyone else wants to do one and tell me about it I will link it here. And we will see what everyone comes up with.

The general concept is; Artpunk plus functional. So original ideas preferred, as pretentious as you like, but minimal text, shaved right down, and functional as a dungeon for players without any extra context. But as much as possible, honed for beauty, interest and strangeness.

The link to 'poetry' being not the euphony structure or rhythm of the text, (though you can try that if you like), but the condensation of utility, beauty, meaning and originality into a functional and interesting micro-adventure. 

All those things traditionally being opposed or at least difficult to have at the same time.

To do as much as possible with as little text and information as possible

HELP ME PUT MYSELF INSIDE A CHILD

Ok I have reached a pause point with Goose-Gold & Goblins. I have spent.. well its coronatime so I have no idea how long I have actually spent doing this but it feels like I have spent quite a while filling out the bestiary with concepts for fifty non (or less) violent 'monsters'.

I have been doing that for so long that I feel like I lost my grip on the larger project somewhat. There is a lot to do, I intend this ultimately to be a pretty big book, or more like three books, D&D style.

Future topics to include building a 'household', magic, treasures, food and cooking, describing circles of familiarity and making friends, stuff about Strange Dangers like sickness, poison, curses, weather and seasons, magical events and poverty, a whole section on building dungeons/mazes, treasures. There is a lot to do.

But a key concept for the project is to have the best possible advice and ideas about running games for families, between generations, with children of different ages and with parents and children. 

I also need to know about child psychology, education and development to work out how to arrange rules and concepts in the book.

I know nothing about any of this so I am opening the Dread Portal, and asking for book reccomendations, and priority analysis of the books I have already listed to buy.

Here is my current list of books to consider buying.

Does the background intellectual capacity still exist in the OSR diaspora to even address this? And if it does is anyone still reading this blog who gives a damn? We shall see.

 If anyone in my audience knows much about the subjects in question then I am asking for advice about where to start, so I need advice on;

- Books or articles on Child Psychology, especially decent (sane) overviews of the topic.

- In particular, stuff about family games and playing games across generations and age groups, how children and adults of different ages play with each other.

- Games and entertainments which work well for children of different ages.

- Games which work with parents and children.

- Analysis about what children are like at different stages of development.

- What motivates them.

- What they can handle intellectually and emotionally.

- General howling at me about families, children, how I should or shouldn't be doing this, culture war stuff, yeah lets culture war it we may as well and its going to happen anyway.

Amish in Space

I've watching Star Trek TNG Series 3 for a while during lockdown.

It's interesting. I saw these first when I was maybe 13, watching at home. Fascinating to see them through the mirror of my own memory. There are lots of relatively subtle adult interactions and themes. Im sure I missed a lot when I was younger and now I try to understand how much I understood and what I half understood.

The family episode where Picard goes back to his brothers vineyard after the Borg, I knew even young that something complex and dark was happening, that Captain Picard was upset! he cried! Now I can see that but, I think more than anything else what adulthood brings me is an awareness of all the complex, invisible social language going back and forth between the characters. I think now I understand just how insufferable a young Jean Luc Picard must have been to his brother and how much Robert must have resented him, and how much he both regrets that and still does resent him.

Anyway.

PURITAN HUMANISM

I know the imagined tech of Star Trek is based more on extrapolations from the current tech of the time of its production AND that its chimeric synthesis of technologies and society is made both to take account of the possibilities at hand, and to communicate the stranger elements of the show through a matrix that a mass audience will understand, so don't @ me.

BUT

I am interested in thinking about what if, even considering the current direction of technology, the Star Trek tech is/were/will be an actually-real thing? I mean in a cultural sense. Because, while from its original perspective, Star Trek is very technologically aspirational and humanist, if you imagine it in relation to current developments in technology then Star Trek is obsessively, puritan about its Humanism even anti-technology, bordering on Luddite, at least Luddite-restrictive rather than Luddite-destructive.

AI

The ships A.I. is basically super-Siri. Little more than a database with a complex search function and a range of cybernetic control algorithms which aid with the running of the ships complex processes.

But all of these are designed specifically to plug into human and humanoid inputs, to 'keep a man in the loop'. From the perspective of a far future systems designer, this is slightly maniacal. Building this complex system of subtle technology and leaving in these gaps which can only be filled by organic semi-independent beings, all of whom perform more slowly, and with less accuracy than a computer.

But it also makes sense from a societal perspective. If you imagine a really intensely puritan humanist culture, one absolutely dedicated to the idea that space exploration, and culture generally, are *for humans*to the extent of throwing away, restricting or banning powerful technologies, even when they might provide a distinctive edge.

This does seem dumb.

But - consider the political and cultural argument after the battle of Wolf 359, and the just in time destruction of the Borg Cube in the Sol System.

One side might say - hey we really need to and should have, woken up the AI's on this one. No-one wants humanity to become a slave to its own machines but if we have to choose between a risk of that and total annihilation then - yeah, wake em up, use a full-scale general intelligence.

But then the counter-argument is - no, the existence of the Borg, and what they just did to us shows absolutely that we can never wake up the AIs and have to do things our puritan humanist way, even if it might mean our destruction.

Because that - the Borg, is what happens to you if you fuck the computer too much. Either the AI's absorb you, or you have to form a giant Borg mind just to control the AI's and turn into that. Maybe that’s how the Borg were created, maybe they are just a distant version of the Federation who faced an impossible threat and adapted to survive.

DATA

The only Synthetic General Intelligence the Federation will even allow to exist is Data, a creature *specifically designed* to look human, bound in a human form and to *desire to be human*, and to be largely unable to fulfil that desire.

And on a few occasions, Data still goes full Skynet and illustrates that even limited as he is, with the right prompting, he could still take over the ship, as he does at least.

Think about how intensely focused/repressed a culture needs to be to be able to conceive of an AI, but only willing to make one, (on the borders of its own power, and half off the books),when the existence of that AI is so closely bound to the conception of humanity that its almost enslaved by its own desires.

GENETICS

The federation actually finds it easier to accept aliens that to deal with genetically altered humans.

Which again makes perfect sense because the Federation is a humanist meritocracy, or trying to be one, and if genetics is anything, it’s the science of human inequality, and worse than that, of *predictive* human inequality, and worse than that, if you bring heritable alterations in, the science of inherited class-based human inequality.

And that makes it kryptonite for a scientific, rationalist, egalitarian and humanist society. A society which simultaneously believes deeply in science and reason, and has no magical source which legitimises its belief in equality, (God didn't make everyone in his image, souls aren't real)

Well here comes science to tell you with increasing and terrifying precision exactly how unequal people are and, with the big data and high end algos (which you may be deciding not to use),to predict their lives and outcomes with increasing and terrifying accuracy. And also to put directly into your hands the ability to produce improved and better humans, or at least, better by all those standards you claim to value, more healthy, more intelligent, more reasonable, kinder.

So if you really believe in humanism, and in reason, why can't you produce improved humans? In fact how can you excuse *not producing them*?

And if you do produce improved humans, is there even any way to do it without essentially bleeding the current social and global technology and resource hierarchy into the very bloodline of the species?

Probably there is not.

In the star trek universe this leads to a genetic world war, and then they discover chill aliens and interstellar travel, and so the Federation is = Aliens Good - Genetic Engineering - FUCK NO.

But this is also because the process rests on an irresolvable fault line in their society and philosophy.

SOCIETY

An egalitarian society with Quasi-Military Hierarchies, Standard nuclear families, adapted relationship rituals with historical continuity.

The society of the Federation is more obviously odd when seen from its out point in time, as society has changed a LOT more than technology since TNG was broadcast. All of the tech is comprehensible, slightly archaic, but the hatred of torture, the traditional roles and archetypes and the 1990's views on sexuality etc all feel very archaic.

But it makes sense if these people are Amish. Individuals living with borderline singularity technology and, from our perspective, infinite resources*, but living in some hyper-constrained version of 20/21st century society _because that society keeps you stable_.

It keeps you safe. It prevents the singularity and it prevents the fracturing and dispersal of humanity into a hundred thousand different lines of gene manipulation, cybernetic alteration, cultural drift etc etc.

(*There is no cornucopia, human desires expand to consider any available resource and human conflicts and ambitions can take place over matters that would seem mad and ethereal to older generations.)

DESIGN

There are no neural-network designs visible in the Star Fleet aesthetic. I'm thinking here in the difference in the arrangement of form, space and technology between a kind of post WWII human industrial thing and the kind of flowing, near-incoherent designs you seem in a handful of hyper-modern buildings, and in other places.

There is a train station in near me based on a 19th century red-brick industrial base, but the roof of the station was designed in a computer and could only have been designed in a computer, with 3d modelling software, flowing, irregular bespoke elements. It looks pretty strange.

This is it. Don't know it it gives you the impression I described here.

Consider also the architecture of both spaces and technological processes designed by neural nets, the kind of tech where, it works really well, but we can’t define *how* it works, and the kind of technology where a box does something complicated but we can't really open the box and fiddle with it because it’s too strange to our limited ability to do. We can get you a new box real easy, we can manufacture them by the 1000s in our super-factories to a design given to us by a monodirectional AI, but you can't open the box and fix it.

Which, compare to a mid 20th Century car, where its big and lumpen but you can open it and fix it and access every part ultimately. (Except maybe some parts sealed inside the engine block?). Because everything in the machine was put there by human hands and arranged to a plan literally, literally directly draw, on paper, in ink, by a human hand, by a guy with a slide rule.

So every part of that technological construction process directly involves human hapsis and ideas and concepts and plans which can be directly conceived of by the human mind and, though highly specialised, can be passed between human minds in base reality.

Star Trek tech, even when miniaturised is clearly designed to be accessible in this way. Something you can repair rather than throw away, something you can read a manual to understand. Something where you understand the principals of how it works and, in theory, could follow all those back till you understood the whole thing.

And again yes there are storytelling and era-relevant reasons for this in the fiction.

However - consider it as a real thing. A society which has the theoretical capacity to create post-future designs but which simply chooses not to.

GOT IT OFF THE VULCANS

For diegetic reasoning as to why this might be so, well I imagine that in the Star Trek universe, species that go hardcore for technology or self-alteration either sublime beyond the point where they can be conceived of as people in the same way as most ST races, like they go off and become interdimensional gods like the Q or the wormhole dudes. Or they become homogenising swarms like the Borg, or hyper-stable genetic tyrannies like the Dominion or they just sit on their planet being mysterious and all-knowing and/or decadent (waiting for a Starfleet Captain to turn up).

But it looks like in the Alpha Quadrant there are a whole cluster of species which gained technology at roughly the same time in galactic terms, and which have also adopted this highly conservative philosophy to quite an extreme degree as even in conflicts with each other they strongly resist any progress towards the Singularity.

(Its mildly amusing to think about the different reasons each species might have for limiting their own technology, even when in conflict with each other. Klingons – not honourable. Romulans – don’t make a machine smarter than you are.)

So..

 interesting thing about the differences in Star Trek between when it was made and when it was seen

When made, its very much about the future, possibility, and bleeding edge tech, and about humanity and humanism. But when seen, from now, if taken as real, the balance has shifted and the same stories are now about being very conservative with technology, stories about controlling and limiting the role of technology about not proceeding towards the singularity, and about bending the arc of tech so that it serves the needs of a people, species and community conceived of in *very* conservative terms.

Compared to even some modern societies, the TNG Cast are like the Amish in space

Soft-Ass D&D

(Part of a series now I guess;
Char Gen for Soft D&D
Shinto in Cumbria
A World without Violence
Monster Brainstorm /
Goose-Gold & Goblins /

Looking for a Mechanic 

I'm old now and I'm getting soft. Recently I've been making consistently brilliant strategic decisions in Ryuutama with Noisms. I really liked the idea of Ryuutama and the promise the game seemed to make with its art and with the idea of play it presented, much as, on picking up Mouse Guard, I really liked the idea of what that game is about.

In both cases I found the actual play (in Ryuutama) and what I perceived as play (in Mouse Guard, which I never actually ran) as being weirdly abstract and discomforting.

Ryuutama feels like quite a displaced 'dual pathway' system. Roll some dice for your abstract properties. Ok now do some roleplaying as instructed to in the text. Ok now roll some dice.

A lot of the ways you can usefully affect dice rolling are through thinking about logistics ahead of time? which seems odd to me for the game Ryuutama was presenting itself as.

Anyway; since our Ryuutama game essentially devolved into Old School D&D anyway, I started thinking about how you could alter the old school D&D rules and assumptions to produce a fundamentally different character of play.

Here followeth my schemes;

(All of these illustrations are by Varguy - who does pictures I like which seems like they come from nonexistant Ghibli films.)

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Look at that fuckin angry toadstool!

GHIBLI-ESQUE REACTION ROLLS

The primary and simplest one was the replacement of the standard reaction table with something with a more complex and subtle arrangement of social and emotional interactions.

Scrap once said that in my Adventures there was no real dividing line between Monsters and NPC's, which I think is largely true, and which I think is a better way of going about things in general. I've even started to use the word 'agents' in my head at least, when thinking about these things.

The basic table is very old school - its essentially about how much of a threat something is going to be to you *right now*, and if it isn't a threat then the nature of the interaction is blank and totally open, depending entirely on the predilections of the DM & players.

Classic Monster Reaction Roll

2 or less - Hostile, attacks
3-5 - Unfriendly, may attack
6-8 - Neutral, uncertain
9-11 - Indifferent, uninterested
12+ - Friendly, helpful

(OK I was at least partly wrong, this is much less tilted towards violence than I was half-remembering.)

Ghibli-esque Monster Reaction Roll

2 or less - Angry.
3-4 - Deceptive/Manipulative.
5-6 - Upset/Sad.
7-8 - Curious.
9-10 - Social.
11 - Impressed.
12+ - Joyous, brimming over.


All except 'Sad' are meant to provide an immediate relationship with the PCs

Then to add complexity - throw in ANOTHER COLUMN.

I suppose this would actually end up somewhat awkward if you were rolling two sets of 2d6, so lets amend it so you are rolling 2 d12. After all, with a low assumption of immediate conflict, the necessity of a flat curve which reduces the likelihood of a combat encounter is less important.

So; roll 2 d12s and read right to left as they land

Right - This person is;

1 - Angry!
2-3 - Deceptive/Manipulative.
4-5 - Upset/Sad.
6-8 - Busy/Working.
9-10 - Seeking social contact.
11 - Impressed.
12+ - Joyous!

Left - Because of..

1 - An environmental change.
2-3 - Social or cultural change.
4-5 - Altered close relationship.
6-8 - Another agent or group.
9-10 - An object, Treasure or resource they have or want.
11 - A magical effect.
12+ - The PCs.

Hmm, perhaps I was inadvertently ripping off this Joseph Manola post?

LANGUAGES

Curiosity I've found about D&D is that languages *as they work in real life, don't really work well, unless you are in a city-like environment where there are many different languages spoken in a small space across multiple levels of society, meaning each language presents extra problem-solving opportunities, but if you lack that language, as its a city, there are usually ways around the problem.

In most D&D, if the majority of the party don't understand the local language, that goes out the window after a few sessions of play.

So in Ru-D&D, extra languages let you speak to unusual aspects of the world and you can spend the extra ones you get in character generation in the following way;

1 language - spend one to speak to a particular kind of vertebrae.

2 languages - spend two to speak to a particular broadly defined animal-type, like birds or four-footed animals.

3 language - spend three to speak to certain plants, rocks or limited natural phenomena, or the spirits which inhabit them. This always requires some complex diegetic expenditure of time or resources and tends to make the speaker somewhat odd.



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

NO WEAPONS

This sounds completely insane in any diegetic sense but I think it might work.

Game starts - no PC has a weapon. Maybe someone has a walking staff.

No-one around them has a weapon. Maybe one old Adventurer in the village has an old sword they keep hung up on the wall. The village only needs one because that's how unlikely violence is. The place has lots of *problems*, but it doesn't have much *violence*.

Now, violence is still a possibility, and death can still happen. Hit Points still exist, its just very unlikely that you will meet anything truly, exceptionally immediately physically dangerous in the first session, first adventure or even the first levels.

And when you do meet them, they will have complex needs and desires; not just be directly violent towards the PCs in particular.


Sub-Rule; If you walk around with a weapon drawn, new people/agents/NPC's /monsters, won't talk to you, most will just run away. High status NPCs will strongly criticise you. People will be afraid.

XP for FRIENDS and FOOD

Obviously the real treasure is the friends we made along the way.

So, XP for friends?

And/or, double XP for making two people or groups friends who weren't before?

And maybe TRIPLE XP for solving one of those complex open-ended problems the village has, like a lack of water, a bad sickness, a missing child or an alcoholic farmer (and by 'fix' I mean heal, you can't kill the farmer)


Optional Rule - XP for served food. I strikes me that one diegetic element which serves this softer play in a manner similar to that in which Gold serves standard Old-School play (encouraging ambition, conflict but also lateral thinking and problem solving), is food.

Sharing food with someone, being tolerated in their personal space, talking to them, being invited to share, are all major social milestones.

Kids bloody love food, as any kids series will show (I am also a fan myself). Getting special foods, and especially being *served* special foods, and sharing food and certain drinks, is almost a marker of your integration into local societies and your ability to integrate others.

If the old witch serves you Tea, that’s one point, if you can get her to bake you a cake, that’s another, or provide a feast for the Village, that’s a treasure hoard.

Of course the children/teens who manage to provide a feast for the Whole Village are going to be considered some badass motherfuckers (by Ru-D&D standards).

YEARLY PLAY

Every adventure takes place in a year, possibly even across seasons.

After the adventure concludes, a year passes. The results of the adventure are incorporated into the home/local PC environment and all the social webs and local hierarchies are updated before the next adventure begins.

This is also part of how the PCs 'level up', they are literally growing up at the same time.

LOCAL LANDS

Integration over time lessens the sociopathic elements of new character/player combinations, and invests people in the ongoing drama/development of their village or land.

So PCs are hobbits, at least socially. They start of young, and they have a place, like a village or something, and with each completed adventure they deepen their knowledge of and relationship with, that place.

COURTESY INSTEAD OF CHARISMA

Not sure about this one.

Traditionally in fairytales, courtesy is extremely super-important. The more polite and socially perceptive you are, the better, and protagonists who lose their shit always end up doomed.

But Charisma, as beauty and personal magnetism, fits better into the concept of an embodied quality rather than a quality which the player can perform and perfect. While courtesy is something which Players can very much be good at, or, more likely, screw up to interesting result.

HOWEVER

It might be engaging to be given a PC with very high or very low courtesy. It would give the player something interesting to play, especially if they were a child (the player) so it might be an engaging element of play regardless.

The idea of courtesy being in some way 'inborn' does match up with a fair amount of folklore/middle ages culture, where aspects we would think of as governed by descent and biology intermix much more fully in the minds of the observer.

Hmm, consider this Courteous Quest Generator

Here's those links aggaiiiin

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