The World That Fit In Scheherezade's Head

Part six in a series on D&Dables in art history

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"I find herein a wonderful beauty," he told Pandelume. "This is no science, this is art, where equations fall away to elements like resolving chords, and where always prevails a symmetry either explicit or multiplex, but always of a crystalline serenity."

--Tales of the Dying Earth, Jack Vance

Royal Mosque, Isfahan, 17th century.
The little niches are called muqarnas. 

"Decorative" is a loaded word in art history, and--considering what art actually is--is hard to define. It has something to do with there being more colors and shapes going on than ideas (and stands on the opposite side of the tightrope from another vague and loaded word--"illustration"--which suggests an image where there's nothing but ideas going on).

19th C. Mughal Qur'an--from Iran or India

Great Mosque, Damascus c. 715 

Drawing a clean distinction between what's "decorative" and what isn't is hard because different viewers are going to have different notions about how many ideas they're looking at in any given object. I, for one, am not sure I've seen anything "purely decorative"in my life.

Samanid bowl with calligraphy, 10th century but looking somehow very modern.

Another one. There are lots of types of Islamic calligraphy--this long geometric
kind is called kufic script, it's fairly common.

The problem is pushed to the foreground with the art of the Islamic world because--depending how you look at it--either it's almost all decorative or none of it is. Or maybe everything religious isn't and everything that isn't religious is--even when they're done by the same artist in almost the same style. Or something. It's hard to say and better, probably, to just look.

Incense burner, Egypt, 8th-9th C.

While the Western tradition addressed ideas mostly through illustration and story ("here's St George killing a dragon") in the various Islamic civilizations a different creative direction took hold.

Part of this has to do with religious injunctions against depicting things. The precise rules are different depending where you are and who you ask--sometimes its a rule about depicting just the Prophet, sometimes it's a rule about depicting people, sometimes it's a rule about depicting any living thing, sometimes it's a rule about depicting any real living thing. I'm no expert on the rules, though I do remember in school seeing one Persian manuscript where a later owner had gone through and painted a black line through the neck of every person in the manuscript.

Wonderfully enigmatic image of the Prophet looking at
a David Lynch box. 1222. The veiled face is one
convention adopted to avoid depicting him.

Point is: the most common way to express stories and ideas was through calligraphy. Taking the overt content--words--and imparting beauty and perhaps new shades of meaning to them by how they were written.

Blue Qur'an--North Africa, 9th-10th C.

Mamluk-era Qur'an

Both the line and the ethic of calligraphy (take a known and legible thing, beautify it with strict attention to geometry and proportion) influenced every single other art form in the culture. The mosques often have calligraphy worked into the reliefs, the paintings have a pictograph-like line, the metalwork is done in dense script-like meshes of vegetal designs.

Ince Manare madrasa, Konya, Turkey, 1258. That's a knotted
prayer running up the front of the building.

Here's what I particularly like about this from a D&D perspective. Consider Jack Vance's Dying Earth as quoted by Jeff:

Turjan found a musty portfolio, turned the heavy pages to the spell the Sage had shown him, the Call to the Violet Cloud. He stared down at the characters and they burned with an urgent power, pressing off the page as if frantic to leave the dark solitude of the book.

Turjan closed the book, forcing the spell back into oblivion. [...] Then he sat down and from a journal chose the spells he would take with him. What dangers he might meet he could not know, so he selected three spells of general application: the Excellent Prismatic Spray, Phandaal's Mantle of Stealth, and the Spell of the Slow Hour.

And consider Jeff's comment here: Spells are almost alive with power. Memorizing a spell is kinda like putting a demon in your head. Something similar could be said of a prayer--a prayer is putting a spark of the divine in your head--or into whatever you're painting it on or carving it into.

Amulet case--10th-11th C.
The black stuff is a compound called niello, often
used for medieval inlay.

And D&D wizards are always writing spells down, and in old editions you could even write it wrong and memorize it wrong. I like the idea that writing things down is encoding them and  binding them into the thing. While calligraphy was esteemed almost- or just as- highly in Japan and China, it didn't have the omnivorous quality of Islamic calligraphy, taking over walls, plates, doorways.

There is something almost gnostic in this: the world and everything in it is just the expression of something else happening in another, higher reality. All our world's objects and pleasures are just a text about that higher world.

Great Mosque, Cordoba, Spain

The architecture also has to be counted as a tremendous influence on the art--moreso than in the West, because of the art's inherently abstract and geometric quality, it's easy to find the forms of buildings reproduced on a smaller scale in the luxury objects and paintings. One theory holds that the "carpeted" look of these traditional walls descends from actual carpets--which the Mongols and other nomadic peoples' used as tent walls and which were and are still hung on walls for insulation and to, of course, tie the room together.

Persian Qur'an, using Nasta'liq script-- 16th-17th century

Bibi-Khanym Mosque, Samarkand, Uzbekistan (1404, but
completely reconstructed in the 70s I think)

Mamluk Qur'an

Lutfallah Mosque, Isfahan, Iran, finished in 1618

Various medieval braziers...

I think the colorful and monumental qualities of Islamic architecture are partially due to having (in a decent proportion of the very many countries which were ruled by an Islamic civilization at one time or another) a lot less foliage to compete with than the rest of us. Bukhara, for instance, gives the impression that if you wanted any kind of environment you had to build it yourself:

Great Mosque, Yazd, Iran 1330

So calligraphy and carpets influence the buildings, and the buildings influence everything else. These influences have something in common: they're all things only people make. Nature plays a role in every civilization's art, of course, but it wouldn't be crazy to say it plays a smaller roll in the art of the Islamic world than in that of any other great world civilization. It appears as pattern and abstraction, but relatively rarely as a force in itself.

Weird cat-shaped incense burners were fairly
common in 12th Century Iran 

I have no idea how accurate this is, but here's someone's
explanation for the variety of weird felines: "While zoomorphic and anthropomorphic representations were forbidden under Islamic religious law, the so-called “principle of improbability” was employed to create animals that were so far removed from reality that they could not be argued to be in any way representational of nature; thus were the strictures avoided. " 

Super cute.

The lack of observed natural motifs adds an air of urbanity and artifice to Islamic art taken out of context that accords well with the kind of goatless cosmopolitanism in 1001 Nights-style worlds like Al-Qadim and the Thief of Baghdad.

This painting, done in 1488 by the renowned Bihzad, features Zuleykha chasing Yusef through seven doors and is one of the most magical things I have ever seen:

Note the totality of the artifice: no sky, no landscape, everything is civilized, abstracted, structured, lonely, symbolic--plants and stars are only present as the idea of plants and stars worked into the patterns. This is a true mythic otherworld maze, made of only psychological things. This is Julio Cortazar territory--hundreds of years before modernism.

Here is Bihzad actually taking on nature, with the typically Persian use of rich colors derived from jewelry, lustred tilework and textile design:

Mir Sayyid Ali came along a little while after Bihzad...

Palace scene,1539-43

...I love how the food and wine float on that palace carpet like toy boats.

It's interesting to compare this battle scene to how a Japanese artist might have painted it. In both cases, the trees could be stylized and isolated, but the Persian painter has decisively and consciously transformed the tree into a beautiful symbol of a tree, whereas a Japanese painter would have given us some approximation of some seen tree.

From the Bayasanghori Shahnameh

The horses, though, have detail and distinction, no two quite alike--as useful war animals they belong to civilization, to the writer-like record of who and what was there. Compare this to one of Paolo Uccello's battles.

Likewise, you can directly compare this anonymous Ottoman portrait to the Bellini painting that inspired it:

…while Bellini was worrying about how the light fell on the folds and the face and making it look like his painter was actually sitting on the ground, the Ottoman artist worked on recording colors and patterns--making the subject of the painting into a pattern.

And, taking a bite out of the other end of cultural appropriation sandwich, here's a Persian hero killing a  totally Chinese dragon...

Bahram Gur Kills the Dragon. 1371. 

GodEyeHate

So it all started when Patrick looked on the map and said "Well we should go to (the heretofore neglected) Abu Zin Zeer--it's a port, they'll probably have some idea which way the elves took the Eye of Vorn"...

So to Abu Zin Zeer they went. They were to have a meeting with the thieves' guild next session to discuss getting into the high end of the city, where Lord Gormengeth and his sticking-out-like-a-sore-thumb white elves were last seen heading with their suspicious 25-foot wide crate.

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But a funny thing happened on the way to the next session... namely a game of Slow War, wherein Dr Noisms, playing eastern interloper Liangyu Hui in that domain-scale wargame, hired one 10th-level and 2 5th level assassins to kill the Warlord of Abu Zin Zeer. I rolled on the AD&D assassination tables and they all failed miserably.

And then Noisms sailed his fleet into the harbor.

And the pharaoh did, too

And Michael sent the Red King's vampire troops in there through a mirror to seize the city.

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So your humble narrator and GM figures that in the timeline of the game, all this Slow War stuff happens after the D&D session the players are currently in, giving them time to do their thing and, if they fuck Abu Zin Zeer up so bad it makes the Slow War events impossible, then, ok, alternate universe.

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The players are, however, having horrible nightmares of things to come.

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Now the players meet with the thieves' guild, who, naturally, have a shadowy figure sent by Liangyu Hui offering to aid the PCs getting up to the palace in exchange for them slaying the Warlord. Makes perfect sense and thank you Noisms for the vicarious plot assist. Players take a 5000gp downpayment. 

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The PCs then devise a wonderful, elaborate plan: druid turns into an exotic bird, is delivered by the fighter as a gift from his army to the Warlord's. They roll well on charisma and the Warlord invites them into the palace.

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However.... this all takes a day. So it's beginning to overlap the first day of the Slow War timeline. I roll to see when Noisms first assassination attempt takes place...7 AM. 

So, right after the party starts, one of the harem girls (a hijra) leaps toward with a wavy blade to decapitate the Warlord. Despite or perhaps because of the fact that this random NPC is about to do his job for him, the party fighter gets initiative and lops off the hijra's hand.

So, Noisms, that's why assassination attempt #1 failed. If you were wondering.

As for why the other 2 failed? Well, it's complicated...

Taking a look at the disposition of the palace...

They concocted a plan for heisting the 20' diameter eye of the Grim Grey God of Iron And Rain whose essentials should be obvious to anyone with even a passing familiarity with Marble Madness...

...a plan which, if successful, would surely ensure them a large and well-appointed home in D&D-PC Valhalla.

After a lot of chaos in the palace and kinda-mapping and crawling around on roofs, the confident high level players use Detect Magic to locate the room the Eye's in and use Stone Shape to peel open the wall from the outside.

And then they saw what the elves had done to the Eye of Vorn...

God's Eye Triple Beholder MechGolem.

To make a long story short:

Three spend most of the fight unconscious.

One now made of stone.

One dead.

One palace totalled.

Everyone in the city runs.

And that, Liangyu Hui, Most August Desert Troll And Oligarch of Silaish Vo, Blessed Of The Burning Sea, Challenger of the Necropharaoh, Bringer of Murder By Sea, is why your assassination attempts failed.

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I guess next week we find out how the players escaped the city just before it was overrun by vampires...

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In The Wine Dark Sea of the 40,000 Isles, There Is Only Booty

The Rogue Traitors (or Trader Marines) menace all waters from Nephilidia to the Exotic East and from the Nornrik Kraal to the Colossal Waste.

Some lack eyes, some lack hands, some lack legs below the knee. Some have birds trained to talk or brass telescopes manufactured with lenses from the Southern Bleak. Some are fearless, all are feared.

Their battles with the goblin freebooters of Gaxen Kane are legendary.

The Traitors are said to number 40,000, one for each island in the sea of Ignorance and Pain. Their home is the fortified city of Enraki--the Terrible Eye.

These pirate queens are largely autonomous, though they abide a common code of Piratical Law, enforced with oaths sworn on ginseng rum and dead men's teeth. The Code prohibits any member of any queen's fleet from revealing the location of any ship in the Traitor Navy.

The defense of their collective right to ubiquitous plunder is the domain of their nominal empress, red-haired Fifi Bendacier, the Strand of Steel, She of the Long Stockings.

The 20 known flagship vessels and their associated sea queens are as follows:

1. Anne Dieu-Le-Veut captains The Black Angel's Death Song, whose crew is curiously fortunate.

2. The Grey Knight, a floating library, serves Jacquotte Delahaye, a priestess of Vorn who cannot die.

3. Fifi Bendacier's vessel Pippi's Child is home to untold depravities.

4. The crew of Bonny Crowley Ann's Perdurabo attempts to summon unholy things from the briny dark.

5. Ching Shih commands the White Scar, the fastest ship in the sea.

6. The Fenris is commanded by Aelfhild, who is cursed with lycanthropy.

7. The Phalanx is a fearsome dreadnought. Its captain, Terra Dorn, will duel anyone over anything.

8. Lady Curse captains the Dart of Harkness, and her methods, involving snails and straight razors, are unsound.

9. The Sleeping Captain Ba'Al'Sheeba is an exiled vampire of Gyorsla, her ship is the Blood Angel.

10. Princess Seela, one of the twelve medusa sisters, sails the sea in the Iron Hand. Her crippled crew is adorned with a wide variety threatening prosthetics.

11. The Dead Templar belongs to the Queen Sayyida, married to the warlord of Abu Zin Zeer.

12. Ann Geryon leads the bloodthirsty crew of the the World Eater.

13. The iron-clad Ultramarine leads the fleet of Maggie McCroke, an entirely typical pirate queen.

14. The crew of the Dusk Raider carries 1000 diseases. It is said Queen Mortara prefers it that way.

15. Arielle, a sorceress, researches unspeakable magics aboard the the Thousandth Daughter.

16. Cthonia the Despoiler, Warmistress of the Rogue Traitors has three flagships: the Daughters of Nephthys, the Lunar Wolf and the Black Fifty.

17. The Word Bearer bears Sullen Culchis, Priestess of the Slime on her endless inquisition.

18. Queen Nocturr incinerates all that oppose her from the deck of the flame-resistant Salamander with oil bombs and flaming arrows. Her fleet is (predictably) small, and (predictably) much feared.

19. Queen Korax is captain of the Deliverer, and her crew are dead men walking.

20. The Conjoined Queen Alpha Lygeia rules the Hydra and the largest fleet in the Traitor navy.

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