To Shanna Malcolm (re: muppet tits)

I saw the news that you're going to be in a D&D show--congratulations! I hear there will be muppets.

I'm also scared for you because you're about to be extremely harassed a lot by assholes online. These are assholes I know. The reason is because you wanted your D&D muppet to have big tits:

So, first: I'm sorry. I tried for a long time to point out these folks were a problem, it didn't work. These folks aren't random 4chan trash--Orion Black is a former WOTC freelancer with one of the largest twitter followings because, in addition to participating in all the usual clout-building-via-harassment-exercises, they got hired by- and then yelled extensively at-, official D&D, Hans Cumming was a big deal in organizing RPG awards and has actual pull in the industry, etc. These people are actually taken seriously. 

Since I have extensive experience with running a D&D-themed show with women who wanted their characters to have big tits and then being attacked by them about it, here's what to expect:

1. You will be harassed. This goes without saying: you're a woman of color on the internet and you've made a choice about tits that a very nerdy group of mostly-men don't like. However, this harassment might be different than what you've experienced before...

2.  You will be erased. Michael Phillips up there is a good example--your decision about what to do with your character has been reduced to a "half-assed attempt to justify" something your Evil Corporate Overlords want to do. This is because it is morally inconvenient for this white nerd to acknowledge that marginalized people they allegedly want to defend don't care about all their dumb nerd shit.

3. Your friends and allies will be harassed. You'll notice some of them up there do acknowledge you exist. Some of the harassers will be self-aware enough to do that, which means they will default to simply pretending you don't exist and attacking the first not-obviously-marginalized people connected to you and pretending your muppets' tits was there idea. The puppeteer, the DM, but probably mostly the people at D&D.

Ah, it's starting already:

4. Your muppets tits will be considered an important datapoint. Since all indie RPG people are pathologically worried about what the Coca-Cola of the ttrpg industry is up to, your muppet's tits will be used to raise the stakes in any conversation about representation. Your muppet boobs will be used as evidence in arguments about D&D being bad that you will never see. 

5. Lots of these harassers' friends will be fine with your muppet's tits, but they'll stay quiet. Basically tabletop RPG people have to pretend that women don't have varied and nuanced ideas about how they want to be represented because sacred crackpot Ash Kreider says boob armor is bad and other people in the indie scene can't be seen to public disagree with them. The internet dynamics where the people with the most reasonable take participate least in the discussion unfortunately apply here as well. You will have customers, fans and supporters. They will not help you.

6. These raised stakes will result in a conversation, from which you will be excluded: This is the saddest, stupidest, and most self-defeating part. Your decisions will be fought over, but no-one will talk to you.

Since there is:

A) Tremendous subcultural pressure on respected RPG commentators to agree that boobs are bad or else be quiet and lose work, and

B) Tremendous subcultural pressure not to admit they're disagreeing with the black woman whose choice they are attacking, and

C) You're dealing with online nerds who conflicting needs to always complain and always avoid confrontation with whoever they're complaining about even when it's not someone from a marginalized group they want to speak for and over...

...there will be a raging discussion of the meaning of your muppet's tits and you will be ignored during it. The idea that you are a person who might have had reasons for your decision or might even have already thought about its socio-cultural implications and come to your own conclusions before they did will be ignored. The nerds casually assume they are smarter than you--so much smarter that it does not even occur to them to consult you when complaining about your decision.

The idea that you are even a human who can be consulted when discussing your decision will be quietly swept under the rug so that the idea that you should be consulted as part of any discussion about your decision isn't even on the table.

Despite the mob's insistence that "debate" is an icky masculine-coded strategy for discussing issues, the idea of employing some alternate soft-coded strategy like inviting you in to have a conversation about their ideas will not so much be dismissed as literally never considered. Repeat: It does not occur to them to treat you as a person.

Seriously--why would this white genius not simply talk to you if they had a problem with your decision?

Hopefully none of this will matter. With luck, your show will be popular enough that these nerds will see the fight they're picking isn't worth it and will just ignore you altogether and this can be treated as the unbelievably terrible internet trash that it is. If not, it will suck and you will continue to be discussed and ignored unless you eventually stop working on the show and start saying things the scoldy mob already agrees with.

Although you probably will never see this, I am genuinely sorry we haven't been able to fix this problem for creators down the line. I tried, but not hard enough. I hope your show does well.

-Z

The Plague Pyramid

A new cult has arisen, worshipping death by plague and its locus is somewhere in the hinterlands, centered around a bizarre structure. Whether the plague pyramid is the result of a mad necromancer’s experiments with the mcguffin or whether the magic inside simply a response from a traumatized plague-ridden land itself is unclear. Either way, thousands of refugees have abandoned the cities and staggered mesmerized toward the infested pyramid, where a Plague Jester urges them on to the most debased and degrading acts.

 5 bucks, details in The Store.

Old School Gamer's Guide to Short-Selling

 Ok, so my players accidentally summoned Cthulhu and next week they have to fight him. Luckily I have the 1st printing of Deities and Demigods, with Cthulhu in it...

So I'm all ready to play on Friday.

Then a podcaster calls me up...

Podcaster: "Hey man, can I borrow your Deities and Demigods?"

Me: "Why would I do that? Your podcast is terrible."

Podcaster: "I'll give you a dollar!"

Me: "Ok, fine, as long as you get it back before my game on Friday. Because: on Friday, I am running a game."

Podcaster: "Perfect!"

So, The Podcaster gets my copy of Deities and Demigods. In fact, The Podcaster has quietly been doing this all over town, and now has thousands of copies of Deities and Demigods. They then sell them for 10$ each.

The Podcaster has 10$ (per customer). However, they still need to get my book back to me before game time and they don't have it.

However however, The Podcaster knows that their friends have been saying that Old School D&D eats babies. So they have them on the podcast.

Podcast Guest: "First of all, Old School D&D eats babies, also I hear that The Podcast is selling hundreds of copies of Deities and Demigods so it's pretty easy to get them, they're a dime a dozen."

After hearing this, many people no longer want their copies of Deities and Demigods.

They want to recoup their losses, so they want to sell them back to The Podcast.

The Podcast's like "Sure, we'll buy them back...for 4$".

Everyone's like "Look, that's not a great deal, but I don't want to have to sell this book later when it's worth even less, so fine."

Now The Podcaster no longer has 10$ (per book) but they do have 6$ per book (they made 10$, bought it back for 4$) plus the book.

They have a nonzero profit from selling, plus they still have the original merch. They then give it back to me, having made a profit. This works because to the supplier (me) the main interest in the book is the book whereas Podcaster was mainly interested in buying and selling it. It's value to me is static, its value to him goes up and down based on what other people do or don't want.

----

So, now, what would happen if, once all those copies were bought, instead of accepting that the OSR eats babies, people just kept buying those copies of Deities and Demigods, kept wanting them?

Well, the price would go up instead of down, because they're in demand. Suddenly:

And the Podcast still needs to get my book back to me by Friday. We have a contract. That's the law. So not only is the price high, but they are obligated to pay it.

I get my book back, my players meet Cthulhu, they establish a psychic link using Psionic Ability I and decide to be friends instead of fight him. They're all happy.

So: everyone who bought a copy of Demigods off the podcast will get rich, I get my book back, and the only loser is the Podcaster who was trying to trade on the book declining in popularity.

-

-

-

Unseelie Fae Race, for Old School D&D

Dad, where do new character races come from?

Well, sometimes a gamemaster gets a text from a goth girl who is also a game master...

UNSEELIE FAE

character race (part fae / part tiefling)

Fly: 30’/round (half of human ground speed)

Infravision: 60 feet

+1 Dex

+1 Cha

Pick size: 6 inches, Halfling size, Normal

Pick one (pointy ears are free): Horns, antennae, hoofs, double-length fingers with extra joint, thorns all over body, devil tail, active webs all over body or just in hair, fires burning in pupils

-2 Con

-1 Str

Roll hit points twice and pick the lowest at every level

Double damage from iron weapons (most weapons are steel, iron weapons are primitve) d4 damage from just touching iron

Ordinary people will not talk to you—peasants, most commoners, etc are terrified of faeries

Spells /bonus spells (Pick two)

(use each once per day--twice per day or pick a third at 5th level, three times or pick a fourth at 10th, at-will or pick a 5th at 15th level)

Darkness

Detect Magic 

Charm

Shrink (opposite of Enlarge)

Sleep

Unseelie Fae owe allegiance to Queen Nyctalis of Broceliande. She may call upon them for a service.

Donna Brazile Kills A Duck

Inauguration day. This is only a little political but trust me, it'll be worth it.

Ok, so:

Over on the left of this inauguration photo there's Donna Brazile, former chair of the Democratic National Committee. She wrote a book a little while ago that mainly got press for revealing how, when she took over the DNC after an emergency, she realized the party may have been in the tank for Hillary all along in the primary against Bernie. While that's all interesting and important, what's been criminally overlooked is her book is well-written and fucking hilarious.

This is from during the campaign, while Brazile's staying with philanthropist Glenn Hutchins in Martha's Vineyard and working with Obama's team on disaster response in Louisiana.

So while I was supposed to be relaxing in the comfortable rocking chairs on Glenn's porch on Martha's Vineyard, I was on my phone and iPad communicating with FEMA and with the president's staff about the record flooding in Baton Rouge, making sure that resources were going to the places where they were needed, and fielding calls and messages from hundreds of people in my extended circle who were trapped or displaced by the flooding of ten rivers. And into the middle of all this walked the Damn Duck. 

Evidently someone in a Donald Duck costume kept showing up at Donald Trump's campaign rallies calling him out for ducking the release of his taxes. Ha ha. With all the noise and confusion and flat-out fear of this campaign, the duck did not surface to the level of my other concerns until one of my bosses at ABC emailed me. The message was titled, "I hate to bother you on your time off…" and it read: "BUT—Richard Bates of the Walt Disney Company is trying to reach you about the DNC's using Donald Duck. He is desperate." Then the phone rang, and it was Robin Sproul, the DC bureau chief from ABC News. 

"Donna, you have got to stop using the duck," she said. 

"What do you mean?" 

"Well, the Clinton campaign and the DNC are using Donald Duck at these Trump events," Robin said. 

"No we're not. I didn't approve that," I said. 

I looked online to see what she was referring to and suddenly I was seeing that duck everywhere: in Los Angeles, in Charlotte, North Carolina, and even one going down the escalator in Trump Tower, just as the other Donald had to announce his candidacy. This duck got around! The Damn Duck was even issuing press releases, questioning if Trump was not releasing his tax returns because he was not as rich as he was claiming to be, or didn't really donate to charity, or didn't pay any taxes. And press reports said that Donald Duck was from the DNC, intending to follow Trump wherever he appeared to heckle him for not releasing his taxes. 

I sat on the porch at Glenn's looking out toward Katama Bay, stunned by the idiocy of whoever thought this was a good idea. I have never been a big fan of people dressing up in animal costumes to make a political point. This was not the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade and it was not Mardi Gras, either. I'd been chair for less than a month, but I thought I'd taken control of all these different factions and finally calmed things down. Here was evidence that I still had to resolve many ongoing things lest the party continue to be embarrassed by these amateur stunts. Donald Duck is owned by Disney, which owns ABC. In addition to all the other trouble the party was in, we just might have a trademark infringement case on our hands. I had to stop the Damn Duck. 

"A duck?" I said to Glenn Hutchins. "How the hell did a duck get past me?" 

So I called Patrice at the office. She said she would have someone from the press office call me, because they had been coordinating it. 

"You mean we have a duck?" I asked. "We have a duck! Why do we have a duck?" 

I hate the duck. When I was a kid people used to call me Daffy because my name was Donna. I don't want no damned duck, and now Richard Bates, the ABC vice president of government affairs is calling me. I called the DC office again. 

"Kill the damn duck!" I said. "Kill the fucking duck, G-ddammit! 

"Why are you worrying about the duck?" 

"I hate the duck!" 

The idea that the campaign—and as far as I knew it was not the DNC—was paying someone to follow Donald Trump around in a duck costume struck me as the opposite of what we should be doing to keep the focus on Hillary's strengths as a candidate. And, by the way, was this not proof of paid protestors? Every time Donald Trump made the claim that we were paying people to protest his rallies, we denied it furiously. That was just not something that the Democrats would ever do, and then here was the Damn Duck. I started emailing up the ladder at the campaign to get to someone in a decision-making role to fix this, but the first person to respond was Brandon. 

Brandon said this was no problem. The campaign and DNC lawyers had signed off on it and besides we had not heard anything from Disney. 

The reason I was emailing was because we had heard from Disney. 

I was sitting on the porch of this beautiful home hearing the soothing sound of the ocean just a few hundred feet away but I was spending all my energy on this duck. Glenn was part owner of the Boston Celtics, and inside the house in the kitchen were three very fine-looking basketball players making me breakfast, and I was out here where the WiFi signal was best, trying to get someone to pay attention to the risk posed by this Damn Duck. I was supposed to appear on that panel about the presidential race in a few hours, but I could not settle in and focus on the comments I was going to make. Who could I get to kill the Damn Duck? 

By the afternoon I had made some progress in convincing some of the campaign leaders and lawyers that the duck had to go, so I could concentrate on making my case for Hillary at the panel, but the duck was always in the back of my mind. I sat at the front of the Old Whaling Church in Edgartown, my iPad on the table in front of me so I could follow the updates the Obama administration was sending me about its response to the storm. I was in touch with the governor of Louisiana and the mayor of Baton Rouge as well as with FEMA. In between notifications from them, I was getting distracted by messages about the Damn Duck. 

By the next morning I got a call from Charlie Baker wanting to know why I was worried about the duck. 

"Charlie, because I'm still—I'm on leave from Walt Disney, which owns ABC. I'm an ABC contributor, and it's their duck. Not my duck. Not the DNC's duck. It's their duck and they do not want us to use the duck. Please stop using the fucking duck." 

I hung up the phone and looked online where I saw they were using the duck at a noon Trump event. 

I'm slow to anger, very slow, but once I am angry, get out of Delores's way ("Delores" is Brazile's nickname for herself when she's angry -Z.). I called Marc Elias, the lawyer for the Hillary campaign, and told him that I had heard from ABC and Disney about the duck and he had to kill it. 

"The duck is the intellectual property of Disney. They could sue us, okay? Do you want that story out there? Hillary's about to go to California to raise money and she's going to see Bob Iger, the CEO of Disney, who is holding this fund-raiser, and this is coming from him. What do you want to do? Have him cancel the fund-raiser? I know you all want that money. So get rid of the fucking duck!" 

"Donna, this was Hillary's decision to use the duck," he said. He explained a close friend had suggested it to Hillary and she thought it was a great idea. Apparently someone wanted to use Uncle Sam but Hillary's friend vetoed that, saying a duck was a lot funnier. 

Was he kidding? He was not. What a brilliant decision! Can someone get this message to her? Is she the only one who can kill the Damn Duck?

Marc Elias was the man to call. By noon he had killed the duck once and for all, and the next morning I was able to enjoy my breakfast with the NBA. I enjoyed it very much, in fact.    

Game Design Isn't Engineering It's Biology

One thing you notice if you pay attention to critical indie game designer circles is: jesus christ these people play a lot of D&D. I mean, even the ones who have a critique D&D or hate the company or say they're permanently emotionally scarred by it or whatever. Last time I was in a game store the counter guy said Fate was what everyone should play instead of D&D--that isn't what the co-founder of Fate thinks because what he's playing in the pandemic is D&D. People like D&D. They like Vampire. They even liked Shadowrun. They play games that they are sure they can do better than.

-

Here's what I think: everybody needs to stop pretending they know how games work. We don't. You know what Gary Gygax did? He made a game with no dungeons, based on a wargame, it was ok, and then Dave Arneson added dungeons and messed with it and both of them were probably influenced by Braunsteins--which, like, the guy who made that didn't have any idea that it was a whole pandora's box to go, in the middle of a wargame, "Yeah, sure, you can drop leaflets on the island to try to start a revolution, that's part of war I guess"--and then somehow this combination produced the game that makes people want to play games or make games or never shut up about games.

And then--none of them ever made anything that good ever again. Lejendary Adventures anyone?

In the '90s, Vampire: The Masquerade came out and completely changed the industry--Call of Cthulhu was already out, Chill 2nd Ed was already out--also a game with slick art about modern horror, and yet neither were a patch on Vampire. And then there was Werewolf and a series of other games which were fine, sure, but that were exactly as less-popular-than-vampire as the monsters they were named after were.

And then the people involved never made anything that popular ever again.

-

I could go on: Sandy Petersen on Call of Cthulhu, Pondsmith with Cyberpunk, any number of indie darlings, this industry is littered with not just one-hit wonders but also Clever Game Theorists who never produce anything that catches on. 

I think there's a reason for this: nobody really fucking knows what makes games work.

-

So that's where the title of this post comes in. Engineering is about what humans make--you understand a principle, you understand the physics behind a simple machine, you build bigger and bigger machines based on these understood things. Nearly everyone in the industry talks about games this way--as built bit by bit from knowable parts that they can explain to you.

But it's not like that--making a game involves spinning a metastatic cotton candy web of fictions and then making the rules key off every part of those fictions (often in chaotic ways you didn't expect to have to do when designing the project) and it becomes much less like building a car and more like when a novelist tells you the characters start telling them what they have to do next.

A game isn't a machine you build--it's an animal that you find living next to the mouth of a volcano and you didn't know anything could live there and then you study it.

Engineering is starting with nothing and creating something, biology is starting with something and going ok what the fuck?

People have real trouble with the idea that some beardy paternalistic Christian '70s insurance guy is smarter than them and so they think game design can't be that hard. Well it is, but not for the reason they think--they're not trying to compete with the people who made D&D because the people who made D&D are right next to them on the ground watching their creation stomp around Tokyo smashing buildings breathing fire and they don't know why either.

A successful game is like a platypus. You're probably doing less useful game design when you point out all the things about D&D or another mainstream game that shouldn't work (It's poison! It's got an electromagnetic beak!) than when you're trying to figure out why it does work anyway despite all the other competitors that don't.

Just as, on paper, a bunch of random electrochemical reactions should not have resulted in self-replicating cells which should not have resulted in a tyrannosaurus which in turn should not have eventually evolved into a cornish game hen, no adult should be so attached to sitting around a table playing pretend with way more paper and accoutrements than necessary with no audience for four hours. That shouldn't work.

Like biology, game design must be understood as the study of the workings of things that should not work.

This requires a humbleness in the face of unknowing which is wholly uncharacteristic of nerds. It requires a letting-go of the comforting nerdwords of predictive science like "will" and "should" and "always". It also requires knowing (this is very difficult) that all the things you know you got right weren't necessarily the important thing.

-

-

-

The Best Saint George

Lancing point-first from horseback is the hardest way to hit a dragon. By the Renaissance—with its humanism—St George had graduated to a sword and was taking slashing blows at it. But Bernat Martorell, painting his George in the International Gothic style of the mid-15th century, was still holding to the Medieval ideal—the one in all the best paintings: take the creature at spearpoint.

You can see the reason—keeping the dragon very far away. It was said to have plague. If you like metaphors, you might say it was the plague. St George’s dragon specifically is always curiously small and at the bottom of the painting. This seems to be an allegory of poisonousness—it is not a great beast that rips your head off but a thing low and insidious, that nevertheless is dangerous enough to require a sheep a day and that—when you are out of sheep—will take your virgins. Also: harder to hit.

Regardless of the numerous delusions and myths involved, there is a kind of real success here: for humans, for art. 

You and I know more about the world and science than Bernat Martorell and that audience of victims crowding that zigzag fortified city ever will. You might even say we know more about art—we know what perspective is, for example. They thought pelicans had tits and squirted blood from them, and almost all of them were very unfair to people in ways that we now know are barbaric, they were scared and religious and every kind of -ist. But they were capable: they knew about horses, they knew about the weather, they could handle shit-stained terror you will never know, and they survived the fifteenth century—and you didn’t. They didn’t die or crack up. And, importantly: they resulted in you. We need them.

And we can all agree: the fifteenth century was terrible. Even a normal day would kill us all five times over. Nearly everything you’ve ever complained about was for the lack of something they hadn’t even invented yet. But they kept going—and that is real. That is why you can read this now.

They had ideas and one idea was St George. St George the man is unimportant here, what’s important is what idea they wanted out of him.

He’s a saint doing something interesting for once—pictorially and philosophically. He’s not just getting burned alive for being extremely Christian or pointing at some wheat and then the wheat grows, he’s taking an action we can look at in a painting. And he came prepared: he wore armor, he brought his charger. He knows he needs a weapon. God will not protect him—he didn’t protect the sheep.

Take a moment to appreciate this image not as an emanation of an all-encompassing faith but as a series of choices that were not like the previous ones. So much of early Christian legend is about the heroism of being martyred for being Christian—boiled in oil, poked by sticks. The stakes of those tales are: getting to be Christian. This isn’t that. The stakes here are people in a town getting eaten. 

We all know what it is like to cower behind our battlements, hoping to not be the next to die.

Not new stakes in the history of human myth but positively pagan by the standards of Medieval philosophy and that’s the point: St George was not theologically important (or even consistent)—he was popular. The people would take a miracle, sure, but what they imagined was a person who would show up and offer practical help. This was more comforting than the hope a hippie would offer waving his hand and hey food, or hey the dragon is nice now. This was a compromise that faith, hope, and charity made with the life of people, as lived: brutality, everywhere, and nobody doing anything about it. They didn’t hope for a miracle, just some guy would do.

People always want a hero, of course, but style tells us how they wanted it, or expected it. St George is not carrying a boar-spear: thick-bladed, stout, with a cross-piece to keep the boar from getting at you as you puncture it. St George isn’t in hunting-gear—he is dressed for war—he is dressed to kill people. The dragon isn’t just an animal, it’s a philosophical terror from the other team—it is all philosophical terrors. Nature, bad behavior, the unknown, whatever.

It’s easy to condescend to medieval people and the typical analysis of this would focus on how we have an oppressive armed class trying to present itself as noble and helpful and pious but there are other forces at work in this world, Frodo, besides that of evil. One of the nice things about art is that—even at its most propagandistic—it has to pass through the hands of an artist, who has to translate from the desires of the patron to the impact on an audience. People have to want to look at it. And the artist can only speak to what is human: art only ever works on a person if it speaks to real feelings people have while avoiding the easy stuff—the buttons every other artist knows how to push. And every other artist did push them—there are remarkable St Georges by Paolo Uccello, Vittore Carpaccio, Raphael, Rogier van der Weyden, as well as thousands of more obscure and totally unknown artists. Painting a St George that stood out was like trying to do a triple-A FPS. Yes, its all very exciting and violent, Bernat, why should we care about yours?

There are always these Medieval faces—they barely react—any expressions they have seem like they might be accidents. But the very ordinariness of that trope or limitation carries a meaning. Bernat Martorell has very closely observed a great many things and he knows that people have facial expressions—and he has decided that he doesn’t care. He is eminent in his profession, he has brought to the field of painting a great many technical, compositional, and observational innovations, he has looked very closely at the faces of people and animals, closer than most people in his lifetime. And, he has accepted the wisdom of the age: fuck facial expressions. The knight looks positively drugged.

The monster gets to have a facial expression—everyone else: you just do it. This is life: horror, jawbones littering the ground, watching from the parapets of a walled city (the cities needed walls—that was normal) and what you feel about it? Not the important thing, to Bernat Martorell, finest painter of his nation and his age. Women and men and even the innocent sheep are stoic. Goodness is stoic, facial expressions are for villains. Who has emotion in medieval art? The laughing skeletons of the danse macabre, ferocious beasts. Passion, immoderation, indicates a problem. Which, y’know, in a world where the guy with the bigger stick than you is almost always also the person with more rights than you and all doctors suck, is understandable. So: what does Martorell offer in the way of hope and counterforce?

Precision. The opulent precision of every detail, eminently D&Dable:

Three dark and jagged shapes: saint, beast, cave-mouth. Three white shapes: horse, cape and breastplate, the virgin's ermine. Gold on the knight but far more gold on the dragon. Then all the rest: outer works of walled fields with a grape arbor, moat with swans and ducks—two definitely mallards, embankment with a wandering path on the far side, walls 30-40 feet, 4 towers, one balcony, battlements, arrow slits, three alternate entrances, a towered bridge with two openings where the moat splits, king in brown, queen in blue, exquisite jewels for the virgin, three local salamanders, a clever horned sheep which has somehow worked the line so she’s still alive even when the virgin’s supposedly next, armor flared at the side wing and gauntlet, misericorde with gold pommel, horse with gold rosettes at bit and browband (worth at least 450gp), white leather saddle matching the coat of the courser, sheep skull, human skull, jawbone, section of spine, and the dragon, you might now notice, is collaged from batwing, peacock-feather, lizard and crocodile, and all these people in their hats, leaning out to see how it ends.

A comparison: Carpaccio's St George (one of three) is also very precise, and full of ornament and gore, and wonderful, but it doesn't have near the balance and clarity of Martorell. It's almost Games Workshoppy in all its self-annihilating, protobaroque detail:

The soil we've grow in is so much more scientific than they ever were—but they had to wrestle what order and understanding they had from a morass of ignorance—everything incomplete, inaccurate, provincial, poorly-communicated, shipped by donkey, suboptimal, and translated from latin by drunks with scabies—and yet look at Martorell's canal, tunnel, swans swimming, the magnificent painted armor: these were achievements not to be measured against how much better we could do now but against a daily saga of mud and misery and guesswork and repetition we can’t even imagine. There is no real religion here: this painting is a human achievement which celebrates human achievement. Saddlery, metalwork, architecture, orderly and protected fields. A humanism not of human feeling but of human doing.

The painting has so many of the limitations of its context—that horse’s head is just too small—but it’s so much better than Masaccio’s Holy Trinity with its perspectivally accurate barrel vault. Just as the lance is a tactical gamble—minus to hit, plus to initiative—it's an artistic one as well: the whole painting has to build off the tension of that one loooong diagonal. And it does. (This is hard, most contemporary fantasy illustrators don't try it. When Wayne Reynolds gives you a big-action diagonal, he usually gives you four or five other cris-crossing angles to support it.) The painting takes what technology it has and makes a marvel from it, which is all anyone can do. We are ignorant and insufficient, but we are necessary. This is what we have and we do our best. This is how you kill a dragon.