Wolf Hall and Impro! (Thought Eater Tournament)

Here we have the next pair of entries that rolled in for the Thought Eater DIY RPG Essay Tournament.

Again, these are not by me--they're by a pair of anonymous DIY RPG peeps who were both assigned this topic "Take a book that you have read and talk about how it influenced, or could influence, the games you run. But it can't be a fantasy book or a science fiction book. It can't be anything in a genre that D&D was designed to emulate".

Anybody reading is eligible to vote for which one you like best and voting will be cut off once all the votes for all the first round Thought Eater essays are up...

First One

If you like this one better, send an email with the Subject "Vote BOOK1" to zakzsmith AT hawt mayle or vote on Google +. Don't put anything else in the email, I won't read it.


Any good novel has something to teach RPGers, and I would rate Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall one of the best novel in English yet written in this century. It doesn’t have much to do with fantasy RPGs directly: a D&D campaign concerns itself with a small group of people who go adventuring in a world that wears medieval trappings but truly has a Bronze Age heart; Wolf Hall is about a single man who manages to drag England out of the feudal world and into modernity, without very much adventuring at all. One looks backward to play in an imagined past and the other endeavors to elucidate the actual present. But like any good novel of ambition, Wolf Hall is vast and contains multitudes--you will find your D&Dables if you search for them. You may not have to search very far.

Consider this extract, which has convinced me to revive the old-school practice of player characters gaining NPC followers as they level up. The context of the passage: Thomas Cromwell, born a blacksmith’s son and ruffian, has proven himself a brilliant lawyer, banker, and political operative, and thus has risen high in the court of King Henry VIII. (This is your zero-to-hero level progression.) Wealthy, shrewd, and feared by the old aristocracy, he ferrets out treason among the grumbling nobles of England. He does it with henchmen:

Even before the [House of] Commons convenes, his opponents meet to work out their tactics. Their meetings are not secret. Servants go in and out, and there are young men in the Cromwell household not too proud to put on an apron and bring in a platter of halibut or a joint of beef. The gentlemen of England apply for places in his household now, for their sons and nephews and wards... He takes it seriously, the trust placed in him; he takes gently from the hands of these noisy young persons their daggers, their pens, and he talks to them, finding out behind the passion and pride of young men of fifteen or twenty what they are really worth, what they value and would value under duress. You learn nothing about men by snubbing them and crushing their pride. You must ask them what it is they can do in this world, what they alone can do.

The process here described of gentlemen clamoring to get their heirs installed in Cromwell’s service is basically the way your AD&D fighter gains those followers who always show up right on schedule at level 9: she was once a lousy 1st-level nobody and became a 9th-level badass, and now a pack of schlubs shows up to serve her because they think she can show them how to be badasses, too.

There are good reasons why the idea of acquiring followers as a specific class feature did not survive into later editions of the game. It basically comes down to the followers being more nuisance than help: tracking their statistics is a pain, you need to pay them, and the level gap between them and the PCs just about guarantees a grisly death if the party ever actually takes them dungeoneering. In total it just seems like a bad deal compared to, say, the ability to create zombies or teleport (just a couple of the features open to a 9th-level wizard). Once third edition arrived, fully informed by new norms of meticulously detailed customization that frowned on any character who could be adequately summed up as a "2nd-level fighter," the notion of tracking a group of sufficiently statted followers seemed totally unmanageable.

The excerpt above from Wolf Hall, though, shows a way past some of these difficulties, with its admirable narrative compression. Forget giving your followers game statistics. Hilary Mantel does not in this passage carefully track the states of Cromwell’s followers; she doesn’t even give them names. It is enough for her to conjure up the idea of these followers--these "noisy young persons" with "their daggers, their pens" and their "passion and pride"--and then put them to work, carrying in the halibut and spying on the nobles.

The lesson here is that you do not need a tremendous amount of narrative detail to create rich interactions between the player characters and the world around them, nor do you need tightly balanced mechanics to make a class feature useful. All you need is a montage here and there. The purpose of gaining new class features is to get new tools to solve more challenging problems. Cromwell here faces a problem that an RPG party can probably recognize: his enemies are conspiring in secret and he needs to find out what they are up to. Within the context of the story, his solution to the problem--acquiring loyal young men who go out and infiltrate noble households--is more complicated and time-consuming than scrying with a crystal ball. But in Mantel’s literary montage he still accomplishes it in a paragraph. This is the novel writer’s equivalent of the DM saying, "Your followers report back in a week. Lord Dragofroth is meeting with the drow at Castle Gloomrock next Tuesday."


Second One

If you like this one better, send an email with the Subject "Vote BOOK2" to zakzsmith AT hawt mayle or vote on Google +. Don't put anything else in the email, I won't read it.

“Impro” by Keith Johnstone is a book about improvisational theater. It was brought to my attention in the context of martial arts and I am relating it to gaming. It is really relevant to any creative endeavor.
The book deals in two broad categories: social status and spontaneity. I want to focus on the later. I’m not going to get into a lot of details about exactly what the book says. You can read it yourself and I recommend that you do.

Here’s the synopsis: We are all already spontaneously creative and we are being so right now. Most of us have learned how to block it.

As adults, when faced with making a creative decision, we often block the first thing that comes to mind for many reasons, but some pretty common ones are: “It’s not original enough”, “It’s too weird”, and “It’s embarrassing”. The reasons for this are many, but here's a big one: Education teaches us to be critical, and to have criteria for what is original and creative. The problem is that those criteria are taught to us. They don’t come from ourselves.

The root of the word “original” is “origin”. For something to be original it has to originate from you. That’s all.

Whatever idea you have right now in your head is the most important idea for you right now.
What is it? What’s behind that idea? Where did it come from?

Roleplaying is something like reverse meditation. Instead of letting thoughts go you want to follow them to the end. See where they lead. It's like a stretch where you tighten the muscle before releasing it. It gives you a better awareness of what’s going on. It's working it out.

You can probably think of some weird shit. You probably do this all the time, waking or dreaming. Just let your mind wander a bit.

Take a minute right now and let your mind wander freely before you read on.

There! See! Put that shit in your games. Go ahead. It doesn’t have to make sense! Overexplaining shit kills it. As an audience we want to be surprised. The best way to surprise others is to surprise yourself. If you’re GMing don’t wait for the players to throw you a loop, throw yourself one. As a GM or player, sometimes just say the first thing that comes into your head.

Many of us are looking for excuses to transgress. To say or do something weird, off the wall, taboo. Maybe it’s sexual. Maybe it’s violent. Maybe it’s deeply philosophical. Maybe it’s about deep personal feelings. Maybe it's something really really nice.  Many of us are too embarrassed to say or do it. However, if we’re given a prompt it’s usually a lot easier.

What’s a prompt? A prompt is anything that invites us to say or do something. The prompt can’t come from ourselves. It has to come from someone else, or be random. Given that prompt we now feel at license to say or do all sorts of stuff, because, we can blame it on the prompt.
“I only said it because of the prompt.”
But really, you know, it’s you.

It’s like Truth or Dare. You want to do the Dare. You just need to blame it on the person daring you.
It can be helpful to have a prompt because, prompts tend to work. In theater this might be a prop, a mask, a costume, a line. In games this might be a die roll, a result from a random table, or an oracle (for more on oracles check out the Lone Wolf Roleplaying Google+ group). Prompts are great.

Remember a few moments ago when I said the prompt can't come from ourselves? I lied. You don't have to wait for someone to give you a prompt; you can give it to yourself. Eventually, do it without the prompt.

Roleplaying is a consequence free environment, relatively. If you’re not with a group that can let you do what you want you’re not with the right group. The worst thing that should happen is your character dies a horrible death, which really is not bad at all, and in some cases quite good. So go with that first idea and just see what happens. It’s your chance to explore your own thought process.
And don't be afraid to say or do something completely normal, if that's what you're thinking. Just see what's there. Something as simple as "I open the door" is ripe with possibilities.

If you’re a player play the role. The role is you. If you can become the role, then maybe you are not who you think you were. If you’re the GM go crazy. It’s still you. See where it goes. It’s a mythic wonderland. That’s the point. Have fun.
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Disruptor

I've said before that one of my favorite books that's accidentally about D&D is the architect Rem Koolhaas' SMLXL. A repeated theme in the book is a certain gap between the possible and the actual: architecture has--more than any other artform--the power to immediately shape the way people live but, the architect, potentially so powerful, is constantly hamstrung in the ability to make these transformations actually occur.

The person charged with making architecture occur is inevitably hemmed in by the very people and situations demanding that architecture happen in the first place--the sites, the climate, the regulations, the clients' psychologies--these combine to make the architect do a lot less than what unfettered architecture can do. Some things you get to choose, some you don't. Likewise a GM has the same deal: in theory a massive ability to create situations and structures, in practice there are rules, schedules, distractions, player preferences, player expectations, etc.

The most obvious solution is to try to extend the zone of controllables as far as possible: make sure the room is like this, insist players arrive on time, publish a page of background for them to read, design a ruleset with detailed hacks, schedule in snacktime and know where you're ordering from. Then just pray the uncontrollables fall into line.

Koolhaas' architecture stories often are about adopting (being forced to adopt?) an alternate strategy--not omnipotence and control but omnidirectional provocation. Creating one radically disruptive element that does not so much control the uncontrolled elements but force them into adopting some kind of relationship to it.

Koolhaas gives the Berlin Wall as one example: viewed solely as an architectural situation, it demanded a wide variety of responses from the buildings around it, not always the same ones or predictable ones but it demanded them. Another example is the elevated train lines over dense neighborhoods: in East Williamsburg on Broadway everything is either in the shadow created by the JMZ line, looking out onto the JMZ line, or above the JMZ line. Every building has to have something to say about the JMZ, every person has to find a response to it.

So point is this is a metaphor I've found useful, mid-campaign, when so much is already an uncontrollable given: the players know they're in a fantasy world, there are orcs not because I put them there but because they're expected, there are peasants and farms for the same reason, a new player's arrived and I have no idea where the players are going to go next session.

Instead of making the adventure out of an attempt to prune away elements to only what I want the players to play with, I create something that, no matter where I put it, activates (rather than replaces) everything--a thing that they have to deal with but that the range of responses is not set. An alien ship landing rather than a rat maze.

This is what complicated, demanding monsters and items are for: they can be set down anywhere, even in the middle of a sandbox session where you have no idea what choices the players are about to make, and everything in the environment suddenly matters no matter what that environment is. The rorschach fight or the spineskelle make everything in the immediate environment dramatic.

I think as important as the usual model for adventure modules is--the invention of all-encompassing environments--the invention of well-executed, flexible game changers is equally, if not more, important. As many disruptors as dungeons.

And now, a word from our sponsor...

Vornheim: The Complete City Kit, finally available againfrom LotFP.com

Alleged Bibliography

Extant:

1. Vornheim

2. Red & Pleasant Land (Voivodja)

Foetal:

3. Amazons of the Devoured Land (north of Vornheim)

Embryonic:

4. The Medusa Maze (200-room dungeon with False Patrick. Needs a graphic designer.)

Theoretical:

5. The Place of Scorpions (Southern Continent: the red pharaoh, the ruined city of Nizadd, Tower of the Hourglass, rules for language acquisition, heatstroke, sandy box kit, etc)

6. The Sea of Ignorance And Pain (Wavecrawl Kit, the Pirate Queens, horrible sea elves, ship-to-ship combat, a not-boring underwater city/dungeon, Nephilidia and the amphibious vampires etc)

7. Realm of the Negatsar (Clockwork baba-yagas, warriors in the wastes, the abandoned summer palace, faceless orc witches, the Puzzle Palace of Tetrus Imperious)

8. Gaxen Kane and Cobalt Reach  (varieties of goblin, the goblin city, goblin inventions, insane goblin architecture, beasts that serve goblins, goblin laws, goblin gods, goblin terrible ideas, rules for radioactivity and slow mutation, Ferox the God-Dragon, the Congress of Freaks, warlords including Nepthyc Vo and the Limbless Harlot, inventions from the Distant War)

9. Drownesia (rules for training dinosaurs, the etiquette of the Gilded Princes, the Viscid King, etc)

10. Serving Time In The Middle of Nowhere (Guide to other planes of existence, Vornheim-Kit style, lots of magic items and weird gods, rules for moving in insane places)

11.  Man is Too Ignorant To Exist (The Distaff Powers--modeled after the original GW Realms of Chaos books) (Possibly part of 10)

12. My Name Is God, I Hate You (a campaign--with linking events and background--about the wedding of Tiamat & Demogorgon, each chapter is named after a Black Sabbath song, in chronological order)

13. Blue Rose 3rd Edition (the most popular and egalitarian edition, but it upset hardcore fans, art by Trungles)

14. 100 Dungeon Rooms (a deck of cards, each has a sketch, you can lay them flat and make a map)

15. You Hear A Noise (50 Encounters, one page each)

16. Why Did We Even Come Her? (50 picture-maps of small dungeons/locations, one page each)

17. A GM's Almanac (Custom campaign notebook, with astrological info for each day, daily background events, weather, short monster and NPCs idea and GM-screen-like tools on each page)

18. The Thousand Dead (The elusive game-tome-as-in-world-player-handout complete adventure in a book)


That's about 30 years of work at the current rate of publishing, so we should be good for a while.

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And now, a word from our sponsor….

The D&Dability of Daredevil

One of the great questions that faces many RPG bloggers is: When do I get to talk about comic books?

Well with everyone talking about Daredevil on Netflix, I'm going to say right now.

So here's my window to talk about the best Daredevil comics and why they're gameable.

Daredevil is a comic of particular interest to RPG people for three reasons:

1) Daredevil is blind. He can't see the word he interacts with. Just like your players. In the comics, we only understand what he experiences through a verbal description. Just like your players. The best Daredevil stories have grounded themselves in this sensory reality, using heard, felt etc detail to express a sense of place and movement. In fact one could argue (ok, I specifically could- and have- argued) that the whole "grim and gritty" late 80s-90s sensibility in comics really took off because Daredevil's blindness and heightened senses demanded that Frank Miller create a language which placed the reader's sensory information very close to the characters' sensory information (what John Gardner called "close psychic distance") which later got ported to Batman and the other grim and gritty character with heightened senses, Wolverine. In short: Daredevil has some great, evocative moments of sensory description. So there's something to learn for GMs there. The man who wrote Batman thinking "The rain is a baptism on my chest" in Dark Knight Returns is someone who'd already spent years describing what Daredevil felt but couldn't see. Compare:

"Close your eyes, let the night touch you. Feel the cold, driving rain as it batters your face and soaks your clothes...hear the moan of a freight barge on the nearby east river: the haunting chimes of a solitary church bell as it tolls the midnight hour, taste air heavy with lingering fumes of rush-hour traffic long gone...smell, in maggot-ridden garbage, the stench of another day's misery in New York's Lower East Side...let the night touch you--and you will take in only a fraction of its total texture...a texture fully experienced by only one man -- a blind man--"
--First lines of the first Daredevil issue Frank Miller wrote and drew

"The unholy three have Matt! We've got to help him, somehow!"
"O-oh, no--! It never ends...never..."

--First lines of the first issue Frank Miller drew, 10 issues earlier, written by Roger McKenzie

2) Because of coincidence or something in the very character-centric nature of the book (the book isn't usually about villains or schemes, the villains are mundane compared to more high-powered heroes, the book isn't about exploration, it's about New York and other comics already are exploring both the imaginary (Spider Man) and the hidden (Punisher) New York more than Daredevil) all of the best and most well-known Daredevil stories have an easily RPGable structure.

3) Ninjas.

Alright:

The Best Daredevil Stories

Where Is A Good Place For Newbies To Start?

Daredevil: Born Again by Frank Miller and Dave Mazzuchelli

Why?

It's all collected in an easy-to-get-edition, it has a clear beginning and ending, the character's origin is mixed in there, you don't have to know anything that's not in the book and it's a fucking classic.

What happens?

Daredevil's archenemy, the Kingpin, finds out his secret identity and uses it to ruin his life. Daredevil goes a little crazy then sets out to ruin Kingpin's life right back.

Why is it great?

This is the gritty urban personal nightmare done exactly right. Flophouses, conflicted newsmen, corruption, henchmen with goofy speech patterns, subway car fights, bricks, burgers, beer bottles. This is the world of Scorcese's Mean Streets getting the closest superhero comics get to Miller's Crossing. And it's a Daredevil story so definitive every single run afterward has had to deal with it's influence, either running toward or away from the tone it set. Harold Bloom would be pleased.

In the early issues, Mazzuchelli is within a stone's throw of what you might reasonably call "normal bronze age comic art". Sometimes it doesn't look like much, especially if you're not into the sludgy, feathery inks characteristic of 70s comics...

Don't worry, this gives way very quickly in later issues to a sharper, more modernist take:

...this stuff had a HUGE influence on David Aja and Matt Fraction's new Hawkeye series, which is the talk of the town these days.

Why is it so RPGable?

Basically, the set-up is so easy you could do this to your players tomorrow--in any genre. They get up and wherever they stay wants them out. Whatever job they have fires them. The wizard's guild kicks them out, the taxman comes with his dobermans (dobermans were specifically bred for tax collection--did you know that?). Their allies are hired, unknowingly, by their enemies.

Finding out all that alone could result in a session's worth of encounters and interactions even before you do anything. Then the characters have clear options: find out who did all this (it's someone immensely dangerous whose minions they've foiled in the past, ensconced in a tall tower, surrounded by assassins). Or hit the road, harried by assassins.

In the second act, the villain starts to make things worse, striking at whoever the PCs value through proxies. The problem is: the proxies are obviously horrible to everyone, and if they can be caught the connection to the foe will be obvious, turning great powers against the archenemy.

And there's more so seriously go get it. The seven issues of Born Again are a treasure trove of gameables, if only because--unlike other classic pop crime stories like the Big Sleep--who killed who when and why and how is actually pretty clear.


But What If Just Being Anywhere Near Frank Miller Gives Me Hives?

No doubt Frank Miller has said some crazy shit. Anne Nocenti, on the other hand, not only delivers the grim and the grit and the city lights but has absolutely impeccable lefty-feminist-activist-journalist credentials.

And her run on Daredevil with John Romita Jr is...ok, I won't say it's a classic--the run is way too long and regular comic book deadlines are way too short for the whole run to be a classic and Nocenti doesn't know narration and pacing like Miller used to (to be fair, nobody knows pacing like Miller used to), but the Nocenti/Romita run has some beautifully evocative moments, like Daredevil meeting the actual devil, both with beer...

...and without...

...and it has a stubbly Daredevil beating the snot out of the main villain in the upcoming Avengers movie using only a pick-up truck and a stick:

...and just generally, a lot of John Romita JR at his absolute peak, with the sense of space and weight he picked up from traditional comics shading into the stylized dynamism of his later stuff:

Issues 275-276, the fight versus Ultron are a good place to start--then, if you're interested in seeing Daredevil in Hell, read forward, if you want the urban neo-noir, rewind to the beginning of the run with 250 (Nocenti's collaboration with Barry Windsor-Smith on 236 is also worth a look, despite the awful cover).

Why is it so RPGable?

Nocenti's unenviable job was to bridge the claustrophobic and moody world of Miller's run with the crossover-happy cosmic time-travelling megaverse 80s Marvel turned into. Basically, the same mid-level switcheroo every GM has to pull once the wizard learns Fireball. She leveled D&D up from orcs to demon princes and she did it with style--the overall plot in the Nocenti/ Romita issues is Daredevil does some Daredevil adventures, collects some bad guys, then they team up and run him out of the city. He then hexcrawls across the land running into bigger and bigger trouble until he meets Satan.

This is basically exactly where my Vornheim campaign is headed.


But What If I Hate Normal Comic Books And Want Something With That Classy Graphic Novel Feel?

Then this is what you want. Miller (on art and story this time) is here assisted by his then-wife Lynn Varley, best colorist in comics and the result is magnificent and very classy. Daredevil doesn't even appear in costume the whole time (just like TV!). In fact, he's naked--and nothing is more classy than naked men.



Though the plot is kind of a lot of set-pieces held together by spookiness (it's almost more of a Call of Cthulhu story than anything else), the fight choreography is magnificent (I've blogged these pages before...

...ninjas in a snowy graveyard, ninjas on rooftops, ninjas in a cathedral worshipping the Beast, ninjas leaping from morgue drawers, chains wrapping around things, chopsticks through eyes, and classy as all fuck. Enjoy.

The larger Daredevil-Elektra metastory is totally D&Dable: she loves him, she keeps getting hired to kill him. Then she is killed. Then she's resurrected to try to kill him again. Who hasn't been there?

If you want more of the backstory on that--or if you just want to see what Miller was like back when he was kind of a normal comic book artist--then you can read all the Miller Daredevils--he starts on art on 158 and takes over writing too at 168, finishing at 191 before coming back for the aforementioned Born Again. They're collected in volumes bearing the useful title The Complete Frank Miller Daredevil.

It would be dumb not to also mention the Sienkiewicz-pencilled Elektra: Assassin here because it's possibly the best comic book in the world, but Daredevil's not in it, so it technically falls outside the remit of this blog entry. Plus it's a total railroad.



But Modern Modern Modern I Want It Modern


Then what you want is the Brian Michael Bendis--Alex Maleev Daredevils.

Some people think they're overly talky and nothing ever happens and Maleevs sharp, photorealistic pencils are buried under and amid too many swiped backgrounds and computer filters. But then some people think Bendis' dialogue is modern wisecracky genius and Maleev is using the tools appropriate to the job.

Either way--their Daredevil is probably the closest to what you'll see on the Netflix series in both the look and the dialogue, so if you like it, you may like them:

I actually think the Bendis/Maleev stuff is some of the hardest to directly convert to RPGs, relying as it does on slow pacing, snappy patter and Daredevil's internal (and lonely) turmoil. But it's a surprisingly long run, especially for a relatively recent comic (50 or so issues), so there's a lot there to mine.

Oh If Only It Were Not So Grim

You're in luck! The runner-up Daredevil stories are pretty much all people who've had a more light-hearted take on the handicapped alcoholic Catholic urban vigilante with the dead lover. Some highlights:

Mark Waid has done some impressive work lately with a platoon of retro-style artists including Marcos Martin and Paolo Rivera.

Karl Kesel and Cary Nord had some good chemistry--though issues with Cary Nord on art are spaced out so it's kind of hard to read, and he was uneven anyway--and the plot's kind of all over the place. Still: as the panel above clearly demonstrates, fun.

...and, of course, the original Silver Age Stan Lee Daredevil comics are, well, Silver Age Stan Lee comics.
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Vornheim Costs 170 Bucks Now

So, yeah, the first and only printing of Vornheim (a three year old book) went for 170$.

That's more than ten times the cover price for a 64-page black-and-white book. So if you're still on the fence about buying a second (or, god forbid, first) copy of 200ish page, full color, gold trimmed, embossed Red & Pleasant Land, there's one more reason.
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Remove Kraken Insert Locus-less Existential Colonial Terror

It's likely that Lovecraft got the idea for Cthulhu from Tennyson's Kraken:

Below the thunders of the upper deep;
Far far beneath in the abysmal sea,
His ancient, dreamless, uninvaded sleep
The Kraken sleepeth: faintest sunlights flee
About his shadowy sides; above him swell
Huge sponges of millennial growth and height;
And far away into the sickly light,
From many a wondrous grot and secret cell
Unnumber'd and enormous polypi
Winnow with giant arms the slumbering green.
There hath he lain for ages, and will lie
Battening upon huge seaworms in his sleep,
Until the latter fire shall heat the deep;
Then once by man and angels to be seen,
In roaring he shall rise and on the surface die.

...which does paint a picture.

If Noisms' Yoon-Suin can be boiled down to:

Tibet, yak ghosts, ogre magi, mangroves, Nepal, Arabian Nights, Sorcery!, Bengal, invertebrates, topaz, squid men, slug people, opiates, slavery, human sacrifice, dark gods, malaise, magic.

....then a poem should be more than sufficient to describe a setting.

I imagine a Cthulhu game set in Martinique, with the tone set by Aimé Césaire's not entirely unKrakenlike Lagoonal Calendar (as translated by Clayton Eshleman and Annette Smith)

I inhabit a sacred wound
I inhabit imaginary ancestors
I inhabit an obscure will
I inhabit a long silence
I inhabit an irremediable thirst
I inhabit a one-thousand-year journey
I inhabit a three-hundred-year war
I inhabit an abandoned cult
between bulb and bubil I inhabit an unexplored space
I inhabit not a vein of the basalt
but the rising tide of lava
which runs back up the gulch at full speed
to burn all the mosques
I accommodate myself as best I can to this avatar
to an absurdly botched version of paradise
- it is much worse than a hell -
I inhabit from time to time one of my wounds
Each minute I change apartments
and any peace frightens me

whirling fire
ascidium like none other for the dust of strayed worlds
having spat out my fresh-water entrails
a volcano I remain with my loaves of words and my secret minerals

I inhabit thus a vast thought
but in most cases I prefer to confine myself
to the smallest of my ideas
or else I inhabit a magical formula
only its opening words
the rest being forgotten
I inhabit the ice jam
I inhabit the ice melting
I inhabit the face of a great disaster
I inhabit in most cases the driest udder
of the skinniest peak - the she-wolf of these clouds -
I inhabit the halo of the Cactaceae
I inhabit a herd of goats pulling
on the tit of the most desolate argan tree
To tell you the truth I no longer know my correct address
Bathyale or abyssal
I inhabit the octopuses' hole
I fight with the octopus over an octopus hole

Brother lay off
a kelpy mess
twining dodder-like
or unfurling porana-like
it's all the same thing
which the wave tosses
to which the sun leeches
which the wind whips
sculpture in the round of my nothingness

The atmospheric or rather historic process
even it if makes certain of my words sumptuous
immeasurably increases my plight.

We're DIY D&D. We Do Good Work.

Yoon-Suin is out. This may mean nothing to you. To me it means (in the author's own words):

Tibet, yak ghosts, ogre magi, mangroves, Nepal, Arabian Nights, Sorcery!, Bengal, invertebrates, topaz, squid men, slug people, opiates, slavery, human sacrifice, dark gods, malaise, magic.

I am excited about this because Noisms has been blogging about Yoon-Suin for ages and it was the first DIY D&D setting I saw that did something truly new while maintaining its own feel throughout. Plus having Matthew Adams on the art is kind of a dream come true. This is no Oriental Adventures style pastiche, this is a fever dream of a fantastic pseudo-Asia. And anybody who reads his blog Noisms thinks about mechanics and presentation, too, so the book is going to be useful at the table, not just inspirational. Here's a review that says what I'd say. Here is one describing the contents in detail. Buy it.

This is what I use as the Exotic East in my home game.

This is 100% the kind of book the PROBLEMATIC CONTENT!!! Squad would've trashed had it come out a year ago. But this is the Year of the Goat and they are all gone now, since they fucked up so bad harassing us over 5th edition .

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Fire On The Velvet Horizon is out. This is the insane folk-art D&D that the world needs and is too wretched to deserve. It's by Scrap Princess and False Patrick, and, unlike, Yoon-Suin, it has not been a long time coming. This is a stunning vortex of words and art hot on the heels of their extremely well-received (like: nobody doesn't like it) adventure Deep Carbon Observatory.

They have a fancy expensive book by a major indie publisher coming out soon and you'll be kicking yourself you didn't get these when they were cheap.

This is 100% the kind of book the Oh Noes Not Up To My Precious Precious Indie Font Nazi Standards Squad would've trashed had it come out a year ago. But this is the Year of the Goat and they are all gone now, since they fucked up so bad harassing us over 5th edition.

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And lastly and not leastly, Stacy Dellorfano and Contessa--the people who brought you the best online gaming convention in the world--are organizing events for Gen Con and they have a call for women to come run games.  They've done an amazing job making RPGs less boring ever since they showed up, here's an opportunity to help out.

This is 100% a group of women who have had to weather the Oh No Not Being A Feminist The Right Way! Squad trashing them a year ago. But this is the Year of the Goat and they are all gone now, since they fucked up so bad harassing us over 5th edition.

My Favorite RPG Covers

Pretty sure this was originally commissioned for something else

(Carcosa)

This was originally the cover of a sci fi novel, I believe, so also cheating

Best Tolkien Blasphemies

Winter. 1953. John Ronald Reuel Tolkien knocks on your door, frantic again, hair awry, stressed and staring. You make coffee. He has this massive manuscript--three books worth, he can't make head or tail of it.

His publisher wants a sequel to The Hobbit, and he
just
can't 
do it.
It doesn't work, he's sick of it all--The characters don't like him, the plot dribbles off the paper time he picks up a notebook. He is moving on.
"Here," he says, shoving the files and stacks of what would, in an alternate Earth, become the Ring Trilogy "you're smart: you take it. Do something good with this mess, use whatever you need. It's a collaboration now."
You go "Ok, no problem" and you set to writing--what do you do with it?

I asked this on G+ and got way better answers than I expected.

At first there was lot of the expected handwringing about how Tolkien is Tolkien and you can't mess with his vision or it all falls apart, but eventually everyone got over it and came up with some gameables...

Scrap Princess:

My first thought is to make Skeletor be in it somewhere. My second thought is that is prob terrible. My third thought is him saying "QUIET YOU FOOL MIDDLE EARTH WILL BE MINE AHAHAHAH"

So Skeletor is in it now. Instead of whoever was in charge before. Let us call this new dark lord Skeletoron. He will do that eye thing but he will then appear and belittle the fellowship. The Fellowship is much the same with the hobbits being scared little good hearted fish out of water. Legolas will keep talking about the elves and their importance and grandeur and everything. His stories keep changing and he doesn't acknowledge this. Sometimes the hobbits wake up and he has been watching them sleep . He sometimes smiles like he is the only thing that is real. He rarely makes eye contact. He does all that cartoon kung fu stuff that showed up in the hobbit and it's terrifying . He eats people. Well he cuts bits of things he kills and puts them in his mouth and chews them thoroughly and then delicately spits them into a handkerchief and throws it away and tells everyone how elves do not need to eat. And smiles. Strider/Aargorn is a large dog that has been made crudely into a man like Moreau thing. Gandalf is cheerful and appears and disappears and makes plans that makes little sense and the hobbits hate him more than burnt cakes. The Dwarf is cheerful and hearty and sings but refuses to acknowledge the insanity of anything around him. He occasionally recites utterly grim dwarven ballads about people being buried alive or eating rocks until they die in barely controlled muttering frenzy.

The forces of evil are factionalized between various scheming warlords like the guy with a skeletonal elephant head or the guy who is a vase of blood.

It's a little bit Frank Baum and bit Masters of the Universe

Everyone sane is petty, and everyone looking at the big picture is insane and it's the wrong picture and it's the wrong building and they broke in and set it on fire.

There is never any talk of any culture without talking about what bizarre monsters they breed with , what implausible war machines they have , and what giant insect they go forth on.

At some point the hobbits murder gandalf out of desperation and start standing on each others shoulders and pretending to be him.

They try and make things better but succeed in uniting a collation of forces against the Shire at which point they give the ring to Skeletoron in exchange for him saving the Shire. He instead uses the ring to sculpt the moon into a likeness of his own head and then claims that everyone will be forced to follow him now. No-one does , but the collation breaks down under complicated age old grievance  anyway. The hobbits go home and spent the last 4 pages discussing cakes. 

Three Sauron-Virus Host Shells

And Nate gave us this (which is just a cool idea for giants and liches even if you don't want to read this book):

Sauron is a dragon and the Doom Mountain vomits his flame. Sauron is an intelligence that moves from wraith to wraith and has no settled form or place. Sauron is a deity worshipped by the Mordorans who have created an immense heirophantic quasi-Catholic religion and is curated by the Pope of Mordor, but he's also a real moldering dead thing on a throne in Bara-dur, and maybe the Pope is unsure whether they should allow Sauron to find the ring and place it on his dead finger, because it would challenge his power.

I still just love the idea of Sauron as a giant because then when Frodo and her wife Sam make it to Mordor they have to hide from the wandering gaze of a malicious colossus silhouetted against the fires of the Doom Mountain. And then you're allowed to imagine all the things a giant Sauron might do - sing unholy hymns to himself / anti-hymns to remake the world as he wants it; sit quietly with eyes open for several months; eat anointed elephants and stitched together groups of captive slave-elves and drink lava and foul water; bathe; piss; have the Weavers of Mordor create him godly raiments and wear them for a day and then rip them off his body and go naked for a while; etc.

This was probably my best one:

Rewrite it almost exactly the same only it all takes place in a Gigastructure-like universe with no actual exterior spaces or hallways. So the hobbits are just crawling from parlor to parlor for the first 50 pages.

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