Relevant Retropost Saturday: Take The Rubies From The Demon's Eyes

So, a little context.

It's awards season in gameland again, and the losers' big mood has moved from harassment to simple sour grapes. A twitter skim from this morning...

Looking back, it looks like I predicted this in 2016:

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Take The Rubies From the Demon's Eyes

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Gen Con is, of course, massive--a brief Disneyland of gaming and of gamers.

However, if you ignore miniatures, boardgames, scenery shops, card game tournaments,"My other shirt is chainmail" merchshops and then run around just looking at and talking to people putting out tabletop RPGs, going to their parties and events, asking about their jobs, a strange thing quickly becomes clear:

While there is a pecking order in the industry, and there are people with and without power, and there are winners and losers, the actual aristocracy of the RPG industry (in addition to being demographically exactly what you'd expect) is:

-Tiny

-Slow

-Relatively powerless

and

-Not particularly internally cohesive

To take the Ennies as an example: Neither D&D nor Pathfinder got the most Ennies. Ken Hite and his co-writer Gareth Ryder-Hanrahan won for Dracula Dossier--a sourcebook for a relatively unpopular game with by no means lavish production values or pictures. Why did it win? It's a smart concept, well-written, by a respected author. Next most Ennies was a tie between Robin Laws (for Greatest Hit Feng Shui getting a new edition) and us (with first-time publisher Satyr Press). Even the most bald-faced marketing-vulnerable fan vote award during a dramatic surge in D&D's popularity as a product recognizes that the mainstream is kinda meh. And the mainstream can't do anything about it.

Other indicators:

-There was not a single RPG bigwig I talked to who hadn't heard of Stacy's female-run auxiliary subCon, Contessa.

-Nobody this year has put out more extensively illustrated color RPGs than LotFP and Satyr.

-People working for the "larger" indies still had to reach out to people they barely knew to work their GenCon tables.

-Nobody with their name on anything is more than a degree of Kevin Bacon from anybody else.

-Freelancers working for major publishers kept saying they wished they could do the kind of stuff we do.

-Everything seriously competing with Maze had crews 3-4 times the size working on it.

-LotFP and Satyr are paying out-of-pocket and profiting off larger, more impressive products than shit more established companies have to run Kickstarters to put out.

-Magpie Games pissed off half the Indie establishment just before the con (including folks at the company that put out award-magnet Feng Shui) and still turned a tidy profit.

-I ran an ad hoc 9-person game of D&D for hours in a bar with the entirety of White Wolf's GenCon presence in attendance and happily rolling.

The bar for entry is as low as it's been since the wargame days, and DIY RPG output has never been better. In the past, I've pointed out that by DIYing it you can make more money than pretty much any RPG freelancer, right now I'm going to go farther:

If the DIY RPG scene wants to, in less than 5 years it can run this town.

Just by hanging out and talking games and not putting up with the usual bullshit, we have accidentally created a monster. We've always known we can out-write, out-design, and out-draw the mainstream, but what I'm telling you is folks like Stacy D and Kiel C and Raggi and Ken at Satyr are proving we can out-organize them and out-market them, too, and this pond is small enough that that's about all that matters. All the boxes are ticked.

The mainstream, with these full-timers whose lives depend on the next RPG paycheck, has dwindled down to such a consistent lowest-common-denominator aesthetic just to pay the bills it's getting sick of itself. Years chasing some elusive imaginary middlebrow customer have taken their toll on them. Yeah, they have licenses. And in 2016 that gets you fuck-all.

We can do this. There are three hurdles:

-You need to clear time on your calendar to make your thing.

-You need to coordinate with folks you probably already know or are 1 degree of Bacon away from to get the thing out there. Make sure it is written, illustrated and produced as well as can possibly be done. Do not half-ass any of those three elements.

-We all need to work together to recognize who is doing good work and cross-promote. Pool resources and exchange audiences.

Goodman Games, Mythmere, Hydra Collective, Lamentations, Gygax Magazine, Sine Nomine, people putting out indie products like Yoon-Suin, everybody: there is simply more substance and better, fresher, more excited personnel there than anywhere else.  The mainstream does not have the talent or the energy to get in your way.

D&D with Porn Stars will be throwing a party next Gen Con. It'll be big and it'll be loud and it'll be a year in the making and the paint will peel from the walls. If you can read this, you are invited. If you're going to put out a game thing, you're gonna show up and you're gonna help us. You have a year to plan.

The Bastille waits, and the guards are drunk.

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So...

Here you go.

Terrible Takes On Frostbitten & Mutilated

Click to enlarge I don't think you'll regret it

So a while back I announced this Terrible Take Contest for Frostbitten & Mutilated.

We have our winners!

Now, in these heady days of cartoon dogs claiming major game companies are secret fascist conspiracies, Poe's Law can take over quickly, so let me unequivocally state: these are genuine fans of the book writing intentionally bad takes. Any resemblance to the typical vocabulary and usage of actual angry gamers is strictly talent. Alright...

Don't forget to vote for Frostbitten & Mutilated in the Ennies,
voting is open and it's nominated for a lot of things including best interior art

Brother Juniper wrote this...

I
There’s no doubt that stories of orcs and goblins are told into a world which has been fundamentally ordered by the categorical denial of the humanity of large groups of people.  The rhetoric of dehumanization – uncivilized, bestial, violent, evil – can be heard in the descriptions of such creatures; Tolkien is a particular problem here.  Tolkien’s work is also a source of hope and inspiration for all sorts of folks, pressing against the boundaries of our world’s certainties, questioning its limits and impossibilities, and offering a source of wonder in a technical age. An ambivalent legacy (like most things).

One direction RPG players have taken is to humanize the orcs and goblins.  Generally, this is the sort of thing we need to do in the world – to cultivate empathy, to extend our imaginations in ways that allow us to recognize the dignity in every being, that the deaths of others become “grievable deaths.”  So in many stories you see orcs reframed as complex, often tragic figures, even playable races.  This, too, is ambivalent; while it moves beyond these creatures as sheer “other,” marked for destruction, it also reifies race as species, still organized around an image of a singular (human) norm.  I’m all for fantasy opening up our sense of the range of possibilities for human life, but I’m not sure making orcs “more human” is the best way to do that.

My concern is as much as we make monsters more relatable, as we develop complex ecologies, as we make them less strange, we lose much of what fantasy was about to begin with.  Tolkien’s work echoed English Romanticism, with its longing for the world unscarred by modernity (i.e. industrialization, urbanization, secularism and capitalism).  The pre-modern world of wonder and terror had been replaced by a world where everything was knowable, explainable, and capable of being mastered.  The violence of colonialism was constitutive of this operation of world-mastery.  Questions of meaning and the supernatural were cordoned off into the privatized category of “religion.”  Anthropology, sociology, and biology emerged to know and order the world on a “scientific” basis.  The project of knowing, measuring, and positioning all things is a central operation of colonialism.  Against such secular mastery, fantasy remembers an enchanted world, full of spirits both helpful and malignant, beyond the discipline of reason and rifle.

....best monster/adversary...

II

Perhaps, then, if we’re concerned with colonial patterns and rhythms in RPGs, the most colonial thing of all was giving monsters PC abilities and statblocks in 3E and following.  Weirdness and strangeness was replaced by the universal, mathematically regularized grid of challenge ratings.  System mastery has its consolations, but so does an encounter with the weird, strange, awesome, and uncanny.  If we’re serious about decolonial play, statblocks should be three lines MAX.  

With that in mind, let’s take a look at Frostbitten and Mutilated from Lamentations of the Flame Princess.   Other reviews will comment on the information design, the art, the usability, and similar bourgeois themes.  I want to talk about Trolls and Giants.  They are terrible, monstrous, utterly strange, utterly frightening – not just frightening, horrific.  They are not species (as in 3E), they are catastrophes.  I’m tempted to say, “This is what a monster should be.”  But I won’t, as they are still saddled with relics like hit points, AC, and special attacks.  For all their fearfulness, just about any DM could bring them to the table, without the aid of crystals, mushrooms, or fairies.

There’s wasted potential elsewhere.  The book begins with a hate-summoning ritual, which I’m not a fan of, but I understand why it’s there.  However, there is nothing comparable for marmots, which seem to be at least as central to the environs as hate.  The lack of a marmot ritual, or even guidance about furry marmot play, seems like a definite gap.  In a quick online survey, I was able to find a number of sites giving advice in this general direction, but quickly realized I lacked the tools to weed out the good advice from the bad.  If a second edition is published, it should definitely include a more robust marmot section, including tips on costumes, artistic inspiration, conventions, etc.

....best writing....

III

Running Frostbitten & Mutilated may require careful contextualization to bridge the historical and cultural distance between you and the ancient Norse – or even you and the metal community.  For those in the United States, I think you’ll find an easy bridge in the cultural resources of the upper Midwest (including northern Minnesota and Wisconsin, and Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.  You could throw in the nice parts of Canada.)  In these lands, Scandinavian farmers braved the cold and snow to bring their culture to the new world.  Thus, Frances McDormand’s Oscar-winning portrayal of Marge Gunderson offers a superb guide for roleplaying the various Amazons.  While a naïve reading of the text points to something like Heilung (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h1BsKIP4uYM&t=73s), I submit it should be more Conga Se Menne (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XYqDIGtwCkc).

....best setting...

Evey Lockhart 

Looks like that animated pile of shit, Zak, is at it again, along with that fat bastard from the frozen north. It's just like PUT A SHIRT ON, ya know.

Anyway, I won't be reading this new "book" for a couple of reasons:

1. Zak is mean to people, just a harassing & name calling garbage person!. (And believe me I WILL be spreading this message on EVERY online space he inhabits. I will not allow harassment to foster in online spaces, you stupid asshole.)

2. He's a body shamer!! Have you seen those too skinny girls he draws?! He clearly hates fat women. That's not what real women look like!

So you shouldn't buy or examine or read anything about this frosty Hate Book!! He does not allow conversation so DON'T BE SHOVING ANY INFORMATION ABOUT THIS GARBAGE IN MY FACE!! OK?

Originally I was just going to have one winner, but I can't get the phrase "frosty Hate Book!" out of my mind so we're having two. Email zakzsmith AT hawtmayle dawt calm to collect your fabulous prizes.

...and product of the year.

Ennie Voting Is Live

Vote for the Ennies HERE

Vote Frostbitten & Mutilated, mark it #1 for:

Best Art--Interior

Best Monster/Adversary

Best Writing

Best Setting

Product of the Year

Also check out

Best Cartography: Midderlands by Glynn Seal

Best Adventure: Hot Springs Island by Jacob Hurst and co.

Best Aid/Accessory: Hex Kit by Cecil Howe

Best Art, Cover: Harlem Unbound by Brennen Reece

Best Electronic Book: The Scenario from Ontario from Kiel of Dungeons & Donuts and Zzarchov Kowolski.

Best Free Product: Vaginas Are Magic by James Edward Raggi IV

Best Game: Zweihander by Daniel Fox

Best Podcast:Rey and Kiel Can Do! featuring Kiel Donuts and Reynaldo Madrinian of Break!

Vote Frostbitten & Mutilated.

Ennies We're Not Going To Win (But We Already Won)

So on July 4 I found out Frostbitten & Mutilated was nominated for 6 Ennies this year! That's more than any other product but we're going to lose them all. This is good news--because we're not gonna lose because of the expectable backlash against a product about half-naked women giving people abortions in the snow, we're going to lose because there's so much that's fucking good this year.

This is the best Ennie year yet for DIY RPG stuff, and I feel like I already won everything I wanted to win just looking at the nominees:

Best Adventure: Hot Springs Island by Jacob Hurst and co.

I have been running this at home now for months. That's the highest recommendation I can give to an RPG product and literally something I've never said before. There's never been a hexcrawl book like this in terms of usability plus making Ela's eyes light up when she got the special players' "notebook" accessory. Wonderful.

Best Aid/Accessory: Hex Kit by Cecil Howe

The first time DIY D&D met the Ennies, Vornheim lost to a bunch of dungeon tiles. I'm 100% sure Cecil is gonna take this because it's something people actually use.

Best Art, Cover: Harlem Unbound by Brennen Reece

It's awesome to see some diversity in horror, and they had the good taste to hire some people I have a lot of respect for: Brennen Reece and Alex Mayo. And Brennen's cover is not the same photobrush-concept-art look. It references the Harlem Renaissance without being a bloodless pastiche. Harlem also gets a nod for best rules!

Best Art, Interior by me. But my book's black and white and up against Starfinder so fml.

Best Electronic Book: The Scenario from Ontario from Kiel of Dungeons & Donuts and Zzarchov Kowolski. Terrible title but these guys' credits are getting seriously impressive. Blood In the Chocolate Thulian Echoes: these are modules people will remember when the dust clears.

Best Free Product: Vaginas Are Magic by James Edward Raggi IV. Just having this said into a microphone at the Ennies is winning. The fact RPGs have gotten their head out of their ass enough to even talk about this dope magic system even though it has a title that scares nerds is a sign of how far we've come in the last 5 years.

Best Game: Zweihander by Daniel Fox. A Warhammer do-over, which is a good thing. If it loses to Delta Green that's ok--that's a good one, too.

Best Monster/Adversary: me again. And again up against Starfinder. Guh.

Best Podcast:Rey and Kiel Can Do! featuring Kiel Donuts and Reynaldo Madrinian of Break! who was my DM for a long-ass time also: I'd be happy to see Hobbs and Friends of the OSR win.

Best Setting: me again. But up against Harlem Unbound and Starfinder. Though the important thing here is Green Ronin and their sexual-harassment-complaint-flubbing-non-freelancer-paying-asses lose.

Best Writing: me again. Up against Delta Green and Harlem Unbound. Super ok with losing to them.

Spotlight Winners: Fever Swamp by Luke Gearing AND Operation Unfathomable by Jason Sholtis over at Hydra Cooperative. Pulpy slimy goodness all around.

Product of the Year: me again. Up against a lot of shit I'd be happy to lose to: Harlem, Hot Springs, all good.

So this is awesome!

When Ennie voting time comes around I'll probably be like "Hey vote for me!" but I really do mean it when I say I feel like we already won. There's an increasingly diverse body of work that truly deserves it and is often doing something totally new nominated in almost every category.

I'm proud of the people who got nominated and, seriously this is not a rhetorical gesture: I am proud that there is enough of a community to support all these folks. If you're not one of the authors on this list and want to be: you are looking at the tide that is going to carry the thing you make next.

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And one more stupid thing:

Kicking the trolls out made all this possible. Unfortunately the trolls don't like that

So as usual, Ennie season has resulted in the usual suspects organizing their usual annual harassment orgy because the things they like aren't nominated. Here, for example is Ettin / Paul Matijevic harassing a trans woman for asking why he's smearing people on twitter

And here he is complaining I called out a sexual harasser. Please report Ettin.

Here's the Dungeon Bastard harassing me for having Charlotte and Stoya--who playtested my game--part of the team--come up on stage with me:

Obviously, as I always say, don't harass them back, but I am verified on Twitter and they are part of a targeted harassment campaign which is against their rules, so if you click over to their tweets and hit the "report" button, sometimes it works and they get suspended. And you're helping save creators a lot of grief in the future and guaranteeing creators and friends can do their game stuff in peace.

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I Have TWO New Adventures Out Today--And A Contest!

1. Judging from the social medias, a lot of you may already know that Frostbitten & Mutilated, aka Black Metal Amazons of the Devoured Land, aka Amazons of the Metal North, aka The Adventure That Started When James Sent Me A Conan Cover And Said He Wanted An Adventure Like This But With Women Instead of Zombies was released.

Fuller preview here if you want it.

Buy it here.

If you like it, then tell people.

2. But I also have another new thing released today:

The wrecked transport lies in the center of a dark, amoebic spread of leaking fuel and coolant, half- submerged, half-floating on a massive (20-30’ tall) mound of chartreuse high-visibility pre-impact-deployed emergency minipontoons--linked, inflated polymer spheres, each about the size of a  fist, forming a weird barge near a cluster of caved-in half-domes. The effect is something like a scrapheap drizzled over a lopsided pyramid of tennis balls.

So this guy Dustin got in touch with me...

He made an RPG called Synthicide--it's an eccentric design: grid combat plus somewhat mainstream skill system plus kind of Pendragony personality mechanics, including like Cynicism as a stat. It's basically cyberpunk in space, with an interesting Philip K Dickish setting--the universe is mostly run by a robot-worshipping church, for example.

And Dustin was like "Hey will you write an adventure for this?"

And I was like "For a modest advance I would be delighted to, sir!"

And I did and I wrote like 5 times the amount of words I agreed to and he got a good deal.

Basically a prison ship crashes on a planet and there are a number of bounties the party can hunt by recapturing them but they gotta get in there before the other bounty hunters do--there are tenebrosaurs, mutant tracking cats, psychic intergalactic drug dealers, cyborg murder nuns, biological experiments gone wrong and more. I wrote it, and Dustin adjusted a few things and added the stats--I think my original draft is available as part of the package if you want to see the differences.

It takes advantage of the specific factions and ideas that Dustin developed for Synthicide but it's the kind of thing you could use in a lot of sci-fi settings or systems, so long as it has room for some robots and people who hate them.

30 pages, only 5 bucks: the price of a side of fries (fact check: at my local diner that's a dollar more than regular fries and a dollar less than chili fries. Unless you're tipping.). Enjoy!

And if you like it: tell people!

3. The Contest!

As you may know, neither of the companies releasing these two games is among the biggest in the indie RPG scene.

As you also may know, for the indie game companies that do occupy said Indie game catbird seat, have gotten there by two methods:

A) Paying their creative people fuck-all, and

B) Promoting their games by coming up with a terrible Take on someone else's game, then getting that Take shared, then--even as that Take is being shredded by the actual marginalized people or bewildered new gamers that the Taker supposedly is trying to protect by inventing up with this Take--making it clear that the point of the Take wasn't to help anyone, but instead to advertise a game they're selling.

So in order to do my best to emulate these marketing geniuses and hopefully grab a piece of that sweet Indie pie, I am announcing:

The Official Sean Nittner Memorial Frostbitten & Mutilated/Target-Rich Environment Terrible Take Contest

Here's is what you must do--

1. Take your copy of Frostbitten & Mutilated or Target-Rich Environment

2. Important: Label it, at the beginning, on the document, up front, "TerribleTakeContest". (This is a crucial bit, obviously. I mean: what kind of rancid trash person would knowingly write a take they didn't believe and not even tell people?)

3. Write the stupidest Take on one of these game things you can think of below it.

4. Put it up on social media somewhere.

5. Tell me.

Best Take gets a prize, a page of original art--8x10--from Frostbitten & Mutilated.

Multiple Best Takes? Multiple pages will get sent out.

Contest ends April 30.

Roland Barthes: Dungeon Master

From Roland Barthes' lectures, Collège de France, 1977 (from How To Live Together: Novelistic Simulations of Some Everyday Spaces, Tr: Kate Briggs):

Of Games

Novels RPGs are simulations that is to say fictional experimentations on a model the most classical form of which is the maquette. The structure, an outline (a maquette) through which topics, situations are let loose.

More than one language game exists because more than one desire exists.

Take note: the game is normative it wants to resist, prevail over the disorder of the given, it thinks of chance as disorder.

But our method—the one we're adopting here—involves shuffling the cards and dealing them in the order in which they appear. For me now whenever I'm working anything any thematic grouping of traits (of index cards) always makes me think of Bouvard and Peuchet’s question: Why this? Why that? Why here, why there?=An automatic distrust of associative ideology (which is the ideology of the ordered presentation genre.) The card players motto: “I cut the deck”. I react against the fixity of language.

The systematic gradually breaks down, is disappointed—the non-systemic flourishes, proliferates. Yes something direct has to be put in place in order for the indirect, an unforeseeable to emerge.

Of Fantasy

Now the first force I am able to investigate, to interpolate--the one I can see is it work within myself even through the illusions of the imaginary--the force of desire. Of, to be more precise (since it's the point of departure for our research)--the figure of the fantasy.

Let's be clear that a fantasy requires a setting (a scenario) and therefore a place.

Now fantasy=scenario but a scenario and bits and pieces always very brief=just a glimmer of the narrative of desire. What's glimpsed is very sharply contoured, very brightly lit, but all of a sudden it's gone: a body I catch sight of in a car as it goes around the bend before it plunges into the shadows.

I engage in the exhausting strategies of desire.


Of GMing


I truly believe that for a teaching GM relationship to be effective the speaker GM should know only slightly more about the topic than the listener player--sometimes, on certain points, less--this is the process of exchange.

Of Foes

Animals=Evil. Demons figured in animal form, a vast theme.  Anthonian theme: demons entering Saint Anthony's cave: snakes, lions, bears, leopards, bulls, wolves, aspic, scorpions: all "the wild beasts." Their figurative profusion in painting. Animality=infranature: aggression, fear, greed, flesh: man without law.

Of The Party

But what's the fascination of the small group (the gang, the sanatorium)? The state of autarky (autarkadia: self-sufficiency) contentedness=plenitude. It's not the emptiness that draws us in its the fullness of or if you prefer the intuition that there's a vertiginous vacuity to the plenitude of the group.

Autarky: strong intradependence + 0 extradependence. Independence marks the boundary and so gives the definition the mode of being of the group.

Bion makes this clear “Leaders who neither fight nor run away are not easily understood”.

Of The Dungeon

Description of the protective enclosure: Robinson Crusoe meticulous almost excessive quasi obsessive set of defenses against others as soon there's a suggestion of the presence of another man on the island (footprints)--> mad defensive measures. A house that's completely buried from view, invisible whole system of fortifications, of hiding places, enclosure as craziness, as an extreme experience.

Already in Robinson Crusoe--a "healthy" "rational" "empirical" subject if ever there was one--panics at the prospect of danger (the footprints in the sand) endlessly reinforces his defenses. Absolute protection is never achieved (mirage asymptotic). Stockade enclosure camouflaged by a thicket, no door--unmistakably the theme of absolute enclosure--just a little ladder that Robinson pushes up behind him. The colonists apartment in the granite wall in the Mysterious Island--a ladder that can be pulled up then in an elevator. The symbolism of burying oneself below ground and walling oneself up is based in the empirical fact of protecting oneself (symbolically speaking, the only absolutely protected space is the mother's womb). To go outside is to be exposed, to be defenseless, it's life itself. Making it impossible for enemy to get in gets converted through access through neurotic exaggeration into the self-imposed impossibility of getting out.

Piranesi: prisons are supposed to be the anti-hut (note that they’re vast, anti-cellular structures demonic capsizing of levels)—> Space of crisis, of drama, of the sublime (Burke= “a sort of delight full of horror, a sort of tranquility tinged with Terror.”)  Piranesi: “out of fear springs pleasure."

The Labyrinth: Symbolizes the paradoxical labor whereby the subjects sets about creating difficulties for himself. Walling himself up within the impasses of a system. It is the archetypal space of the obsessive. The Labyrinth is this space of active enclosure. Endless futile efforts expended on finding the way out. In the subjects effort to find the exit he only acts exacerbates his only his own imprisonment. He walks, constantly changes direction, etc yet remains in the same place. Labyrinth: a system that's hermetically sealed by its autonomy. Example: The system of a love affair--once inside there's no way out, and yet the labor it requires is immense. Finding a way out an almost magical act: the glimpse of a thread of a different system through which you then have to pass--Ariadne's thread. The Labyrinth is a very effective symbol of that state, an inextricable system of walls, but one that's out in the open air graph paper there's no roof...To someone looking on from the outside (looking down from above at their notes) the solution is obvious, in contrast to the person inside it: a situation typical of a love affair.

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P.S.

Check it: Red & Pleasant Land is Reddit /RPG game of the month--and it's not even a game.

Notes Taken While Starting to Write My Next RPG Book

Room When she is there, Room when she is not there.

Johannes Vermeer

100 Octopuses

Nimue

“A terrible worm in an iron cocoon,” 

Oceanids

Sexual cannibalism is rare in the animal kingdom. Although cannibalism is not uncommon in cephalopods, here we report the first documented case of sexual cannibalism. A large female Octopus cyanea was observed continuously for 2.5 days in Palau, Micronesia, when she was out of her den. On the second day, a small male followed and mated her 13 times during 3.5 h while she continued to forage over 70 m distance. After the 12th mating, she aggressively chased a different small octopus that barely escaped by jetting, inking and swimming upwards. Shortly thereafter, the original small male mated her a 13th time, but subsequently she attacked and suffocated him and spent 2 days cannibalizing him in her den. This sort of intraspecific aggression helps to explain several reports of octopuses mating out in the open, a behaviour that may serve to allow the smaller mate to escape cannibalism.

Kang the Conqueror

Christianity from Judaism from Canaanism 

Niobids

Nimue, Viviane, Vivien, Elaine, Ninianne, Nivian, Nyneve, or Evienne

T.H. White's 1958 Arthurian retelling, The Once and Future King, in which "Merlyn", as White calls him, has the curious affliction of living backwards in time to everyone else. This affliction also appears in Dan Simmons' Hyperion as the "Merlin sickness." A related novel is The Book of Merlyn.

Metacomet

Abbas II of Persia

Kamāl ud-Dīn Behzād

Nympharium

Nzinga of Ndongo and Matamba

“

Voltaire:

This unfortunate time for Ibrahim was unfortunate for all monarchs. The

Holy Roman Empire was unsettled by the famous Thirty Years War. Civil war

devastated France and forced the mother of Louis XIV to flee with her children

from her capital. In London, Charles I was condemned to death by his own

subjects. Philip IV, king of Spain, having lost almost all his possessions in Asia, also

lost Portugal.

Voltaire went on to consider the careers of Cromwell in England, Li Zicheng in

China, Aurangzeb in India, and others who had seized power by force, concluding

that the mid-­seventeenth century had been ‘a period of usurpations almost from one

end of the world to the other’.1

“

The Loe

Llyn y Fan Fach

Llyn Ogwen

Ribbon lake

Llyn Llydaw

Dozmary Pool

Witch's ladder

Martin Mere

dolls and doll carriages harnessed to mice

Lady of the Lake

One Thousand and One Nights

the Seclusium of not Orphone

Anaxaorchas

Islamic Golden Age

William Adams (sailor)

http://dndwithpornstars.blogspot.com/2015/10/the-goblin-cubes.html

sorceress / witch

clowns

Valmont (film)

Thessaly rebellion (1600)

Giordano Bruno

Haunted Lake

Elizabeth Báthory

wfrp career list

http://dndwithpornstars.blogspot.com/2015/09/100-more-lyonesse-things.html

http://dndwithpornstars.blogspot.com/2015/09/d100-things-you-find-in-lyonesse.html

Lyonesse?

Vrokk

http://dndwithpornstars.blogspot.com/2015/10/vrokk-isle-of-war-wizards.html

History of Spain

Les Liaisons dangereuses

Clathrus archeri

A Coconut Octopus Uses Tools to Snatch a Crab - YouTube

Octopus leaps out of water, grabs crab - YouTube

octopus wraps around the Wildlife Man`s head - YouTube

Tortuosa willow

Ich Dien

Scheherezade

 a piece of John the Baptist’s head. (relics)

Myddfai

Paimpont forest

Brocéliande

Pergusa Lake

Beeswing, Dumfries and Galloway

Buccaneer

The Decameron

The War Hound and the World's Pain

Battle of the Planets

Galactor

G-Force: Guardians of Space

All Purpose Cultural Cat Girl Nuku Nuku

Hispania

Eustache Deschamps

Eleanor de Montfort

a rainwater fishpond on the roof.

chinese painting

Rime dictionary

Monolatrism

Ancient Canaanite religion

Origins of Judaism

Jews

Judaism

Yahwism

Jean Le Maingre

a mere Wrecca

Grimoires—17th c

microscope

1674  A Hindu conqueror, Shivaji, is crowned king at Rajgarh. Maratha power is established. Shivaji gives assurance to Hindus across India.

1675  The Mugal emperor, Alamgir, has escecuted Tegh Bahadur for refusing to accept Islam. Tegh Bahadur's son and successor, Guru Gobind Rai, vows to combat Alamgir's oppression. He adopts the surname Singh (lion) and gives his closest followers the same surname.

1686  Isaac Newton presents his Principia, Book I, to the Royal Society. 

Merlin

Nymphaeum

Ranulf Higden

Cephalopod Attack

Octopus Wrestling

Clytie

Ocyrhoe

Nymph

Naiad

Salix babylonica

Weeping Willow

La Maupin

“List of Women In the Old Testament”

Joanna of Flanders

Imagine an umbrella. Or a willow. Salix babylonica (Babylon willow or weeping willow; Chinese: 垂柳) is a species of willow. This is the situation. 

Nemesis

Styx

I'm sailing away set an open course for the virgin sea

I've got to be free free to face the life that's ahead of me

On board I'm the captain so climb aboard

We'll search for tomorrow on every shore

And I'll try oh Lord I'll try to carry on

I look to the sea reflections in the waves spark my memory

Some happy some sad

I think of childhood friends and the dreams we had

We live happily forever so the story goes

But somehow we missed out on that pot of gold

But we'll try best that we can to carry on

A gathering of angels appeared above my head

They sang to me this song of hope and this is what they said

They said come sail away come sail away

Come sail away with me

Come sail away come sail away

Come sail away with me

Come sail away come sail away

Come sail away with me

Come sail away come sail away

Come sail away with me

I thought that they were angels but to my surprise

They climbed aboard their starship and headed for the skies

Singing, come sail away come sail away

Come sail away with me

Come sail away come sail away

Come sail away with me

Come sail away come sail away

Come sail away with me

Come sail away come sail away

Come sail away with me

Come sail away come sail away

Come sail away with me

Come sail away come sail away

Come sail away with me

Come sail away come sail away

Come sail away with me

Come sail away come sail away

Come sail away with me

Hourglass Heads

“We risk all, we win everything”

Randall, Time Bandits
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Demon City Appendix N (Part 1: Books)

New painting for Demon City, click to enlarge

While lists of other media to check out are extremely helpful in RPGs, you're often given so much to read that you end up no better than where you started. I, for one, wish I'd been told to read Tales of the Dying Earth or Seven Geases on day one before ever playing D&D--and then let all that other stuff filter in when I got around to it.

So what follows is not an attempt to cover every jewel of the horror and crime genres--this list is just about the most broadly useful texts and starting places, it's assumed the motivated Host can chase down the rest once they find out where their interests lie:

How Crime Works

None of these books are world-class well-written, but they get the job done:

David Simon's book Homicide is a fast read and a good primer on how murder detectives do their jobs--fans of Simon's TV shows The Wire and Homicide: Life on the Street will recognize many anecdotes borrowed from the book, but it's all fleshed out in more detail here. Also a good resource on just how extreme modern crime can get without even dipping in to the supernatural.

A Burglar's Guide to the City by Geoff Manaugh is full of real-life examples of how criminals get in and out of summer homes, armored cars and bank vaults. It also does an excellent job of outlining the surprising variety of things a PC party can get away with in the city without attracting police attention. Did you know master criminals really do build scale models in their secret hide-outs? Did you know cops create completely fake "trap houses" to catch burglars? Read the book.

The Ice-Man: Confessions of a Mafia Contract Killer by Philip Carlo is a case study of the infamous Richard Kuklinski. Conveniently for detail-hungry Hosts, he was both a meticulous assassin-for-hire and an omnicidal maniac driven by chaotic inner turmoil. The tedious film featuring Wynona Ryder contains absolutely none of the most interesting bits--like Kuklinski's unhinged autobiographical prison drawings of rats eating his victims, his killing of dozens of homeless men on his way to work just for practice, the way he used every kind weapon on the job from piano wire to crossbows to keep the police from noticing a pattern, or how he'd get so frustrated he'd punch himself in the head until he fell unconscious.

Modern Horror In General

Kier-La Janisse's magnificent House of Psychotic Women is essential to anyone interested in psychological horror. Beginning Hosts will never starve stealing plots and characters from the alphabetized summaries of horror and exploitation films that fill out half the book while experienced ones will learn a lot from the other half: an extended autobiographical essay, in a smart and perceptive style, where the author describes why and how these stories resonated with her during her own troubled childhood and teen years.

The aggressively minimal short stories making up Dennis Cooper's Ugly Man are so far out on the arty cutting edge of the urban and suburban gothic that they still get filed in the literature section. Casually brutal about drugs, abuse, boredom, atrocity and existential terror, they're very modern, very disturbing and--perhaps refreshingly for the kind of Host who tires of femme fatales and mutilated women--very gay. Hosts in search of raw material should appreciate the fact they're almost nothing but plot and voice. If you're worried, go to the store, turn to page 43 and read the surprisingly representative nine-line story Santa Claus vs Johnny Crawford and decide whether it's too weird or too real.

The Alien Quartet by David Thomson is a deep dive into the first four films of modern horror's greatest franchise. Though the Alien movies take place out in space, smart Hosts will find Thomson's nearly shot-by-shot analysis of pacing, characterization, source materials, world-building and imagery shows how minor details conspire to give a story a distinctive shape. 

Batman--Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth (not the video game, the fully-painted graphic novel by Dave McKean and Grant Morrison, named after a line in Philip Larkin) is more horrorish--though perhaps less horrifying--than Brian Bolland and Alan Moore's slightly more famous Killing Joke. Gotham has always been a city of psychopaths but in terms of density and lovingly-rendered variety of lunacy-per-page nothing in the Bat-catalogue matches Arkham, largely because the creators ditch plot mechanics in favor of a giving us a kaleidoscopic view of the most demented members of the hero's rogues' gallery mixed in with the memoir of the asylum's mentally deteriorating founder. 

Although Bill Sienkiewicz's Stray Toasters takes place in more than one building, it manages to be even more claustrophobic than Arkham. Told in gorgeously-painted fragments of image and overlapping first-person dialogue, a Host won't learn much about story mechanics, but in terms of setting a mood of urban paranoia this 200-odd page bad trip can't be beat.

Mike Dringenberg and Neil Gaiman's Sandman issue #6 contains absolutely none of the vaguely positive story-worship and humanism that creeps up around the edges of Gaiman's other work--it's just wall-to-wall awful. A man who can do everything shows up in a diner and makes the diners do, well, everything. It's a raw and disgusting tale of bad things happening to good people. Hosts note: it's made powerful not so much by the victims' fates, but by how clearly the characters are realized before being destroyed.

The Classics

Although Demon City is about the present, there has always been room for archaic imagery in every kind of horror--Euripedes The Bacchae is arguably the first horror story, and the tale of murder and zeal still has eminently stealable lines: "Now through the shattered skull the blood smiles". Other Googleable sources for Hosts keen on internalizing the rich and rigid cadences of cultist-speak include The Lesser Key of Solomon and, of course, the King James Bible (particularly the books of Job and Revelations).

If you don't know HP Lovecraft, the short story Nyarlathotep contains the most of what's original in his work (the stunning and stunned turns of phrase, the intimations of a colossal, nihilistic mythology) and the least of what's familiar from his more conventional works and their imitators. It's about a page long and, like the rest of his work, in the public domain--the best place to start if you're wondering whether to plunge in to the longer stuff.

If you've seen Carrie and The Shining and want to get further into Stephen King's world of horror in parking lots and office blocks, the short story collection Skeleton Crew is a good survey, with The Mist and Nona giving the best idea of what the novels are like.

Shirley Jackson is the missing link between the fevered mythography of Lovecraft and King's horror-as-wound-in-the-modern in terms of both era and style--her short story The Lottery is easy to find on the web.

Thomas Harris' Silence of the Lambs is not only the best of his Hannibal Lecter books, but probably the best written popular example of the overlap of crime and horror--rich in procedural and psychological detail, well-paced, thoughtful, and stylish enough to have caught the attention of literary types like Martin Amis (who gave it a rave review) and David Foster Wallace (who put it on his syllabus).

Japanese Horror-Manga K-Hole

Of the delights and terrors of Toshio Saeki, Junji Ito, Kazuo Umezu, Suehiro Maruo, Shintaro Kago, Hideshi Hino and their ilk Google knows far more than any human should. Type in a name and image search until you get a good idea for a monster or become too ill to continue. 

As to actually diving in to the stories, Suehiro Maruo's Mr Arashi's Amazing Freak Show is a decent introduction to the depraved body-horror and pitiless psychology typical of both the plots and "NPCs" in the genre and is available in official English translation.

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And now, a word from our sponsor:

The Demon City patreon is here

Things Underlined So Far in "Gormenghast"

I picked up a copy while visiting Scrap Princess...

a python! Even at that ghastly and critical moment I could see what a beautiful thing it was. Far more beautiful than my old brute of a mule. But did it enter my head that I should transfer my allegiance to the reptile? No. 
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the darkness that lay beyond took him, as it were, to herself, muffling the edges of his sharp body.
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(re: a bunch of cats) so close upon each other's tails that they might have been a continuous entity, her ladyship's white clowder
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For a moment she stared about her ruminatively. The cats, with not a whisker moving, were everywhere in the room. The mantelpiece was heraldic with them. The table was a solid block of whiteness. The couch was a snowdrift. The carpet was sewn with eyes.
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I was among mountains. Huge tufted things. Full of character; but no charm. I was alone with my faithful mule. We were lost. A meteor flew overhead. What use was that to us? No use at all. It merely irritated us. 
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No one reads his poems, but he holds a remote status – a gentleman, as it were, by rumour.
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yet sullen as her mother and as incalculable...Fuchsia tosses her black flag of hair, bites at her childish underlip, scowls, laughs, broods, is tender, is intemperate, suspicious and credulous all in a day.
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Do things without any mention – like getting tea, for instance, and laying it quietly before me.' 'All right,' answered Clarice, rather sullenly.
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and stroked the sleek ears of the goat
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There was something lewd in the way the wax-coloured petal of his eyelid dropped suggestively over his bright eye and lifted itself again without a flutter.

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is as naked and blatant as a pig in a cathedral.
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They made no effort to bear out the promise of the other features, which would have formed the ideal setting for the kind of eye that flashes with visionary fire.
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...less like a man than a ravaged suckling
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Must I what? Explain yourself, dear boy. If there's anything I abominate it's sentences of two words.
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His skin stretched so tightly...that the freckles were twice the size they would normally have been.
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At The Fly's prod he did not wake with a start, as is the normal thing: that would have been tantamount to a kind of interest in life. He merely opened one eye. 
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His voice floated out of his soft head like a paper streamer.
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It was in Bellgrove’s class, one late afternoon, that Titus first thought consciously about the idea of colour: of things having colours: of everything having its own particular colour, and of the way in which every particular colour kept changing according to where it was, what the light was like, and what it was next to.

Bellgrove was half asleep, and so were most of the boys. The room was hot and full of golden motes. A great clock ticked away monotonously. A bluebottle buzzed slowly over the surfaces of the hot window-panes or from time to time zithered its languid way from desk to desk. Every time it passed certain desks, small inky hands would grab at it, or rulers would smack out through the tired air. Sometimes it would perch, for a moment, on an inkpot or on the back of a boy’s collar and scythe its front legs together, and then its back legs, rubbing them, scything them, honing them, or as though it were a lady dressing for a ball drawing on a pair of long, invisible gloves.

Oh, bluebottle, you would fare ill at a ball! There would be none who could dance better than you; but you would be shunned: you would be too originaclass="underline" you would be before your time. They would not know your steps, the other ladies. None would throw out that indigo light from brow or flank – but, bluebottle, they wouldn’t want to. There lies the agony. Their buzz of converse is not yours, bluebottle. You know no scandal, no small talk, no flattery, no jargon: you would be hopeless, for all that you can pull the long gloves on. After all, your splendour is a kind of horror-splendour. Keep to your inkpots and the hot glass panes of schoolrooms and buzz your way through the long summer terms. Let the great clock-ticks play counterpoint. Let the swish of a birch, the detonation of a paper pellet, the whispered conspiracy be your everlasting pards.

Down generations of boys, buzz, bluebottle, buzz in the summer prisons – for the boys are bored. Tick, clock, tick! Young Scarabee’s on edge to fight the ‘Slogger’ – young Dogseye hankers for his silkworms’ weaving – Jupiter minor knows a plover’s nest. Tick, clock, tick!

Sixty seconds in a minute; sixty minutes in an hour; sixty times sixty.

Multiply the sixes and add how many noughts? Two. I suppose. Six sixes are thirty-six. Thirty-six and two noughts is 3,600. Three thousand and six hundred seconds in an hour. Quarter of an hour is left before the silkworms – before the ‘Slogger’ – before the plover’s nest. Buzz-fly, buzz! Tick, clock, tick! Divide 3,600 by four and then subtract a bit because of the time taken to work it all out.

Nine hundred seconds! Oh, marvellous! marvellous! Seconds are so small. One – two – three – four – seconds are so huge.

The inky fingers scrubble through the forelock – the blackboard is a grey smear. The last three lessons can be seen faintly one behind the other – like aerial perspective. A fog of forgotten figures – forgotten maps – forgotten languages.

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