Rending Damage

I D&D'ified and Last-Gasped the rending crit table for 'Only War'. List includes body hit location as well as effect.

Click the Axe for random Rending Critical

CLOSETCASES

I made a book out of what I thought to be the best posts on False Machine and put it on Lulu .

I think other people who run interesting blogs should do the same thing.

This is my argument for that.

Firstly the negatives.

1. Blogging is free, that’s the point of blogs.

Firstly, you can still set the profit margin for a print copy of your book on Lulu to Zero, or near-zero if you like. Secondly, don't worry, it doesn't make any money anyway.

2. Information on a blog is accessible to anyone at any time, they can look at it whenever they want and share it with whoever they want. A book does not do this.

My counter-argument here is not a logical one.

A book lodges in the mind and in the world in a different way to a blog. Blogs are part of the daily flow of information that surrounds us at all times. They kind of have to be part of that flow to remain what they are.

There is a lot of cognitive variety possible here and I expect many, or some, would say that they read a blog post with all the seriousness, contemplation, attention and consideration that they dedicate to a book. These are qualities they possess inwardly and they simply apply them to information in the world as they become aware of it. This being the case, a blog, with its accessibility and ease of navigation, is always superior to a book.

Now some of these people will be knobends with shallow minds who do not know what it means to really deeply attend to anything and so believe they attend to everything. But some will not and that must be considered also.

I will say that I consider a book, especially a physical book, differently to a blog. I attend to it more deeply. I keep it with me physically. I return to it at greater intervals.

(I am a proponent of magical thinking about books. I do not have airtight arguments in their favour, but they are embedded in my personality, in my history and my perception of the world. Through years of poverty and movement from terrible place to terrible place, the one constant has been my books. They define me more than any other owned object. It's almost true that apart from clothes and this computer, I own no other objects.)

3. This will take me valuable time which (being a fully optimised human being (as I know all of you are)) I cannot afford to lose. Great works and mighty entrails press upon me constantly and if this be done, who knows what legend shall go unfulfilled by my hand?

It took me about a day and a half of real (ie constant, effective, non-rambling, non-distracted) work to put the book together. Maybe two.

Now I am an inefficient flake so if one of you (fully optimised) humans tried to do the same thing then it would probably take you less time and effort. That is still time out of your schedule but the more valuable your time is then probably the more well-read your blog is and the more likely that the (small) profits of the book sales will pay for your time. So maybe it evens out?

The Second Part

I will now move onto the positive arguments in favour of this idea.

I’m not sure if my blog is an ‘OSR’ blog. It’s certainly connected but it’s kind of its own strange thing off on the margins. They say that if you can’t see the clique then you are in the clique, therefore I think of my blog as being in the;

Clique Of Self Absorbed Knobends Who Cluster Around Zak Smith

Which I capitalise as;

ClOSAKWCAZS

Then shorten and simplify to;

ClOSEKCAZS

or just

CLOSETCASES

It seems that the CLOSETCASES are approaching the end of a big cycle of thinking

Blogs appear and grow in strength from strange gaps in people’s lives.  The golden age of Noisms was when he was trapped in a Japanese office all day with nothing useful to do. Jeff got a job, James M disappeared. When the life changes the blog changes and as people move into new phases the blog either disappears or becomes much less regular or less intensely imagined. And blogs need to be regular and vibrant in order to really fulfil their potential as blogs. A blog that liveth not, is not a blog.

In addition, the current crop of OSR blogs seemed to draw strength and impetus from the Living Disaster of 4^th, combined with the OGL. Yet soon, 4^th shall be but a hungry ghost, flitting around the edges of the feast, and its inheritor, 5^th, is thought by all to be “a bit old-school really” and “really more than we might have expected”. What fierce beings shall possesses this re-made world? Who can tell?

Ideas have a kind of life inside them. They only work through human minds, and through transmission between minds they must change, ever so slightly, or die. They must also change the world in which they act. But ideas are rarely suited to survive in a word shaped by their own success. In this changed environment they must change again, or die. In either case the original is lost. So an active living idea is also an idea with a clock ticking inside it. It will not last. We CLOSETCASES have sustained this idea for some time.

Therefore, in the same way that the Necrontyr were clad in immortal bodies of living metal by the C’tan star gods, let us transmute this great age of self-absorbed intellectual titting around into a different form, that it might better suffer the long reaches of the interstellar night that must surely fall when Zak can’t be bothered any more. For lo, the CLOSETCASES will all ultimately either sort their lives out, or just fall the fuck apart and in either cases their blogs shall go untenanted, standing as dark cyclopean monuments in the dusty netherverse of the world wide web.

You may say it will never happen, but it has happened to every other clique of self absorbed knobends in human history, and it will happen to us.

Books = Good

A book can be given as a gift to a strange yet interesting person and count well with them. Saying ‘hey, read this blog’ does not work as well, despite its ease of access.

You can probably punch a book through a class or culture divide more easily than you can a blog. A blog comes with a ‘I am this kind of person’ feel to it, yet anyone may receive a book, even a doctor, or a lawyer, or you know, real people.

The self-curation of a person reading their own blog and selecting only the best or most original means that you end up with a purified and intensified version of that person. Or, at least, how that person would like to think of themselves.

You can put them on your shelf and thus display your ‘Nerd-but-actually-slightly-better-than-those-mediocre-nerds-that-like-worse-stuff-not-that-there’s-anything-wrong-with-them’ identity.

It is a physical and real thing to show for what was, for many, quite a lot of relatively serious effort over a long period of time. It is a talisman.

You can tell normal people who ask what the fuck you have been doing with your time ‘I wrote a book’ instead of ‘I have a blog’ which is code for ‘I masturbate a lot’. You can then show them the book. And prove you have not just been masturbating.

There could be a small library of nerds and if one of them got mysteriously popular then people would probably check out the rest.

personal sargasso

I've got nothing.....

Have some de Tocqueville in leu

“I do not know, indeed, whether this loose style has not some secret charm for those who speak and write amongst these nations. As the men who live there are frequently left to the efforts of their individual powers of mind, they are almost always a prey to doubt; and as their situation in life is forever changing, they are never held fast to any of their opinions by the immobility of their fortunes. Men living in democratic countries, then, are apt to entertain unsettled ideas, and they require loose expressions to convey them. As they never know whether the idea they express today will be appropriate to the new position they occupy tomorrow, they naturally acquire a liking for abstract terms. An abstract term is like a box with a false bottom; you may put in it what ideas you please, and take them out again without being observed.”

“The reproach I address to the principal of equality is not that it leads men away in the pursuit of forbidden enjoyments, but that it absorbs them wholly in quest of those which are allowed. By these means a kind of virtuous materialism may ultimately be established in the world, which would not corrupt, but enervate, the soul and noiselessly unbend the springs of action.”

“If two Englishmen chance to meet at the antipodes, where they are surrounded by strangers whose language and manners are almost unknown to them, they will first stare at each other with much curiosity and a kind of secret uneasiness; they will take care to converse only with a constrained and absent air, upon very unimportant subjects. Yet there is no enmity between these men; they have never seen each other before, and each believes the other to be a respectable person. Why, then, should they stand so cautiously apart? We must go back to England for the reason.”

“I have often noticed in the United States that it is not easy to make a man understand that his presence may be dispensed with; hints will not always suffice to shake him off . I contradict an American at every word he says, to show him that his conversation bores me, he instantly labours with fresh pertinacity to convince me; I preserve a dogged silence, and he thinks I am meditating deeply on the truths that he is uttering; at last I rush from his company, and he supposes that some urgent business hurries me elsewhere. This man will never understand that he wearies me to death unless I tell him so, and the only way to get rid of him is to make him my enemy for life.”

“It is not my purpose to inquire whether the new state of things that I have just described is inferior to that which preceded it or simply different. Enough for me that it is fixed and determined; for what is most important to meet with among men is not any give order, but order.”

“An American, instead of going in a leisure hour to dance merrily at some place of public resort, as the fellows of his class continue to do throughout the greater part of Europe, shuts himself up at home to drink. He thus enjoys two pleasures; he can go on thinking of his business and can get drunk decently by his own fireside.”

“The Americans, in their intercourse with strangers, appear impatient of the smallest censure and insatiable of praise. The most slender eulogy is acceptable to them, the most exalted seldom contents them; they unceasingly harass you to extort praise, and if you resist their entreaties, the fall to praising themselves. It would seem as if, doubting their own merit, they wished to have it constantly exhibited before their eyes. Their vanity is not only greedy, but restless and jealous; it will grant nothing, while it demands everything, but is ready to beg and quarrel at the same time.”

Svirfneblin

Svirfneblin

At the edge of the comprehensible world, where darkness sculpts itself an active form, where death is the constant and life the except, what kind of good can exist?

In the delicate curves of their hidden cities the Svirfneblin feel a purpose that strikes like lightning in the tempest of their daily lives. The flame to live is quickened in them and they feed it on the pure rhythms of light and space and nothing else.

They are a people without shouts, without tears, without hopes, without regrets, They value only four things.

LIFE

Svirfneblin prize any living thing above any non-living thing in any circumstances. To them, life is the justification for the world and its true continuity. The spine of reality. All is a fiction. Only life and its laws are authentic. Kings and wealth both fade and die, but life is strong and grows and time goes on in its real continuity. Life is what is real.  Life knows neither good nor bad nor justice as a measure of morals. It simply is and it must be preserved.

ACTION

Svirfneblin culture is built around doing. Speech, description, planning, these are tertiary concerns. The word is just the bodyguard to the deed. Svirfneblin are unimpressed with oratory and difficult to persuade. Even rational description and analysis are sometimes not as effective as might be wished. Deed is the highest and surest of all truths.

LIGHT

Svirfneblin see the Veins as pure space and light, only highlighted by mass. They consider themselves lucky to live here. From their perspective no-one from the surface could understand what space and light truly are. They drown in both. They use space to 'keep things in', they use light to 'see' other things. Space is not a piece of luggage. Light is not an errand boy. Light is, space is. They have their own quality.

Svirfneblin value gems but only for the light within the gem, not the gem itself. Gems are a construction of space and light, not mass. To them, the light is active, alive, it races faster than a waterfall, soundless and eternal.

Their cave-cities are all beautifully carved in unpredictable, yet harmonious curves. Being there fills the observer with a sensation of lightness, despite the difference of scale for larger beings.

To Svirfneblin the body is superficial, accidental. Tone, brightness, occluding or refracting, that is all. The eyes matter to them, not the face. Though they do value worked beauty, they think beauty has all the properties of a real force like gravity or heat, and they treat it as such.

THE DAY

Svirfneblin are present-minded to an astonishing extent. They are intelligent and capable of both planning for the future and interrogating the past, but they do not value these processes for themselves. They are things to be got out of the way. They stand between the Svirfneblin and direct experience of the present moment.

To Svirfneblin the past is dead. It is carrion, the future is nothing. Can you eat it? What is its taste? It is impossible to speak of the future without lying, so as little as possible should be said of it. Today is the deed. They take the present day.

Duergar Decision Flowchart

Veins Large Scale Mapping 2

Here are the Veins themselves in order of likelihood. For a crazy slightly gonzo formation you may simply roll a d8

1. River

2. Fault

3. Mine

4. War Works

5. Sulphuric blooms

6. Myco

7. Gigastructure

8. Burrow

For a more naturalistic generation you can try this table:

1-5. River

6-9. Fault

10-12. Mine

13-14. War Works

15-16. Sulphuric blooms

17-18. Myco

19. Gigastructure

20. Burrow

RIVER

The River is, in real life, the primary creator of caves. It shapes the classic 'wet look' limestone cave with the elaborate speleothems. In reality a river can leave a kind of halo of caves around it, mainly above it as it hollows them out and finds new routes through the stone, but also around, and underneath.

On The Map.

Remember a river will only go down in a vertical section.

In Description.

Rivers are unlikely to be navigable by boats in real life, in the Veins its your choice. Remember that if ships can navigate a river it makes it extremely valuable and strategically important.

An underground river will be cold, narrow and often fast. Its depth and power will vary tremendously. It will pile over falls and sweep through sumps.

FAULT

On the Map

The Fault is pretty simple, exactly how you imagine it to look, a jagged line. It doesn’t matter much if it changes its nature or direction when it reaches the vertical sections as it’s the nature of faults to break through vertical space.

In Description.

A fault could be described as a huge, dry, dark, irregular chasm in the mid-earth. A kind of natural void. Its walls will not be smooth or semi-organic like a limestone cave but rough and fragmentary, bearing the sings of torsion and stress. It may still be moving. It may have tectonic relics. It may still be active. There may be lava.

MINE

The Mine is a little like the Fault. The mine heads stop and then a new branch is begun from behind the mine head as the miners seek the vein they are after. Like many of these shapes the mine is an extremely abstracted form of how a mine map would look in real life. 

On The Map.

Technically a mine should proceed up and down a little differently than it goes across. I have mainly ignored that though.

In Description.

The *major* difference between this Vein and any other is that a Mine is rational. It is built to  be accessible, though often for races shorter than man. Columns will be left to support the roof. Searching shafts may run in every direction. Dwarves will be able to read the culture of the miners from the toolmarks left on the walls.

(Remember this isn’t an exact map of what the thing does, only where it is. Real rivers and mines can have small falls, steps, ladders, lifts, anything you like.)

WAR WORKS

War mines are unusual in that you use two colours and that they produce a large amount of lines. If you roll this result you may only need this and one other to make a map. The war works each start in an opposite side of the map and process towards each other.

On The Map.

They essentially look like brush heads. An extending line, then a lateral at its head, then more extenders and so on.

The war works are positioned to cut each other off and intercept each other.

In Description.

War mines will be smaller and less stable than normal mines. Towards the ‘attack heads’ they will be of a minimal size, about three feet wide and four or five high. They were built fast. There may be signs of conflict. The conflict may still be active. End points may be cut off by explosives or magic collapsing the heads. 

SULPHURIC BLOOMS

The blooms are strands of corrosive gas seeping up from the deep earth, they chemically corrode stone and produce cave systems leading upwards.

On the Map.

On the map the blooms actually look like roses. On the vertical they curve up like stalks, on the top down they are roughly circular infiltrations of corroded stone, like cup stains on paper.

In Description.

These expulsions ruin the stone. The surfaces are rotted, torn and almost necrotic.

MYCO

Now we get onto the odd ones. Myco veins represent tendrils of fungus, slowly infiltrating through the stone, cracking it apart, widening it, searching, perhaps blindly, or for some unknown purpose. Then, over centuries, or days, dying back, leaving empty caverns with the rock bearing the strange fungal marks and the passages stretching in gorgonite waves.

On The Map

These are like a very simple tree.

In Description.

Myco passages will be stained, strange and winding. They may have numerous tiny branching inaccessible pathways. They will however, link up, all products of the same organism they will join like the branches of a strange tree. The cave surfaces may be crumbly like flagstones pushed apart by a mushroom growing from below, or smooth, abraded away by mild organic acids. The passages may still carry fungal smears.

GIGASTRUCTURE

The gigastructure is a built thing. Something huge, a city, ziggeraut or city-sized tomb. It probably wasn't built here, but sank slowly into the earth over millennia, being compressed by the shifting of plates and the slow unfolding of time. Whatever it was has long been forgotten now.

In this image you can see Rome on its way to becoming a gigastructure before it was dug free.

On The Map.

The gigastructure shows layers in the vertical sections and radial pattering in the top-down sections.

In Description

Moving through it could be like moving through a giant breakdown pile, except all the stone is worked, blocks, columns, collapsed or tipped over buildings, even sewers or city streets turned on their sides. The cultures will be effaced by time, truly ancient.

BURROW

A giant *thing* has found its way down from somewhere, an ancient dragon, purple worm, tarresque, mad god or something stranger.

On The Map

The burrow goes laterally across the top down sections and curls in loops down the verticals as the creature digs its way deeper.

Unlike every other Vein, this one has an end. Perhaps the beast still sleeps, or is dead, but maybe not.

In Description.

The passages have been ripped open by some natural force. The signs of claws or other marks may still be there. The width of the tunnel may give some indicate of the size of the creature.