Veins Character Sheet Reverse

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Veins Character Sheet

Anyone stupid enough to bring platemail underground should just be fucking shot.

(I make no apologies for these ridiculous nerfs.)

In the Veins, cultures almost never use Platemail.

The Weeping Knights of the Knotsmen and some Duregar may make some occasional use for expeditionary purposes.

Those guarding fixed positions inside cities may have plate and large shields.

No-one else ever will.

Squeezes are simply not accessible to anyone in plate and are difficult to anyone in chain.

Sumps and Swimming are made so difficult they verge on suicidal. The armour drags you down and gives you hypothermia if you survive.

No-one wearing plate may attempt a climb of hard, very hard, or above.

If any PC is wearing Plate then when the party rolls encounter dice, a 1 causes a normal encounter, a 2 means the plate has gone wrong, roll a d6

1. Rusted. Now loses 1 AC per week unless cleaned for d4 hours a day.

2. Dented. A random limb now has limited extension.

3. Noisy. Squeals all the time.

4. Trapped. You are stuck in a narrow space and need friends to free you.

5. Slow. journey will take x2 as long.

6. Freezing. Roll for hypothermia.

Or roll on this much more fun chart.

Interview with Bathsheeba Grossman

 Bathsheeba Grossman is a sculptor. Her site is here.


PJS -
The sculptures are inspired by mathematical constructs but not pure copies or transcriptions of those idea's. At what stage in the creation, or through what process, do you move away from pure maths?


Grossman –
Actually I work much less with pure math these days.  There was a while when I was one of very few people doing much direct-to-consumer work with 3D printing, and at that time there was almost an obligation to make complex geometrical objects available.  There was no other way to do it, and very few other people in the field, and when people wanted these things I was rather on the spot.

But now there are many excellent actual mathematicians using the medium, and they're doing that work in spades.  Also my math degree is 25 years old now, and I confess it's become a little rusty.  What's left is my love of symmetry: at its bones, most (though not all) of my work has one of a few symmetry groups which I find intriguing.

And, to answer your original question, what sort of symmetry a piece will have is a very early-stage design decision.



PJS -
Do you keep a self-conscious register of your reasons for doing things with a sculpture, or is a silent awareness or intuition of what must be done?



Grossman –
I try to keep it nonverbal.  I grew up in a family of writers; that's all right as far as it goes.




PJS -
I was going to ask if you think your sculptures have personality but perhaps identity might be a better word. Do you think about your shapes as having strong identities?



Grossman –
They do tend to be very different from each other.  I noticed as an art student that many sculptors, as they get into their later years, develop a style that is consistent to the point of being repetitious.  I suppose it helps with marketing, but I don't know how they keep from dying of boredom, so I've tried to avoid that.


PJS -
Other sculptors I have spoken to or looked at have created toys or playing pieces which have to act together in groups. Differing forms must work as directly observable groups and be shown as such through their aesthetic. They have to ‘work’. Yours don’t have to ‘do’ anything but they seem, to have 'families' or groupings, is this right?


If they do, what about a shape connects it to its 'family' or group?



Grossman -
Well, in _my_ head they fall into classes defined by their symmetry groups: 

none (Whelk), 

bilateral (Tuskshell), 

tetrahedral (Ora),

 D2 (Soliton),

 S4 (Antipot). 

 Plus a few oddballs (Quintrino).

Some are also related by style or form, e.g. the 4D polytopes in the Math section, or the Ora family in the Sculpture section.

Lately I've been working with things that assemble: Tetrabox, and this is my latest finished piece:

These aren't exactly puzzles -- I'd prefer "toys" -- but they're definitely intended to be experienced as individual pieces, as the group of parts, and as the whole object.


PJS -
They are still but I imagine them as moving or flowing. Do you think of them only as single still things or do you ever imagine them as frozen processes?



Grossman –
Sometimes I think of them as being like bones or shells -- static, but in the style of things perhaps shaped by dynamic processes.


PJS -
You have used a bunch of different tool over your career. Do different tools change how you think about beauty and form, if so, how?



Grossman –
Yes.  Software, especially big things like CAD programs, puts you into the mind of its maker in ways both superficial and profound.  I'm mainly a NURBS modeler because I started with Rhinoceros: focused on complex topology and clean surfaces with exact measurements.  I'd be a very different artist if I'd started with Solidworks, which skews toward mechanical design and Boolean operations.  Differenter still if I'd picked up Zbrush, which as a mesh modeler favors mushy structures with excruciatingly detailed surface features.

I think that what I did choose was the best option for my artistic style and aims...but then in retrospect I _would_ think that.


PJS -
Does the length and complexity of the process of design change the kinds of things you make?



Grossman –
I'm a very slow worker as sculptors go, it's not unusual for a piece to take months.  The laboriousness of CAD, and the weeks of delay that it takes to get a print, makes me want to make things absolutely perfect. Maybe I waste a lot of time on this...but if I look at some of the knockoffs of my stuff on Shapeways and Thingiverse, maybe not.


PJS -
You said you wanted sculpture to be more like publishing, you also made that baby toy

 the  Geared-Widget

 and one of your forms has been reproduced at the size of a few microns.  Another is, I think, the world’s biggest 3d print sculpture.


Grossman –
The Rygo was the biggest in North America when it arrived, but I wouldn't bet any green bananas that it still is.  I'm very sure there are larger pieces in Europe, and particularly Italy, where the DShape printer that created it is housed

This is a great thing about being a digital sculptor: the designs are translated into sizes, materials, formats that I never thought of.  I'm in favor of this.  I like sculpture but I don't like work, so it's nice when other people do the work part for me.


PJS -
I think you are pushing at the edges of the art world. Do you think it’s possible to push at the edges of the art world and make it bigger and build a new territory of thought or will anyone trying that just break through into the neighbouring worlds of toys or tools or industrial design and have the art in what they do be ignored?


Grossman -
Well, in the thousand-voiced Internet everything is ignored, and claimed by existing territories, and hailed as the most amazeballs novelty ever, all at once.

What we've seen, as 3DP has become popular, is the start of a new art medium.  It's also a craft medium, toolmaking medium, product design medium, etc., which is what happens when a new tool is invented: people use it for everything.

In the case of metal printing, I contributed to its early adoption as an art medium.  No doubt it would have been co-opted for art eventually, but it was largely my work that woke both manufacturer and art buyers up to the idea that sculpture is a thing you make with this tech, as soon as it was available.

I think that did make the art universe bigger.  It was ignored by the traditional art-gallery world, but I can't say I feel deprived by that -- customers knew which end was up, and that's who pays me.  I don't see galleries as terribly relevant in the post-WWW world.


PJS -
The casting process for your pieces, particularly the capillary action of molten bronze, seems utterly bonkers. The results are irregular in an interesting way. Do you have any plans to take advantage of the oddities of 3d printing and casting to produce particular effects?



Grossman –
Well, we should back up a bit and say that casting is not involved: the steel fabrication that I use is a direct metal printing process using sintered steel powder, followed as you say by a ridiculous infiltration phase which should not work.  (That we think this is why Ex One has this patent, and we do not.)

I try to design in ways that respect the strong and weak points of the process.  The heavy surface texture doesn't lend itself to fine detail, while the powder sintering process provides very free geometry.  Bulky volumes are expensive, while light lattices are cheap.  Certainly it influences one's style.
 

PJS -
Are there any other unbelievably strange things about 3d printing that the world should know about?


Grossman –
Oh, it's pretty much talked to death lately.

What's important about it, if you ask me, is simply that it allows production of unmoldable objects.  It is extraordinary how powerfully and stealthily the prevalence of molding and casting has influenced our physical environment over the (roughly) 6000 years since that technology was invented.  Now, at last, we can leave that box.


PJS -
Most of the people I look at or interview are involved in gaming somehow. Have you ever thought about constructing a game around your pieces, or making pieces for a game?



Grossman –
Never have.  I've made a few puzzles, but gaming isn't really natural to me...trying to sell art is game and puzzle enough.  I'd talk to someone if they had an idea, but the sweet spot in price/performance for what I do is pretty far above the amount of expense and complexity that game pieces can usually support.


PJS -
People seem to not think about things that they use. If something is ‘useless’ it’s easier to get people to see the art in it, but when they use it, they don’t see it. Does this bother you? (It bothers me a little.)


Grossman –
Nah.  The flip side is that people are much more willing to pay for something that can be seen as useful, even if the utility is very marginal to its artistic content.

The best of my bottle openers, the Klein bottle opener, works so nicely that I use it because it's the only bottle opener that doesn't hurt my hand.  It's a successful design as both art and gadget: either side can disappear, depending on whether you're looking for an aesthetic experience or an open beer; and that's reflected in its popularity.

PJS -
Game pieces are used and this use forces constraints on their creation. You seem to create your own constraints and to deal with those presented by the technology you use. Do you think the creation or use of these constraints is necessary for good art?



Grossman –
When I figure out a way to make art that doesn't have any constraints, I'll try that and let you know.


PJS -
Finally, is there anything in the world of sculpture or art that you are really excited about and want people to know about?



Grossman –
I'm going to be uncharitable to many fantastic influences and colleagues, and say no...I feel absolutely unable to add to the enormous ongoing wave of media interest in 3DP art.  I'm in an inward phase, and I'm currently very excited about a piece of corroded iron drainpipe that I found on a beach.

Where the Veins begin.

"Dost thou forget

From what a torment I did free thee?

No.

Thou dost, and think'st it much to tread the ooze
Of the salt deep,
To run upon the sharp wind of the North,
To do me business in the veins o' th' earth
When it is bak'd with frost."

At the deepest point of the dungeon, behind the throne, beyond the rooms where the battles took place, after everything is done and the enemy dead, there is a crack. A black empty space where the wall joins the stone floor, a foot and a half high and three wide. A breeze comes out. You'd never notice it. You could lie on your belly and fit inside.

It never ends.

Or; Miners heard a noise. They stopped hammering, but someone else did not. Now there is a space they did not make in the wall of the mine between the props and the the vein is mined out from the other side.

Or; On a distant island there is a dead volcano and no metal, but the people living there carry swords of unknown make and they know the names of ancient kings from distant lands.

Or; Beneath the city streets there are buried roads and cellars where the sewage runs through. Below those are forgotten colonnades, and under those are caverns, and right at the deepest point is a black gate and the gate is guarded, from both sides, by guards who never speak.

Or; A maelstrom in the ocean swallows ships, but once, after an earthquake, it vomited one up. A ship lost long ago, but not wrecked or sunk to the bottom of the sea, but still in use, its sails of grey silk, its broken planks replaced with shards of some enormous bone, its mast of something almost as strong as steel but lighter than wood.

Or; On the dirt-poor land where the river runs into the cave, there are walled farms. The people there are pale and rarely speak. They hunger for fresh fruit, workable wood and meat and they pay with uncut gems and slivers of gold. No-one knows where the gold comes from, no-one knows where the goods go.

A spider that walks across your outstretched hand might tell itself tale of what you are. It does not know. There are veins beneath the skin it takes to be the whole. The world you think you know is nothing but a shell, a thin, carapace over the skin of the, deeper, unbound world below.

You have existed, up to this point, on the illusion of a plane, bordered by mountains, rivers, seas or the politics of maps, and this life has been a lie. Its borders are made up, its seas are gateways, its mountains are cradles of deep life. There is no plane.

You were raised within a history running back through recorded time, written in ink, carved in stone, scooped from clay, hidden in songs. Your primal myths are an eye-blink of the memory of that place. Your history is a candle burning out.

The real world, the deeper, more true world, is bordered only by light above and fire below, and perhaps not even by that.

It is one invisible day distant from you now. If you proceed directly down, doing nothing but travelling for 24 hours, and go a whole day without sight of the sun, you edge upon its realm.

It is where the paths cannot be mapped.

It is where the worked stone gives out.

It is where the weight of your flesh is worth more than your weight in silver. They are wealthy there, and they hunger.

It is the ocean-of-stone, and there are seas within it.

When you loathe gold for its weight and, and count your wealth by a radius of illuminated rock and think yourself lucky to do so, then, you have passed into its realm.

Food in the Veins

Three sources of food exist, above, below and within.

Nutrients can come from the sunlit lands above, washed down in rivers, lost, searching or stolen from the surface. (This includes the party. If they die, they will almost inevitably

be eaten by something eventually. Nothing is lost.)

In the lightless seas, vents gasp out heat and strange chemistry to feed the ecology of those abyssal deeps. From strange planes or portals, sometimes edible things come through.

In between, strange fungi and odd organisms slowly transmute stone, water, heat and air to eatable food.

It is never enough. Everything is hungry, all the time. In the cities the poor are hungry and the rich, insanely wealthy as they are in gold, occultum and silk, are also hungry.

Cities in the veins are made possible by a few factors. The careful tending of every available resource. Relentless recycling, no waste is thrown away. The fact that they

occupy volumes, not flat two dimensional plains. Every area of the veins may be a 20th as productive as a surface desert, but the controlled volume extends 360 degrees around each

city, giving a vastly increased surface area of workable land. The use of generative magic is vital. As is cannibalism. The slave labour force of a city in the Veins can be directly

transformed into agricultural produce, either to feed the free population, or to trade. They can even transport themselves to the point of consumption or sale.

The low caste population can likewise be transformed into a food source for the upper caste and military in a state of emergency. They will not be informed of this ahead of time, or

at all.

Eating.

Rather than obsessively tracking food, adding another element of accountancy to the game, it is assumed that the party is constantly foraging and re-supplying. They are on the border of starvation at almost all times. The counter-

effects of starvation vs drive and determination are considered to even themselves out in most cases.

In the Hungry stage, bonuses are given for finding and eating food.

If the team fails to incur regular bonuses they enter the Starving stage.

In the stage, negative effects are incurred for not eating food when available.

if the team incurs too many negative effects they enter the third stage.

In the third stage, terminal starvation sets in and character performance decays.

An edible opponent is one whose biochemistry matches yours. So, Drow, Toraptoise or Dragon but not Cambriman, Silichominid or Archean.

The food creation abilities of a Cleric or Magic User, or careful explicit food-and-encumbrance keeping can keep a party out of Stage One if they wish it to, so long as a meaning ful amount of food is generated or carried each day.

(A real caver used about 6000 calories each day, though DM's may wish to be more forgiving.)

Stage One; Hungry

Bonuses for Eating

Eating the flesh of an edible opponent.

This gains you XP equal to the HP of the creature consumed.

Eating the flesh of a PC or henchman.

This gains you XP equal to the HP of the colleague consumed.

Stealing food.

The party can re-roll a failed caving or climbing test either once each or once collectively.

Paying for food.

Ten calories cost 1. You must buy at least 2500 calories, spending at least 250. Party gets XP equal to the cash spent, up to 1000.

Provoking a combat encounter simply to get food.

Party adds d4 to intimidation tests over the following 24 hours.

The party must do one of these every three days. If they do not, they move to the second stage.

The party can ignore the effects of a day if they spend the whole 24 hours resting, conserving energy and doing nothing.

So if they have spent 3 days exploring, and gained no bonuses, they can simply sit down to wait. If someone turns up, they can buy food, steal food or just kill and eat them to avoid moving to stage two.

Stage Two; Starving

Negative Effects for Not Eating.

Eating the flesh of an edible opponent.

Doing this puts you back in stage one. Failing to do this if it is possible reduces every roll by 1 for each failed opportunity.

Eating the flesh of a PC or henchman.

Doing this puts you back in Stage One.

Stealing food.

Doing this puts you back in Stage One. Failing to do this if it is possible reduces every roll by 1 for each failed opportunity.

Paying for food.

Ten calories cost 1. You must buy at least 5000 calories, spending at least 500. This puts you back in Stage One.

Provoking a combat encounter simply to get food.

Doing this puts you back in Stage One so long as you get the food.

The party must do one of these every three days. If they do not, they move to the second stage.

The party must act, if they spend the whole 24 hours resting, conserving energy and doing nothing they get another -1 to every roll.

If your starvation minus to rolls hits -5, you enter the third stage.

Stage Three; Dying

You Must Eat Or You Will Die.

The good news is that the madness of hunger now cancels out the -5 you had to your rolls. You are now too crazy with hunger to be slowed down

Every member of the party loses one level, as per the level drain spell, for every 24 hours they spend in this stage.

Consuming an edible opponent entirely.

Doing this puts you back in stage one.

Consuming a PC or henchman entirely.

Doing this puts you back in Stage One.

Stealing food.

Doing this puts you back in Stage Two.

Paying for food.

Ten calories cost 1. You must buy at least 10,000 calories, spending at least 1000. This puts you back in Stage One.

If a party members level hits Zero, They starve to death.

The Cathedral at Night

From ‘Cathedrals of France’ by Auguste Rodin, Chapter Ten

Distant gleams turn brown and blacken before certain columns. They clarify others obliquely, feebly yet regularly.

But the depth of the chancel and the whole left part of the nave are plunged into a thick gloom. The effect is horrible because of the indecision of things in the lighted distance. A whole square space is struck by stark illumination; lights flame between columns that take on colossal proportions. And I am made to doubt this epoch and this country by the interruptions, these conflicts of light and shadow, these four opaque columns before me and these six others lighted further off in the same oblique line, and then by the night in which I am bathed and which submerges everything. There is no softness. I have the impression of being in an immense cavern from which Apollo will arise.

For a very long while I cannot define the horrible vision. I no longer recognise my religion, my Cathedral. This is the horror of the ancient mysteries. At least so I should suppose if I no longer felt the architectural symmetry. The vaulted ceilings are barely perceptible, braced by shadows, the ribs of the arches.

I must escape the oppression of this effect of closing in. A guide takes me by the hand, and I move through darkness that soars as far as the vault.

From the light beyond them, these five columns have their oblique illumination. The ribs, the arched ceiling beams, the ogives resemble crossed flags like those at the Invalides.

I advance. It is an enchanted forest. The tops of the five columns are no longer visible. The pale lights that cross the balustrades horizontally create infernal roundelays.¹ Here one is in heaven by day and in hell by night. Like Dante we have descended into hell.

Violent contrasts are like those from torchlight. Ardent fire at the mouth of a tunnel spreads out in layers. Only the columns against this flaming background are indistinctly black. At moments a drapery appears with a red cross; the light seems to be extinguished, but no, it persists in a mortal immobility.

The chancel is laid bare to horror. But the horror controls itself, imposes order, and this order reassures us. And then, our memory of day, our connections with the day come at this moment to our rescue, giving us the necessary confidence.

There is a reflection on one ogive; the perspective is masked and the clarity, imperfectly developed on the edge, shows only the stationary construction in the dim gleam. But this gleam, although terrible, nevertheless reveals the masterpiece.

The Cathedral assumes an Assyrian character. Egypt is vanquished, for this Cathedral is more poignant than a Pyramid, father from us than the grottos where the great creation of rules appeared. The unknown is the mystery of this spectacle. One thinks of a forest, of a grotto, but this is nothing of that sort: this is something absolutely new, which it is impossible to define at once.

The frightful bulk of night, feebly pushed aside for a moment, as quickly, and with an irresistible violence, regains empire.

This is like Rembrandt, but as a spectre of taste and order. Rembrandt himself brings us not more than an echo of this prodigious world.

I am in terror and in rapture.

Dante, did you enter this circle of horror?

The chapels are transformed by the struggle between darkness and light.

This one is a sombre grotto where there seem to be only shells set out along the ribs of the arches. And yet, the terrible shadow allows itself to be seen, appreciated, and modelled.

Another chapel is divided in two by a cast shadow. One whole side is abolished. The columns seen from three-quarters, black and formidable, disturb the whole architectural arrangement. My dissipated mind apprehends only frightful things; it sees horrible supporting legs repeated in this forest that man has created for his God. Is this forest less beautiful than the real one?  Is it animated by fewer thoughts, less populated by atrocious larvi and by fewer spirits?

And you, gargoyles, did you not issue from the brain of sculptors who returned to the Cathedral after sunset to take counsel there from the night and to seek there the memory of some horrible dream?

I aspire to a new confirmation of the grandeurs of the Gothic soul.

One would have an impression of a Tower of Babel if, in this apparent confusion, all at once architectures did not surge out of the night, if the shadow itself were not organised. The moment is present without words and without voice.

Completely black columns are around the chancel; this is stone in prayer, a waterspout that rises to God.

Oh Night, you are greater here than anywhere else. It is because of the half illumination that terror comes over me. Incomplete illuminations cut the monument into trunks, and these gleams tell me the thrilling pride of the Titans who built this Cathedral. Did they pray? Or did they create?

Oh genius of man, I implore you, remain with us, god of all reflections!

We have seen what the human eye had not seen, what is perhaps forbidden it to see. Orpheus and Eurydice feared being unable to escape, since the boatmen did not come to fetch them in the terrible gloom. We walked alone amid the Night. We were in the straits of Tarn. We went alone into a great forest. A whole world was in this Night that the Titans had prepared for us.

A candle buns: a tiny point of light. To reach it I must stride over heavy masses of shadow where I rub against dead gleams, unicorns, monsters, visions.

The Thinker² would have been well adapted to this crypt; this immense shadow would have fortified that work.

By lighting a candle, the sacristan has displaced the shadows. There is a treasure here, the treasure of shadow accumulated by the night. It hides the treasure of the Cathedral.³

As we reached the door, this gigantic scene advanced toward us: the immense room seemed prepared for a banquet to the infernal gods.

Then the small door of the Cathedral was closed. The vision disappeared. All is entrusted now to our memory

1. Translators note: dances in the round. See Albert E. Elsen, Rodin, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1963, pp 155-156.

2. Translator’s note: This refers to Rodin’s enlarged figure of the Thinker.

3. Translator’s note: The French word here is église (Church), but obviously it refers to the Cathedral of Reims.