The title was a trick, this is actually a review of the book 'The Wood Engravings of Agnes Miller-Parker' but I knew if I said the words 'wood-engravings' and 'review' then you probably wouldn't click.
But now there is art to look at so you don't need to think. Just scan onwards.
Some of you may remember her from one of my 'Artists of the Faerie Queene' posts, as that is where I encountered her. She was an artist working mainly in wood engraving book illustration and largely in the inter-war years for private presses in the UK.
This is my review of a rather fancy and quite large book of her work.
This was published in 2005, written by Ian Rogerson.
Its a brave effort and a good book. Rogerson has discretion and sensitivity but sadly lacks vividness and imagination, which leads his assessment of quality to be totally utterly wrong.
Nevertheless, these are only the faults of his class and neurotype and can be easily amended by me, now, so we should award him at least the silver for effort and intention.
And I did find his brief view into the history of Private Press publishing in inter-war Britain fascinating. Thank Christ for the internet, the old ways seem specifically designed to annihilate artists and creators in order to fatten a managerial class. What a terrible waste.
The only thing Rogerson and I can agree on is that AMP's Aesops Fables pictures are really good.
Scan quality is imperfect but look at that frog!
Beyond that, her best images are for The Forest Giant and the Faerie Queene. These are also the images where AMP's vorticist leanings collide most energetically with nature and form.
Rogerson likes the boring images, made with skill and a medium emotional range but fundamentally AMP was a genre illustrator, the more intense and gothic the situation the better she generally does.
Rogerson John Clare is a fair shout. I am not super-familiar with his poetry but AMP being more obsessed with the hyperreality of objects than their symbolic meanings makes perfect sense. More precisely - shes really really interested in focusing on the object in particular, in the beauty of that precise form, and because everything is black and white, light and shadow and shape are all there is.
Vortex Mole
Beasts Rotating
AMP really likes animals. Aven a poor AMP animal is usually pretty good.
From Welsh Folk tales
These animals often appear in pairs or groups, usually crossing each other in the image, facing slightly different directions, with different sides and dimensions and aspects showing. I get the sense that these are in a way, all the same animal, (though there are a few cases where they are clearly not), but, in the way that animals in heraldry are flattened and invisibly twisted so more of the animal 'presents' to the viewer than would ever naturally be seen from one point of view and in the same way that cubism fractures the view of something so that, in a different way, you see it from multiple directions and multiple fragments of it at once.
So these are post-vortcist animals maybe? Done in a naturalistic way. Not that she was trying to save time or cheating but that she was so totally absorbed by the animal as a living breathing object-form-being, that she was looking for some way to hyper-represent the creature but without going into modernist techniques. So we get these pairs and crowds of animals moving around each other showing different sides, different aspects of movement and in-sense.
Shadowed Faces
I do know know why AMP was so much into shadowed faces. Faces turned away. It is as if she was uncomfortable with faces somehow. She can do them, and pulls them off a handful of times, but in almost every case if there is some possibility that she can occlude a face, she does.
Storms, Water, Light, Forest, Hills
What is a storm but a dangerous series of sky-things
about to fall upon you like the toys from a shelftop box?
The wonderful thing about light, weather, forests and anything in the background of a good AMP image is that it is a field of forms.
I think Scot McCloud said US superhero comics were like a cornucopia of objects, and AMP makes a world, not necessarily of mere objects, because her objects live powerfully,life is central to her work, but or forms.
I feel as if I could reach into the image and run my hands across the hills, pick up clusters of buildings like lego blocks, smooth my fingertips across billows of wind like fine clay and grasp crystal shards of light.
Our old friend MVTABILITY
Tubular Clothes
Apparently there were some complaints that her clothes for poverty stricken characters weren't ragged enough? Thats because her clothes were tubes, shapes before they were textures or material.
Floral Explosions
These are pretty great.
The really great thing about AMP is how she smashed together the world of forms and that of living breathing emotion to produce an intense hyperreality.
From 'The Forest Giant'
That is not best shown in her later works which are merely literary.
She should have been given more weird shit to do, and should have been paid a lot more.
“You seem confused Agent. Take a blow to the brain in the
SquidBrawl maybe?
Hold still while I info-dump you, and concentrate because
this will go FAST.
YOU are me, and we, all of us, are expressions of the Eldritch
Founder, a meta-reality being who’s thoughts and opinions are literally split
into different bodies and factions, all so we can run the Seraphormer.
What’s the Seraphormer?
Its this giant moon-sized stitched-together ultramachine
we are in right now! And its FALLING APART!
WHY??? BECAUSE REALITY IS BROKEN and everyone is FIGHTING
LIKE HELL!!!
As soon as reality fractured, a titanic SquidBrawl broke
out between two factions of us! Look at this mess;
The
are flailing
at the..
1
Hyperintelligent ATMAN encoders
Iron-Chambered Quileth Stokers
2
Deep-Cover Incursion Specialists
Punk Sorcerer Co-Operative
3
LichJammer Ambassador Faction
Timeline Confabulators
4
Penumbral clerks of the Occlusion Engine
Rocket-Suit Space Repair Crew
5
Gene Coder Cubical Drones
Cyber-Tentacle Gang
6
Ectoplasm-Ejaculating Ghost Gang
Post-Singularity fluorescent techno-squid
It’s impossible to get anything done with this brawl
going on! And the reality breakdown means I can only communicate with you like
this, through a pattern of choices.
What do you want to do?”
Find the Perpetrator – Go to #2
Reassemble Reality!- Go to #3
Meditate – Go to #4
#2
Good idea, time to do some detective work! What’s
first?
Track the source of the Reality Breach – Go to #12
Hit the Streets – Go to #7
#3
Its time to FIX REALITY ITSELF!
Nothing will stop you! (For long, probably).
Go to #12
#4
Yes of course, True Understanding was always within you,
if you can only settle the waters of your mind and become one with the infinite
Dao, the silent darkness beyond all things. Surely the answer lies there.
You undulate softly as your mind drifts down, down down
through the subtle enumerations of being, through the illusion of Time, to a
point where your answers are already clear within the great oneness…
Go to #19
#5
Somehow you get away, wounded, beaten and dizzy from the
violence and from reality shattering all around you, suddenly you hear a voice!
Go to #1
#6
You should never have tried to access meta-reality. Somehow
you have become trapped in a time loop!
Go to #16
#7
Ok you don’t actually have streets as this is an
interdimensional megastructure, but you can certainly try to shut down this
riot! But how?
Use that silver tongue. Go to #8
Fear is the only language they will understand! Go to #10
#8
Yes the fine art of Diplomacy, but which subtle tactic
is best for you to take?
medium
message
1
Table bashing demagoguery
Vague dithering beneficent promises.
2
Soft voiced sympathy
We’ll redistribute resources!
3
Schitzo-cryptic arcane word-labyrinth
Fix their minds on an outside enemy.
4
High toned speechifying
Threats (go to #9)
5
Break into song!
I feel your pain!
6
Crying fit and shaking meltdown
Deep philosophy. What is reality after all?
Did it work?
Yes!- Go to #11
No?!?!?!
Ok, time to amp up the verbiage - Go to #10
Or…
Screw that! And screw these nerds! Time for a BEATING. Go
to #14
#9
Randomly scanning through eh? Very meta-textual.
Go to #6
#10
THREATS
Manner
Settle down
or…
1
Eye-bugging inner tension and spat words
Eject you into Unspace!
2
False-friendly fatherly manner
Turn you inside out and send you to Marginalia!
3
AS LOUD AS POSSIBLE
Memory wipe and a trip to Uud
4
Crack a few jokes before the threats, why not?
Cortex removal and turned into children’s balloons!
5
Ejaculate ink and scream ATMAN code
Time-loop the lot of you!
6
Hurl things at them between words
Set to dream-delving the darkest Sleeping Gods!
Did it work?
Yes! – Go to #11
If it it didn’t:
To calm things down, go to #8
To ACCELERATE them, go to #13
#11
Yes the place is finally clear and silent, the SquidBrawl
is over. Peace reigns!
Oh dreaming gods, its horrible! Look at the bodies! The
Carnage! Torn fragments of meta-flesh everywhere and squid-ink staining the
walls! What did we do? What did I do?
Are we monsters?
Go to #18
#12
Damn, this place is Cephalopod CHAOS. Tentacles and
Meta-Ink graffiti everywhere! Seems like your ultra-personality is having a
total meltdown.
You need to find that reality breach, but you have no
chance of doing it until you settle this SquidBrawl, but how?
Go BERSERK. Go to #13
Join a Faction and turn them against each other, just
like Yojimbo. Go to #15
Get smooth as butter, use that charm. Go to #8
#13
RAAAAGGHHHH!! ITS RAGE O-CLOCK!!
NOW IS THE TIME FOR BLOOD.
Go to #14
#14
A HUGE FIGHT ENSUES!
You try
They counter
with..
1
Wall-bouncing Squid kung fu!
Bear-attack savagery. The teeth! Re-roll!
2
Hyperfocused dimensional mind blasts!
Memory-annihilation flail! (Go to #1)
3
Murder-Apsara Dance Style!
Chronometric labyrinth! (Go to #6)
4
Electrical Tentacle Coil Attack!
Dharma-Bomb! (Go to #15)
5
DUAL-WIELD URANIUM NUNCUCKS!
Illusory mind-palace Inception blow! (Go to #19)
6
JUST CHOKE THE ASSHOLE
Nothing! You defeat them! (Go to #11)
#15
Very cunning. Using the Art of War you aid both
groups against each other, secretly leading them into a fruitless attritional
conflict.
Of course now both of those groups are united by hated of
you..
But whatever! It pretty much kind a worked! Go to #11
#16
Ah ha! Don’t worry, you are pretty sure you have found
your way out of this mind-wiping time-loop thing. Just need to try this….
Go to #6
#17
It worked, you stuff this meta-biological stuff into the
crack in reality like jamming newspaper into a broken pipe. Yes its probably a
horrific botch of a job, but it works!
You wonder for a moment about how exactly this breach was
created..
Oh well, this kind of thing is only to be expected in the
Seraphormer. You’ll probably never know!
(12# o tog – sdrawkcab siht daer nac
uoy sselnU)
On to #19!
#18
Wait, this stuff is itself a meta-material!
It’s a little bit radical, but maybe your could use this
stuff to fix the reality breach
Go to #17
#19
The Reality Breach is Fixed!
All is well. You have stabilised the situation and
brought balance to the Founders Mind. A deep sense of calm fills you.
Congratulations Founder.
(Wait, do you know how you even did this? – Go to #20)
#20
Of course, you repaired the reality breach with FLEX
TAPE.
Wait, that’s completely insane and makes no sense. And
this flex-tape actually looks like something disturbingly organic, like the
strange textured skin of some being from beyond reality…
What did you do? Who’s skin is this? How was
reality broken?
WHAT THE HELL IS THAT?
Go to #21
#21
It’s a PARA-REALITY INVADER!
Something from outside the Seraphormer has found its way
in! That’s what caused the breach! What even is it?
Looks like a
and its..
1
Grey crystal angel
Tearing at the reality gap!
2
Caustic shadow trilobite
Doing some kind of ritual!
3
Skeleton ultra-golem
Summoning more of its kind!
4
Post-singularity kill-AI
Meditating.
5
Pain-Armoured Demonform
Feasting on Founder flesh!
6
A radical crazed Founder!
Performing the Kali-Yuga dance!
Go to #22
#22
The Invader notices you!
“So, fragment, somehow you have walked the weave of
consequence and choice and detected my presence here. It will not be enough. Do
you think your petty mind and weak tentacles can defeat me? COME FORTH AND
TRY!”
Made the following comment on a Discord and people seemed to like it so here is Blursed Sontag to give you a cultural think;
"I had great fun playing Bioshock and my response to it and to its criticism was very typical of my response to the bourgeoisie create/criticise cycle which I will now lay out for you AT LENGTH
FIRST - Someone makes a good example of a low-status artform. (action movie, video game (in the past) - this is good and it often has a dab of philosophy in it BUT - the dab of philosophy is not the main reason it is good. The source of its goodness is often something beautiful but only intuited by the player integration and synthesis of space, form, character, some combination of things bourgeoisie critics find it hard to analyse and talk about (to be fair, these things are actually hard to analyse.)
SECOND - these middle class critics watch/play this thing, and they really enjoy themselves, and they find it fulfilling. But they can't sense WHY exactly they find it fulfilling, (because in a coherent work of art it is actually hard to tell what is good about it as good art brings together in harmony many slight things)
SO - they feel 'this is good', but 'its also low status', so they try to do the right thing and say "Hey everyone! This piece of culture is actually good, it has PHILOSOPHY or a POLITICAL POINT, it is about THE CONVERSATION.
Now in fact, the political and/or philosophical element of the work is usually only one slight strand and not the main thing about it, and its usually not like a fucking leap in thought, it usually comes from books someone wrote 30 years ago - because this is a popular art form and why the fuck would you make it a thesis statement?
THEN - some clever wag notices and points out - "Hey, the PHILOSOPHY" in this piece of POPULAR ART is actually kinda DUMB. Maybe your are dumb and it is also dumb"
Then the Critic and fans respond saying "no actually we are not dumb and maybe you thinking we are is because you are actually the dumb one hmmm?"
And the wheel goes on
Anyway, judging interesting but flawed pieces of mass popular art by the fragments of 'high culture' theorising they sometimes contain is usually a broke ass way to either validate or invalidate them.
Case in point - Joker - a not bad dance movie about a man having a meltdown. Does it have a strong political point to make? Does it fuck. But it is still a pretty good film.
Behold, I hath read (much of) Chris McDowalls Electric Bastionland and tweeted about it, often while drinking. Below you will find my often-incisive analysis and commentary while my brain rockets back and forth between alohol and the effects of antidpressants.
(I left the mis-spellings and insanity in. Headings and sub-headings added by me.)
We Begin
Ok I'm gonna drink and read Chri's Electric Bastionland and tweet it now
Jealousy
everyone has better design skills than me
"Other game say Gamesmaster, Referee or MC but this is Bastion and we do things differently" -
differently, even to the last version of this game, in an acceleration of the rule that every rpg deign head must ritually kill gary in their mind by renaming the DM into something new to symbolise their new dawn
A Starting Party
a sandwich is SIX POUNDS - like, actually that is possible, like an M&S sandwich
Huh so there is starting group debt and even a starting Belloq rival figure with more hit PROTECTION (not points) than you - so the game is very absolutely and directly about doing this particular thing right now
and you also have a failed career
and dying adds to the groups debt - so if you die, even doing something heroic and useful to the group and Basionland as a whole, you are still fucking the rest of the group and your own future self
there is something extremely british and of its generation about the quiet background sadism of that concept
so you start with lamps and batteries, climbnig and camping equipment and food and water - presumably because its boring getting those things
one other thing you might add in - and this comes of gaming with the Fallen Demiurge whos name shall not be spoken - is in a city game no one ever has a car to start with - so I would add in, considering the ambient britishness - a bus pass or family ticket
So in other versions of ItO the crapness of your stats got you better stuff, and good stats got you rubbish stuff - a concept I enjoyed - is that still the case here? For it seems not..
Chris Betrays Gaming
multiple attackers are NERFED - no longer do numbers count for all, and one man can indeed hold off an army
what will this mean for adventuring
no doubt much flop sweat was dropped by Chris over this arguably non-diagetic rule!
HAS CHRIS MCDOWALL BETRAYED GAMING?
LIKE WHEN THAT D&D RUYLESET HAD DAMAGE ON A MISS?
THE JURY IS OUT
AND IS ALSO ME
it makes EB an essentially interpersonal adventure-world and sets a hard - or flattened curve limit, on tactical thinking
so - big ass rooftop ambushes etc or hiring a company of dudes - all flattened, both against the players and if they try to use those methods
a sandwich and a drink gets your hp back but riskes a random encounter- curiously specific
You Will Play This Game The Way Chris Says
Also - 1st mention of Greggs
fuck Electric Bastionland is like being kicked out of your parents house in your 20s and trying to survive off your overdraft while sleeping on a friends couch and begging for a job in Greggs
carryig too much shit reduces your hp to zero! Ruthless!
And effective
rules here are bascially chris staring at you thru the page & saying "the game is not _about_ that"
so there is no 'persuasion' rules - just save CHA to avoid a *negative* reaction and to *stop* your peons running off
that still doesn't get people to *do* things for you - that is all down to gameplay
ah so in fact one map cannot hold off an army as they would be a detachment and roll a D12, while he would roll a d4
HOWEVER
one man could popssibly hold off an armies worth of INDIVIDUALS provided they do not fight as a detachment
'vehicles take no damage for running over soft targets like people' - dark, since everything else is an exchange of risk - time for some hit and runs!
A Complex Relationship with Risk
SCARS - what are scars in EB? Are they gud?
They are a reflection of the creators complex relationship with risk and its role in gaming
you get one if you go to EXACTLY 0hp
not a likely event
and if you get one, there can be good and bad effects (though since the standard response is death, any intermission of chance is 'good'so we may account scars as mercy if we wish
scars are a kind of high risk high reward routlette game you get accesss to for being damaged to juuuust the right degree but not dying
they are interesting enough that I wuold have got rid of the 'death at 0 hp rule, and just made the damage suffered a modifier on an extended
Exemple of play has differing corridors having differeing smells and winds - an adaptation to the generational praxis of high resources but limited time - corridors only gain meaning thru context which the modern gamer may not have time to create and so they must breathe and live
example of play - everything broken down into either/or risk decisons - the essential binary of meaning creation
say w your friends, or run away? fight, or flee? risk w reward or safety with life - the essential dilemma of entropy bound forms
hmm, no random roll for targets in multiple pc situations - a ruthless and heavy burden on the DM - orr CONDUCTER
and classic mcdowall fair declaraion of in-world risks, even if that level of perception not necessarily diagetically justified - a very prodestant mind. All the information will be given to you and you will decide, and FACE THE CONSEQUENCES.
curious that we can creat nothing complex without embedding our perception of morality into it
ok a new page has happened
ok weapons are basically
- how much damage d6, d8, d10, d12
- is it bulky (can't carry too much
- does it do BLAST (and so harm detachments)
and thats the deal
THA ART
lol Alecs art has started to come in and the text is so Gen-X british and the art so US Zoomer/Millenial that the combo makes a whole new thing
Old ItO was a lot like watching a british sitcom from the 70s, a halrold pinter televised play or an episode of Dr Who -
what will the asethtic of this version be??
'Board' meaning somewhere to sleep - costs £10. More than the d6£ you start with - so you better get working day one
fuck Electric Bastionland is like being kicked out of your parents house in your 20s and trying to survive off your overdraft while sleeping on a friends couch and begging for a job in Greggs
also - why is Greggs not in this Chris? UKFAIL
Hospital and Leasure are free, but slow - spending money only speeds them up
taking an 'improvement course' lets you re-roll a stat, but you have to keep it whatever - an accurate representaion of british education system
'luxuries ' include a medal ceremony for yourself, a sanctioned duel, a legitimate funeral (10k, really you should be leaving at least 1k for your inheritor to clear the expense of your death) and a radio station
ahhh so he has dealt w the transport issue - public transport is available with sliding scales for distance
A NEW THREAD BEGINS!
OK new thread as we are on to 'failed careers' -- which aaaare about 215 pages of this 333 page book
answering the question of how do you turn a rulselight system into a fucntional money making product in our global times
answer - fill it with art and make char gen also worldbuilding and make there be a LOT of it
so this is also our map to Electric Bastionland, through the failed careers of its economy and society
which are also options
(look out for a shit neutered version of this in D&D 5E(b) <<<< A PREDICTION
£10,000 is the group debt - so game assumes that by the time you have done enough shit to make that, you will have embedded yourself in the world and caused enough trouble to be essentially self-generating adventure machines
The Mysteries of Publishing Exposed!
Interesting that this is *not quite* black and white
for anyone who doesn't do pblishing - B&W is much cheaper, and so the profit margins are highter
so every creator notices this and thinks "wait, I'll just do B&W art w high quality, charge the same and make a mint"
BUT
then they think - "hey this thing is going well... maybeoooone colour wouldn't hurt.. just one..."
and then you end up w a full colour book
those are the beans which I just spilled
Cultural Background
so from one career we have sci-fi, sci-fantasy, terry gilliam, touch of 40k, edge of dr who
terry prachett - a 'loot office'
o there is some of the old school ItO evening out of capacities thgrough the money and hp system - w lower money & hp granting cooler stuff and higher worse etc
3. Trench Conscript. What was your role?
£2 -Recon. Take paints and a portable canvas.
So for anyone who did NOT grow up wathing british TV in the 80's/90's
So while up to now was lite sci-fi and Blackadder, this Dead-Shoresman is pure Gaiman. Not only are you back from the dead, but no-one believes you.
So there's this invisible backwash of generall 'oddness' (hook in the title) that flows through market towns at night, moterway service stations, the BBC at odd times
and EB is right slam in the centre of that
I Complain about 'Hipsters'
This book will be popular w hipsters and people who care about 'design' because its easy to read, text tlight and has good art
it is worth caring about for other reasons
I am just making it clear that other, more attractive and succesful, but shallower people, will enjoy this for the WRONG REASONS =and they need to be jidged for that
"Threatening Stave - has no fucntion but glows and vibrates in a way that suggests that it could be used for distributing extreme pain"
what can we say about art?
So - first ItO felt VERY british, 19tC industrial in aesthetic
Here the people and style are clearly not that - more idk definitely US, maybe futuristic/current - from a different social milueax
& sadder - more human - but also more beautiful
definitely the people I saw walking around the hipster area of toronto - thin, golde, multi-ethnic, rather than the dense potato people I know from my youth and environment - 1 of which I am
so for me there is a very slight tension between the art & text
but not necessarily for the first reader, for whome the whole will fall a new whole <<< PARTICULARLY BRILLIANT PHRASING HERE PATRICK, THAT'S HOW YOU GET THOSE SILVER ENNIES
I gotta stop because its nearly 10 heere and I drank everything in the room
got up to page 37 though, so you no i did an in-depth reaed
back tomorrow maybe?
More Cultural Influences
K I bought more cider and am back to read Chris McDowalls Electric Bastionland again
'Verminator' gets a combination of Cronenberg castoffs
'Lost Expeditioneer' is in debt to the Elephant Reinbursment House, which is a post-singularity sci-fi story right there
Wall-Born more 'infinite city' vibes and more of a China Mieville feel
Cities demorph and arrange themselves neatly for game designers shaping space w random generators and tables - maybe because they are already organised on human-useful lines anyway - as much information as arrangments in space
'shoe throwing' - thats not an object Chris, you have broken your own rules. Inspired by Austin Powers or that guy who shoes George Bush?
All the places Aliens can come from are worse than Bastion. makes sense I guess.
BONE MAGNET! My old nemesis!
The next drink is for Chris for having to come up with 1200 items and elements
"Dog rifle" is one of those fragments which tells a.. _tail_..
Face with tears of joyFace with tears of joyRolling on the floor laughing im dying inside
'Roadside Picnic' is probably the best tonal match for the technology. Reality-bending, semi-useful, not understood, often one-shot and clearly not meant to be used for the thing it is being used for. Humanity as scavenger.
This definitely feels more like 'Dark Toronto' more than decayed England.
(I have been outside the UK a handful of times in my adult life so my field of reference may be limited)
In the absence of a frontier or a singular unnatural incursion, the adventure takes place 'in between' islands of various elements of order which, if seen from afar, could be mistaken for a whole
See the book 'the insurgent archipelago' which was about no matter how dominant modernity becomes, its very complexity keeps creating new webs and cracks and elisions of chaos betwixt its endlessly moving parts
There is always a little microdrama or a little worldbuilding in the back of Alecs art
main figure, often a crowd, often a single individual that doesn't quite fit, often crossing eyelines, and something in the background, a wreck, a cable car
so depending on what PCs you roll in EB, you could be playing a Neil Gaiman urban fantasy game, a near future China Mieveille sci-fantasy, straight sci-fi or just victorian social drama
Urchin pack - think Arnold was the 1st person to have this idea. I always wanted to use it in a Frostgrave RPG
Classes
Wizard - magic & in charge but can take no action
Merc Company - as in the whole company, can do stuff but no authoity or money
Dog - is a dog, can smell. A good dog.
Barbarian etc - more like standard characters
The advert and the celestial sphere is very "Electric Bastionland", whatever that is
I fully support this movement! #HumanityFirst
If warhammer has taught me anything its that if you really love humanity, you need to kill anything that isn't human
and most of the things that are - because they are getting it wrong
Char Gen is also NPG gen, society gen, plot gen, rival gen and item gen
efficient
'Masked Horrorist' is very Ramsey Campbell, so we can add that to the stew I guess
Chris you give away being able to see in the dark too easily, have I taught you *nothing*?
of course you can basically hack your own 'bastionland' by making maybe 20 character gen packages of a particular tone or diagetic implication
oh gooood people are going to do that - they are going to release _zines_
if you imagine Electric Bastionland as a real place, life there is largely about intuiting the use and meaning of any one of a million potentially powerful but *singular* items, talents or situations, encountered near-randomly in the mosaic of order
The Absence of Moral Chaos - a personal failing in Chris McDowall????
There is no moral chaos is the decision matrix of EB. Risks may be unfair but they are always signalled. It's rare you make a choice without knowing the consequences. My impression is that mad streaks of luck or doom are not an intended part of the game.
Which is a major character difference between Chris and I
It does take some balls to just say "Yes there are Muppets in this"
"They are not aliens or androids. They are Muppets. And they even sometimes act like you are in a Muppets Movie"
But "Monstrosities" are still an element and you can recognise immediately that they are monsters, even if verbal and self aware. This does seem to nudge slightly against the moral axis of much of the rest of the book.
Hmm Chris and his cult of information again.
Information is not the be all and end all Chris! If we never have to gamble with limited, poor or deceptive information then ARE WE NOT MACHINES?
I skipped a lot of the failed careers. May go back to them later
"If you get into the habit of giving the right amount of information to your players, they have more agency in their decisions, and are less likely to be unpleasantly shocked by the consequences of those choices.'
No. Negative affect, boredom, frustration and *some degree* of unknown unfairness are vital and necessary organs of FREEDOM.
These advices are good but they cannot be held to be absolutely true
If I am a contrarian, what of it. I drove to that forest to test my eyes! I was acting legally and ethically!
I have been drinking yes
heuristics of efficiency
It's tomorrow now
Reading this book on vision confirms that evolution is as obsessed as Chris McDowall with cognitive offload, heuristics of efficiency and more minimising time on unnecessary decisions
So the obverse of Chris's risk/reward hypertransparency is the severity of impact once the choice is made
No "minor" fuckups and few "learning" mistakes? Is that how it actually plays over time?
Ah ha! "Like your Tomb of Horrors style deathtrap dungeon might be full of hidden traps that don't announce themselves, but you're breaking that rule as a specific exception for this particular dungeon"
A paradox of performed secrecy in films is that the actor (& film) communicate simultaneously to the audience that they are lying &/or keeping a secret and..
to other characters in that fiction that they are telling the truth.
A dual signal
So in EBlnd can there be *real* geographic secrets? Like a secret door?
*People* can keep secrets, but are not likely to have more than one, if at all
But can there be a secret place which does not communicate it's existence
but which can still be discovered?
The doctrine of information and risk and the iteration of the game world may interact strangely over time to produce unpredictable cognitive lacunae of particular types
Maybe
giant ants and the attention economy
Look giant ants are not uninteresting as a concept - they are basically the Borg - but, ants
The city as starting area seems to be as common a concept to whatever the current gen is as the wilderness was to whatever older gens were
The difference may lie partially in the shift in the attention economy and social groupings from the 70s to now
70s issue I imagine being more like " how do I spend these extra cognitive hours in a world without screens and internet" and "what do I do w my geographically close sustained friend group for 6 hours'
Modern problem being more like "how do I keep their attention for maybe 3 hours max" and "how do I adapt the game to a shifting attendance group and online interaction"
The city can present a flowing matrix of challenge, information and adaptation more easily than the imagined wilderness. << I SAID ALMOST EXACTLY THE SAME THING ABOVE BUT I WAS DRINKING AND FORGOT I SAID IT
Characters/Players can be brought in and out more easily too.
Amusingly, if PCs and NPCs have actual jobs in the imagined world, that explains why they weren't present at the game or scene - they were at work.
In the next edition Failed Careers might be "Unstable Careers" or "Gig Economy Trap Careers"
Future Bastionland would definitely have twitter in it
"9. Dark clothes, lone wolf, won't work with any other hirelings. Thinks they're so cool." - Chris I feel attacked by this remark. Neutral face
Cosmic Angels - are these 40k Primarchs?
So you can have Kermit the Frog and a Primarch in the same world?
Lack of Ghosts
Actually if this was REAL British Paracosm role playing it would have more ghosts in it CHRIS
Fuck you could do a Gerry Anderson "Supermarionation" source book for EB. Hidden humanoid mockeries rocketing forth to save Bastionland in bright primary vehicles
Have fun trying to work out which internet personalities these are based on
A Mass Coffin Auction does sound like fun.
The fact that cremation doesn't seem to exist in this megacity pretty much guarantees a gothic logistical structure of trains and necropoli.
The Bureaucrolabyrinth is good. Advancing d20 rolls remind me of Gardens of Ynn
Alien Kung Fu meta dice games - lol I would probably have based the whole game around these
