Wednesday 28 August 2024

Let Him Cook

Hugh Cooks Chronicle of an Age of Darkness; Books one to Five


It was an age undreamed of…

Between 1987 and 1992, Hugh Cook released a ten volume Science-Fantasy simultaneous-chronology epic series which absolutely did not sell well, at least after the third book. Originally intended to be a 20-book series, the first series of three, It was a glorious and doomed project, ultimately he only completed ten, in six years.  He was writing them only a little slower than I can read them, but I have read the first five; 'The Wizards and the Warriors', 'The Wordsmiths and the Warguild', 'The Women and the Warguilds', 'The Walrus and the Warwolf', and 'The Wicked and the Witless'. Yes every single one of this series was titled in the same way. The man knew how to vibe.

This is my review of the Chronicle of the Age of Darkness, (Part One). It’s pretty great! Might be a niche taste.

The Chronicle, (books 1 to 5) is set across the fantastic A4-shaped, America-sized continent of Argan and its surrounding seas and isles. Its northern reaches feel Canadian, its middle bit has Mediterranean grain nations, south of them is a Rice Empire and south of them is Drangsturm: the Castle of Controlling Power, a huge flame trench dug into the isthmus with a castle full of wizards at each end. South of that is the swarmlands, an area controlled by a possibly-hive-mind utterly incomprehensible and deeply inimical to humanity, insect species ruled by the semi-mythical ‘Skull of the Deep South’.






Book One - The Wizards and the Warriors


This book holds many wonders. Since it is our introduction to Argan and the entire world, it’s about everything, - but the main through-line is that it’s about love, the plot driven by the friendship between two warriors (who read like the villains of a previous series of books we never got to see), and the agony of their moral development. That's interesting because Book 5, Walrus and War-Wolf, is also driven by love and by the slow moral development of a teenage piece of shit and also has a theme of unrecognised friendship between two dangerous badasses. Book Two is about a boy in love growing up and Book Five is about a boy not growing up.

Love, friendship, growth and the meaning of a life.

But first! Heenmor, a Wizard of Argan has gone rogue and stolen a wonder-weapon ‘Death Stone’!  The Confederation of Wizards sends one of their finest; Phyphor (old, powerful, smart), one of their sanest; Miphon (low power, kind, reasonable) and Garash (powerful, an utter dick).

The three chase Heenmor and run into the two Rovac Warriors; Elkor Alish, (Napoleon-level strategist) and Morgan Hearst (arguable and actual Dragon-slayer). The Rovac Warriors hold an age-old  hatred for Wizards, but the Death Stone threatens the whole world. To get it back these enemies will have to team up to stop Heenmor and return the stone. Can they do it? No. Or at least, mainly no, but eventually yes, but by then the end of the world may be in the  offing regardless.

One axis of this sprawling story is the relationship between Elkor Ailish and Hearst; both could be villains of a previous unseen tale. Coming down from the cold north where they made terrible war, they are best friends, or at least Morgan Hearst thinks they are, after all, he saved Elkor Alish from the bewitchment of a mysterious sorceress who kept him captive in her frozen city.

In fact, Elkor Ailish, who had intended to infiltrate the frozen city and open it from the inside, was actually in love with the Sorceress, though he realised this too late, just after he had already opened its doors and let in the army outside. He was still processing his terrible mistake when Morgan Hearst turned up with the severed head of his one true love and a beaming smile. Now Elkor Ailish hates himself, and hates Morgan Hearst. Morgan Hearst has no idea about any of this, he just wants his friend to like him again.

The Cynicism and the Sincerity


Cook writes his world with great cynicism and seemingly anarchic indifference but he writes the human heart with great sincerity.

This is a key difference to Vance, in some ways a close equivalent of Cook, in invention and prose-joy. Vance write worlds and hearts with ironic distance, which makes him cold to read too-long-a-while. Cook is an eternal anglo; the core emotions are seen side-on and held tacitly, rather than occupying the central field and main narrative drive of the scene, chapter or story. But still they rule. All deeds in this cold world are leaves and vines of dreams of yearning hearts.

It’s no wonder normal people didn't really like these books because that is not how popular art is meant to be made. It might be how literature is done, or comedy and satire, but if you want a big audience for an heroic tale then the emotions of the story-drive are the emotions of the scene, or at least only one or two layers deep. To be clear; I really like Cook but he is an odd one and I am not surprised he didn't really strike a chord with others.

The Worldbuilding and the Wainscoating


The bones of Cooks Dark World are buried deep in Vance, Dungeons and Dragons, and perhaps Wolfes Book of the New Sun. A skin of magic over the skeleton of a post-post-post apocalyptic world, with extra species, strange interdimensional tech and apparent magic being degraded forms of super-science.

There are tunnels and forgotten black site research dungeons everywhere. The languages and ethnogroups have been turned over a bunch of times. Fragments of the magical speech are the old scientific speech. ‘Rovac’ sounds like a military term and later on the ‘command language’ of the northern Colloson Empire is called ‘Ordur’. Ethno-groups have curious turns of phrase to show they have migrated and changed a lot within the last 5,000 years. (If I don’t make a comment on Cooks brief Ethnographic and Linguistic excursions before the end, let me know). In book five Drake just straight up finds an abandoned space ship.

Not just the background of the world, but the precision of the power distributions; what powers various people have, their qualities and how these interrelate in the scene of immediate action - all of these REEK of Dungeons and Dragons and of either a deliberate importing of its core concepts or a second hand assumption of them through some other medium.

Some cases in point relating to extra-natural powers;

Wizard Powers vs Warriors; the first Wizards we meet, the Wizards of Arl, are potentially incredibly destructive and can hurl fireballs about, but in-effect, over the long term, not that great, and very vulnerable. They have to store up capacity over time, can burn it all quickly, and once this is done they go back to being just an old man - so their power as direct damage dealers is somewhat crappy. In military situations they blow their load, kill a bunch of guys and then are useless. They can also be stabbed in the back, poisoned, tricked and imprisoned etc, relatively easily. Their greatest power is the threat of their destructive potential, not its use. Like a politician, their power lies in what they might do.

The 'Death Stone' – {“Whoever holds the Death Stone could rule the world” says anyone who gets their hands on it},  - has hard limitations on the conditions of use, recharge, range, etc, that actually strongly limit it in many real life circumstances. It would actually be very hard to take over the world with this stone, its powers are incredibly dangerous but, like the wizards, highly conditional and limited.

Godlike spirits exist and can do miracle-like things, but they are highly focused to particular locations and are difficult to manage (they also seem pretty fucked up).

In terms of natural arrangements;

The personal qualities of the main cast balance out so neatly you can nearly feel the stats whirring behind them.

The economies, agricultural bases, populations, cultures, power systems, trade routes etc, are all carefully organised and invented, not improvised - everything fits together. The great salt road exists because pirates decimate nearby shipping, because there are handy pirate islands here and here, so... There are big population centres growing grain along the Nile-like velvet river. South of that is a coastal Rice Empire, north are more pastoral lands, sheep farmers, then steppe, then tundra.

While the objects of the world-plan can be whimsical, the logic of their working-out is not. Mountains may walk but if they do, agriculture will be destroyed.

All of this crafts the world towards a very un-naturalistic sense of dramatic functionality. Power systems and methods interrelate, but everyone is vulnerable somewhere and has reason to be afraid. Plans fail and fools betray, chaos ensues Wizards guard their backs. This schema would function both as an RPG, (no wonder China Mieville did an intro for 'Walrus and War-Wolf'), but also serves as a means of generating and sustaining story for everything has a knock-on effect somewhere, or some-when else; characters are consistently dealing with the downstream effects of others actions and creating more themselves.

The Pointillism and the Pretension


In Cooks modernist or seemingly absurdist plotting, vital and dramatic moments are always swinging out of left field, or happening in the wings, or we are being informed of them as happenstance. in a way this absurdism is more true to life.

(His Grand Battle scene is more like an actual Grand Battle than most I have read in fantasy; a scene of careful and relentless planning and politicking and persuasion and perception, agonising organisation, then a grand contest of mistakes and limitations, of who can make the fewest mistakes and who can exploit the others mistakes first and best.)

More true to life in some ways, but there is a reason popular authors do not write that way - where the core emotional strand of the story is like a thread running through the background, foreground, off-screen, subtext or overtext of each individual scene, where the question of 'what exactly is the core of this story about' is very highly up in the air or at least not completely obvious for large parts of the book.

I can only really say 'The Wizards and the Warriors' is about love and moral growth because I have read 'The Walrus and the Warwolf', and by the end of the story, that is about love and moral growth. If I read more and different books in this series then I might suddenly realise that 'Wizards and Warriors' was about something completely different.

Cook is a highly intelligent planner, but still I don't read this harum-scarum bouncing around of characters, scenes and points of view, the time-skips and crime-skips, the leisurely fishing scenes with demi-relevant monster sightings, as pure planning. Its.. just his vibe. It just seems to be how he thinks and how he is happy addressing and imagining things; like a big bird or mad mosquito, racing around the 'plot' and diving at it from this direction and that before racing away to come at it again from another, stranger point of view.

The Intelligence and the Interlacement


Ahead of its time... or BEYOND IT! A key element of the Chronicle (One to Five), is that it is a simultaneous and interlaced story. All of the narratives take place across roughly the same ten years. Tough none of the chronologies start or end in exactly the same place, the protagonists consistently interact in the same events, often from different sides and different perspectives, showing up in each other relations.

So, in the dying years of the Age of Darkness, before Drangsturm falls and the Swarms invade, the City-States of Selzirk and Andromarphos go to war over the ownership of the mysterious ‘Death Stone;

In Book One we see events first from the perspective of Morgan Hearst, Rovac Warrior recruited as the general of Selzirks forces, his feud with his former best friend Elkor Ailish, the usurper of Andromarphos now exploded into a war between states

In Book Two the protagonist Togura, having survived life in a mongol-esque horse clan, is recruited as cavalry onto the side of Androlmarphos, but falls sick and spends the whole time nearly dying on a hospital ship, only being ‘rescued’ by a character from Book Three and running into Drak Deldragon Douhey, protagonist of Book Four.

In Book Three we hear about the battle distantly, but run into Morgan Hearst much later, after the events of Book One.

In Book Four, the protagonist Drake interacts substantially with the ‘Wizards and Warriors’and makes an enemy of Sean Sarazin, protagonist of Book Five in Selzir. He is then is sent to Andromarphos and is imprisoned there before the battle, escapes during it and meets up with Togura from Book Two.

In Book Five, the protagonist Sean Sarazin is the son of Farafella, Kingmaker of Selzirk, who recruits Morgan Hearst as its general. Sean makes an enemy of Drake (from book Four), in Selzirk, and annoys Morgan Hearst during the final battle with irritating advice about cavalry formations. (Which we remember from Book One).

Has anyone done or imagined anything like this on such a scale?

Other reviewers have mentioned; Cook just missed the internet. If his stuff had been coming out a decade later it would have had a House-of-Leaves style fandom dedicated to tracking and tracing all the character interactions across this scene and that, from this timeline to that. (The D&D-esque powers and tools add to and utilise this - the bottles and death stones and magic swords being like bookmarks or hyperlinks that show one plot bounding into another.)

The Grand Plan surely is the most obvious thing you are selling here and the most notable achievement, but it isn't really sold. People are dumb and don't understand what to look for unless you very explicitly say LOOK FOR THIS HERE. I dream of a re-issue of the series with massive notes, maps, footnotes, indexes, timelines etc. This ridiculous complexity is part of the art and should be framed.

(The covers for the re-named and re-arranged American versions have almost nothing to do with the actual text, at least in many cases, but they are much more fun images!)



Book Two - The Wordsmiths and the Warguild


"'History is what we understand. The rest is a waking nightmare. History is the explanation of who holds the knife. Without this explanation, all we understand is the pain.'"

Cook said they made him write Book Two as  the original Book Two, now Book Three, ‘The Women and the Warlords’ was about a Woman and for a variety of reasons might not appeal to the standard fantasy reader. (We will look into this later). So now Book Two is an ‘extra’ book, not part of the original plan, but woven into it.

Some call this a parody or a subversion of a classic hero story. It doesn’t seem so to me. Though it is quite a bit more ridiculous than Book One, Cook is always somewhat ridiculous, at least on the surface.

Our story is about a lone male adolescent hero on a quest. This makes it one of a trio with Book Four Walrus and Warwolf, about Drake Deldragon Douhey, and Book Five, Wicked and Witless, about Sean Sarazin.

Who then is Togura Poulaan? Son of Baron Chan Poulaan, first of the Warguild of Sung?

He is an actual, normal, well-meaning early-teenage boy with an IQ of 100 who ends up on an adventure and acts pretty much as an actual teenage boy would act. The difference in character between Togura and the she sheer MAX PROTAGONIST energy of people like Drake Dedragon Douhay or the Wizards and Warriors of 'Wizard and Warriors', being a sometimes remarked-on part of the books theme. What if a protagnist has enough heroic luck to throw him into wild and crazy situations, but is just a normal boy?

Like ‘Wizards & Warriors’, 'Wordsmiths and Warguild’ has a piece of ancient hypertechnology at its centre’ the Odex, a floating mirror into which anything can be flung. Myth and legend say the Odex is a physical encyclopaedia of a forgotten world, a placeless, timeless place filled with literally everything, (or at least everything that will fit the mirrors girth), and that, in theory, anything placed within can be summoned forth, whole and timeless, from the point it was sent in. The key to do this is the even-more mythical Index, an artefact hidden somewhere in the world, but long lost to the Wordsmiths who currently control the Odex. In fact the main thing the Wordsmiths do is  charge people money to use the Odex as a dumping ground for rubbish, dead bodies, old cheese etc. They also regularly shout random words at the Odex as it seems to respond to sound, but apart from some extremely random objects, all they have gotten so far are curious flying probability-monsters who pop up but who can usually be banished by shouting questions at them.

Due to various complex inciting incidents, the Lady Day Suet, Toguras one-true-love, is hurled into the Odex and the only thing that can get her out is the Index. The Wordsmiths have a few leads on possible locations; all of them insanely dangerous to reach. Our story follows Togura as he is bounced about Argan, often being an idiot, still managing to survive and grow up.

The Ode and the Onomatopea


Because it’s mainly about a normal guy dealing with a chaotic world, the book is more of a petri-dish for extremely Cook-ish qualities. If you liked them in other books you will like them here; worldbuilding, (or revealing), through discursion and wild digression, a cynical, perhaps more tragic, worldview with an empathic heart, deep and amusing interlacements which make the chronicle.. well a chronicle; one big story, and lovely, odd, goblin-mode onomatopoeic prose. This is most beautiful when Cook is most inspired and Cook is most inspired by nature, sex and dreams.

Trying to escape from a nightmarish ruined city and the Post-Apocalyptic cult that rules it, Togura is lost in a colourful swamp, and sleeps;

“Togura slept, dreaming of Day Suet asleep in a bed of turquoise, jacinth and ligure. She woke, a sultry melon-light glimmering in her eyes. Giff-gaff said an insect, eating her nose. He tested her jymolds. She was hot. He was swollen. A sheep pushed him to one side. He plucked mint and ate it, gnawing the sheep. He watched his mother, now perissodactyl, walk across water lilies. I raped her, said Cromarty. Not so, said Togura; you’re just saying that because this is a dream. He closed with Cromarty. His swelling spat. Hot. As birdsong sang.

Togura woke and heard the birdsong. There was something wrong with it. True birdsong should not be like that. He was hearing people talking. They were hunting him. Hunting me, said Togura. His words took flight, becoming shovels of goldleaf; with relief, he realised that he was still dreaming. Sleep on, said Togura to Togura. He did, but his dream soon became a nightmare.”

Later, he nearly dies trying to cross a mountain range whole on crutches;

"'Zaan', said the sun.

The ice-white light ran through his blood in splinters.

It was fading.

'Clouds,' he said.

A frog answered him. He spoke. It answered again. His teeth hurt. Then came the rain, drenching away the last of the sunlight. The skiring wind fladdered and scooped, outpacing his eyesight; it came in rents and buffets, sending the shimmy-shimmy leaves stappering and plattering from down to around. Some dead at his feet. He kicked them from ventral to dorsal.

'Tog, he said.

Asking for someone.

He couldn't remember who.

His legs went balder-shalder-tok through the rain perhaps autumn or winter. His third leg was a gnarled and unyielding strake padded with moss and wort where it jammed home to his armpit. The music of a flute cut closer than a knife; hard, high, unyeilding, it lacerated his heart. He felt his pulse-beats bleeding through his body. The wind blew furnace-hot; he shivered, his teeth tok-tok chin-cha-chattering."

Togura is threatened by his evil half-brother, nearly married to an Ogreess, runs into the Colloson Empire as they besiege the ‘Wizards and Warriors’ of Book One, is lost in the wilderness multiple times, becomes a pseudo Mongol Horse-Archer, meets Drake Deldragon Douhey multiple times, fights an unutterable evil in the ruins of an ancient city, rides a sea-serpent and makes his way home.

The Wilderness and the Word-Hoard


Because in the Age of Darkness, State Power is breaking down, armies are marching and invading, mountains are moving and swarms of alien bug-things are advancing, everyone spends a fair amount of time either at sea, or yomping through the northern mountains. Often they are yomping to their doom as, being Pirates, Oracles, pseudo-Mongols or random teenage boys, they are not well prepared for wilderness exploration.

I'm not sure if I have a point here other than; there sure is a lot of wilderness travel in the Age of Darkness and Hugh Cook must have really liked Hiking. The travel, techniques, environments, wildlife, and in particular, the deep and well-painted sense-impressions of wilderness travel and survival all resound with the ring og truth and subtle perception. If he is just making this stuff up from books he is doing very well. I suspect northern Estar bears a lot of resemblance to New Zealand in its geography and environment. Though every area does have its own distinct feel. The Ravilish Lands in book two feel a LOT like the Cumbria of my youth.

Book Two is a pleasant dalliance. Unplanned from the start, it carries little conceptual weight of the world and bears up little of the interlacement. Because of this, it is a ramble, a wander through the garden of Cooks prose and invention, with a protagonist who, while he is less thrilling and competent than some, is still more likeable and sympathetic than many.

(Let me say again, the book is ALMOST NOTHING like this incredibly cool and cheesy US cover!)




Book Three - The Women And The Warlords


Now we encounter perhaps the most intelligent protagonist of the Age of Darkness; Yen Olass, high-status slave of the Colloson Empire, is allowed her own room, but not a door.

She is a Seer, or prophetess, of a shamanic sisterhood. Perhaps the only form of direct female power allowed in the Colloson Empire, all other women being property, the occasional high status noblewoman, or ‘Raklosh’; a word for baby-withering witches which encompasses any form of ‘outer’ woman who falls from societal safety.

As our story starts, Yen Olass has already had her culture destroyed by the Colloson Empire, has suffered rape and genital mutilation, and through cunning and relentless scheming, has gotten into the ‘Sisterhood’, who have a somewhat protected status, and from there has schemed her way into the service of the foreign born Lord Algrace and her own room.

While the other heroes of the Age of Darkness quest to save the world, for True Love, or for their princely fate, Yen Olass desperately wants safety, a family and freedom.

The Mutilation and the Misogyny


This is less brutal than I expected it to be, but maybe I am just a cold and unmoving person.

Lots of terrible things have happened to Cooks male heroes so far, but only one, a young teenage boy, has had to worry about sexual assault. The story of Yen Olass is not entirely about the fear of rape and physical dispossession, but it’s the major, fuming dragonlike antagonist. Living in an extra-misogynist empire which views women as slaves, in a pseudo-early modern setting with no state power and general chaos everywhere, Yen Olass is working harder than a Questing Hero just to stay afloat and safe. Her Dragon is society and the greatest period of safety she gets is when she can be as far away from it as possible, surrounded by frog-men.

Yen Olass does achieve her 'Hero's Journey' by the end of the book, having quite literally regained her womanhood via a suspicious wishing machine, experienced a (reasonably) loving relationship in safety, at least for a while, having carried and birthed a daughter who seems happy and healthy, (though she may be alien psi-child), and ending up with some kind of husband, not the one she wants because she would prefer none, but he seems to actually like her and she has persuaded him to bathe. She also gets to absolutely brutally murder a would-be child rapist and outwit, (with a fair amount of luck), imprison and exploit a would-be child murderer.

The Story and the Slices of Time


A Hugh Cook character is either the protagonist and a callow youth, in which case they emerge fresh from the pupae, or they are an adult, and they walk onto the scene as if exiting another. This is an adult story, really a middle-aged story, and everyone in it feels like they begin the book after the end of a deep sequence of tales we don't get to see.

This has a good effect on character because absolutely everyone in a Hugh Cook story feels like a real, specific person with a distinct, strong personality and a complex set of motivations which spring from particular circumstances. When they turn up as a side character in a future book, or as a deuteragonist in a book after that, or a villain or sage in a book after that, the continuity and distinctness of their personality will still be present - clearly the same person, not frozen in time, but growing and changing with their circumstance.

This is good for character, and good for the world and the story-sequence as a whole. (As I read more it becomes clear that the main life of the series is in the world and the sequence, not any individual book). But it is not necessarily great for single individual books, as, just as in life, nothing ever ends. Yen Olass begins the book being dragged into the Dynastic dramas of the Colloson Empire and ends the book being dragged into the Dynastic dramas of the Colloson Empire. Of course now she is the mother of a prospective Empress, and possible alien miracle child, and possibly the wife of a freshly-scrubbed Pope of the Horse Cult, and she managed to magically grow her clitoris back, so definitely not exactly the same.

In a Hugh Cook story the only real and satisfying ending for a character is in death. So unless we follow someone all the way to their death, their story is not done, and does not feel done, and that can be a little frustrating.

The Coldness and the Care


There are lines in many long books or series where it seems like the author is talking to us directly or describing themselves. This quote stuck out to me;

"Though Yen Olass had never entirely lost the ability to play like a child, there was nothing childish about her appreciation of power, sex and the manipulation of one human being by another."

That describes the 'Chronicle of and Age of Darkness' pretty well. A D&D-esque, carefully made post-post-post collapse exquisite sandbox of a world, with an extremely cold and "realist" view of power dynamics, individual ambition, greed and desire, and international and ethnic relations.

Despite this, Cooks work is almost never cynical, though many of its characters are cynics within themselves. There are very few utterly evil people, not do his characters exist across the scales of 'fall' and redemption that we might see in more Manichean paracosm. Instead their souls and motivations act more like those in a 19C social novel, but one set in an age of catastrophe and violence, where heroic natures of both light and dark tones are needed to survive and to carve out brief moments; a year here, a year there, of safety and comparative freedom. If a character remains "on-screen" for a reasonable period of time, Cook will usually find something interesting about them, perhaps not a "sympathetic element" but a particular and distinct inflection of humanity that could make them, in some circumstances, the "villains" of a chapter, and in others, the "heroes" of another.

That said, in 'Women & Warlords' - the Emperors Sons are fucking evil and stupid, or evil and civilised.

I get why Cooks books didn't sell. It’s not just because the third book was a feminist epic about a woman avoiding rape, it’s because the complexity, tonality and morality of his stories is all slightly 'off', (or very 'off') from popular taste and from the way normal people like their stories told. You can tell a story about a wise prophetess, enslaved from her destroyed people, who is threatened with rape and child murder by the sons of a dark emperor, who is also carrying the child of that dark emperor, having teased from him before his death, a few moments of humanity, and who avenges herself violently on those whom wouldst destroy her and her sacred child, destined to be Empress! And those events do technically happen in this book, but Cook is morally sly, always asking us to view things askance from the (arguable) main moral thrust of what would, in other hands, be a melodrama, and he is historically cheeky, showing is what feels like a bunch of unpredictable catastrophes with characters desperately trying to survive and adapt - more like history feels as you are living it, than as it is presented in the legends afterwards.

But legends are what people want to read for fun.

I am not saying Cook is wrong to do this. I have a huge amount of sympathy for him. But I am saying his books didn't sell big numbers because of it. As many other reviewers have pointed out, much worse writers at the same period, with much less ability than Cook, sold much bigger numbers and are still talked of, while Cook is nearly forgotten.

I cannot tell what is right or wrong for an artist to do but only how things are.

(This cover is from one of the original non-US versions.
This scene does nearly happen in the book!
Though not with a dragon, but a giant insect-creature of the Swarms
{there are dragons in the other books though})



Book Four - The Walrus And The Warwolf


(There is no map in the Paizo version of Book Five. If there was ever a series which needed maps, and ideally, footnotes, end-notes, timelines etc etc, it’s this one. The original Corgi versions do have maps and it makes the read a LOT easier.)

The Audacity and the Amphetamines


This book did about three lines of speed in the toilets just before it got on a bus and cornered you in a back seat. Now it’s going to tell its tale. The bus trip will be long and The Walrus and the Werewolf is sitting right next to you and there is actually no-one else on the bus, including a driver. The bus is out of control!!!! This book is like speedy Gonzales is trying to give the Tasmanian devil a colonoscopy on a Ferris wheel and its being animated by chuck jones. It goes pretty hard is what I'm trying to say.

The most interesting thing about the Walrus and the Werewolf is trying to work out how morally serious it is, because it has very strong, but very tacit themes, of moral challenge and historical and moral development, but is also an utterly manic text which races along at the pace of a re-cut cartoon, or like a rubber ball bouncing around in a small room, and while it has a lot of morally consequential things happen, it often views them, at the time they are occurring, through a cynical, absurdist or simply an unnervingly morally neutral tone.

Added to this is the utter mania and primordial moral chaos of its protagonist. Is he a good man? Certainly not, but a bit? Not at the start at all. Is he an evil man? A bit, especially at the start, but not a lot and rarely with sadism. Is he any worse than any other 16 year old boy, or person of whatever age he is in each part of the book, in the crazed and chaotic world he is from? Honestly probably not.

Drake Deldragon Douhey is as much a trickster spirit as a main character. He lies like Bug Bunny disguised as Odysseus. He lies when he doesn't have to lie. He lies even when it would be a bad idea to lie. Even when telling the truth he embroiders, adds and fantasises, even when speaking to people he respects. He lies to his good friends for no reason. By our standards he is probably mentally ill. He spends a lot of time in jail.

In his defence the society of the world and the plot of the book don't want him to tell the truth and won't trust him when he does. The one time he tries to tell the truth the people asking for it (Sean Sarazin, of Book Five), try to saw off his feet, he needs to use all his desperate skill and invention to devise lies they actually will believe.

The Chaos and the Chronology


I was going to compare the story-to-travel chronology of Walrus to something like O'Brieins Aubrey/Maturin tales, with their social dramas extending across long voyages and then spurts of rapid action, but to be honest that doesn't come close.

If you tried to make a chart of the time compression, dropped chapters, ("oh the crew had a pretty crazy adventure here, anyway), long prison and slavery stints simply danced across with a few words, that time Drake became a King for a year or so, (one chapter in third person historical record form), well the chart would look like a seismograph during an earthquake, or two earthquakes going different directions at the same time. If you tried to draw a map of his travels, enslavements, imprisonments, flying castle trip, teleport gate incident, mysterious tunnel travel and many, many sea voyages, shipwrecks and abductions, then it would look like a Jackson Pollock painting.

Very likely a number of these wild journeys are to bring Drake into contact with various other characters from the previous four, and later six, (and possibly planned ever later FIFTY), books who are all interlaced.

The Disgust and the Development


Drake does actually slightly morally develop. He goes from a teenage attempted rapist, driven by obsessive lust, to someone who actively tries to value the object of his affections as something more than the object of his affections, and eventually into something more like adult love.

While the text skates madly over incidents, or arrantly informs us of vital matters in passing, and while its main group of piratical characters remain generally relentlessly self-interested, they are still coherent characters. They are not jokes, though the story makes jokes about them. The 'storyteller' part of the story might leap hither and yon over important events but the characters are affected in full depth, as they should be. A crime, abandonment, act of violence or of mercy might happen and be shown in a chaotic way, lightly, but if the characters involved pop up again in the roiling broth of the story, they will remember and be affected by these acts. The fears of a neurotic pirate might be played for laughs or plot convenience in one moment, but over time, they will have reasons for their existence and will not be forgotten or overwritten to make a new or better joke.

Its beyond curious that while many of these characters enter as parodies, they are not parodies of themselves.

This feels like a book founded on deep thought and careful planning, and then merrily painted over and scrawled over as if it were graffiti, but as you look closer it seems the graffiti was planned all along.

The Subtlety and the Stupidity


This book should have been a hit! Its tremendous fun!

Still, it seems ridiculous. People like simple blocky morality as the base, with a lot of very deep and serious language and self-consciously writerly and morally-instructive and dramatically perceptible Events.

Walrus does this the wrong way round; the base, the world and its morality, are complex, but hidden, or at least not self-consciously or deliberately described by the writer who in engaged in a kind of mad folk dance over the blocks of their story.

It’s impossible for me to tell if this is a cynical book, or a tragic one. It seems like a tragic book in disguise as a cynical one, or perhaps the two things are in equipoise.

(Has NOTHING TO DO with book five
Great cover though!)




Book Five - The Wicked and the Witless


Sean Sarazin is a Son of a Bitch.

Actually, that’s an insult to his mother, Farafella, the Kingmaker of Selzirk. But of Sean, what can be said? He's just a bad guy. Certainly my least favourite of the first five of 'Chronicles of an age of Darkness'. It lives in parallel.

Cook has already done two versions of the singular young male point of view hero. In 'Wordsmiths and Warguild' we got Togura Poulaan, a sometimes slightly dim, or, more fairly, just a normal young teenage boy, while in 'Walrus and Warwolf' we met the literal incarnation of chaos; Drake Deldragon Douhey, an absolute fireball of manic energy, crazy schemes, relentless invention and Big Protagonist Energy. 'Wicked and Witless' is built around Sean Sarazin, firstborn child of the Kingmaker Farafella, of Selzirk, sun-worshipping ruling city of the Harvest Plains.

So who is Sean Sarazin? Aka Sarazin Sky, aka ‘WATASHI!’?

The Delusion and the Dickheadedness


A somewhat occasionally clever, not especially cowardly, pompous, pretentious, status-obsessed, lonely deluded dickhead.

There are some excuses for this; Sarazin was raised as a hostage in a southern, vaguely Chinese/Japanese coded Kingdom, as the distaff "Son" of its ruler Lord Regan. His closest companions are his weapons tutor Jarl Theodric, his scholastic tutor Epelthin Elkin and the prostitute Jaluba.

It’s not clear if anyone involved in the raising of Sean Sarazin actually likes him in any way. Lord Regan plans to use him as a weapon against his mother the Kingmaker of Selzerk, and every else he knows is in the pay of Lord Regan. True, Sarazin isn't actually that likeable, but this may be something of a chicken and egg situation as his entire life has been one of manipulation and carefully deluded dreams. Regan fills Seans head with vaguely Nietchien/Randian philosophy about the great individual being able to shape their own fate and conquer all.

"'Remember, we create ourselves. Always remember that. We have free will so we are entirely responsible for ourselves. Everything happens t us by our own choice. Never forget that.

'I never will, my lord,' said Sarazin.

'In the final analysis,' said Lord Regan, 'you can have whatever you want. You can be whatever you want to be. You can win whatever you want to win.'

'I believe it my lord,' said Sarazin.

'Some people become victims,' said Lord Regan. 'This only happens because they have a victim mentality. Feeling themselves to be victims, they behave in a way which makes them just that.'

'My lords wisdom is all-encompassing.' said Sarazin, truly impressed by the depth of Lord Regans philosophy."

It's not clear if Regan is doing this because he actually believes it, or because it will hopefully turn him into a guided missile of crazed ambition aimed directly at his mothers not-Queendom.

Seeds and fertile soil. Sean Sarazin decides right at the start of the book that he is absolutely destined for some kind of great and/or heroic role of command and glory, and that he can achieve this largely by his own efforts. From that point on he becomes a problem for absolutely everyone else in the book, primarily his mother, who exerts insane amounts of energy and political cunning trying to keep him alive.

The book is an exercise in seeing the world from the point of view of someone who understands less about what is going on than most of the intelligent characters, and usually less than the reader, who is misinformed, but still less deluded than Sean Sarazin. It’s also an exercise in viewing a deep and complex world, full of deep and complex characters, from the point of view of a shallow and self-interested person.

The Contempt and the Comparisons


The comparison to the two other young, questing male heroes, explain why this is the least of the five;

Togura Poulaan - sometimes a dingus. Relatively unambitious for a Prince. 'Memorises' the one magical word needed for his quest and then forgets it. Fails to notice that he has, by luck, actually found the object of his quest once he has it. Broadly good-natured, genuinely wants to save his girlfriend from a magic circle and puts in a fair degree of effort to do so, does actually achieve some quite heroic things; in particular being captured by pseudo-Mongol steppe riders and managing to move from slave and the lowest status person there to actual tribe member; his notable deed is surviving an ambush and dragging himself a lot of miles over broken ground with broken legs to get back. Wins some degree of respect from at least one father figure. Crosses a mountain range on his own. Survives capture, disease, war. Fights for his life in a Nightmare City against an ancient evil and manages to defeat it. Does, in the end, manage to free his GF from the magic circle and defeat his evil half-brother. Honestly he does pretty good for a teenage boy!

Drake Deldragon Douhey - raised in a bizzaro sex cult, dissolute and scheming, survives attempted drowning, convinces an ogre king to make him his heir, becomes a pirate, defeats a crazy bug-monster and saves the ship, performs several high-risk secret missions and manages to survive, crosses most of the continent of Argan at one point or another, may have dived into alternate realities, falls in love, tries to commit a rape, is made the antichrist figure in a new religion, becomes less of a rapist, fights an entire religion for his beloved, discovers works of an ancient poet and sells them, is given a semi-immortality health parasite, becomes master swordsman and skivamareen player, briefly a king of the Chennaming Gate, kills Par Plovey the extremely evil misogynist bastard, goes to extreme and ridiculous lengths to save his one true love from illness. Honestly I have barely even sketched the surface.

Sean Sarazin; you get involved in a lot of stuff but are largely as competent as extensive education and experience make you, and not much more. Sean why can't you be cool like these guys? Why can't you learn?

The Sadness and the Stasis


The agonising thing about Sarazin is that, even though by the end he has a mother and a father who love him, and a small kingdom, and a pretty cool Dwarf servant he's still an utter tit! He sentences Jaluba to death! (She survives). He consistently does things almost as bad as that and seems to gain almost no self-knowledge or depth. He remains, almost and perhaps even to the end, a big believer in 'noble blood' and the grace and natural will to power of the nobility, despite being not of noble blood himself, and being reminded of that multiple times.

The Glimmers and the Shimmers


Competence - after being exhaustively trained by a very good mercenary, educated by a possibly-evil wizard and having experienced the complexity of court intrigue in Selzirk, and having been part of and somewhat-lead, several at-least-not-disastrous military expeditions and actions, Sarazin does seem to get actually better at basic protagonism. He can fight and war and organise and plan, to a degree, and is not always crap at it, though he would still lose to most other protagonists.

“'Am I doing the right thing or the wrong thing?'

'It’s not what you do,' said Jarl, ' it’s how you justify it when you get back to Selzirk. I've seen a lot of famous victories which were actually no more than draws - a couple of them were in fact defeats!'

'We'll worry about Selzirk when we get back there alive,' said Sarazin.

'No!' said Jarl. 'Start writing your history now. This is what happened. By a skilful forced march you took the enemy by surprise. you seized Eagle pass. You established a base on the heights. Then you yourself led a reconnaissance in force while your subordinates were busy bringing up the supplies necessary to support a determined thrust deep into enemy territory.'

'Why,' said Sarazin, in admiration, that sounds really good.'

'Of course it does,' said Jarl. 'With the right line in storytelling, you can make the worst defeat into a triumph of courageous, dynamic soldering.'”

Dwarf - after being roofied and sexually assaulted by a witch, Sarazin ends up with an evil Dwarf manservant, the Dwarf: Galbrax! Galbrax is great, partly because he consistently gives Sarazin shit, and partly because he is openly and nakedly a petty, awful, lying, thieving little shit and owns it. He is on the outside what Sarazin is on the inside and that makes him much more palatable. He also sticks by Sarazin and never betrays him, (maybe once or twice), becoming the closest thing Sarazin actually has to a friend, (though of course Sean, being a dick, remains largely oblivious to this).

Some Friends - after being not-a-prick to at least some people, Sarazin does end up with some friends, or at least friend-like relationships, which is all he deserves.

Loving Parents - Raised in a palace of manipulation and more and more aware that everyone around him only wants to manipulate and use him, Sarazin is honestly crushed when he thinks he has accidentally killed his own father, and is genuinely thrilled to see him alive again. His time spent with his actual father running around preparing to be a revolutionary insurgent, his efforts to protect him and willingness to put aside his crazy Randian politics to spend time with him, make Sarazin, for once, almost likeable. Here, the reader starts to think; "Damn, maybe if he was raised right he wouldn't necessarily have been that bad."

Sarazins Mother; Second-best female character in the series so far, the Kingmaker Farafella, also genuinely loves him and tries hard to keep the dumb bastard alive. If only she had met Yen Olass from Book Three, they would have had a lot to talk about. Sean does actually manage to save her at one point with some magical ooze he got from an evil Druid.

Flickers of Decency - after being interrupted in an absolutely horrible crime by his father, Sarazin experiences something like.. momentary shame? Near self-awareness? Once utterly bamboozled and defeated by Drake Deldragon Douhey, who Sarazin had previously tried to saw the legs off, he bows in supplication to the grand tragedy of Drakes noble (and imaginary) kingdom and blood curse. This is all nonsense but for Sean Sarazin its nearly character development.

The Miscellaneous and the Mysterious


Many fragments of world-lore are found within the book, including much that may come to pass, (or would have, if Cook had lived).

Elpeth Elkin; the mind-controlling Wizard of Ebber. Is he good or bad? Certainly the only other wizard of Ebber has proven to be quite bad previously. Now he has access to his ancient city, what will he do next?

The mythical 'Tectonic Lever' of the Deep South. Fated to drop all of Southern Argan into the sea. Previously pulling this thing would be genocide, but with the Swarms invading, pulling that dang lever is starting to look like a pretty good idea actually.

The Prose and the Drowse


Because Sarazin is the way he is, much of the pleasure of the book is provided by the world and the side characters. This being Cooks AoD, the world is more than up to the challenge, and the co-stars are customarily, complete, interesting and compelling. As always - every single named person is clearly on their own complex journey and adventure all of the time.

Perhaps because of Sarazin, Cooks lovely inventive, euphonic sometimes ridiculous onomatopoeic prose is lesser here than in the first four AoD books, though there are bits here and there.

The political and personal complexity remains, and the hearts are still genuine, but again, due to Sarazin, the natural cynicism becomes more dominant than it was in other books, making this one 'darker' but in a low, grimy way, rather than a magisterial tragic way.

For a 'Cook' story I give this three out of five, or even maybe two-relative. For a normal fantasy, I give it a four out of five, as it is still Cook.



‘Zaan’ said the sun


I muse occasionally on how to produce Cooks Age of Darkness in a way that will actually sell books. At least enough so that he finally gets his much-deserved spot in the Fantasy Hall of Fame.

First we must re-name the series; too many things are called things like ‘Chronicle of an Age of Darkness’. Google it and see.

‘Zaan said the Sun’ should be the title, or just ‘Zaan’.

Next we must sell it as something else – Mievelles ‘Weird fiction’ would be a good choice. Even though it ‘seems like, and maybe is, fantasy on-top, its really a distinctly strange and odd thing underneath, almost its own genre.

Next, we Front the Interlacement; do an encyclopaedic version. Put together a cast list, with individual articles showing where and when they come into each tale. Have maps with the crazy journeys of the protagonists. Have an index and footnotes whenever someone shows up in someone else’s story.

What more? Illustrations certainly, but who could possibly illustrate tales of such remarkable tonality. The Corgi covers are competent fantasy scenes, but have almost nothing to do with the feel or meaning of the actual books.

The American Questar ‘Wizard War’ covers are utterly insane and sell the stories as things they absolutely are not, but they do have a certain energy to them. Yann Olass would probably be amused by her interpretation on the cover of ‘The Oracle’ at least.

We are not done with Cook, there are, after all, five more books to go, and apparently, they get weird.

I shall return, in due time, with a review of the second half of ‘Zaan’, and with more thoughts on how it might be adapted and recreated in living visual form, and perhaps on the meaning of the whole massive thing, a meaning which may well have changed totally based on the content of the next five books; The Wishstone and the Wonderworkers, The Wazir and the Witch, The Werewolf and the Wormlord, The Worshippers and the Way and finally, The Witchlord and the Weaponmaster!



Saturday 24 August 2024

Queen Mab's Palace is Complete

 I wrote a novel by mistake. I am sorry.


How Queen Mab Started


Back in 2020 I conceived the idea of an adventure that "depending on how you orient the page as you read it, it is both a fantasy and a science-fiction adventure."

The original Queen Mab was meant to be a crazy gimmick book where you could read it one way, then turn the book upside down and read it another way, engaging with two adventures;

When you flip the book one way - with the spine on the right, as in western books, then it’s a science fiction adventure.

"BUT - the truth is that these are the same people and places but just seen from different cultural perspectives

"the portrait-images of the main characters are flipped like those of playing cards, one half facing one, direction the other facing the other direction.

The Science Fiction adventurers will see it as a dimensionally-warped ship of perverted biomechanical transhumans.

In terms of adventure design, the context of the information they can get and are given will lead them to see it as a technical and material problem, and the very nature of their inquiry and the way they seen the people in it

will make the *mission* darker and more dangerous for them. Their technical abilities and the power of destruction and opposition that their guns etc give them means they are more likely to start conflicts."



This was always meant to be, and has remained, a fully-illustrated book.

Right from the beginning, August was the intended artist and I have driven her slowly insane with my relentless over-writing and never finishing anything. I am sorry!

There is not much art in this initial post as we are still working out how much of our load to blow in promotion and how much to save for the book, but expect to see more as we get closer to the Kickstarter.


Inspiration


A key inspiration was Vincent Wards 'The Navigator: A Medieval Odyssey' in which Monks from the Cumbrian Middle-Ages, fearing the advancing Black Death, tunnel through time and arrive in a modern city (1980s Aukland).




This is a film I haven’t seen in decades, and I think I only saw it once, but it left an impression, the key to which was the deep visionary strangeness with which its characters encounter modernity. The known made unknown, the familiar viewed through unfamiliar eyes, a great making-strange

Another, less-direct and later inspiration was Shellys 'Queen Mab', a radical pure-freedom anti-monarchist poem full of startling images.

"The yet more wretched palaces

Contrasted with those ancient fanes,

Now crumbling to oblivion;

The long and lonely collonades,

Through which the ghost of Freedom stalks,"

Another was a translated copy of the 'Orphic Hymns'. There are many more! There is a lot of stuff in the book.


How It Changed Over Time


Two things happened as we went on;

First, I kept writing more and more and more and more, adding monsters, characters, concepts, places and so on,  breaking them all down to be somewhat workable and part of the same reality

the other is that, as the number of things in Queen Mab grew, the complexity of the arrangement became questionable.

First, we realised that we just couldn't handle the whole two-books-in-one thing.

Then we realised we couldn't handle two actual books.

Ok, so one book only, with one adventure, but we incorporate the pseudo-medieval viewpoint of the adventurer into the text, so that, everything is described as if it is being seen from a medieval/early-modern viewpoint. The reader, and presumably the players, know they are looking at something technological and science-fictional, but the viewpoint characters don't, so that the duality exists in the mind of the user rather than literally on the page.

Then that went on for a while, (with me constantly writing more and more and more), until about June 2023

With so many other books, (I think Demon Bone Sarcophagus, Gackling Moon and Speak, False Machine were all put together and published in the period of writing Queen Mab), and projects stumbling down the track, I had just kept writing and writing and writing.

But once I got a good look at everything I had written - it was just too much. Too many places, process, creatures, characters, courts, crypts, Queens, Knights,  Ladies, Fairies, just too much of everything. It was crazy. There was no way I could turn this into a workable game-book. It would be unplayable to an insane degree, or it would take another four years to make it playable.

So instead I took one year, and turned it into a novel! Problem solved.


The Final Version


I did not think it would take me a year to completely re-write and re-arrange Queen Mab. I did think, for each of the 14 months it took, that it would only ever take "a few more weeks", but it took much longer than that.

What does it mean to turn a game into a story? They are not the same thing at all, though they seem to share organs and limbs, these things are differently arranged, so that if you try to turn one into another, without thinking about why and how they work, it will not go well.

So as time went by in the writing of 'Queen Mab', now retitles 'Queen Mab’s Palace', partly to make it a nice classic three-word False Machine name, and partly because there are a LOT of things in our world called 'Queen Mab' and I wanted this one to be searchable.

At first, it was just a travelogue, a report from the Palace of Queen Mab, but as more and more was written, and more and more actual events took place and more of a character came into play in the nameless, and at-first, genderless, Protagonist, and then secondary characters joined the journey, and then secondary and tertiary narrators, it turned into... well who knows what? A historical science-fiction travelogue picaresque adventure tragedy?

I finally finished Draft One around the middle of August and here we are!


Draft one is about 970 words, (including appendices), and we are budgeting for 400 pages, though hope to have it in well below that.

It might be a work of genius, or at least of peak deluded narcissism. Which is appropriate considering the subject.

This is how the book starts;

..............................................................................................



Queen Mabs Palace

 - how I came to the seat of the Queen of Air and Darkness and what I learned there of her Courts, Ladies and Thanes, and her lesser Servants and Rude Rabble that do occupy thereabouts, from one who has journeyed to that Realm overlong and returned, but not unchanged, may God have mercy on my soul.

The Missing Children and the Frozen Knight


Let me live in memory for a while, and write with glass within my glass, to the spirit which resides there. May-be in writing and remembering in line, as pearls on string, one upon another, I may escape my dolour, and know again what once it meant to be astounded or surprised. For it was surprising, and most strange.

It came about in the grieving of the year when gold first touched the green that the night, black as sleep, chill as stone, made strange music and some heard voices of beasts who spoke as men.

We barred our doors and hid, trusting to prayer and cold iron. With the sun came silence, and then the wailing of women, my sister among them. All the children fit to work were gone, and their parents mazed and made curious numb, like empty pots. And these were Jory my Sisters Son, the Blacksmiths Child, Ceyln the old Maids helper, the Dog Boy, Haswa, and Dgibert the Fat Squires boy.

Some said was bandits, others fae, but while the sun still halved on the skys rim, a dog found scent and the bravest set forth and doing so, made for me to come, for I could both read and write and had been the teacher of those lost, and also my Sister was grieved and made me go.

We had gone not far but we found a Knight wounded by the path, strangely armoured, fit to die and rimed with frost.



The Knight made gesture for one to come forth and hear him and I was made to by the rest for I might give him Grace, though I am no Priest and did not wish to.

The Knight spoke twice-ways. He whispered words I could not understand, but as I spoke to him and gave him succour, soon came another voice, this like cold iron, but an echo of the first, yet I knew the tongue.

He said; “You seek those taken, as once I so sought.”

I said aye this was so and how came he here.

He said; “They are with Queen Mab. Knowing this, would you still go?”

This name I knew. The Queen of Air and Darkness, Empress of the Eld, timeless and undying whom the wise have called a myth. I asked how Queen Mab might be found and the Knight said; “There is a Door. It is a cut in the air. You do not have long.

Then he said; “Do not go, but if you do, know this; First; never promise, never disagree. Second; speak well and listen more. Third; eat not fairy food or you shall never leave.”

Then he grieved and said;

“Your life is death to me, and mine to you. I do not know where I am. My seals are broken and the stars unknown. I die lost. But I am under a sun and above a land. And I am myself. So ends my story. Put me under stone, far from water, where none go.”

Then he died. I said words from the Book. Then, though I meant first to tell the others with me of what the frozen Knight had said, a madness came upon me and, thinking but to test its truth,

I stepped forth into a haze, like mist, cut like a slice, which hovered close.

This is how I came into the Palace of Queen Mab, and often I wished I had not, for I returned much changed; marked with strange service and cursed with queer passions and wild hungers, that I think none could fulfil, and I am placed here in this cell, and mocked and much wondered at I do not doubt.

But still my mind and my soul are my own, which not all I have seen can say, and I have ventured far, more far than men might dream of. So I make this book within my glass, where none may look upon it less I allow it, for only I have its print and key. And I make it as a warning and confession, so those who read its words will know that I have seen and spoken true, and like that frozen Knight I say; do not go, but I fear some shall, through some Dream or Autumn door, and Mab alone knows if you have or will for in that place there is no other God but Her, Christ have mercy on me.”

..............................................................................................




What Next?


In the words of Joesky; an adventure is on, as the fearful scribe ventures into what they see as the Fairy Palace of Queen Mab, crawling through its Crypt, visiting its Courts, speaking with (gently) its Knights and Ladies, and trying as best he can to get back the missing children and go home.

Well, from the opening text, you know they make it home, but you don’t know how, or what they see, how they are changed and who else makes it back with them.

This is Queen Mabs Palace, an adventure through a decaying, dying space-ship inhabited by crazed transhumanist radicals, through the eyes of a Medieval Scribe.

The main text is done. August is still working away on images. We are getting quotes in and preparing for a Kickstarter which should hopefully start around (or maybe before), Autumn, which seems appropriate for the Queen of Air and Darkness.

Gird your loins and batten down your marketing hatches, expect to here me going on about this for a while!

Wednesday 21 August 2024

Thief and Butterfingered Infinity

In one of my rare excursions into gaming, I recently finished 'Thief: The Black Parade'; a full game of fan-made missions for the 199-something “immersive sim” (before we had that phrase) – ‘Thief: The Dark Project’.

I originally conceived this article as an essay on the concept of ‘Butterfingered Infinity’; something about the uses and limitations of ‘natural language’ as compared to, and revealed by, a complex virtual simulation like Thief. 

In the end it became just the meat in a thief burger, with the start being a distaff review of a much-reviewed game and the end being an odd mix of suggestions for D&D.

The Thief-Review is below. 

The essay on Butterfingered Infinity in the middle.

Thief’s Lessons for D&D at the end.





Why Thief is Good


Thief was a nearly pure-stealth simulator which, through talent, work and luck, coalesced into perhaps the best stealth game. Other reviewers have talked about why this is in more depth than me; its engine, built specifically around shadow, its first-person nature, its exquisite and carefully engineered sound design, and the integration of that sound into its level design and its relationship with violence and the vulnerability of its main character.

[A brief digression on stealth and violence; they don’t mix. Stealth and murder, (or, if you are batman, stealth and a beating), make an intoxicating combination, such that, if you build a complex immersive sim, where both stealth and violence are available, any sane character build will naturally coalesce around some kind of stealth-archer or stealth-assassin - as this is optimal in-game and feels powerful to the player. 

Then, if the game wants to make the now hugely-empowered player behave in a purely-stealthy fashion, to fit the theme and feel of the game, they need to add in extra-diegetic elements, rulings, 'points*' and so on in order to make the player-character behave 'stealthily' and, in the words of one reviewer; ‘you are being stealthy to protect the NPCs from you, not to protect you from them’. 

This is a mistake no game in the Thief series ever makes, since the Player Character is always, by Protagonist standards, insanely vulnerable, and sword fights are a nightmare. The structure of the game, without extra-diegetic elements, makes you want to play as a thief. It’s a game where you can snipe people in the back of the head, but won't want to as it would feel unprofessional.

{A digression with a digression on ‘points’; There should be some neo-OSR ruling about points being the opposite of gold as, just as xp for gold is almost always good and feeds dietetically in so many ways into the game, there is a kind of reverse of that, in which, as soon as 'points' are involved in anything, it almost always gets worse, though the means and method of how that happens will vary greatly.}]





The Black Parade


Based on the engine for the original ‘Thief’, Black Parade is large and complex enough to be a fourth game in the franchise. For free. Which is, I think, larger than any of the other games, and might be the best one? At least I think it has more consistently high level design than any other version of the game.

Its staggering really that a small number of talented people could collaborate for so many years
to produce something both so massive, and so exquisite. Thief was always a distantly OSR-ish game and its fan-mission community is even more so. For ‘The Black Parade’ Melan gets a mention in the credits!


The Paradoxes of Thief Level Design


What defines Thief games more than anything else is level design and it is here that some of the interrelationships between Thief and the OSR are brought into focus

Fear, Desire, Exploration and Investigation


In 'Thief', you think like a thief. You are vulnerable and can be killed easily, so you carefully watch, and LISTEN, to the environment, constantly checking for threats. You also hide relentlessly, moving carefully from shadow to shadow, cursing electric lights and marble floors. Your only real safety is the darkness and so you cling to it instinctively, even when there is no tangible threat, because there might be one; a wandering guard or servant, or something else. 

So fear and vulnerability ensure you deeply and constantly search, investigate and utilise the environment, and when these are naturalistic environments, you are deliberately navigating them in a way that feels ‘inverse’ and therefore a little cool. You might be in a kitchen and, instead of doing Kitchen things, be searching for fragments of shadow in the light coming from the stove, creeping behind shelves etc.

You are a Thief, you want to steal not kill. There are no points for killing and increasing the difficulty of the game (usually) only increases the conditions of play, not the substance of the game itself. Maximum difficulty means getting all of the treasure without killing and sometimes even without harming anyone. {Thief does mix this up somewhat with the easy availability of the blackjack, with which you can "knock people out" (irl this would likely mean a lot of brain embolisms), but only if you catch them unawares}.

Desire keeps you fixated on that shiny artefact on the dresser, and carefully avoiding anything sensate or alive. Guards walk regular routes and chat with each other, and this means a chunk of Thief is listening for and measuring the movements of others, so you can avoid them. In almost every case you are searching for a way around anything dangerous. You are continually mapping the physical space in your head and also the routes and movements of any living thing within that space.


The Music of Pseudo-Naturalism


The best thief levels are pseudo-natural. You can intuit things about them from their nature and then investigate based on those intuitions, and sometimes be right, which makes you feel very clever stately home will have a kitchen and cellars, a Cathedral will have a belltower, etc. They are also physically distinct and separate from the surrounding area. 



The urban slum levels are slightly less-perfect because the pseudo-nature of the level becomes more obvious; there are unopenable doors and inaccessible areas; PNG’s of doors on buildings that rim the play area. Though you can still try opening them, and discover from the games response if they are actually just PNG doors, or would respond to a lockpick or yet-to-be-found key. A handful will turn out to be functional, as you will discover when you find the right thing to open them, or pop up from the other side after dicking about in a sewer for hours.

Still, it’s curious that in D&D there are no unopenable doors, or at least, there are no simulated doors. The play area, in theory, expands outwards forever, and in practice, only becomes misty, general and improvisational as you move out of whatever the DM has thought about already, (but come back next week and the details will have sharpened up a lot).

But, just like Dungeons’, Thief levels are almost never purely naturalistic. Firstly; they are simulated environments, and can’t match the chaos or complexity of the real world, second; they have locked doors which need keys, sequences of actions needed to progress, certain pieces of intelligence which must be combined to succeed; they have paths, like flow-charts, which lace through these otherwise wide-open environments.

Still they are otherwise very wide open, with a large array of possible ingress points, secret routes and other possible access-ways that strongly reward exploration, investigation and, sometimes, cunning extrapolation from the logic of the depicted world. Nothing is quite as pleasurable in Thief as spotting a chimney, pipe or ledge, wondering if you can get to it, finding a way to, then realising you can find a way inside/across, then popping up somewhere you should never have been able to get to.

There are “weird” Thief levels too, set in ancient magical tombs, lost cities or supernatural netherworlds, but they are never quite as good. Great Thief levels exist at a near perfect synthesis of  naturalistic play-space and toyetic, planned sequential-challenge environment. They are levels where the nature of the space provokes investigation and exploration, which it also rewards with naturalistic opportunities, where a complex adventure-flow runs through the pseudo-naturalistic space but where the space always gives opportunities for adaptation, evasion and incursion. A toybox with the lid half-open if you will.






Butterfingered Infinity


Thief is actively trying to give you an experience very like that of an AD&D Thief, and does so, in a curious mirror-view fashion, but the differences between a Thief in play in D&D, and a Thief in Thief, are interesting to consider.

Problem solving in D&D is often related to the concept of ‘tactical infinity’ due to the very wide-open nature of possible approaches to various problems, but its more like a ‘Butterfingered Infinity’ in which the Players can hold and use almost any imaginable, or describable, concept, but carefully, and with blunt inexactness. The infinity of the Word rather than the Vast but Finite potential of the Eye.


An Equation on the Utility of Butterfingered Infinity


A very rough pseudo-equation on the utility of words in roleplaying might be something like this;

[The Descriptive Power of Language] – [[(word concepts the DM actually knows) x [(The Speed of relation) + (what the Player Group can easily understand)]]


The Descriptive Power of Language


There are a lot of words. If you have enough time and a big enough dictionary, you can describe almost anything. It we assume the total potential of words, and look for things they absolutely cannot describe, there is not much, but here we enter paradox, because we are trying to use words to describe what words can’t describe.

(This is a problem which exists continually, as a faint umbra, which sometimes obscures and sometimes reveals, whenever we come to think about the things language can’t do, in almost any situation.)

But, so far as things that could be interacted with in a tabletop game, a computer game or any other form of simulation, let’s assume that words might be able to describe nearly everything necessary to know


How much the DM actually knows


The classic DM is a natural word-hound and Gygaxian Wunderkammer encyclopaedist. Not a few writers have named D&D as a font for their discovery and use of words, and the use of strange or novel words can, with limits, be a pleasurable aspect in itself in D&D.

Lets assume the DM knows a lot of words.


Speed of relation


We can describe anything if we have time. But technical, unfamiliar jargon, and highly precise measurements, as well as large numbers of things or elements, will all take time, which robs immediacy, and in some theoretical cases, perhaps a truly insane amount of time.


How much and how easily the players understand


For a concept to be useful, it has to be known to at least some of the players. A rare word-concept only the DM knows is a near-useless word-concept. It is the Player Group that must understand. I real terms this means, probably (?), at least two or three know it and can easily explain to the rest. If this happens many times in sequence, the game dies.

No-one is paying as much attention to the whole thing as the DM. Every individual has a totally different base capacity for imagining different things, so the words flow out, are half attended to
and when they are attended to, are understood differently by almost everyone. In effect, a DM has a relatively small ‘armoury’ of words and conceptual language which is strong, simple, descriptive and already mutually understood by almost everyone, from which they can take excursions into complexity, for short periods and specific problems, but which they always return to. We can think of this as the ‘verbal armoury’ or word-hoard of natural language. The aspects of spatial and physical situations that make up the meat and majority of D&D problem solving are those for which or conceptual language is already well developed and widely shared, and which can be imagined with ease by a wide variety of people. 

So: being STUCK to something, being TIED to someone. Being BEHIND someone. Getting a LEG UP.  In fact in terms of three-dimensional space, these are all things most of us did as children, which is why we understand them. For many of us who are not athletes or dancers, childhood was our first, last and by a large margin, greatest education in the nature of three-dimensional space and the language of physical problems remains that of the playground.





Responses to ‘The Limitations of Language’


I asked people on Twitter and Facebook about “things and situations you have experienced as a DM, which have proven really difficult to describe quickly and clearly using *only* spoken words?

(The classic is trying to describe a complex 3D environment to a bunch of people but I am interested in other examples.)”

The responses were very interesting!


Tim Samwise Seven Harper; “I sometimes struggle with describing natural environments filled with fantasy plants and animals. I always try to picture those scenes from Dark Crystal and that helps, or I default more toward real trees and plants as well as real life animals with a twist.

Big parties with hundreds of NPCs are always a challenge. I tend to use 3x5 cards with a few descriptive words on each NPC card.”

Yuri Zanelli; “PC's and other creatures' positions in their environment. Miniatures can help a lot with that, but I don't like to use them. My game tables tend to be already too crowded with maps, manuals, bottles, snacks, character sheets, dice, notepads and so on. I tend to use a quick sketch on a sheet of paper.”

Greg Benedicto; “Describing liminal elements in a scene WITHOUT drawing obvious attention to them.”

Jesse Rooney; “As a general rule, spacial relationships are much easier and faster to show then tell. Hence minis at the table. There are a number of times when playing theater of the mind that Ive pulled out a sketch pad to demonstrate who and what is where.”

John Enfield; “That's why I use gridded maps (either hand drawn or published), minis and occasionally terrain pieces. Having visual aids helps aid in describing environments.”

Ragnar Hill; “A good ambush because players always start squealing and panicking and then I get over excited.”

PARAMANDER @CravenSensation; “Mechanisms or devices made of many parts and monsters with complicated and alien anatomy. Even if each detail is relatively straightforward/easy to visualize, more details means higher potential for miscommunication + more attention required on the part of the players”


Derek Dees @NihilSineLabor; “Places with lots of shadows and light, not sharp contrasts, but layered or with partially obscured nooks and objects.

The Great Hall of Durin, as light broke through, but shadows still engulfed so much, for example.”


Bo Banducci @bo_banducci; “I’m struggling to remember one aside from the classic. Possibly when an NPC is lying to the players and I want to intimate this somehow without giving it away.”


Synthesis of Responses


I broke these down into a few large categories as a tool-of-thought, (with the usual effect that many real-life situations involve one or more categories, often in point and counterpoint.)  

These provide a very brief idea-map of things with which ‘Words’ are especially butterfingered;


PLETHORALITY


“natural environments filled with fantasy plants and animals”

“Big parties with hundreds of NPCs”

“Mechanisms or devices made of many parts and monsters with complicated and alien anatomy”


We know about these things because we encounter them in life, and the Eye can show them to us easily and immediately – well, if not quite immediately, a scene or painting can give us a very quick general impression of a scene with many things of strange and novel quality in it, which the scanning of the eye-and-mind can ‘fill in’ very smoothly and fluidly, much faster than words could describe. When the eye works with the ear, they can combine, bind and represent a truly complex scene, in but a moment. Nature can present deep, immediate and novel interconnected complexity in-one. Words are slow, specific and sequential, happening one after another, and sometimes blunt. These are two forms of time in conflict.

Thief does well with some forms of ‘Plethorality’; its ‘big views’ where you teeter on a rooftop and get a nice ’Batman’-esque view of a highly vertical city, are exciting and poetic, and also useful as you start planning routes and investigating things with the eye. But Thief, like other virtual simulations, is strongly limited in the number of active, moving, identifiable, people and living things it has going on. Not quite as much as words, but a fair amount. They really eat programming power.


DIMENSIONALITY


“PC's and other creatures' positions in their environment”

“As a general rule, spacial relationships are much easier and faster to show then tell”

Or more prosaically; physical positioning and complex three-dimensional situations. But ‘Dimensionality’ sounds cooler. 





In Thief the exact precision of a jump, climb or any other kind of movement, can be demonstrated in the substance of the world with deep subtlety and immediate precision. As in; “*this* I can jump on” to “*here* I can climb on to in a few moments”, “*here* I can climb up to, if I have equipment”. 

The assessments are fluid, rapid and immediate, and this is a key part of the game. A patrolling guard is here and going this way, the next pool of shadow is over here and it will take me this long over the loud marble floor to get there. Then a climb of this length, then.. and so on.. Immediate, intuitive, fast. 

A similar thing takes place with even small skirmishes, let along larger ones. Close physical positioning matters enormously and is very hard to communicate, accurately, and quickly, to a group. For this were sketch-maps made. Words alone have a butterfingered grasp on three-dimensional space.



LIMINALITY


“WITHOUT drawing obvious attention to them”

“A good ambush “

“Possibly when an NPC is lying to the players”

If problems with describing three-dimensional space were what I expected, and problems with ‘Plethorality’ were less expected, but make sense, then ‘Liminality’; secrets, shadows, deceptions and double meanings, in all ways, is an unexpected but quite beautiful problem to face.





It’s the illusionists problem. Or an actors problem. It seems to flow deeply from the situation of the GM or storyteller being the fount of both the reality as-a-whole, and of a deception within that reality.

A simple example; a scene in a visual narrative like a play or film. One character is lying. The actor and director want the audience to know they are lying. But the characters in the fiction are not supposed to know. How to solve this?

The answer depends entirely on the naturalism and subtlety of the fiction, its tellers and its audience. In a pantomime or cheesy melodrama, or a children’s play, its relatively simple, at least in concept; the mustachoed villain twirls their moustache and even cocks an eye at the audience, before saying “of course not! Bwahahaha!”.

The more naturalistic the drama becomes, the more complex and difficult the lie becomes to communicate. For a soap actor, a touch of archness, for a dramatic actor, a complex scene-setting and capturing by the director to prepare the way for the lie and leave the right kind of space around it, for a highly naturalistic ‘spy’ or intrigue drama – almost nothing maybe, but the tone and emotional volume of the scene must be low or even and this might suit best a modernist story where the audience just never finds out what the ‘truth’ is, or at least that ‘finding out’ isn’t central to what the story is doing.

For other kinds of secrets, they have been written about in depth by many people. How, and how often, to portray lying NPC’s, (my last read on OSR culture was that it was generally anti deceptive NPC’s because they were over-used, difficult to get right and crippled the PCs long term relationship with the game-world, leading to more murderhoboism than desired), huge debates and discussions on how to run investigations, (what does or doesn’t count as railroading), and clues, (the ‘three clue rule’), 

“Places with lots of shadows and light, not sharp contrasts, but layered or with partially obscured nooks and objects.”

This was an especially interesting response as, I didn’t even mention Thief in the question, and literal complex environments full of layered shadow is the main thing that Thief does. They built an engine specifically for the game called ‘the shadow engine’. 

Though this has strong elements of Plethorality, (the simultaneous number of things and their complexity), and Dimensionality, (its about a large, complex, 3D space), the fact that it is also about the revealed/unrevealed paradox at the heart of Liminality is fascinating to me.

Words find it hard to form reliable shadows and perceptible lies. Words can lie easily, but its very hard to get them to build a lie as-object. 



Thief Lessons


Considering the deep differences revealed between the world of the Eye and Virtual Simulation, and the world of the Word, and social, conversational simulation, are there lessons we can actually learn from Thief about how to run D&D? Or are the worlds so different that we might even deliberately not  try to transfer lessons between them, as they would lead to bad play?

Here are a handful of concepts from Thief and some comments from me on how and whether they might be useful in D&D.


‘Ghost Missions’


Even the hardest level of Thief doesn’t demand that you be seen by no-one, but high settings often insist you hurt no-one.

In D&D the effects of a difficulty setting or complex level can be delivered diegeticaly by a highly specific quest-giver; a priest or wizard wants something, and insists that you ‘kill no-one’ or ‘hut no-one’ or in extreme versions ‘are never seen at all’, performing a ‘perfect ghost’ Mission Impossible situation where the incursion takes place and no one ever knows it happened at all.

(Of course the Party get paid a lot for fulfilling these conditions.)
A mission like this already implies a very different kind of D&D, a quest based around planning, surveillance, mapping and intelligence gathering, and then a quick and complex incursion full of distractions. 

Difficult to pull of in D&D, but far from impossible,


Sketchy Maps


Thief usually provides a map for each mission, and it is always a vague map. A sketch map with some useful information, but a huge amount of things it doesn’t tell you. Its usually enough for you to orient yourself in the play area and tell where the major sections roughly are, but absolutely insists you explore to find out what you need to know.





More sketchy dungeon and play area maps before games might be a good idea. Diegetic literal ‘sketch maps’ by previous thieves and adventurers. Maps good enough for you to form the bones of a plan, but clearly vague enough that you know going in that they won’t describe everything. 


Monster PATROLS, not Monster ROOMS


God damn patrols are hard to manage in D&D without a lot of extra shit. No wonder monsters in D&D just really like their particular rooms. Its easy to simulate one or two from the encounter table, but a key element of Thief is timing the patrols. If patrols are regular or even mostly regular and predictable, then they become part of the environment you can learn about and plan for, and evading or subverting them makes you feel very clever as a player.

Arranging a full system of patrols for a dungeon or wizards tower would probably require an entire sub-system, but it might be fun to give it a try.


Clumsy Monsters with Keys



There should be more clumsy monsters carrying VERY OBVIOUS keys through the darkness. Big, dumb stupid but dangerous ogre guards who could easily one-shot a PC if they see them, with huge gold or silver keys hanging by their sides.

I’ve spoken at length before about how the big, dumb, dangerous ogre is the perfect low-level opponent for D&D. 


Helix Views/Verticality


Dark-Souls helix-like atriums. In terms of dungeon design, this would be a game where there is more up and down. A dungeon arranged around a step well, inside a tower, down a mountains slope or similar. 


Tempting Treasure


Would being able to SEE the treasure really have the same effect in a described game as in a virtual simulation? 

For the main treasure, the idea is that, from most points of ingress, the main treasure the PCs are here to get is very visible, in a revered-panopticon style, but very hard to actually get to. I imagine it poised on the top of a tower, itself at the bottom of a vast cylindrical step-well or similar. You have to infiltrate all the way down, and then all the way up to get to it. 

Thief has a lot of visually obvious, but very hard to reach, small and light treasures. So many in fact that it becomes hard to believe you have fit them all in your Thief-sack. Rather than having lots of mixed, hidden treasures in a dungeon-equivalent, what if instead, there were a small number of very gold and shiny very visible treasures, each in the centre of a complex, shadowy environment with guards patrolling, traps and other hidden obstacles, so it was easy to see where the treasure was, but very hard to work out how to get to it.


Discoverable Pseudo-False Alarms


A ‘ghost’ mission which demands perfect, or near perfect, stealth, (from a group), and pseudo-naturalistic patrolling guards, suggests a very binary result to mistakes. Which is; you make one, are discovered, alarm raised, mission a dead loss and now you are just fighting to get away.

In D&D you have a group who all need not to fuck up, and there is no quicksave, so some of the binary, complex and difficult challenges of Thief just won’t work.

An idea might be a way of artificially cancelling a general alarm. Or several ways, but each one only works once and is specific. This would be the equivalent of modern Thieves calling in to the police station with the password to tell them it’s a false alarm.

If the guards are big dumb ogres, and other things with less adaptability, like ghosts or constructs, then its not impossible there might be some kind of code or sign to get them to stop banging the Big Bell, blowing the alarm horn or whatever it is. Ideally, each of these methods would be completely different, and you would need to actually do the incursion and poke around to find some of them out. There would also likely be a max-usage, where, if you trigger the alarm three times, even if you have methods spare, even the Ogres are going to keep ringing the bell.


Visual Verticality


One of the most fun and engaging elements of a Thief level, if its pseudo-natural, is getting up really high, maybe somewhere you had spotted earlier, and climbing about, pulling a batman, looking down at the streets and tenements, the little guards scurrying about, and having a Cid Kagenou moment as you cackle to yourself about all the SHEEP below you!




For all the reasons give above in ‘Plethorality’ – this would be hard to make use of.

One method would be to combine the ‘Coms Snails’ idea below, with an ‘Eagles Perch’ position. Some hidden spot far above the play area with a big view that allows one person to sit there and whisper information to their fellow PCs as they buzz about below, each on their individual missions.


Comms snails


My old teen players got a bunch of silver-shelled telepathic snails and ended up using them as in-ear comms. In a Noisms game, we tried using psychic shrimp as a radio base in a similar way.

Why? Because comms are super-useful in D&D and once you have seen them in a film youjust naturally want to use them in group mission situations.

I know this is CRINGE as FUCK from a low-fantasy OSR perspective, BUT – it’s so deeply and desperately useful in doing meaningful physical GROUP stealth storytelling and problem-solving. It turns a knockabout fiasco into a heist.

For a purely-stealth mission where you actively don't want violence to happen, having the party split up is actually good it makes much less sense if they are all together, huddled together as a ‘stealthy gang’?, since stealth as a group always starts to feel more ridiculous than is useful. The social dynamics of play push against it and a tragedy of the commons situation happens where one impulsive player ends the mission.

Around the table, everyone can hear everything the everyone is saying and doing, so the extra-dimensional player-entities that pilot the PCs always have more of a global awareness than the PCs themselves, which, even with very disciplined play, often communicates itself to the PCs via shadowy tubes.

Allowing Comms-Snails for stealth-only missions might actually be a good idea that would improve play. Perhaps the stealth-obsessed wizards who hired you will loan them out.


Less-Lethal Falling


In these levels with-verticality, there should be more falling, and it should be less lethal. More bits where you fall into water, or something similar, but it doesn't kill you, and you end up at a different spot in the dungeon, separated from the group, and can explore and maybe find new routes to what you want, or just to link back up.

If being noticed is a fail state, then non-lethal separation is more interesting in play than HP loss.


Sound-Encounters


I think Brendan and others (possibly many others), have considered this will the ‘overloaded’ encounter die, but more encounters when you things or people coming, would be interesting.

In standard D&D being surprised is a reasonable punishment for dicking about and not paying attention, but in a stealth-only game, the threat of being discovered is more useful – the PCs have maybe one or two actions to hide or try something.


Stealth via Diegetic Sound


This isn’t directly from Thief, but I do think it would be a fun idea for stealthy D&D, which is; the sound you make around the table is the sound your character is making in the game.

So, if you want your PC to be stealthy – SHUT THE FUCK UP, and get WHISPERING! I think this would be a fine addition to the game. It would give all PCs access to some form of silence, and would encourage the players to actually fucking concentrate and think for once in their lives.


The ‘Mission Turnabout’


One possible useful import from Thief might be the ‘turn’ that happens in a lot of missions, for its is a way of involving liminality and deception that might  be useable in D&D.

The classic ‘questgiver turns on you when you are done’, is rightly abjured in OSR circles, for reasons well-known. (Although Thief, does in fact use this trope a lot). But the idea of a delve having a clear set of objectives, and then, right in the middle of the adventure, something is discovered or something changes, and suddenly the goals and nature of the mission change, and change a lot, leaving you to improvise a new plan and work with the same space you had previously, but towards entirely new goals, this could work in D&D I think.




Things that happen in Thief include;

Shalebridge Cradle – you sneak through the haunted asylum, but to complete the mission you have to turn the electric lights on, then somehow sneak past all the terrifying things again, in bright light.

Ghosts – You sneak past some dumb zombies and animals, but grabbing the target means a supernatural event and oh fuck actual high level ghosts and wraiths are now patrolling about.

Rescue to Heist or Heist to Rescue – You are going in to get someone out, but can’t and end up having to re-plan to grab an item, or the opposite is true.

Guards Guards – getting in is easy but the alarms go off and now the 

The entire axis of a mission might alter and now you are trying to do a very different thing, a theft becomes a rescue, an assassination becomes a theft, an exfiltration becomes a sabotage. This might be do-able in D&D. 


NPC Conversations


This was one charming Thief method that sadly I could find no way to use. In Thief, guards and servants commonly mutter and complain to themselves while wandering around, they also have sometimes long, informative or just whacky conversations with each other in pairs. Just two guards chatting in the middle of the night. Coming upon these conversations and sneaking around behind them while they yap is quite charming, and listening to them often provides intel. But I couldn’t find a way to reproduce, or even use, this in D&D as long intra-NPC convo’s are a damned nightmare when the DM has to deliver the whole thing. Maybe if you are a massive ham it could be fun.


A Thief-like Dungeon


So, what do we have?

Powerful and wealthy wizards hire the PCs to do a heist. They offer to pay a LOT and have strong conditions;
Grab this one particular thing and bring it to them.
You don’t kill anyone or the missions off
Ideally, you swap the thing for a fake they will give you. This raises your pay.
Even better – no-one has any idea you were ever there. Perfect Ghosts.
They will give you these comm-snails to help, but they don’t live long.
They have some sketchy maps and a handful of ideas about where to get more intel. 


The mission is a mansion-tower, maybe in a deep valley, or an ancient terrace mine, or somehow part sunken into the under verse. There are layers to go down, they are arranged as gardens or mazes or other somewhat-knowable patterns.

At the bottom is the mansion/tower/castle. 

You have to sneak all the way down, then get inside, then sneak all the way up to get the thingy.

There will be locked doors, gates, traps and hidden problems.

There is an overwatch position somewhere where one person can see a lot of the area. If a PCs can get there and hide, they can whisper a lot of useful info to the others.

Its guarded by a clan of strong ogres. They are pretty dumb. They walk in regular patrols with lanterns. If they have a key they have it tied to their big belt with a label saying KEY, so they know what it is. The keys are also large.

There is a big gong or bell the Ogres bang on if they think something is up. There might be some kind of counter-signal or password or spell to convince them to stop this, but your patrons don’t know what it is, though it may be discoverable in the area.

There are sewers and fast-flowing water. Several of the falls, drops and traps dump you into these and will wash you up somewhere, or wash you against a grate you can climb up.

If you do get the actual treasure – surprise, it’s the only things holding the Vampire/Lich/Ghost in place. You now need to get out, but instead of, and sometimes as well as, dumb Ogres, you will now be dealing with clever, dangerous ghosts or vampires with keen senses.