A Review of 'Local Heroes' by Amanda Lee Franck

"put on a mysterious hat or a wizard robe or a regular robe"

(Disclosure; I am friends with the creator so you can add this review to the ever-expanding ‘OSR Circlejerk’ sub-category).

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Local Heroes - is a 16-page PDF game that Amanda Lee Franck put out on her Patreon, so far you can only get it there! (Or on her Comradery, which is communist Patreon.)

A single-session game about about a single night; the players play themselves, the game-world is their own. They are given gifts and sent to fight a multidimensional monster which must be dead (banished) by dawn.

Imagining the Known

Character generation has already been done. In rules terms this means (unless you have that Fireman/Marine buddy) everyone has relatively ‘flat’ characters, and that everyone knows who everyone is, and that everyone knows what everyone can do. A basic exchange system exists to discourage inane min-maxing or self-delusion, though, since its near-assumed that the players will be a semi-familiar friend group, the honour system, and embarrassment, will be the more effective restriction.

The game begins (in-world) at midnight and the creature need only see the sun to win. Thankfully is is bent on wiping out the heroes opposing it and won’t just get a taxi out of town, and hopefully you are playing in Winter and dawn is many hours away.

What remains is planning and manipulating the environment and a small selection of magical tools. You get an hour of lead time - all those fragments of local knowledge can actually be utilised - zombie escape plans, the locations of building equipment and industrial machinery, of train tracks and ruined buildings, unfilled pits, canal locks, teetering long-term structural collapses, places that might be set on fire, walled gardens, funnel spaces, dead zones in the middle of vast roadworks, strange places difficult to get into or out of, water mains, electrical junctions and pylons, barbed wire, hardware stores, fire axe locations. Its a memory-and-play game for local residents.

As it pulls on local memories so much, and as the honour system and mutual knowledge are quite useful in shaping ‘character generation’, this is not a good ‘Con Game’ and therefore mildly unamerican - it is not highly systematised, depends on local knowledge, is not great for a mixed group of strangers meeting in a place unfamiliar to all, and might not work well in rural America, the south, or anywhere where gun ownership is common or widespread - your average game with a bunch of enthusiastic gun owners might be pretty short. (Or might not, the Monster is not always vulnerable to bullets).

The Multi-Stage Problem-Monster

There is only one enemy and you know its coming. It has a range of ten, or sometimes more, possible forms. Each form is that of a hero who opposed it in the past. It can change forms five times until it ‘slinks back into the void’ and and most forms have specific win conditions. (Though in most cases you can still beat it to death or smash it to bits.) One of the possible ‘transformations’ is a tower with three archers and a series of complex traps and environments inside. If the creature kills a PC’s it might take on their form.

The monster transforming into a place, then back again, is I think, new, (though if someone else has come up with it, I am sure you will tell me in the comments, or would have if this was 2015 and people still commented on things.)

Few of the forms can be straightforwardly fought, but then the special relics gifted to the team are barely weapons at all, but curious tools with strong specific game effects.

Parlour Game

While its not a ‘Con Game’, Local Heroes feels much more like something like ‘Werewolf’, a parlour game of problem-solving you could play with normies. They barely need to imagine anything at all, only recall who they are and where they live, and the Aristotelian compression of time and space, and single, set, obvious and declared win-condition (defeat the multidimensional monster in five of its forms, before sunrise, using these particular tools), hopefully nukes most decision paralysis. Its quite Dowlian in that sense.

False Machine Christmas Discount!

Orders to the U.S. are back up (and have been for a while. I originally intended this to be a discount for Americans only (as everyone else in the world has had the equivalent during the Tariff Chaos a few months ago).

However! BigCartel makes it very difficult indeed to set up discounts specifically for one nation (without a LOT of dicking around on the back end), so now, this is a UNIVERSAL 50% DISCOUNT for EVERYONE till CHRISTMAS DAY.

And if you actually want stuff by Christmas, then in effect you have about two weeks to order.

The discount code is; HOHOHO

When you make your order, after shipping has been added, but before you pay, type in HOHOHO to the discount bar and that will take 50% off your total order.

It’s ONE PER EMAIL.

It EXPIRES CHRISTMAS DAY.

I reserve the right to CANCEL and IGNORE if you order like an insane shitload of books.

The store is HERE; https://falseparcels.bigcartel.com/

MERRY CHRISTMAS!

Currencies of the Dark

Design concepts for money in VotE: ReDux

Light is the Currency

Light is often only way to find a path and stay alive. Light is a resource that is always being eaten away. Light must be carried, in the form of lamp and fuel. Light is literally a currency; the Lume.

Distance relates to time. There is no solar cycle down below. Seasons and cyclic calendars, are partial, conditional and strange. The most important aspect of travel is how long it takes to get somewhere; this is measured in a loss of Lumes; “eight lumes distant” means you will need eight hours of strong light to find your way there.

Prime Currencies of the Veins

The Lume = 1l

The ghosts of fireflies made extinct in a long-forgotten apocalypse. The pale wraiths are imperishable, distinct, and gather and gust through currents in the Veins, moving in swarms through ocean and stone. Only rarely are they accessible en-masse; the means of capture and containment are particular and queer.

The ghosts are held in little bags made from fine intestine; ‘glow bags’, or in little Lantern-pots of clay or bone. They are transferred with great care; sucked into pipes of silver, bone or reed, held at the end in clumps, or trapped on little honey-dabs held at the ends of sticks, then gentle ‘poofed out’; transferred to another’s ‘Glow Bag’. Merchants and settled peoples have scales for measuring the unweight of a Glow Bag so that the bags themselves can be exchanged.

The massless nature of the ‘Lume’ and the extreme difficulty of forging Lumes, helps to make them the base ‘physical’ currency of the Veins; they can be carried without impediment, but not without care. The fact that ‘Glow Bags’ can be damaged in combat, or opened, and the ‘Lumes’ set free, to float away into the stone, makes them difficult to steal. The slow and ritual nature of exchanging Lumes is favoured in the Veins as, in this careful breathing and depositing, both sides of become vulnerable to the other; to exchange is a matter of trust.

A Glow Bag of Lumes of a little bone or clay Lamp-Pot, gives out its own small ghost-light; a vague glow up to five or ten feet of clarity, if that, but enough to accomplish small tasks or to provide comfort in the dark. Veinslings may sleep, or do small deeds, lit by their purses glow.

The Lume as literal currency is paired with the ‘Lume-as-Concept’. A ‘Lume’ is worth one hour of strong light, in whatever form, though the most usual form of exchange is Whale-Oil. What counts as useful light varies enormously according to the buyer, the seller and local conditions, but the universality of this conception; One Lume = One Hour of Light, forms the pillar of stability in economy of the Veins. All is based on the Lume, counted in Lumes, and reduced back to Lumes. Even distances are given in Lumes as that indicates how many hours of light you will need to reach wherever it is.

Occultum = 10,000l

A massless shadowy disc, its edges blurred, the texture of Occultum is felt by the Soul, rather than material flesh, (Golems, like many Janeen Viziers, cannot use them directly).

No-one really knows exactly where Occultum Coins are made or found. Rumours say they are forged in some hell, or minted in a ‘House of Leaves’ where the substance of reality is strange. They come always from below.

Like ‘Lumes’ they weigh nothing like are impossible to forge. Occultum is magic-neutral, it cannot be picked up, manipulated, scried or otherwise altered via magic. The coin itself resists duplication. The black discs cannot be chopped, melted, cut or ground down; if chipped or ‘snapped’ they simply ‘burst’ collapsing into little static clouds and staining the area nearby with fluctuations in natural chance.

The one danger of owning too many Occultum Coins is that, if kept in large numbers, they are inherently uncertain, meaning the total value and number of the coins may fluctuate. The extent of this fluctuation increases the more you have. Usually if you get into triple digits, you can expect a variation of about 5% over time, with there sometimes being up to 105 coins and sometimes as few as 95. (In rare cases variations can be more extreme). Nevertheless, the variation itself tends to be stable over time, so many wealthy cultures maintain their core currency reserves in Occultum; they can eat the cost of temporary fluctuations, it all evens out over time.

Occultum has a heavy cultural weight which goes beyond the movement of economies and trade routes. Just as in our world, Gold is Gold, and signals and displays wealth, permanence and seriousness, regardless of the fluctuations of the times, in the Veins, Occultum is Occultum. Even the most high-toned merchants or Lords would not refuse payment in the Black Coin. Of all currencies, perhaps only Lumes themselves are more stable and only Cloudcradle silk of equal status.

Occultum is known to, and accepted by, supernatural and extra-planar entities. Demons, Ghosts, and Things from Beyond, all accept its worth and for some rare magical services Occultum is the only coin accepted; a disc equivalent to mortal souls.

Intermediate Currencies

The Veins has a massive and permanent problem with making change. The two most well-known, accepted and strongest currencies, the ‘massless two’; Lumes, and Occultum (which is still ultimately measured in Lumes), occupy the far ends of the value scale. What on earth do you do when you need to buy intermediate things? To some extent ‘Glow Bags’ can make up for this, but the Veins has developed a range of complex intermediate currency-equivalents to make up the difference.

None of these are ‘massless’ in the same manner as Lumes or Occultum, but all are very light and a great many are slightly luminescent themselves. While every culture will accept Lumes, Occultum and Silk, an exchange for these intermediate currencies is not universally guaranteed, you may have to chop and change to work things out.

Gleams = 8l

Also called ‘Gleamers’ or ‘Butane Gleamers’. These gems are blue as the flame. Their edges seem to shiver in the dark. Usually these are bagged up into ‘Bags of Gleams’ worth about 80l each.

Slave-Month Links (or just 'Links') = 31l (varies)

Usually made in chased and engraved silver. Each culture, (often Knotsman, Aelf-Adal and various Janeen Courts), engraves its links in a varied and highly distinct style. Each link represents a nominal month of particular labour owed. Often gathered into great linked chains and worn by potentates. Ray-Men and some other cultures with weird principals might refuse to take these.

Toxolucent Emeralds ('Greens') = 200l

Acidic and slightly poisonous to the touch, its widely thought these are cut from rare bezoars recovered from abyssal creatures of the Nightmare Sea. Olm will almost always refuse these.

Topaz Flames ('Flames') = 500l

These seem to glimmer and flicker slightly in the hand. Though they are utterly cold, when smashed, they reliably produce a burst of pure flame. Undead prefer not to deal in these.

Knotsman Debt-Threads ('Knots') = Variable & Bespoke

Knotsmen record their debts and contracts in what else, but knots? Formed in rare and precious materials depending on the depth of the debt. Neither immaterial nor magical, and sometimes frustratingly bespoke and weird, the strength of the knots as currency comes from the fanatical dedication of Knotsman culture to maintaining them. Knotsmen hate to be in debt to anyone from outside their culture. They are very eager to ‘gain knots’ as this gives them power over others from within their culture. All are utterly deranged in their pursuit of counterfeiters. Though a strong material currency, some cultures or groups just really hate Knotsmen and will refuse to deal with these. Also the nature of the exchange can just be weird; how much is a ‘Thirteenth-level Fundamental Humiliation” worth in real money?

Whale Oil  – Variable

Somewhere between a trade good and a currency, Whale Oil is useful, ubiquitous and has a regular rate of exchange. Compared to most Veins currencies, it is a bit heavy and difficult to use, but it literally burns to make a pure, bright, smokeless (important for Veins cultures who hate waste and staining the rock), flame. Usually sold in ‘day pots’ for 24 hours of clean-burning oil, (24 Lumes) or ‘watch pots’ for eight hours of light (8 Lumes). For some groups, traders or individuals who have solved their light problem by other means, the Oil is just not worth it as a medium of exchange. Olm find it useless but might take it at a reduced rate, Opal-Winged Chiropterae in particular tend not to like it.

Bank Notes = Variable

There are banks in the dark, often associated with the Great Cultures or with one or more of the Grand Coagulations (cities). Usually run by Vampires for their Aelf-Adal overlords, the worth of such a currency will often diminish the further into the Wastes you get. Though, if you can get to another Alef-Adal-run Coagulation, they will often accept these notes, more as a point of pride, since to refuse them would be an insult to another Aelf-Adal, (unless the Byzantine intrigues of that race means these Courts are currently opposed, in which case they may not only refuse, but also take offense.)

The nature of these Notes/Bonds/Certificates can vary from something like an exquisitely handwritten I.O.U, to something like an actual, printed note, though usually hand-printed on soft skin, rather than machine printed on paper. (Aelf-Adal know about various forms of surface money.)

If you are in an Aelf-Adals city-coagulation, it’s hard not to take payment in their bank notes. After all, they have the Aelf-Adals name and perhaps something like a face on them, and are signed by Vampire Banker. A whole sub-skill of ‘ritual excuses’ exists to allow Veinslings to attempt to get out of being paid in local notes.

Silks

Even cheap silk is light, resistant to decay, and compresses down deeply, allowing a large surface area to be transported in a relatively small ‘bale’.

Silk is heavily associated with the Aelf-Adal. A ‘Bale’ of silk is in most cases, much smaller and lighter than that transported on the historical silk Road in our reality. Even for ‘Rough Silk’ like Whipsilk, a ‘bale’ will only be two or three feet square and weigh 40 to 50 kilos. The highest value of silk is sold in ‘hands’; roughly thick envelope or small parcel sized packages, which, due to the incredible density of packed silk, can still weigh quite a lot; 5 to 10 kilos.

Whipsilk = 10c per bale

Silk given as a status symbol to slaves trusted to oversee their fellow slaves. An illusory boon. The silk carries the cultural taint of alien flesh and Aelf-Adal will never touch it once it has been used. A nominal advantage is that Aelf-Adal will tend to assume that anyone wearing Whipsilk is some kind of Slave Overseer, and ritually not-perceive them.

Stormsilk = 25l per bale

Colour of a storm sky and rough to the touch. A perfectly serviceable ‘commoners silk. Worn by the lowest members of a Coagulation, by normie Once-Men out in the sticks or by Aelf-Adal ‘hunting parties’ who want to make a point about getting out of the Spire and ‘roughing it’.

Chainsilk = 50l per bale

If braided can form a strong rope or chain. Practical. Carries a little cultural ‘cool’ as it is standard military gear for many cultures and coagulations.

ClipperSilk = 100l per hand

Tough, noted for its ability to survive long journeys. Not well respected. A bit of a Bourgeois upwardly-mobile low-rent social climber silk. The very top of the ‘middle class’ silks, but the bottom of the ‘upper class’ silks. Does anyone actually wear this stuff?

Maskmaker Silk = 500’ per hand

Valuable enough that if given as tribute one can be considered to have ‘made ones mask’ in Aelf-Adal terms – a sufficient bribe to be someone actually worth talking to. Makes up much of the ‘baseline wear’ for Aelf-Adal and other Volume Lords.

Cloudcradle Silk = 1,000’ per hand

Like folded smoke, flowing wearable steam. In most coagulations, this is either illegal to wear under direct sumptuary laws without being a member of the ruling class, or is simply culturally impossible to wear unless you are so.

Being gifted this silk, or given formal dispensation to wear it, makes you near-officially part of that rulers ‘Court’. Be careful; accepting this means that in a sense, the giver ‘owns’ you, and takes responsibility for you, which can be good or bad in many ways.

Cloudcradle silk is highly valued by traders as light, tough, high-value currency. It is probably used more as currency than as clothes; so few who live and breathe are willing or able to wear it.

Design Notes

Collapsing the concept of the ‘Lume’

In the original VotE, the ‘Lume’ was purely a concept, rather than a material thing, but I thought, people generally won’t understand this or grasp it, and also I thought ‘why not?’. There seemed to be little disadvantage to me in making ‘Lumes’ both a concept and an actual thing you could use in game, that way the concept and the physical item reinforce each other (though of course, in keeping with VotE aesthetic and world-scheme, they are not actually physical.

So now a ‘Lume’ is one of these tiny firefly ghosts you keep in a special little bag or pot. You can exchange one of these ghosts for one hour of strong (really 30 to 50 ft visibility or more, but you can negotiate that), light with most merchants and settled peoples.

The ‘Lumes’ themselves also make a little light eternally, but only enough to do close hand-work with, probably not enough to help you get around (though a last ditch possibility for those severely lost).

The difficulty and slowness of exchanging Lumes, and the kind of ritual behaviour it suggests, seems to me to fit the nature of the Veins, as does their weightless nature and the fact that, if lost or thrown away, they simply disappear into the stone without a trace.

If you think this was a dumb idea you can let me know in the comments.

Finding Treasure/Getting Paid

Generally players really like to find treasure and to get paid in weird, distinct and particular ways.

In most cases its more enlivening to find a curious artefact, or even a bag of jewels or bale of rare silk than just a pile of coins.

This works out more in the low to mid levels of a game, where the value of a particular treasure or gem or something as a trade item still has potency. As you get into the higher levels I have generally found that people stop caring as much.

Likewise, sometimes people actually want a little haggling sub-game where you have to try to get your hands on the kind of currency you want and avoid those less useful, but sometimes you really just want the whole thing over and done with so you can end the session. It depends on taste and circumstance.

This currency pattern is meant to be adaptable to both playstyles if needed. You can enliven and solidify it by giving players a bunch of weird currencies, each desired or disliked by different cultures under different circumstances, or you can just abstract the whole thing to ‘so many lumes’.

Hopefully, finding or being given Occultum should remain deeply interesting and exciting at any level. I wanted it to be, and to feel, special.

[Occultum has always been, and still is, based on the Obol, first invented by Mateo Diaz.]

Mixing Currencies/Using Money

For the silks and intermediate currencies I fell back on a lot of ideas I first used in ‘Deep Carbon Observatory’, though with somewhat altered values.

Most of the Gems are super easy to carry but have things that are slightly wrong with them (Emeralds mildly toxic, Topaz might actually set you on fire if it breaks). Others have moral issues (Slave-Links or Knotsman ‘Humiliations’), some are just a bit awkward (Whale Oil and Bank Notes).

The ‘Bales’ are meant to be fucking annoying to carry around, but still solid currency, better in the early game or perhaps moved en-masse by servants in the later game as part of a trading journey.

…

U.S orders are now open on the False Machine Store

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I am going to Dragonmeet at the end of November

I don’t have a store or a talk or anything, and so far have no particular plans but I will be there.

A Review of 'All Tomorrows' by C.M. Kosemen

C.M. Kosemen; as he might say; "kind of a (lip smack) weeeiird guy.... kind of a dream cormorant.”

‘All Tomorrows’ is an artbook super-scaled in time; multi-millennia, then multi-millions of years pass in the spaces between pages. The book tells the story of mankind’s ascent to space, transformation and galactic spread through slower-than-light genesis pods, then a kind of soft galactic dominance, then the arrival of eldritch super-aliens, the Qu, who are pissed off to find the galaxy full of genocidal space-apes (that was their job).

Annoyed and offended by the weeds, they transform humanity into an hundred thousand twisted forms, more akin to the punishments of Dante or the geography of Herodotus than the blank ‘scientific’ scourings of more common sci-fi vibes.

Then ‘Qu’ then just... wander off, off to another galaxy, leaving the ruins of twisted humanity behind. These altered men, mainly fall extinct, but then, over a million or so years, fragments evolve, into wild, highly different strains.

But that’s only half way through the book, and the book is not super-long. We still have several cycles of super-races, terrifying galactic genocides, remaking’s, falls ascensions etc, before we reach the end.

‘All Tomorrows’ is a book of mutations. It takes a lot from speculative evolution, but also feels a little medieval in a way; partly as a ‘book of curiosities’ (look at this weird little guy!), partly due to playful aspects (a post-human at a rock concert, a snake man jiving to some snake-jazz), and partly due to its slight shades of moralism, punishment through transformation, ascension through time.

The book speaks in the language of (speculative) evolution, meaning reaches of deep time so great, and changes so massive, that for any single sentient in the midst of them, the journey as a whole would be so vast it was invisible, even irrelevant, and, like with evolution on earth, horrible, terrible terrifying bursts of brutal and near absolute extinction. Like if two thirds of the way through Anna Karrenena, literally EVERYONE in the cast died, and every city was destroyed, except for one side character that wasn’t really mentioned before, and the book just carried on looking at this one side character; what is this guy up to? Look, he’s trying to survive, look at him eating dirt for a couple thousand years. (Because the civilisations are galactic, all the extinctions are deliberate genocides, no meteor or pulsar could be big enough to wipe out everyone).

Like any book of deep time, from Hallidays ‘Otherworlds’ to one of Forteys books on Geology, the moral challenge it sets is subtle, mysterious, vast; great and terrible things will happen, mighty alterations, dark galactic crimes, cruel perverse punishments, utterly random and meaningless death. Can all of these things even be said to be a ‘story’? or just a record of events? The reach of deeds so vast that over the incredible eons, the meaning of these things for any particular individual is... little? Like the man who carefully raised his child without reference to particular colour linkages, simply to discover what the child would describe, and then one say asked him; “What colour is the sky?” only to be told; “The sky doesn’t have a colour.” For it was truly a vault of light and not a ‘thing’ at all; so, in a way similar to Stapledon, we are left just kind of vibing.

Stories call for villains, heroes and adventures, and this book sort of has these; after all, what are a bunch of entirely mechanical black spheroid genocidal super-science post-humans who canonically want to ‘kill all life’, if not villains? But Koseman oars his way into his own text to remind us that in the grand scheme of events, they are not, nor can there really be, ‘bad guys’, and indeed you might quite like black mechanical genocidal spheroid if you sat down with one. It’s no crime to speak both in the language of epic time, beyond the concerns of daily man, and also in the language of comprehensible adventure, in fact you might call this a central polarity of the successful large scale sci-fi story, but though this is a fundamental axis of the form, it’s still a disjunction and should be noted.

Perhaps the only viewpoint which can synthesise and imbue with meaning such vast reaches of chaotic time is that of a god so gigantic and indifferent that even their existence makes little difference to the motes that float within its eye.

It would be cool to play a fantasy RPG where you got to encounter (and perhaps play as) all these varieties of humanity, (it’s not beyond the Qu to set up such a world for a laugh), and almost as cool to play some kind of Star Trek/Mass Effect game where you play as a federation of these whacky post-humans. Think about playing an asymmetric man and a composite guy and a snake lady on some kind of Star Trek away-mission; pretty wild. (It would also make sense of everyone having pseudo-human morality and having enough psychological similarities that they could actually communicate).

I suppose we can wait for the possible Adrian Tchaikovsky ‘All Tomorrows’ expanded universe or comic book series (’AT’ seems to spring from the same general noosphere as ‘Prophet’ and Calum Diggles ‘Humanity Lost’ - it will be 50 years r more before some boomer incarnates anything like this in film, they are so slow), though the Koseman-verse, despite its playful grotesquerie’s, is much more (relatively) low-fi and saves the actual FTL causality-twisting technology until deep in a species development, when it has already become so queer and clever that its mentality and viewpoint is deeply detached from whatever we might understand.

I did say the ‘language of speculative evolution’ and I think it really is a language, with wild swings from its ‘hard sci-fi’ branch (serious dudes imagining ‘what if this bird had a _slightly differently_ shaped claw), all the way to its ‘Fantasy-with-spec-evo- influences) branch. ‘All Tomorrows’ swings a little more towards the whacky end of the sci-fi branch of the sub-genre, (but will it stay a ‘sub’ genre for long? it feels like much of the intellectual and creative ferment is going on here). Dougal Dixon has a lot to answer for.

A Review of 'Medieval Welsh Lyrics' Translated by Joseph P. Clancy

I have no idea who recommended this book to me but thanks to whoever it was! ‘Medieval Welsh Lyrics’ has some of the most startling, vivid, awakening and sometimes astonishing verse I have read. It was very unexpected.

(Translated by Joseph P. Clancy and published in 1965, taking from a range of previous books on the subject.)

THE NECESSARY ABOMINATION OF TRANSLATION

I don’t speak Welsh.

The translation of poetry is a necessary abomination. If a perfect poem is a precise, even total, annealing and cross-synthesis of sound and meaning, of the chosen sonic structure of the poem, combined with the perfect representation of meaning within it, and within that, the most precise, perceptive, original and imaginative observation, relation and creation, then the ‘perfect’ or ‘best’ poem, is the one which is most wounded by being translated.

For a perfect ordering, the dis-assemblement and re-creation in some utterly other substance - its like taking apart one of the high points of Greek or roman sculpture, say ‘Lacoon’, and re-making it in Legos You can do it, and it’s awful, but if people can only see Legos and cannot perceive Marble, then that’s what you have to do. It’s bad to lose a lot and to create frankenpoems, but its worse to lose everything, which is what happens if you don’t translate into whatever the dominant medium is

What we lose is probably inestimable, and we should accept that we are dealing with half-poems, or even zombie poems, compared to the originals - the bards would not be happy. But the alternative for me is nothing, so I accept it.

what comes through is the images, descriptions, similes, concepts, arrangements of ideas and general flow of thought

STARTLING THINGS ABOUT WELSH POETRY

What startles is the immediacy and imaginative power of interwoven with vivid, glowing, immediate and intense observations of nature, and added all to this; clearsighted, almost documentary descriptions of real-life events. Though they are given in an elaborate Welsh scansion in a format driven by ritualistic forms and common tropes, these moments ‘POP’

These things are rare and hard to find in time. People do not write like this for long books of history or if they do, it is lost. So the past is monumental, graven, sombre, strange, not because it was as it was lived (though at times it was indeed), but because that is what survives; as in stone, so in verse and prosidy; the big fat masses carry on while the warp and weave of human life are lost.

what I mean is we can awaken into a scene of Daffyd ap Gwilym, lying in bed in some inn or hostelry, in the year 13-something, getting up at night and, in an attempt to sleep with a women he has seen earlier, sneaking about in the dark, knocking things over, getting lost and waking everyone up, before sneaking back into bed and pretending the whole thing never happened, and it feels like a story related from yesterday. ‘The Battle of Waun Gaeseg’ gives us a first-hand view of the experience of a small scale, disastrous, unglamorous battle, and ‘Sheep-Dealing’ the story of an equally disastrous attempt to sell some sheep, while ‘The Ship’ by Iolo Goch shows us this;

“She would rock, faulty creature,

On her side, quivering cold.

God’s wrath to me, seas’ cheeshouse,

Cramped castle, seafarers’s chest.

She’s a thin-staved false-steering

Foul Noah’s ark of a ship.

Sooty oak, sharp her furrow,

Spy old cow, round-walled, pale-clad,

Cart of coal, not a clean court,

Her sail coarse cloth, wide open,

High-nosed hag, scabby-lipped boards,

Wide-nostrilled, rope-reined saddle,

New moon, broad pan for kneading,

She’s clumsy as an old churn,

Swift tower, bulky shadow,

Stiff screen seven cubits high,

Swift-leaping sea-splashing mare,

Bowl unsteadily bouncing,

Scabby crab-bowelled jailhouse,

Broad mare, seen as far as France.

She’s make a face with seaweed,

Sea-cat, teeth under her breast.

More than a mark her rental,

bent basket amidst green cork.

She has filth, oath of Arthur,

In her cracks like stone wall.”

..and such a ship I think you have not seen before, but it comes to mind now strongly, does it not?

DAFYDD AP GWILYM - YOU SON OF A BITCH

there is a Master Poet and a third of the book is His. He is so talented and dominant that some of the other Very Notable poems in this are just laments for Dafydd ap Gwilym by other bards.

He would be thrilled to realise he had a statue, and sickened to discover there weren’t more

Dafyd writes in an even more complex verse form than most of the other poets (they can’t keep up after he is gone). He exemplifies both the tropes and higher qualities of eras verse, either because he ate the soul and speaks it back, or because through his writing he re-writes what Welsh poetry is meant to be, and meant to be about. ‘AD’ in this subculture means “After Dafydd” and ‘BC’ means “Before that Cunt” (he is awful). Everyone after him is to some extent writing in response to him.

Dafydd is an apollonian talent inflicted on a contemptable piece of shit. You don’t start reading Dafydd ap Gwilym hating Dafydd ap Gwilym – it’s hard to hate a genius, but you get there over time . He is like a bright burning portal into another time, carried about by a guy whose main interest is trying to bang another guys wife - this is 90% of Dafydds time and the real slow disenchantment of his character is that he can’t change and, incredibly, for a man who perceives the world through eyes none else can match, he is largely unaware of the poverty of his own character.

As Dafydd gets older, and he writes himself laments about his stumbling entry into middle age, he is still trying to bang Morfudd; gets angry when his married cheating gf commits the indignity of getting pregnant by her husband, is shocked when she shows signs of aging, laments his own loss of looks, and ends up feeling terrible about his life (good).

His poetry will burn through history like a meteor, and the story that it tells will be of a guy who was an utter tool; a sleazy ratbag who never grew up and wasted his whole life on sketchy inherently dishonest relationships. The deep, deep contrast between his immortal talent and shit personality, which, I know, common enough for poets and painters, leaves me flabbergasted. The dissonance between his talent and his soul, combines with vividness which has adhered his memory to me. Like something sticky on the inside of a cup you can’t get off; its Dafydd ap Gwylym.

As an antidote to Dafydd; a fragment of ‘Lament for Sion Y Glyn’ by Lewis Glyn Cothi, in which he mourns his dead son.

“A sweet apple and a bird

The boy loved, and white pebbles,

A bow of thorntree twig,

And swords, wooden and brittle;

Scared of pipes, scared of scarecrows,

Begging mother for a ball,

Singing to all his chanting,

Singing ‘Oo-o’ for a nut.

He would play sweet, and flatter,

And then turn sulky with me,

Make peace for a wooden chip

Or the dice he was fond of.”

OF WHAT USE CAN THIS POSSIBLY BE?

It is a book of vividness and immediacy in line and concept. For those of use settled on bringing imaginary worlds to life, there is not much difference between resurrecting a past world and emblazoning an imaginary one.

For anyone interested in prose, verse, observation and the combination of ideas, this is a great aleph of combinations, which grows more strange and potent, seems more original, remarkable and distinct, the more out of place it feels in its medieval home. In its humanity it seems more a work of the renaissance, in its concrete immediacy it feels modern and in the wild but telling arrangements of simile it feels almost post-modern.

For those who simply care about the past and would like to think more about what it actually felt like to, for instance, be on board a crappy ship in 14-something, or to be part of a vaunted battle which goes horribly wrong, or to hide out in a grove waiting for a ‘maid’ to turn up for a ‘tryst’, or simply to be lost in fog, or to stumble around in the dark, or, in a poem remarkable for its nature, what its like to be a relatively ordinary townsman in a normal town;

“Mine is the heat of houses,

I’m fond of bread, beer, and meat.

A wooden house in lowlands

Brings me health, like a green tree.

And so I make my dwelling

In the March, I’ve wine and mead.

A kind, attractive city,

Most blest in its citizens,

Curtain-walled is the castle,

Best of cities, far as Rome!

Croes Oswalt, friend to Jesus,

Great keep for the conqueror.”

- Wiliam Herbart

Or if you would live for a moment in the mind of a man deeply displeased with his own beard;

“Old roebuck’s hair, where’s your source?

You are a crop of gorse-shoots.

Sharp and strong is every hair,

Sticking a girl, stiff heather,

Resembling, so harsh they grow,

A thousand thistle feathers.

You are like frozen stubble,

Seamless stiff-tipped arrow quills.

Go away! Prevent dishonour,

Chin’s thatch, like a horses mane.”

‘Bard and Beard by Iolo Goch

Or if you want to get involved (sucked into) the extremely spicy, messy, sketchy, slutty and poetically brilliant life of DAFYDD AP GWILYM, whether it is perving on the local girls;

“No Sunday in Llanbadarn

I was not, as some will swear,

Facing a dainty maiden,

The nape of my neck to God.

And when I’ve long been staring

Over my plume at the pews,

Says one maiden, clear and bright,

To her shrewd, pretty neighbour:

‘That lad, palefaced as a flirt,

Wearing his sisters tresses,

Adulterous of the slanting

Glances of his eye : he’s bad!’”

Obsessing over his own fading looks;

“I’d not dreamed, burdensome bane,

My face not fine and handsome,

Till I lifted, lucid thing,

The glass : and see, its ugly!

The mirror told me at last

That I am not good-looking.

The cheek for one like Enid

Turns sallow, it’s scarcely flushed.

Glassy the cheek from groaning,

But a single sallow bruise.

The long nose might be taken

For a razor : isn’t it sad?

Is it not vile, the glad eyes

Are pits completely blinded?

And the worthless curly hair

Falls from the head in handfuls.”

Or just really absolutely hating one particular owl to the extent that he writes a whole poem cursing it (this Owl specifically);

“She’s a slut, two tuneless cries,

Thick head, persistent crying,

Broad forehead, berry-bellied,

Staring old mouse-hunting hag.

Stubborn, vile, lacking colour,

Dry her voice, her colour tin,

Loud gabble in the south wood,

O that song, roebuck’s copses,

And her face, a meek maiden’s,

And her shape, a ghostly bird.

Every bird, filthy outlaw,

Beats her ; how strange she still lives.”

A review of The Golden Peaches of Samarkand

 by Edward H. Schafer

tldr; this book has a whole sub-section on Dwarfs

Its 1962 and Edward H Schafer delves into ream upon uncounted ream of scholarship and records, all to make a list. Lists, beloved by RPG nerds, chroniclers, romantic writers and a Billy Joel.

If reams of DnD theory have been ejaculated from the question ‘What do they have in their pockets?’, birthing engines of devisment dedicated to the rapid simulation of a goblins pockets, and thence, by inference at least, also making query; what can we learn of Goblin culture from the contents of one Goblins pockets? Here now, are the pockets of a People, or an Empire, or at least a Dynasty; one of the big ones, the T’ang. Her is an encyclopaedia of all that the Emperor received. This shows us several thing;

First, it is an image of the world as perceived by the T’ang court. At its distant, wildest most suggestive western reaches, it brushes against ‘Rum’, but the more common Occidental foreigner is the ever-wealthy Persian, bringer of materials and artistic styles. To the East we hear of jungle islands, home of rare hardwoods, poisoned arrows and magical pearls. In the ocean lie the phosphorescent eyes of whales. To the South West is India; source of scripture, and of suspicious witchy alchemists who probably accidentally poisoned the Emperor that one time. South lies the known, but uncivilised aboriginal lands of continental China, malarial yet wealthy country. To the north, the ever-dangerous and very charismatic horse-riding barbarians; one Chinese noble larps so hard as a northern barbarian he ends up living in a tent erected on his family estate, wearing furs, drinking milk and eating near-raw meat, dreaming of the steppe

Second; it is an image of China and Chinese tastes and culture, as seen from the very peak of the pyramid. Horses are desired. The Middle Kingdom has a massive thirst for Horse and is always drinking dry its own supplies. A centrally-mandated Horse-sustainment organisation exists, with vast government herds, but they never seem to have enough and tribute in horses is ever-desired. Some treasures have cross-cultural appeal; hawks, dwarfs and slave girls might be banned occasionally but the tribute always starts up again. One wise magistrate is honoured by his land; he elegantly evades the relentless Imperial demands for MORE DWARFS, taken from his small population, by claiming that since everyone in his country is very small, and they are all pretty much the same height, he really can’t choose anyone exceptional to be sent to the Imperial Court. Another wise one saves the nature pearl-farms by instituting fierce governmental controls, later he is deified as one who returns the pearls. Its only about 800ad but the environmental devastation and consumption of a massive civilised population is already a stark part of the story. China needs horses, but despite efforts, can’t maintain them. She loves pearls, but over-fishes them. The exotic creatures from the borders of her lands keep going extinct or disappearing. This land is like a great terrible octopus, devouring whatever its can from the edges of its knowledge, but ever-spreading.

Third; it paints a suggestive and utterly deranged picture of what life might actually be like in the Imperial Palace; gilded squalor comes to mind. Wealth incalculable, chaos unending. The throne must have tribute and that tribute can come in many, almost in any, form. This means the Palace is filled with, is crammed with, whole zoo’s and parks of rare and strange animals, often the only ones of their kind. Horses, camels, cattle, sheep and goats, asses, mules onagers, dogs, elephants, rhinoceroses, lions, leopards, cheetahs, sable, ermine, gazelles, marmots, mongeese, weasels, ferrets, hawks, falcons, peacocks, parrots, ostriches and several animals, the ‘Doubtful Ungulates’ or ‘Doubtful Carnivores’, whose name and nature is unclear. These creatures may be mythic, or extinct.

That’s just the animals. If a foreign king sends the Emperor, for instance, an instrument, he will send the musician to play it, in fact, the whole band, actually send the orchestra, the dancers, backstage people, everything. Its not a holiday, they belong to the Emperor now. The palace holds entire third generation micro-communities descended specifically from such ‘gifts’. Throw in prisoners, slaves, (Dwarfs of course), Hostages (the heirs to foreign kingdoms might end up joining one of several ritual palace guard companies), or other skilled workers in materials and crafts.

We haven’t even gotten to the objects. For all the animals, imagine at least ten times the variety of plants, sent to wither or bloom in strange soil, then woods, foods, aromatics, skins, drugs, textiles, pigments, industrial materials, jewels, metals, weapons, lamps, books and sacred texts and yes of course when an Indian king sends a sacred Buddhist text in Sanskrit, he also sends along a sage who will spend the entirety of his life in the T’ang court, translating this One Book into Chinese, in one case with the Empress Wu hanging out directly over his shoulder (she liked to watch him do it).

Those are just the generalities, you must imagine, hidden and skittering amidst these grand illusions of systemic knowledge, just a bunch of weird random shit; a solid gold wine jug in the shape of a great goose, a 100 foot iron pillar holding at its top a ‘fire orb’ carved with the names of the Empress and her greatest Advisors. Asbestos robes.

Magic has no meaning here because everything is a bit magic by western standards. Nothing is ever just material. Amber, born from the coagulated glance of a dying Tiger, works well to seal wounds from weapons. Ground up Jade imparts its irresistible immortality to the taker, ground (whole, not pierced), pearls impart watery blessings. Of course, mysterious and distant foreign cultures, from places where blessings, icons, witches and ghosts are common, know the best ways to draw out these sacred abilities. Everything edible has properties that might verge on ‘magic’, and everything inedible can be made edible, or burnt as incense, or turned into a house, or clothes. Sleeping on a tiger-skin pillow obviously chases away bad dreams, but at some psychic danger to the sleeper. Those oppressed by Ghost Tigers, incubi or sex in dreams will be cured by eating Tiger Meat.

Some treasures have no modern cognate. What was ‘Purple Gold’? Perhaps the same stained metal recovered from the tomb of Tutankhamun? What is ‘Myrobalan Wine’? Black as ink. The several kinds of ‘Dragons blood’, pigments, ointments, medicines and foods, are all the same? What of ‘Gibbons Blood’ pigment?

Excess also shapes the scene; some rare aromatic woods are supplied in such superfluity that, while rich Chinese might burn fragments as incense, and others have perhaps a single box, one noble contracts an entire pavilion from the semiprecious wood, inviting noble guests to midnight smell sessions, walking their aromatic decks, smelling the contents of their wonderful garden, filled with plants from a host of nations.

Imagine living in this. Specifically, in the Imperial Court. It feels like a lurid, lively Gormenghast. What an insane mess of people. How did they live together? The endless rituals, bizarre entertainments, animal, plants, slaves, nobles. That palace guard? Yeah he’s the third-hand heir to an empire somewhere, he’s never actually been there though.

Schafers grasp of his overflowing subject and his ability, and willingness, to connect themes, facts and ideas across reaches of history, make many of these entries, about the most obscure kinds of treasures, little humanist windows, little perfect ink-sketches, of a strange and living world. As an example, here is the full entry for ‘Amber’, not the shortest and by no means the longest;

...

“Amber

The Chinese word for ‘amber,’ *xuo-p’nk, has been pleasantly explained as “tigers soul,” a phrase which has the same pronunciation, the etymology has been rationalized by the tale that the congealing glance of a dying tiger forms the waxy mineral. This reminds us of the Greek notion that amber was the solidified urine of a lynx. But Tuan Ch’eng-shih, our T’ang bibliophile and collector of curiosa, has this to say:

“Some say that when the blood of a dragon goes into the ground it becomes amber. But the record of the Southern Man has it that in the sand at Ning-chou there are snap-waist wasps, and when the bank collapses the wasps come out; the men of that land work on them by burning, and so make amber of them.”

This strange and ambiguous tale seems to contain an allusion to the wasps and other insects, often found encased in amber, but the rest of it is incomprehensible. In any event, “tigers-soul” probably has nothing to do with the word *xuo-p’nk, which seems to represent a loan from some language of western or southern Asia, in its original form something like *xarupah, related to harpax, the “Syrian” form mentioned by Pliny.

Although the legend of the relation between amber and the vital essence of tigers and dragons persisted into medieval times, the true nature of amber has been known since the third century, of not earlier. This scientific knowledge was familiar to the T’ang pharmacologist, and preserved in their compendia. The Basic Herbs of Shu for instance, states; “Amber then as a substance, is the sap of a tree which has gone into the ground, and has been transformed after a thousand years. Even poets knew this truth. Wei Ying-wu’s brief ode to amber embodies it:

Once it was the old ‘deity of chinaroot,’

But at bottom it is the sap of a cold pine tree.

A mosquito or gnat falls into the middle of it,

And after a thousand years may still be seen there.

The ‘deity of chinaroot’ is a precious fungoid drug found among pine roots; it was believed that this was an intermediate stage in the development of amber from pine resin.

The precious resin was known to be a product of Rome, and was imported from Iran. This must have been the famous amber gathered on the shores of the Baltic Sea. But closer at hand was the amber deposit of upper Burma, near Myitkyina (and near the jadeite mines which would be exploited mand centuries later); this material was acquired by the people of Nan-chao, where the nobles wore amber in their ears, like the modern Kachins. There were even gifts of amber from Champa and Japan. A commercial variety brought up by merchants through the South China Sea was thought to be especially fine.

Amber had a part in T’ang jewellery similar to that of coral, that is, it was readily converted into ornaments for ladies, and small but expensive objects of virtu for well-to-do households. Among the objects of Amber in the Shosoin are double six pieces, a fish pendant, rosary beads for a ceremonial crown, and inlays in the back of mirrors. Medicine also had a place for amber, as it had for all precious substances which might conceivably lend their beauty and permanence to the human organism. Venerable pine trees were revered in themselves and fresh pine resin was itself a life-prolonging drug. How much more so must amber be, which was pine resin suitably embalmed by a spiritual preservative. More specifically, it was prescribed for “bad blood” and affusions of blood caused by weapons. In short, recipes based on the ancient idea that amber was coagulated blood continued in use even in the T’ang, despite evidence of better knowledge.

The T’ang poets found ‘amber’ a useful colour word, signifying a translucent red-yellow, and used it particularly as an epithet of ‘wine’. We have already seen it used by Li Po, in our discussion of saffron. A line by Chang Yueh is another case;

“In the Northern Hall they stress the value of amber wine.”

Li Ho, the precarious ninth-century poet, went a step further, and made ‘amber’ stand for ‘wine’ by metonymy. This usage was part and parcel of his well-known interest in colour imagery for the intensification of emotion; he was unique in his abundant use of “golden”, “silvery”, “deep green”, and in the way in which he used “white” to express intense illumination and emotional contrast in landscape descriptions (as in black and white photography, say): “the sky is white,” and even “the autumn wind is white.” Here is his “Have The Wine Brought In!”

In glass-paste stoup

The amber is thick -

From a small vat wine drips - true pearls reddened;

Boiling dragon, roasting phoenix - jadefat dripping.

Net screen, embroidered awning, encircle fragrant wind.

Blow dragon flute!

Strike alligator drum!

Candent teeth sing -

Slender waists dance -

Especially now when blue spring day is going to set,

And peach flowers fall confused like pink rain.

I exhorrt milord to drink besottedness by end of day,

Nor let the wine upset on the earth over Liu Lings grave!

Liu Ling, one of the ancient “Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove,” was a notorious winebibber, and bottles were buried with him; to spill wine on the ground now, was a libation, intended or accidental, would be like carrying coals to Newcastle.”

...

Within one entry we go from a discussion on etymology, to a discussion of mythic origins, consideration of foreign word origins, perhaps explained or obscured by a pleasing poetic ‘just so’ story, this then contrasted with apparently already-known origins, this knowledge embodied by an ode, a brief line on some weird drug that never comes up again, a geographic analysis of likely sources of the raw material considering global trade routes, a paragraph on the use of this luxury and its integration with the lives of its final consumers, a loop back round in which magical properties are considered, then finally a little pleasing dive into the use of the ‘idea’ of the material in poetry, its effect on high language, and lastly a line about a famous legendary drunkard.

If this pleases you, then here you are.

This is the sort of ‘Wunderkammer’ book which used to go very hard in the OSR, (when I had any connection to it). Back in the day, bloggers would knife fight a monkey to be the first to post this kind of thing.

Its obvious use as a list of incredible treasures is only the first part. Every aspect of the book suggests adventure, perhaps not of the dungeon-diving variety, but certainly adventures of intrigue, travel and trade, as well as medicine and art. The tantalising but specific hints about the most curious elements of imperial and T’ang life have a vivifying effect, one wants to fill them in, to experience the world they describe. Who wouldn’t want to run into the cosplay steppe-barbarian noble as an NPC? Or Ultimate Smell Guy? Or the Foreign Orchestra Tribe? Or even just they guy in charge of the Elephants?

It is the kind of text that feels like gloves; you want to grasp and manipulate its contents.

False Machine Update!

Veins of the Earth: ReduX

Bad news first; because of a whole bunch of complex events I have had to pause development on VotE ReDux till the first Snail Knight story is finished. I hope to be done with the basic text for SNAILS ALPHA by the end of September/middle of October so will go back to VotE then.

Queen Mabs' Palace

Its been just over a year since 'Queen Mab's Palace' was funded. In our latest update [CLICK HERE TO SEE IT] we have some images, thoughts by August on the arrangement of complex scenes and figures and confirmation that we expect to have the art complete mid-October.

Once the art is done will will do another round of checks and layout and then hopefully move to printing, I hope maybe around Christmas? We will see.

It also depends if/when shipping to the U.S. resumes and how that happens. I have my fingers crossed.

Snail Knights

Some of you may know of my old Snail Knight stories. A long time ago I completed two stories, of a great plan I had for twenty interlaced tales.

SUPERAKIDDO from Reddit

You can read the first two stories for free by clicking here!

I have been persuaded to take up the stories again. So far I have completed four and am half way through the fifth. The stories have grown in depth and complexity as I have gone on, (and hopefully in skill). Each of them should be a self-contained chivalric tale, each of a different scheme, yet interlaced, so that it becomes a book of short stories that ultimately tells one great epic. (Jack Vances Lyonesse is maybe the closest equivalent).

Once the fifth story is complete, I will look into making these first five stories a physical book, a 'Part One' of a hopefully, eventually, Four-Book series telling all twenty interlaced tales as; ‘Knights of the Snail’

Like 'Queen Mabs' Palace' I intend for this to be fully illustrated, hopefully by Amanda Lee Franck. We will see!

That is what I am working on right this moment; the Tale of Sir Whirl. Once he is done I intend to move on to production for 'Queen Mabs' Palace' and development (unbroken this time), for VotE ReDux.

Current Schedule

1. Complete Snail Knights One base text
2. Start production on Queen Mabs’ Palace
3. Somehow shipping to America Re-Opens!
4. Re-Start development for VotE:ReDux
5. Edit Snail Knights One
6. Run a Kickstarter for Snail Knights One (February 2026?)