A Review of 4th Edition Underdark

I was broadly demoralised by this damnn book, but to make it bearable to get through, I will make a list, from back to front, of everything I actually liked.

TOROG - The King Who Crawls

The Level 34 Solo Lurker Himself! (“Huge Immortal Humanoid, XP 195,000")

God of Torture, Imprisonment and the Underdark. A few concepts in here govery hard indeed and Torog is the best. Entered the Underdark to fight some primordial horror in the Dawntimes and was cursed even as he killed it. He cannot heal, cannot leave, and as a God, cannot die.

Trying to escape the Underdark, Torog crazily crawled his way through the whole of the planet. He was cursed to never reach the surface, but he could madly smash his way into other planes, so long as it was into the Underdark of those planes. His crazed crawl created a permanently bloodstained Godroad which curls and spirals madly through the Underdark, and even breaches the walls between realities.

Now his palace is the hewn corpse of the Titan he killed to get here and Torogs servants have to constantly chew and cut away at it to stop it re-growing. Bitter, wrathful and in constant pain, Torog tortures and imprisons people, turning them into wracks. Unlike other Gods, he does not share his power or trust his angels. If he wants to communicate he will either send some horrid low level servant with his words sliced into its back, or the big guy is coming himself, in person. He likes to take cities of people who piss him off, and pull them down into the Underdark. I imagine this happening like two mountain-sized hands rumble up from the earth on each side of the city, fingers like arcologies, curling over, then down, down down.

Torog is so depressed he may actually want to die, which would form a neat apex to a long campaign. The guy was just messing with you because he wants to commit suicide-by-adventurer.

If he does die, he horrible presence is the only thing keeping the Abberant Outer Realms from infiltrating and merging with the Underdark, which will end up with Mind Flayers, Beholders and Grell turning everyone into pâté, which is a neat piece of setting-sustaining divine engineering.

Torog is novel, functional, has a cool picture and really holds the book together. Its not surprising they made the whole thing about him.

The Incunabulum

Vecna-Worshipping sort-of humans defined by Mum-Ra Drip. Obsessed with discovering and recording secret knowledge of all kinds, they have “the grisly ritual of the Unveiling” which strips every piece of memory from a (dead?) subject. This involves the questioner eating the subjects brain, which gives them access to their entire experience. BUT, the interrogator has only 12 hours to write down parts before the memories fade. They keep these secrets on parchment, (which is probably made from the victims).

The Incunabulum are culturally defined by their wrappings. When they come of age they are given a set of wrappings derived from dead Incunabulum. These contain knowledge and memories, and once they go on, they don’t come off till death.

The lore says elements of these memories date back to the first Incunabulum. The nature of replication and dispersal means that, while there must be continuity, I’m sure there will be a lot of alteration, adaptation, splitting and drift in what feels like a ‘written genetic signature’, each Incunabulum having access to a kind of edited, pathed together palimpsest of memories, dating first to one or two predecessors, and from them, back and back and back, all the way to the first. The patterns created by the memories no doubt being stronger than the details of the memories themselves, each Incunabulum being a kind of evolved book of memories, as well as a person.

I’m already interpolating too much into a very sparse 4e text. These guys look largely human, they hang out in a Cavern-Venice City called Glimmer in the Shadowdark, worship Vecna exclusively, make a lot of use of (dry, never wet) Undead, and generally love secrets and being evil. Good villains with some unexplored Borgesian depths.

Blood Ooze

A bad Ooze monster with fragments of interesting elements. One - its made from Torogs blood. Two - if it manages to Ooze you it gets inside you and puppets you. Three - “A blood ooze has no allies.” A koan to place alongside “Giant Oysters are never surprised.”

Lathan, River of Souls

“The lathan forms where streams of souls join together in a crevasse known as the Vale of Sighs. Here the moaning torrent becomes a true flow as spirits funnel through the narrowest part of the canyon ... its surface and depths are made of a rushing press of intertwined and glowing spirits.”

“Devils frequently sail the Lathan to the Soul Slough to find souls that had been promised to them. They float atop the spirits in iron-keeled boats and fish spirits out with ghost catching nets.”

“Only at one place along the Latham does a permanent crossing exist: the Worm Bridge. .. Its master, Bragarra the Bridge Witch, controls it constantly to keep it from being dashed to pieces by the tormoil of the Lathan.

The bridge is crafted from the corpse of a purple worm whose long body forms a tunnel through the water to reach the other side. On either end stand a pair of nightmares chained to the dead beast, and dark stalkers lurk nearby, ready to obey their masters commands. Nearly frozen and unable to move more than its head, the purple worm must be pulled up and down the river to compensate for the water’s movement. The dark stalkers drive the nightmares to draw the worm taught for crossing, and sin its coils deep to avoid floating dangers.”

Bragarra the Bridge Witch is very Chris Avellone-coded.

Esaham, Graveyard of Demons

This is actually a pretty bad section, but the very idea of a graveyard for Demons, a place of binding and repose for what are meant to be sempiternal, extra-causal entities, is provocative.

Icegloom Chart

Bad name, good concept. A fat shard of ice. “Barely visible channels and bubbles in the ice constantly reshape themselves to resemble a map,”

Fire Pit

One very good fragment from an overall tiring 4e ‘Encounter’.

“This magic fire pit burns only meat and leaves wood untouched.” From an encounter in the Feydark. Excellent Druidic/Ent horror concept.

Deadtrees

“These four titans shed dappled shadows over thier realm while gods and primordials still warred.”

Four primeval and long-fallen Tolkienesque super-trees. Their roots though, still exist, and now form tunnel systems. Very fey concept for the Feywild, but interesting.

Sick Gnomes

The GNOMES are wilding the fuck out.

“King Finutar’s court magicians assure the people of Drochdan that the haze is a hostile sending from a rival kingdom - perhaps the formorians. In private,some gnomes whisper that it is a curse ...”

“In reality, this magical ailment is spread by contamination of the Drochdan’s food supply by fungal spores. This fact explains why entire gnome hunting bands are stricken by it at the same time - they’ve all eaten the same rations.”

Look, even mildly interesting GNOME CONTENT is rare.

Inbharann

A Formorian Kingdom that has learned how to mass-produce Sauron-Eyes and uses them as searchlights.

They also have a neat succession system; anyone can be adopted into the Royal Family based on competence. When the Monarch dies they all have to fight it out. The war is over when one is left standing, however, if everyone dies, a tribunal decides which one fought with the “greatest cleverness”, and orders his or her resurrection.

Resurrecting the leader from a dynastic bloodbath is fun, and having a commission to decide which was ‘cleverest’ feels very loony-tune-talmudic.

Primal Mud

4e combat chess idea with mud which you can use to heal yourself. Stated in the text, this dries out when you call on its power. Unstated is that, if this is a pool of mud, you just healed yourself and then likely trapped yourself by drying the it out, which makes for a nice combat decision. Even better, in a combat situation with multiple liquid pools, drying them out here or there could make the place more or less navigable for allies or enemies depending on circumstance.

Mherkrull

“Just as Asmodeus rebelled against the god that commanded him to relinquish his power, so too do devils and angels alike occasionally challenge their lords. Those wise enough to recognise their error before being destroyed have no hope of mercy. Their only succour is to escape divine notice for a time, and those who succeed most often do so by coming to the cavernous godless realm known as Mherkrul.”

That’s nearly all we get.

Xarcorr - Realm of the Aboleths

Some reasonably funky environments are sketched out;

“The area around Xarcorr tumbles and twits as if in pain ... stone shifts and mutates without warning ... Thoughts drift through the passages like smoke, choking the minds of the unwary with the nightmare imaginings of abhorrent creatures..”

These roiling rocks have islands of relative stability.

The Dripping Jungle; ”abuzz with glimmering creatures that make their own light. Ghostly insects glow in gemstone colours through transparent shells. leechlike rodents leave luminous slime trails behind their slithering bodies. Great behemoths stand on legs as tall as ship masts that shine with radiant blood, stretching their ruddy necks to reach ceiling vegetation”

The Stone Gyre; “the rock becomes fluid - the stone of the caverns ripples and moves while remaining in a cave shape ... Up is whatever direction air can be found.”

The Toothy Plains; “vast, flat expanses of ceiling and floor roughly 200 feet apart. .... massive crystal monoliths that resemble jagged fangs jutting from the ceiling and floor ... “glide along the surface from which they project..”

Then, once you enter Xarcorr itself; “a strange, still point, disorientating both in its contrast to the surrounding chaos and in the alien nature of the realm. ... Xarcorr overlays the place in the world that its area covers. it is both in the world and not, and what was in the world before its coming remains behind the unreachable barrier of Xarcorr’s existence. No mortal knows what lies in the world beneath where Xarcorr now rests.”

Within; Dreaming Vaults “in these long chambers the aboleths keep captives of many races alive in a shared dream state. ... Their captors observe the effects aboleth plans might have on the real world by looking at the reactions the captives have and how the sleepers imagine others would behave.”

The Warp Web; “rivers of slimy water from all over Xarcorr ... float out into the open air and split into a latticework of waterways that dangle down into the canyon.”

The Preserve, where the aboleths “modify the environment in extreme ways, hoping to scrape open a hole in the weave of existance and find a conduit to the Far Realm behind the flow”

Grell Colony Politics

We have a nice page here digging into the varying philosophies amongst a colony of Grells. I feel like these my have been written by a very angry, very cynical vegitarian;

The Byoll (”Opportunity for Use”) “Their philosophy permits captured prey to avoid being eaten by performing a dangerous mission of the grells devising.”

The Glatt “Equanimity of Harm”) “The Grell philosophy Glatt holds that harm to prey animals is a necessary part of life, but that the moral grell parcels out this unavoidable hurt so that no piece of potential food suffers more than other members of its litter, tribe or group.”

The Jrall (”Feasting in Knowledge”) “Jrall philosophy argues that it is acceptable to torment and kill sentient beings as long as they are ennobled by knowledge first. Thralls are kept in clean pens and taught the simplest rudiments of Jrall belief in anticipation of the day when they will be slowly devoured alive.”

The Kragg (”Consume the Willing”). “Like the Byoll - from whom they broke in a murderous conflict years ago - the Kragg send captured prey to perform hunting missions or other quests for them. The Kragg do this as part of a braoder exercise in bending future prey to their will. They use their psychic powers to make their victims want to be eaten. Philosopher Kragg asserts that this is the only ethical way to devour sentient species.”

Hraak Azul

A massive living multiple-fungus fortress/environment colony, slowly moving through the Underdark, going who knows where. Pretty similar to the Fungal Environment in ‘Forgotten Realms: Underdark’, but now mobile and with a nice image and some extra details.

Dark Lake Ziggurat

Its a big black Ziggurat on a dark lake. Neat element is that it is multi-planar, and perhaps multi-causal. The same ziggurat, built by different races and cultures, in different planes, in exactly the same place, and perhaps with multiple histories even within one plane.

Kind of basic Lovecraft tbh but a big black ziggurat standing alone above a dark lake, miles beneath the earth, is still a banger image. Its also mildly funny/das that the Lovecraft inspired Kua Toa have a colony nearby and keep sending Fishmen into the Ziggurat to perform what they think is ‘sacred work’ (they are being randomly hurled through other dimensions and driven totally mad.).

Maelbrathyr

Maybe the only part of 4e Underdark that keeps some of the old ‘Infinity Engine Location’ energy from Forbidden Realms: Underdark. Maelbrathyr feels very much like a city laid out in isometric graphics, with a dark and edgy backstory and a series of personally dramatic bossfights with Chris Avellone-style tormented bad-guys.

Story is that an Underdark City put together a team of heroes to rescue someone from Torogs Torture clutches. This they did, but the King Who Crawls was annoyed enough by this that he reached up and dragged the entire city down into the earth, leaving it a tiered collapsed city of ruins and levels.

He also cursed the heroes who ‘stole’ his prisoner, even the ones who didn’t survive. Now they are immortal horrors, mad and evil. One a half fire half ice slug centaur in undying agony, one given mega-schizophrenias by being inhabited by the souls of the comrades he let down, who don’t like each other or him, and who change his body when they take over, and one guy trapped in an eternal hamster-wheel/orrery torture device who can only roll around forever. Hilarious. Good one Torog.

This Image

Is this “4th Edition” in the room with you now?

Reading this was like suffering a flashback to an old, dull, war. 4e truly is a depressing system, with a kind of brutal, nasty, cognitive weight. Going thorough the text I kept wanting to argue with someone who wasn’t there, and who hasn’t been there for fifteen years.

Building your entire reality around a series of boutique grid-pattern ‘balanced’ combat encounters (which the PCs can’t actually lose without fucking things up), drags the imaginative potential of the human soul into a pit of mediocrity and tortures it - glistering pools of blood torn from a god who can never heal and never die and which still stain the passage of the King Who Crawls, give a +5 to fucking a fucking evoking surge but disadvantage on heals or some shit, its just the most depressing stuff. Torog would approve.

Even the really good ideas, like the Incunabulum, which have potentially fascinating concepts behind them, are all designed to be communicated via big dumb stat blocks, which are all built around combat-as-sport grid combat, its like watching fine French cheese be squeezed through a sieve onto the dirtiest burger.

Foaree Underdark also provides splatters of gaming advice, not so much wrong within itself, as the horrid product of post-apocalyptic mutational pressures producing something that approximates a previously health organism, but only through limb-splintering mutilations of an already horribly warped concept;

“One way to impress upon the players the dangers of the Underdark is tot talk about the deadly monsters that live there. But talk is cheap. I find that most players assume the DM will pit them only against foes they can defeat. They imagine difficult fights, but they also imagine winning all of them.

That’s great. D&D is at its best when its collaborative and everyone at the table has fun. Still, I like to put fear in the players and let them know that their decisions have real meaning in the game. If every choice has the same victorious result, the game gets dull.

I find the best way to do this is to call the players’ bluff. I’ll talk about some dangerous foe in a particular location, and if the players go there, they meet the danger. In effect, I put up a sign that says, “Here there be dragons!” If the players go past the sign, they meet a dragon - and not some wyrmling either.

The key to making this approach work is letting the characters get away. Some players might want their characters to run, but one or two often stick around to see if you mean it. (”Maybe that Mind Flayer is a doppelganger. He wouldn’t really have us face a Mind Flayer.”) This inevitably draws the others back to hep out, but after a few potent attacks from the monster, everyone should be looking for the exit. When they do, let them go. if you need a reason for the monster not to pursue, perhaps some other threat attacks it (the big fish being eaten by the bigger fish). If you do something like this in the Underdark, the players will give each other worried looks the next time they need to delve into the deep, dark caverns.

Using this technique has the additional benefit of teaching players that it’s ok to run from a fight. I’ve seen many campaigns come to an abrupt end or have to be saved by some deus ex machina because the players didn’t see a way out of a fight that went south. letting them run away shows them that their decisions have consequences, but that you’re still collaborating to make a fun game.”

Not a good book but there were at least some good things in it.

A Review of Forgotten Realms; Underdark

 By Bruce R.Cordell, Gewndolyn F.M. Kestrel and Jeff Quick. Art direction by Robert Raper. Graphic Design by Robert Raper and Robert Campbell, Cartography by Robert Lazzaretti. First printing 2003.

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This book has some notable slop and a semi-regular patterning of some supremely boring ideas, which gradually frets like cloud to reveal increasingly good work in exploration, before dawning blackly into seventy pages (nearly half the book) of geographic information about the Underdark of the Forgotten Realms and in particular, of the period right in the middle of R.A. Salvatore’s ‘War of the Spider Queen’ novel series.

honestly, these covers are almost selling me

Prestige Classes, ‘Regions, Feats

These things are like dirty nasty crack to me, or cheap sweets I can’t help eating more of. With my heart and my soul they disgust me, yet like a low enslaved desire, some abandoned part of me yearns for them; what exactly would it be like to be a ‘Cavelord’ (a kind of Underdark ranger), and exactly how does that differ from a ‘Prime Underdark Guide’ (someone who helps others range under the dark). Perhaps these crystalline imagined alter-selves occupy something like the fragmentary dreams of other ordinary lives which sleet through our minds in quiet moments of the vaguest ennui; “What would my life be like if had Prestige Classed up to ‘Arachnomancer’? Sure there’s a lot of stuff I wouldn’t be able to do, but think of the spiders. At least then I would know who I was = an Arachnomancer.” O to be the guy who has a ‘thing’, and for everyone to know it.

A standout for its pleasurable ridiculousness is the ‘Illithid Body Tamer’ - for those who, not only want to play a brain-eating psychic octopus from a hyper-villainous made-for-crime cephalopod race, but want to play the buff , hand to hand focused version of that race.

These strong squid come with a range of whirling tentacle attacks; (Tentacle of Fate, Reaching Tentacle, Whirlwind Tentacle and Tentacle of Destiny) spiked tentacle attachments and a promise not to use their innate, deadly, and very easy murderous psychic powers. A promise which they will break if they feel like it;

“An illithid body tame is not slavishly devoted to its code. If using plane shift or mind blast is clearly in its best interest, then it does so, preferring to lose access to the benefits of abstinence than lose its life.”

This surely takes the already hypertrophied art of Prestige Classing close to the limits of its own absurdity. But perhaps its that very insane hyper-specifity that helps to cast the strange spell such thing have over a living game. The others in this book are more boring and lack the ‘tang’ of 3.5 hyper-absurdity. (The vision of a 3.5 influenced game where only the most deranged Prestige Classes are allowed; Cancer Mage, Candle Caster, Halfling Outrider and Fochlucan Lyrist anyone?)

Though some still mourn the loss; “Multiclassing, at its best, is a biography expressed through mechanics.”

Nothing in the ‘Races’ section is as good as these images of them;

which are amongst the best art in the book.

You are not (at least here), actually allowed to be a ‘Derro’, which is disappointing for the book that introduced the Mind-Flayer Body-Tamer. Perhaps even amidst these often somewhat-villainous races, they were simply too Chaotic Evil.

‘Feats’ are as you would imagine them, apart from a few sparks of fun; ‘Elfhunter’ only available to Drow? Very sad. ‘Graft Illithid Flesh’ lets you play Squid Frankenstein, which has at least one very boutique use we will discover later on.

Magic and Spells

Spends an alarming amount of time describing the for-this-book ‘Node Magic’, a system of magic and advantage built around dicking around with ‘Earth Nodes’. This is the kind of deeply embedded rules system that, once you know someone is planning on interacting with it, you have to integrate it into your whole campaign, placing various NODES of varying level here and there; and what NODES you place where will have a big effect on play.

If anyone has ever used this, leave a comment or a link. Its hard for me to believe anyone could be as into something called ‘Node Magic’ as is required to actually simulate and use it for a campaign.

I did find a handful of spells I enjoyed, all of which do what they say on the tin; Amorphous Form, Contagious Fog, Drown, Rushing Waters, Viscid Glob and my favourite; Stone Sphere, which creates a five-foot diameter sphere of polished stone which moves under your control at a speed of 30ft. The Stone has Armour Class 5 and 500 hit points. One round per level and its a Level 5 spell. After casting, directing its movement requires a move action, so you can still presumably cast more bullshit so long as you stay in place, rolling your bid deadly marble about. A wonderful alternative to ‘Fireball’.

Equipment and Magic Items

Things improve a little more with ‘Equipment and Magic Items’, almost all of these are very or slightly impractical outside of a handful of uses, but isn’t that the pleasure of a tool? And of having this particular tool? Perhaps this granular imagining is the true spirit of 3.5.

It also has a pleasing image.

Various odd or conditionally useful weapons, some bizzarro additions to armour. ‘Blackwater’ which cripples water breathing creatures in a certain volume of water, (there have been occasions where I wished I had some), the Caveharp, (less interesting than it sounds), the blessedly-specific ‘Darkvision Invisible Paint’, wonderful SHRIEK PASTE, a ‘Spelunkers Kit’ which should be standard issue for all characters anyway.

Then a range of poisons and chemicals, including ‘Virile Madness’, which is PCP, and another curious obsession of this book; templates. Here templates for magical weapons made of this thing and that, including ‘Morphing’ weapons, which I feel like would be much more insanely useful irl than in game, where the physical/kinetic problems such things are made to solve are rarely imagined with the depth, fluency and regularity to make their use worthwhile.

Armours of ‘halfweight’, ‘Drowcraft’, ‘Illithidwrought’ and ‘Xorn’. Cortical mucusy armour that blanks your mind to foes, psychic armour and Drow Death Armour that makes you invisible, gives you ‘disguise’ and ‘spider climb’, for if you want to fantasise about being the coolest most cracked ultra-high-fantasy protagonist EVAR - these are dreams and aspirations I think, more than tools, and its curious how much ultra-mega-high-fantasy begins to intersect with post-singularity science-fiction tropes. We will see this later in city design.

Rings, of which the most fun is ‘Antivenom’ (60,000gp), and just below it ‘Antivenom, Frugal’ (10,000gp), just for the image of a world that contrast creates. RODS always feel under-noetic, and Staffs (no room underground surely?). A Figurine of Wonderous Power that transforms into a giant spider you can ride around on, and I have always wanted to own one of these in D&D, the less romantic and perhaps more old-school ‘Figurines of Illusory Escort’ which cast an illusion of guards around you when you sleep. Some very boring Neutral-Themed items. Last; a magic tome so powerful its like carrying around a semi-divine limited-use A.I. (you must speak to it in a specific dead language or it eats your soul and makes you one of its pages), and the Illithid Grafts, finally, but they are mainly just sticking tentacles on things, apart from ‘Humanoid Skin’ which involves sealing up something (or someone, presumably horrific), inside;

“If the humanoid skin hides monstrous features below its surface (such as extra arms, tentacles or antennae), using those features requires thrusting them through the skins surface as a standard action. This act showers all nearby cretures with blood and deals 1d4 damage to the graft recipient.”

Monsters are not a high point, there are rules for crossing things with Illithid (add tentacles), crossing them with spiders (add legs), crossing them with Chameleons, filling them with ‘Faerzress’, rules to mineralise anything; none make anything more interesting, producing largely globs. Multiple creatures that ‘swim through earth’ for various reasons and in various ways. A minotaur with demon blood? The ‘Lith’ has a good silhouette;

The ‘Maur’ as a hunched underground giant has a pleasing mechanic in which, if it can find room, it laboriously and horrifically stands full upright, “an agonizing, joint-popping experience for the Maur, though it relishes the change” and takes on a little of the noble potency of its forebears. The ‘Ineffable Horror’ which I can only assume got its name as an Underdark joke, since it is the most ‘effable’ thing ever.

The only really very-good monster is still only half-good and that is the ‘Annihilator’, a kind of Abberant solo Rust Monster with extra tentacles which can disintegrate anything. “The annihilator seems to derive sustenance and pleasure from destroying things, especially living things.” It has no ecology, background, sanity or reason for being, and likely would not benefit from them, it just likes Annihilating things and that is all it wants to do. A twist in the tapestry of the world and a gleaming contextless ambulatory disaster. Not bad.

just once in my life I want to say ‘call forth.. the ANNIHILATOR’

Exploring the Underdark

Things take an uptick here and its surprising, or unsurprising, how parallel to my own thought much of this is. We begin with a tour of underground features; Abysses, Caves, Dungeons, Gorges, Lakes, Rifts, Rivers, Seas, Shafts, Tunnels, Vaults and Volcanoes, which in this last section, does nothing to elucidate the Magma/Lava differentiation; what is lava encountered underground, but magma? What is Magma encountered in an open cave, but lava? Precisely when does water count as having left the tap?

From there into rocks and rock formations, including the classic trifecta of Sedimentary, Igneous and Metamorphic, to which we add MAGIMORPHIC rock formations - much could be done with the consequences of alternative geology and tectonics in a fantasy world, one far older than ours, and thus with a different arrangement of stone, or with magical warfare etc happening on the regular, with semi-regular portals to the Plane of this and that, D&D type Gods popping down to fundamentally alter reality for a certain place or time, and of the more Abrahamic, Tolkien-level God fundamentally changing the substance, history and nature of reality if, for instance, you sail too far West. (Discovering America is a sin.)

Then the Environment, climate, ecologies, plants and fungi, animal life. In almost every version of the Underdark the environment is still seperate from the solar cycle, as with ours, but is much higher in energy than our own cave systems. The answer is magic. The conception of the Underdark being ‘magically compressed’ appears in many tomes. This book imagines trees which feed on magic the way others do on sunlight. I can’t help but imagine what the leaf and branch shapes would be? Would the leaves have subtle dimensionally warped Escher shapes? The branches bend in directions you can’t go?

My own conception for this hyper-compression is that of the unification, compression and composting of multiple causal paths, the deeper in you go.

So for instance, if you go a mile down, civilisation is about 5,000 years old and modern humanity has only expanded since the last glacial maximum roughly 10,000 years ago.

But if you go two or three miles down, then there may have been 10,000 years of civilisation, perhaps even mutually-contradicting civilisational paths, either combined from alternate worlds or perhaps those paths wiped from ontology by divine hands, cannot be wiped down here, so if the world is ‘re-set’, this deepest layer of it cannot be re-set, and retains all the old programming and tombs and remnants of old dreams and old ideas, things which could never have happened, but did, but which are only remembered here.

Then if you go down four to six miles, you walk amongst the compressed relics of 20,000 years of civilisation, or 5,000 years X four, each semi-sperate yet interacting, interlaced and overlapping. This combined weight of time, experience and record, more than the surface could bear, is what creates the overwhelming magical compression of the Underworld. There is more down here than could be here, and more and more the deeper you go. Till if you go deep enough, perhaps the depths of all possible worlds combine into one vast realm of night.

That, at least, is my conception. We get ‘Underdark Hazards’, a limited but ok climbing and spelunking section, a bit on getting lost and then a long section on Encounter tables. I will be advising people make their own for Veins of the Earth

Finally for this ‘exploration’ section, we get into the once-again parallel conceptions of a somewhat ‘mythic’ underworld and the differences between this and the real-life underworld that inspired it.

A pseudo-natural aspect of the Forgotten Realms Underdark is that it is not contiguous, that is; it comes in patches and bounds, like islands, and its hard, sometimes impossible, to get from zone to zone. There are big areas of interconnection, but these are seperate to each other. Interesting and curious.

A classic situation for the ‘semi-mythic underworld’ is that its deeper than it should be, and the magma, water, caves and tectonics are much more spread out and interwoven than they ever should be. You can imagine our world like a densely layered cake, or lasagne, with interesting, but limited, layers of interaction. You have limestone caves, which were usually below, or on, the water table, but are now above it, then you have the water table, and its hard to explore beneath that underground, and then you have massively increasing pressure and heat, and then molten rock. Head to tail there is not that much actual depth to work with.

In the Forgotten Realms, and in VotE, there is way more depth and things are more spread out and intermingled, even at the cost of perhaps making less sense. Can you have a huge cavern beneath an ocean, with another (navigable) ocean in it? In our world, no, but in Fantasy, yes. Can you have navigable caves above, around, even below a magma flow? Not really, but in Fantasy, yes.

Geography - Faerun’s Underdark

A really nice piece of cartography and a slightly-frustratingly organised alphabetical section finish off the book, and much of it is this section. We are moving slightly more into a ‘Hasbro’s Invisible Cities’ vibe here; a list you can read like fiction, purely for the enjoyment of it. And its here that the propensity of the Forbidden Realms to build upon some very normative base concepts, but to keep building on them, to keep iterating and developing, and to bury the results of those developments deep in hidden corners of its world, helps it reach ramparts of innovative high fantasy you probably weren’t expecting going on. A lot of this is normative, some more interesting than you thought, and bits of it are very good.

Araaumycos - an entire kingdom-sized section of the Underdark is one fungal organism. It seems to be maybe possibly sentient, some of the time, and broadly neutral, or at least not expansionist. “On rare occasions enormous patches of Araumycos die, revealing ancient civilisations ripe for plunder beneath.” Even better, there is another, smaller, but aberrant and expansionist Fungal kingdom/entity/person.

Blingdenstone - A collapsed Deep Gnome city, but one of the ‘factions’ currently occupying it is ‘Ogremoch’s Bane’ a sentient cloud of magic dust. Its motivations are unclear but “In the back of the city, dozens of planar creatures of earth stand inert as the cloud swirls around them, whispering promises of victory and glory in Terran. Earth Elementals, mephits, Xorns, thoqquas, end even stranger creatures wait, still as statues.”

Cairnheim, Demense of the Dodkong - a lava tube village of giants ruled by a crafty 1,500 year old Stone Giant Liche with a magical crown, ruthless, but being very old, he still clings to an ancient Giant custom of hospitality, (limited, three days of safety). Of course you need historical knowledge to even guess this custom still exists and he’s not going to tell you.

Chaulssin; a ruined city, half within the plane of shadow, on a precipice above an abyss, now occupied by a House of Assassins. An Illithid city ruled by a council of Vampire Illithids who took over when their Elder Brain died - but they are all going slightly crazy from absorbing the thoughts and memories of so many other Illithids. Also home to the twisted Illithid philosopher Nurr’Korzahg who, after a moment of clarity, has started developing the notion that consistently trying to subvert and dominate all other forms of life might actually be not a great long-term strategy (several cultures and locations in this Map are made up of Illithid-hating ex-slaves, and they have at least two ‘Slave Races’ (Gythanki and Duergar) who ended up escaping and turning into absolute 100% Illithid HATERS, could our own policy of literally making enemies be at fault here?)

Deep Imaskar is a really neat addition to the legendarium; an ancient city of Wizards which hid beneath the earth after a major slave revolt. Now a self-sustaining pocket-kingdom with buildings growing from its gravatically-warped walls.

Imaskar is so secret that the glowing ‘sky’ of its cavern is a gigantic seal made specifically to keep it hidden, a seal so complex that studying and repairing it is equivalent to stargazing, a seal that affects reality so much that, wherever anyone is outside Imaskar, if they imagine Imaskar itself, the seal subtly and invisibly tugs at their thoughts, suggesting to them that the city is long-gone, if it was ever real, nothing but a rumour or fantasy. Imaskar is so secret that if people are chosen to leave, to complete some mission or for other reasons, they have the very memory of Imaskar erased from their minds, and are dropped in some random place far from the city; a true Wolfian hero, (or an RPG hero), who literally does not know where they are from, has a general sense that they have a mission, and at some point, will face a deeply buried command to return... somewhere, somehow. An interesting literary experiment.

Drik Hargunen; a city overwritten on every surface with the testament of a Duergar god, with complex runes of warding and subtle interlaced command phrases for the cities self-defence system interwoven in the ever-flowing words. To live here you must know how to read, know what to read and know deeply what not to read, which is why the Duergar allow no sighted slaves into the city-proper, instead they bring in blind Grimlocks, their hands tied to the handles of carts, so they can’t touch anything they shouldn’t.

Dupapen; a village of Aboleth slaves who, in the mental absence of their masters, have set up a thriving commercial concern. Some time ago the Aboleths ate a bunch of Gityanki and absorbed their minds and memories of intra-planar life. These memories are so vivid and intense that the Aboleths have been sitting around, blissed out and vibing for a decade. They tried breeding new Aboleths to manage the slaves but since each new Aboleth is born with the perfect memories of its parent, they had the same problem.

A near-extraplanar city made up of portals and spherical spaces in solid stone. If you can’t naturally swim through stone, don’t bother turning up.

Llurth Drier; Drow but poor and covered in mud.

Looblishar; a Kua Toa settlement overtaken by devotees of the Goddess of Darkness. Utterly lightless, only those with perfect Darkvision need even try to enter, though small this is the Axial point for a range of portals which reach to oceanic and above ground exit points all over the world. Creepy cultists of the Dark Goddess use Looblishar to move things and people and to engage their no-doubt whacky schemes. The kind of place you drop a patriot missile on as soon as you find out where it is.

Ooltul; a Beholder city forced into a surprising level of cosmopolitan toleration by an infestation of planar parasites who control the head Beholders; “Considering that Ooltrul is a city of evil geniuses dominated by monstrously unhuman aberrations, it is reasonably welcoming of outsiders.”

Oryndoll; an Illithid city dominated by a cult who’s modus-operandi is not only to acquire knowledge, but to specifically acquire knowledge that can then be removed from all other records or minds world-wide, so that this thing once known, now only they may know.

Reeshov; a Grimlock fortress town of former Illithid slaves who surround their settlement with complex traps, free slaves but trust no-one (the Illithids consistently probe their defences with mind-altered thralls and they know this).

Rringlor Noroth; “a city in only the most liberal sense of the word”, a city of Cloakers built into a gigantic bridge, part sculpted from shadow, crossing an immeasurable abyss. “The cloakers of Rringlor Nortoth spend much of their time continuously moaning and flying in great swooping orbits around a bridge of shadowstone”

I love these guys, they manage to be effortlessly more alien than either Kua Toa (cringe and flanderised) or Mind Flayers

“The entrance is a series of cracks and flat passages no more than 4 inches wide within the Shadowspan. Cloakers peel away from the circling mass at random intervals and wedge their bodies into the cracks to crawl into the city.”

“Sometimes, cloakers just lie on the ceiling and stare at the floor for hours;” - same.

One human sage ‘inhabits’ this ‘city’; “Saibh is not insane, but he is immersed so deeply into the cloaker mindset that he cannot easily return and carry on coherent conversations in Common...”

Undrek’Thoz; a Drow mega-city, a bunch of very different Drow cities connected by hidden portals and unified by a general government, though outsiders won’t necessarily know about the portals. The gates between different sections of the mega-city are set to allow no metal to pass through, (to limit the craze for assassinations), this has lead to a sophisticated arms-race in pets and poisons. Economically, the city is unified by vellum scrip. In a high fantasy setting, things like this portal-linked mega-city would be way more common; such settings, if allowed to run, would inevitably develop into something a little like high-energy science fiction.

Final Analysis; Adventure Locations, Infinity Engine, Nostalgic Emotions

A last section on ‘Dungeons’ lets the book down again; single entry, mono-path micro-maps with complex ‘trick’ enemies and substantial treasure. Nothing really like ‘dungeons’ and the section is not large, but it does have an entry for ‘Citadel of the Fiendish Slayer’ which is a great title if nothing else.

Of the differences I have with ‘Underdark’ at least some can be put down to preference in design. I am not of the Kind whom suffers for the Prestige Class, or who enjoys the ‘build’, let alone picking an absurdly specific Prestige Class and playing specifically towards that for god knows how many sessions. A ‘biography expressed through mechanics’ has no interest for me, I am not amongst the elect, yet, I cannot despise them. We are cousins if not kin and I have enough of the hyper-specificity autism tingle to refuse a wholesale rejection. Neither will I live in, or near their, ghetto of stats.

Of the monster section; it is simply bad. Of Underdark exploration and transit; parallel, and respectable.

The best part of the book is where it enters into the beautiful twilight dream of the Forgotten Realms, a place so normative in fantasy that it gets interesting again, there are lots of odd ideas buried here and there in this ‘eventide of gems’ (which I can never believe to be ‘lightless’, the conception of a true devouring dark and of adventuring for weeks within a fragile bubble of light is something this Underdark book, and perhaps every book of this type, fails at), and I see this dream, strangely, through the medium of the Infinity Engine and isometric RPGs like Baldurs Gate and Planescape: Torment.

Perhaps this is because such games were my only actual active interaction with 3.5 and its culture. Perhaps the physical design language of this engine seeped through into the worldbuilding for the entire setting. Wouldn’t be the first time there was conceptual counterflow. Deep Imaskar in particular seems set up for an ‘amnesiac protagonist’ RPG. The careful and quite charming visual design, including pseudo-crumpled ‘parchment’ edges, a boutique, or at least, rare, internal title font, and a handful of other things, speak of the fading edge of correct and comfortable warm and basking 1990’s page design. Summer.

Perhaps it is the sad, strange, isolated summer vibe I get from all these things and which seems to unify them. Of dreams engaged in darkened rooms while concrete bakes outside. Of a slight interior sadness and loneliness mixed with the deep possession of a fantastic land.

‘Stone Sphere’ is great.

(There is a side bar of ‘graffiti left around a portal’ so cringe it nearly made me want to kill myself.)

A Review of 'Soliloquies in England' by George Santayana

 “Only the dead have seen the end of war.”

Remember that Plato quote? Well it WASN’T Plato, it was George Santayana! In one of the better parts of one of his better essays; ‘Tipperary’, in which he observes a group of British soldiers singing in a coffee shop after the Armistice is signed and they realise they don’t have to die.

A grim riposte but, in responding directly to his living circumstances, these singing soldiers manage to focus his mind, at least for a while and thus produce an unusually coherent, analytic and downbeat sequence of thoughts.

(All quotes severely broken up. GS does not use paragraphs much.)

From ‘Tipperary’

“They are hardly out of the fog of war when they are lost in the fog of peace.

If experience could teach mankind anything, how different our morals and out politics would be, how clear, how tolerant, how steady! If we knew ourselves, our conduct at all times would be absolutely decided and consistent; and a pervasive sense of vanity and humour would disinfect our passions, if we knew the world.

As it is, we live experimentally, moodily, in the dark, each generation breaks its egg shell with the same haste and assurance as the last, pecks at the same indigestible pebbles, dreams the same dreams, or others just as absurd, and if it hears anything of what former men have learned by experience, it corrects their maxims by its first impressions and rushes down any untrodden path which it finds alluring, to die in its own way, or becomes wise too late and too no purpose.”

GS goes on to (correctly, but surprisingly ruthlessly) say that there is no reprieve in this armistice. The other nations may be at peace, but the Germans definitely are not. Nothing is over.

“Be sad if you will, there is always reason for sadness, since the good which the world brings is so fugitive and bought at so great a price; but be brave. If you think happiness worth enjoying, think it worth defending.

Nothing you can lose by dying is half so precious as the readiness to die, which is man’s charter of nobility, life would not be worth having without the freedom of soul and the friendship with nature which that readiness brings.

The things we know and love on earth are, and should be, transitory; they are, as were the things celebrated by Homer, at best the song or oracle by which heaven is revealed in our time. We must pass with them into eternity, not in the end only, but continually, as the phrase passes into its meaning; and since they are part of us, and we of them, we should accompany them with good grace: it would be desolation to survive.”

This might be true but such words count for more with me if the speaker themselves is visibly willing to claim ‘man’s charter of nobility’ (i.e. get shot). Coming from a man behind an orchard wall, it strikes a little different.

I have no exact recollection of why I first got my hands on this book. I think it may have been Georges Essay ‘Queen Mab’, about fiction and the British character, (I was working on Queen Mab’s Palace’ about this time). But my interest was redoubled, initially, by the largely warm viewpoint of this exquisitely civilised man going though a spate of pre-War Anglophilia.

From ‘Grisielle’

“England is pre-eminently a land of atmospheres. A luminous haze permeates everywhere, softening distances, magnifying perspectives, transfiguring familiar objects, harmonizing the accidental, making beautiful things magical and ugly things picturesque. Road and pavements become wet mirrors, in which the fragments of this gross world are shattered, inverted, and transmuted into jewels, more appealing than precious stones to the poet, because they are insubstantial and must be loved without being possessed.”

...

“In England the classic spectacle of thunderbolts and rainbows appears but seldom; such contrasts are too violent and definite for these tender skies. here the conflict between light and darkness, like all other conflicts, ends in a compromise; cataclysms are rare, but revolution is perpetual. Everything lingers on and is modified; all is luminous and all is grey.”

…

Its always slightly pleasant to see one’s home through the eyes of an admiring foreigner, though in this case, sad, because Santayana is describing the last flower of pre-war Europe and England, a culture which, culturally, and largely environmentally, is now overwritten and essentially gone. (Though the sky does still act like that.)

From ‘The British Character’

“What is it that governs the Englishman? Certainly not intelligence; seldom passion; hardly self-interest, since what we call self-interest is nothing but some dull passion served by a brisk intelligence. The Englishman’s heart is perhaps capricious or silent; it is seldom designing or mean.

There are nations where people are always innocently explaining how they have been lying and cheating in small matters, to get out of some predicament, or secure some advantage, that seems to them a part of the art of living. Such is not the Englishman’s way: it is easier for him to face or break opposition than to circumvent it. If we tried to say that what governs him is convention, we should have to ask ourselves how it comes about that England is the paradise of individuality, eccentricity, heresy, anomalies, hobbies and humours.

Nowhere do we come oftener upon those two social abortions - they affected and the disaffected. Where else would a man inform you, with a sort of proud challenge, that he lived on nuts, or was in correspondence through a medium with Sir Joshua Reynolds, or had been disgustingly housed when last in prison?

Where else would a young woman, in dress and manners the close copy of a man, tell you that her parents were odious, and that she desired a husband, but no children, or children without a husband? It is true that these novelties soon become conventions of some narrower circle, or may even have been adopted en bloc in emotional desperation, as when people are dissident and supercilious by temperament, they manage to wear their uniforms with a difference, turning them by some lordly adaptation into a part of their own person.”

…

As with almost everything Geroge says, he layers positive and negative, the one implying the other, or counter-informing the other, layer upon layer, till one receives, never a judgment, (George would make a terrible Judge, his cases would never end and no final opinion would be reached), but more a rich, deep, painting of whatever he apprehends, in this case a culture, mixed with and informed by its environment, and its good-bad qualities mixed among its bad-good errors.

This is also the opinion of a very much a slightly anglicised, but still very Spanish Latin Man, (from a culture that knows how to feel and how to live) dealing with a horde of strange Anglos (who live and feel mysteriously, if at all, but sometimes know how to do.)

From ‘Death-Bed Manners’

“That a desire to ignore everything unpleasant is at the bottom of this convention seems to be confirmed by an opposite attitude towards death which I have observed among English people during this war. Some of them speak of death quite glibly, quite cheerfully, as if it were a sort of trip to Brighton. “Oh yes our two sons went down in the Black Prince. They were such nice boys. Never heard a word about them of course; but probably the magazine blew up and they were all killed quite instantly, so that we don’t mind half so much as if they had had any of those bad lingering wounds. They wouldn’t have liked it at all being crippled you know; and we all think it is probably much better as it is. Just blown to atoms! It is such a blessing!”

..

The precise, living, vivid yet ironic voice of the past springing briefly from this quote, highlights what, (for me, if definitely not for him), if part of the tragedy of George Santayana; that he spent a huge amount of time thinking deeply, but mysteriously, and elliptically, though beautifully, about those wise and high generalities in which the limits of philosophy and cognition are defined.

Head in the clouds, where nothing is accomplished. With a mind as precise, sensitive, knowledgeable and tolerant as his, and a pen as brilliant and expressive, the world lost an incredible reporter and probably a great novelist (he wrote one but I fear it is a novel of ‘ideas’), while GS dedicated himself to the sky-castles.

Eventually, George seems to have had enough of England. Perhaps, in part of the long cyclic back and forth of admiration and alienation which any traveller feels when dealing with a foreign culture for a sustained period, he, after dealing with what I call ‘England England’ (home counties, oxford, misty fields, hidden wealth), he gets a view of what I would consider (to me), the ‘real’ England (mad councils, housing estates, public transport, mediocrity and depression). Here he writes an essay about how terrible the Hegelians are and how wrong, bad and inappropriate it is that England is filled with them, (who should not be there). I am not really fully familiar with what exactly an Hegalian is, but based on Georges writing I am willing to accept that they are very bad.

From ‘The real England’

“In the real England the character I dreamt of exists, but very much mixed, and over balanced by its contrary. Many have the minds of true gentlemen, poetically detached from fortune, and seeing in temporal things only their eternal beauties. Yet if this type of English character had been general, England could never have become Puritan, not bred so many prosperous merchants and manufacturers, not sent such shoals of emigrants to the colonies; it would hardly have revelled as it does in political debates and elections, and in societies for the prevention and promotion of everything.

In the real England there is a strong, if not dominant admixture of worldliness. How ponderous these Lord Mayors, these pillars of chapels, these bishops, these politicians, these solemn snobs! How tight-shut, how moralistic, how overbearing these intellectuals with a mission! All these important people are eaten up with zeal, and given over to rearranging the world, and yet without the least idea of what they would change it into in the end, or to what purpose.”

They have not changed, but this leads us into GS’s alienation from whatever modernity is becoming in England during and after the war, and while his ‘final opinions’ on anything are as misty and negotiable as always, he does have a lot of interesting things to say…

From ‘Liberalism and Culture’

“... Fortunately, liberal ages have been secondary ages, inheriting the monuments, the feelings and the social hierarchy of previous times, when men had lived in compulsory unison, having only one unquestioned religion, one style of art, one political order, one common spring of laughter and tears. Liberalism has come to remove the strain and the trammels of these traditions without as yet uprooting the traditions themselves. Most people remember their preliberal heritage and hardly remember that they are legally free to abandon it and to sample any and other form of life.

Liberalism does not go very deep, it is an adventitious principle, a mere loosening of an older structure. For that reason it brings to all who felt cramped and ill-suited such comfort and relief. It offers them an escape from all sorts of accidental tyrannies. It opens to them that sweet, scholarly, tenderly moral, critically superior attitude of mind to which Matthew Arnold called culture.”

....

“Culture requires liberalism for its foundation, and liberalism requires culture for its crown. It is culture that integrates in imagination the activities which liberalism so dangerously disperses in practice.”

Reading this from the far end, in a sense, from the other end, of a great age of Liberalism, where the Liberalism still exists, but the culture has run out, feels a little spooky.

From ‘The Irony of Liberalism’

“... the transcendental principal of progress is pantheistic. It requires everything to be ill at ease in its own house; no-one can be really free or happy but all must be tossed, like herded emigrants, on the same compulsory voyage, to the same destination.

The world came from a nebula, and to a nebula it returns.”

....

“It admonished the dogs not to bark and bite, even if, in the words of the sacred poet, “it is their nature to.” Dogs, according to the transcendental philosophy, ought to improve their nature and behave better.

A chief part of the liberal inspiration was the love of peace, safety, comfort and general information; it aimed at stable wealth, it insisted on education, it venerated culture. It was wholly out of sympathy with the wilder instincts of man, with the love of foraging, of hunting, of fighting, of plotting, of carousing, or of doing penance. It had an acute, a sickening horror of suffering; to be cruel was devilish and to be hardened to pain was brutal.

I am afraid liberalism was hopelessly pre-Nietzschean; it was Victorian; it was tame. In inviting every man to be free an autonomous it assumed that, once free, he would wish to be rich, to be educated, and to be demure. How could he possibly fail to covet a way of life in which, in the eyes of liberals, was so obviously the best? It must have been a painful surprise to them, and most inexplicable, that hardly anybody who has had a taste of the liberal system has ever liked it.”

When GS is not talking about England, Politics or, really.. who can say truly what precisely a lot of his essays are essentially about? He does not think in categories. But at least some of them are lean more into what we would call cognition, thought, the experience of the world and what it is to be, think, sense and exist.

From ‘Cross-Lights’

“... Things, when seen, seem to come and go with our visions; and visions, when we do not know why they visit us, seem to be things. But this is not the end of the story. Opacity is a great discoverer. It teaches the souls of animals the existence of what is not themselves. Their souls in fact live and spread their roots in the darkness, which em-bosoms and creates the light, though the light does not comprehend it.

If sensuous evidence flooded the whole sphere with which souls are conversant, they would have no reason for suspecting that there was anything they did not see, and they would live in a fool’s paradise of lucidity.

Fortunately, for their wisdom, if not their comfort, they come upon mysteries and surprises, earthquakes and rumblings in their hidden selves and in their undeciphered environment; they live in time, which is a double abyss of darkness; and the primary and urgent object of their curiosity is that unfathomable engine of nature which from its ambush governs their fortunes.

The proud, who shine by their own light, do not perceive matter, the fuel that feeds and will some day fail them; but the knowledge of it comes to extinct stars in their borrowed light and almost mortal coldness, because they need to warm themselves at a distant fire and to adapt their seasons to its favourable shining.”

In his views on the embedding of the mind in reality, and what ‘light’ and ‘darkness’ knowledge and ignorance, the known and unknown truly mean, GS is brilliant, Heraclitean, perhaps wrong, but holy shit can he write. Even if his arguments are wrong, his prose is correct.

From ‘Psyche’

“Long before sunrise she is at work in her subterranean kitchen over her pots of stewing herbs, her looms, and her spindles; and with the first dawn, when the first ray of intuition falls through some aperture into those dusky spaces, what does it light up? The secret springs of her life? The aims she is so faithfully but blindly pursuing?

Far from it. intuition, floods of intuition, have been playing for ages upon human life: poets, painters, men of prayer, scrupulous naturalists innumerable, have been intent on their several visions, yet of the origin and of the end of life we know as little as ever.

And the reason for this; that intuition is not a material organ of the Psyche, like a hand or antenna; it is a miraculous child, far more alive than herself, whose only instinct is play, laughter, and brooding meditation. This strange child - who could have been his father? - is a poet; absolutely useless and incomprehensible to his poor mother, and only a new burden on her shoulders, because she can’t help feeding and loving him. He sees, which to her is a mystery, because, although she has always acted as if, in some measure, she felt things at a distance, she has never seen and never can see anything.”

From ‘The Tragic Mask’

“Living things in contact with the air must acquire a cuticle, and it is not urged against cuticles that they are not hearts; yet some philosophers seem to be angry with images for not being things, and with words for not being feelings.

Words and images are like shells, no less integral parts of nature than are the substances they cover, but better addressed to the eye and more open to observation.

I would not say that substance exists for the sake of appearance, or faces for the sake of masks, of the passions for the sake of poetry and virtue. Nothing arises in nature for the sake of anything else; all these phrases and products are involved equally in the round of existence, and it would be sheer wilfulness to praise the germinal phase on the ground that it is vital, and to denounce the explicit phase on the ground that it is dead and sterile.”

....

“Under our published principles and plighted language we must assiduously hide all the inequalities of our moods and conduct, and this without hypocrisy, since our deliberate character is more truly ourself than is the flux of our involuntary dreams.”

..

“Our animal habits are transmuted by conscience into loyalties and duties, and we become “persons” or masks. Art, truth, and death turn everything to marble.”

From ‘The Comic Mask’

“Reason cannot stand alone; brute habit and blind play are at the bottom of art and morals and unless irrational impulses and fancies are kept alive, the life of reason collapses for sheer emptiness.”

....

“Where there is no habitual art and no moral liberty, the instinct for direct expression is atrophied for want of exercise; and then slang and a humorous perversity of phrase or manner act as safety-valves to sanity, and you manage to express yourself in spite of the censor by saying something grotesquely different from what you mean. That is long way round to sincerity, and an ugly one.”

This ‘long way round to sincerity’ seems utterly appropriate to the current poisoned moment of relentless mutual surveillance and censorship combined with reactionary, resentful and permanently ironic ‘freedom’.

From ‘Carnival’

“This world is contingency and absurdity incarnate, the oddest of possibilities masquerading momentarily as a fact.

Custom blinds persons who are not naturally speculative to the egregious character of the actual, because custom assimilates their expectations to the march of existing things and deadens their power to imagine anything different.”

Santayana’s ‘job description’ is ‘philosopher, essayist, poet and novelist’ – I am not sure how he actually got paid. The man writes like an angel, thinks like a cloud and rambles like a lost dog. There are no short, accurate Santayana quotes, because every single idea is lengthily toyed with, and even if you excise that, each idea is lodged or woven in with, sometimes an elegant tapestry, sometimes a foul slum, of other ideas, many of which contradict or cast shade on anything stated or suggested by the one you are looking at now. No-one can criticise Santayana’s conclusions because we do not know what they are.

“I notice that the men of the world, when they dip into my books, find them consistent, almost oppressively consistent, and to the ladies everything is crystal-clear, yet the philosophers say that it is lazy and self-indulgent of me not to tell them plainly what I think, if I know myself what it is.

Because I describe madness sympathetically, because I lose myself in the dreaming mind, and see the world from the transcendental point of vantage, while at the same time interpreting that dream by its presumable motives and by its moral tendencies, these quick and intense reasoners suppose that I am vacillating in my own opinions.”

You are vacillating in your own opinions! You are not getting to the point! You should have gotten a proper job where people would have made you do things! Being bound to some actual functional purpose would have sorted you right out, instead we get this.

Count Belisarius by Robert Graves

An overwhelmingly sad book about the worlds most heroic dude. A study in ressentiment. Rome’s summer in the east, before its very slow descent, produces an actual hero; and absolutely everyone hates him. Ok maybe not everyone, but surely the core of the story is the staggering level of fear and resentment so many Romans feel towards their military saviour, especially the Emperor Julian.

Julian and Belisarius

The toxic relationship between Belisarius, (brave, rational, Roman, focused, moisturised), and Julian (cowardly, clever, fanatical, irresolute, possibly possessed by a demon, flaky skin), is the core of the story. The more of a Paragon Belisarius, is and the more capable, unbribable, virtuous and honest he is, the more Julian absolutely hates, resents, fears and despises him.

This core personal resentment of Julian, and the slightly deranged, almost inhuman passive acceptance of this by Belisarius, is just the axis of a wider and deeper resentment. People have always loved to hate their heroes, in some sense, the yearning for a hero is a product of the same weakness that produces the ressentiment of the hero. We must either become our own heroes or despise those we erect above us.

Never was there a society more desperate for a hero, or less willing to accept one, than the Constantinople of ‘Belisarius,’ - the man is adored when he is absent, hated when he is close, despised for his virtue, loved again once he has been shamed and ruined - it is the story of celebrity writ large, though, purely as-a-narrative, Justinian’s utterly deranged resentment does make this a much more interesting story. He is almost comically disruptive to his own schemes when they go too well, it does give the book a central ‘villain’ (most of the Gothic generals aren’t really up to it), and the later relationship between the two, with Belisarius,’ almost perverse levels of aggressive loyalty, almost increasing the more badly Justinian treats him, adds a tone of dark comedy.

Likewise; doomed

One reason ‘THA WEST’(tm) cares a lot less about Byzantine/Eastern Rome history may be because it is inexpressibly sad for a long long time. Its hard to inhabit long a story of reversals and ruination. Julian’s war in Italy destroys much of the old Roman culture it was there to save, making the victory nul. The material and moral erosion is gigantic.

Constantinople itself, and the culture it represents, is craven deluded, hysteric and obsessed by the most deranged trivialities (no-one and nothing on this earth will ever make me believe that it actually matters exactly what view of the Trinity you have). The moral quality of its people; backstabbing and short sighted to an extent you would not believe was actually sustainable, (long term it wasn’t), seems deeply current. This is an age after the big dreams have fled. A lack of idealism is one thing but no-one seems to actually genuinely believe in anything. (This may not be a true history but this is the sense of the book.) I know Byzantine became a byword for crazed levels of intrigue but good god they earn the title.

Above all, no-one has any ideas, at least not ones related to reality. No-one has any sense of the Christian world as a unified thing and no sense of a future for the Roman Empire. Even if Belisarius, manages to tape bits of it back together with raw charisma, effort and intelligence, they no idea of what to build, anywhere, except fortifications in the wrong place and a gigantic (admittedly, insanely beautiful), Cathedral in Constantinople.

The constant ethnic changeover creates a slight air of cosplay, of varied peoples adopting older patterns, with more or less effectiveness or utility, and putting on the clothes of a fallen culture, while the ethnos that made that culture lies quiescent, utterly indifferent, ready to be ridden over. Belisarius is a Perfect Roman, from the old stories, but he’s not actually Roman, or even really Greek, instead he is an Illyrian-Roman or Thracian-Roman. The actual Romans; in Rome, just want to be left alone, so their future, and the future of Rome will be decided by a contest between a Thracian and a German, both of whom have reasonable claims to be defenders of Roman culture.

Obviously has nothing to do with modern Britain. Neither does the character of Justinian; clever, manipulative, inconstant, idealistic about all the wrong things and treacherous and vague about all the important things, have anything to do with any U.K. leader, either in the 2020s or 1930s.

Ambivalent Military History

Robert Graves combines experience, interest in ambivalence to fascinating effect. It feels as if he has, in some ways, a distinctly un-military personality, yet, as a scion of the Great War, he has more actual direct military experience than 90% of other historical authors. He knows a lot about military affairs and he knows a lot first-hand, yet he is not very ‘pumped up’ about them. This intelligent awareness and emotional ambivalence is mirrored in the character of the narrator, through who’s eyes we see the hero - a Greek eunuch slave.

I’m reminded of the line from Frieren where someone asks the great mage Frieren if they actually enjoy magic; “only somewhat”.

The image of war that emerges is at times, like that of an epic; glorious, brave, deadly, magnificent, but combines this with a world-view which is not quite cynical, (the narrator is quite compassionate to most of his subjects), but detached, and through this we get an image of deep historical contingencies, of miscommunications, strange events, odd ideas, of people going the wrong way and getting the right thing, or doing the right thing and getting the wrong result - much is chaos.

A key story; in the attempt to conquer Carthage, Belisarius arrives by ship in Africa. He sits down with his generals to discuss what to do next. The Generals want to advance along the coast, shadowed by the ships. Belisarius, disagrees and, using calm reason, persuades them to his own plan of advancing inland. Now, ultimately, the Roman army encounters the Vandals they are there to fight, and in fact they win, but the way in which this happens, is utterly chaotic, disordered, comic, strange.

A random encounter leads to the death of a figure in shining armour. The Romans advance, are cut off, the Vandals advance, miss the Romans, find them. They find the body of the man in shining armour; he is the son of the Vandals king. The king is so distraught by this that he breaks down in grief and becomes totally unable to command his army. During this grief, Belisarius, attacks, wins, re-unites the Romans, advances on Carthage and is let into the city.

On considering events, Belisarius, realises he made exactly the wrong choice; his army was broken up and if the Vandal King had not been grief stricken, the Romans should have lost, so he should have advanced along the coast. However, on examining the defences of Carthage, he realises that if he had advanced along the cost, he would have run into them, and there would have been nothing he could do against them - so he still would have lost.

There were no good choices, logic failed, he won. Strange for us, but for this most rational and reasonable of men, who bent enormous energy into making a sane, disciplined fighting force, and using them calmly and rationally, truly troubling - none of his ideas actually worked, or if they did, they did not work in any way he expected. There is a fundamental chaos under human affairs, which no plan may outrace.

The Strange Character of Belisarius

He never betrays the Emperor, even when, perhaps, for the good of Rome, he should have. Likewise he never betrays his wife, his men, or stabs anyone in the back. Eventually he suffers the final humiliation of a circus-trial for crimes he did not commit, (if he actually had, perhaps Julian would have been able to tolerate him), and is blinded. The general suffers, at all times, in quiet self-possessed dignity. Truly moisturised and unbothered. Its a bit creepy!

It is perhaps the fact that for Belisarius,, the question of the meaning of his life was a solved one, that makes him, when he stands alone before the viewer, a slightly un-interesting character. Like Galahad, since he is already right, and knows what he must do, the only interest comes in how, and in the rogues gallery of people around him, of which the most captivating is his wife, Antonia;

Antonina

She is perhaps the actual Protagonist of the book. (Though if graves had called it ‘Antonina the ginger witch’ I doubt sales would have been as high.

Since the slave who tells the tale is hers, we hear her story from the start, the dancing girl daughter of a man betrayed; here the strange, intense, pseudo-ethnic and religious resentments of the Coliseum crowd, and their curious effect on Imperial History, come into play. Antonina’s father was a Green, (or possibly a Blue), betrayed by the villainous Cappadocian John, he turns to the Blues (or possibly the Greens), and loses everything, linking Antonia in this with the Empress Theodosia, the resolute wife-to-be of Justinian, and setting a deep, deep resentment of both the Blues and Cappadocian John.

Graves springs more fully into life describing the life and dramas of the court, the lives of these clever, shifty, practical, sometimes insincere women. Antonina meets Belisarius, as a nearly-naked dancing girl and is set up with him again, later in life, by Theodora. This subtle, brave deceptive woman forms a politically-practical shadow to Belisarius. (An odd mirror to the relationship of Justinian and Theodora). They are never better than when working together, it is sad when they are parted, (Antonina being slutty and unwise), and their reunion later in life is one of the few purely happy moments in a story otherwise set against a fading empire.

"‘That evening I sought out Belisarius at his mean lodgings. Though weak from a return of his malarial fever, he rose from his couch to welcome me. With a smile that concealed the depth of his feeling, he asked: ‘And are you not afraid to visit me, Eugenius, old friend?’

I answered: ‘No, Illustrious Lord. With the message that I bring I would have risked passing through fire or a camp of Bulgarian Huns.’

He grew a little impatient: ‘Do not address me by titles of which I have been deprived. What is the message?’

I related, as from myself, all that I had agreed with my mistress to say. He listened most eagerly, crying ‘Ah!’ when I told him that his wife had asked pardon of God. Then I showed him the State papers in which Photius’s confession was recorded - having bribed the copying clerk to the Assistant-Registrar for a day’s loan of them. Belisarius read them hastily, and then again with great care, and at last he beat his breast and said: ‘For my jealous rage and my credulity I deserve all that I have suffered. But alas, Eugenius, it is too late now. our mistress will never forgive me for what I did to her at Daras, even if I make her a full apology.’

I urged him to be of good courage: all would yet be well. Then I repeated my mistress’s message, which at first he would not believe to be authentic. he said: ‘If your mistress Antonina will indeed listen to any words of mine, tell her that the fault was wholly on my side - but that it was only an excess of love for her that made me guilty of such madness.’

That night Belisarius and my mistress met secretly at his lodgings. Nobody but myself knew of it. Both embraced me, kissing me on the cheeks, and said they owed their lives to me.”