796.529

Several good things have happend recently, therefore this post is nice. It has no other pupose really.

Firstly two people took it upon themselves to do art of the Pariahs of Creation

Cedric P dropped some Psychomycosis Megaspores here 

Scrap Princess made a Trilobite Knight, along with a lot of other excellent prehistoric monsters here 

They are both very good so go and look at them if you haven't already.

And a great number of people left entirely civil comments in the post below. Really a surprising number of people.

To explain why these things matter I have to give you a negative example. A long time ago I was writing a play in Iambic Pentameter. It was hard. Every time people asked me what it was about I would tell them "Its a story about a perfect alternative world kept that way by the alteration its own past through time travel. Since inventing it, groups of people have to police it.  One of those groups goes back to do something dangerous. Things go wrong. When the return the world is destroyed-

the teams are dead, the sphere turns out of synch

a gyring crystal palace of the dead

the dangling ornament of a crashed car

final testament of a doomed household

cast from the burning home like a child’s doll

un-scorched, by a ruin, with the family gone.

They find that world transformed into another one, ours

The dregs of men are now confined to Earth

to brawl and war in a slow dying world

pathetic lees of what they could have been

You must undo this thing. At any cost.

The only people who could have done this are someone on this team, the only people who could undo it, are this team. 

So they have to race back their own history and discover what went wrong while also trying to find  the traitor in their midst. The morally-decayed shithole they are trying to wipe from reality in order to bring back utopia is the same word the audience is watching from.

And they time-travel with poetry.

It's possible large parts of the play were pretentious and not very good. You didn't really need to know that much about it. The important thing isn't the play itself, but the look I got when I told people about it.

That look is hard to define. Glassy. Distant. The feeling of someone disconnecting and dissapearing behind their eyes. The sense of being rapidly shuffeled into a box marked eccentric or crank. Watching someones face turn into a polite mask. Waiting for somone to say something about this thing you made, that means so much to you, that you expended so much effort and attention on. Alright it was pretentious, and confused and overlong. But it was about everything, and there were good bits. It wasn't nothing. And they look at you and say "....iambic pentameter .... gosh... that must have taken a lot of work" and they smile a glassy smile.

I ended up taking it to a play reading. It was agony. it was a whole room full of that smile and those dead eyes for half an hour of my own words. I never went back and I never touched it again after that.

Anyway. This blog, and in particular that last post and the response to it. Along with the fact that people like my stuff to draw pictures of it. And all the various comments people have left ove the past year or so. That is the opposite of what happened in that room. Of the tight smile and glassy look. It means a lot to me. It feels odd to say it, i'm not sure why, but its true. i suppose you can consider this an apology for all those times I failed to reply to comments or involve myself in conversations. I did notice what you said and it did matter. Regretfully i may be the worst person on earth to be involved in social networks, being both quite un-social, and also vaguely suspicious of networks.

 

In addition to which, Liverpool re-opened its central library, my girlfriend wanted to climb the spiral stairs in the reading room and this brought me face to face with an entire shelf of Jules Verne. All the wierd books you never see have been brought out of the central reserve and made accessable. Including many I had never seen and had no idea of. It turns out that Jules Verne wrote a science fiction book set in a scottish coal mine. I had no idea this existed and do not know hw it ends so don't tell me. Vernes scottish miners talk like this:-

"'Good-bye, Simon,' said the engineer.
'Good-bye, Mr James,' replied the overman, 'or rather let me say Au revoir'!
'Au revoir then Simon!' Starr replied. 'You know that I'll always be glad to see you, and talk over old times, in the dear old Aberfoyle.'
'Yes I know that Mr James.'
'My house in Edinburgh will always be open to you.'
'It's a long way off is Edinburgh!'"

There were also two books, total, in dewy decimal reg 796.529, of which I have read one. I got the other one out 'The Complete Caving Manual'

So in the general spirit of good feeling here are some Canonites from the re-written Civilopede, apologies for the somewhat light blogging but I'm trying to spend several hours a day channeling monsters.

"(The Canonites seem evolved centipede-parasites, half-smart, hip-high, pale yellow semi-transparent bipedal tick-things. They can talk intelligently about art and history. They explain why the Civilopede picks objects to collect. Can give long in depth-explanations about an artefacts aesthetic worth. Are wrong and have no idea that they are wrong. They do not know why the Civilopede chooses things. They have no taste or individual perception of any kind but can only explain the choices of others. They have no idea of this and will never have any idea of this. You can change their mind with some force and a CHA test. When changed, it was always this way to them. You can persuade them but you never win.)"

 



*they have no core, like a body without a heart, how do they live? how can they die?

What to do?

A long time ago I wrote a possible index for Veins Of The Earth. It’s here.

I have done quite a lot of work on it and a lot has changed. The rest of this is an assessment of the work I have done so far and estimation of what I still need to di, with an idea of what the finished book might look like.

All of this leads up to a question  about what to do with all this. That is an argument about money. I invite you all to contribute your thoughts to this argument about money on the internet. Remember my rules.

So. First I needed an encounter table. I decided it needed living parts, so I started making monsters. Got a little side-tracked.  

The bestiary, ‘Pariahs of Creation’ is looking like a 1^st draft might be done in the next month or three. Then I need to go back to the table and the caves and re-order those. The whole thing together looks like a combination of these things.

3 life without light extremophile and fungal personalities, treasures, magic, politics. Cracked and ancient evolutionary paths. Ancient genetics from the dawn of life. Forgotten Phylum.

10 the shape of the space small scale immediate/tactical cave generator.

17 people you meet and why they want to kill you npc's (is there such a thing underground?

19 encounters 2 part encounter table, geographical and animate

What else needs to be done and what would the book as a whole look like?

I am thinking I will probably end up combining these three things

2 corpse of a river in the body of the sea. Karst diagram, most likely entrances. How Karst works, what it's like.

15 nobles of the deep Random table for generating rivers, water features, water generally.

24 larger cave system equivalent to street system.

They will become another large table I am currently thinking of as the ‘flows’ table. Its purpose would be to give you a larger scale view of the systems of caves around you, how they were arranged, how they came to be.  It wold tell DM’s the pattern in which to arrange their systems, not exactly, but a general format. So that, when people moved from system to system, they could tell they had gone into a different area, just from the arrangement of the caves.

It would also be a table of rivers, and of mines and some other things. This is not as stupid as it sounds.

Cave systems are only created a number of ways.

- Rivers and water. (In the real world this is the major way. Water + limestone = caves)

- Mines and workings (In a fantasy world there could be layered millennia of these)

- Lava tubes, theoretical chemical bleeds from beneath the earth (Could be true, there are sulphur created caves in (I think) Mammoth cave system in America that may be there even without water coming from above.

- Weird magical shit (God Ichor caves, magical re-ordering, Godzilla-warrens e.t.c)

What combines these things is that in every case something flows and it creates spaces in the rock. The nature of the flow changes the patterning and arrangement of the caves. Water and Lava and god Ichor are obvious Strange chemicals from beneath also. Mines follow the patterns of minerals, so that sort-of works too. With deliberate workings it gets a bit more complicated, be we could (at a pinch) say that capital, or trade or political will flows like water or like a river so the nature of the intangible abstract affects the formation of cave systems in the same way.

What else would be in the book?

I wanted a series of small dungeons that would give people places to travel between and reasons to travel. Currently I think of this as the SpiderSilk Road. It would combine elements of the following things:

5 the vampire court/and others

6 the fungal underground railroad

7 the hive of glass

One dungeon is half-done. Sky-Stone-River-Place. It needs a lot of work to make it any good. Ultimately I want one dungeon for each intelligent race and maybe one or two more. Thinking of adding the Deep Carbon Observatory and Dark Biosphere Investigations. Though those may end up as introductory rival organisations that give you reasons to go deep underground. (Of course the Civillopede will appear as an NPC. A Monster and a mini-dungeon)

What else?

1 Grow Your Own Planet – I still like this idea, both as a way of bringing players into generating a larger scale game space and also as providing a ‘world map’ that lets you know where you are and where you could go. My current vision of this is like an earth-curve with upside-down trees.

4 his body blocked the route

8 classic climbs

9 Cave Crawl Rules

14 breakdown Including

Hallucination table

21 dying in the dark what happens when the lights go out or (they search your body)

I imagine these all being combined into ultra-simple cave crawl rules. (At it’s most basic, half your players encumbrance budget, a big list of things to go wrong when they go over budget, build the sensory/detail aspects into the failures list for people who don’t want to actually have to learn everything about caving before they go pretend caving) The purpose of the rules should be to encourage people to to properly paranoid/obsessive about rope, light and encumbrance, to reward those who are, and punish (in interesting ways) those who are not.

Hallucination is an actual monster now, the Rapture. I think I will make that a more potent presence in the game. Not an actual monster like the Pariahs but an intangible living thing, waiting and watching, always present, ready for you to get tired and make a mistake, insinuating itself into you silently and invisibly. It’s more fun (I think) for players to have a kind of active relationship with insanity rather than it just being a blank force like gravity.

There should be benefits to being close-to-crazy as well. You adapt to the Underdark mentally (and perhaps Physically). If you come out you are like an Underworld veteran, wearing smked lenses in the sun, agoraphobic, hypersensitive, pale and dark-adapted.

12 black market

16 extremophile/fungal treasures and tools

18 maps and guidesv

20 I search the body

Stuff and things. These will need work. Could be one table maybe.

13 the impossiblity of darkness  - This one is important. I still envision a Light Economy as being a very important factor in driving/limiting exploration and travel. Light is a quasi-currency in fact. Always running out, always needing to get more. This should also key into making the players obsessed with light and the kind of light they have. It should highlight an important factor which is the living, liquid relationship between light and darkness. Players in this book should not simply be moving into a dark space, they are divers in a tiny fortress of light. Dark follows them, worms its way into every available crack, retreats unwillingly before them. Each kind of darkness is different and each kind of light is different. It seems impractical to write about but I am not sure that anyone has written about it in that way before, anywhere. So that would be nice to do.

Other things

11 whispers in the dark – not sure about this one, I like it but maybe at the end.

22 speliothaumaturgy

The Question(s)

Should I sell this stuff?

How should I release it?

(of course these questions interrelate.)

Selling Pro’s

- People are more likely to pay attention to something if they pay a nominal amount of money for it, I want people to actually read it not keep it as a pdf on a forgotten drive..

- Can have a big fancy copy with hardback covers and art in it. (I designed it not to need art but I would like to have it.

- I would technically be a published writer.

If I did want to sell it for money should I do it myself, lots of work at stuff I am not good at (ie layouts) and no idea how to market anything.  Or offer it to a publisher?

Not-Selling Pro’s

- I did tell my friend months ago that I might give it away free,

- If you want people to use it then just put it in people’s hands, let them decide if they want it.

- People all over the blogs have given away stuff that is often better than this.

- If it wasn’t for the blog and the people reading it and commenting then this would never have happened or been done.

- HONOUR. Would Worf sell it? Would Picard? Sometimes you play the game, sometimes the lesson is not to play.

- Won’t make any money, will die poor anyway, may as well do the right thing.

- Scared of Kent.

How should I release it? Bits-and-pieces, or all-at-once?

In-bits-and-pieces Pro’s

- Oh god it took so long to do, so, so long. The rest may never be finished. Can I wait another year? Two? I feel like I’m going crazy working on this dark weird thing no-one cares about. I need my madness validated. Have to get something out there.

- I want something out there with my name on it so I can point to it and say ‘look, this is something I can do’

- The full thing may be massive. Even the bestiary is going to be about 70 pages? Will anyone want the giga-thing?

-Paraiah’s could stand quite well on it’s own.

Bit’s-and-pieces cons.

- It will have a much bigger impact as a whole thing.

- Just because the bestiary got massive you have no idea if the rest will. In fact you will be actively trying to keep it under control and shorten it. So you could end up releasing a thing, then a petty little extra thing to go on top.

- You have absolutely no emotional self-control. You eat every biscuit in the pack. You drink everything in the fridge. The only reason you’re not fat is because you stopped buying food. You should listen to other people on this one.

- It feels more aesthetically and culturally potent to have a big, whole thing that is distinctively itself and nothing else. It creates a powerful nexus of attention that draws people into the imagined world in a deeper way, therefore becoming a better piece of art. (This is the vast-tome, welcome-to-my-alterworld school of RPG design)

I have a time machine but it drove me insane

This was provoked by Matt Diaz’s LOTFP classes. And by Richard G’s Monster Trainer Class and various other old-school class re-imaginings on G+.

Matts rules for sorcery and shapechanging are very neat and concise.

Because LOTFP classes only get better at one thing you have to take all the extra crap that comes with a splatbook class and distil it to one powerful idea. Then you have to take that idea and encode it in a rule. This rule has to be as simple as possible as most class rules have to fit on a page of A5. It also has to scale neatly over 10 levels without a lot of bumpf and crap. Doing this is intellectually and creatively interesting.

This made me think about what’s going to happen to Fourth edition. Now we all know that as soon as Fifth edition comes out Fourth will be forgotten. Then it will slowly slowly become cool till, in about 30 years, when D&D has built up enough new contradictions and fuckups, Fourth edition will be radical again. This is inevitable.

Our aged greybeard future selves will be creeping through attic, ready to move the old ‘books’ away from rising sea levels to the refugee camps. The kids don’t care about hardcopy and the robots are malfunctioning. We spy a dusty old copy of the Fourth ed players handbook. It’s creaking covers crack open like a book of spells. We sit down, ignore the sirens and the screams outside, and read.

 People will go through those books, mine them for whatever was interesting, create new stuff based on that and essentially have an OSR for Fourth.

Now that sounds like fun for my older self. But fuck that guy. I’m bored right now. Let’s have the autopsy early.  We should pretend we are in the future so we can have a renaissance about right now. A Pre-naissance.

Lets create a splatbook for the imaginary Fourth edition of LOTFP.

Come with meeee to the distant time of 2043. Raggi will have been shuffled aside by a board of directors with business degrees from affordable universities. The full name will no longer be used. The acronym LOTFP is now the official name because the original wouldn’t fit on the bases of the plastic toys created as a tie in an international Googlecast web series that was never released because the Indonesian island tax shelter that housed the shady production company Raggi hired to make the series because they were the only ones who didn’t vomit at the concept art fell prey to rising sea levels an emergency international fracking treaties and has disappeared from maps.

Sometimes people dredge up what they claim are lost ‘production materials’ but could just be bullet-riddled skeletons infested with mutant coral and broken computer parts. It’s hard to tell. Zak Smith found the Hand of Vecna and is now the Republican Senator for the Ocean City of New Idaho*. Jeff Rients fucking ate a guy.

Imagine with me a future splatbook retrieved by someone with a time machine. But the machine drove them crazy.

It would have a vanilla-esque name so bland its almost creepy. Like a stepford wife module.

“Burning Shadows, Heroes of Daggerknife Keep.

A supplement for Fourth Edition LOTFP.

Copy of Fourth LOTFP necessary for play. 

Including Errata for the FAQ of the Fourth edition players handbook volume 3 (9^th printing).

Multiple new classes and guaranteed fixes for multiple rules issues with the LOTFP family of games. All your questions answered.

(item may not be returned once seal is broken.)”

And it would be stupid and it would be a joke but also it wouldn’t be. Because we understand things as much from watching them fall apart as from creating them. So why not transport ourselves 30 years into the future and watch the sad ignominious end of a thing we love. Like taking a time machine to interview your children as they lie dying in an old folks home. Using that information to raise them better.  You can’t fix everything, but you can do better than you did.

We can’t stop things dying. Ideas have a life inside them. For them to be any good they have to have an end. But we can make that life as good as possible.

We could have fun by ripping the shit out of all the things we dislike about late-period low-creativity RPG overproduction.

We could ferret through all the Fourth stuff we thought had a glimmer of something inside it, then use intelligence and creativity to purify, simplify and concentrate it, which would be difficult and interesting. Then build a new game from what we had made. Something both like and unlike what we know.

We could learn more about what we are doing right now by imagining its necessary end.

It would have

-Old School reducions/distillations of every thing good we could find about Fourth.

-Old school versions of as many of the weird splatbook classes as we could find. ESPECIALLY the weird ones no-one ever plays, like the Shardmind AND the boring ones no-one ever plays like the Rune Priest, or the Ardent, god that was a boring fucking class. But our versions would be good because the RunePriest is a guy who knows the Enochian language and an Ardent…. Well it could be good, it could be. 

 -All the most fourthy Fourth edition things that were half good but rewritten, condensed and with a LOTFP twist.

-Decrepit patch-on fixes for imaginary rules problems created by a byzantine decadent 30 year old version of LOTFP. Fun because we get to think about how game structures grow/decay over time and interesting for the same reason.

If we imagine its really popular and there are 1000’s of nerds going ‘ghhhaaa the investment rules interfere with level progression above Sixth level! Fix it!’

“The animal sacrifice rules conflict with the human sacrifice rules. Harmonise it!! Don’t nerf my druid if he wants to sacrifice both at the same time!!!”

It wouldn’t even need to make that much sense as a lot of the Fourth stuff is so fractured and disconnected you needed a fucking doctorate in D&D to even make sense of it. Like the essentials stuff. What on earth was going on there?

-Instead of an endless list of weapons that looks like it came out of a spreadsheet, make stuff like the treasure gen tables from Realms Of Crawling Chaos (that was some good shit)

-And all the strange classes people have come up with online. Living Statue plus Matts Warlock plus Monster Trainer plus Anarchist Librarian? Why not?

-And anything else that was good and interesting.

It’s a Science-Fiction Renaissance.

*Vote Smith. Duty. Honour. Country.  Idaho! Drowning The Weak.