Hey, there's a bandwagon!

Look while I jump on it.

And as always when faced with a carefully reasoned argument I will descend into barely-coherent semi-mysticism with an opinion I worked out in a daydream, based on 'a feeling I had once'. Like a dirty hippy jumping onto a bus full of lawyers heading to the conference. "Hey guys, lets talk about totems!"

Basically dice are magic. They make you feel different. And since none of the rules make that much sense anyway you should go for the invisible feeling cause' its the most real thing at the table maaaaan.

We found a guys wallet on the street a few days ago and to find out who he was and how to give it back we had to root through it and get all up in his bizznes. (Guy needed to stop going to pawn shops). Anyway, doing that made me think about what would/will happen why my body is pulled off the train tracks and the paramedics root through my pockets for ready cash, what will they find and what will that say about me?

A fucking nerd is what it says. All of the Vast and Starlit nano-games plus the Citadel Of Evil pocketmod and no fucking money. One thing I don't have in there are the green minidice I got with the LOTFP grindhouse edition but that's just because they are lumpy and that fucks up the lines of my moneyless wallet.

The reason they will peg me right on the dice is because so far as I know they have never found another use outside RPG's. They are a shibboleth for a certain kind of person and a totem of cultic activity. What is the symbol of RPG's? What shows up on T-Shirts and mugs? The Icosahedron.

And they are strange things even independent of that. A clutch of platonic solids that someone carries around. Perfect little bags of angles, clearly part of a group yet each having its own personality. They are strange to hold in the hand. they weigh differently. The shape effects how you pick them up. The grip of your fingers. How you throw them down. The 20, most spherical, needs lightness, it'll roll off the table if you let it. But if you use the same force on the four it may land flat. That one needs a tip and a whack to roll right. The eight can be tricky with its landings, the six is dependable. The ten has mixed motives and soaks up hidden status from its side job as half of the d100. The twelve is always in the twenty's shadow. Never as useful, never as glamorous. It even has its own affirmative action site.

So with every action of play your kinetic senses are interacting with these strange objects and the way the occupy space. Your rational mind probably doesn't even register it much but do you think it doesn't leave a trace. Everything your body does effects thought. Limb position and movement can affect memory recall and if it can do that it can do other things.

When you are holding a bigger weapon in your hand you are holding BIGGER DICE. Not only bigger but more complex and more subtle to the grip. It feels different. Your characters weapon is matched by the feeling in your hand. None of you are going to give that up for good. You can cold turkey on sixes with talk of rules and reason but your body remembers holding that four and senses you don't even notice are itching for it.

Interesting shapes are interesting. They make the ritual more powerful. And you are engaged in a ritual, not a series of blank instructions. Look at everything around RPG's that is so ruinously impractical. Why are the books so massive? Why so many oddly-shaped things? The workings of capital? Maybe. But deep in your heart you know the books need to be big and look visibly strange. There need to be glyphs.

I am not joking. People need rituals and ritual spaces. Every time we try to take them away they spring back. Look at the flowers at crash sites, the sneakers hanging from wires. You are getting five or six people to put enough energy into an imaginary world to make it semi real for a few hours. That is not a rational thing. It cannot be reduced to reason.  I mean think about it man, people thought we worshipped the devil. I mean, Americans are mental but they don’t say that shit about cribbage. They couldn’t say it. Think about all the games you couldn’t reasonably paint as devil worship. Think about the bright, rational, open things they have in common. Then think about D&D. Its closed, its hermetic, it’s a fucking ritual. The Christians pegged it right, kind of. They sensed a rival faith and pattern recognition filled it in with Satan. But they felt something the rational world couldn’t, or wouldn’t notice. They kicked off at theatres back in the day and you can see why. Something powerful and strange happens when people physically gather in a closed space to act a story. It’s not religion, but its numinous, a little bit. Cracked religious people will feel the radiation coming off that act because they have it too.

Polyhedral dice mark the boundary between our world and the space of the imagined world. They do this better than six sided dice on their own in the same way that the pyramids do something better than a sign saying 'dead pharaoh here'.

The contrast between the shapes and their occupation of the same vertical plane in close conjunction, their constant re-arrangement but continual association. This creates and kind of tactile-kinetic signature in your mind. It helps you enter THE OTHER WORLD.

(I had a rational argument about how the damage die don’t necessarily indicate ‘one blow=one die roll’ and you can still have long abstract turns because they actually incorporate or ‘hide’ part of the attack roll inside the damage die. So a d4 isn’t necessarily the damage a knife does when it hits you, it’s the amount of damage it might do, over a round, compared to a sword over the same period of time. But fuck that. I will argue MAGIC)

a language of which we can only dream

“It might seem hardly worth questioning the idea that the world is made for seeing, or that eyes are consequent upon the undeniable fact that there is so much to be seen. Yet think for a moment and the inevitability of vision is much more uncertain. The world is full of other signals that may be used to describe it: there are smells, chemical signals both subtle and ubiquitous, and touch is as sensitive to shape as sight – more so, because it cannot be misled by trompe l‘oeil or by camouflage. 

Imagine a world in which the eye had never developed – not the eye of insect, nor of fish, nor of mammal, nor yet Mankind. It is easy to conceive of the other senses having taken over the comprehension of their surroundings. It would be a world of palpation, of feelers, a world in which caresses would have rendered glances superfluous. The twitching and waving of antennae would accompany every action. It is not difficult to imagine that a different evolutionary course would have selected those organs most delicately attuned to the passing molecule: even now we know of moths so sensitive to the pheromones of the opposite sex that the most evanescent whiff of a mate can stimulate a love flight across kilometres. In a sightless world, sensitivity to such stimuli would be selected and refined: it would be a world of nuance so delicate that our gross mauling’s would be inconceivable.

In conscious animals this most sensory of environments would entail everywhere the language of touch and smell: beauty would be aural or tactile or olfactory. Poetry would not celebrate the unfathomable mysteries of eyes and their unplumbable depths, nor compare hair with flax, for visual similes would be redundant. Rather, the texture of skin might be the supreme erotic stimulus, or natural selection might have favoured en even more elaborate array of perfumes and chemical attractants, which in turn would evolve a language of which we can only dream. There might be symphonies of perfume, Mozarts of musk. Novelists might construct nasal narratives, versifiers sonnets of scent. Sculpture would entail subtleties of shape that only fingers trained through hundreds of millions of years of tactile evolution could discriminate. There would be no word for ‘blindness’.”

Richard Fortey in Trilobite!

The Joey School

Hey Carl Niclas!

You said this on G+

“I watched a bunch of Big Bang Theory episodes this Summer, for various reasons, and it is quite interesting: The characters actually get shallower as it progresses. I'm not saying they were poignantly written people with deep and layered personalities from the start, but what little there was of personality dynamics seems to have been deliberately eroded further into the series.”

Now is as good a time as any to tell you, AND EVERYONE about the Joey Tribbiani school of writing and political philosophy.

(This has almost nothing to do with RPG’s at all)

Curse the Prince!

Pluvial sits upon the broad and wasted plains of Ennui, highly fertile arable land fed by the flooding of Lethe. Not farmed at any time, its muddy shoals left to rot.

Justice

In Pluvium, they don’t call you for jury service, they call you to judge.

The most important factor is that person judging a crime is in exactly the same mental state as the criminal was when the committed it. So, drunk, angry, desperately in love, insane, enraged, jealous or suicidal. Whatever you need to commit that crime, that’s what you need to judge it. The courts of Pluvial send all over the city, and sometimes all over the world for someone in the exact right state of mind to judge a particular crime.

Killing your husband or wife is generally ok, if they were really annoying. Suicides are always found guilty in-absentia during very quick trials. Theft is rarely prosecuted as you never get a conviction.

Religion

Any god may be worshipped, but prayers are allowed only to request from a particular god those things the god is unable to give. From the Devil – pity, from the Buddha – engagement, from Thor – calm, from Zeus – chastity. Faith is encouraged so long as you are in the middle of losing it.

Holidays

Weekend trips are laid on to Cythea, a black naked island in a stormy sea, strewn with creaking gibbets, populated only by wasted and highly political lesbians with a culture of forced nudity in all weathers.

Society

Casual conversation with friends must include some cursing or disparagement of the Prince, he listens at doorways secretly hungering for the amused condescension of the people. If the Prince hears you mocking him, he screams, rolls on the ground clutching his head and staggers away shaking and cursing you. Then he writes a poem about you. If the prince doesn’t hear you cursing him he leaves silently and you disappear the next day.

Conversations begin and end with frightened cried of “curse our worthless Prince!” and “curse the rhymes!”

Alcohol is encouraged but pluvial law says to drink at all you must drink at least 7 units in the first ten minutes or face arrest. Beyond that point you are on your own. Regular drinking tests are administered. Taste is ignored but impurities are added to guarantee particular kinds of hangover. Drinks are named after the depressions and headaches they provoke.

Art and the Media

Portraits are allowed only if the subject is decapitated before they are painted. Famous portraits are required to family tombs, though they can take a while to complete.

Art is only of the dead.

Porn is only of the dead.

Porn is required reading.

Other art is optional.

Most of the newspaper is porn and you have to read it once a day.

Pluvial ID is a copy of todays paper and some questions about its contents. This makes you a citizen.

Everyone is familiar with recent obituaries and editors try to sneak in useful news under descriptions of the recent activities of the just-deceased. For instance, this recent label to a picture of a headless corpse fucking a starved, dead, naked pensioner.

“..while attending the recently-built bridge across the lachrymose tributary, Monsieur R- was decapitated by a falling stanchion from by what he described, a few moments before its collapse, as

 ‘a really excellent piece of engineering!’

The papers artist Mademoiselle G- states of the wound,

‘I couldn’t have done better myself’.

The bridge is now closed and pedestrian traffic is asked to divert around the Rue De Smiles or ‘just throw yourself in the river’. Curse the Prince.”

Pluvians tend to look at your hands while they talk to you, in case they need to recognise your pornographically-arranged corpse in tomorrow’s paper.

A common Pluvian ‘joke’ amongst familiars is “I thought I saw your thumbs in the paper!” Sometimes an expression of happy surprise that you are alive, meaning ‘It’s been too long’. But also, sometimes a coded criticism from an older relative for not visiting enough.

All Pluvian plays and fiction are comedies, all set in a better version of Pluvia, a-

‘Babel of endless stairs, arcades

It was a palace multifold

Replete with pools and bright cascades

Falling in dull and burnished gold’

In these fictions loving couples live happily ever after, caring families stick together, decent Priests praise kind rational gods, wars are short and glorious, cares are few and no crime goes unpunished under the blue and golden sky. The Prince of Carcasses commands this because he wants his subjects to dream of that perfect world. Every morning, when they wake up from that dream, and remember who and where they really are, just for one moment they understand how he feels every day.

He's finally stopped talking about women at least

Pluvial – city of the Prince of Carcasses

The life of a skeletonised beggar in Pluvial is not so bad. The arthritis from the semi-constant rain is gone so you can stand straight up at least. You get (have) to dress up for the balls as well. You still have to bend, caper and dance madly as the prince goes by. He likes to scream in rage-black madness at the sight. It’s easier, at least, than simply being old.

Skeletons and flensed bodies animated by poetic backwash do most of the menial work and Tomb conversion. They don’t really get tired. The free labour has destroyed what’s left of the economy, which runs mainly on prostitution and words.

Ancient men must bend at 90 degrees and crackle around in single file tapped out in held canes cut only from lumps of the darkest wood. No pine. No beech.

The blind are commanded to gawp and loll madly in the streets, regardless of how they feel about the matter, though some have taken to exchanging braille pocketbooks which they read secretly by fingertips whilst moaning at the tapping of dancing skeletons they cannot see.

Young children are allowed out if they look suitably thin, ghastly and/or starving-gamine. Average, plump children, the middle aged, the robustly proportioned and those with good skin and bright eyes, tend to get their jobs done in the morning and mid-afternoon when the Prince of Carcasses sleeps. Or on Tuesdays which he has banned as ‘gauche’ and now ignores as a matter of form. (Or simply expands Monday and Wednesday by 12 hours each to meet in the middle.)

Women by decree must be beautiful or old. Old women must be pitied and wept over wherever they go. Grey locks and ragged hems caressed as periapt’s of Age and Loss. But not actually helped in any physical way, for instance, picked up off the ground, or given somewhere to live.

Social events are sometimes licenced if sufficiently symbolic of decay. For this reason, aging prostitutes in flaking greasepaint are in much demand, bussed in en-masse in broken coaches drawn by pale and plaguy mares. They un-liven retirement parties and camouflage happy weddings with broken decorations and pre-weathered paint that cracks on application to the wall. Burghers hold covert barbecues on tomb-top roofs when the sun peeps out from round a cloud.

The sewer system is excellent. Or at least capacious. Labyrinthine. Cathedral-Naved, baroque, knotted like lost string and several times deeper that the city is tall. Presumably the stuff is going somewhere. Though drainage does descend below the water table and keep going, which seems strange. In a way, it’s lucky it rains so much. The constantly running water means that despite much encouragement, tuberculosis has yet to take hold. White foundation, diet books and re-useable blood clots can be bought at local shops.

Men have been hired to paint the sky the colour of bruises and rot, to no effect. Enquiries of their progress have not yet been made.

Crime has been encouraged in song and handy ratways built across the tomb-top roofs in hopes that assaulters, housebreakers and masked bandits will transit silently in the night. Lack of anything to actually steal has limited opportunities for crime but numerous anonymous try-hards still make the nightly effort, climbing around, passing each other on the midnight eaves, sometimes mugging each other in a sad, ritual way.

Once, someone broke into the Princes garret (he lives alone in a broken-down tenement made especially for him.) The Prince found evidence of the crime and the resulting breakdown kept him out of everyone’s hair for two weeks. Regrettably it also resulted in several poems. The experiment has not been repeated.

The Prince of Carcasses

Loathsome, tiresome, heroic only in the smallness of his self-awareness, the Prince of Carcasses throws himself down in the muddy soil next to a tomb, bounces off the marble top and lies writing, undulating like a snake, gripping the cold sides and pushing his head backwards into the mud.

He is weeping a woman’s name. Dull-faced footmen stumble forward holding copper tanks of rocks and rainwater.

“Oh the thunder!” cries the Prince “black consuming horror of endless night!”

On cue three footmen ring the largest cauldron, hoist it up and shake it back and forth. The rolling rocks counterfeit the sound of storms.

A second crew holds up a huge black velvet circular shade on dull brass poles, designed specifically to blot out the sun. They place the Prince of Carcasses in the centre of his carefully ordered blot. A third stands by the moaning man as he crawls, he holds out an iron sieve on a pole and delecatly shakes cold rainwater over the princes weeping face.

“Oh monstrous ice-hearted woman with a daemons eye!” cries the Prince. He waves and makes a writing sign. A servant sighs. Paper is brought. A pen. Another woman will die soon.

The Prince of Carcasses is searching for a woman who can appreciate the grey churning depths of his ennui and the dark silent tragedy of his fallen soul. This will never happen. The Prince of Carcasses is a snivelling privileged little shit who happens to have a magical talent.

The Prince loves women. He doesn’t really pay much attention to what they do or why they do it or what they say, or what that means, or how they act when not around him. But he loves them. He is hungry for them and drawn to them. They pin him with arrows of burning desire. He shakes and shivers in their wake. Turned ankles corkscrew his heart.

When the prince can no longer hold back the red gurgling of his onrushing love, he writes a poem. The woman becomes immortal. Her body dies.

No-one knows what the women involved think of this as he steals their voice at the same time. They are silent forever.

Depending on how the prince felt about them, the women become different kinds of undead. Those he watched and worshipped from afar usually transform into pearly floating ghosts and beautiful wraiths. Those he was sexually obsessed with slowly rot. Zombies. He watches as their naked flesh decays. Knowing no-one can ever comprehend the storm of emotion in his poets’ soul. Who knows the poets spleen!

The Prince of Carcasses has had all the buildings in his city replaced with graves. All the buildings are buried or disguised as statues and tombs. He has taken the tops off drains the make the gurgling resonate and commanded greyness and continual rain. This has had no effect.

He has replaced all forms of entertainment with games of solitaire played with incomplete packs of cards in empty wood-panelled rooms. You can also listen to music, so long as it seeps out of a building several doors down. He also advises you to stare at the sky when it is blank.

He likes cats and is kind to them, possibly recognising the only other form of life as self-centred and indifferent as himself.

The Prince always hungers for witty conversation, his own. He does, however, need someone to talk at. If you visit with the prince he will not listen to you. When you are gone he will compose satirical verse about your stupidity and cloddish indifference, it will be believed. He is a genius after all.

Despite his tendencies, women often still attend the prince. He pays well, the city is poor and there are no jobs. No-one destroys the poems. They are too beautiful. He publishes them. Poetry is the cities remaining export.

Cave Giants

There are shitloads of giants in the monster manual so I can’t see how one more will hurt. Seriously, it seems like every possible type of terrain got its own giant. Mountain giants are not hill giants, forest giants are not jungle giants. There are no garden giants, and no terminal moraine giants. No archipelago giants. I feel like glacier giants deserve to be their own thing, though they seem to have been absorbed in the rather-unimpressive frost giant. Beach giants must be a combination of desert giant and reef giants. There is no city giant and no moor giant.

Anyway.

Arnold K already did a very good post about very giant alien giants who swim through the earth. Go and read that first.

Cave giants can no longer walk. Naked, hairless and pale. Full-body scar marks cross the thumb-sized varicose veins that wind across their skin. They crawl, if they have the space, on deeply calloused forearms and knees, pausing often to listen and sniff the air. Their bones have turned to flexible cartilage like a sharks and will no longer support their weight when standing up. They can, however squeeze their way around underground, passing through narrow gaps that would trap any other kind of giant. This giant could come into your house though the front door. It could slowly squeeze its body up your stairs, filling the stairwell with its flesh, then send one questing hand through your bedroom door. It could squeeze its head into your room and look at you.

Cartilage deforms more than bone so a Cave Giant can, with time, work its way through spaces that in human scale would be little bigger than a letterbox mouth, about the size (relatively) of an A4 book. It could come in through your window like a burglar.

They crawl around, semi-blind and sniffing constantly with their remarkable sense of smell. They have not yet fully lost their sight as long lifespans means giants evolve (or devolve) quite slowly.

If they could stand they would be about 18 or 20 feet tall, but slender and starved. As the crawl, their eyes will be about five feet off the ground, level with yours.

They have lost none of their strength. They climb well, oozing and creeping up the rock with every point of their flexible body in contact. They lack leverage due to their flexible bones so usually choose to strangle, crush or twist apart their prey.

You may be attempting a passage just low enough to make you crouch, and see, ahead of you, a pale gigantic hand reaching towards you, clutching at the rock. Behind it an arm, a shoulder and then a gawping face filling the width of the passageway, rolling opalescent eyes under half-closed lids. A mouth like the boot of an economical car.

What to you, is a walking passage, to the giant is a dangerous squeeze. It must lie flat, with one arm extended out and the other pressed back against its side. It lets the stone scrape and compress its cartilaginous skull and distend its head to the corridors shape.

If you will not, or cannot retreat, the giant has no choice, it cannot turn around. Its only option is to crush you against the wall with its outstretched hand, or grab you and squeeze you to death, then to slither forward and scoop you up in its mouth. It must eat you, chewing well, equipment and all, to get you out of the way.

There are very few Cave Giants and they must move constantly to find food and avoid organised resistance. They call to each other by finding hidden seams of rock, biting into them, and screaming into the stone in ultra low-frequency. It’s huge body, and its wide contact with the stone let it sense low frequency waves reflected from the strata.

The rest of the time they are silent, like much cave life. Highly intelligent, they exchange much information with their strange long howls into the rock, mainly about threats, prey and changes to the environment. They are of neutral alignment, but, like everything underground, they are constantly hungry. If you could find one after it ate, you might possibly be able to negotiate, though there is nothing they want.

They are loathed perhaps less than they should be, as they hunt Fomorians. They stalk them invisibly from the dark, needing no light, they wait for long periods, days, weeks, or months, without moving. They watch from some impossibly small, door-sized crack, noting the movements of their prey. Then, when all is still, they creep out, crawling silently towards the sleeping freak. They slip rubbery fingers round its neck and choke out its life. Then the drag it away to consume. If necessary they slowly twist off limbs to get it through the gap. Cave Giants have perfected a way of twisting the limbs from a gigantic corpse so that the skin knots at the joints, preventing any flow of blood and meaning they leave no trace as they are carried away. Very rarely, the Cave Giant plans badly and the trunk of the Fomorian is too big to fit. They leave it propped up like a present, arms, legs and head twisted off with neat little fleshknots where they were. They carry the limbs off like a string of sausages.

Fomorian slaves never wake their masters while a cave giant crawls towards them. They know the giant will often release them just before it leaves, though this is to create chaos that will mask its trail while it escapes.