"The Romans believed that the relative position of the planets influenced earthly events. The endeavours of the astrologers and augers as they scrutinised the night sky are encapsulated in the Latin verb considerare. It meant 'to study the stars with great care', being a combination of the intensive prefix con- and sius. 'constellation star'. It soon came to be used more generally with the sense 'to observe carefully. to examine', before developing the figurative use 'to reflect upon'. In these senses it was borrowed into Old French, and from there into Middle English in the fourteenth century.
- The verb desire, which came into English in the thirteenth century via Old French desirer, is also derived from sidus. It comes from Latin desiderare which meant 'to regret, to miss' and hence 'to long for'. The original sense of desiderare and its connection with 'star' is obscure, but Skeat suggests 'to note the absence of stars' and hence the regret that the auguries were hidden."
(From 'Word Origins' by Linda and Roger Flavell.)
Wednesday, 30 September 2015
Monday, 28 September 2015
Why did I mix up these city-states?
The DM forgot where he left a minor city and went with the nearest equivalent, only realising later that we were in Osc-something, six days travel away from where we should have been in Osc-Somethingelse. And we had met the 'right' NPC's for Osc-Somethingelse too. I mean I met my hot insect baby-mamma and had hot inset sex. Dumped the kids on her too. So that happened.
So here are a bunch of reasons that you might have mixed up two city-states. I put the same-context dependant ones in the front and numbered the others so you can use them as a table if you need to.
- Love can move mountains and also city states. It was a miracle of love, the kind that happens to Lancelot when a fucking castle appears out of nowhere so he can bone Guenevere in peace.
- Deathfrost Mountain time emanations. Its near Deathfrost Mountain, that place if full of temporal shenanigans. Maybe we went all the way to the right place in a moment?
- The journey between the two cities is so fucking boring and so free of incident that, like a five hour shift on the biscuit lines, the moment its finished its simply wiped from the memory.
- Hot astronomer girlfriend swapped cities so she could get parallax on a particular star formation and we happened to go to the right one.
- Hot insect girlfriend organised city government-swap with Osc-Something for complex dynastic and economic reasons. Like a house-swap.
1. Names of all local cities changed regularly to confuse infiltrators from very-nearby enemy state.
2. Cities 'Harrisoned' now twinned in time and space. Kind-of reflections of each other but not necessarily causally connected. Like the Mad Max films. Its all a bit vague but probably a metaphor for something.
3. Cities 'Mievilled' A bit like like a Harrisoned city but a bit more practically worked out. They are separate but somehow share space. You could walk down a street in one and come out in the other. This is regular and people know about it but no-one takes advantage of it for COMPLEX POLITICAL REASONS. This is definitely a metaphor, for capitalism.
4. City 'Gaimaned'. Deal with para-deity means single city story-locked and eternal so long as people remember it, but the collective memories shape its physical expression. Council big on intellectual property laws and punish silly songs about the city with death. Will invade to stop rumours about them spreading. You went to the same place but it was different because the memories of it had changed.
5. Its the same city. Djinn fly it back and forth at dawn and dusk. You just went at different times.
6. Djinn again, one was ordered to build city B in a single night. Sneaked a few millennia into the future and took the ruins of city A and built them of that. They are literally the same stone. Scholars from City A go to City B to analyse relics and stones and try to work out their future history.
7. The second city is actually a necropolis of the first where bodies rest in simulations of their former homes. The people you interacted with were g g g ghoooosts! (Also if you saw old friends it means they're dead.)
8. Second city built as vast copy of the first by trillionare idiot obsessed with history and tales of old culture. Like those americans who buy London Bridge. An inhabited folly an a gigantic scale.
9. Mission-Impossible style plot by well resourced enemies with small army of illusionists and actors to persuade you one place was in fact another. You got Truman-Show'd.
10. Whole population swaps back and forth every 12 years in vast processions for ritual reasons. You jut missed the swap.
So here are a bunch of reasons that you might have mixed up two city-states. I put the same-context dependant ones in the front and numbered the others so you can use them as a table if you need to.
- Love can move mountains and also city states. It was a miracle of love, the kind that happens to Lancelot when a fucking castle appears out of nowhere so he can bone Guenevere in peace.
- Deathfrost Mountain time emanations. Its near Deathfrost Mountain, that place if full of temporal shenanigans. Maybe we went all the way to the right place in a moment?
- The journey between the two cities is so fucking boring and so free of incident that, like a five hour shift on the biscuit lines, the moment its finished its simply wiped from the memory.
- Hot astronomer girlfriend swapped cities so she could get parallax on a particular star formation and we happened to go to the right one.
- Hot insect girlfriend organised city government-swap with Osc-Something for complex dynastic and economic reasons. Like a house-swap.
1. Names of all local cities changed regularly to confuse infiltrators from very-nearby enemy state.
2. Cities 'Harrisoned' now twinned in time and space. Kind-of reflections of each other but not necessarily causally connected. Like the Mad Max films. Its all a bit vague but probably a metaphor for something.
3. Cities 'Mievilled' A bit like like a Harrisoned city but a bit more practically worked out. They are separate but somehow share space. You could walk down a street in one and come out in the other. This is regular and people know about it but no-one takes advantage of it for COMPLEX POLITICAL REASONS. This is definitely a metaphor, for capitalism.
4. City 'Gaimaned'. Deal with para-deity means single city story-locked and eternal so long as people remember it, but the collective memories shape its physical expression. Council big on intellectual property laws and punish silly songs about the city with death. Will invade to stop rumours about them spreading. You went to the same place but it was different because the memories of it had changed.
5. Its the same city. Djinn fly it back and forth at dawn and dusk. You just went at different times.
6. Djinn again, one was ordered to build city B in a single night. Sneaked a few millennia into the future and took the ruins of city A and built them of that. They are literally the same stone. Scholars from City A go to City B to analyse relics and stones and try to work out their future history.
7. The second city is actually a necropolis of the first where bodies rest in simulations of their former homes. The people you interacted with were g g g ghoooosts! (Also if you saw old friends it means they're dead.)
8. Second city built as vast copy of the first by trillionare idiot obsessed with history and tales of old culture. Like those americans who buy London Bridge. An inhabited folly an a gigantic scale.
9. Mission-Impossible style plot by well resourced enemies with small army of illusionists and actors to persuade you one place was in fact another. You got Truman-Show'd.
10. Whole population swaps back and forth every 12 years in vast processions for ritual reasons. You jut missed the swap.
Saturday, 26 September 2015
Podecast Three - Beauty
The subject today was 'beauty'
(It's shorter than usual because I had to go to Manchester.)
http://www.stuff.co.nz/dominion-post/news/72404517/judges-take-a-shine-to-wow-winner
Zak hates nature.
Snails.
"The child of love and war is sex"
A thick silky coffee with cardamon
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crepuscular_rays
kelvin helmholtz
http://www.pncc.govt.nz/media/32138/citizensadvicebureaulogo.jpg
http://www.firstlighttravel.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/Maori-Rock-Art.jpg
Wednesday, 23 September 2015
The Caliphate of Holes
The Caliphate of Holes
The shattered karst and black cyclopean frags that make up the Sifir, or 'The Plain of Sifir' or 'The Plain of Nothing', or more simply 'The Nothing', are uninterrupted and empty of life.
Only in the shadowed micro-climates of the black broken kaiju temple shards, bigger than buildings, will life appear, and then only the clenched octopoid charcoal-vermilion corn that grows in tangled bezoars. Despite its vile appearance the red-black safir corn still feeds safely and well. Enough to support the few mad banished vagabonds that haunt the safir and the wolfslugs that prey on them in turn.
Monsters haunt the safir, monsters and monstrous men and wild vortexes of time that pinwheel through the sky like storms. But, hidden till you see it is the Caliphate of Holes.
Each village, town or house in the Caliphate of Holes exists in a stepped-pyramid sinkhole. A natural occurrence, deliberately crafted by the hand of man.
The sides of these limestone pyramid-reflections have been cut into shelves and filled with soil. Crops grow in the steps and paths lead mazelike routes between the paths. At the bottom of each asifir (a-sifir meaning simply not-sifir, or 'not nothing') lies a home or several, a village, and in many cases the shell-palace of a noble line.
It is like walking the surface of a blasted alien world, then looking down into a green, green valley that opens up before you like a trap. The hole-sides protect the asifir from the cruel desiccating winds of the outer plain and as each stepped field sinks slowly through the water table, they grow green with life. many sifir have rivers running through their base, emerging from caves and apertures in the rock, all have wells and oases.
All the asifir, linked together in rulership, form the Caliphate of Holes, a hidden nation.
It is so difficult and dangerous to cross the sifir that most residents of the Caliphate do it only once. The asifir are connected in trade by a migratory culture of caravan guards, some of the toughest, most dangerous people on earth, who ply their beetle caravans across and through the labyrinth of the broken karst to connect the valuable markets of the asifir.
You can become rich quickly in the caravans of the Caliphate, and die quickly too.
The asifir are connected by this strange mercenary culture, but they are also connected beneath the stone as well. The whole Plain of Nothing is a gigantic water table feeding into the three mighty rivers of the south. rain does fall there but is absorbed so quickly by the rock that the place can seen parched seconds after a storm.
But underneath the surface the water trickles and runs, forming a lacework of hidden rivers and streams. All asifir have access to this underground world and, dangerous as it is, connecting to the Veins of the Earth and the terrible things that reside there, it is also a medium of communication.
A few asifir are lucky enough to be connected by navigable underground rivers, but even for the rest communication is still possible.
The watery underground world beneath the Sifir is home to a race of intelligent, albino octopus-men. The Calipahte exists in a state of alliance with this race, in a sense, the form two sides of the same coin. The Caliphate provides crops, food, space to devise and create and protection from, along with access to, the upper world. The Octopi-men first, when young, carry sealed messages between the asifir, worming through the perforated rocks, forming a postal system beneath the earth. Second, when adult, they emerge from the wells and oases and form the guards of the asifir, protecting them from the monsters and horrors of the plain. When Caravans appear from out of the plain, they are greeted fist by Octopi-men riding gigantic snails. These then lead them through the maze of the asifirs terraced fields.
Every aspect of the asifirs construction is devised towards protection. The layout of the terraces is like a puzzle hard to understand. Residents know it, but visitors can quickly be disconcerted by the narrow paths between paddies and fields. Even the crops themselves and the way they are laid out can be a form of trap.
The topmost, dryest terraces are usually planted with hypnotic poppies that require blind guides. Then come orchards protected with beehives in the branches of their trees. Anti-cavalry potato mazes can be found on lower levels. Thick grain crops are always grown in mazes. narrow paths lead between paddies of calligraphic rice, as the thin wind moves across the leaves of rice the shifting of te leaves en-masse forms single words and letters when seen from above, different each time On lower fields sheep-sized snails are herded and watched over by young shepherds and war-pigs are bred and kept secure.
(The asifir of the Caliphate of Holes are famous for their culturing of snails, but despite their success in this field, they cannot grow snails as large, intelligent or warlike as the 'Chivalric Snails' rumoured to exist in the lands of the Curlicue Throne, somewhere beyond the Snaegleborg. Though they are large enough to provide a kind of cavalry for the octopi men to guard against wolfslugs in the night, and worse things.)
A noble family rules each asifir from a home or small palace near its centre. Often these are gigantic shells of mega-snails long since extinct. What role these gigantic snails played in the formation and development of the sinkholes, and how they came to e extinct, is lost to history.
The noble youth are educated by clerics of the Caliph. The Caliph himself is a living vortex of time, though civilised, and his, or her, clerics are finely trained legal minds who act as impartial judges and lawyers for the asifir, as well as being combat-trained.
Since the culture of the Caliphate insists that the young marry only for love and for no other reason, and since it is very difficult to travel between asifirs, and because it is illegal to marry someone of your own family, and somewhat devient to marry below your family, a sizeable proportion of the messages carried through the underground maze of the water table are love letters.
Poetry is the accepted means of discovering and declaring love and it is entirely common for young couples to find each other through the written word, court, fall in love, all through the exchange of poetry, and then to meet only at the moment before being married (after at least one of them, usually the man, has survived a gruelling passage across the sifir.
Since poetry is the primary means of finding a mate and gaining and retaining status, the Caliphate produces very good poets. A good poet essentially has their choice of spouse. This has lead to the noble families of the Caliphate becoming somewhat obsessive in pursuit of this talent and poetical inbreeding, of character if not of bloodlines, has lead to a melancholic, depressive, sometimes bipolar, yet brilliant temperament amongst that class.
Since poetry is status, access to poetry is restricted to the upper class. It is illegal for anyone else to create any and the peasants of the Caliphate even sing their field songs without words, or in a deliberate nonsense fashion to ensure that no-one suspects them of illegal poetical talent.
Unpoetical, unromantic but likeable and practical-minded youngsters will often pay for 'bandit verse' so they can create the simulation of the perfect relationship and be allowed to marry. if they are known by their families to be 'un-versical' then this will be quietly allowed without comment.
And of course the folk stories and legends of the Caliphate are full of poems being delivered to the wrong people, Snail herders with an incredible unexpected talent, princesses wandering in the safir and bumping into bandit kings who happen to be incredible poets and are also exiled princes, princes being sucked into time vortexes and sending poetry through the calligraphic rice that ensures their own conception. All the creaky old classics.
Only in the shadowed micro-climates of the black broken kaiju temple shards, bigger than buildings, will life appear, and then only the clenched octopoid charcoal-vermilion corn that grows in tangled bezoars. Despite its vile appearance the red-black safir corn still feeds safely and well. Enough to support the few mad banished vagabonds that haunt the safir and the wolfslugs that prey on them in turn.
Monsters haunt the safir, monsters and monstrous men and wild vortexes of time that pinwheel through the sky like storms. But, hidden till you see it is the Caliphate of Holes.
Each village, town or house in the Caliphate of Holes exists in a stepped-pyramid sinkhole. A natural occurrence, deliberately crafted by the hand of man.
The sides of these limestone pyramid-reflections have been cut into shelves and filled with soil. Crops grow in the steps and paths lead mazelike routes between the paths. At the bottom of each asifir (a-sifir meaning simply not-sifir, or 'not nothing') lies a home or several, a village, and in many cases the shell-palace of a noble line.
It is like walking the surface of a blasted alien world, then looking down into a green, green valley that opens up before you like a trap. The hole-sides protect the asifir from the cruel desiccating winds of the outer plain and as each stepped field sinks slowly through the water table, they grow green with life. many sifir have rivers running through their base, emerging from caves and apertures in the rock, all have wells and oases.
All the asifir, linked together in rulership, form the Caliphate of Holes, a hidden nation.
It is so difficult and dangerous to cross the sifir that most residents of the Caliphate do it only once. The asifir are connected in trade by a migratory culture of caravan guards, some of the toughest, most dangerous people on earth, who ply their beetle caravans across and through the labyrinth of the broken karst to connect the valuable markets of the asifir.
You can become rich quickly in the caravans of the Caliphate, and die quickly too.
The asifir are connected by this strange mercenary culture, but they are also connected beneath the stone as well. The whole Plain of Nothing is a gigantic water table feeding into the three mighty rivers of the south. rain does fall there but is absorbed so quickly by the rock that the place can seen parched seconds after a storm.
But underneath the surface the water trickles and runs, forming a lacework of hidden rivers and streams. All asifir have access to this underground world and, dangerous as it is, connecting to the Veins of the Earth and the terrible things that reside there, it is also a medium of communication.
A few asifir are lucky enough to be connected by navigable underground rivers, but even for the rest communication is still possible.
The watery underground world beneath the Sifir is home to a race of intelligent, albino octopus-men. The Calipahte exists in a state of alliance with this race, in a sense, the form two sides of the same coin. The Caliphate provides crops, food, space to devise and create and protection from, along with access to, the upper world. The Octopi-men first, when young, carry sealed messages between the asifir, worming through the perforated rocks, forming a postal system beneath the earth. Second, when adult, they emerge from the wells and oases and form the guards of the asifir, protecting them from the monsters and horrors of the plain. When Caravans appear from out of the plain, they are greeted fist by Octopi-men riding gigantic snails. These then lead them through the maze of the asifirs terraced fields.
Every aspect of the asifirs construction is devised towards protection. The layout of the terraces is like a puzzle hard to understand. Residents know it, but visitors can quickly be disconcerted by the narrow paths between paddies and fields. Even the crops themselves and the way they are laid out can be a form of trap.
The topmost, dryest terraces are usually planted with hypnotic poppies that require blind guides. Then come orchards protected with beehives in the branches of their trees. Anti-cavalry potato mazes can be found on lower levels. Thick grain crops are always grown in mazes. narrow paths lead between paddies of calligraphic rice, as the thin wind moves across the leaves of rice the shifting of te leaves en-masse forms single words and letters when seen from above, different each time On lower fields sheep-sized snails are herded and watched over by young shepherds and war-pigs are bred and kept secure.
(The asifir of the Caliphate of Holes are famous for their culturing of snails, but despite their success in this field, they cannot grow snails as large, intelligent or warlike as the 'Chivalric Snails' rumoured to exist in the lands of the Curlicue Throne, somewhere beyond the Snaegleborg. Though they are large enough to provide a kind of cavalry for the octopi men to guard against wolfslugs in the night, and worse things.)
A noble family rules each asifir from a home or small palace near its centre. Often these are gigantic shells of mega-snails long since extinct. What role these gigantic snails played in the formation and development of the sinkholes, and how they came to e extinct, is lost to history.
The noble youth are educated by clerics of the Caliph. The Caliph himself is a living vortex of time, though civilised, and his, or her, clerics are finely trained legal minds who act as impartial judges and lawyers for the asifir, as well as being combat-trained.
Since the culture of the Caliphate insists that the young marry only for love and for no other reason, and since it is very difficult to travel between asifirs, and because it is illegal to marry someone of your own family, and somewhat devient to marry below your family, a sizeable proportion of the messages carried through the underground maze of the water table are love letters.
Poetry is the accepted means of discovering and declaring love and it is entirely common for young couples to find each other through the written word, court, fall in love, all through the exchange of poetry, and then to meet only at the moment before being married (after at least one of them, usually the man, has survived a gruelling passage across the sifir.
Since poetry is the primary means of finding a mate and gaining and retaining status, the Caliphate produces very good poets. A good poet essentially has their choice of spouse. This has lead to the noble families of the Caliphate becoming somewhat obsessive in pursuit of this talent and poetical inbreeding, of character if not of bloodlines, has lead to a melancholic, depressive, sometimes bipolar, yet brilliant temperament amongst that class.
Since poetry is status, access to poetry is restricted to the upper class. It is illegal for anyone else to create any and the peasants of the Caliphate even sing their field songs without words, or in a deliberate nonsense fashion to ensure that no-one suspects them of illegal poetical talent.
Unpoetical, unromantic but likeable and practical-minded youngsters will often pay for 'bandit verse' so they can create the simulation of the perfect relationship and be allowed to marry. if they are known by their families to be 'un-versical' then this will be quietly allowed without comment.
And of course the folk stories and legends of the Caliphate are full of poems being delivered to the wrong people, Snail herders with an incredible unexpected talent, princesses wandering in the safir and bumping into bandit kings who happen to be incredible poets and are also exiled princes, princes being sucked into time vortexes and sending poetry through the calligraphic rice that ensures their own conception. All the creaky old classics.
Saturday, 19 September 2015
Podecast 2 - Scrap Princess Omega
The second Podecast ever.
This one has a subject, it's about monsters.
(Click it)
Has;
Rhiannas new video.
Ghosts and why they hold candles.
Skeletons and skeletor - egyptian theories of the dead.
He-Man.
Gas-Spores.
Nazi Aurochs.
"I've been around some pretty smelly subcultures."
Eating living things.
Godzilla.
Forbidden Planet.
Imperialism and microbiology.
Scrap fades in and out around this point for mysterious reasons.
Possible collaborations.
Natasha Allegri.
Stephen Pyne.
The state of modern poetry.
The Art of Not Being Governed.(He wasn't a poet.)
Friday, 18 September 2015
The Omnistructure in Decay
An Omnistructure because it is not just a structure filling reality, but a structure that is reality. A reality that can only exist as structure, in the same way that ours is expressed as space and form.
Here are worlds the size of Nebulae, grown, not in tight massed spheres and gravity wells, but like ferns or fractal fungi infiltrating a mass. Storm-wrapped tendril worlds with neutronium cores. Worlds as slender as mycelium, all linked, receiving their light from the transient civilisation of intelligent nomadic suns. Primary trunks of world with surfaces like gas giants and storms as large as small galaxies.
Entire world-equivalent biospheres spending their existence transiting and slowly evolving. Sometimes running into each other, resulting in titanic conflicts and strange syntheses.
Gravatically balanced structures of form. Vast tendrils of world.
Some worlds with hollow cores like old trees, some wormed within by passages and cells, some carrying lightless life inside.
Some oceanic, like branches of water. Some carrying vast globular oceans at their tips. Sometimes these oceans have frozen surfaces and pressure-ice cores. Sometimes they break free and drift, are caught and smeared through the Lagrange zones causing disaster and opportunity.
Sadly, all the world curls have fallen into decay. They are blackened and dying, though the diamond highways sing.
The highways are cylinders the thickness of stars, transparent, flexible diamond lattice environments, home to their own intelligence yet transmitting a blood supply of light.
At the nexus-points of the intersecting highways, like the cores of neural cells, are the Photo-Arcologies , gigantic hives of living suns that take on strange insectoid forms. Between the worlds the suns are harmonies of light like freight trains spiralling round the helices inside the diamond highways.
Yet without the responsive song of life from the the world fronds, the arcologies themselves grow silent, the highways are failing, slowly but inevitably being cut off. Eventually the culture of the Omnistructure will retreat, becoming only a memory. In the star-cemeteries deep in the centres of the Photo-Arcologies, black-hole tendrils and white dwarf root-stubs animate and attempt escape.
The space between the highways and the mycellium of world is divided into cells of void, like the cells of a leaf, each similar but distinct. At the border of each cause/effect lipid layer, time hesitates for a moment to confirm.
Lagrange points within the cellular voids play host to their own strange zero-g civilisations. High altitude web cities grow like gigantic highway shacks along the easy-to-transport zero-g lines between the world-roots and the suns.
Lagrange points generally lie at the borders of void cells and have slightly different realities depending on which side you are on. Multi-cell Lagrange strands are complex, with many realities involved. They say if you agree something there you must agree it four times, once between all possible combination of yourself and the other party.
Here are worlds the size of Nebulae, grown, not in tight massed spheres and gravity wells, but like ferns or fractal fungi infiltrating a mass. Storm-wrapped tendril worlds with neutronium cores. Worlds as slender as mycelium, all linked, receiving their light from the transient civilisation of intelligent nomadic suns. Primary trunks of world with surfaces like gas giants and storms as large as small galaxies.
Entire world-equivalent biospheres spending their existence transiting and slowly evolving. Sometimes running into each other, resulting in titanic conflicts and strange syntheses.
Gravatically balanced structures of form. Vast tendrils of world.
Some worlds with hollow cores like old trees, some wormed within by passages and cells, some carrying lightless life inside.
Some oceanic, like branches of water. Some carrying vast globular oceans at their tips. Sometimes these oceans have frozen surfaces and pressure-ice cores. Sometimes they break free and drift, are caught and smeared through the Lagrange zones causing disaster and opportunity.
Sadly, all the world curls have fallen into decay. They are blackened and dying, though the diamond highways sing.
The highways are cylinders the thickness of stars, transparent, flexible diamond lattice environments, home to their own intelligence yet transmitting a blood supply of light.
At the nexus-points of the intersecting highways, like the cores of neural cells, are the Photo-Arcologies , gigantic hives of living suns that take on strange insectoid forms. Between the worlds the suns are harmonies of light like freight trains spiralling round the helices inside the diamond highways.
Yet without the responsive song of life from the the world fronds, the arcologies themselves grow silent, the highways are failing, slowly but inevitably being cut off. Eventually the culture of the Omnistructure will retreat, becoming only a memory. In the star-cemeteries deep in the centres of the Photo-Arcologies, black-hole tendrils and white dwarf root-stubs animate and attempt escape.
The space between the highways and the mycellium of world is divided into cells of void, like the cells of a leaf, each similar but distinct. At the border of each cause/effect lipid layer, time hesitates for a moment to confirm.
Lagrange points within the cellular voids play host to their own strange zero-g civilisations. High altitude web cities grow like gigantic highway shacks along the easy-to-transport zero-g lines between the world-roots and the suns.
Lagrange points generally lie at the borders of void cells and have slightly different realities depending on which side you are on. Multi-cell Lagrange strands are complex, with many realities involved. They say if you agree something there you must agree it four times, once between all possible combination of yourself and the other party.
Tuesday, 15 September 2015
The Pernicious Pamphlet by Mateo Diaz Torres
Mateo made this zine, the Pernicious Pamphlet.
Here are some reasons I think it is good
Firstly he taught himself design and the tech stuff you need to do that, something I have so-far failed to do. The unity of space and meaning in RPG products means anyone who can combine writing, art and design will become a kind of OSR omnibeing.
And the design is pretty good. Set out in a broadly Greco-ish style but a little lighter, clearer and more rational.
The stated aim is to compress as much setting information into character generation as possible and it fulfills that intent with grace and ease. Its a very small masterpiece of terse, useful, original, interactive information. Essentially a kind of Players Handbook for someones home game with only the novel, active parts and no fat. He says you could extrapolate an entire game world from just in information and you could.
Languages
I like the way he has handled languages. There are seven given, none are for human cultures, all are for types of being but the additional cultural uses of each language paint a very neat picture of a certain kind of social/supernatural world. The two that really interest me are:
Elegaic - Spoken by vampires, demons and the tragically damned. Also grimoires and spellbooks.
Lament - Common undead, boringly damned and the rebellious living. Most graffiti is in this language.
The idea of a class system of Undead languages makes sense and the linking of Magical script and high-status undead works really well in a not-entirely-rations-but-feels-right way.
The ideas of languages linking states of human existence as well as simply *cultures* is really fascinating to me. PC's will probably only ever come from one culture in their lives but they might experience many different states. Poverty, wealth, madness, death. By making the language of one kind of death the language of magic, and the language of another kind of death the language of rebellion Mateo has created natural in-game linkages between certain kinds of groups. You magician can probably speak to that Vampire. Your anarchist thief can probably speak to that skeleton, and it kind of makes a strange kind of organic sense that they would. 'Alignment' languages do a similar thing but that is a top-down highly rationally arranged system which always makes a world feel more designed, not more lived in. This is quite different and works better for me.
Other languages include Enochian - angels, clerical spell scrolls, Mew - language of cats and educated animals, Ara Gorash - language of the outer dark (I would have had mad people also speaking this) and Fol - unwritable language of the fairies (I would probably have had lovers and small children speaking this.)
Obol
This is a rare kind of un-exchangeable currency, the coins of choice for Fairy Queens, Vampire Lords, Demigods etc. They allow for otherwise impossible transactions - souls, dreams etc.
I had an idea a little like this a long time ago called 'Occultum' but this is better and simpler and communicated much more gracefully and does in full what I had only half-imagined for Occultum.-magica characters. Does your fighter need to make a deal with a demon? It was always possible, but if he/she steals some Obols it now becomes quite reasonable and likely. You could use this currency to trade all kinds of intangibles, events, states etc.
And it makes high-yield treasure piles simpler, smaller and genuinely useful. Whats better than finding a shitload of gold? Magic coins you can trade for deamon favours or the souls of lost loves.
Post
Albion has an effective postal service to Farie, The Sunless Lands, Heaven and Hell.
This is incredibly useful and a good idea all round. All you have to do is require that your players actually write an actual letter and take it to the supernatural postman. Between sessions you have time to write a reply and can deliver this, as an actual letter, to the players either at the start of the next session or at a moment of great tension.
The slow speed of communication with letters and the fact that players would actually have to write them in-character makes them perfect for allowing meaningful but controllable and not game-breaking contact between other planes. for instance with dead relatives, the spirits of former PC's, supernatural entities etc. This is good, more people should do this.
Vampires
There are some good, simple old-school vampire rules that make them hell to play at low levels and interact in interesting ways as you level up. Like the whole thing, these are a very good example of terse, no-bullshit rules that are nevertheless very neatly engineered and evocative.
Clerics and Warlocks
There are rules for clerics of Albions horrid Chthuloid Queen and three weird kind-of demigods for your characters to pimp themselves out to and hang out with. The rules for these are as simple and well thought out as the rest.
The three entities are evocative and interesting personalities, as well as that, like everything in the pamphlet, they are chunks of setting information. Everything in it, pretty much every word, does two jobs and contributes to two structures. Firstly it does what it need to help a character make interesting choices in creation. Secondly it highlights and illuminates a piece of the imagined world.
Its so fucking short and so lean that I can't really write much about it without giving stuff away. I kind of already have just by mentioning what stuff is. There is more I haven't mentioned. Read it, use it, chop it up or throw it at a player and say 'yeah you can do this stuf'. $7 for the hardcopy, including postage I think.
Here are some reasons I think it is good
Firstly he taught himself design and the tech stuff you need to do that, something I have so-far failed to do. The unity of space and meaning in RPG products means anyone who can combine writing, art and design will become a kind of OSR omnibeing.
And the design is pretty good. Set out in a broadly Greco-ish style but a little lighter, clearer and more rational.
The stated aim is to compress as much setting information into character generation as possible and it fulfills that intent with grace and ease. Its a very small masterpiece of terse, useful, original, interactive information. Essentially a kind of Players Handbook for someones home game with only the novel, active parts and no fat. He says you could extrapolate an entire game world from just in information and you could.
Languages
I like the way he has handled languages. There are seven given, none are for human cultures, all are for types of being but the additional cultural uses of each language paint a very neat picture of a certain kind of social/supernatural world. The two that really interest me are:
Elegaic - Spoken by vampires, demons and the tragically damned. Also grimoires and spellbooks.
Lament - Common undead, boringly damned and the rebellious living. Most graffiti is in this language.
The idea of a class system of Undead languages makes sense and the linking of Magical script and high-status undead works really well in a not-entirely-rations-but-feels-right way.
The ideas of languages linking states of human existence as well as simply *cultures* is really fascinating to me. PC's will probably only ever come from one culture in their lives but they might experience many different states. Poverty, wealth, madness, death. By making the language of one kind of death the language of magic, and the language of another kind of death the language of rebellion Mateo has created natural in-game linkages between certain kinds of groups. You magician can probably speak to that Vampire. Your anarchist thief can probably speak to that skeleton, and it kind of makes a strange kind of organic sense that they would. 'Alignment' languages do a similar thing but that is a top-down highly rationally arranged system which always makes a world feel more designed, not more lived in. This is quite different and works better for me.
Other languages include Enochian - angels, clerical spell scrolls, Mew - language of cats and educated animals, Ara Gorash - language of the outer dark (I would have had mad people also speaking this) and Fol - unwritable language of the fairies (I would probably have had lovers and small children speaking this.)
Obol
This is a rare kind of un-exchangeable currency, the coins of choice for Fairy Queens, Vampire Lords, Demigods etc. They allow for otherwise impossible transactions - souls, dreams etc.
I had an idea a little like this a long time ago called 'Occultum' but this is better and simpler and communicated much more gracefully and does in full what I had only half-imagined for Occultum.-magica characters. Does your fighter need to make a deal with a demon? It was always possible, but if he/she steals some Obols it now becomes quite reasonable and likely. You could use this currency to trade all kinds of intangibles, events, states etc.
And it makes high-yield treasure piles simpler, smaller and genuinely useful. Whats better than finding a shitload of gold? Magic coins you can trade for deamon favours or the souls of lost loves.
Post
Albion has an effective postal service to Farie, The Sunless Lands, Heaven and Hell.
This is incredibly useful and a good idea all round. All you have to do is require that your players actually write an actual letter and take it to the supernatural postman. Between sessions you have time to write a reply and can deliver this, as an actual letter, to the players either at the start of the next session or at a moment of great tension.
The slow speed of communication with letters and the fact that players would actually have to write them in-character makes them perfect for allowing meaningful but controllable and not game-breaking contact between other planes. for instance with dead relatives, the spirits of former PC's, supernatural entities etc. This is good, more people should do this.
Vampires
There are some good, simple old-school vampire rules that make them hell to play at low levels and interact in interesting ways as you level up. Like the whole thing, these are a very good example of terse, no-bullshit rules that are nevertheless very neatly engineered and evocative.
Clerics and Warlocks
There are rules for clerics of Albions horrid Chthuloid Queen and three weird kind-of demigods for your characters to pimp themselves out to and hang out with. The rules for these are as simple and well thought out as the rest.
The three entities are evocative and interesting personalities, as well as that, like everything in the pamphlet, they are chunks of setting information. Everything in it, pretty much every word, does two jobs and contributes to two structures. Firstly it does what it need to help a character make interesting choices in creation. Secondly it highlights and illuminates a piece of the imagined world.
Its so fucking short and so lean that I can't really write much about it without giving stuff away. I kind of already have just by mentioning what stuff is. There is more I haven't mentioned. Read it, use it, chop it up or throw it at a player and say 'yeah you can do this stuf'. $7 for the hardcopy, including postage I think.
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