Eenie Meenie Miney Mo

From Memory In Oral Traditions

(some line breaks added by me)

"More suble poetics also exist. For instance, the first line of Eenie Meenie contains vowels that progress from front to back (as in the fee, fi fo of fee, fi, fo, fum or in ee, eye, ee eye, oh of Old McDonald Had a Farm). Therefore meenie, miney mo sounds better than miney, meenie, mo, and the order is unlikely to change. 

In addition, the first word, eenie, is part of the second word, meenie. This is a sophisticated poetic device used by Jakobson (1960) in relation to the political slogan I like Ike, used by Eisenhower in his presidental campaign. Together these first two words of the first line have four repetitions of the sound ee. It could even be argued that the /m/ sound is used because it is the easiest for a child to make.

Changing words without reducing the amount and quality of the poetic device is not easy. Changing words while maintaining both the meaning and the poetic devices is even more difficult. To be convinced of this, it is only neccessary to try to find, for each word in the two rhymes, a word that fits as well as the original. 

Consider the first line of Eenie Meenie again. It has only sound pattern, not meaning, but sound pattern is enough. As noted, eenie is part of meenie, and there is a front-to-back vowel progression for the middle words. Meenie, miney and mo alliterate. Ennie, meenie and miney rhyme with a sound that repeats as the first vowel of eenie and meenie. Mo rhymes with toe and go. The remaining sound, /n/, repeats in the same location in three words. The whole line repeats as the last line, where the one sungle-syllable word, mo, coincides with the person who is chosen. This change from the two-syllable pattern adds to the closure of the piece (Smith, 1968) and emphasizes the end and the rhyme scheme by putting a stress on the last word. Thus there is not a phoneme or even a distictive feature that can change without breaking some pattern.

The whole line can change - for instance, to the Scottish version Eena, deena, dina, do, noted later in the chapter - but any single change reduces a sound-pattern repetition. The multiple constraints outlined in Chapter 5 are at work here, resulting in many sounds being overdetermined. Thus a change from the /o/ of mo would break the front-to-back vowel progression and the end-ryhme pattern, and a change from mo to a two-syllable word would take the stress off the rhyme sound"

a city without a name

I wanted to imagine building a city for D&D.

No. Not true. I was fantasising about being asked to build a city for D&D. Someone important was saying ‘well you are a genius Patrick, Veins Of The Earth was a huge success, everyone is thinking, what are you going to do next?'

I was saying ‘well I could do the ultimate Drow sourcebook but to be honest if I did it I would want to go full out and not hold back anything and if I did that it would be mainly about slavey and way to dark and upsetting and trigger-warningy for mass production so I better not. Plus, thinking about all that dark shit for a long length of time would get me down. So instead I would like to do a signature city or place for one of the good guys. Like those 4^th edition modules, but good. Like the module as you remember it through the haze of childhood fifteen years after you actually read it. With all the crap forgotten and the good stuff embroidered by the inventions of time. Then I thought of this picture-

 And I said DWARVES. But different.

Imagine you are coming to the painful end of a long life. You can feel your body decaying around you. You have Alzheimer’s, you can feel your memories and sense of self drifting away moment by moment. You are alone. You are afraid. You are living the last moments of your life in the direct presence of annihilating despair. A void of meaning. But, let loose from all calculations, at the end of every possible hope, instead of collapsing, or crying or silently breaking down, what if you were to rise up?  To surge. To throw yourself carelessly into deadly adventure? To coil every fading memory, every tenuous pale flame of selfhood and every dying ember of self-respect into a charged spring of action and then to hurl yourself madly and violently into the face of evil and madness for the cause of all mankind?

Imagine if instead of a person, that was describing a civilisation, and that civilisation was encoded in a single city. That is the city I would write.

I don’t know what it’s called.

It’s lying tilted and falling in the mouth of a volcano. A good third has already fallen in and bits and pieces are going all the time. The whole thing could just side away every second.

The volcano leads straight to hell and daemons spew out every night.

The kings of hell hate this city. It is the city of the Dwarves. The Dwarves were great and mighty in ages past. They were sombre and grim and dwarfish and sang long low songs, but they were hard as fucking nails, so instead of getting decedent and pervy, whenever their civilisation got bored, they would collectively find the evilest creatures and forces across all the cosmos and they would just fuck with them. Just to ruin evils day. That is what the dwarves did with their spare eons. Century over century over century of tracking down daemons and liches and diabolic dragons and creatures of the outer dark and just fucking with them, killing them, wrecking their plans, freeing their slaves, bringing down the dark towers, just for the pleasure of doing it. That’s how you run a culture.

So now the age of dwarves is done. Their civilisation is dying. The kings of hell have sworn to drag the last city of the Dwarves down into the fire. Who is going to stop them?

The City is a place where every night hell unleashes another apocalypse to destroy it, and every night the anarchist remnants of the Dwarven people (and anyone else who wants to turn up) fight them off, just to ensure another day goes past.

There would be big tables to decide what kind of apocalypse is happening tonight, they would all be utterly different. Yes, big red devils with wings, but also living creatures of despair, evil plots, strange magics, ghosts of evil dragons, fallen angel deathsongs, diabolic brass siege engines, never the same thing twice. Never the same kind of thing twice.

 And because this is a place where you are guaranteed to come face to face with ultimate despair every night, only the coolest, craziest, bravest people go there. The kind of people who are either massively good, totally at the end of their tether, or just don’t give a fuck.

this girl is there, she looks cool

 

There is no real central authority. There might be a king but he is pretty busy foiling endless evil plots to worry too much about what you are up to, so it’s cool. It’s mainly Dwarves. Strange mad brave dwarves. They are old and weird with the knowledge of forgotten centuries and dead friends, or young and careless in the face of destruction. There are lots of other types of people there as well. All the people who couldn’t get along anywhere else because they were too real for the system. No-one is too fussed about normative conduct because you have probably signed your own death warrant by coming there. It’s generally assumed that you are going to spend your time doing something unspeakably heroic. Because if everyone in the city wasn’t doing that all the time then the city would be gone.

There are endless halls and catacombs and ancient libraries and museums and strange crypts. They are full of the knowledge and secrets and treasures of the Dwarves. Accumulated and guarded over millennia. The secrets are all about fighting evil. Every night demonic forces surge into the city and try to wipe out the collected memory of civilisation. Every night, teams of anarchist kamikaze librarians do battle to preserve the memory of the past so that future generations will know how to successfully fuck with evil too.

(There is also lots and lots of gold and treasure which needs to be rescued from hell.)

When the sun comes up and the city is still there, people throw a drunken dwarven party. There will be big random tables and rules for partying and what happens then.

In the day while living hero’s sleep, the ghosts of the heroic dead guard the city silently against invisible evils no-one else suspects. So even if you die in the city then that’s just the start of a bigger adventure for your ghost.

In the points between fighting evil, partying and sleeping, people try to run a (sort-of) normal city. They fix sewers, shop, deal with infrastructure. There are normal jobs but the people doing them are the best possible versions of the people doing them anywhere because everyone here is slightly mad and heroic.

And that is the city I would make. (art by John Blanche)

i think this girl is also there

this post is less good

If you are reading this and thinking ‘where is this guy going with this?’ Well he doesn’t know. Fair warning if you read on.

Now, I have been reading a book about memory systems in oral traditions and for some reason I want to talk about it. Because it feels like it relates.

Ballads and epic poems in oral traditions are designed to survive in the memory. When you really start looking at them it seems that everything about them is designed to survive in the memory. They are like deadly fucking machines for that one particular purpose.

We are not used to thinking about it this way because when we think about old stories and contrast them with new stories they often seem a bit shit. Long, winding, repetitive, direct, conservative, uninventive, literal, using the same symbols and a lot like each other.

And at the things we think stories do, we are right. But old stories are not designed to do those things. At least that is not their main intent. They are honed to live inside the substrate of the human mind in a world empty of writing or machines, and at that, they are hyper-evolved cultural technology.

David C. Rubin argues that one of the main ways these oral stories do this is with the use of layered constraints.

He uses constraints to mean the things about a recollection that limit the things that can be thought of. They are of multiple types. There are big stage-setting constraints that decide the type of tale that will be told. We call these genre and theme.

There are structural constraints. Now these are interesting. They are about the arrangement of words. Of rhyme, word length, syllable stress, word-sound. Line length, line rhythm, end stresses. All the stuff you find in poetry. These provide the grid or layout of the things that will be said. The words coming out of your mouth have to fit into the pattern so this limits the kinds of words you can say.

(Rhythm is so important, if you read people strings of random numbers, regular caesuras between number groups raise recall a great deal, even with no internal meaning, regular pauses allow the mind to organise information. I hate talking on the phone and I hate talking on the mobile phone because the lag is different by a quarter of a second and you feel like an idiot.)

The most important kind of constraint used is visual, spatial imagery with people performing sequential actions. Making people learn information of this kind really locks memory onto place.

I don’t thinks of Rubin’s constraints with the word he gave me. I think of them as activators.

I imagine a network of pale golden light. A living three dimensional neuronal web. This is the opening genre, the basic culture that underlies the song. It probably wouldn’t be like that because it might not be a network of neurons. Each activator might be a different type of work within the mind. But it’s a nice image. They all interact.

Then with each new constraint I imagine a different network springing into existence. They cross at places and where this happens the glow intensifies. The ideas in the song create one kind of network, the visual, actual description engages another, the rhythmic word-pattern another, then finally the immediate serial word relationships spring into place. Where all the networks cross, at the point of greatest activation there is a compounded golden point of fire. That is your word. The only word that could be in that place.

As word leads to word that golden point migrates, the networks shift and drag the point of activation along, word to word to word. It has to be serial and it has to move. It can’t just be a steady state like a memorised list. If has to be a process and you recall each individual thing in its place, which itself forms part of the queue or referent for the next particular thing.

There are lots of ways in which epics and ballads are not like D&D, but here’s a few similarities.

- Obsessed with spatial information.

- With people transiting through particular spaces in sequence.

- With concrete visual imagery.

- People taking sequential actions (for action 5 to happen, actions 1 to 4 must have happened.)

- They are made from conservative parts. (There is a Zak line somewhere I half remember about Vornheim having to be made of pieces people already understand because when you explain stuff to players you have to use the stuff already in their heads as referents*) Maybe you can have conservative parts in a novel structure, or a conservative structure with novel parts but rarely both at the same time.

- They are often, in some sense, performed, and performed in groups. (When we play together we are performing for each other a little bit I think)

- Meaning and structure are usually (usually, broooooadly) coherent to each other. (i.e oral poems don’t use enjambment. Each line is a discrete chunk of meaning, each rhythmic unit is usually a discrete chunk of meaning. Each stanza is about one thing. Ideas don’t spill over onto the next line. They go in tidy sequence. D&D is not always like this. It doesn’t have to be. But it likes that format. Each dungeon room a separate chunk. Meaning, Time and Space mapping directly onto each other in the dungeon map. Each dungeon a separate thing.

I suppose that I have often thought that memory and creation are hacks or repurposing of each other. Like two crazed scientists fighting for control of the same machine.

It was thinking about constraints that did it. If oral memory ignites and manages these layered networks to ensure stability of recall, are we using similar layered constraints to do something different with the same technology? Like we use genre and theme too. And concrete visual imagery, we add dice and classes and numbers. But it’s still a way of ensuring that particular things happen.

When we play are we trying to snatch something out of the air? We don’t know what it is but we know its shape. It’s not like finding something we’ve had before. It’s a kind of active living experiment to make.. something.

(The men who discovered Neon, and Phosphor (very separate people) both found out they had done it when something in the lab started to glow with its own light. A light no-one had ever seen before. Those must be the best elements to discover. They guys who isolated the Rare Earths just got more brown gloop, I kind of feel a bit shit for them.)

Well that’s it. I warned you at the beginning.

*D&D is such a strange tangle of conservatism and invention. You have the power to create anything, but if you can’t fit it into the fantasy world archetype that everyone is familiar with then it often doesn’t go anywhere. Like with oral epics, when anything is misremembered or changed by chance, it is changed to be more like what people already expect. Like there is a kind of cultural gravity pulling everything gradually back towards the centre.

Contrarian Knobend Dungeons & Dragons

Reading my friend talk about random character generation andoptimisation got me thinking about what happens in our minds when we create a person from a row of random numbers.

Like, which numbers are the best? And can you do the opposite of optimisation and would it be a good thing.

I thought of three ways there can be good numbers.

First When you look at a list of numbers and some are wildly divergent, then they are better than the average array. They make better people. Like this:-

STR-4 DEX-12 CON-15 CHA-7 WIS-17 INT-8

Is better than this

STR-9 DEX-13 CON-10 CHA-11 WIS-8 INT-10

The first person is more interesting. They are weak, tough, slightly unpleasant to be around and very aware. That is already a person I want to know more about. Who is the second person? Who cares?

When you look at divergent stats, your mind does a different kind of work than when you look at a steady range. It’s impossible to look at the first array without asking questions. It doesn’t make sense so you have to read it. It’s impossible to hold those numbers in your head as a description of a potential person without your mind waking up and interrogating them as an embodied human being. This is a particular person. Not a type. They have a particular body and a particular history. Why are they so weak and so tough? A disease? Age? Why are they so charmless and so aware of themselves. What kind of personality does this make? Are they embittered? Cruel? Not thoughtless anyway.

You may argue that you can do exactly the same thing for the second person. You can give them a history and a character and everything. Yes. You can, but you don’t have to. They slot neatly into place. The numbers float through your mind without triggering any dissonance. The first person is a problem to be solved and when you look at them your mind will try to solve the problem whether you want it to or not. You already told your brain its meant to be a person and it can’t allow people to be atomised or inconsistent. It sees people very day. They have to make sense, somehow. Not the usual kind of sense perhaps but they must be a meaningful whole.

Second When you assign this person a class you are deciding a big chunk of their history, some of their nature and everything about their future. You also choose much of how they will interact with the game world.

We don’t want our guy to die so we can’t make him a fighter. A cleric might be ok, or a wizard..

But what if we decided to not give a fuck about that? What if we added another kind of dissonance on a different scale. What is the least appropriate class for this person? Lets make them a fighter. What happens inside our heads now?

The first choice took effect over seconds. The second choice will take hours to play out. What happens when we try to play a character against type?

The answer is that we think and we think furiously. We obsess, we embody. Our weak fighter won’t survive in a swordfight, they have to fight at range. How will they do this? What tactics will they use? What kind of person does this, why do they fight?

The only way for us to deal with this is to harry the game world. We become obsessive investigators of the fictional environment. We cannot sit and wait for the tools and situations the DM gives us. That will kill us. We must search, observe, intuit, strive and decide. Yes you can with a normal character. But with our broken fighter you must. They cannot be played with just the stuff on the sheet and in the book. They will only survive as the product of an active mind.

Third On another level we must do this as a very particular person. The product of a very particular history. No normal person with these qualities would choose to fight. There must be something different about them, personality or history or both. You can’t ignore this. Unless you solve it the character doesn’t work. And you will be solving it continuously as you play.

Because you made this person, you will see the world through them. You didn’t make them when you rolled the dice. You did it without realising when you looked at the stats. And then again with ten or twenty micro-choices in the first hour of play. Ones you didn’t even see yourself making. You didn’t design this person but you made them nonetheless. They are a product of the patterns of your thought.

So you see things from their point of view, because it grew invisibly from your point of view.

So now you have to solve three exciting problems on three levels simultaneously and continuously. The conflict between stats, the conflict between stats and class in problem solving, and the problem of seeing the world through a very particular personality.

I call this ‘Contrarian Knobend Dungeons & Dragons’ or CKD&D, because you are being a pretentious fancy bastard and making a big point of making things difficult for yourself because you are a bit special.

Sky-Stone-River-Place

Draft 1 Is done. For PDF click the picture. 

I shoud really dedicate this one to Zak Smith, David Weaver and  Phil Spitzer, who's time I wasted by dicking around and failing to manage my time properly.

(Oh its really fucking long, like 17 pages)

Veins Encounter Table First Draft

Click on the pictures

Encounter Table PDF

 

The Raw Data

 

I realise this isn't very good, bad formatting, no animal information. Opinions, advice and suggested alterations welcome.