Ten Ideas For The Backs Of Toy Soldiers

I am taking an hour or two off to imagine differently profiled toys. Most of these are for Imperial Guard style armies. If you want to know abou the God Angle Profile, go here.

1. A single air tank like the ones divers carry, either vertically or aslant. When seen in groups this should highlight the vulnerability of the guardsmen. If aslant, would seem like a row of tallymarks. Marines get Rhomboids and Triangles, guardsmen get single lines. A gasmask pushed back over the head so it hangs upside-down, a line of deflated faces staring back at the player in blunt accusation. Like a row of graves.

This world could be one where large pockets of invisible gas fill valleys, turning them into lifeless oceans. Armies walk into the gas like going underwater. So they have excellent reparatory gear but always know when they will need to use it. They would walk slowly and act calmly in toxic environments. 

2. A kinetic sculpture. The simplest would be some kind of pinwheel. Is there any way to make this cool? Maybe psychic-dispersal vanes that catch the unseen wind of chaos and stop you mutating. Chaos troops could have an uneven eight-arrowed pinwheel that spins on their backs. They wouldn’t even need a reason, those guys would just be into that shit.

Their artillery would look like one of these.

(I just really want to get Kinetic sculpture on the battlefield)

 3. A counterweight for aliens. I know they could do this and GW would like it as you could move the bulk of the sculpture much further forward of the base, creating a great impression of dynamism that would be a profile for the entire army. Imagine a beast leaping forward with only its rear limbs just touching the base. Behind it a long tail with some nodule or club at the end. Inside the club, a small lead weight. Could work well for the as-yet unseen Hyper-Violent Barghesi.

4. A mirror. The player would have their face staring back at them. I have seen kinder eggs do stuff like this. Regiment carries half-parabolic defensive mirror shields like tiny radio telescopes with chunks taken out of them. Officers and assault groups carry them forwards. The bite taken out of the shape makes room for the active weapon arm. Rifle troops carry the mirror shields slung on their backs. Pointing back towards you.

Maybe they come from the world where they make the ultra-rare anti-lasgun shields. Or from airless asteroids where laser fire can carry across hundreds of miles as it doesn’t disperse, so they had to think up an active defence.

5. Faces in profile. Stormtroopers might wear embossed body armour with fear/medusa face going forward like the face of Phobos on Alexander’s breastplate and the face of Fortune, or Tyche, on their backs. Fortune does guard your back after all. The player would see a series of serine smiling female faces in profile, like on coins. All facing the same way.

6. A spirit level. Carried in small of the back or across the shoulders. Width of a drain. Just a bit wider than the back, with an actual bubble in there. Regiment from non-demonic otherspace or collapsed webway fragment. They grow up in a non-euclidian zone and need this stuff to function in realspace at enormous cost.

They could wear strange angular helmets with prisms inside them to alter their eyesight for normal space. Could be an anti-necron veteran assault force, trained for suicide actions. Or for assaulting deamon worlds. Or searching the webway when the empire finds a breach. Can’t be driven mad, so that’s handy.

Weapons could look like Naum Gabo Sculptures.

 

 

 7. Knots. Big knots of rope worn across one shoulderdeliberately encrypted climbers harnesses. Like that thing Worf always wore, but bigger, chunkier, giving a strong asymmetric profile. Like Celtic knotwork in 3d. Regiment adds one knot for battle survived, vets have huge backpack knots they never take off.

8. Stowed ceremonial powerfists they are not allowed to use. Probably not the real thing but religious/cargo cult replica’s. Like a pair of huge open hands crossed at the back. Could be worn palm down like hands reaching over the shoulder pulling them forwards into battle. Or palm up like hands reaching up out to the player. Fits with god-angle theme as its like prayer aimed at you.

9. Savage world without technology yet worships machine god. Wears icons made from wood on their backs. Cargo-cult mech arms like Tech Priests, but made from wood and obviously carved. Or curled-up Space Marine icons made from wood. Organic grain contrasting with mech form. Possibly leaves and branches still left on.

10 Hexagonal backpacks? Ok this one is really rubbish, but they would lock together on the field and look like a big beehive, which is nice.

"Still, that is not the point.”

Whenever we try to decide whether to accept a new idea, we must ask ourselves some very serious questions.

1 – Does it make me look good?

2 – Is it like something I already half-believe but better phrased?

3 – Can I get away with it?

4 – Has someone already done most of the heavy lifting?

Exactly one week ago I went to the library to look for books on sculpture. Of the two I picked up, one was chosen mainly on the basis of size. It was large and brown and looked official. The dewey decimal number was embossed onto the spine, which is how you know someone means business with their book. There were also lots of pictures.

And by pure chance I pick up the one book I absolutely need. What a surprise is Herbert Read.

He died in 68’ I think and never saw large-scale miniature production. Let alone Warhammer. But I think he would have liked it. Here are some things I learnt from Herbert

Read believes that the ‘Painterly’ and the ‘Plastic’ are in conflict all through the history of sculpture. What this means is a little complex. I hope I have under stood well enough to summarise without saying anything too stupid.

This is ‘Painterly’ 

The simplest way to say it is that it is sculpture made to be seen, made to create an image first. To do the same thing that painting does, but with different materials.

I think Herbert would probably think that Elves are Painterly as well.

 

They are kind of an illusion. The material is not being itself, it is being transformed, with skill, to create the pretence of another kind of matter. To float. The problem Herbert has with this is that, while not bad in itself, and requiring a high level of ability, it separates sculpture from its core. He thinks sculpture can do something that images can never do and that when sculptures become too painterly and feed on each other they, over time, become absent of this core quality.

“but it is perhaps still necessary to expose the weaknesses that, present in the painterly conception at its best, lead with logical inevitability to the horrors of academic sculpture at its worst.”

So what is this quality?

Sculpture can shape mass. It can occupy space in a particular way. It holds and contains weight and depth and projects or embodies this in the world. The spatial presence comes first, the visuals are just a consequence of that.

“The mind, said Rodin, only with difficulty familiarizes itself with the notion of depths, it always tends to play over surfaces.”

“Henceforth, when you carve, never see the form in length, but always in thickness. Never consider a surface except as the extremity of a volume, as the point, more or less large, which it directs toward you. In that way you will acquire the ­science of modelling.” – some guy advising Rodin

Read would say that this did that well

 

“Michelangelo, whose work had this compactness, said that only those works were good that could be rolled from the top to the bottom of the mountain without breaking.”

Now Dwarves.

Dwarves embody mass. They occupy space. You could roll them downhill and nothing would snap off. If they are interesting to look at it is probably a secondary effect of the way they occupy the space they are in.

(Now we have a problem here in that we can only look at these pictures. We have only the visual sense in this case. So we are trying to reach behind or through one sense to reach another. The way I think of this;- I imagine feeling it in my body, beginning with my hands I pretend the sculpture is life size, I press my palms against it, I move my body forward until I can feel my weight move against it's. I imagine trying to rock it gently back and forth, moving around it and pushing it from every side. If I can feel the sculpture, then I would say it has this quality. 

It's possible that I am being a little mad. But maybe not.)

“It is very difficult to convey the nature of the sensations by descriptive words or even by photographic illustrations. Ideally each reader of this volume should be provided, at this stage, with a piece of sculpture to hug, cuddle, fondle – primitive verbs that indicate a desire to treat an object with plastic sensibility.”

“I know that we can get on quite well with a life  of visual sensations, with perhaps an merely subcutaneous or subconscious life of tactile sensations. Still, that is not the point.”

Goblins.

Goblins, on the other hand, are Haptic. They are shaped by touch. They are a primitive sense feeding straight back into itself without interacting much with sight.

This is the haptic homunculus. You may be familiar with it.

The human body with the sizes and proportions relative to the density of nerve endings. he body as you touch it and as it is touched. Absent of sight. Congenitally blind children often sculpt the body with these proportions.

And here is a goblin.

Goblins are haptic homonlculi. I think that's why I enjoyed painting them so much.

We cannot actually stroke or cuddle out mini's much. Our main points of contact with their surfaces is firstly when we assemble them, but mainly when we paint them. We feel then virtually through the tip of a very soft, and carefully observed paintbrush. Though we do not have perfect tactile feedback on the brush tip, we observe the paint being applied and the exact nature of the touch affects that very clearly. I always loved painting goblins (and Orcs somewhat) more than anything else. The hugeness and crudeness of their features was a delight, quite a different feeling to a normally proportioned model.)

It is possible that a combination of the limited means of lead casting and the, kind of, artistic 'moment' of the times meant that early citadel miniatures were better sculptures in this way. Less perfect as pictured things, and maybe not as skilled. But they occupied space and held mass in a different way and in that sense, were more pure sculptures because they did that thing that only sculpture can do.

And they were made of lead, which weighs differently in the hand. And people might say why does it matter if the shape is better and I would reply why wouldn't it. It is a tactile form. it is a haptic form. The weight is part of what it is. It's not just what the material can do it is also what the material is.

Touch is the most shat-upon sense. Along with smell. How do we tell if someone is low status or mentally ill? If they smell, if they try to smell other people. If they touch things. Children touch things. All the time. Grabbing twisting biting licking. But when you hit twelve you are expected to have all the haptic information you will ever need. Better remember it.

You might say that any mini in your hand is better than any mini on the screen because it is in your hand.

Jesus Likes Your Backpack

Many things have been said and some are below the jump. But first, the backpack.

I want you to imagine you are playing a game of 40k in the middle of a church. There is no-one else around. The table is in the middle of the building.

Mini’s might be like sculpture, but the battlefield is more like a cathedral. Like this – 

The informational capacity of this image is more like architecture than sculpture

They both have to carry information in a similar way. They are information-producing spaces. The information is a narrative.  In the cathedral the story is the religion. It never changes, but you are meant to. 

The battlefield is a story you create and reshape moment by moment. But you need to get that information either way or the whole thing has no point. 

They both need to work on multiple scales. Not many forms of art need to do this. You are usually expected to be only one distance away. The mini can be in your hand. Close. On the table, arranged either on its own or as part of a group. It must stand out or lock in with the group in an intuitive way. It must clearly show informational capacity both at short range as a discrete thing and very far away from you as part of a mixed group.

A cathedral has to work on similar scales. Sculptures in there must work up close to give direct information. They are also part of an overarching schema, they must harmonise with a group of other sculptures when seen from a great distance. They must also work as part of the structure of a large building.

The cathedral is a space you transit through, saints and the like look down on you from above. The battlefield is a space you create and change as you play. In both cases there is a kind of movement through the space, one literally with your body, the other with your intent and minds-eye.

If you trace the line of sight from one of the saints in the windows to the mini’s on the table then the line goes pretty much through your head. The saints are looking down on you from the same angle from which you look at the table. It’s a weird fucking angle to be interacting with something at. About 75 degrees.

And that’s why the Imperial Guard need better backpacks.

So far as I have been able to find out (let me know in the comments if I am wrong) Mini’s are the only form of sculpture, of a human form, in which you are expected to interact with the thing from behind and from above.

Most of what you see of you miniatures on the table is them facing away from you. Yes you can, and will see them from every other angle as the game goes on. But the primary, the assumed angle is from behind and from above, at about 75 (I think) degrees.

This is the same angle from which the Saints view you. Which explains why a great many religions are obsessed with certain headgears, robes and haircuts. It’s because God is looking at you from the same angle. 75 degrees. From behind. He wants you to have a distinctive reverse silhouette so he can pick you out of your squad. In case he needs to grab you. 

A good mini can, and must, hold much of its informational identity when seen from this angle. The designer of the Space Marines knew this. He gave them a cool nuclear backpack based on that of a roman legionnaire.

And then there was an even better idea. Give the bad Space Marines their own evil backpack.

Look how odd and interesting these things are when seen from behind, without any context. They are strange amulets.

Interestingly, a 40k model and a fantasy model have to do slightly separate things with their god-angle profile. A 40k model will be with a loose group, continually re-arranged. It must carry, match and mesh with that group identity. It must bind the squad together instantly, at a glance. You need the information now, you cannot waste time thinking about it.

A Fantasy mini, by contrast, will always be considered as part of a large automatic block. It is more like a piece of architecture from this angle than a sculpture. It must fit neatly with its regiment and form part of a large already-cohesive group. The informational transmission of the mini’s from the god-angle is different and I would expect the 40 mini’s, generally, to have a more powerful and more expressive god-angle profile because of it.

And that’s why the imperial guard need something on their backs. There is not much interesting stuff going on back there. They do not have a powerful god-angle profile and this makes them less charismatic and less useful sculptures.

If you look at the expensive Forge World Imperial guard Mini’s, they have one thing in common.

Kried stuff, the packs are on the bottom

these look tiny but they are better on the model

 They have been given, or given the option for, cool things on their backs.

In addition to this, the Krieg helmet, combined with the backpack, makes a much bolder god-angle profile than any other guard unit.

I don’t know how fully GW, or other companies, think about this. They seem to do so with war machines, which often receive an exciting profile of this kind. With troops they seem to go on and off. (If anyone has any info on this please do let me know.)

There are no god-angle photo's on the GW website that I could find. And no-one seems to photograph their mini's like this. Which is strange as this is how they use their mini's. But everyone thinks of them as sculpture when they hold them and then forgets how they are used.

I fantasise about a GW R&D meeting in which the first thing they do is decide on the boldest and most powerful god-angle profile. What do they wear on their backs and their heads. What is the body shape. Only then do you think about the front of the body. The you decide on the technology and aesthetic. Then simply write the whole culture and history to account for the back and the top of the head.

Completely enclosed in the hollow of his hand

“He must strive continually to think of, and use, form in its full spatial completeness. He gets the solid shape, as it were, inside his head - he thinks of it, whatever it’s size, as if he were holding it completely enclosed in the hollow of his hand. He mentally visualises a complex form from all round itself; he knows while he looks at one side what the other side is like; he identifies himself with its centre of gravity, its mass, its weight; he realises its volume, as the space that the shape displaces I the air.”

Henry Moore ‘Notes on Sculpture’ in Herbert Reads ‘Henry Moore, sculpture and drawings’

There is popular music and popular cinema and there is actually popular sculpture. Much of it is what we would usually call ornaments. Some of it is mini’s. Minis are sculpture for the masses in the same way as pop is music for the masses.

It is a kind of invisible art.

Constraints shape thought. The mind is a little like water. Any particular thought will usually choose the path of least resistance to its assumed end. Total freedom often leads to general blandness. See the melange of modern fantasy.

When constraints are introduced. (I think of them as patterns of activation rather than constraints.) The thought is displaced from its track. Like a river being dammed. It must find a new route through usually untouched pastures of the mind and make unusual connections to be what it needs to be.

The most powerful and creatively interesting constraints are those of different kinds. If a D&D character has to be a cleric but cannot worship any stated god in a D&D book, that is two constraints from within a very similar field. If the cleric has to be created in five minutes because a train was late, that introduces a constraint from a different level. If it needs to fit into the poetic formation of a sonnet, that is another, if it needs to be generated from a memory of your real life then this is another. Constraints imposed from different levels of reality are the most powerful

I have been thinking about the overlapping constraints under which big companies make popular sculpture and they fascinate me.

How many?

The Fiction. Every mini is linked to and feeds back into an overarching fiction, so each mini must encapsulate and even move forward a bit of the story. It has to have continuity with what came before.

One of my favourite things about 40k lore is the backward technology. In the 40k verse older technology is always better and most of it is lost. R&D is forbidden. To make something better you have to actually find an archive and mine it for already existing designs. This makes sense of the insane tech levels in 40k, especially in human culture. Old and new, recently discovered and long forgotten all mixed together almost incoherently. If game designers want to invent something new they just have something old discovered. This means designers get to invent what they want, so long as it makes artistic sense. It feeds back into the power of the fiction because everything is old and decayed and no-one understands it.

Stories need inherent technology to talk about the future so that we understand it now. Star Trek has post-relativistic speeds, gravity control, matte reorganisation and AI. A society with those things would look and act like nothing we can recognise. So the tech is used but the implications are ignored.

40k gets around this by inventing an incoherent culture. It’s brokenness adds emotional and aesthetic power rather than taking it.

Capital. If it’s made by a major corporation then it will be affected by what the market wants. Space Marine models outnumber Imperial Guard models because everyone wants to play Space Marines. The company semi-accidently hit something that jams right in to the adolescent male mind. It does so in an interesting way. It’s like a pop hit of popular sculpture. Everything they do almost has to hang somewhere around the orbit of Space Marines as they drive profits. If we look back at the fiction constraint, they need to live inside a universe that justifies the existence of Space Marines.

It will be affected by what the company thinks it can persuade people to want and by what makes the most money. The company has worked out it has a higher profit margin on very large very expensive kits. Now every army has one. Would you like a giant multi-part GW kit? Buy two for your apocalypse game. The creation of these mega-kits has been enabled by shifts in…

The Means of Production. It needs to be mass produced. The materials and the techniques change. Generally you are trying to fake a figure that occupies three dimensional space with a technology that wants to make long thin things. Old models were usually arranged across a single axis. So instead you make it in parts, the parts get snipped off the sprue and attached a different way so it occupies 3d space in a more fluid way. Computers can scan in complex shapes for mass production.

Materials. Lead holds differently to pewter which holds differently to plastic which holds differently to finecast resin. Metals are heavy and need special glues to make them stick so its hard to build big multipart models without special skills. Plastic bends under heat and glues super easy so that effects things for the consumer.

(Some of what we think of as an ancient style of sculpture is based on how granite carries detail. Granite is a hard rock. It survives when others wear. Its hard to cut so you have to use simple bold designs.  Those designs last so they become symbolic of time. The material affects the form which affects the culture.)

Architects of old large buildings would shift the level of detail in the building depending on its distance from the viewer. Fine detail in the distance is often bad detail because its fineness fades when seen from a long distance away. Detail on a battlefield might work in the same way.

USE! This is where popular sculpture is really different to any other kind of art. The guy who designed Space Marines gave them that unusual highly distinctive upper body profile because the player is always looking down on them from above and they need to pop against a mixed background. Warhammer fantasy minis need to click together next to each other on square bases as a regiment while also forming a semi-realistic impression of something going to war.

Movement and uniformity

(Go and have a look at the 360 rotating images on the site)

 It’s assumed that the user will and should want to alter the product. Means are designed specifically for the end user to do that. Is there any other form of art in which it is assumed that the consumer is also a minor creator?

Painting is a whole other thing. So far as I know the west hasn’t painted sculptures since Greece. Except we do.

Go here and tell me if you think you are looking at an artform

Emotion? This may be a sub-constraint of story. Most warhammer minis need to not look stupid when they are posed alone away from a combat, but also no look stupid when rammed right up next to another model in hand-to-hand. This often strands them in a kind of strangulated emotional space. There are exceptions, sort of.

(The guy who designed this mini based it unconsciously on his grandfather, he only realised when it was finished. You can’t see here but the characters hand is held behind it’s back and clenched into a fist. Which, ok, isn’t that subtle. But for 40k it is.)

I suppose where I am going with this is that it makes more sense to think about minis as a form of popular art and to assess them along with elite officially-art sculpture in a similar relation as that of pop music to classical music.

Except if you brought in assessment of ALL the things working on a model design and how they all knit together to make something you are talking about it in a way I think no-one has before.

I can’t help but think that if you took some GW sculpts, filed off the details, leaving them as abstract shapes, then grew them is size and took them to a gallery, they would be regarded as art and possibly as high art.

the rotating version of this is great

Art has movements and markets and the mind of the sculpture but it doesn’t have a fucking universe to draw from and account for. And it isn’t for the people. It’s for some people. You can go and buy some remarkable forms of art right now. And the creators assume you are capable and willing to alter and adapt them to your will. You are invited to do so. You are invited to use the art. You can hold one in the palm of your hand.

Has anyone done this kind of criticism or analysis? It sounds like somebody should have I know nothing about sculpture. If anyone does have anything interesting to add to this, or can direct me to anyone who has done original thinking on it then please do let me know.

WHOREDOM MODE ACTIVATE

Ok so we are literature now.

This is here for anyone who hasn't already seen it on G+. Or twitter, or my desolate facebook page.

So parts of Pariah's of the Earth are in the new Spolia magazine. This is an Internet-only literature thing put out by Jessa Crispin the editor of Bookslut. I think that makes it about as legit as stuff on the internet is likely to get. Click on the picture to go there.

(IT COSTS MONEY TO BUY AND I GET PAID SO DON'T PIRATE THAT SHIT. PIRATE COMICS, PORN AND BREAKING BAD LIKE EVERYONE ELSE YOU FREAK, LEAVE LITERATURE OUT OF IT.)


That really annoying waffly man did a long thing in the guardian about the importance of gatekeepers and editing and how pimping stuff on social networks is demeaning and too many writers and free writing pushes down the pay for real writers but regrettably no-one seems to have edited it or done any quality control because its fucking long as fuck and dull but hey, at least its free, and on the internet.

"Amazon wants a world in which books are either self-published or published by Amazon itself, with readers dependent on Amazon reviews in choosing books, and with authors responsible for their own promotion. The work of yakkers and tweeters and braggers, and of people with the money to pay somebody to churn out hundreds of five-star reviews for them, will flourish in that world. But what happens to the people who became writers because yakking and tweeting and bragging felt to them like intolerably shallow forms of social engagement? What happens to the people who want to communicate in depth, individual to individual, in the quiet and permanence of the printed word, and who were shaped by their love of writers who wrote when publication still assured some kind of quality control and literary reputations were more than a matter of self-promotional decibel levels?"

Anyway this is me yakking and tweeting and he's right it's demeaning as fuck, and tiring. I've already put this on three social networks and I feel eaten away at my core. But this is my blog so if I don't pimp it on here I am reneging on the internet soul-exchange deal right?

Probably the real nerds will want to wait until it comes out in a complete form some time next year (maybe?), but if you are into literature there's a bunch of other stuff in there.

If you are one of those people who like bragging about the gang they are in (and I suppose we all are a little bit in moments of weakness) then you can tell people on forums and stuff that this is probably the first time that stuff from a monster manual has been featured in a literary magazine.

That guy who thinks V Baker is a cult leader trying to destroy gaming will probably have a prolapse and come up for a shitty new acronym for OSR Swine. Pretentious, Impudent, Guilt-free, Swine (P.I.G.S?). I don't even know what swine meant in the first place.

Personally I think of it as a victory for unstable shut-ins of all kinds.

(THERE ARE PICTURES! By ScrapPrincess and Cedric Plante!)

WHOREDOME MODE DE-ACTIVATE

You gotta jack Vitruvius bro

How about dungeon design notes as an in-game object?

I think BLDBLG guy a while ago proposed a city in which each district had a different legal planning system. So like how in modern office buildings the doors and windows and walls and ceiling and whatever all have to be up to spec and there are legal arrangements they have to fill. And the different legal requirements of different nations or jurisdictions are part of what give spaces an individual ‘feel’.

So if there was an ancient culture that built lots of tombs, like the Egyptians. Then they would have favoured historical architects, and a kind of pattern of arranging things. Traps yes, but also how long and far things should be, how deep and which doors, how to arrange rooms in the proper spiritual configuration.

So if you wanted to you could type up a kind of one-page (no need to go crazy) design plan for each culture that built dungeons in your world. You could use these notes when making dungeons for your sandbox and try to follow them and improvise as much as possible within the cultural strictures laid down in the text. Like a real architect would do. Writing within constraints might make you more imaginative and even if they never get the notes they can still work out the logic.

 And you could do it in the voice of an ancient forgotten architect-priest addressing future generations. And then those notes could be an actual book hidden in a library or hidden place in that world. So if players rob the library or collection, you just give them your design notes for that book.

Then, though they don’t have the map to any particular dungeon, they understand the logic of all of those kind of dungeons. So they know the treasure room will always be towards the north, at the end of a long hidden passage, and that the number of traps will always be a prime number, and they will always try to take off particular body-parts in a particular sequence. You are looking for the decapitation trap just there. There has to be an upward secret passage from the kings tomb in case his soul comes back and needs to escape.

And then you could have one very ancient culture tomb invaded or re-engineered by a later culture and they constraints would be layered on each other and interact in all kinds of interesting semi-predictable ways.

(in addition to this and in no way related to it. My friend Noisms once wrote a piece about dungeoneers being rentiers because they don’t generate any new wealth, just waste rescources looking for old wealth. It got me thinking about how an economist would account for wealth transmitted between cultures separated by thousands of years. So if the death-obsessed over-culture buries like 50% of their stuff. Then 5000 years later new people invade the ruins and start ‘mining’ them. Does that connect the two economies across the ‘dead’ or inactive intervening years, could you then analyse them as one economy, separated in islands of time?

And. Could there be a genius right-wing economist who is totally theoretically enraged by the ‘dead’ or inactive wealth buried beneath the ground and at the pointlessness of it and the horror of all the money not doing anything, that they would go crazy and start demanding that people start digging it up and recovering it and spending it and using it any way they could just to end the economic illogic of it all. Like if Ayn Rand* (maybe?) or Hayek* (maybe?) was advising an insane king and they were just “we have to dig up ALL the tombs, NOW, all funds must be liquid, both on, and below the earth. No un-owned capital! Anywhere! Ever!”

So then you get the culture of dungeoneers. Grave robbing is now a state-approved and practical job with a hierarchy and bureaucracy and everything)

*Probably neither of those guys would do that but you get the idea.