False Machine

The Lost Great Crystal Debate

pjamesstuart@gmail.com (Patrick Stuart) — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 08:44:00 -0700

In a late and desperate attempt to shore up my ‘relevance’ I have been scouring the internet for evidence that I exist, and have stumbled into the tragic gap left by the lost ‘Great Crystal Debate’ DOES ANYONE EVEN HAVE A COPY? If you would like to find out more, scan down the following chronological list of text, video and audio discussions, down to 2018…

2015 – Podecast

Back in 2015 Scrap and I played around with a ‘Podecast’ (i.e. each was at the antipode to the other), and ended up recording a brief run of unedited ‘conversations’ about a rather wild range of subjects which ranged from 2015 into 2016

Podecast 1 - the Experiment

https://archive.org/details/PatrickAndScrap1a

I honestly have no idea what is even in this. Its eleven years old!

Podecast 2 - MONSTERS

https://archive.org/details/ScrapAndPatrick2a

Contents include; 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.)

Podecast 3 - BEAUTY

https://archive.org/details/ScrapAndPatrick3a

Contents; 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. 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

Podecast - 4 BEES

https://archive.org/details/ScrapAndPatrick4a

Contents; 1.20 Scrap starts rambling about chromosomes. - (seriously, think about skipping this part). 4.26 Gives up on that and starts again. Begins a very dark story about Bees. 8.00 King Arthur and Bees. 9.55 The Demiplane of British History. 13.25 Brief ramble here. 13.40 Other Planes, verticality. 14.50 Hook Birds. 15.25 Dinosauroids - http://povorot.deviantart.com/gallery/9348116/The-Dinosauroids. 15.35 The first few issues of Prophet. (I think these are in fact the same guy.) 16.35 “Bees, have to get this back to bees..” 17.20 Evolution of pollen, and therefore bees. 17.45 Exploiting colony organisms. Pretending to be ants. 20.10 We are colony organisms. 21.20 The nihilism of not cleaning your room. 21.45 Emergency coping mechanisms. 23.09 Sudden change in conversation due to girlfriend interruption. The Death of Avril Lavigne. 24.24 Schizophrenia. The voices are probably real. Believing you are in the matrix. 26.13 “That’s kind-of like a hive..” 26.45 In stories no-one can ever be competent. 28.15 Destroying a city with super-speed. 30.15 The delay between conception and creation. 31.00 Cut-Up

2016 - Doom of the Podecast

Podecast 5 - relate-able content

https://archive.org/details/Podecast5

Contents; 1.30 - Dark gods. 5.00 - FotVH Images. 8.30 - Please buy my fucking books. 9.30 - Making relate-able and insightful points about a variety of role playing related conversation things. 10.30 - Alchemy. 15.15 - First impressions of the OSR. 19.30 - Motivations are monsters from inside you. 21.30 - Choices in char gen. 31.30 - Cognitive silence. 33.30 - Traditional originality, fire, hirelings and dogs. 37.30 - Ten minutes on dark AI’s & nightmare futurism. 46.45 - Language, objects & baby psychology. 51.30 - Lard, the currency of agency. 55.00 - Stories, memory and experience, the grand conflict. 58.30 - Fail states.

Podecast 6 The Wonderful Kererū

https://archive.org/details/Podecast5RemasteredAudio

The Wonderful Kererū appears only once in this Podecast but exemplifies the spirit of both participants, a fat, pompous, ridiculous animal snatching a whole twig from the tree of thought, eating a single flower and then throwing the rest away.

Contents; 0.07 - VotE. 2.38 - Weightlifters with no penises. 3.37 - Do you want to talk about pre-history? (We do not do this.) 4.36 - I cut a huge amounts of blathering out here. 5.00 - Scraps game. 7.10 - Complexity and depth. 9.30 - Scrap has a moment of clarity about the nature of Complexity. 11.10 - Where it actually starts to get interesting. 11.50 - The capacity of a post-apocalyptic world to create its own context. 13.10 - A new place to put adventures. 13.45 - “What’s his face? The guy who does Udan-Adan? We’ll probably never know his real name.” 14.15 - Our regular obligatory mention of Zak. 15.50 - Who did invent ‘the dungeon as a living thing? 17.28 - A Ghost in my house. 18.30 - The ‘blank slate’ game world & identity. 20.43 - Eve as the first D&D player, Adam as a Storygamer. 22.28 - Rachel Pollack’s ‘Unquenchable Fire’ I got the name wrong in the podcast. 24.26 - Our other regular segment on colonialism. 26.16 - Mention of Potatoes causes internet to drop out. 28.10 - It’s ‘Henry Moreton Stanely’ and I may well be wrong about Cortez. Have fun with Wikipedia. 31.45 - “You’re treating those children like subhumans.” 33.41 - Scrap is confused by the moral exchange inherent to Government. Sarah Horrocks would probably agree. 38.15 - “If only one culture has reliable deep-water navigation, that culture is effectively playing D&D with the world.” 39.45 - Cowboys on Mars. 41.53 - We expand our mentions of Zak to include his sister? Anyway, X-Men school-style Character Gen. 47.39 - Communicating on a Meta-Level. Maybe our players are friends. 49.15 - MY SPECIAL SETTING!! 51.00 - We cycle back to, or around, different contexts in which to place adventures.. 52.00 - The ancient civilization of Dan. 55.09 - The Halfmen of O by Maurice Gee. 56.55 - The Changeover by Margaret Mahy. 58.45 - Does the Conspiracy Theorist have a D&Dish world? No, not really. 60.01 - Pre-apocalyptic D&D. 60.03 - Stealing & faking art throughout history. 60.05 - Dirtbag Greys. The Burke & Hare of space. 60.07 - Changes in scale. Insect wars. 60.08 - The Author was ‘William Tenn’ and the book is Of Men and Monsters. 70.45 - Giants would be very vulnerable, and likely peaceful. 72.55 - The wonderful Kererū or New Zeland Wood Pidgeon. (A bird that flies through the glass in your window is also playing D&D). 76.00 - “Birds would be good D&D characters.” 81.00 - Evil Dolphins.

2017 - VotE!

The Secret DM — Veins of the Earth Interview with Patrick Stuart and Scrap Princess

http://www.thesecretdm.com/2017/04/veins-of-earth-interview-patrick-stuart.html

A text interview about the original ‘Veins of the Earth’.

2018 - Crystals!

What Would the Smart Party Do? — Episode 80

I am not even sure what we talk about here but hopefully Dirks art for Silent Titans gets a mention!

Direct MP3:

http://media.blubrry.com/thesmartparty/content.blubrry.com/thesmartparty/WhatWouldTheSmartPartyDo_80.mp3

Page: https://smartparty.wordpress.com/2018/09/13/patrick-stuart-interview/

The Great Crystal Debate!

The missing interview!!

Back in 2018 I was making my (negative) views on CRYSTALS widely known, when who should step forth to challenge me but the fool and creator of the BREAK! RPG, Reynaldo Mandarinian. To settle the matter for All Time, we got into a SAVAGE hour long verbal dual which, since there seem to be no copies surviving online, I will assume I won.

If anyone out there has any records or copies of the Great Crystal Debate, please let me know in the comments. The world deserves to hear my (assumed) victory, and how crystals were defeated for All Time.

2019 - The Worm!

Ignite Liverpool — Talk on the Wapentake

I am slightly embarrassed to see myself physically incarnated in maybe my only physical in-person talk.

https://youtu.be/nr4KKZMpf6Q

Those of you familiar with ‘Silent Titans’ will know about the ‘Wapentake of Wirral’ from that book, based on a real historical incident in which a corrupt lawyer got his hands on the medieval documents giving ownership of a dark age court and used them to form a criminal gang and extort the people of the Wirral.

The Worm Orouboros with Tom Fitzgerald

In this interview the beloved creator of ‘Middenmurk’, sits down to talk with me about the excellent and under-discovered ‘Worm Ouroboros’ by E.R. Eddison. (One day I will read the Zimiamvia trilogy).

https://archive.org/details/TheWormOuroborosWithTomFitzgerald

2020 - DCO ReMastered

Loco Ludus — "Interview with Patrick Stuart"

I have no idea what we talked about, but its 55 minutes long!

https://creators.spotify.com/pod/profile/loco-ludus/episodes/Interview-with-Patrick-Stuart-ebgc3h

‘Udda Ting’ podcast

Henrik Möllers podcast is still going strong. In this one I think we talked mainly about Veins of the Earth.

https://soundcloud.com/henrik-moeller-180995804/100-veins-of-the-earth-patrick-stuart

The Magniloquent Moth

Part One show notes (full version at the link); Deep Carbon Observatory (Remastered!), Patrick's talk on the Wapentake at Ignite Liverpool, Silent Titans, The world is a spell, Fear of a Black Dragon (DCO episode), Arnold's "Goblin Punch" blog and time traveling dinosaurs, Veins of the Earth, Fire on the Velvet Horizon, A Night at the Golden Duck, The audio starts to overlap in the second half of the episode, Time travel in RPGs, Continuum RPG.

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/a-conversation-with-patrick-stuart-first-course/id1506689162?i=1000470707137

Part Two show notes CGP Grey's video about why your timeline is infuriating, Is the loose collective of RPG fans online a "community"?, A Distant Mirror, The Gods Must Be Crazy, Patrick's letter writing game (a literal play by post), FLAILSNAILS, Chris McDowall's conversion advice, TROIKA!, Half-Life Alyx, Tom Francis' games, Heat Signature, Tactical Breach Wizards, Deadliest Warrior Yes, there really was an IRA vs the Taliban episode.

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/a-conversation-with-patrick-stuart-second-course/id1506689162?i=1000470707139

2021 - Groan!

Appendix N Book Club

I actually remember this one and it was fun! I finally got to talk about something other than my own books! This is all about Gormenghast.

https://player.fm/series/appendix-n-book-club/episode-103-mervyn-peakes-titus-groan-with-special-guest-patrick-stuart

Zock Bock Radio

Apparently I am, (or was?) the Townes van Zandt of the OSR. I don’t know what that means but I will assume its good! Show notes in the link!

https://pesa-nexus.de/2021/08/29/episode-25-he-is-the-village-green-innovation-society/

Monsters and Manuals (Noisms), Video Interview

I am horrified by the sight of my own face so will rush past this one.

Blog post: https://monstersandmanuals.blogspot.com/2021/08/video-interview-with-patrick-stuart-of.html

Youtube; https://youtu.be/sPhfvkRDxvo

2021 -Demon-Bone!

Weird & Wonderful Worlds

Ahh blessed text.

http://weirdwonderfulworlds.blogspot.com/2021/08/patrick-stuart-false-machine-interview.html

Her Christmas Knight

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8yClMXIjlrM&t=244s

Archons March On

Thanks to the commenter below who managed to dig this one up!

https://archonsmarchon.blogspot.com/2021/08/interview-with-false-machine-for-his.html

Whose Measure God Could Not Take

This one covers the Demon-Bone Sarcophagus Kickstarter, Gawain and the OSR community.

https://whosemeasure.blogspot.com/2021/09/interview-patrick-stuart-of-false.html

2022 - The End!

"Art" with Her Christmas Knight

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LOpKlStShCs

Then, Silence

Or at least, no interviews or appearances from 2022 to 2025 where I popped up in the ‘Weird Hope Engines’ zine fair.

Looking back on it, some of these bursts of extroversion were to help with Kickstarters, but it looks like the relative failure of ‘Demon-Bone Sarcophagus’ and the hangover from Covid really fucked me up more than I realised. I may have brought books out but I really didn’t leave the house for years. Damn.

Now, once again, I fitfully stumble into action, to prove to myself and the world that I exist.
(Seriously if anyone has a copy of the Great Crystal Debate let me know.)

2025 - Fantasy Art History

A sock resembling me did appear on the Abelard and Joe Fantasy Art History show;

Take This You Fiends

pjamesstuart@gmail.com (Patrick Stuart) — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 02:54:00 -0700

This is the story of an encounter with Tunnels and Trolls by a guy who did not know that much about Tunnels and Trolls and still doesn’t, so if you are a T&T maven and don’t want to hear some half-interested newb bang on, then stop reading now. (Also; they are bringing out a new version of this soon, and by god my post has nothing to do with it! I literally stapled together the rules that I used from ancient box-sets and a PDF, and I ignored most of them.)

7.5

Somehow, I have the boxed set for the 7.5 edition of Tunnels & Trolls on my shelf. I must have bought back around 2009-2011 when I was getting interested in RPG’s . Yet more curious; I have a vague sense impression that I actually read these rules. I remembered nothing of them, but if sitting un-played on a shelf for fifteen years makes an RPG guilty then I don’t want to be innocent.

More recently I was listening to Chris McDowalls ‘Rule of Three’ podcast, where he interviews game makers about three favourite works, and he brought up the story of encountering someone at an Old-School meetup who had only ever played Tunnels and Trolls, and in fact, had only ever been in one campaign of Tunnels and Trolls, and had been gaming for years, this one game, this one world.

Clearly there is something going on with Tunnels and Trolls, I thought, and, foolishly, brought this up in a conversation with the Artist; “maybe that’s the secret, maybe we all should have been playing Tunnels and Trolls all along.”

“Oh, you should run it for us.”

Thus came the curse. My smallest statements are literally engraved on Votans Spear, and I am a pussy, a clock was ticking; could I read and absorb the Tunnels and Trolls ruleset AND develop a dungeon for Tunnels and Trolls in time, and well enough to run an actually functional game? (Watch my reality TV series to find out.)

(tldr; I can. Comments from two of the players, the ‘Rogue’ and the ‘Leprechaun’ are scattered through this post.)

Long hours of digging through this ruleset, producing documents to make sense of it, and writing dungeon ideas on the back of till receipts at work, which provoked some consternation when colleagues looked down to discover that I had been scribbling about Moon Mice and “THERE IS A COUNTDOWN”.

Character Generation

T&T Char Gen begins in a space broadly adjacent to Dungeons and Dragons, with Seven stats (in 7.5 at least) rolled 3d6 and in my case, down the line. Add Gold, a ‘Height and Weight table and so-on. When complete you get essentially three Core classes; Warrior, Wizards and Rogues. (There are more but I won’t get into those). So far so D&D.

What’s different?

TARO

“Remember, triples add and roll-over. This rule always applies in Tunnels and Trolls.” – Ken St Andre

It doesn’t always apply; one of a number of ways the 7.5 ruleset seems to be written by someone with an irregular supply of amphetamines. However, this fascinating and distorting rule probably should apply more fully across the ruleset.

If you roll a triple in Character Generation, you add everything together and roll again, adding the resulting value. If the second roll is also triples, you add and roll again. If the third roll is triples, you add, and roll again.

This means that while the general range of stats for an opening character is likely similar to D&D, it’s possible that one or more players may have one or more stats that are insanely ridiculously high, creating an utterly distorting effect on the game.

And in fact this did happen in the game we played, with one Rogue rolling an insanely massively high CHA score and very mid scores for everything else, resulting in one of the party being or a youngish Matthew McConaughey, roaming around the dungeon just charming the shit out of everyone.

This is important because, like a lot of things essential to T&T, it strongly effects the tone of the world in which you play, the nature of the challenges you face and a range of other things. The wilder the dice curve, the whackier the reality.

The Leprechaun – “T&T produces lawless, erratic game outcomes, but *appears to be* rigorously designed. There are a lot of rules but they don’t really work. The depthless complexity acts as a wax seal that legitimizes the game outcomes. In combat, you do a bunch of calculation and roll a big pile of dice, which is a ritual act that irreversibly moves the game timeframe forward one increment.”

Liz Darnforth

Kindred

Kindred is ‘Race’ in old D&D terms, and while it looks like earlier editions had a relatively narrow range of ‘normal’ Kindred you could be, the 7.5 edition has gone utterly loopy and included stat tables for a gigantic (literally, you can be a Giant), range of possible races, from Skeleton to Vampire to Dragon.

Almost all of these Kindred are measurably better than standard humans. Even Skeletons are a bit better. There are no gates or limits on what Kindred you can be. This means, if you are playing 7.5 as written, you can be literally almost anything and that almost all of these are better than standard human stats.

If you include one or two of these ‘hackable’ or ‘optimisable’ elements in a game ostensibly dedicated to a balanced experience then they are flaws, but if you flood the game with them, then you fundamentally alter the expectations for what kind of game it’s going to be. This is one of a wide range of ways in which Tunnels & Trolls is protected from the negative effects of being Tunnels and Trolls by the fact of it being Tunnels and Trolls, the games own anarchic spirit keeps it… stable?; if you are the kind of person who wants to min-max and powergame, (which you could theoretically do easily in T&T), why on earth would you be playing this loosy-goosey game?

I set bounds that no-one could play a Kindred too large to actually fit in the dungeon. We ended up with one very charismatic human rogue, one Leprechaun (size and weight reduction tables are included) and one Star-Obsessed and (below average for his people) strong dwarf with a BIG AXE.

Talents

Every PC gets one ‘talent’; a particular thing that they do, and this could also conceivably be power-gamed but generally is not. They roll a d6 for their talent value and add this to the stat being used when rolling for this particular thing.

Level

Your Level in T&T provides a number of benefits, and is based explicitly upon your highest essential stat. This means you can start play at Level Zero, Level One, Two, or even possibly Three, and that as your stats fluctuate through play, you can possibly change Level, back and forth, within the range of even one adventure. (NONE of the specifically-designed character sheets I saw online were built with the essential changeability of the PC stats in mind. You are better of just using notepaper.)

Loony Tunes Adventure Gang

It’s clear that through the 7.5 editions it took to reach me, T&T had been through a lot of rules changes and additions. As I will describe later, I think many of these are errors, or at least, non-optimal.

Two things I agree with fundamentally are TARO and the more-recent extended-Kindred chart. I actively want a Loony Tunes Adventure Party with a bunch of whacked-out and distorted stats and a range of weird presences in the game. (How would a Leprechaun react to hanging out with a Vampire?). I think it’s generally fine if someone with crap stats inflates themselves with a Kindred, so long as they actually play that role (remembering they are still a below-average member of their own Kindred). I didn’t set it as a hard rule but I would probably state next time that anyone who gets a TARO roll and a massive single stat, should stay human, but everyone else can pick a Kindred.

In its simplicity, adaptability, broadness of concept, lightness and gonzo-feel, T&T feels well-adapted to the ‘Island of Misfit Toys’ style of play. It also seems to suit well a ‘play whatever/whoever you want’ ethos. So long as you stick with it, and take it seriously (coherent and sustained), though not seriously (with tragic gravity). [The two forms of seriousness will prove a vitally important distinction going forward.]

(I also made the PC’s buy clothes out of their initial gold store, which kept them all relatively poor. Though gold doesn’t matter that much in T&T. (Also, TARO applies to your Gold Roll in Char Gen too, so one PC may just have ‘being loaded’ as their core trait.))

The Rogue - “I liked having to buy my own clothes using the gold generated by character creation, it was like starting out in Oregon Trail or something. I appreciate that the clothes list was long and carefully priced out and if I was in charge I would add even more carefully described clothing choices which could be used to define the character you are playing. What if you sunk it all into one really great jacket, no mechanical effects. Could you describe a jacket in such a way that it is really tempting even if you are gonna have to put that arbalest back on the shelf?”

Liz Darnforth

The Combat Sequence

Farewell happy fields, where joy forever dwells. Hail, horrors, Hail! The Tunnels and Trolls combat sequence makes no sense. Attempts to fix have made it worse.

Conceptually it is brilliant. Once it was simple, intuitive, somewhat baggy and clean to play. I think years of people asking questions (filthy nerds) has ruined it. I tried to boil it back to what I thought was the core; a battle is on, both sides roll all their dice; whoever gets the biggest number wins.

Adventurers and Monsters calculate these differently; Adventurers have Combat Adds derived from their physical stats, and whatever weapon they are using. Monsters have a Monster Rating, which breaks down to their dice rolled (The Monster Rating divided by 10), and their own Combat Adds (Half their Monster Rating). Confusingly, some posh and special Monsters can also have stats like Adventurers, but let’s not even get into that.

Everyone has a big pile of dice. Everyone rolls. Bigger is better.

Over time additions have been made, (as a result of questions). Some wise, most I think not.

One positive addition is ‘spite dice’; every roll of 6 on either side, always counts as damage. I think this was made to amend the horribly brutal attritional effect of these massive dice pools contending over multiple rounds, and it works ok.

Other additions are complex arrangements of specific damage set aside and re-integrated during the round to account for people sniping ranged targets or similar, and specific arrangements of spellcasting where damage from certain spells is accounted like a weapon and the effects of others are placed before-this-and-that etc.

I Ignored Almost All of This

I ran combat description-first, rules-light, quick and high consequence. It ended up not unlike a storygame or a Dowlain modern ruleset.

Surprise Rounds are a slightly weird thing in T&T, (if rounds are truly meant to be around 2 minutes long), and thankfully I was able to ignore them. Likewise I ignored sniping in or out of combat.

How I conceptualised it was like this;

First; describe fully where everyone is and what is going on as combat breaks out, be above all vivid, quick and physically exact. Go round the table asking, quickly, what each character wants to do, or “what do you want to achieve in the next two minutes”. PCs can combine actions, do tricks stunts, etc or anything they like, but they can’t take too long thinking about it Tunnels and Trolls does not respond well to planning.

Second; everyone rolls their dice and we add them all up.

Third; whichever side won inflicts damage, and I describe the events of these two minutes turn out largely as they intended. However, the T&T ruleset does say that the losing side of this can decide who on their own side takes what damage. This infers, and I applied it as such, that the losing side gets some vote in how exactly things turned out in these two minutes. They don’t achieve their aims but they do get to choose events relating to damage to their own side (though not whether they take damage at all).

Last; I tried to go for big, consequential swings in the description of events that would rapidly lead one side or the other to be disadvantaged, to flee, surrender, negotiate, be trapped etc, I did not want this shit going on too long.

Liz Darnforth

Why Ignore the Details?

The game does not seem to want to be played that way.

I think the inclusion of Ranged and Magic attacks being, at some points, their own special thing, is ultimately fucking stupid, as you are rolling to make these special pre-attacks (each of which requires their own segment of the round to work in) and then counting them towards the total value of the HPT? And then at the end, you focus special damage on the specific targets of the magic or Ranged attack? At this stage why are you not just going person-by-person?

Even the rules seem confused about this as the details seem to change from edition to edition.

It looks like the simple, basic concept of the opposed, simultaneous, dice rolls, has been subjected to so many tactical questions and faffing about that over time, it has developed so many exceptions, set-asides, layered sequences and so on that it has, in effect, become exactly as, or even more complex than an equivalent D&D combat turn.

But D&D has the saving grace of being sequential-by-person, so at least while you are faffing with big numbers you are doing them one after another. T&T has the elegant conception of simultaneous action, but that then divided, excepted, specified and detailed so much that now the DM deals with an equivalent cognitive weight to D&D and the initially non-intuitive simultaneous action of T&T at the same time. It seems to me the worst of both worlds.

I forwarded description, and tried to keep it forward. Everything that happens can only be allowed to make sense in terms of what has already been visually and spatially described in natural language. The results of dice rolls feed into this and are fed back out as more description. The vivid description of events fills the need for specificity that the rules either ignore or don’t do well. Most of all its meant to happen light and fast.

The Rogue - “I remember way back starting a D&D game with some friends who had never played before, and at first when we got into fights they would say all these wild ideas of what they were gonna do (’I’m gonna put my bow over his head and grab the string and shoot the arrow in his neck that way”) and then get discouraged as the rules generally would at best penalize for you for trying something different than: hit with sword, watch hp go down. Doing the combat as narrative first, even if that did not have very much to to do with the dice rolls, and then narrative again after all the rolls (deciding how the damage gets doled out) was kinda nice. I am surprised at feeling this way as I do not usually like story game rules.

Everyone goes at once feels more nervewracking & unpredictable as a player: instead of things slowing way down you are all making immediate guesses about what would be best to do, which feels more real than if you have to wait your turn & can adjust your actions based on what happened to the person who went first. On the other hand, every time we got into combat seemed to end after a single dice roll: either we got crushed & ran away or the opposite happened- which on the one hand is hugely superior to sitting around waiting for your turn to hit guy with sword, but sometimes made things seem anticlimactic: players all do one thing each, roll dice, cool that’s it evil is defeated. I guess one has to lean heavily on narrating what’s happened (either on the DM or player side) to make things properly impactful? It’s possible this was just on account of lucky rolls & combats could have taken longer? It seemed like our characters were appropriately balanced to the dungeon though (the leprechaun died)”

Rob Carver

The Leprechaun – “T&T combat as written is almost pathologically bad. We generally want things to be useable and simple; if a ruleset has complexity, each complication should justify itself in producing a better play experience. Instead, the rules work together to produce an appalling result. Rolling a large pool of dice that’s the same every “round” makes it likely that there’s a consistent result, so that combat is guaranteed to feel samey and yield similar outcomes from round to round. But there’s also a disastrous feedback effect: damage reduces your Strength, which gives you lower combat adds and less weapon access, so you roll fewer dice, so you lose faster and faster, and you have to do a bunch of paperwork to figure out how much worse you’re going to do each round.”

Running the Dungeon

it all began to go wrong when they re-named Ralph

Play Time

I came up with a relatively simple 12-room dungeon with a lot if diegetic ‘safety rails’ and potential in-world guidance. The Rogue told me that a normal group will only handle about four rooms an hour, if that, so I planned for two possible sessions of up to four hours each. In fact they cleared the thing in just over two hours. Apparently I run games ‘quickly’(?)

The Rogue - “Patrick DMs like he is driving a bus with a bomb on it.”

Rob Carver

“Take That You Fiend!”

People seemed to like the principal of ‘Saying the Spell Names Out Loud’. I felt like it kept the tone right.

The Leprechaun – “I agree that saying the spell names as though you’re casting them yourself is a splendid idea. You can’t cast a spell without literally saying the magic words.”

Post-Adventure System Issues

I only had to make a single, one-shot adventure so I was saved any of the scaling complexities of ‘how much gold is there’ or ‘what do you do with the gold’? Or any worries about ‘what happens after this adventure? T&T (at least in 7.5) bases advancement on ‘Adventure Points’ which you hand out regularly, mid-adventure, and which can be used, mid-adventure, to improve PC’s stats, which effects what level they are. Gold or treasure is mainly used for buying spells or equipment.

The Leprechaun – “The one idea I was interested in was gaining lots of XP and spending it incrementally whenever you wanted. It really changes the texture of the game to be getting these drips of XP and feel like you could realistically, in one session, change something meaningful about your character. This is also a place where narrative and ruleset dovetail nicely: players can spend their XP to level up a given stat *right before they need it*, which feels like the character rising to meet a challenge.”

Rapid Monster Improvisation

T&T’s Monster Rating is a raw, single number from which are derived both the number of d6’s rolled and the ‘adds’. The ‘adds’ are reduced as the Monster suffers damage while the dice are not. This is perhaps even simpler than the Hit Dice concept and makes inventing, moving and shifting around monsters for change and improvisation relatively easy. It does result in some big dumb dice pools though.

Big Dumb Dice Pools

Everything is based on the d6 and everything is Dice Pools, rolled in big piles, simultaneously. The PC’s add up theirs and the DM adds up the monsters. It’s a lot of adding up. I am not sure how this will actually work once you get into the Monsters with really big numbers or the really big amounts of monsters. I think I recall in some Ken St’Andre ruleset, seeing his rules of thumb for managing huge dice pool numbers, which was essentially multiplying smaller pools, which is fine, but also; it’s your ruleset dude.

The Leprechaun – “3d6 * 6 is a *dramatically* different roll from 18d6 and would totally change the texture of the game. I kept finding things like this in the T&T ruleset. Most early TTRPGs seem “game design naive”, even most modern TTRPGs do. This can make them characterful, or introduce some loveable features by accident, but can also lead to miserable gameplay patterns.”

Liz Darnforth

Growing and Shrinking

Probably inspired by the ‘small’ and ‘large’ tables for character generation in 7.5, I included a shrinking rules in the dungeon. While I may have intended to use some complex coherent system based on alterations to the core stats, in fact I just eyeballed it, using patched together rule-ideas that were systemically inelegant but procedurally quick and functional; I made it up. T&T’s super-simple core stats make it easy to adapt things relatively quickly.

‘Lightness’ and Speed

They re-named the Dragon Continent :-(

It seems to me that the speed of T&T combat, combined with the relative lightness and light comedy of its setting, are key to how this is supposed to work.

The description of events plays a huge shaping part in deciding what seems reasonable to happen in a fight, i.e; is it reasonable that one guy might hide out in a corner and try to snipe with arrows? Is everyone going to end up in a big melee or are they spread out or separated? Is the environment going to do something odd?

The enormous potentiality of this simultaneous-resolution roll is only moderated by a mutual, vivid, lively and quick description of events.

Put simply, this shit falls apart rapidly if you are autistic or power-gamy about it, and gamers do tend to be autistic about everything. There should never be arguments over numbers or spazzy autistic D&D arguments over precisely what the rules should allow – if it seems like it makes sense then it can be done, or tried with a Saving Roll, or if not just a flat ‘no’. If this decision or roll didn’t go well, there will be another along soon! Very soon! And another and another and another.

Conversely, if you are lively engaged, largely trusting, and more committed to acting out an adventure than managing risk though careful play, then you may get a great boon; of a rapid, complex unfolding and multifarious range of combat events which might never happen in another game.

There must be a rapid, and easy exchange of description and descriptive power between the Players and DM, especially in combat. It’s like dancing. It only works if you go in moving and go forward. If you hold back and try to plan and limit risk, or hyper-plan, you fail.

The Leprechaun – “Despite working on TTRPG systems myself, I think the ruleset barely factors into how good a given game session is. I had a wonderful experience playing Mausritter a few years ago and that game is rancid. My actual play experience with T&T was excellent, because you’re a great DM, and [The Rogue], [The Dwarf], and I are good players. I still think I would have preferred a system where every single outcome was decided by coin flip. But then my choice to be a leprechaun wouldn’t have been legitimized by doing a bunch of arithmetic with tables!”

The slight silliness of the setting, along with the ridiculous range of possible ‘Kindreds’ (I can play a Leprechaun with a Bardiche), and the slightly light tone, all help to control and manage the kinds of personality drawn to the game and the way that they play. (A meta-game effect like a Gonzo X-Card).

I feel like getting rid of this (slight) silliness and trying to make the setting and the game answer more ‘normie’ Fantasy questions actually ruins it. The absence of tangles and argument is just an effect I can describe of a cause it’s hard to define; it is the spirit of the game. It’s why the Dragon continent is shaped like a Dragon and (should still be) called ‘Ralph’. If you don’t like the idea of running, or playing on, a ‘Dragon Continent’ shaped like a Dragon, and called ‘Ralph’, or of a Skeleton teaming up with a Dwarf, a Vampire and an Elf, then the game has done its job.

The Rogue - “Maybe it is not so important that a game system have any particular level of seriousness as that it have like, any discernable character at all? While there’s a utility in basic fantasy tropes ( everyone knows what a dwarf is like so it is easy in your personal character to subvert or exemplify it) most world building in game systems ends up just being like the collecting of influences listed on such as a Kickstarter page as a reassurance that you won’t find anything too surprising or new here.

Anything in the games rules/setting that is discernably created by a real idiosyncratic human ( whether that is being unfashionably comic or having edges that are not sanded off entirely) is a chance to have an actual experience of art that’s your own interaction with another real person not with a corporation or like sales goals and it’s worth forgiving a lot of shakiness of rules and so on to get that.”

This is also built into the nutty world-creation of ‘Tunnels and Trolls; Trollworld is literally built on wizards. Or at least, huge numbers of whacky wizards have inhabited it over time, burrowed into its crust and disappeared under the earth, building their own strange ‘magical realms’, which form the nuclei of, one would assume, huge tunnel complexes. In in-world history is literally ‘a wizard did it’. Gonzo dungeon design is the actual geology of Trollworld. Gonzo, or a Toybox, or very ‘Dungeony’ gamified non-naturalistic dungeons work well with this ruleset and play experience. It’s not a ‘flat’ game, either in its aesthetic, or the probability curves that underlie it. I am not sure if its modern re-creators have grasped this.

"And next year.. Queen Mab.."

pjamesstuart@gmail.com (Patrick Stuart) — Sun, 15 Feb 2026 02:24:00 -0800

Man this took a long time. My earliest development notes date back to July 2020. This was originally meant to be an adventure.

The idea came in at almost the same time that the Covid 19 Pandemic began.

2020- Covid and Genesis

The earliest file I have is “Queen Mab Base File 15072020”

I used to live in Birkenhead and take the train into Liverpool to work in the Library there. Slowly I began to notice less and less people working in the Library, and odd people wearing masks on the train. Eventually I was the only one left, masked up, working alone on an empty floor, then the library closed, then my gym closed, then oh boy my life got a lot worse.

Phobos

Actually, the ‘real’ earliest file I have on Queen Mab is from a project I conceived of around March 2020 called ‘Phobos’. One element behind this was doing a different or new version of ‘Maze of the Blue Medusa’. I only have two files left relating to this and one of them is just a blank Notepad document called ‘THE PHOBOS’. Here are the entire contents of the other file, and the total development done on that idea;

“A space ship

Inderdimensional Fey Techno-Vessel

3 Transhumanist Techno Angel Fey chicks

From a post singularity post apocalyptic futurepast

Titan-Children, or architects

psathyrella - th Infinite

(Weird space angels)

Some new arrangement

re-write of the opening area

factions and moving parts

Where am I to get names?

Science Fictional

Poetic

Memorable

Decks of a ship?

How to Introduce Concepts

Lizardmen are Zombie Engram Humans

A cylender ship?

a spiral, like a helix of DNA?

like a curl of smoke

sections - but they intertwine

but like a ship also, a tendril of sails

>> reflection of a cosmic solar-sail vessel on a midnight sea

seen through a dimensional mirror thing

Maybe you can enter through any painting in the ship?

or through many of them

More complex desires/actions for the factions

Lizardmen

Aurum Spectre

Critics

A repository of culture

like an ark

the ark of fear

holding humanities hopes, and its end

evolved past the need for

and you enter it maybe from a fantasy setting

like its a normal ship

but then you work out - or the player works out

its a space ship

or an interdimensional thing

or the PCs would think its an Elf prison

even though its supertechnical”

What remains from that concept into the final ‘Queen Mab’ seems to be; transhumanism, fey babes in space and the idea of a space ship entered from a fantasy setting.

We cut ahead a few months. By this point I must certainly have encountered August because she is mentioned here and our first formal agreement dates from a month before this. So we must have been discussing it. Here we are definitely reading a proposal for an Adventure;

“Concept

The idea for this adventure is that, depending on how you orient the page as you read it, it is both a fantasy and a science-fiction adventure.”

HOW THIS IS MEANT TO WORK IN THE PRINTED BOOK?

When you flip the book one way - with the spine on the right, as in western books, then its a science fiction adventure.

When you turn the book upside down and read it “backwards”, like a manga, then its a fantasy adventure.

BUT - the truth is that these are the same people and places but just seen from different cultural perspectives

the portrait-images of the main characters are flipped like those of playing cards, one half facing one, direction the other facing the other direction.

The Science Fiction adventurers will see it as a dimensionally-warped ship of perverted biomechanical transhumans.

In terms of adventure design, the context of the information they can get and are given will lead them to see it as a technical and material problem, and the very nature of their inquiry and the way they seen the people in it

will make the *mission* darker and more dangerous for them. Their technical abilities and the power of destruction and opposition that their guns etc give them means they are more likely to start conflicts.

BUT

If PCs enter this realm from a Fantasy Land, they will see it as a strange Eld Palace (Spenserian & Shakesperian elves rather than Tolkien) and will react to the beings there very much as if they were elves. They will (probably) not believe they have much of a chance of direct opposition so will fall back on the traditional weapons of the weak: courtesy, deceit, flattery, cunning and thinking ahead.

AND - most importantly, they will treat the beings in The Queen Mab *the way they wish & expect to be treated*.

So for fantasy characters it will be more of a dangerous social/investigation adventure, whereas for SCi Fi characters it might become more of a ‘run and gun’ shooty and/or running-away horror adventure. Either Alien, or Aliens, depending on how competent your PCs are

Wonder, or Horror. (Or both).

Format Of This Product?

I’m basing it roughly on Sean McCoys ‘Mothership’ and associated adventures. So I would say;

Size - US half-letter size, or A5.

Pages – estimate 42 pages, say 21 spreads inside.

Stapled booklet on decent quality paper.

Should be relatively easy to print and simple to send about.

‘Mothership’ is very dense and really a masterwork of layout. I doubt I can match that density but hopefully I can get close.

Aesthetic Concepts

My initial Aesthetic prompts are Alcopopstars “Ship of Theseus” and “Chernobyl Fairy Pool”.

So based on that - everyone is blue and female and there is lots of biomechanical porn/horror/beauty.

Which I am cool with - actually I am not cool with it - I really really like it and the strangeness, intensity and beauty of those images was a prime driver behind the concept.

HOWEVER - I am open to alternative approaches and the aesthetic is far from set atm.

Shelly

Another aspect of this ‘design doc’ is the huge number of quotes from Shelly’s Queen Mab;

“Unalterable will, quenchless desire

Of universal happiness, the heart

That beats with it in unison, the brain,

Whose ever wakeful wisdom toils to change

Reasons rich stores for its eternal weal.”

Which I must have read about this time. Shelly’s Mab is an extremely, almost hyper-progressive poem about human development, and while relatively little of the scenes and figures end up in the final ‘QMP’, this verse of helter-skelter revolutionary human potentiality does seem to affect the soul and background of what becomes a somewhat nightmarish Post-Human ‘Paradise’

“The restless wheels of being on their way,

Whose flashing spokes, instinct with infinite life,

Bicker and burn to gain their destined goal:”

“Sean McCoy Built this in a cave with a box of scraps”

Thusly, work begins! A SIMPLE (directionally flipped duo-adventure) SHOT (42 pages and 21 spreads!) product. Surely, this won’t take long!

“Logistically, how does this work? in terms of timeframe and revenue split?”

Timeframe - this is the hardest one to answer. The longest I’ve ever had, a huge project that got delayed a lot, was about 5 years.

For this I would guess at about a year, the majority of which for you would be waiting around while I did stuff.

Yes…. about a year

By the time we get to the end of 2020 the basic idea of what this place is going to be, has become a lot more clear, the High Ladies exist, and their courts are set; The Queen of Air and Darkness in Autumns Halls, the Pythian Three in the Court of Dreams, Elpozoi in her Grove of Joy, Nights Iron Chariot, the Parliament of Beasts (largely cut from the final text), the Nome Queen in the Symphony of Forms, Her Grace of Wyrms in the Wyrms Roost, ‘The Halls of Melinoe’ (a little different now), and Matterjack and Antijack.

And we have a little bit of (very sketchy, I hope August won’t mind me posting this), art for ‘Queen Mab’;

2021 – Peak Patrick Hours

Its 2021 people! Good news for Patrick; DCO Remastered comes out and is very popular. This is by far and away the most popular and successful thing I have ever produced since I started self-publishing, I think it nearly matches the sales volume of the rest of my catalogue put together.

I still remember the delivery of the final book to my flat; I had it sent to what I thought would be a more accessible location and ended up having to take an Uber to some industrial estate in the middle of summer, masked up, sweating and confused, and wandering around the place looking for my boxes of books. Can’t remember if I walked back or got another cab.

While I must have been pretty busy doing other things, 2021 shows regular, at least weekly, and often daily, growth in the regular drafts of ‘Queen Mab’. There are a bunch of things here which end up ‘on the cutting room floor’ and don’t appear in the final book, for instance, the Exo-Petitioners;

Exo-Petitioners

You Hear

Barks in an unknown language. A devil-box eats this tongue and spits it out in comprehensible metal words.

“Put your hands up! Who are you? Who do you serve?”

You See

Sun-Spears blind you. Lances of burning white light, carried by hunters who seem no more than black shadows behind the sun-bright lamps.

An older, calmer voice calls out, ordering the hunters, who drop the lances of their lamps.

As sight returns you, you see a strange conclave; an old hunter and his strange followers, circled and guarded by a league of blind men. All wear masks of glass strapped around their heads, attached to tubes which lead to flasks of imprisoned beneficent wind.

These are men, of a sort. Not quite as you know them.

The Petitioners

The Old Hunter

A grave gentleman with a lined, heavy face and hair like snow. He wears something like a hunting jacket with a slim silk scarf hanging in a straight line down the centre of his pure white shirt. His clothes are finely made, though in simple cut and sombre colours which match his strong and certain manner. Clearly he is leader of this group. Though he is dressed to hunt, he carries nothing in his hands.

[For August – the references to ‘hunters clothes’ or being ‘dressed like a hunter’ are meant to be someone with a middle-ages aesthetic looking at a modern suit, for which the trousers, short jacket and tie might seem like a strange version of the clothes worn by nobles when hunting.]

The Scrivener

A young woman in a fitted hunting jacket and skirt. she carries a case at her side and holds a tablet. She treads closely upon the old hunters heels, attending to his words

replying only with agreement, and scribing in her tablet.

The Priest

An old man with a long grey beard, wearing a fine robe embroidered with strange symbols, he walks with a tall ivory staff, topped with gold. He is deeply troubled by everything he sees.

The Mage

A woman, her hair tied and face unadorned but for glass lenses upon her nose. She wears a knee-length coat of purest white over a mans grey hunting suit. She glances about herself, like a bird, talking overmuch, though largely to herself. She carries a bulky case and holds the devil box which speaks the transformed metal words.

The Warrior

A warrior in a peaked cap, his face lined and serious, his chest bestrewn with medals and ribbons of many colours. His gaze roves about, dauntless and impetuous. He has a miniature cannon at his side and he shouts orders at the blind guardians.

The Blind Guardians

Strong and vital men wearing the black glass shades of the blind. Yet they look about themselves, glancing here and there, listening to the orders of the great warrior. Their sombre hunting clothes are like that of the Old Hunter, yet not as perfectly made. They hold small cannons and sun-spears which they shine about at any noise or movement.

The Plea Of The Old Hunter

In metal words passed through his mages devil box the Hunter tells his tale;

“I rule a far land.

One fall-time, strange things came. Flyers in the sky. Beasts, Satryrs and Dancers stepped from shadows and from water, like reflections.

Our tools turned on us. Our fighters fell sick, or were lost to dreams.

They took much. Winter came. They left.

Since then, many dream without sleep. More and more each day. Soon the dreamers will outnumber those who wake.

We can find no cure.

Autumn came. The leaves turned. A white Satyr came, and said; Come, King, beg Queen Mab, and she will heal your harm.

The White Satyr showed us a door in the shadow of falling leaves.

So I have come to find this Queen Mab. To beg her to lift her curse of dreams.

We are lost here. No food and water. Please help us.”

2022 - ‘HA HA HA I AM A GENIUS’

Bad news everybody! Demon-Bone Sarcophagus comes out and it is not well liked to put it mildly. (It actually sells not-too terribly, about half the rate of DCO, but unfortunately I had, lets say, a LOT of confidence in this project and its collapse was demoralising.)

This far in, the art for ‘Queen Mab’ is starting to look a lot more like the final version and the file is starting look a lot like an actual book. We have tables like this;

One or two characters from which do actually show up in the final text.

By the end of the year I have… massively overwritten the idea. 2022 ends with 306 pages and nearly 79,000 words. Any idea of a ‘short adventure’ is clearly left long behind, but where am I actually going with this? While continuing to detail the people and places of ‘The Queen Mab’, I am also bringing in hyper complex concepts like the time-looped ‘Knights of Grief’, strange extra-causal ‘Messengers of Time’ and aspects of the adventure that include messages from your future selves and the idea of multiple plays as an intrinsic diegetic part of the setting.

This is all very innovative but this idea is huge, and growing ever more complex, and every form of complexity interacts with every other form, requiring more and more prodigies of explanation and contingency.

2023 – a Crowhurst Moment

Speak, False Machine comes out this year and does ok. A massive book at a high-ish price, and all little more than a testament to my own self-importance. The robots won’t be able to re-write me now!

But with Mab, clearly I have begun to recognise that I have fucked up severely. There are only eight updates for this whole year.

2024 – Wait, I Can Still Fix This

The year of Gackling Moon, another book whose publication history is… complex, and long.

With Mab, a sea-change has taken place. Clearly I have given up on writing an actual adventure module. Instead my drafts have been re-named ‘Queen Mab – a Guide’ and everything starts to be re-written in a very different manner.

“I find I must speak a little more to tell you first of the manners of the palace for its courtesies are so curious that, should I embark to tell you of this or that realm or court and you have not the way of it first, what might be held strange shall seem beyond understanding.

While it is said that the Palace is a Free Kingdom where one might rise or fall by ones own efforts, aye even beasts and the doors given voice, the dead walk and dreams made real, in truth the High Ladies rule all, and Mab rules the High Ladies.

The creatures and courtiers may be somewhat predatory, cannibalistic, homicidal and mad, but they are rarely impolite. Even the lowest; the Kroo and the Dwellers of the Crypt will make some attempt at forms of politeness. Courtesy does not preclude predation. The Palace hovers often on the edge of famine. In the Crypt one may eat freely of whomever one may take, save those blessed by Melinoe, or in a Night Market during a Saints day. In the Courts there is a different law; one should not predate, save by the will of whatever court one is in.”

This is the first existence of the voice of ‘The Scribe’; the narrator of a ‘Gackling Moon’ style Gazeteer, written in an Epistolary style, a visitor from a pseudo-medieval culture describing ‘The Queen Mab’ for… who exactly?

The first ‘Scribe’ is bodiless, nameless, even genderless, I never knew even what sex they were or what they looked like. But this will slowly change..

Around April, the drafts of ‘Queen Mab – a Guide’ transmute into ‘Queen Mab’s Palace’, and then into ‘QMP’, I am on a roll here and its during this grand re-write of 2024 that the descriptive ‘place’ sections are broken up, moved around and absorbed into particular recollections by in-world characters. The ‘Guide Book’ slowly changes into a ‘Story Book’. The ‘Scribe’ gains a gender, a form, and a strange and particular history. They even get their own drawing!

Most people who have read the final text of ‘Queen Mab’s Palace’ say something like; “It’s not bad, the first part reads kind of like a game and the end more like a novel” and I think I am ok with this. I could have re-written more, made it more and more and more like a novel, but I am fine with the presence of time and the development of the writer in a text, and I like the book the way it is, and of course, remember the “42 Pages” and “About a year”. By this point the phrase “and then Queen Mab” and “still working on Queen Mab” have bedded themselves so deep into my vocabulary that they are like automatic speech.

By August (the month) 2024, I have completed a ‘Draft Zero’ which is pretty much the text for the finished book

And in October 2024, we run a successful..

KICKSTARTER!

Yes everything is going ok and we will certainly have a finished book for you by….

Oh my god….

2025 - Did I really publish nothing this year?

Look, things just take a while.

Layout, discussions, firm and frank exchanges of views, art, more art. I know it seemed like not much was happening but in fact a fair amount was and I can prove this because we did indeed produce a finished book! It just took just over a year to get everything laid out and finished and the book actually printed.

But it does exist!

2026 – No-One Killed Me

Donald Crowhurst is a semi-famous figure in British modern mythology; an attempted amateur round-the-world solo yachtsman, his self-designed yacht started to fall apart mid-Atlantic.

In a world with global radio coverage, but without, yet, a universal Global Positioning System, the only way for the race observers to confirm the yachts locations across the globe was via self-report. Each contestant would radio in, every day, with a latitude and longitude, to tell everyone how they were doing.

As Crowhursts actual position began to fall behind the other contestants, he began, only a little at first, to bend details, to place his reported position just a little ahead of where he actually was. Then the next day, having lied a little, he lied some more, all the while desperately dealing with a leaking, floundering ship, alone in the ocean. Thinking, perhaps; “I can make it up, I can get back on track.”

Eventually he seems to have come up with a desperate concept to rescue his dream; he would float around in the Atlantic, going nowhere, living out this fantasy of a round the world race, with fake reported positions and fake events, until the actual race did finally go circumvent the earth, and returned to the Atlantic, at which point he would join in, for real, and float into port, ahead of the rest, having gone ‘round the world’.

Either he fell into the sea or took his own life. His body was never found, just the empty, leaky yacht, with no Crowhurst, but two well-kept logbooks; one showing every position of his ‘round the world race’, the other, his actual, mad empty circles in the Atlantic.

Who knows, perhaps he is still out there somewhere, living under another name. We can hope.

(Shelly, who wrote the ‘Queen Mab’ quoted above, also died mysteriously in a boat.)

What does this have to do with ‘Queen Mab’s Palace’? Absolutely nothing.

Anyway, thanks to August for not actively murdering me. The book is now done and is available for sale. I think its pretty good.

Hugh Cook is Re-Published!

pjamesstuart@gmail.com (Patrick Stuart) — Thu, 29 Jan 2026 11:33:00 -0800

A curious wonder has taken place. Some of you may remember my extensive reviews of near-forgotten 90’s Author Hugh Cooks ‘Chronicle of an Age of Darkness’

You can read Part One (probably the best) here; https://pjamesstuart.substack.com/p/let-him-cook

And Part Two here; https://pjamesstuart.substack.com/p/he-cooked-zaan-olo-malan

Well, these reviews garnered me a smidgeon of attention for the crazed radicals at https://zenphospress.com/ a micro publisher set up by a small group of obsessive Hugh Cook fans with the sole aim of bringing the world of Olo Malan back into print. Something they have actually accomplished! The whole series is back, and available on Amazon!

Even more amazingly, I have been allowed to do a small introduction for one of the books; Book Seven ‘The Wazir and the Witch’, the second part of the ‘Injiltaprajuna Duology’.

Because of this, I have been gifted a Full Set of the new versions for ‘Chronicle of World of Darkness’; the new large size editions give a new vividness to the cover illustrations which, (while they still tend to have almost nothing to do with the contents of each book), look wonderful.

(I might be one of the only people on earth to own multiple full sets of ‘Chronicles of an Age of Darkness)

Even stranger, the only other person I could see doing introductions for this series (he introduces two of the books), is noted author Adrian Tchaikovsky, who was behind ‘Starseers Ruin’ which I mentioned in my end-of-year roundup here; https://pjamesstuart.substack.com/p/15-in-2025

Now my name stands on amazon; “by Hugh Cook (Author) , Adrian Tchaikovsky (Foreword) , Patrick Stuart (Foreword)”

Cook died young, leaving behind his wife and daughter, I have been assured by Zenphos Press that "Hugh's family will receive a substantial portion of the profits", so, if you would like to try them, (at a reasonable price), you can buy the whole series here. Or just try the first one ‘Wizards &Warriors’, to see what they are like the feminist grown-up one ‘Women &Warlords’, to see what tanked the series or the two set on Injiltaprajuna ‘Wishstone &Wonder-Workers and ‘Wazir & Witch’, one of which is introduced by me!

Spider is a Mushroom Now; Concepts for an 'Avatar' RPG

pjamesstuart@gmail.com (Patrick Stuart) — Sun, 25 Jan 2026 08:41:00 -0800

Watching the third Avatar Movie has convinced me that this series maybe the most interesting current sci-fi setting in popular culture

Spider Sirocco, the lithe blonde-dreadlocked teen who flirts with digital Sigourney-Weaver-Cat in Avatar Three, is now a mycelium symbiont. Invaded, at his Cat-Girls command, by the glowy tentacles of Ey’wa, the intelligent mycelium world-spirit which envelops, (‘rules’? ‘serves’? ‘enslaves’?) Pandora, glowing moon of Polyphemus, a gas Giant orbiting Alpha Centuri-Two, the mycelium has gurgled throug his corpus, forming some kind of secondary pulmonary/arterial system which lets him breathe Pandoras’ toxic air. It is also growing a neural crest out the back of his head; a tuber of mind-roots which allow him, like the native Naavi Cat People, to link with various plants and animals in the Pandoran Biosphere, and even to enter the mind-world of Ey’wa herself!

This strange confabulation of hard science, (the Avatar movies might be one of the ‘hardest’ Sci Fi movies of the modern era), and absolutely New Age hippie dreamcatcher bullshit, exemplifies the setting.

Camerons self-drawn art for ‘Xenogenesis’ from the 1970’s

And it’s the setting I am talking about. The Avatar Movies are utterly fascinating from a, pictorial, technological, cultural and forensic angle, but as much as artefacts as art. James Cameron is two people in one body; the obsessive hard-science worldbuilder and the absolutely loopy new age driver of the groove bus. I could go on about the films for hours.

But the setting;

Earth, in the midst of a slowly-unfolding environmental catastrophe, hyper-population and something called the ‘Resource Wars’, discovers the living moon of Pandora, in stellar terms, not too far away.

Probably one of the most scientifically-accurate interstellar space ships on film.

Over a gradually-more-complex series of missions, humanity reaches Pandora, investigates it, discovers the human-like cat-people Naavi, and also discovers that Pandora is riddled with deposits of a room-temperature superconductor, and also that the brain-juice of the local self-aware space whales grants humans functional immortality.

Humanity dedicates increasingly huge and complex resources to the exploitation of Pandora’s natural resources, while the native species, linked by the mushroom mind of Ey’wa, which they worship as a goddess, try to stop them.

It’s the Columbian exchange in space, (as seen through the mind of a technophile hippy).

Its also an exercise in identity-drama as both sides develop methodologies which allow body alteration and mind transference, as well as simple cultural swaps, with various humans going over to the Ey’wa side and various Naavi going over to the human side. All of these methods compile and flow over one another, producing some fascinating effects. (‘Potential’ effects at least.)

All of which leads to our once-Human, now-Naavi freedom fighter, Jake Sulley, pulling a ‘Binding of Issac’ scene in which, after being rescued from the evil RDA techno-city by his adopted son, the mushroom Spider Sirocco, he takes him off into the forest and nearly cuts his throat.

this is not that scene, but this happens to Spider a lot

Why? As an Ey’wa-created human-mushroom-Pandoran hybrid, Spider can breathe Pandoran air and interface with the Mycelium network. This is either the worst thing to happen to Pandora ever, as humans will replicate it and colonise the moon, or an ultimate mega-chess move by Ey’wa; by giving humans the ability to walk unaided on Pandora, but ensuring they will also grow a spinal crest that allows them to merge with her, Ey’wa accelerates her absorption of the human species. Uno Reverso, Mankind!

Who, or what, has the moral upper hand here? (In the films it’s absolutely Ey’wa - that is the point, but we can consider also the setting as something that stands alone, and since James Cameron is utterly schizophrenic in his divide between technophile militarist precise worldbuilder and utterly deranged boomer woke environmentalist, in a sense he aids us in this, because the complexity and systemisation of his carefully constructed reality, implies fascinating moral conflicts which the story he is telling largely ignores.)

False Gods; Ey’wa vs RDA

A human megacorporation vs a planet-wide self-aware Mycelial web and varied symbiotic (’employed’) species; WhoWouldWin?

The RDA keeps trying to dominate Ey’wa but their very life blood is the transportation of bits and pieces of Pandora back to Earth for profit - how much of Pandora can they take back before Earth gets ‘Pandora’d’ - generating its own Ey’wa?

The Whale Sauce - incredible biomaterial presumably injected directly into rich people to give them eternal youth. Will this carry the Ey’wa symboite? And how will this class of immortals respond to Pandora? They must dominate it, but they cannot afford to kill it. They must feed on the whales but they must also sustain their numbers. How secret is this immortal faction? Surely no-one is boasting about it but surely they can’t keep it secret for ever.

Bits of Mycelial Web - if you are taking people and materials off Pandora and transporting them back to earth, surely no matter how careful you are, bits and pieces of mycelial web are going to be transported too? Maybe this doesn’t matter if the pieces are too small to ever come into contact with each other and too small to carry any ‘Eywa’ identity, but what happens if they do meet, and do start to grow in earths Anthrocene Environment - could there be a Hive Mind Plague on Earth? If a Hive Mind emerges on Earth, what would its character be?

She would be derived from whatever fragments of Ey’wa survived in the fungi, but much of her impression of sentience would be born from the human species – a much more cosmopolitan, technophilic, dominant species, which, unlike the Naavi, has not spent several millennia ‘living in balance’ with nature, but trying to control it. Shadow-Ey’wa might be a lot less pleasant to deal with than Hippy Ey’wa, and might also be more directly intelligent – having absorbed the knowledge of relentless centuries of human development. Imperial Ey’wa?

Standard plagues and viruses - any kind of Columbian exchange is going to end up accidentally dumping an absolute shitload of active alien biomaterial into each others biospheres. most will be functionally inert, some might produce actual plagues - Terran and Pandoran viruses and bacteria crossing each other in space; others might be poisonous or harm in other ways - things like Prions.

Who is going to be better at adapting to this alien biomatter? Terran Science, or Ey’wa? Ey’wa essentially is the environment. Who knows how deep or subtle her power is?

Why hasn’t Ey’wa just wiped out the human presence with some undefeatable combination of complex plagues and toxins? Presumably she could do it - more fuel for the ‘Eywa is Colonising Earth’ theory.

Meanwhile, on Earth..

Alternate Invaders of Pandora

What happens when the Chinese Communist Party gets to Pandora? have you SEEN the size if their Skaven fishing fleet? They will make the RDA look like wet blankets. (In Cameron’s Avatar Movies no non-western or even non-white character or organisation will ever play a major part on Pandora working for the RDA)

An Immortal Elite

What is going to happen to or about the elite now they can become literally immortal and ever-young? What if you are the guy in the Elite just poor enough that you don’t get the magic oil but others do? Surely there will be some war or something about this on earth? Polities rejecting an immortal overclass, billionaires either faking having the oil and not having it, or faking not having it while they do have it?

Or what about the children of billionaires born to immortal parents but aging past them? Due to the obsession of narcissistic billionaires with creating as many genetically optimised children with as many willing brood mares as possible, the future Musks are going to number hundreds, thousands - there is not enough Whale Juice for all of them to get some - will the neo-Catholic anti-Pandoran revolution be lead by the mass spawn of immortal billionaires? Or even the abandoned Engram bodies of failed billionaire experiments? Glitch-Musk verses Musk Prime.

The Alternative Immortals

What about the answers of human technology to space-whale immortality? The RDA has the power to take complete-mind engrams and transfer them to specially-grown clone bodies, even hybrid bodies of mixed human-Naavi; creatures which have never existed before. What about uploading engrams of yourself into clone bodies? What if you make a League of Yourself, or make a chain of clone-selves?

Pandoran animals on Earth

The RDA can make a Naavi body and put the engram of a dead marine in there - bioinformation is easier to transfer across the stars than brute matter, so what are they cooking up in the labs on Earth? Surely you could make a Naavi body that’s engineered to breath earth’s Atmosphere? How many people would want to create a second self as a tall blue cat person? What about the space whales? Can you make those on earth too?

‘Avatar’ Technology on Earth

Pseudo-Naavi in the sex trade, Pseudo-Naavi Avatar celebrities. What if the new Elite are purely-Terran clone-uploads into nine foot tall sexy blue Naavi with the inherited minds of the rich, or celebrities? Surely uploading or just ‘Avatar-ing’ yourself into a range of clone bodies will be the hot new thing amongst the super-rich of earth? The ultimate possession of the Native. The super-rich engaging in actually-lethal sports in human, or hybrid bodies. Why not holiday as a Space-Whale and write a book about it later?

Layers of Identity;

‘Avatar’ into Animals

Human directly ‘porting in’ to a Naavi Avatar body. If you can do this, then why not almost any other Pandoran Animal? It would be hard to learn, and hard to gain the resources for the really big ones, but, why not convert Avatar Dragon things? Why not Avatar Whales? If your enemy is a primitivist cult who just don’t use technology, then assuming the form of animals to spy on and infiltrate them makes perfect sense. A deep-oceanic Whale scout can just eat its way wherever its going and doesn’t need to worry about sinking or refuelling. A Demon Whale with a Human Mind!

‘Avatar’ into a Mycelium Web

If you can ‘Avatar’ into a flesh-brain, and if the Ey’wa mycellium web can carry consciousness, then why not ‘Avatar’ into a deliberately grown structure of Mycelium - you could attach to and infiltrate Ey’wa, or just form your own island, with your own sub-Ey’wa, that works according to your rules. Build a God for the Company.

Mass-Produced Consciousness

We have seen this with Quaritch, but what if you did it ‘en-masse’, really made a production line - if you scale up you could be pumping out tens, maybe hundreds of exactly the same guy.

If you can put the memories of a dead man into a Naa’vi body based on his Genome, then surely you could just as easily, more easily, put them into an actual human body, either his, or another. How about bringing back old personalities and old memories in a fresh new, very different, body? A human engram in a Gunship, or logged into the command and control centre for a fleet of drones.

‘Stealing’ Souls

Engram-Collection doesn’t need to be voluntary – what if you have a prisoner, or an enemy, and you can’t afford to, or don’t want to, keep them? Just take an Engram, then you have a copy you can play with in whatever form, whatever body, whatever reality, you want, for as long as you want. You can even replicate them to discover the best methods of manipulation.

Invasive Ey’wa.

Not only humanity can play at this game. Ey’wa can create mycelium symbiotes. She merged with Spider to give him new physical capacities and the neural crest to commune with Her, are those the limits of Her power? If she can fully infiltrate a humanoid body, can she do that without permission? What happens if she grows within someone who doesn’t know it has happened? Can she fugue out the consciousness of the bearer? Alter memories? Pilot them around physically? Or just add cravings and desires? Alter broad personality functions? What if you were a mushroom and you didn’t know?

Ey’wa Consciousness Reborn

It seems like Ey’wa can inculcate ‘virgin births’, producing parthenogenic clones of the mother. Can Ey’wa return dead personalities into new bodies in the same way humanity can? This would be strongly against the spiritual self-identity of most Ey’wa worshipping Naavi - they think the copy in Ey’wa is the contiguous soul, not just a memory copy. How about a generation of ‘reborn’ souls – the greatest martial heroes of the Naavi past reincarnated with their basic personalities and abilities intact, all growing up at the same time; like the last generation of Native Americans all getting pregnant and all giving birth at the same time just before the 19th century, and every child has the soul of some conquering hero from the deep past – truly an Age of Myth.

Pirate Software

What if Ey’wa sympathisers gain access to RDA technology and start Cyberpunking it against the system. How about Naa’vi ‘Avataring’ human bodies on earth itself? They might be excellent spies, but maybe, like Jake Sulley, they would adapt too fully and ‘Go Native’

How about Ey’wa factionists using En-Com engram technology to reproduce personalities favourable to them and not the company? Or even infiltrating the facilities where the Engrams are managed to sabotage or alter ones the RDA thinks will be loyal?

Simple Cultural Betrayal

From the para-media, we know the RDA did a forced cultural domination schooling thing with some Naa’vi - what if that worked, or half-worked, producing personalities and loyalties which were neither totally loyal to Ey’wa or to the RDA, true free radicals, or highly fluid spies?

Pandorified Humanity

As much as we are seeing what an Earthified Pandora is starting to look like, perhaps back on Earth, we might begin to see what a Pandorafied Earth starts to look like. Some will desire this, and others fearfully resist. Do you want to merge with the Mushroom Goddess and have your population reduced? Living in harmony is also living in material poverty. (I mean almost everyone who cares about the environment is in favour of theoretical human population reduction but you don’t see them jumping off bridges.)

Religion

Zoraster on Pandora

The Worlds most Racist Man has been reborn in a hot cat body and, like a true alpha-Chud, has a goth Latina GF who also hates the fucking environment; cat-girl Varang had her forest exploded by a volcano – accustomed to seeing Ey’wa as an all-providing Goddess, she was surprised to find literally no fucking help whatsoever coming from the carbonised mushroom queen.

Thusly, she converts to anti-Ey’wa-ism; Ey’wa is a False Goddess who keeps the Naavi enslaved to her will and actually can’t do a lot of the things the Naavi think she can. Therefore; lets start burning stuff down.

Varang is not far away from inventing Proto-Abrahamic religion on Pandora. She already believes that ‘fire is the only true thing on this world’, and that the rule and effect of Ey’wa is not truly universal, only local (though powerful and real).

As much as the existence and products of Ey’wa might cause moral chaos on Earth, the existence of the ‘Sky People’ and revelations about a fundamentally different way of being, and about a whole cosmos in which Ey’wa plays no part, might cause a totally philosophical implosion amongst the more intelligent and independent Naavi; imagine knowing that your God is real, but limited, surely this could cause some kind of massive moral challenge on Pandora, and not just in freaks like Varang who went through a particular set of traumatic circumstances. What happens if you know human tech can replicate some Ey’wa powers - for instance returning the dead to life, but the humans are clear; these are just copies, not the original. Does this not mean that the ‘souls’ in the Ey’wa afterlife are not actually truly real souls? and are just copies, impressments, memories, and that the real actual people all died and that in fact hundreds of thousands of real Naavi have just died permanently and absolutely and that only their fading memories are held in a network as big as the world, but no larger?

Even if your god is verifiably real, if you realise they are not all-knowing and are actually limited, and that possibly they have been, deliberately, or tacitly, deceptive, or that you believed the wrong thing about them, would not that strongly effect your perception of the way you live?

How about realising that without your ‘God’, you, like humanity, would effectively rule your world?. and that this has been taken from you by Ey’wa? (I’m pretty sure 90% of Naavi, at least as written in the movies, would still be full Eywa-ists, but there are always going to be a minority of either malcontents or just unusually rigorous thinkers. What about the Martin Luther of Ey’wa?)

It’s a hard hit to realise death is, and always has been, real, (and that the only people getting ‘true’ contiguous, immortality, are the scumbags eating your whales.)

The Abrahamic View on Ey’wa

What is the Catholics church view on Ey’wa? Or a more general Abrahamic view? Or a Buddhist view?

Is she a new mega-soul, a new gestalt entity made of memories, which will persist as long as the biosphere of Pandora does? Or is she a kind of Demiurge, or sub-god, or semi divine entity, like the Halls of Mandos on Middle Earth, or is she a demon or False God, an Antichrist world, sent to tempt people away from the only real immortality with false immortality?

I want to see a sequel to ‘Conclave’ where Raphe Finnes and co all get together and discuss the actual spiritual implications of Ey’wa.

Na’avi Possibilities

Realistic Hunter Gatherers

On earth, Hunter Gatherers are ruthless, as almost all human populations are through time, with controlling their populations, and will often do things that are strange, savage, and deeply troubling to the consciences of modern liberal people.

They (we) are sometimes strange and worrying.

This is an aspect of ‘living in harmony’ with nature which will never be described or shown in any ‘Avatar’ movie because the moral universe of those films is ultimately very childish, but it’s interesting to think about what that reality might look like if the Naavi were a little more like actual hunter gatherers and ‘lived in harmony’ via methods that modern humans found disgusting, and/or were (like humans) actually occasionally sometimes super sadistically violent with each other

Varangists

Varang - the Eternal Prophet of Fire; her boyfriend is an Engram. A personality useful to the RDA, the Sky People can just bring her back as many times as they need to. They have her Engram, her genome, they can make you a bazillion Varangs, a Varang for each continent, for each tribe. Forced cultural revolution via the mass-production of hyper-charismatic revolutionaries. A Stalin in every house.

Agricultural Naavi

What if the Varangists work out agriculture on their volcanic fields (irl volcanoes provide the endless nitrates that make hyper intensive agriculture workable) - are they going to be using slaves? It’s a better story if they do, but they present more of a moral threat if they don’t. How about if the RDA sells them robots for Whale Juice, Unobtanium, or something else.

What if the Varangist community starts growing faster than the ‘natural’ Naavi tribes? With hierarchies and palaces and scribes and all that shit? Mayan-Varangism? Aztec-Varangism? (She would probably approve).

Now you have a simultaneously primitive, neo-stone age pseudo Maya/Aztec fire-worshipping agricultural Naavi people, with their own Fire Prophet, with the agricultural work done by RDA spider-robots. A slave society without the slaves, a pure warrior aristocracy. Sounds interesting, no?

A City to Dream Of

We really need a ‘marginal’ setting, a particular location where all the wild and whacky potentialities of what might, or could, happen on Pandora, are allowed to flourish?

Maybe one of the flame-spewing astro city-cores meant to be landed on Pandora went off-course somewhere? Maybe it landed on a strange and unpredictable patch of ground that was not what it seemed, or a Tsunami and/or Volcano smashed and ruined it - but there is enough tech for the ‘natural’ humans to survive there, but they can’t do it without Naavi help, which they have to trade for?

Where?

Possibly it landed on the near-exact antipole to ‘Bridgehead’, the current main human techno-city. Maybe in Pandora’s equivalent of the ‘deep southerlies’ where very strong seas and massive storms are common, regular enough, along with magnetic disturbances, to make space descent and direct travel very difficult for most of the year. Perhaps at the far end of a range of islands and sub-continents diminishing to archipelagos, across, or sitting on, some kind of ‘Wallace Line’, with dramatically different species and biospheres on each side..

And the site itself is on the last isle in the chain, out in a new-Zeland style position, surrounded for the most part by ocean, with irregular links to the closest islands, from which you can get to other islands, and so on – maybe a little like Papua New Guinea without Australia.

Ideally we want this to be somewhere it is hard, but possible, to survive, and for the varied opportunities of resource gathering to make working together look like an actually-good idea.

Geography

The long burn of the crash site, and long spread, with bits of tech scattered liberally across it – by now this is being reclaimed by native Flora but could still prove a good base for experimental Naavi agriculture, Varangist or otherwise.

In spots in this fresh environment, larger parts of the fallen ship and city-core have formed isolated townships – re-colonised from the main City, and links by tenuous roads, but solid enough chunks of metal to form strange ‘castles’ in the ruins of the forest.

Population

Substantial numbers of the main crew died trying to bring the ISV into something like a landing, along with a majority of active security personal and the entire executive – the main active survivors were low-level ship personal and almost all of the construction and scientific clade, (many of whom were in cryo-sleep) – most of the core construction fabricators also survived (lots of Spider-Bots, but not always humans to supervise them), as well as partial generators and a large majority of the human ‘cargo’ in cryo.

Cryo went into full emergency mode during the crash and isolated itself from everything, much of the sleep section deliberately breaking away from the core mass of the ship to avoid destruction and floating/falling into Pandoras atmosphere, landing at varied unknown points. Many, perhaps most of these were destroyed during the fall, but there were around 300 in total and some estimate a 10 to 30% survival rate – cryo-clusters, and in some case, individual high-status pods, are well protected and have separate backup nuclear generators good for up to 100 years autonomous – it’s only been about 20 years since the crash and people are sometimes recovered from crashed lifepod-cryo sites.

This can cause a lot of cultural and psychological difficulty as the culture of Splashdown has changed a lot in those years. Its also a great starting introduction for a story.

Forced Adaptation

With few people, some power, no executive and a fair amount of cybernetic constructs, as well as much of a logistics corps in deep freeze, once the surviving humans had stabilised their immediate situation, they linked together and began building to ensure their survival – they needed air, masks and food. Of which air was the most important.

The ‘ant lines’ were constructed, based on the surviving superstructure of the ISV, with airtight tunnels linking them. This is where unaltered humans are born in Splashdown, is where their children are raised, at least until they can learn mask discipline, and is where most of them go home to sleep at night, and to live without a mask. This makes the unaltered humans of Splashdown, by their own description, something like ants, surging out from the Ant Lines during the day to work and gather resources, or simply to explore and be outside, yet returning around dark.

In most cases ‘family life’ for unaltered humans is still centred around the Ants Nest, but almost all humans have an ‘outside life’, with social and psychological peculiarities developing in the human culture of Splashdown – in some ways the humans of Splashdown are some of the most outward-facing and eager explores of all human colonies on Pandora, and live in much closer relationships with Naavi and the environment as a whole, but the fact that many more have families, and more, being young, are born on Pandora, gives them a special attachment to the Ants Nest as a source of safety and continuity. There are extremes at each end, with rare radicals exploring for a lifetime, and effectively living in their masks for years at a time, while there are some humans who have never left the Nest, and never directly seen the sun, stars or seas of Pandora, living a kind of hermetic ‘Terran’ existence.

Many of the original tunnels of the Ants Nest are tilted side-on by the end stage of the crash and various complex adaptations have been made to make them liveable – the 90-degrees ‘side on’ old architecture can be seen under new usage, re-worked screens, doors, fans, pipes etc.

Coastal City

The final crash of the ISV was stopped partially by the ocean at a very high tide and the main mass of Splashdown lies directly adjacent to the ocean, forming a massive metal bulk which rises up (still), like a burned fortress.

Within, beneath and burrowed into the lands to the rear is the Ants Nest, but all over the outside of the structure are new wooden constructions, which make up the ‘outer city’ – that part of it open to the environment and air of Pandora – which now makes up the majority of the structure and is where most humans spend most of their time.

There are extensive wooden pontoon docks, and behind and around the main mass of the blackened ship, extensive wooden and robot-constructed extruded-material buildings, with main streets running off in every direction. The city has multiple small generators, extensive solar farms everywhere, small wind-turbines and some tidal power but is still massively electrically ‘underpowered’ compared to all other human settlements on Pandora. Electricity is available, but is expensive, can be unreliable and is far from being ubiquitous.

Shifting Political Integration

The Sea, the Land and the Sky – you can get to Splashdown all three ways, but the availability of each method changes constantly with the seasons and with the varied political/ecological situation on Pandora.

Splashdown has an airfield and runway for human-tech shuttles from either other human cities on the opposite hemisphere, or directly from space – this is useable (safely), only for a month or so out of the year, the rest of the year it is slowly overgrown until, as the correct season arrives and the storms and magnetic fluxes abate, the airstrip is cut back and re-flattened – something which has become a kind of impromptu ritual festival for the ‘Downers’.

It’s really only during this period that people and material can be brought directly and quickly from larger, more industrial and distant human settlements, or from orbiting ISVs – for this period of months, Splashdown is much more of an ‘RDA Colony’ and is much more directly integrated into the RDA government, policies and systems.

In the gaps between the magnetic storms, which crump human tech, and the physical ones, the Sky-Trader people can visit – floating about in their rattan balloon-beast caravans, they can touch down directly by the docks of Splashdown City itself.

The storms, magnetic and actual, vary, as do the currents, but the area around Splashdown had a native Naavi sea/shore tribe living there, and they can float about on deep-water canoes, drawn perhaps by sea-beasts, or by whales. Depending on the shifting currents the Port-City part of Splashdown might form a nexus for Naavi sea-dwellers from all over the local ocean, and even beyond. Perhaps there are hairy Polar Naavi? Sinewy Australia-type Desert Naavi, or Plains Naavi who ride huge animals long distances.

Depending on the shifting patterns of travel and the migrations, Splashdown could form an irregular Nexus for a wide variety of cultures - a new adventure every week.

Creepy Experiments

Perhaps abandoned by the RDA, or partially abandoned - actually the company is letting the experiment run, to see what happens, the Crash City itself is also somewhere the RDA can hide its more illegal experiments, and where it can hire people who shouldn’t exist for things it shouldn’t be doing (turns out for a MegaCorporation, having a ‘criminal underworld’ is actually very useful).

A half built, half-ruined human city complex, interlaced with Naavi structures, maybe on an archipelago, maybe somewhere quite distant from the main human deployment and so difficult to directly influence - and here you find literally every single kind of human, Naavi, engram, symbiote, corpo, primitivist, prophet etc - like Casabanca it’s a city of spies and intrigue, but it’s also an oceanic and space port, and the centre for a possibly-whaling fleet, an exploration fleet, those sky caravans the Naavi have, experimental Varangist agriculture, a free market on Biotech and full experimentation on symbiotes, a dumping ground for failed experiments; humanised Naavi and ‘gone native’ humans - kind of a dirtbag city, with everyone poor enough that they need to hustle and adapt to survive (making them highly available for various RPG ‘missions’)

Here is where you could gather a really crazed group of kooky characters - all with different identity issues, different biological needs, different skillsets.

Char Gen;

Human Characters

Human Origin

1. Human – Earthborn Veteran (lived through ‘Splashdown’ 40+ yrs old)

2. Human – Pandora-Born (12 to 20 years old)

3. Human – Cryo-Recovery, Earthborn, limited Pandora Experience, socio-political views 20 years out of date.

Human Identities

1. A normal human being.

2. Human to Naavi Avatar (assume they have the tech for this). Human form stays in the Ants Nest while the Avatar travels. Vulnerable to power outage.

3. Human to Pandoran Animal Avatar (possibility they are ‘covert’). Same power issues.

4. Soul Chip Human – younger, or altered body, 50+ years of memory and personality on top of that. 50/50 chance they are ‘covert’ and not telling anyone about their true loyalties.

5. Soul Chip ‘other’ – personality ended up in a mech suit, Skel Suit, vehicle, weapon or something else. They have some central skill or experience which makes their ‘resurrection’ useful.

6. Recombinat – Human/Naavi hybrid suited to Pandoran ecology. Will be ‘Soul Chipped’ with identity loyal to the RDA, (for now).

7. Human/Pandoran Mycellium Hybrid – absorbed, via ritual, or forcibly, into Ey’was’ mycelium web. Can breath Pandoran air unaided. May have a neural crest. Small (2 in 6) chance they are unaware; a covert infiltration with no crest.

8. Naavi ‘Avatar’ infiltrator. Almost certainly covert. Somewhere a Naavi (likely with radical science-group assistance), is ‘Avataring’ into a human body.

Human Ideologies

1. Manifest Destiny – sincerely dedicated to human rule over Pandora, could be a career Corpo or raised by same. Could be security personnel, some science personnel. More common in older, recovered or visiting personnel. Probably an RDA loyalist, but even the RDA may not go far enough for this person.

2. Security Loyalist – loyal to their ‘team’ and immediate chain of command, but perhaps not philosophically loyal to dominion over Pandora.

3. Human Family Loyalist – an ‘Ants Nest’ human who puts the safety of their family unit above anything. May be trying to get ‘home’, or willing to adapt to Pandora to survive.

4. Abrahamic – a sincere Abrahamic. May view Ey’wa as a strange alien mind, a ‘meta-soul’ or even an Antichrist. Absolutely does not believe the ‘souls’ in Ey’was’s mind are ‘real’ souls.

5. Tentative Ey’wa-ist. Some attraction to Pandora and Naavi culture. Would probably like to bind with animals as they do and breathe the air. Not really philosophical or extremist about it.

6. Strong Ey’wa-ist – arguable human traitor, fully committed to the superiority of Pandoran Culture and may believe Ey’wa is a ‘real’ Goddess. Perhaps anti-human, definitely anti-RDA.

Human Skills

1. Logistics – the most common amongst baseline humanity. Skilled in principals of building; can organise, repair and perhaps build, spider-bots and other semi-autonomous drones.

2. Security – skilled in weapons and the many varieties of human military equipment and tactics. Probably has at least a gun, may also have a Skel-Suit or more.

3. Executive – Highly intelligent, ambitious and manipulative. Expert in RDA systems of governance. Some part of their power comes from possible RDA responses (when available) or ever-more theoretical ‘rewards’ on Earth. Later versions often assume leadership and diplomatic roles. Good with Languages.

4. Science (Pandoran) – knows and can learn a lot about Pandoran biology, culture etc.

5. Science (Terran) – expert in human tech, likely specialised but may include Avatar Programme, biotech, military tech, etc.

6. Exploration – very good at getting out and about on Pandora.

Naavi Characters

Tribes

1. Local Forest Tribe – as seen in the first movie. They fly around on lizard things. Much of their forest got scorched when the ISV crashed, its growing back but takes time. May be against the ‘Sky People’ for this, but may also be willing to adapt to survive.

2. Local Water Tribe – powder-blue Tahetian dolphin-riders, friends with whales.

3. Sky Trader – cosmopolitan here-and-gone, very ‘clued in’, possibly left behind as they were sick or lost.

4. Southern Desert/Plains Tribe – dark blue animal-riders and herd hunters.

5. Cave Tribe – pale, spindly, black eyed long-lived wierdoes.

6. Polar/Tundra/Icepack Tribe – from Pandoras southern pole, chunky for Naavi and actually wear clothes when its cold.

Age

1. Post Childhood but pre-adulthood - about the size of a human and a rough physical match for one. Adaptable and ready for adventure.

2. Grown but Not Bonded – they haven’t yet joined with or mastered one of the Pandoran Animals this tribe lives with. Not a ‘real’ adult yet, may be bitter about it.

3. Beast-Bonded – they can ride the sky lizard, or space dolphin or whatever it is this tribe does.

No partner or children yet, more ‘free to choose’ than perhaps they will be at any other point in their life.

4. Adult with Partner and Young – bound to their partner and children.

5. Adult w Adult Children – bound into family structures of tribe, but immediate dependants no longer need regular help.

6. Old – may be in last few years of useful life. All family are now independent. May be deeply considering death and meaning of life. May be more free than others to explore alone or choose for themselves.

Role

(For a child their role is ‘child’ unless they belong to a family with some important cultural inheritance.)

1. Low-Status – something a bit ‘off’ with this Naavi, for some reason*. And they know it.

2. Standard Hunter/Gatherer – they can all do this but this Naavi is generally trusted as a reliable food hunter/gatherer/

3. Skilled Builder/Crafter – clothes, houses, weapons, nets, musical instruments, other tools.

4. Skilled with Animals – most tribes have a bond with a particular type, this Naavi is amongst the best with them, and knows a lot about their local animals generally.

5. Long-Range Scout/Explorer – goes a long way, comes back and tells what’s going on.

6. Hunter/Killer – different from general hunting, this one is skilled in fighting other intelligent foes, other Naavi, perhaps intelligent predator animals, and perhaps humans.

7. Storyteller/Shaman/ Culture Worker – smart, excellent memory, lots of influence with the tribe. May think too much.

8. Tribal Leader – either foisted on them by birth or circumstance, or attained through achievement or ritual, they wear the big hat and often have the final choice. High CHA, good awareness of the group.

Weird Naavi

1. Damaged neural crest (its not growing back, this makes them ‘less than’ and cuts them off from the Naavi religion, often provoking a spiritual crisis/investigation).

2. Mixed child of Avatar or Recom clone.

3. Raised in RDA forced schooling programme.

4. Used in RDA experiments, may have been kept in Cryo a long time.

5. Believes self to be, (and may be), ‘reborn’ soul of ancient of famous hero.

6. ‘Virgin Birth’ – parthenogenic clone of mother, perhaps Ey’wa inspired.

7. Last of their tribe.

8. Mutated, flesh-altered or visibly ‘strange’ or non-optimal, i.e albino, withered limb, hare lip or something else, this may be down to human pollution, Ey’wa’s will or just random chance – in any case they may be exiled.

9. Beast-bonded too early and/or with too powerful/intelligent an animal – this resulted in permanent personality alteration with something of the beast left in the Naavi and something of the Naavi left in the animal – kind of a ‘were’ creature.

10. Life saved by human medical science, may even have an artificial organ, eye or limb – does not make them super-popular amongst other Naavi.

Naavi Ideologies

1. Xenohobic Ey’wa-ist – sky people are demons, this Naavi would probably drop a meteor on earth if they could. They may hide this around others.

2. Strong Ey’wa-ist – a normal, traditional Naavi, Ey’wa is the good mother goddess. Go to her when we die. Doesn’t like Sky People but not insanely xenophobic.

3. Cosmopolitan Ey’wa-ist. More likely amongst Sky Traders, diplomats or travellers. A believer in Ey’wa and holds to the No Wheels/No Stone/No Mining rule, but otherwise quite adaptable to foreign, and ‘human’ concepts.

4. Uncertain – May have begun to question the ‘Way’.

5. Soft Anti-Ey’wa-ist – Ey’wa is a physical thing, not a supernatural god, but isn’t really evil. However, since she is not god and we can die, it might be reasonable to adapt some human tools and concepts. (Agriculture?) (May be a potential Abrahamic).

6. Varangist – FUCK Ey’wa. Metal weapons. Fire worship. Suicide bombing. Maybe also kill some humans but will use any technology available. The ancestors are DEAD and those visions are MUSHROOM DELUSIONS.

Missions for ‘Splashdown City’

Mission-Givers

1. The Turquoise Council – the mixed Human/Naavi council that deals with anything that affects the ‘outer city’ (i.e. not the Ant Heap).

2. The Augustine School – the mixed college set up by idealists of the achievements of Grace Augustine.

3. The RDA – above board; they need something legitimate doing and are willing to pay, or arrange services, to get it done (there are plenty of places the raw RDA can’t go as either the Naavi will kill them or the environment will.

4. The RDA – under the table; it may not even be the ‘real’ RDA, but a faction or element in that increasingly fractious organisation, or even a ‘lone operative’, what they are asking for may be reasonable, but they don’t want to be seen dealing with it, or it may be straight-up illegal, or it may have ‘hidden depths’

5. One of the bordering tribes – most likely the forest tribe of the crash zone, who are trying to reconstitute and sustain themselves after the disaster of the ISV crash.

6. ‘Interested Parties’ – if a crime has been committed, and its outside the legal or tribal jurisdiction of any other power, or if some mercenary, exploration or recovery work needs doing, and its only the individuals directly affected that are asking/paying.

Missions/Adventures

1. Cryo-pod recovery. Someone rich may be alive out there, go wake them up, and bring them back (you may not be the only ones involved).

2. Re-Open the road to scrap-town.

3. Go out into the Outer Islands to check on the Tsunami Warning system (which seems to mysteriously gone down).

4. Investigate the source of intra-tribal Warfare out on the borders of Splashdowns area of influence.

5. Hunt the Demon Whale (a failed Avatar/Whale experiment with a psychotic human mind) – try to recover the soul chip from this one.

6. RDA personnel have gone ‘off the books’ out in the deep bush and may be pulling a Colonel Kurtz – the Main Company wants that shut down quietly.

7. Human Smugglers are operating somewhere out there and someone wants them shut down.

8. Varangist Cult.

9. Extreme-Xenophobe Ey’wa cult.

10. Dangerous animals acting chaotically/dangerously (likely some environmental problem, you need to find the source.

11. RDA construction drones have emerged from a crash site and started building, they may have gone loopy or be under someone’s control, but you have to go out there and find out.

12. A body in the surf – between the land and sea, it looks like a murder has been committed, but no-one has any idea as to why, and no tribe or polity will take responsibility for finding out – now a bunch of weirdos have to be ‘hired’ to find out more.

Things to ‘Pay’ Naavi Characters

Many of those who end up as PCs will be ‘weird’ Naavi who have their own reasons for doing things, but in general, there is very little humanity can ‘pay’ Naavi since the stone age symbiotic primitivists simply have no interest in the products of human culture. Here are some potential ideas of you need to motivate some ‘less interested’ Naavi PC’s.

1. Tribal duty – dealing with questionable human bullshit is something this tribe has to do, and a role has been created for that. Your turn has come up. Look, no-one actually wants to do this shit but we need the northern border and human relations stable so go up there and play your role for a year, then you can come home.

2. Medical Attention – its very ‘down-low’ but Naavi do sometimes get sick, or have medical problems, and its known that human science, while cold, can be effectual, either this Naavi, or someone they care about, needs human medical access and this will help pay that debt.

3. Satellite Imagery Access – especially useful for plains or sea tribes; the ancient skills of your people help you predict the weather, but that’s still not quite as useful as having a human just look at a picture of it from above every day.

4. Infiltrator – you are actually learning more about the Sky People as part of the resistance, you will play this role well but everything you learn and every ally you make will be added to the war effort when the time finally comes to Remove the Sky-People forever.

5. Media – there is a whole planets worth of culture out there and, once translated, it can be traded worldwide by the Sky Traders – how about a Naavi copy of ‘The Odessey’ or mobile projector that shows ‘The Wizard of Oz’, or a copy of Camus’ ‘The Plague’ translated into Naavi, or ‘Midsummer Nights Dream’?

6. Coms – I mean its not technically breaking Ey’wa’s rules if you get a human to send one or more messages to another human on the far side of Pandora, and then they tell a Naavi that you happen to know…

A Review of 'Soliloquies in England' by George Santayana

pjamesstuart@gmail.com (Patrick Stuart) — Sat, 10 Jan 2026 08:38:00 -0800

“Only the dead have seen the end of war.”

Remember that Plato quote? Well it WASN’T Plato, it was George Santayana! In one of the better parts of one of his better essays; ‘Tipperary’, in which he observes a group of British soldiers singing in a coffee shop after the Armistice is signed and they realise they don’t have to die.

A grim riposte but, in responding directly to his living circumstances, these singing soldiers manage to focus his mind, at least for a while and thus produce an unusually coherent, analytic and downbeat sequence of thoughts.

(All quotes severely broken up. GS does not use paragraphs much.)

From ‘Tipperary’

“They are hardly out of the fog of war when they are lost in the fog of peace.

If experience could teach mankind anything, how different our morals and out politics would be, how clear, how tolerant, how steady! If we knew ourselves, our conduct at all times would be absolutely decided and consistent; and a pervasive sense of vanity and humour would disinfect our passions, if we knew the world.

As it is, we live experimentally, moodily, in the dark, each generation breaks its egg shell with the same haste and assurance as the last, pecks at the same indigestible pebbles, dreams the same dreams, or others just as absurd, and if it hears anything of what former men have learned by experience, it corrects their maxims by its first impressions and rushes down any untrodden path which it finds alluring, to die in its own way, or becomes wise too late and too no purpose.”

GS goes on to (correctly, but surprisingly ruthlessly) say that there is no reprieve in this armistice. The other nations may be at peace, but the Germans definitely are not. Nothing is over.

“Be sad if you will, there is always reason for sadness, since the good which the world brings is so fugitive and bought at so great a price; but be brave. If you think happiness worth enjoying, think it worth defending.

Nothing you can lose by dying is half so precious as the readiness to die, which is man’s charter of nobility, life would not be worth having without the freedom of soul and the friendship with nature which that readiness brings.

The things we know and love on earth are, and should be, transitory; they are, as were the things celebrated by Homer, at best the song or oracle by which heaven is revealed in our time. We must pass with them into eternity, not in the end only, but continually, as the phrase passes into its meaning; and since they are part of us, and we of them, we should accompany them with good grace: it would be desolation to survive.”

This might be true but such words count for more with me if the speaker themselves is visibly willing to claim ‘man’s charter of nobility’ (i.e. get shot). Coming from a man behind an orchard wall, it strikes a little different.

I have no exact recollection of why I first got my hands on this book. I think it may have been Georges Essay ‘Queen Mab’, about fiction and the British character, (I was working on Queen Mab’s Palace’ about this time). But my interest was redoubled, initially, by the largely warm viewpoint of this exquisitely civilised man going though a spate of pre-War Anglophilia.

From ‘Grisielle’

“England is pre-eminently a land of atmospheres. A luminous haze permeates everywhere, softening distances, magnifying perspectives, transfiguring familiar objects, harmonizing the accidental, making beautiful things magical and ugly things picturesque. Road and pavements become wet mirrors, in which the fragments of this gross world are shattered, inverted, and transmuted into jewels, more appealing than precious stones to the poet, because they are insubstantial and must be loved without being possessed.”

...

“In England the classic spectacle of thunderbolts and rainbows appears but seldom; such contrasts are too violent and definite for these tender skies. here the conflict between light and darkness, like all other conflicts, ends in a compromise; cataclysms are rare, but revolution is perpetual. Everything lingers on and is modified; all is luminous and all is grey.”

…

Its always slightly pleasant to see one’s home through the eyes of an admiring foreigner, though in this case, sad, because Santayana is describing the last flower of pre-war Europe and England, a culture which, culturally, and largely environmentally, is now overwritten and essentially gone. (Though the sky does still act like that.)

From ‘The British Character’

“What is it that governs the Englishman? Certainly not intelligence; seldom passion; hardly self-interest, since what we call self-interest is nothing but some dull passion served by a brisk intelligence. The Englishman’s heart is perhaps capricious or silent; it is seldom designing or mean.

There are nations where people are always innocently explaining how they have been lying and cheating in small matters, to get out of some predicament, or secure some advantage, that seems to them a part of the art of living. Such is not the Englishman’s way: it is easier for him to face or break opposition than to circumvent it. If we tried to say that what governs him is convention, we should have to ask ourselves how it comes about that England is the paradise of individuality, eccentricity, heresy, anomalies, hobbies and humours.

Nowhere do we come oftener upon those two social abortions - they affected and the disaffected. Where else would a man inform you, with a sort of proud challenge, that he lived on nuts, or was in correspondence through a medium with Sir Joshua Reynolds, or had been disgustingly housed when last in prison?

Where else would a young woman, in dress and manners the close copy of a man, tell you that her parents were odious, and that she desired a husband, but no children, or children without a husband? It is true that these novelties soon become conventions of some narrower circle, or may even have been adopted en bloc in emotional desperation, as when people are dissident and supercilious by temperament, they manage to wear their uniforms with a difference, turning them by some lordly adaptation into a part of their own person.”

…

As with almost everything Geroge says, he layers positive and negative, the one implying the other, or counter-informing the other, layer upon layer, till one receives, never a judgment, (George would make a terrible Judge, his cases would never end and no final opinion would be reached), but more a rich, deep, painting of whatever he apprehends, in this case a culture, mixed with and informed by its environment, and its good-bad qualities mixed among its bad-good errors.

This is also the opinion of a very much a slightly anglicised, but still very Spanish Latin Man, (from a culture that knows how to feel and how to live) dealing with a horde of strange Anglos (who live and feel mysteriously, if at all, but sometimes know how to do.)

From ‘Death-Bed Manners’

“That a desire to ignore everything unpleasant is at the bottom of this convention seems to be confirmed by an opposite attitude towards death which I have observed among English people during this war. Some of them speak of death quite glibly, quite cheerfully, as if it were a sort of trip to Brighton. “Oh yes our two sons went down in the Black Prince. They were such nice boys. Never heard a word about them of course; but probably the magazine blew up and they were all killed quite instantly, so that we don’t mind half so much as if they had had any of those bad lingering wounds. They wouldn’t have liked it at all being crippled you know; and we all think it is probably much better as it is. Just blown to atoms! It is such a blessing!”

The precise, living, vivid yet ironic voice of the past springing briefly from this quote, highlights what, (for me, if definitely not for him), if part of the tragedy of George Santayana; that he spent a huge amount of time thinking deeply, but mysteriously, and elliptically, though beautifully, about those wise and high generalities in which the limits of philosophy and cognition are defined.

Head in the clouds, where nothing is accomplished. With a mind as precise, sensitive, knowledgeable and tolerant as his, and a pen as brilliant and expressive, the world lost an incredible reporter and probably a great novelist (he wrote one but I fear it is a novel of ‘ideas’), while GS dedicated himself to the sky-castles.

Eventually, George seems to have had enough of England. Perhaps, in part of the long cyclic back and forth of admiration and alienation which any traveller feels when dealing with a foreign culture for a sustained period, he, after dealing with what I call ‘England England’ (home counties, oxford, misty fields, hidden wealth), he gets a view of what I would consider (to me), the ‘real’ England (mad councils, housing estates, public transport, mediocrity and depression). Here he writes an essay about how terrible the Hegelians are and how wrong, bad and inappropriate it is that England is filled with them, (who should not be there). I am not really fully familiar with what exactly an Hegalian is, but based on Georges writing I am willing to accept that they are very bad.

From ‘The real England’

“In the real England the character I dreamt of exists, but very much mixed, and over balanced by its contrary. Many have the minds of true gentlemen, poetically detached from fortune, and seeing in temporal things only their eternal beauties. Yet if this type of English character had been general, England could never have become Puritan, not bred so many prosperous merchants and manufacturers, not sent such shoals of emigrants to the colonies; it would hardly have revelled as it does in political debates and elections, and in societies for the prevention and promotion of everything.

In the real England there is a strong, if not dominant admixture of worldliness. How ponderous these Lord Mayors, these pillars of chapels, these bishops, these politicians, these solemn snobs! How tight-shut, how moralistic, how overbearing these intellectuals with a mission! All these important people are eaten up with zeal, and given over to rearranging the world, and yet without the least idea of what they would change it into in the end, or to what purpose.”

They have not changed, but this leads us into GS’s alienation from whatever modernity is becoming in England during and after the war, and while his ‘final opinions’ on anything are as misty and negotiable as always, he does have a lot of interesting things to say…

From ‘Liberalism and Culture’

“... Fortunately, liberal ages have been secondary ages, inheriting the monuments, the feelings and the social hierarchy of previous times, when men had lived in compulsory unison, having only one unquestioned religion, one style of art, one political order, one common spring of laughter and tears. Liberalism has come to remove the strain and the trammels of these traditions without as yet uprooting the traditions themselves. Most people remember their preliberal heritage and hardly remember that they are legally free to abandon it and to sample any and other form of life.

Liberalism does not go very deep, it is an adventitious principle, a mere loosening of an older structure. For that reason it brings to all who felt cramped and ill-suited such comfort and relief. It offers them an escape from all sorts of accidental tyrannies. It opens to them that sweet, scholarly, tenderly moral, critically superior attitude of mind to which Matthew Arnold called culture.”

....

“Culture requires liberalism for its foundation, and liberalism requires culture for its crown. It is culture that integrates in imagination the activities which liberalism so dangerously disperses in practice.”

Reading this from the far end, in a sense, from the other end, of a great age of Liberalism, where the Liberalism still exists, but the culture has run out, feels a little spooky.

From ‘The Irony of Liberalism’

“... the transcendental principal of progress is pantheistic. It requires everything to be ill at ease in its own house; no-one can be really free or happy but all must be tossed, like herded emigrants, on the same compulsory voyage, to the same destination.

The world came from a nebula, and to a nebula it returns.”

....

“It admonished the dogs not to bark and bite, even if, in the words of the sacred poet, “it is their nature to.” Dogs, according to the transcendental philosophy, ought to improve their nature and behave better.

A chief part of the liberal inspiration was the love of peace, safety, comfort and general information; it aimed at stable wealth, it insisted on education, it venerated culture. It was wholly out of sympathy with the wilder instincts of man, with the love of foraging, of hunting, of fighting, of plotting, of carousing, or of doing penance. It had an acute, a sickening horror of suffering; to be cruel was devilish and to be hardened to pain was brutal.

I am afraid liberalism was hopelessly pre-Nietzschean; it was Victorian; it was tame. In inviting every man to be free an autonomous it assumed that, once free, he would wish to be rich, to be educated, and to be demure. How could he possibly fail to covet a way of life in which, in the eyes of liberals, was so obviously the best? It must have been a painful surprise to them, and most inexplicable, that hardly anybody who has had a taste of the liberal system has ever liked it.”

When GS is not talking about England, Politics or, really.. who can say truly what precisely a lot of his essays are essentially about? He does not think in categories. But at least some of them are lean more into what we would call cognition, thought, the experience of the world and what it is to be, think, sense and exist.

From ‘Cross-Lights’

“... Things, when seen, seem to come and go with our visions; and visions, when we do not know why they visit us, seem to be things. But this is not the end of the story. Opacity is a great discoverer. It teaches the souls of animals the existence of what is not themselves. Their souls in fact live and spread their roots in the darkness, which em-bosoms and creates the light, though the light does not comprehend it.

If sensuous evidence flooded the whole sphere with which souls are conversant, they would have no reason for suspecting that there was anything they did not see, and they would live in a fool’s paradise of lucidity.

Fortunately, for their wisdom, if not their comfort, they come upon mysteries and surprises, earthquakes and rumblings in their hidden selves and in their undeciphered environment; they live in time, which is a double abyss of darkness; and the primary and urgent object of their curiosity is that unfathomable engine of nature which from its ambush governs their fortunes.

The proud, who shine by their own light, do not perceive matter, the fuel that feeds and will some day fail them; but the knowledge of it comes to extinct stars in their borrowed light and almost mortal coldness, because they need to warm themselves at a distant fire and to adapt their seasons to its favourable shining.”

In his views on the embedding of the mind in reality, and what ‘light’ and ‘darkness’ knowledge and ignorance, the known and unknown truly mean, GS is brilliant, Heraclitean, perhaps wrong, but holy shit can he write. Even if his arguments are wrong, his prose is correct.

From ‘Psyche’

“Long before sunrise she is at work in her subterranean kitchen over her pots of stewing herbs, her looms, and her spindles; and with the first dawn, when the first ray of intuition falls through some aperture into those dusky spaces, what does it light up? The secret springs of her life? The aims she is so faithfully but blindly pursuing?

Far from it. intuition, floods of intuition, have been playing for ages upon human life: poets, painters, men of prayer, scrupulous naturalists innumerable, have been intent on their several visions, yet of the origin and of the end of life we know as little as ever.

And the reason for this; that intuition is not a material organ of the Psyche, like a hand or antenna; it is a miraculous child, far more alive than herself, whose only instinct is play, laughter, and brooding meditation. This strange child - who could have been his father? - is a poet; absolutely useless and incomprehensible to his poor mother, and only a new burden on her shoulders, because she can’t help feeding and loving him. He sees, which to her is a mystery, because, although she has always acted as if, in some measure, she felt things at a distance, she has never seen and never can see anything.”

From ‘The Tragic Mask’

“Living things in contact with the air must acquire a cuticle, and it is not urged against cuticles that they are not hearts; yet some philosophers seem to be angry with images for not being things, and with words for not being feelings.

Words and images are like shells, no less integral parts of nature than are the substances they cover, but better addressed to the eye and more open to observation.

I would not say that substance exists for the sake of appearance, or faces for the sake of masks, of the passions for the sake of poetry and virtue. Nothing arises in nature for the sake of anything else; all these phrases and products are involved equally in the round of existence, and it would be sheer wilfulness to praise the germinal phase on the ground that it is vital, and to denounce the explicit phase on the ground that it is dead and sterile.”

....

“Under our published principles and plighted language we must assiduously hide all the inequalities of our moods and conduct, and this without hypocrisy, since our deliberate character is more truly ourself than is the flux of our involuntary dreams.”

“Our animal habits are transmuted by conscience into loyalties and duties, and we become “persons” or masks. Art, truth, and death turn everything to marble.”

From ‘The Comic Mask’

“Reason cannot stand alone; brute habit and blind play are at the bottom of art and morals and unless irrational impulses and fancies are kept alive, the life of reason collapses for sheer emptiness.”

....

“Where there is no habitual art and no moral liberty, the instinct for direct expression is atrophied for want of exercise; and then slang and a humorous perversity of phrase or manner act as safety-valves to sanity, and you manage to express yourself in spite of the censor by saying something grotesquely different from what you mean. That is long way round to sincerity, and an ugly one.”

This ‘long way round to sincerity’ seems utterly appropriate to the current poisoned moment of relentless mutual surveillance and censorship combined with reactionary, resentful and permanently ironic ‘freedom’.

From ‘Carnival’

“This world is contingency and absurdity incarnate, the oddest of possibilities masquerading momentarily as a fact.

Custom blinds persons who are not naturally speculative to the egregious character of the actual, because custom assimilates their expectations to the march of existing things and deadens their power to imagine anything different.”

Santayana’s ‘job description’ is ‘philosopher, essayist, poet and novelist’ – I am not sure how he actually got paid. The man writes like an angel, thinks like a cloud and rambles like a lost dog. There are no short, accurate Santayana quotes, because every single idea is lengthily toyed with, and even if you excise that, each idea is lodged or woven in with, sometimes an elegant tapestry, sometimes a foul slum, of other ideas, many of which contradict or cast shade on anything stated or suggested by the one you are looking at now. No-one can criticise Santayana’s conclusions because we do not know what they are.

“I notice that the men of the world, when they dip into my books, find them consistent, almost oppressively consistent, and to the ladies everything is crystal-clear, yet the philosophers say that it is lazy and self-indulgent of me not to tell them plainly what I think, if I know myself what it is.

Because I describe madness sympathetically, because I lose myself in the dreaming mind, and see the world from the transcendental point of vantage, while at the same time interpreting that dream by its presumable motives and by its moral tendencies, these quick and intense reasoners suppose that I am vacillating in my own opinions.”

You are vacillating in your own opinions! You are not getting to the point! You should have gotten a proper job where people would have made you do things! Being bound to some actual functional purpose would have sorted you right out, instead we get this.

Count Belisarius by Robert Graves

pjamesstuart@gmail.com (Patrick Stuart) — Thu, 18 Dec 2025 02:23:00 -0800

An overwhelmingly sad book about the worlds most heroic dude. A study in ressentiment. Rome’s summer in the east, before its very slow descent, produces an actual hero; and absolutely everyone hates him. Ok maybe not everyone, but surely the core of the story is the staggering level of fear and resentment so many Romans feel towards their military saviour, especially the Emperor Julian.

Julian and Belisarius

The toxic relationship between Belisarius, (brave, rational, Roman, focused, moisturised), and Julian (cowardly, clever, fanatical, irresolute, possibly possessed by a demon, flaky skin), is the core of the story. The more of a Paragon Belisarius, is and the more capable, unbribable, virtuous and honest he is, the more Julian absolutely hates, resents, fears and despises him.

This core personal resentment of Julian, and the slightly deranged, almost inhuman passive acceptance of this by Belisarius, is just the axis of a wider and deeper resentment. People have always loved to hate their heroes, in some sense, the yearning for a hero is a product of the same weakness that produces the ressentiment of the hero. We must either become our own heroes or despise those we erect above us.

Never was there a society more desperate for a hero, or less willing to accept one, than the Constantinople of ‘Belisarius,’ - the man is adored when he is absent, hated when he is close, despised for his virtue, loved again once he has been shamed and ruined - it is the story of celebrity writ large, though, purely as-a-narrative, Justinian’s utterly deranged resentment does make this a much more interesting story. He is almost comically disruptive to his own schemes when they go too well, it does give the book a central ‘villain’ (most of the Gothic generals aren’t really up to it), and the later relationship between the two, with Belisarius,’ almost perverse levels of aggressive loyalty, almost increasing the more badly Justinian treats him, adds a tone of dark comedy.

Likewise; doomed

One reason ‘THA WEST’(tm) cares a lot less about Byzantine/Eastern Rome history may be because it is inexpressibly sad for a long long time. Its hard to inhabit long a story of reversals and ruination. Julian’s war in Italy destroys much of the old Roman culture it was there to save, making the victory nul. The material and moral erosion is gigantic.

Constantinople itself, and the culture it represents, is craven deluded, hysteric and obsessed by the most deranged trivialities (no-one and nothing on this earth will ever make me believe that it actually matters exactly what view of the Trinity you have). The moral quality of its people; backstabbing and short sighted to an extent you would not believe was actually sustainable, (long term it wasn’t), seems deeply current. This is an age after the big dreams have fled. A lack of idealism is one thing but no-one seems to actually genuinely believe in anything. (This may not be a true history but this is the sense of the book.) I know Byzantine became a byword for crazed levels of intrigue but good god they earn the title.

Above all, no-one has any ideas, at least not ones related to reality. No-one has any sense of the Christian world as a unified thing and no sense of a future for the Roman Empire. Even if Belisarius, manages to tape bits of it back together with raw charisma, effort and intelligence, they no idea of what to build, anywhere, except fortifications in the wrong place and a gigantic (admittedly, insanely beautiful), Cathedral in Constantinople.

The constant ethnic changeover creates a slight air of cosplay, of varied peoples adopting older patterns, with more or less effectiveness or utility, and putting on the clothes of a fallen culture, while the ethnos that made that culture lies quiescent, utterly indifferent, ready to be ridden over. Belisarius is a Perfect Roman, from the old stories, but he’s not actually Roman, or even really Greek, instead he is an Illyrian-Roman or Thracian-Roman. The actual Romans; in Rome, just want to be left alone, so their future, and the future of Rome will be decided by a contest between a Thracian and a German, both of whom have reasonable claims to be defenders of Roman culture.

Obviously has nothing to do with modern Britain. Neither does the character of Justinian; clever, manipulative, inconstant, idealistic about all the wrong things and treacherous and vague about all the important things, have anything to do with any U.K. leader, either in the 2020s or 1930s.

Ambivalent Military History

Robert Graves combines experience, interest in ambivalence to fascinating effect. It feels as if he has, in some ways, a distinctly un-military personality, yet, as a scion of the Great War, he has more actual direct military experience than 90% of other historical authors. He knows a lot about military affairs and he knows a lot first-hand, yet he is not very ‘pumped up’ about them. This intelligent awareness and emotional ambivalence is mirrored in the character of the narrator, through who’s eyes we see the hero - a Greek eunuch slave.

I’m reminded of the line from Frieren where someone asks the great mage Frieren if they actually enjoy magic; “only somewhat”.

The image of war that emerges is at times, like that of an epic; glorious, brave, deadly, magnificent, but combines this with a world-view which is not quite cynical, (the narrator is quite compassionate to most of his subjects), but detached, and through this we get an image of deep historical contingencies, of miscommunications, strange events, odd ideas, of people going the wrong way and getting the right thing, or doing the right thing and getting the wrong result - much is chaos.

A key story; in the attempt to conquer Carthage, Belisarius arrives by ship in Africa. He sits down with his generals to discuss what to do next. The Generals want to advance along the coast, shadowed by the ships. Belisarius, disagrees and, using calm reason, persuades them to his own plan of advancing inland. Now, ultimately, the Roman army encounters the Vandals they are there to fight, and in fact they win, but the way in which this happens, is utterly chaotic, disordered, comic, strange.

A random encounter leads to the death of a figure in shining armour. The Romans advance, are cut off, the Vandals advance, miss the Romans, find them. They find the body of the man in shining armour; he is the son of the Vandals king. The king is so distraught by this that he breaks down in grief and becomes totally unable to command his army. During this grief, Belisarius, attacks, wins, re-unites the Romans, advances on Carthage and is let into the city.

On considering events, Belisarius, realises he made exactly the wrong choice; his army was broken up and if the Vandal King had not been grief stricken, the Romans should have lost, so he should have advanced along the coast. However, on examining the defences of Carthage, he realises that if he had advanced along the cost, he would have run into them, and there would have been nothing he could do against them - so he still would have lost.

There were no good choices, logic failed, he won. Strange for us, but for this most rational and reasonable of men, who bent enormous energy into making a sane, disciplined fighting force, and using them calmly and rationally, truly troubling - none of his ideas actually worked, or if they did, they did not work in any way he expected. There is a fundamental chaos under human affairs, which no plan may outrace.

The Strange Character of Belisarius

He never betrays the Emperor, even when, perhaps, for the good of Rome, he should have. Likewise he never betrays his wife, his men, or stabs anyone in the back. Eventually he suffers the final humiliation of a circus-trial for crimes he did not commit, (if he actually had, perhaps Julian would have been able to tolerate him), and is blinded. The general suffers, at all times, in quiet self-possessed dignity. Truly moisturised and unbothered. Its a bit creepy!

It is perhaps the fact that for Belisarius,, the question of the meaning of his life was a solved one, that makes him, when he stands alone before the viewer, a slightly un-interesting character. Like Galahad, since he is already right, and knows what he must do, the only interest comes in how, and in the rogues gallery of people around him, of which the most captivating is his wife, Antonia;

Antonina

She is perhaps the actual Protagonist of the book. (Though if graves had called it ‘Antonina the ginger witch’ I doubt sales would have been as high.

Since the slave who tells the tale is hers, we hear her story from the start, the dancing girl daughter of a man betrayed; here the strange, intense, pseudo-ethnic and religious resentments of the Coliseum crowd, and their curious effect on Imperial History, come into play. Antonina’s father was a Green, (or possibly a Blue), betrayed by the villainous Cappadocian John, he turns to the Blues (or possibly the Greens), and loses everything, linking Antonia in this with the Empress Theodosia, the resolute wife-to-be of Justinian, and setting a deep, deep resentment of both the Blues and Cappadocian John.

Graves springs more fully into life describing the life and dramas of the court, the lives of these clever, shifty, practical, sometimes insincere women. Antonina meets Belisarius, as a nearly-naked dancing girl and is set up with him again, later in life, by Theodora. This subtle, brave deceptive woman forms a politically-practical shadow to Belisarius. (An odd mirror to the relationship of Justinian and Theodora). They are never better than when working together, it is sad when they are parted, (Antonina being slutty and unwise), and their reunion later in life is one of the few purely happy moments in a story otherwise set against a fading empire.

"‘That evening I sought out Belisarius at his mean lodgings. Though weak from a return of his malarial fever, he rose from his couch to welcome me. With a smile that concealed the depth of his feeling, he asked: ‘And are you not afraid to visit me, Eugenius, old friend?’

I answered: ‘No, Illustrious Lord. With the message that I bring I would have risked passing through fire or a camp of Bulgarian Huns.’

He grew a little impatient: ‘Do not address me by titles of which I have been deprived. What is the message?’

I related, as from myself, all that I had agreed with my mistress to say. He listened most eagerly, crying ‘Ah!’ when I told him that his wife had asked pardon of God. Then I showed him the State papers in which Photius’s confession was recorded - having bribed the copying clerk to the Assistant-Registrar for a day’s loan of them. Belisarius read them hastily, and then again with great care, and at last he beat his breast and said: ‘For my jealous rage and my credulity I deserve all that I have suffered. But alas, Eugenius, it is too late now. our mistress will never forgive me for what I did to her at Daras, even if I make her a full apology.’

I urged him to be of good courage: all would yet be well. Then I repeated my mistress’s message, which at first he would not believe to be authentic. he said: ‘If your mistress Antonina will indeed listen to any words of mine, tell her that the fault was wholly on my side - but that it was only an excess of love for her that made me guilty of such madness.’

That night Belisarius and my mistress met secretly at his lodgings. Nobody but myself knew of it. Both embraced me, kissing me on the cheeks, and said they owed their lives to me.”

The Future of False Machine

pjamesstuart@gmail.com (Patrick Stuart) — Tue, 9 Dec 2025 04:27:00 -0800

Dragonmeet left me relatively alienated and thinking a lot about my ‘career’, such as it is.

Sir John Soanes House was pretty great

I don’t think I can really call myself a ‘gamer’ any more, nor do I think it likely I will have any very huge success. I do still love writing and making things, so will continue to do that, but I’m guesstimating that in the future my print runs will be around 1,000 copies. More of a Small Press for Weird Fiction.

Here is everything I have coming up;

Queen Mab’s Palace

A fully, and excellently, illustrated novel, derived from an adventure that became too complex to complete. The last and final art has been completed and numerous drafts have been considered. The next draft will be the one we take to print and I hope that printing takes place in January 2026. (The ideas behind this date from 2021!!, good god!)

We only have enough to print 1,000 copies and 500 of those are for backers so look out if you want one.

Knights of the Snail - Book One

Another novel. A long, long time ago I produced one or two stories based around the concept of Snail Knights. (You can read them here.) People seemed to like them so I tried to keep going. I developed the idea for a highly-interlaced book make up of twenty seperate short stories, each telling the tale of a different Knight.

Then, in the middle of the third story, I got utterly stuck, had a meltdown and put them aside. That was ten years ago.

That was how things stayed until around March this year when someone persuaded me to look at them again. I dug back into the Snail Knights and managed to complete the first five stories, the first two, the Tales of Sir Bird Spiralling and Sir Duno Chrime, have not changed. Added are the Tales of Sir Babbling, Sir Lucent Void and Sir Whirl.

Each story is meant to be of a very different character, and they got longer and more complicated as they went on. Book One is about 115,000 words, so a bit longer than Queen Mab’s Palace will be.

I will try to crowdfund the first book of KotS in 2026, hopefully after the early-year malaise has passed. The book is written but as you know, artists are mute, savage beasts and cannot be controlled.

The savage beast producing art for Knights of the Snail will be Amanda Lee

Hopefully the crowdfund will be popular, if it is I will try to set it up so that the more funding we get the more art Amanda makes (of course this will end up taking even more time.)

Hopefully KotS Book One will be both funded and printed in 2026 and if people like it, and it makes money, I will start work on Book Two.

Veins of the Earth ReDux

The gargantuan VotE-ReDo is still grinding forth. I am trying to re-write everything both to fill in gaps in the first book and also to make the whole thing more generally useable. You may have seen my development blogs on the Substack and here.

It will be slow, but, with Mab done and no more interruptions from Snail Knights, this can go back to the top of the list. I don’t know when it will be ‘finished’ but hopefully text complete at least in 2026.

This project will happen, it just takes time, (and no more interruptions).

I wonder if this will actually do well at all in Crowdfunding. In general, people quite like being sold the same thing twice, (strangely), but I also feel very much like yesterdays man. We will see.

Unnamed Scrap Princess Project

A project of various horrific and/or unbelievable dimensions and qualities may or may not exist. Various horrible Things may have been produced for it, various words may have been appended to the Things. Certainly something is or may not be happening.

Pig Seekers

A very wafty, wavy may-or-may-not happen project that is nevertheless technically in the planning stages. This is intended to be another book, hopefully with Tom Kemp, hopefully a bit like (though not a direct sequel to) Gackling Moon.

A book of trading caravans, gunsmoke and conspirital chromatic magic set in a monochrome fantasy Afghanistan. (Taken slightly from ‘Balach’, the first setting I ever imagined on my blog). The visible story is about learning the strange monochromatic culture and heaving your pack beasts into yet another valley with yet another peculiar ecology/government/tribe to trade yet more melons.

by Seamus Murphy

The under-story is a leveless magical system based around Pigments; stolen a little from Witch Hat Atelier; the only colours in this land are illegal and form the basis of reality-warping magic that everyone denies (though actually literally everyone is a secret Chromophile and somehow involved in the magical pigment trade). If you have the right ink, and know the right signs, anyone who can draw can cast spells (with complex embodied effects); of course this is all totally wrong and everyone is against it (50% of the nations GDP comes from the trade).

The PC’s will be ‘Pig Seekers’ secretly or otherwise, playing at trading while secretly searching out the signs and pigments that enable spellcraft. To use them, or to destroy, and thus restore the Monochrome beauty of the Real? Probably all of the PCs have different motivations and levels of knowledge so this might turn into a ‘Conspiracy’ style intra-party explosion. (Of course you need to understand the Pigments in order to combat them. That’s why I personally will be researching them. (Could it be that the creation of these pigments is the very reason the land is Monocrhome, and that these two utterly opposed world-views actually secretly support each other???)

A simple trading system, a magic system and the subtleties of a monochrome reality. Will this end up with me ripping off Chris McDowall again somehow? Massively overextending myself and having a breakdown? Yes probably.

No idea if this will happen!

Broken Fire Regime, Parts Two and Three

Literally triples of people have been asking about the always-intended and largely-written sequels to ‘Demon-Bone Sarcophagus’.

If I ever manage to actually get through the above, I will return to the world of Broken Fire Regime with the intention of producing..... a basic PDF! Or a pair of them really.

VERY basic. Functional. Cheap. I will produce the (much larger, and intended ‘Main Part’ Frictionless Blue Glass, and then the final difficult and weird part Palaces of Fire.

These will exist as simple ‘playtest’ PDF’s for the literal dozens of fans who want to know where I was going with all this.

Beyond..

Who knows. I would like to complete the intended ‘Elemental Quartet’ of adventures before I die; so Earth (DCO and VotE), Fire (Broken Fire Regime), then Air (Littoral Storm Corsairs) and finally Water (Cold Pelagic Maze).

If people like Snail Knights then I would like to finish all four books to make one Grand Saga.

Beyond that, I have no particular plans.

Lastly;

The False Machine CHRISTMAS SALE is still on!

And will be till Christmas eve. Though if you want to order stuff to the U.S., now is pretty much the latest you can do that.

Just enter the code HOHOHO at checkout for FIFTY PER CENT OFF EVERYTHING!

Plus, if anyone likes the Vampires from Age of Sigmar, I got a bunch up on eBay at the moment. LINK.

A Review of 'Local Heroes' by Amanda Lee Franck

pjamesstuart@gmail.com (Patrick Stuart) — Tue, 25 Nov 2025 07:28:00 -0800

"put on a mysterious hat or a wizard robe or a regular robe"

(Disclosure; I am friends with the creator so you can add this review to the ever-expanding ‘OSR Circlejerk’ sub-category).

…

Local Heroes - is a 16-page PDF game that Amanda Lee Franck put out on her Patreon, so far you can only get it there! (Or on her Comradery, which is communist Patreon.)

A single-session game about about a single night; the players play themselves, the game-world is their own. They are given gifts and sent to fight a multidimensional monster which must be dead (banished) by dawn.

Imagining the Known

Character generation has already been done. In rules terms this means (unless you have that Fireman/Marine buddy) everyone has relatively ‘flat’ characters, and that everyone knows who everyone is, and that everyone knows what everyone can do. A basic exchange system exists to discourage inane min-maxing or self-delusion, though, since its near-assumed that the players will be a semi-familiar friend group, the honour system, and embarrassment, will be the more effective restriction.

The game begins (in-world) at midnight and the creature need only see the sun to win. Thankfully is is bent on wiping out the heroes opposing it and won’t just get a taxi out of town, and hopefully you are playing in Winter and dawn is many hours away.

What remains is planning and manipulating the environment and a small selection of magical tools. You get an hour of lead time - all those fragments of local knowledge can actually be utilised - zombie escape plans, the locations of building equipment and industrial machinery, of train tracks and ruined buildings, unfilled pits, canal locks, teetering long-term structural collapses, places that might be set on fire, walled gardens, funnel spaces, dead zones in the middle of vast roadworks, strange places difficult to get into or out of, water mains, electrical junctions and pylons, barbed wire, hardware stores, fire axe locations. Its a memory-and-play game for local residents.

As it pulls on local memories so much, and as the honour system and mutual knowledge are quite useful in shaping ‘character generation’, this is not a good ‘Con Game’ and therefore mildly unamerican - it is not highly systematised, depends on local knowledge, is not great for a mixed group of strangers meeting in a place unfamiliar to all, and might not work well in rural America, the south, or anywhere where gun ownership is common or widespread - your average game with a bunch of enthusiastic gun owners might be pretty short. (Or might not, the Monster is not always vulnerable to bullets).

The Multi-Stage Problem-Monster

There is only one enemy and you know its coming. It has a range of ten, or sometimes more, possible forms. Each form is that of a hero who opposed it in the past. It can change forms five times until it ‘slinks back into the void’ and and most forms have specific win conditions. (Though in most cases you can still beat it to death or smash it to bits.) One of the possible ‘transformations’ is a tower with three archers and a series of complex traps and environments inside. If the creature kills a PC’s it might take on their form.

The monster transforming into a place, then back again, is I think, new, (though if someone else has come up with it, I am sure you will tell me in the comments, or would have if this was 2015 and people still commented on things.)

Few of the forms can be straightforwardly fought, but then the special relics gifted to the team are barely weapons at all, but curious tools with strong specific game effects.

Parlour Game

While its not a ‘Con Game’, Local Heroes feels much more like something like ‘Werewolf’, a parlour game of problem-solving you could play with normies. They barely need to imagine anything at all, only recall who they are and where they live, and the Aristotelian compression of time and space, and single, set, obvious and declared win-condition (defeat the multidimensional monster in five of its forms, before sunrise, using these particular tools), hopefully nukes most decision paralysis. Its quite Dowlian in that sense.

False Machine Christmas Discount!

pjamesstuart@gmail.com (Patrick Stuart) — Sun, 23 Nov 2025 11:30:00 -0800

Orders to the U.S. are back up (and have been for a while. I originally intended this to be a discount for Americans only (as everyone else in the world has had the equivalent during the Tariff Chaos a few months ago).

However! BigCartel makes it very difficult indeed to set up discounts specifically for one nation (without a LOT of dicking around on the back end), so now, this is a UNIVERSAL 50% DISCOUNT for EVERYONE till CHRISTMAS DAY.

And if you actually want stuff by Christmas, then in effect you have about two weeks to order.

The discount code is; HOHOHO

When you make your order, after shipping has been added, but before you pay, type in HOHOHO to the discount bar and that will take 50% off your total order.

It’s ONE PER EMAIL.

It EXPIRES CHRISTMAS DAY.

I reserve the right to CANCEL and IGNORE if you order like an insane shitload of books.

The store is HERE; https://falseparcels.bigcartel.com/

MERRY CHRISTMAS!

Currencies of the Dark

pjamesstuart@gmail.com (Patrick Stuart) — Mon, 10 Nov 2025 08:48:00 -0800

Design concepts for money in VotE: ReDux

Light is the Currency

Light is often only way to find a path and stay alive. Light is a resource that is always being eaten away. Light must be carried, in the form of lamp and fuel. Light is literally a currency; the Lume.

Distance relates to time. There is no solar cycle down below. Seasons and cyclic calendars, are partial, conditional and strange. The most important aspect of travel is how long it takes to get somewhere; this is measured in a loss of Lumes; “eight lumes distant” means you will need eight hours of strong light to find your way there.

Prime Currencies of the Veins

The Lume = 1l

The ghosts of fireflies made extinct in a long-forgotten apocalypse. The pale wraiths are imperishable, distinct, and gather and gust through currents in the Veins, moving in swarms through ocean and stone. Only rarely are they accessible en-masse; the means of capture and containment are particular and queer.

The ghosts are held in little bags made from fine intestine; ‘glow bags’, or in little Lantern-pots of clay or bone. They are transferred with great care; sucked into pipes of silver, bone or reed, held at the end in clumps, or trapped on little honey-dabs held at the ends of sticks, then gentle ‘poofed out’; transferred to another’s ‘Glow Bag’. Merchants and settled peoples have scales for measuring the unweight of a Glow Bag so that the bags themselves can be exchanged.

The massless nature of the ‘Lume’ and the extreme difficulty of forging Lumes, helps to make them the base ‘physical’ currency of the Veins; they can be carried without impediment, but not without care. The fact that ‘Glow Bags’ can be damaged in combat, or opened, and the ‘Lumes’ set free, to float away into the stone, makes them difficult to steal. The slow and ritual nature of exchanging Lumes is favoured in the Veins as, in this careful breathing and depositing, both sides of become vulnerable to the other; to exchange is a matter of trust.

A Glow Bag of Lumes of a little bone or clay Lamp-Pot, gives out its own small ghost-light; a vague glow up to five or ten feet of clarity, if that, but enough to accomplish small tasks or to provide comfort in the dark. Veinslings may sleep, or do small deeds, lit by their purses glow.

The Lume as literal currency is paired with the ‘Lume-as-Concept’. A ‘Lume’ is worth one hour of strong light, in whatever form, though the most usual form of exchange is Whale-Oil. What counts as useful light varies enormously according to the buyer, the seller and local conditions, but the universality of this conception; One Lume = One Hour of Light, forms the pillar of stability in economy of the Veins. All is based on the Lume, counted in Lumes, and reduced back to Lumes. Even distances are given in Lumes as that indicates how many hours of light you will need to reach wherever it is.

Occultum = 10,000l

A massless shadowy disc, its edges blurred, the texture of Occultum is felt by the Soul, rather than material flesh, (Golems, like many Janeen Viziers, cannot use them directly).

No-one really knows exactly where Occultum Coins are made or found. Rumours say they are forged in some hell, or minted in a ‘House of Leaves’ where the substance of reality is strange. They come always from below.

Like ‘Lumes’ they weigh nothing like are impossible to forge. Occultum is magic-neutral, it cannot be picked up, manipulated, scried or otherwise altered via magic. The coin itself resists duplication. The black discs cannot be chopped, melted, cut or ground down; if chipped or ‘snapped’ they simply ‘burst’ collapsing into little static clouds and staining the area nearby with fluctuations in natural chance.

The one danger of owning too many Occultum Coins is that, if kept in large numbers, they are inherently uncertain, meaning the total value and number of the coins may fluctuate. The extent of this fluctuation increases the more you have. Usually if you get into triple digits, you can expect a variation of about 5% over time, with there sometimes being up to 105 coins and sometimes as few as 95. (In rare cases variations can be more extreme). Nevertheless, the variation itself tends to be stable over time, so many wealthy cultures maintain their core currency reserves in Occultum; they can eat the cost of temporary fluctuations, it all evens out over time.

Occultum has a heavy cultural weight which goes beyond the movement of economies and trade routes. Just as in our world, Gold is Gold, and signals and displays wealth, permanence and seriousness, regardless of the fluctuations of the times, in the Veins, Occultum is Occultum. Even the most high-toned merchants or Lords would not refuse payment in the Black Coin. Of all currencies, perhaps only Lumes themselves are more stable and only Cloudcradle silk of equal status.

Occultum is known to, and accepted by, supernatural and extra-planar entities. Demons, Ghosts, and Things from Beyond, all accept its worth and for some rare magical services Occultum is the only coin accepted; a disc equivalent to mortal souls.

Intermediate Currencies

The Veins has a massive and permanent problem with making change. The two most well-known, accepted and strongest currencies, the ‘massless two’; Lumes, and Occultum (which is still ultimately measured in Lumes), occupy the far ends of the value scale. What on earth do you do when you need to buy intermediate things? To some extent ‘Glow Bags’ can make up for this, but the Veins has developed a range of complex intermediate currency-equivalents to make up the difference.

None of these are ‘massless’ in the same manner as Lumes or Occultum, but all are very light and a great many are slightly luminescent themselves. While every culture will accept Lumes, Occultum and Silk, an exchange for these intermediate currencies is not universally guaranteed, you may have to chop and change to work things out.

Gleams = 8l

Also called ‘Gleamers’ or ‘Butane Gleamers’. These gems are blue as the flame. Their edges seem to shiver in the dark. Usually these are bagged up into ‘Bags of Gleams’ worth about 80l each.

Slave-Month Links (or just 'Links') = 31l (varies)

Usually made in chased and engraved silver. Each culture, (often Knotsman, Aelf-Adal and various Janeen Courts), engraves its links in a varied and highly distinct style. Each link represents a nominal month of particular labour owed. Often gathered into great linked chains and worn by potentates. Ray-Men and some other cultures with weird principals might refuse to take these.

Toxolucent Emeralds ('Greens') = 200l

Acidic and slightly poisonous to the touch, its widely thought these are cut from rare bezoars recovered from abyssal creatures of the Nightmare Sea. Olm will almost always refuse these.

Topaz Flames ('Flames') = 500l

These seem to glimmer and flicker slightly in the hand. Though they are utterly cold, when smashed, they reliably produce a burst of pure flame. Undead prefer not to deal in these.

Knotsman Debt-Threads ('Knots') = Variable & Bespoke

Knotsmen record their debts and contracts in what else, but knots? Formed in rare and precious materials depending on the depth of the debt. Neither immaterial nor magical, and sometimes frustratingly bespoke and weird, the strength of the knots as currency comes from the fanatical dedication of Knotsman culture to maintaining them. Knotsmen hate to be in debt to anyone from outside their culture. They are very eager to ‘gain knots’ as this gives them power over others from within their culture. All are utterly deranged in their pursuit of counterfeiters. Though a strong material currency, some cultures or groups just really hate Knotsmen and will refuse to deal with these. Also the nature of the exchange can just be weird; how much is a ‘Thirteenth-level Fundamental Humiliation” worth in real money?

Whale Oil – Variable

Somewhere between a trade good and a currency, Whale Oil is useful, ubiquitous and has a regular rate of exchange. Compared to most Veins currencies, it is a bit heavy and difficult to use, but it literally burns to make a pure, bright, smokeless (important for Veins cultures who hate waste and staining the rock), flame. Usually sold in ‘day pots’ for 24 hours of clean-burning oil, (24 Lumes) or ‘watch pots’ for eight hours of light (8 Lumes). For some groups, traders or individuals who have solved their light problem by other means, the Oil is just not worth it as a medium of exchange. Olm find it useless but might take it at a reduced rate, Opal-Winged Chiropterae in particular tend not to like it.

Bank Notes = Variable

There are banks in the dark, often associated with the Great Cultures or with one or more of the Grand Coagulations (cities). Usually run by Vampires for their Aelf-Adal overlords, the worth of such a currency will often diminish the further into the Wastes you get. Though, if you can get to another Alef-Adal-run Coagulation, they will often accept these notes, more as a point of pride, since to refuse them would be an insult to another Aelf-Adal, (unless the Byzantine intrigues of that race means these Courts are currently opposed, in which case they may not only refuse, but also take offense.)

The nature of these Notes/Bonds/Certificates can vary from something like an exquisitely handwritten I.O.U, to something like an actual, printed note, though usually hand-printed on soft skin, rather than machine printed on paper. (Aelf-Adal know about various forms of surface money.)

If you are in an Aelf-Adals city-coagulation, it’s hard not to take payment in their bank notes. After all, they have the Aelf-Adals name and perhaps something like a face on them, and are signed by Vampire Banker. A whole sub-skill of ‘ritual excuses’ exists to allow Veinslings to attempt to get out of being paid in local notes.

Silks

Even cheap silk is light, resistant to decay, and compresses down deeply, allowing a large surface area to be transported in a relatively small ‘bale’.

Silk is heavily associated with the Aelf-Adal. A ‘Bale’ of silk is in most cases, much smaller and lighter than that transported on the historical silk Road in our reality. Even for ‘Rough Silk’ like Whipsilk, a ‘bale’ will only be two or three feet square and weigh 40 to 50 kilos. The highest value of silk is sold in ‘hands’; roughly thick envelope or small parcel sized packages, which, due to the incredible density of packed silk, can still weigh quite a lot; 5 to 10 kilos.

Whipsilk = 10c per bale

Silk given as a status symbol to slaves trusted to oversee their fellow slaves. An illusory boon. The silk carries the cultural taint of alien flesh and Aelf-Adal will never touch it once it has been used. A nominal advantage is that Aelf-Adal will tend to assume that anyone wearing Whipsilk is some kind of Slave Overseer, and ritually not-perceive them.

Stormsilk = 25l per bale

Colour of a storm sky and rough to the touch. A perfectly serviceable ‘commoners silk. Worn by the lowest members of a Coagulation, by normie Once-Men out in the sticks or by Aelf-Adal ‘hunting parties’ who want to make a point about getting out of the Spire and ‘roughing it’.

Chainsilk = 50l per bale

If braided can form a strong rope or chain. Practical. Carries a little cultural ‘cool’ as it is standard military gear for many cultures and coagulations.

ClipperSilk = 100l per hand

Tough, noted for its ability to survive long journeys. Not well respected. A bit of a Bourgeois upwardly-mobile low-rent social climber silk. The very top of the ‘middle class’ silks, but the bottom of the ‘upper class’ silks. Does anyone actually wear this stuff?

Maskmaker Silk = 500’ per hand

Valuable enough that if given as tribute one can be considered to have ‘made ones mask’ in Aelf-Adal terms – a sufficient bribe to be someone actually worth talking to. Makes up much of the ‘baseline wear’ for Aelf-Adal and other Volume Lords.

Cloudcradle Silk = 1,000’ per hand

Like folded smoke, flowing wearable steam. In most coagulations, this is either illegal to wear under direct sumptuary laws without being a member of the ruling class, or is simply culturally impossible to wear unless you are so.

Being gifted this silk, or given formal dispensation to wear it, makes you near-officially part of that rulers ‘Court’. Be careful; accepting this means that in a sense, the giver ‘owns’ you, and takes responsibility for you, which can be good or bad in many ways.

Cloudcradle silk is highly valued by traders as light, tough, high-value currency. It is probably used more as currency than as clothes; so few who live and breathe are willing or able to wear it.

Design Notes

Collapsing the concept of the ‘Lume’

In the original VotE, the ‘Lume’ was purely a concept, rather than a material thing, but I thought, people generally won’t understand this or grasp it, and also I thought ‘why not?’. There seemed to be little disadvantage to me in making ‘Lumes’ both a concept and an actual thing you could use in game, that way the concept and the physical item reinforce each other (though of course, in keeping with VotE aesthetic and world-scheme, they are not actually physical.

So now a ‘Lume’ is one of these tiny firefly ghosts you keep in a special little bag or pot. You can exchange one of these ghosts for one hour of strong (really 30 to 50 ft visibility or more, but you can negotiate that), light with most merchants and settled peoples.

The ‘Lumes’ themselves also make a little light eternally, but only enough to do close hand-work with, probably not enough to help you get around (though a last ditch possibility for those severely lost).

The difficulty and slowness of exchanging Lumes, and the kind of ritual behaviour it suggests, seems to me to fit the nature of the Veins, as does their weightless nature and the fact that, if lost or thrown away, they simply disappear into the stone without a trace.

If you think this was a dumb idea you can let me know in the comments.

Finding Treasure/Getting Paid

Generally players really like to find treasure and to get paid in weird, distinct and particular ways.

In most cases its more enlivening to find a curious artefact, or even a bag of jewels or bale of rare silk than just a pile of coins.

This works out more in the low to mid levels of a game, where the value of a particular treasure or gem or something as a trade item still has potency. As you get into the higher levels I have generally found that people stop caring as much.

Likewise, sometimes people actually want a little haggling sub-game where you have to try to get your hands on the kind of currency you want and avoid those less useful, but sometimes you really just want the whole thing over and done with so you can end the session. It depends on taste and circumstance.

This currency pattern is meant to be adaptable to both playstyles if needed. You can enliven and solidify it by giving players a bunch of weird currencies, each desired or disliked by different cultures under different circumstances, or you can just abstract the whole thing to ‘so many lumes’.

Hopefully, finding or being given Occultum should remain deeply interesting and exciting at any level. I wanted it to be, and to feel, special.

[Occultum has always been, and still is, based on the Obol, first invented by Mateo Diaz.]

Mixing Currencies/Using Money

For the silks and intermediate currencies I fell back on a lot of ideas I first used in ‘Deep Carbon Observatory’, though with somewhat altered values.

Most of the Gems are super easy to carry but have things that are slightly wrong with them (Emeralds mildly toxic, Topaz might actually set you on fire if it breaks). Others have moral issues (Slave-Links or Knotsman ‘Humiliations’), some are just a bit awkward (Whale Oil and Bank Notes).

The ‘Bales’ are meant to be fucking annoying to carry around, but still solid currency, better in the early game or perhaps moved en-masse by servants in the later game as part of a trading journey.

…

U.S orders are now open on the False Machine Store

…

I am going to Dragonmeet at the end of November

I don’t have a store or a talk or anything, and so far have no particular plans but I will be there.

A Review of 'All Tomorrows' by C.M. Kosemen

pjamesstuart@gmail.com (Patrick Stuart) — Thu, 6 Nov 2025 04:17:00 -0800

C.M. Kosemen; as he might say; "kind of a (lip smack) weeeiird guy.... kind of a dream cormorant.”

‘All Tomorrows’ is an artbook super-scaled in time; multi-millennia, then multi-millions of years pass in the spaces between pages. The book tells the story of mankind’s ascent to space, transformation and galactic spread through slower-than-light genesis pods, then a kind of soft galactic dominance, then the arrival of eldritch super-aliens, the Qu, who are pissed off to find the galaxy full of genocidal space-apes (that was their job).

Annoyed and offended by the weeds, they transform humanity into an hundred thousand twisted forms, more akin to the punishments of Dante or the geography of Herodotus than the blank ‘scientific’ scourings of more common sci-fi vibes.

Then ‘Qu’ then just... wander off, off to another galaxy, leaving the ruins of twisted humanity behind. These altered men, mainly fall extinct, but then, over a million or so years, fragments evolve, into wild, highly different strains.

But that’s only half way through the book, and the book is not super-long. We still have several cycles of super-races, terrifying galactic genocides, remaking’s, falls ascensions etc, before we reach the end.

‘All Tomorrows’ is a book of mutations. It takes a lot from speculative evolution, but also feels a little medieval in a way; partly as a ‘book of curiosities’ (look at this weird little guy!), partly due to playful aspects (a post-human at a rock concert, a snake man jiving to some snake-jazz), and partly due to its slight shades of moralism, punishment through transformation, ascension through time.

The book speaks in the language of (speculative) evolution, meaning reaches of deep time so great, and changes so massive, that for any single sentient in the midst of them, the journey as a whole would be so vast it was invisible, even irrelevant, and, like with evolution on earth, horrible, terrible terrifying bursts of brutal and near absolute extinction. Like if two thirds of the way through Anna Karrenena, literally EVERYONE in the cast died, and every city was destroyed, except for one side character that wasn’t really mentioned before, and the book just carried on looking at this one side character; what is this guy up to? Look, he’s trying to survive, look at him eating dirt for a couple thousand years. (Because the civilisations are galactic, all the extinctions are deliberate genocides, no meteor or pulsar could be big enough to wipe out everyone).

Like any book of deep time, from Hallidays ‘Otherworlds’ to one of Forteys books on Geology, the moral challenge it sets is subtle, mysterious, vast; great and terrible things will happen, mighty alterations, dark galactic crimes, cruel perverse punishments, utterly random and meaningless death. Can all of these things even be said to be a ‘story’? or just a record of events? The reach of deeds so vast that over the incredible eons, the meaning of these things for any particular individual is... little? Like the man who carefully raised his child without reference to particular colour linkages, simply to discover what the child would describe, and then one say asked him; “What colour is the sky?” only to be told; “The sky doesn’t have a colour.” For it was truly a vault of light and not a ‘thing’ at all; so, in a way similar to Stapledon, we are left just kind of vibing.

Stories call for villains, heroes and adventures, and this book sort of has these; after all, what are a bunch of entirely mechanical black spheroid genocidal super-science post-humans who canonically want to ‘kill all life’, if not villains? But Koseman oars his way into his own text to remind us that in the grand scheme of events, they are not, nor can there really be, ‘bad guys’, and indeed you might quite like black mechanical genocidal spheroid if you sat down with one. It’s no crime to speak both in the language of epic time, beyond the concerns of daily man, and also in the language of comprehensible adventure, in fact you might call this a central polarity of the successful large scale sci-fi story, but though this is a fundamental axis of the form, it’s still a disjunction and should be noted.

Perhaps the only viewpoint which can synthesise and imbue with meaning such vast reaches of chaotic time is that of a god so gigantic and indifferent that even their existence makes little difference to the motes that float within its eye.

It would be cool to play a fantasy RPG where you got to encounter (and perhaps play as) all these varieties of humanity, (it’s not beyond the Qu to set up such a world for a laugh), and almost as cool to play some kind of Star Trek/Mass Effect game where you play as a federation of these whacky post-humans. Think about playing an asymmetric man and a composite guy and a snake lady on some kind of Star Trek away-mission; pretty wild. (It would also make sense of everyone having pseudo-human morality and having enough psychological similarities that they could actually communicate).

I suppose we can wait for the possible Adrian Tchaikovsky ‘All Tomorrows’ expanded universe or comic book series (’AT’ seems to spring from the same general noosphere as ‘Prophet’ and Calum Diggles ‘Humanity Lost’ - it will be 50 years r more before some boomer incarnates anything like this in film, they are so slow), though the Koseman-verse, despite its playful grotesquerie’s, is much more (relatively) low-fi and saves the actual FTL causality-twisting technology until deep in a species development, when it has already become so queer and clever that its mentality and viewpoint is deeply detached from whatever we might understand.

I did say the ‘language of speculative evolution’ and I think it really is a language, with wild swings from its ‘hard sci-fi’ branch (serious dudes imagining ‘what if this bird had a _slightly differently_ shaped claw), all the way to its ‘Fantasy-with-spec-evo- influences) branch. ‘All Tomorrows’ swings a little more towards the whacky end of the sci-fi branch of the sub-genre, (but will it stay a ‘sub’ genre for long? it feels like much of the intellectual and creative ferment is going on here). Dougal Dixon has a lot to answer for.

A Review of 'Medieval Welsh Lyrics' Translated by Joseph P. Clancy

pjamesstuart@gmail.com (Patrick Stuart) — Wed, 29 Oct 2025 02:25:00 -0700

I have no idea who recommended this book to me but thanks to whoever it was! ‘Medieval Welsh Lyrics’ has some of the most startling, vivid, awakening and sometimes astonishing verse I have read. It was very unexpected.

(Translated by Joseph P. Clancy and published in 1965, taking from a range of previous books on the subject.)

THE NECESSARY ABOMINATION OF TRANSLATION

I don’t speak Welsh.

The translation of poetry is a necessary abomination. If a perfect poem is a precise, even total, annealing and cross-synthesis of sound and meaning, of the chosen sonic structure of the poem, combined with the perfect representation of meaning within it, and within that, the most precise, perceptive, original and imaginative observation, relation and creation, then the ‘perfect’ or ‘best’ poem, is the one which is most wounded by being translated.

For a perfect ordering, the dis-assemblement and re-creation in some utterly other substance - its like taking apart one of the high points of Greek or roman sculpture, say ‘Lacoon’, and re-making it in Legos You can do it, and it’s awful, but if people can only see Legos and cannot perceive Marble, then that’s what you have to do. It’s bad to lose a lot and to create frankenpoems, but its worse to lose everything, which is what happens if you don’t translate into whatever the dominant medium is

What we lose is probably inestimable, and we should accept that we are dealing with half-poems, or even zombie poems, compared to the originals - the bards would not be happy. But the alternative for me is nothing, so I accept it.

what comes through is the images, descriptions, similes, concepts, arrangements of ideas and general flow of thought

STARTLING THINGS ABOUT WELSH POETRY

What startles is the immediacy and imaginative power of interwoven with vivid, glowing, immediate and intense observations of nature, and added all to this; clearsighted, almost documentary descriptions of real-life events. Though they are given in an elaborate Welsh scansion in a format driven by ritualistic forms and common tropes, these moments ‘POP’

These things are rare and hard to find in time. People do not write like this for long books of history or if they do, it is lost. So the past is monumental, graven, sombre, strange, not because it was as it was lived (though at times it was indeed), but because that is what survives; as in stone, so in verse and prosidy; the big fat masses carry on while the warp and weave of human life are lost.

what I mean is we can awaken into a scene of Daffyd ap Gwilym, lying in bed in some inn or hostelry, in the year 13-something, getting up at night and, in an attempt to sleep with a women he has seen earlier, sneaking about in the dark, knocking things over, getting lost and waking everyone up, before sneaking back into bed and pretending the whole thing never happened, and it feels like a story related from yesterday. ‘The Battle of Waun Gaeseg’ gives us a first-hand view of the experience of a small scale, disastrous, unglamorous battle, and ‘Sheep-Dealing’ the story of an equally disastrous attempt to sell some sheep, while ‘The Ship’ by Iolo Goch shows us this;

“She would rock, faulty creature,

On her side, quivering cold.

God’s wrath to me, seas’ cheeshouse,

Cramped castle, seafarers’s chest.

She’s a thin-staved false-steering

Foul Noah’s ark of a ship.

Sooty oak, sharp her furrow,

Spy old cow, round-walled, pale-clad,

Cart of coal, not a clean court,

Her sail coarse cloth, wide open,

High-nosed hag, scabby-lipped boards,

Wide-nostrilled, rope-reined saddle,

New moon, broad pan for kneading,

She’s clumsy as an old churn,

Swift tower, bulky shadow,

Stiff screen seven cubits high,

Swift-leaping sea-splashing mare,

Bowl unsteadily bouncing,

Scabby crab-bowelled jailhouse,

Broad mare, seen as far as France.

She’s make a face with seaweed,

Sea-cat, teeth under her breast.

More than a mark her rental,

bent basket amidst green cork.

She has filth, oath of Arthur,

In her cracks like stone wall.”

..and such a ship I think you have not seen before, but it comes to mind now strongly, does it not?

DAFYDD AP GWILYM - YOU SON OF A BITCH

there is a Master Poet and a third of the book is His. He is so talented and dominant that some of the other Very Notable poems in this are just laments for Dafydd ap Gwilym by other bards.

He would be thrilled to realise he had a statue, and sickened to discover there weren’t more

Dafyd writes in an even more complex verse form than most of the other poets (they can’t keep up after he is gone). He exemplifies both the tropes and higher qualities of eras verse, either because he ate the soul and speaks it back, or because through his writing he re-writes what Welsh poetry is meant to be, and meant to be about. ‘AD’ in this subculture means “After Dafydd” and ‘BC’ means “Before that Cunt” (he is awful). Everyone after him is to some extent writing in response to him.

Dafydd is an apollonian talent inflicted on a contemptable piece of shit. You don’t start reading Dafydd ap Gwilym hating Dafydd ap Gwilym – it’s hard to hate a genius, but you get there over time . He is like a bright burning portal into another time, carried about by a guy whose main interest is trying to bang another guys wife - this is 90% of Dafydds time and the real slow disenchantment of his character is that he can’t change and, incredibly, for a man who perceives the world through eyes none else can match, he is largely unaware of the poverty of his own character.

As Dafydd gets older, and he writes himself laments about his stumbling entry into middle age, he is still trying to bang Morfudd; gets angry when his married cheating gf commits the indignity of getting pregnant by her husband, is shocked when she shows signs of aging, laments his own loss of looks, and ends up feeling terrible about his life (good).

His poetry will burn through history like a meteor, and the story that it tells will be of a guy who was an utter tool; a sleazy ratbag who never grew up and wasted his whole life on sketchy inherently dishonest relationships. The deep, deep contrast between his immortal talent and shit personality, which, I know, common enough for poets and painters, leaves me flabbergasted. The dissonance between his talent and his soul, combines with vividness which has adhered his memory to me. Like something sticky on the inside of a cup you can’t get off; its Dafydd ap Gwylym.

As an antidote to Dafydd; a fragment of ‘Lament for Sion Y Glyn’ by Lewis Glyn Cothi, in which he mourns his dead son.

“A sweet apple and a bird

The boy loved, and white pebbles,

A bow of thorntree twig,

And swords, wooden and brittle;

Scared of pipes, scared of scarecrows,

Begging mother for a ball,

Singing to all his chanting,

Singing ‘Oo-o’ for a nut.

He would play sweet, and flatter,

And then turn sulky with me,

Make peace for a wooden chip

Or the dice he was fond of.”

OF WHAT USE CAN THIS POSSIBLY BE?

It is a book of vividness and immediacy in line and concept. For those of use settled on bringing imaginary worlds to life, there is not much difference between resurrecting a past world and emblazoning an imaginary one.

For anyone interested in prose, verse, observation and the combination of ideas, this is a great aleph of combinations, which grows more strange and potent, seems more original, remarkable and distinct, the more out of place it feels in its medieval home. In its humanity it seems more a work of the renaissance, in its concrete immediacy it feels modern and in the wild but telling arrangements of simile it feels almost post-modern.

For those who simply care about the past and would like to think more about what it actually felt like to, for instance, be on board a crappy ship in 14-something, or to be part of a vaunted battle which goes horribly wrong, or to hide out in a grove waiting for a ‘maid’ to turn up for a ‘tryst’, or simply to be lost in fog, or to stumble around in the dark, or, in a poem remarkable for its nature, what its like to be a relatively ordinary townsman in a normal town;

“Mine is the heat of houses,

I’m fond of bread, beer, and meat.

A wooden house in lowlands

Brings me health, like a green tree.

And so I make my dwelling

In the March, I’ve wine and mead.

A kind, attractive city,

Most blest in its citizens,

Curtain-walled is the castle,

Best of cities, far as Rome!

Croes Oswalt, friend to Jesus,

Great keep for the conqueror.”

- Wiliam Herbart

Or if you would live for a moment in the mind of a man deeply displeased with his own beard;

“Old roebuck’s hair, where’s your source?

You are a crop of gorse-shoots.

Sharp and strong is every hair,

Sticking a girl, stiff heather,

Resembling, so harsh they grow,

A thousand thistle feathers.

You are like frozen stubble,

Seamless stiff-tipped arrow quills.

Go away! Prevent dishonour,

Chin’s thatch, like a horses mane.”

‘Bard and Beard by Iolo Goch

Or if you want to get involved (sucked into) the extremely spicy, messy, sketchy, slutty and poetically brilliant life of DAFYDD AP GWILYM, whether it is perving on the local girls;

“No Sunday in Llanbadarn

I was not, as some will swear,

Facing a dainty maiden,

The nape of my neck to God.

And when I’ve long been staring

Over my plume at the pews,

Says one maiden, clear and bright,

To her shrewd, pretty neighbour:

‘That lad, palefaced as a flirt,

Wearing his sisters tresses,

Adulterous of the slanting

Glances of his eye : he’s bad!’”

Obsessing over his own fading looks;

“I’d not dreamed, burdensome bane,

My face not fine and handsome,

Till I lifted, lucid thing,

The glass : and see, its ugly!

The mirror told me at last

That I am not good-looking.

The cheek for one like Enid

Turns sallow, it’s scarcely flushed.

Glassy the cheek from groaning,

But a single sallow bruise.

The long nose might be taken

For a razor : isn’t it sad?

Is it not vile, the glad eyes

Are pits completely blinded?

And the worthless curly hair

Falls from the head in handfuls.”

Or just really absolutely hating one particular owl to the extent that he writes a whole poem cursing it (this Owl specifically);

“She’s a slut, two tuneless cries,

Thick head, persistent crying,

Broad forehead, berry-bellied,

Staring old mouse-hunting hag.

Stubborn, vile, lacking colour,

Dry her voice, her colour tin,

Loud gabble in the south wood,

O that song, roebuck’s copses,

And her face, a meek maiden’s,

And her shape, a ghostly bird.

Every bird, filthy outlaw,

Beats her ; how strange she still lives.”

A review of The Golden Peaches of Samarkand

pjamesstuart@gmail.com (Patrick Stuart) — Tue, 7 Oct 2025 05:54:00 -0700

by Edward H. Schafer

tldr; this book has a whole sub-section on Dwarfs

Its 1962 and Edward H Schafer delves into ream upon uncounted ream of scholarship and records, all to make a list. Lists, beloved by RPG nerds, chroniclers, romantic writers and a Billy Joel.

If reams of DnD theory have been ejaculated from the question ‘What do they have in their pockets?’, birthing engines of devisment dedicated to the rapid simulation of a goblins pockets, and thence, by inference at least, also making query; what can we learn of Goblin culture from the contents of one Goblins pockets? Here now, are the pockets of a People, or an Empire, or at least a Dynasty; one of the big ones, the T’ang. Her is an encyclopaedia of all that the Emperor received. This shows us several thing;

First, it is an image of the world as perceived by the T’ang court. At its distant, wildest most suggestive western reaches, it brushes against ‘Rum’, but the more common Occidental foreigner is the ever-wealthy Persian, bringer of materials and artistic styles. To the East we hear of jungle islands, home of rare hardwoods, poisoned arrows and magical pearls. In the ocean lie the phosphorescent eyes of whales. To the South West is India; source of scripture, and of suspicious witchy alchemists who probably accidentally poisoned the Emperor that one time. South lies the known, but uncivilised aboriginal lands of continental China, malarial yet wealthy country. To the north, the ever-dangerous and very charismatic horse-riding barbarians; one Chinese noble larps so hard as a northern barbarian he ends up living in a tent erected on his family estate, wearing furs, drinking milk and eating near-raw meat, dreaming of the steppe

Second; it is an image of China and Chinese tastes and culture, as seen from the very peak of the pyramid. Horses are desired. The Middle Kingdom has a massive thirst for Horse and is always drinking dry its own supplies. A centrally-mandated Horse-sustainment organisation exists, with vast government herds, but they never seem to have enough and tribute in horses is ever-desired. Some treasures have cross-cultural appeal; hawks, dwarfs and slave girls might be banned occasionally but the tribute always starts up again. One wise magistrate is honoured by his land; he elegantly evades the relentless Imperial demands for MORE DWARFS, taken from his small population, by claiming that since everyone in his country is very small, and they are all pretty much the same height, he really can’t choose anyone exceptional to be sent to the Imperial Court. Another wise one saves the nature pearl-farms by instituting fierce governmental controls, later he is deified as one who returns the pearls. Its only about 800ad but the environmental devastation and consumption of a massive civilised population is already a stark part of the story. China needs horses, but despite efforts, can’t maintain them. She loves pearls, but over-fishes them. The exotic creatures from the borders of her lands keep going extinct or disappearing. This land is like a great terrible octopus, devouring whatever its can from the edges of its knowledge, but ever-spreading.

Third; it paints a suggestive and utterly deranged picture of what life might actually be like in the Imperial Palace; gilded squalor comes to mind. Wealth incalculable, chaos unending. The throne must have tribute and that tribute can come in many, almost in any, form. This means the Palace is filled with, is crammed with, whole zoo’s and parks of rare and strange animals, often the only ones of their kind. Horses, camels, cattle, sheep and goats, asses, mules onagers, dogs, elephants, rhinoceroses, lions, leopards, cheetahs, sable, ermine, gazelles, marmots, mongeese, weasels, ferrets, hawks, falcons, peacocks, parrots, ostriches and several animals, the ‘Doubtful Ungulates’ or ‘Doubtful Carnivores’, whose name and nature is unclear. These creatures may be mythic, or extinct.

That’s just the animals. If a foreign king sends the Emperor, for instance, an instrument, he will send the musician to play it, in fact, the whole band, actually send the orchestra, the dancers, backstage people, everything. Its not a holiday, they belong to the Emperor now. The palace holds entire third generation micro-communities descended specifically from such ‘gifts’. Throw in prisoners, slaves, (Dwarfs of course), Hostages (the heirs to foreign kingdoms might end up joining one of several ritual palace guard companies), or other skilled workers in materials and crafts.

We haven’t even gotten to the objects. For all the animals, imagine at least ten times the variety of plants, sent to wither or bloom in strange soil, then woods, foods, aromatics, skins, drugs, textiles, pigments, industrial materials, jewels, metals, weapons, lamps, books and sacred texts and yes of course when an Indian king sends a sacred Buddhist text in Sanskrit, he also sends along a sage who will spend the entirety of his life in the T’ang court, translating this One Book into Chinese, in one case with the Empress Wu hanging out directly over his shoulder (she liked to watch him do it).

Those are just the generalities, you must imagine, hidden and skittering amidst these grand illusions of systemic knowledge, just a bunch of weird random shit; a solid gold wine jug in the shape of a great goose, a 100 foot iron pillar holding at its top a ‘fire orb’ carved with the names of the Empress and her greatest Advisors. Asbestos robes.

Magic has no meaning here because everything is a bit magic by western standards. Nothing is ever just material. Amber, born from the coagulated glance of a dying Tiger, works well to seal wounds from weapons. Ground up Jade imparts its irresistible immortality to the taker, ground (whole, not pierced), pearls impart watery blessings. Of course, mysterious and distant foreign cultures, from places where blessings, icons, witches and ghosts are common, know the best ways to draw out these sacred abilities. Everything edible has properties that might verge on ‘magic’, and everything inedible can be made edible, or burnt as incense, or turned into a house, or clothes. Sleeping on a tiger-skin pillow obviously chases away bad dreams, but at some psychic danger to the sleeper. Those oppressed by Ghost Tigers, incubi or sex in dreams will be cured by eating Tiger Meat.

Some treasures have no modern cognate. What was ‘Purple Gold’? Perhaps the same stained metal recovered from the tomb of Tutankhamun? What is ‘Myrobalan Wine’? Black as ink. The several kinds of ‘Dragons blood’, pigments, ointments, medicines and foods, are all the same? What of ‘Gibbons Blood’ pigment?

Excess also shapes the scene; some rare aromatic woods are supplied in such superfluity that, while rich Chinese might burn fragments as incense, and others have perhaps a single box, one noble contracts an entire pavilion from the semiprecious wood, inviting noble guests to midnight smell sessions, walking their aromatic decks, smelling the contents of their wonderful garden, filled with plants from a host of nations.

Imagine living in this. Specifically, in the Imperial Court. It feels like a lurid, lively Gormenghast. What an insane mess of people. How did they live together? The endless rituals, bizarre entertainments, animal, plants, slaves, nobles. That palace guard? Yeah he’s the third-hand heir to an empire somewhere, he’s never actually been there though.

Schafers grasp of his overflowing subject and his ability, and willingness, to connect themes, facts and ideas across reaches of history, make many of these entries, about the most obscure kinds of treasures, little humanist windows, little perfect ink-sketches, of a strange and living world. As an example, here is the full entry for ‘Amber’, not the shortest and by no means the longest;

...

“Amber

The Chinese word for ‘amber,’ *xuo-p’nk, has been pleasantly explained as “tigers soul,” a phrase which has the same pronunciation, the etymology has been rationalized by the tale that the congealing glance of a dying tiger forms the waxy mineral. This reminds us of the Greek notion that amber was the solidified urine of a lynx. But Tuan Ch’eng-shih, our T’ang bibliophile and collector of curiosa, has this to say:

“Some say that when the blood of a dragon goes into the ground it becomes amber. But the record of the Southern Man has it that in the sand at Ning-chou there are snap-waist wasps, and when the bank collapses the wasps come out; the men of that land work on them by burning, and so make amber of them.”

This strange and ambiguous tale seems to contain an allusion to the wasps and other insects, often found encased in amber, but the rest of it is incomprehensible. In any event, “tigers-soul” probably has nothing to do with the word *xuo-p’nk, which seems to represent a loan from some language of western or southern Asia, in its original form something like *xarupah, related to harpax, the “Syrian” form mentioned by Pliny.

Although the legend of the relation between amber and the vital essence of tigers and dragons persisted into medieval times, the true nature of amber has been known since the third century, of not earlier. This scientific knowledge was familiar to the T’ang pharmacologist, and preserved in their compendia. The Basic Herbs of Shu for instance, states; “Amber then as a substance, is the sap of a tree which has gone into the ground, and has been transformed after a thousand years. Even poets knew this truth. Wei Ying-wu’s brief ode to amber embodies it:

Once it was the old ‘deity of chinaroot,’

But at bottom it is the sap of a cold pine tree.

A mosquito or gnat falls into the middle of it,

And after a thousand years may still be seen there.

The ‘deity of chinaroot’ is a precious fungoid drug found among pine roots; it was believed that this was an intermediate stage in the development of amber from pine resin.

The precious resin was known to be a product of Rome, and was imported from Iran. This must have been the famous amber gathered on the shores of the Baltic Sea. But closer at hand was the amber deposit of upper Burma, near Myitkyina (and near the jadeite mines which would be exploited mand centuries later); this material was acquired by the people of Nan-chao, where the nobles wore amber in their ears, like the modern Kachins. There were even gifts of amber from Champa and Japan. A commercial variety brought up by merchants through the South China Sea was thought to be especially fine.

Amber had a part in T’ang jewellery similar to that of coral, that is, it was readily converted into ornaments for ladies, and small but expensive objects of virtu for well-to-do households. Among the objects of Amber in the Shosoin are double six pieces, a fish pendant, rosary beads for a ceremonial crown, and inlays in the back of mirrors. Medicine also had a place for amber, as it had for all precious substances which might conceivably lend their beauty and permanence to the human organism. Venerable pine trees were revered in themselves and fresh pine resin was itself a life-prolonging drug. How much more so must amber be, which was pine resin suitably embalmed by a spiritual preservative. More specifically, it was prescribed for “bad blood” and affusions of blood caused by weapons. In short, recipes based on the ancient idea that amber was coagulated blood continued in use even in the T’ang, despite evidence of better knowledge.

The T’ang poets found ‘amber’ a useful colour word, signifying a translucent red-yellow, and used it particularly as an epithet of ‘wine’. We have already seen it used by Li Po, in our discussion of saffron. A line by Chang Yueh is another case;

“In the Northern Hall they stress the value of amber wine.”

Li Ho, the precarious ninth-century poet, went a step further, and made ‘amber’ stand for ‘wine’ by metonymy. This usage was part and parcel of his well-known interest in colour imagery for the intensification of emotion; he was unique in his abundant use of “golden”, “silvery”, “deep green”, and in the way in which he used “white” to express intense illumination and emotional contrast in landscape descriptions (as in black and white photography, say): “the sky is white,” and even “the autumn wind is white.” Here is his “Have The Wine Brought In!”

In glass-paste stoup

The amber is thick -

From a small vat wine drips - true pearls reddened;

Boiling dragon, roasting phoenix - jadefat dripping.

Net screen, embroidered awning, encircle fragrant wind.

Blow dragon flute!

Strike alligator drum!

Candent teeth sing -

Slender waists dance -

Especially now when blue spring day is going to set,

And peach flowers fall confused like pink rain.

I exhorrt milord to drink besottedness by end of day,

Nor let the wine upset on the earth over Liu Lings grave!

Liu Ling, one of the ancient “Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove,” was a notorious winebibber, and bottles were buried with him; to spill wine on the ground now, was a libation, intended or accidental, would be like carrying coals to Newcastle.”

...

Within one entry we go from a discussion on etymology, to a discussion of mythic origins, consideration of foreign word origins, perhaps explained or obscured by a pleasing poetic ‘just so’ story, this then contrasted with apparently already-known origins, this knowledge embodied by an ode, a brief line on some weird drug that never comes up again, a geographic analysis of likely sources of the raw material considering global trade routes, a paragraph on the use of this luxury and its integration with the lives of its final consumers, a loop back round in which magical properties are considered, then finally a little pleasing dive into the use of the ‘idea’ of the material in poetry, its effect on high language, and lastly a line about a famous legendary drunkard.

If this pleases you, then here you are.

This is the sort of ‘Wunderkammer’ book which used to go very hard in the OSR, (when I had any connection to it). Back in the day, bloggers would knife fight a monkey to be the first to post this kind of thing.

Its obvious use as a list of incredible treasures is only the first part. Every aspect of the book suggests adventure, perhaps not of the dungeon-diving variety, but certainly adventures of intrigue, travel and trade, as well as medicine and art. The tantalising but specific hints about the most curious elements of imperial and T’ang life have a vivifying effect, one wants to fill them in, to experience the world they describe. Who wouldn’t want to run into the cosplay steppe-barbarian noble as an NPC? Or Ultimate Smell Guy? Or the Foreign Orchestra Tribe? Or even just they guy in charge of the Elephants?

It is the kind of text that feels like gloves; you want to grasp and manipulate its contents.

False Machine Update!

pjamesstuart@gmail.com (Patrick Stuart) — Thu, 18 Sep 2025 05:04:00 -0700

Veins of the Earth: ReduX

Bad news first; because of a whole bunch of complex events I have had to pause development on VotE ReDux till the first Snail Knight story is finished. I hope to be done with the basic text for SNAILS ALPHA by the end of September/middle of October so will go back to VotE then.

Queen Mabs' Palace

Its been just over a year since 'Queen Mab's Palace' was funded. In our latest update [CLICK HERE TO SEE IT] we have some images, thoughts by August on the arrangement of complex scenes and figures and confirmation that we expect to have the art complete mid-October.

Once the art is done will will do another round of checks and layout and then hopefully move to printing, I hope maybe around Christmas? We will see.

It also depends if/when shipping to the U.S. resumes and how that happens. I have my fingers crossed.

Snail Knights

Some of you may know of my old Snail Knight stories. A long time ago I completed two stories, of a great plan I had for twenty interlaced tales.

SUPERAKIDDO from Reddit

You can read the first two stories for free by clicking here!

I have been persuaded to take up the stories again. So far I have completed four and am half way through the fifth. The stories have grown in depth and complexity as I have gone on, (and hopefully in skill). Each of them should be a self-contained chivalric tale, each of a different scheme, yet interlaced, so that it becomes a book of short stories that ultimately tells one great epic. (Jack Vances Lyonesse is maybe the closest equivalent).

Once the fifth story is complete, I will look into making these first five stories a physical book, a 'Part One' of a hopefully, eventually, Four-Book series telling all twenty interlaced tales as; ‘Knights of the Snail’

Like 'Queen Mabs' Palace' I intend for this to be fully illustrated, hopefully by Amanda Lee Franck. We will see!

That is what I am working on right this moment; the Tale of Sir Whirl. Once he is done I intend to move on to production for 'Queen Mabs' Palace' and development (unbroken this time), for VotE ReDux.

Current Schedule

Complete Snail Knights One base text
Start production on Queen Mabs’ Palace
Somehow shipping to America Re-Opens!
Re-Start development for VotE:ReDux
Edit Snail Knights One
Run a Kickstarter for Snail Knights One (February 2026?)

Un-American Activities

pjamesstuart@gmail.com (Patrick Stuart) — Tue, 2 Sep 2025 01:17:00 -0700

I am halfing prices for all False Machine books held outside the U.S.A.

This discount will last until sales the the U.S. are re-started, OR until the end of the year, whichever comes first.

(This is to keep my sales up so I can at least keep paying my storage costs.)

The new prices for everyone outside America will be;

Golden Duck - £5 to £2.50
DCO - £35 to £17.50
DBS - £25 to £12.50
Gackling Moon - £25 to £12.50
Gawain and the Green Knight - £15 to £7.50
Speak, False Machine - £35 to £17.50

(most) False Machine sales to the U.S.A. are paused

pjamesstuart@gmail.com (Patrick Stuart) — Sat, 23 Aug 2025 02:37:00 -0700

Sales to the U.S.A. for the majority of False Machine Products are on pause.

(Silent Titans is the one exception - it is stored in the U.S.A. and sales are still active.)

This is not exactly my decision, my fulfilment company, Spiral Galaxy Games, won't currently ship to the U.S.

The main problem is the uncertainty of how the Tariffs will be actioned. To get a parcel to you my fulfilment company needs to interface with their delivery company, who go through customs and interface with USPD. Since its unclear if, where and how tariffs will be charged in this process, and if USPD even has the capacity to deal with the charges, everything is up in the air till this is resolved.

There are a couple of possible solutions;

A DDP Route

We eventually work out a way for a 'Delivery, Duty Paid' service from the U.K. This will mean Americans paying more I am afraid.

A Mysterious DDU Route.

'Delivery, Duty Unpaid'. There are currently only vague rumours about this but it would involved parcels being held in the U.K. while Tariffs and Taxes are charged directly to the end customer. This sounds like a nightmare but nightmares sometimes come true.

I Ship Pallets to America.

I manage to establish a U.S. Hub. This would mean shipping over several pallets worth of goods, probably about six pallets, and paying taxes on those, which would not be cheap at all. However, though expensive, it would be a sane long-term solution and would reduce and simplify relative postage for U.S. Customers.

Printed Matter Exemption

There is also talk of 'Printed Matter' being exempt from the Tariffs. Problem is no one is sure what will and won't count and if/how this will be actioned.

I will keep everyone informed as things develop!

MAC ATTACK - An Interview with Amanda Lee Franck

pjamesstuart@gmail.com (Patrick Stuart) — Mon, 11 Aug 2025 03:57:00 -0700

i have seen MAC ATTACK

yes i am INNER CIRCLE

for a hot minute

sometimes and purely by chance

"Chris, this title is terrible" I said

and it is,

but I need not say it more than once surely (I probably will)

I have tried kitbashing a force for this and have played it once, (incorrectly), so this will be the first of a series of small posts about MAC ATTACK, probably far too late to do anything useful for its crowdfunding, which is happening HERE

This first post is an interview with the artist for MAC ATTACK - Amanda Lee Franck, (click for socials), who you may know from such works as ‘Vampire Cruise’, ‘Crush Depth Apparition’ and ‘You Got a Job on the Garbage Barge’.

The subject is of particular interest to me as it involves miniature wargaming, world creation, the involvement of art and design in differentiating and embodying factions and the interplay between painting, building, playing and pretending.

Here is the Interview!

Cover Sketch - see below for final

GENERAL HISTORY

Patrick - How did you become involved with the project?

Amanda - Chris sent me a note cause he saw some spaceships I posted on I think instagram.

Patrick - How long has it taken from beginning to end?

Amanda - The art took from June of 2024 to late December (I did a little work on other projects at the same time but mostly it was Mac Attack). I am slow but also there were a lot of pieces! Also there are two entirely painted illustrations where I made a literal analog painting for them and that takes so long (paint has to dry). (all the others are analog ink drawings with digital color).

Cover Final

FACTION DESIGN

Patrick - We have ten factions;

Elder Circle
Grand Forge
First Regiment
Arksworn Order
Torchbearer Archive
Dynapolis Foresight
Vox Stellari
New Genesis
Monolith Conclave
Skyless Cartel

Patrick - Ten factions is a LOT for a starting Wargame. Three or four is more usual. In the book, factions are defined by a small clutch of rules and options, some example MAC stats, a single sentence modelling guide and your images. More; each is, or was, human, and each has some kind of shared history with the 'Humanity Fleet' they all descend from.

How did you start thinking about the factions - what was the exchange of ideas between you and Chris like?

Amanda - I have pages & pages of notes I took while I was trying to figure out the designs (Also Chris sent an art brief with notes about the factions). It is true that ten is a lot, and I figured my job in the pictures was to give each of the factions a visual shorthand: pick out whatever it is that makes each faction most distinguishable from the rest, and make a design that emphasizes that particular thing. So I took a bunch of notes & expanded on all the ideas and then went around & collected some visual references for each faction (mining equipment, home-made church banners, bug parts & so on) and then I tried to condense everything back down again and made each faction a sketch page with a drawing of a mech & a portrait of their leader & their capital, which I sent to Chris & then he gave me notes on the designs.

DIFFERENTIATING FACTIONS

Patrick - How did you differentiate the factions visually?

Visual Profile - Are the factions intended to have strong individual profiles? (In particular, some are 'nearly humanoid', while others are 'Crystally', 'Flowing' and Big Lump Things of various shapes.)

Substance - were you thinking about how people would build these, and of what? while you were drawing them?

PAINTING - were you thinking about people actually painting these things and did you consider colour schemes during the design process? To the individual factions have their own 'palettes'?

Amanda - I am answering these all at once:

When I started working on this I had not ever played a miniatures game or painted a miniature so I found a friend who had & asked him a bunch of questions about it & learned most importantly that picking out the colors of your guys was very important & that meant that I should not use color as key way of distinguishing the factions from each other.

Instead I tried to give each faction a super simple motif that was obviously different from the others (and not size or color based: something like: pyramids or drills or banners or the MACS have human faces attached. There are still color schemes that crept in as I was working, but they are vague: one faction being shiny and and brightly colored vs another faction being rusty & broken down vs another faction having painted on details as though the MACS have been decorated by their own pilots.

Patrick - Future Faction Definitions - Would you, either yourself or in combination with others, (Chris has an active Discord I think) be down for producing a 'Design, Colour and Heraldry' type book or file showing the world examples of how they could produce examples of the various factions?

Amanda - If I saw a model someone else made of one of the guys I drew I think I would feel the most famous a person has ever felt (I do not know very much about making models and could not be very helpful).

SMALL SCALE

Patrick - 6mm - this is an insanely small scale for a wargame. At this level the MACS (which are roughly the size of buildings) would be about the size on the table of a 40k Space Marine, or smaller.) Was this a deliberate choice to help/aid with Kitbashing and construction?

The scale influenced by other things (you can carry a small wargame around easily and its hopefully cheap to get into.)

6mm Vehicles and Infantry*. Did you put any thought into what the infantry and vehicles might look like?

Amanda - I don't know! I do not know the answers to these questions you will have to ask Chris!

KITBASHING

Patrick - Was thought given to Kitbashing, modelling and self-creation of MACs by the players?

Grand Forge and First Regiment both seem to have general humanoid forms, Grand Forge with spikes and First Regiment with those wild horns and crotch faces. Were these intentionally designed as factions it should be easy to Kitbash just by adding bits and pieces to humanoid mech models?

Amanda - Yeah, I was trying my best to do things that could be made with stuff you might have around (like if I was going to try making skyless cartel I would go get lots of screws or old drill bits & glue them together into a huge earth tunneling looking thing). I suppose Torchbearer Archive is for if you want a challenge cause I don't know how you would make them. You'd have to model the whole thing from scratch.

Patrick - You yourself have kitbashed some of the Arksworn Order. Can you tell us a little about how you did that and what your thought process was?

Amanda - As I have never done this before I would describe my thought process as trying things out, failing messily, trying a related thing out (this is also how I draw). Luckily I had help with glueing and attaching techniques and access to a marvelous parts horde. I managed to make ship's prow shapes out of some plastic card & a mysterious paste and I found a marble in a stream and used that to weigh down the back end so the whole fellow doesn't tip over on his face. (The marble collects and stores energy from lightning collected by the many spires up top). I tried to copy the colors I used in the 2d art (but I am not really satisfied, it turns out this is completely different from painting the way I am used to and I feel like I could spend weeks painting one of these little guys. and then smearing mud on them & then making them such as a light up diorama with explosions effects to live in oh no)

BOOK DESIGN

Patrick - What was the process of book design? Who did what when?

Amanda - Chris did all of it! He did the logos for the factions as well. He wanted a border to go around the edges of each page & I designed that to suggest a light-up instrument panel, with green-yellow-red going up to indicate your MAC is overheating.

Patrick - Spot Images - the book is full of pictures, small and large, from the world of MAC ATTACK. What where you thinking of when making these? Were you imagining particular moments between factions, images from real life? From your own imagination? Did you begin with the image and then place it in the world or something else.

Amanda - I actually made a complicated chart to make sure that I was drawing equal amounts of each faction and I used the inspiration tables in the book to help come up with ideas of dramatic things which might happen. The spot images are related specifically to the page they are on- the text was complete when I started working so I was able to do that which is always nice.

WORLD DESIGN

Patrick - The reality of MAC ATTACK is massively inferred from this element and that. How fully did you model this reality in your head? What kinds of things were you thinking of when representing it?

Amanda - I think I almost invent a new way of working for almost every project I do in the hope that doing so plus reading the text really closely produces a coherent place in my mind & then later in the art. The way the setting of this game is big: multiple planets: any kind you can think of! All kinds of guys! made me want to do things very splendid and colorful: big, weird, colors. And I wanted to use a bunch of the same oversaturated red (because of the overheating rule, which I suppose is an obvious choice but it ties all the images together)

When I was composing images I was thinking about trying to get at those moments when you are playing a game & you get a really good roll & your guy gets to do something so dramatic that it kinda hangs out in your head like a real memory of something you did afterwords.

Patrick - Future Works - will you ever be diving back into the world of MAC ATTACK in the future with any art, minis or anything else?

Amanda - I do not know but I have learned that I like making small things, which ought to have been obvious as I still think fondly of childhood school projects where I had to make a diorama in a shoebox of a book I read.

ANYTHING ELSE?

Patrick - Is there anything you really wanted to talk about or be asked about that I didn't bring up?

Amanda - I don't know if anyone cares about artist materials? But I could go into more process detail if thats at all of interest.

Patrick - So for those curious types; what tools, inks, papers, pens etc did you use? What was your method of working from first sketch to final copy?

How do you know when an image is 'finished'?

Amanda - I use sumi ink (cheap! comes in big bottle) and dip pen or tiny tiny brushes on some cheap printer cardstock (not as nice as bristol board, but close). Then I scan the drawings & clean them up digitally if I have made any huge mistakes and add color using Clip Studio Paint (a japanese digital drawing program which is better & cheaper than photoshop).

For the cover & the interior painted pieces I did actual paintings, photographed them, and then added some of the really really small details digitally. I have copied this process from someone I cannot remember who does magic card art, to be able to make an oil painting quickly enough: you can get in the big forms and color & texture pretty quickly in actual paint, and then work on top of the photograph of the painting for the little bits & highlights that would take forever if you had to wait for layers to dry.

I like to work with analog media because I think I make more interesting decisions when I know I can't delete anything. I started doing looser & looser sketches because it forced me to think harder & be more attentive- If you get something wrong you have to try to make it work anyway and I think that struggle is what makes the most interesting work (or you have to toss the whole thing).

I know when something is done cause it makes a kind of almost audible click in my brain.

*(Tanks, if they were actual size, would be about the size of peanuts I think while actual-size infantry would be like grains. Effectively this means Tanks and infantry on the table will effectively be represented by 'out of scale' models. Which isn't unusual for a small scale

'On Guard'

pjamesstuart@gmail.com (Patrick Stuart) — Thu, 7 Aug 2025 11:31:00 -0700

I am doing proper work, but all for things I cannot show. Here is a very basic concept for a kind of quiet, still, ‘para-venture’ made up of quiet, strange moments; only things which happen in the night.

The PCs are hired as the Night Watch for the rear entrance of a Magical Academy. Their shift runs from sunset to sunrise and their only job is to guard a particular door, manage entry, and, if there are more than three PCs, patrol the perimeter.

Pieter Neefs the Younger

Concepts

Stay In Place

The PC’s cannot move. They do not go anywhere. They have to stay by the door, stay alert and stay On Guard. In case of a serious emergency, they could perhaps, walk down the alleyways behind the college, to investigate a fire, a dying man, a crashed cart or the like, but they better be back On Guard fast. But there won’t be a ‘Serious Emergency’.

No Drama

Almost nothing dramatic happens. There are dramas, conspiracies and crimes happening in the College, in the city, in the night, but the PCs are simply ‘extras’ in these plots and happenings. A man runs down the alleyway, veers into a side-street. Then a second man, perhaps a Hero or Detective, runs the same way; “Did you see where he went?” The PCs can answer however they like. This will be the limit of their interaction. They do make some decisions, which will have some effect, but they are not the main event

Long Term Awareness

A long time is meant to pass. Certainly months, perhaps a few years. The PCs have to save up money (and not get fired). One effect of this is the depth and detail revealed by the ever increasing familiarity the PC’s have with their small patch of space.

This area, around the rear wall and the rear door, its locality, everything near it and everything they can see, hear and smell, everything they experience in this place, they perceive with incredible depth. The details of the alley itself, its shifts and changes over seasons. Its stones and flags. Details of the view - like 'Rear Window' they see the same view every night and grow accustomed to its patterns, so much that when they change (the wrong light going on at the wrong time, a dog that doesn't bark in the night), they notice. Details of the soundscape - they hear the city round them, night after night, and know its rhythms and patterns, from market nights (lots of rats from the lost produce), post-festivals (vomit and people passed out), the regular closing times of pubs nearby, the brawls and drama they hear on Saturdays, religious holidays and the timing of bells and sacred services, through months and seasons, all of this becomes deeply familiar to them, so much that if the pattern changes, they notice. And minor things; the fortunes of a stray cat (regular visitor), corrosion of the brickwork, (“somebody needs to have a look at that”), a broken drain, a banging gate a mile away.

Minor Situations

The PCs have a list of people who are allowed to go in and out, and are definitely meant to keep a list of anyone who does.

What if someone 'very important seeming' turns up, but they aren't on the list, but they say its ok? If the PCs don’t let them in, they could get into trouble, but if they do let them in, they could get into trouble for that. What if this sets a pattern and someone starts taking advantage? What if they offer a distaff bribe? What about horny students climbing the walls? What about the woman you see in her window? The noises from the sewer? The sound of a thief fleeing in the darkness a street away?

After the Night Watch by Erik Henningsen

What Kind of Characters?

The players could make PCs specifically for ‘On Guard’, but if incorporated into a wider campaign the ‘Player Characters’ of ‘On Guard’ could be;

· Old; PCs who have simply aged out of adventuring, but who are not so rich they can fully retire.

· Injured; PCs who received a substantial injury it will take time to heal. This could have permanently altered their employment prospects (‘Took an arrow to the Knee’) or they may simply need some time in a less-stressful position.

· Mentally Traumatised; or even cursed.

· Young; those who have not yet started their adventuring career, (and if they stay in this job, perhaps they never will).

· Under Cover/On The Lam; the Adventurers are hiding for some reason and have taken on false identities. Either as part of a larger scheme or simply to avoid the Law until the heat dies down.

If the PCs are still adventurers, they should have no particular scheme or idea in play regarding the College of Magic, or any nearby organisations. This would ruin the character of ‘On Guard’, which is meant, fundamentally, to be ‘about nothing’ or about what happens between and within people who are ‘doing nothing’.

Antoine Auguste Ernest Hébert - On Guard

The Rules of the Job

You stay On Guard from Sunset to Sunrise. This means in Summer, hours are short, but the work is easy as its warm. While in Winter, hours are LONG, and the work is hard, (but at least you get paid more).

You take over from the Late Shift, who are supposed to maintain the gate, the record and the Watch House, (but often don’t), and you hand over to the Morning Shift (who are often late).

There is a Gate, a smaller man-sized Gate within that gate, a Watch House within the walls (one room), and a Rear Perimeter (you are not meant to patrol the front of the building – it has, or is meant to have, magical defences and a small guard staff who are much better paid and uniformed than you. You would make the College look bad to be seen ‘out front’.

Duties

You have three duties, depending on how many players there are.

· First and most important; two Guards (in Uniform, with halberds (this is non-negotiable)), must always be ‘On Guard’ before the Rear Gate.

· If there are two more, they should patrol the rear of the College, slowly, quietly, roughly once an hour.

· If there are two more, making six, then two can sit in the Guard House. Its one room with no fire, (but you are allowed a brazier outside in winter).

· There is a ‘behavioural code’ meaning no ‘slovenly or disruptive’ behaviour, including no ‘leaning’, no ‘leaning of Halberds’, no smoking, drinking, fraternising, game or chatter. No pets – has been recently added.

· There will be surprise inspections and regular checking of paperwork.

General Equipment

· Hourglass – this tells you which hour of the Watch you are in. (Though Church bells throughout the night will do this too.)

· Small Gate Keys - which you receive, (or are meant to receive) from the Late Watch, and which you in turn hand over to the Morn Watch. These open the small gate-within-the-gate, not the large one.

· Entry List - particular names who are allowed in or out of the Rear Gate. In some cases these names have descriptions, special seals they are meant to have, riddles or even stranger things. This also changes for mysterious reasons. You are pretty sure the Late Shift have added some things on there as a joke.

· Passage Log - the names of everyone who did come in or out. You are meant to record all of these, along with the time, any pertinent details etc.

· Watch Log - where you report.. well anything that happens.

· Equipage Log – where you sign in and out confirming that you have received all this stuff. (Oddly, the Equipage Log itself is not noted in the Equipage Log.

· Ink and Pen – this freezes in winter, dries in summer and the Late Watch always use it up and don’t replace it.

· Three Lanterns and enough oil for two Lanterns for Eight hours. (One is meant to be spare and they do not adjust for Winter or Summer hours.)

· Brass Whistle – this indicates the Watch Commander, (a near meaningless rank).

· Bell – to be rung only in event of attack on the school, but if an attack is underway, it must be rung.

· Lot Tin – for choosing who goes on Watch/Patrol/Reserve with who. The ‘Watch Commander’ can decide this, but the College recommends you take lots for it, to avoid cliques forming.

Personal Equipment

· Morion Helm – Non optional. shared with the other Watches. Most Guards wear a coif of some kind which they own themselves.

· Chainmail – shared, has to be adjusted for each guard. (You are allowed to bring your own armour).

· Halberd – shared and non-optional. A Guard ‘On Guard’ or ‘On Patrol’ must have their halberd with them and specifically in their hands at all times. (This is impossible while also writing down names). The Halberd does have a hook-thing on it you can hang a lantern from. The Halberds are very top-heavy and uncomfortable to carry.

· Tabard – with the Symbol of the College. Again, non-optional.

There is also a general dress-code indicating you should be reasonably turned out, facial hair trimmed, clean and ‘give a good account of yourself’. Added is ‘No slender knives, incendiary devices or knuckledusters’. You are not specifically banned from smoking, though without an ‘incendiary device’, how can you light anything?

The Night Watchman by Karl Martin August Splitberger

Kinds Of Schedule

The substance of the game is made up of layered patterns of time. Rhythms of events sensed by the PCs, layered over and upon each other, each subtle changing according to circumstance of the time of the year.

Remember the deeper one gets into night, and the quieter everything becomes, the more sounds seem to carry. Sounds usually inaudible become more tangible. A single iron-wheeled cart several streets away is virtually inaudible in day, very striking after midnight.

The life of the City

· Last bars putting out, (these may have different characters).

· The last carriages leaving, wheels striking the cobblestones.

· Bells ringing.

· A dog that always barks when its master comes home.

· Garbage men making their rounds,

· Sewermen and Gongfarmers.

· Bakers arriving for work and their bakeries lighting up.

· The sound of single horses hooves moving at midnight.

· Traffic, the tramping of feet, of horses and cattle, dying away around sunset and building again before dawn.

· A dawn chorus when the sun rises.

Animal Life

· Stray cats.

· Stray dogs (rare).

· Rats in the street (where are they going to or from?).

· The occasional owl at night .

· Urban foxes.

· Lost stray or rare domestic animals, a lost pet from somewhere (maybe in the college, an escaped test subject)

· A run-away horse or donkey several streets away.

Plant Life

This changes more than anything season to season. Everything tangible to the PCs is very small, stuff people passing by likely wouldn't notice.

· Flowers growing in the wall.

· Weeds in the gaps in the paving stones out back.

· A small tree starts sprouting - pull it out?

· Things growing in the gutters of the buildings up above.

Slow-time senses

The things you would only notice if you were in a single place, listening and watching, for a long time, time after time.

The wind turning the weathervanes. Shifts in the winds sound as it moves its direction; from some angles it is displaced over the roofs, from others, funnelled by the streets and whooshes down your alleyway

The pulse of water running through drains in the minutes after a sudden shower. Anywhere dripping water lands just-so on a resonant surface, making a lout repetitive sound.

Any door or gate, within half a mile that swings regularly in wind. Even if the noise is slight, its rhythmic irregularity makes it highly noticeable in the middle of the night.

In the darkness, the ground only visible from the sheen of lamplight on wet cobbles, or the little pools between them, making a gridwork of light, the trail of particular snails across cobbles or bricks. the general prevalence of snails and slugs at certain times. A hedgehog!

Sounds of the Academy

What is even going on in there? It’s a magical Academy right? - and a Hogwarts style thing, so there are going to be students sleeping overnight, presumably broken up by house and gender, so you may have some Harry Potter little shit, or groups of little shits, running around in the night on some 'adventure'.

Overnight Experiments – it’s a research school as well, magical research I would think, so with some alchemical or ritual magics, you are going to need to be going all night, possibly over several days, and so have people attending to the 'reaction' or the 'summoning' all night.

Plus MIDNIGHT is always a magical time, so every night at midnight there is maybe going to be some chanting and/or some lighting or electricity going on.

Most astronomers would likely have to leave the city to observe, but you would see them leaving and coming back in the dawn.

Wizards making magical doors in the wall.

A well-known 'climbing spot' where students can get over the wall and go about in the city acting tough, thinking they are cool, and you can possibly get bribed by them

I probably need to do a whole section on bribery.

Possible monsters/vampires/doppelgangers trying to get in/out, like a guy who is clearly a pale jelly-like simulation of someone else, so you just don't let him in. (This would conflict with the ‘no drama’ rule.

Scharwache by Carl Spitzweg

How do you actually 'play' this game?

The actually-difficult part. There is a reason, after all, that no-one designs games like this. Ultimately this is not a thing where challenge is going to be a huge part of the game, people are largely going to be there because they want to be, but it still needs to be some part of the game. So far I have no actual plan, but only concepts….

Time is the Enemy

If Time really is the enemy, then any challenge of this adventure lies not necessarily in facing any particular event but in simply getting through the night. A failure state means what exactly? You get bored, fuck up, get your pay docked, get fired?

Don’t Be Noticed

A useful concept might be that at least one member of the crew is genuinely ‘hidden’, maybe an ex-criminal or in hiding from some other organisation, and they really don’t want anything to happen. In that sense, ‘getting through the night’, like getting through a bunch of nights, without being fired or reprimanded, but also without being noticed or remarked on, adds more of a gamic element.

Its tempting to make it so that every member of the crew has some particular reason for not being noticed, or a particular desire specifically for nothing exciting to happen. Making them all explicitly, or secretly anti-adventurers. But that alone makes this perhaps more of ‘game’ than I originally conceived it as being. (Though much more tangible to a wider audience.)

Near Real-Time

Concept – the game at its basic level is lived almost in ‘real time’. You simply live through the 'hours'. Most of the ‘action’ of the game is trying to find things to do that will ‘speed up’ time, while also not actually making you bad at your job or getting you into shit.

Betting Time

One concept is some kind of 'betting system' where the PCs can 'bet' time, but the more time they 'bet' the more likely they are to be inspected or to get something wrong somehow, thus throwing them back into ‘real time’, and/or giving them some kind of negative event.

Ways to ‘Accelerate’ Time

Perhaps you can accelerate time by telling each other stories, playing games of chess, (presumably inside the guard room), having random conversations etc. Maybe this could take advantage of the slightly sopophoric sleepy regular intonation of events – if PCs can have random conversations about the sound of a bell, or a dog barking, that’s fifteen minutes or half an hour taken off. This would be defeating time through role play.

A Boredom Score

Maybe the pcs have to roll (collectively) against boredom? Or to roll awareness, and if they succeed, they get a richer, more detailed story of the events of the watch, while if they fail, they get the bare information.

We can do this hour-by-hour with each hour being a separate roll, and with environmental effects and the various preparations for them also affecting this. Like - you are not meant to have a chair out here, or to lean against the wall, (a brazier is allowed in winter), but you can kind of fudge this by keeping a secret chair, or by covertly leaning against the wall, or leaning your Halberd against it, maybe this brings down your Boredom Score, or makes time faster, but with some secondary negative effect, getting caught or being punished some other way.

‘Islands’ of Events

The big problem with this information is that its NON INTERACTIVE (or much of it is). Maybe I could break the 'watch' up into 'islands' of minor interactable events, like a cat visits, someone throws up on the street, a visitor comes to the rear door, and simply have long chants of information between each 'event'.

……………………………………………….

Sébastien Bourdon, A Brawl in a Guard-room

Well, ‘design’ questions like this are part of the reason comment threads exist.

News!

Matthew Addams

There will be, hopefully, a Snail Knights book.

These are a series of stories which I began back in 2015, then stalled on ten years ago. I completed two of them, which have appeared in various formats, and which you can read for free here.

Encouraged by a friend I have been working on more and have completed Story Thee - The Tale of Sir Babbling, and Story Four - The Tale of Sir Lucent Void. I am currently working on Story Five - The Tale of Sir Whirl.

If I can complete five stories the result will be a novel-length fully illustrated book, hopefully the first book of Four, ultimately containing twenty interconnected Snail Knight stories which tell the Whole Saga.

Loopy Tombs

pjamesstuart@gmail.com (Patrick Stuart) — Mon, 30 Jun 2025 12:35:00 -0700

This poast was inspired partly by reading James Holloways 'Tome of Tombs' - a zine of Tomb creation which you can find here; https://james-holloway.itch.io/

A aid to generating tombs based partially on the creators IRL historical knowledge.

Reading this I realised that the most interesting thing about most pseudo-real tombs, in terms of exploration and dungeoneering, is the context.

In real-life tombs, at least anything under a pyramid in size, you go in and come out. the 'flow cart of possible exploration is very linear, though the paths within the tomb might seem winding.

Holloways Zine deals well with the creation of this context, but I was interested in crossing the streams somewhat, and thinking about reasons a pseudo-real Tomb might have the loops and choices we often desire in dungeon design.

What follows starts with pseudo-real reasons a Tomb might 'loop'; 'Living Beings', 'The Touch of Time' and 'Architectural Reasons', but rapidly spirals out of control into the whackiest possible sources for complex tomb layouts.

LIVING BEINGS

Giant Sloth - In an adventure beloved by few, I used the giant south American ground sloth burrowing in and about the tomb, creating a series of alternate passages which wove in and around the 'natural' pathways of the tomb. Many creatures burrow but few IRL creatures make man-sized burrows. If you wish to confine yourself to creatures that have lived, or that do live, I think its either the sloths or the Honey Badgers. (Place your answers in the comments). (Of course one living creature that does produce man-sized burrows, is man, which leads to the next entry.)

Lair of intelligent creatures - Its a classic for a reason. Clever beings lair, or have done, in the tomb, they have expanded the place, putting in their own obvious and hidden routes.

THE TOUCH OF TIME

Massively overbuilt - Multiple religions or cultures have occupied this site and all built on it, or the same religion over a thousand years, (St Peters in Rome has an insane number of underground levels, each of which used to be the main level). This can also expand the 'tomb' laterally as the buildings placed over it expand.

Built onto, and partially collapsed into, deeper tomb or necropolis - They either didn't know it was there or simply forgot. Now the floors and stuff have fallen through into the deeper levels.

A river ran through it - or a stream really is all that’s necessary, and it may well have dried up since, but at some point during the life of the tomb, a water-course has shifted and run into it, drowning some areas, breaking through some walls, finding its way between places, and leaving unexpected routes.

Banyan forest - tomb is in a tropical environment, huge marvellous trees have infested the place, layering over and around, teasing aside the great stone blocks and opening strange ways between their complex root systems.

ARCHITECTURAL CHOICES

Maintenance Spaces - another thing I tried using in DBS; designer/creator access/trap reset tunnels for the architect themselves. If you want traps or any kind of complex 'effect' you may need complex mechanisms, or at least weights. To organise and set those up, you might need crawlspaces or other access spaces, that let you into the rear or back of rooms or setups.

Escape Route - the classic fear of being buried alive. Leaving an actual potential escape route for the 'corpse' should they be buried alive would effectively make a secondary network of tunnels or paths in the structure, leading directly from the body to the outside, but presumably very well camouflaged and perhaps only openable from within.

Spiritual Labyrinth - either to make sure the dead do not find their way out again or to baffle and disturb any negative spirits who might try to reach them, you build a complex labyrinth between the body and any possible exit. Spiritual - and therefore a bit different from a 'tomb robbers' labyrinth in that there may be no actual lethal traps or mortal deceptions, but may be a lot of complex religious trickery.

Double or triple fakes - I have used this myself previously. Just build a fake tomb, with fake treasures, then for people smart enough to see through that, build ANOTHER tomb, also fake, then an even-more-hidden third tomb, the real one, (this does not guarantee LOOPS though).

Palace for the Dead. It’s not enough to just have, for instance, a room or something, whoever is buried here will need an entire dead palace full of dead luxuries, all mirrored and replicated from the living world, which means their tomb will be a buried palace, with all the corridors and extra ways implied by that.

Mandala Map - the tomb has to be a physical map of the spiritual world as imagined by the deceased, so it’s like a giant mandala, embossed into physical reality. (Having some knowledge of this belief system would really help).

I should be able to think of something better than this, what are the...

VERY STRANGE, UNUSUAL AND MYSTERIOUS REASONS?

Cover to Manor of Infinite Forms by Tomb Mold

Time Loops – it’s a classic. If you die in the tomb you *don't* die in real life you just time loop back to certain 'save points', but some of these are so horrible - bounded on every side with impassable traps and dangers, that being trapped in them is a form of eternal undying madness.

Doors into Dream - certain symbols send you to sleep where you must navigate the tomb in dreams (the dream structure is significantly bigger).

Size Alteration and Rat Tunnels - rats have made their own paths, at the same time, eating the strange flesh of the tomb will shrink you down to their size, for a while.

The Statues Came Alive - and, unable to find their own way out, carved their own tunnels in the earth for their own reasons (seeking perhaps to get away from each other). It seems reasonable that the spirit of a god, or part of it, might come to inhabit, for a while, an image made for it, and perhaps it would be really annoyed at being stuck.

Reality-Distorting Artefact - Sword of Leaves, or similar, is buried with the corpse. In combat and legend it simply cut through the space around it, granting semi-anime powers to its holder. After being stored for a few centuries doing nothing, its nature to warp space around it is creating labyrinthine structures from simple ones, nesting excess space in unobserved corners. Now residents are appealing for someone to actually go and rob the tomb; the extra space is leaking out into the surrounding community and breeding labyrinths and impossible spaces in corners. The sword should be fine so long as someone keeps it on the move, only starts leaking if you leave it in place for a century or more.

Builders Buried Alive - perhaps to keep the tombs location secret, its builders were buried alive within, but they reanimated and, consumed with their last memory, have kept digging and building in ghost and skeleton form, weaving the tomb ever deeper into earth and stone over the centuries.

Hell Itself - the resident was so exceptionally evil that the forces of hell tunnelled directly up from hell to grab their physical remains to which their soul was attached, the tomb is now fully interwoven with the distant outskirts of hell.

Religious Teleport – it’s a linear, maybe EXTREMELY linear, single long straight path with various doors, alcoves and statues along the way. The doors and other stuff can teleport you forward and back along the main route, meaning that 'in effect' the path is looped. We could call it 'The Long, Straight Dungeon', or the 'Five Mile Dungeon'.

Dickhead Teleport - tomb is physically linear though not to such an extreme sense as the five mile dungeon, but various items and interactions teleport you back to the 'starting area', meaning you have to keep transiting the same space trying to work out how to avoid or subvert the teleport effect.

Mirror World - various bronze mirrors in the tomb give access to the 'mirror tomb' which is basically a different (now spooky) version of the same thing, there are always two or more ways of encountering or dealing with everything now. When you leave, try to make sure you are in the actually-real-for-you version of reality.

Cancerous Brick - through curse, fluke or magical overflow, one particular brick or tile used in the construction of the tomb, has meta-cancer, meaning it will just keep replicating itself and the context of its placement over time, this means at a certain point the tomb now just dissolves into an insane mycelium web of brick or tile tunnels. The purpose of these tunnels is to *be tunnels*, simply to hold replications of the brick or tile. Dungeon chemotherapy might involve finding that one cancerous brick and smashing it, or smashing ALL the bricks or tiles - locals may have started invading the tomb to harvest the superfluity of bricks/tiles which now makes up their main local building material. Nothing can or will go wrong with this idea.

Djinn Dumping Ground - for whatever reason, whenever a certain Djinn or family of them are ordered to build or disassemble a castle or something, they need somewhere to store the stone, and have chosen here - they have built huge warrens and caverns of utterly random shit based on building materials from over many millennia covering the whole world, if they are uncorked somewhere and ordered to make something, they may turn up and start disassembling this stuff.

Gravity Shift - the long, spiralling yet linear way has a super-high ceiling and there are certain gravity shifting things in the tomb, or just ladders between the up and down, so that there are in essence two corridors or paths through, with one set of things and challenges on the 'bottom' and one on the 'top', meaning everything is technically looped.

Paths of Memory - various mosaics etc in the tomb represent the memories of the inhabitant and staring at them for a while can drag you into those memories AND - they are made too well so, like real memories, they interact and meet up at points, based on theme, mood, strong emotion or sensory factors (smell especially, which often unites memories), so that you can, deliberately or accidentally, move from one memory to another and emerge somewhere else in the tomb.

Dead-Eyed Dwarves - development for VotE; ReDux

pjamesstuart@gmail.com (Patrick Stuart) — Thu, 19 Jun 2025 13:30:00 -0700

The Dead-Eyed Dwarves are bald and bearded, shorter and stronger than men. They value only work and blood.

Appearance

STOMP STOMP STOMP – the heavy iron-shod boots of Dwarves passing invisibly but for glaring lamps and lances of light.

For the Dead-Eyed Dwarves have many magics; cloaks which make the wearer invisible, clicking rings which make their owner large or small, strange insect-lenses which pick up every drop of light and ever stranger eye-wear; pearl-pale cyclopean masks which perceive the flow of ‘dark’ itself and twin-cone faces which turn rebounding clicks and whines into images in the air. Beneath these, often, grills or tubes, breathing apparatus or voice amplifiers, who knows. Beneath those; beards.

Their lamp are harsh, actinic and directional; itself a near-aggressive act within the Veins. The blinding sharp-edged light turns the Dwarves behind them into silhouettes. The tramping, trudging, armoured and indifferent Dwarves. Few cultures of the Veins dare to wear full-armour underground; none but the Dead-Eyes possess the craft to endlessly clean, amend and fix their metal shell, the brutal endurance to carry metal weight, nor the size-shifting techno-magic which lets them shrink and grow, giving them access to shafts and warrens which others attempt only in extremity.

They can pass invisibly, but they are loud. Stomp, stomp, stomp. Too big, too small. Disappearing in the blink of an eye. Hooded, armoured, masked, with wild prickling beards. Lights powered by crackling batteries which drip toxic alkali slime. Loaded with crossbow, axe and pick, careful maps and guidance dials, grappling hooks and superlight chains. Walking and moving in unison, grunting to each other in muttered subsonic; a guttural under-speech, as if they resented even, the need to speak, even to each other.

The most likely encounter is that you are simply ignored. The cost/benefit assessment of enslaving you simply doesn't move the dial.

The Dead Eyes

Things don’t get better when the masks come off. There is just something missing in there; the strange, deep-time, assessing gaze of a Dwarf, but with the humour, honour, boldness; gone, washed away, leaving what? Eyes pale as slate, empty as the letter O.

They eat, breathe, smell, move like living things, more than many in the Veins, yet a vampire, or a crazed patchwork Gilgamash, can have more 'anima', more individuality, vitality and humour than a Dead-Eye Dwarf.

They are not pleasant to deal with, but they are reliable, practical and rational, and they think long-term, which makes them an incredible stabilising force. Yet no-one, and nothing 'likes' the Dead-Eyed Dwarves.

Abilities

Powerful Lights

Bright white spheres, hanging lanterns and lances of burning white light. Used to blind or disorder seeing foes, or simply to pick out blind enemies.

Invisibility Cloaks

Heavy toxic things with pointed hoods, less useful in the Veins than you might think, these are used mainly in raiding other lands. When wrapped around and buttoned up, everything they cover turns translucent. Complex physical movements, like most forms of attack, will make the wearer visible, at least for a moment.

Size-Control Rings

Heavy click-clacking bracelets which turn like locks or rings of code. Rapid tactile codes are needed to make use of one, and once that code is known, each ring is still is different, tuned for a particular Dwarf. Worn, usually on the left arm. Move the right hand over and quickly, and loudly, click through the code before carefully carefully carefully clicking through the size-set sequence.

When a Dead-Eyed Dwarf shrinks or grows, its not a smooth transition. Its as if they were an image and each heavy CLACK spun some fresh lens in front of them so that they seemed smaller or larger by leaps. CLACK CLACK CLACK and big, big BIG, as if they were projections, with the ‘real’ dwarf somewhere else.

It takes time and training to accustom oneself to getting bigger and smaller on the regular.

Seeing Lenses

They like these, though its questionable how useful they are. Varied masks and lenses, the most common are Light-enhancing eyes, heat-trace Snake-Pit lenses and Sonic Lenses. More rare are the special ‘Dark Vision Lenses’ which literally treat darkness as a substance.

Each Dwarf will only have one set of Lenses, if they have any, and few groups will have more than one set of each kind. They are hard to make, maintain and repair and each Dwarf makes their own.

Mouth Masks

The Dead-Eyed Dwarves don’t even use gas that much, purchasing it from the RayMen occasionally, but they like to wear the masks. Some protect from gas, some change the voice to a harsh bark, others alter voices to simulate those heard, still others provide air should the Dwarf go underwater, or into airless spaces.

Again, each Dwarf only has one set and the whole group rarely has more than one of each. Its not a systematised technology.

Combat Encounters

Morale

Morale plays no part in the decisions of the Dead-Eyed Dwarves

Everything is based on their immediate objectives. If violence is required, and they think they will win, it starts at once, without warning.

If victory becomes impossible, or if the situation changes, so that violence no longer serves, they simply stop, again, without warning, usually turning invisible and simply walking away.

If there is no way out, they fight, bitterly, to the emotionless end

Combat Tactics

Armoured; the Dwarves can weather most projectiles, and most blows.

Bright Directional Lights; these can be used to blind many Veins inhabitants. Activating then turning off the lights can be more effective than actual invisibility.

Invisibility Cloaks; if out-ranged, bottled up or boxed in, a combat team can use their invisibility to close with the enemy, or to escape if needed.

Size-Change = BIG; The Dwarves can ‘click-click-click’ up to Ogre size. This always takes an action and is loud. All of their equipment changes with them, as if it, too was being projected from somewhere else. A Dwarf might turn huge and fire ballista-sized crossbow bolts, or get close before turning massive and laying into a party from behind its lines.

Size-Change = small; mainly used for escaping should a situation turn bad, especially by accessing crawl-spaces or similar. Combining this with Invisibility makes them near-impossible to catch.

The enormous power of their techno-magical abilities, combined with their utter ruthlessness and invincible will, means the Dead-Eyed Dwarves don't need fancy 'tricks', though like many Veins cultures, though they have an expertise in Poison (to which they have a meaningful resistance), and sometimes use various forms of Gas.

Chameleon/Tarantula Cavalry

Mainly used in and around their settlements, due to the enormous costs of keeping them fed, but the Dead-Eyed Dwarves do often use ‘Cavalry’ formations; their favourites are a very chunky form of huge Tarantula, and kind of sticky lizard with some Chameleonic abilities.

They will usually change size to something smaller in order to comfortably ride these things. The combination of activating their toxic invisibility cloaks, the giant animals, and the glaring lights they carry, creates a truly bizarre appearance.

Non-Combat Encounters

No Pride, No Shame

The Dead-Eyed Dwarves don’t carry resentments around, if they beat you before, or were beaten by you, their attitude will be what it always is - relentlessly practical.

This makes conflict with them a troubling experience; they will not try violence unless they believe they will win, and they are rarely wrong.

Non-Combat Encounters

the Dead-Eyed Dwarves will pass invisibly, except for their lanterns. They seem like trudging shadows passing underneath an actinic light which glows like a willow the whisp.

Did they just walk right past?

Whatever they are doing, they are doing it. They have a purpose and if the PCs cannot help

or impede them, what do they care?

Goals of the Dead-Eyed Dwarves

[THIS NEEDS WORK BUT HERE IS THE BASIC IDEA

A simple way to do this might be for there to be three goals;

One BIG THING that the whole of local Dead-Eye Dwarf culture is currently aiming towards. You roll for this when you are generating the Veins and it remains the same throughout the Campaign.

Two –a medium scale political or large structural goal that will help them towards the MAIN THING. This can change from session to session and can differ from settlement to settlement. (But it doesn’t have to change). You can roll for this on-encounter, or during the session or just keep it from previous sessions if that make sense.

Three - a current goal for *this particular group*, the mission or thing they are currently trying to fulfil, which will lead towards the second, which will lead towards the third. You roll for this when you encounter these guys.

Do, whenever you are dealing with Dead-Eyes, just look at this list; they are doing A, to achieve B, to finally achieve C. And all you need to think about, as it is all the Dead-Eyes are thinking about, is ‘how do I achieve the next goal and make sure it connects to the main goal’. ]

They must always be working

Simple Behaviours For Encounters

Literal

They do not like metaphor. Things mean one thing. If a thing tries to mean two things then it becomes nothing.

LITERAL DOESN'T MEAN STUPID - they do not like metaphors, but they understand them. They know that you or other characters, are not being literal, and they can understand that, but they themselves will do everything they can to avoid it.

Taciturn, Concrete, Direct

Get to the point, get there now and be explicit about what it is.

Use the minimal number of words to make things clear.

Do not 'chat'. Every conversation has a clear and concise point towards which they are going.

Dead-Eye Culture

Long ago the first of them emerged from a distant primal core. He made himself. That work goes on. They believe they are improving. It is their mission to do so.

Their family trees spring up, not down. Each generation more focused and efficient than the last. This is the Ascent. Dead-Eye heredity. A machine of blood and bone, carrying them into the pre-remembered future. One of only two things in which they truly believe.

They have statistics, and the graphs all show a clear upward trend. Production, efficiency and development, all increase.

They imagine the future and the things they will build there. It belongs to them. They want it more. They understand it more. They will become what the future needs them to be. The future is a god to them. A god-above-gods. They know it to be true.

Even as the race slowly winds itself deeper and deeper into the earth, passing through fretted valves and carved abandoned chambers they have made, falling in its orbit of stone, they map their continual advance.

Each thing must be built upon another thing. A word, a deed, a thought, each must have its foundation. Arguments over the Ascent are arguments over reality itself. Without its sustaining foundation, the word becomes a gabble of sound, the deed an accident, the thought a dream, the existence a lie.

Dull

One of the most powerful, wide-ranging and transformative of all the cultures of the Veins, the Dead-Eyed Dwarves are dishwater-dull, to deal with. Utterly reliable and quite insane, they are a power second only to the Aelf-Adal, to whom they are almost immune, and with whom they enter irregular war.

Makers Of Ruin

The totality of their physical effect on the Veins of the Earth is enormous. Dead-Eyes never stop working, mining, carving, delving. They are always building, cutting, shaping, and thence always moving.

They cannot stop working, ever.

This makes a Dead-Eye city or settlement, more like the cast of a worm than a singular place. They mine and carve EVERYWHERE, continually, they do not stop to inhabit very long. A Dead-Eye settlement is like a time-worm; it’s not located in any particular place but is continually being delved, leaving the carved and developed volumes behind it, like the cast of a worm.

The Dead-Eyes therefore make the Veins more ‘ruined’ and more ‘empty’ than they would otherwise be, for an empty building can be empty in ways a cave cannot.

Dead-Eyes do still consider that they 'own' anything that they have worked on, (that they haven't formally agreed to sell or exchange), which means these vast Piranesi-ruins that plunge through the Veins are technically 'theirs'.

Neutral, Practical Evil

Dead-Eyes do not torture or psychologically destroy their slaves. Not deliberately at least. They simply kill them when they fail.

Skilled slaves can appear to rise far in Dead-Eye ownership, and will (any skill at work must be nurtured and sustained so that better work may be done). But it is not the individual that is respected. It is the work. The work passing through the alien flesh.

They do not really hate their slaves. They do not realise that they are beings at all. Only vectors for work.

They do not really hate anyone. Because they really don’t know there is anyone there to hate.

Neutral, ultra-reliable, non-bigoted, they may be the sanest (?) culture in the Veins.

They are honestly quite boring to encounter and maybe that's ok. Remember it’s not about offending them, it’s unlikely you even could offend them, it’s about getting in their way, and if you do get in their way, they will grind through you and over you with utter ruthless indifference. It’s almost like fighting golem.

Skill Is Meaning

They respect skill. But it is the skill itself they respect, which is work moving through the body, not the body or the person itself, which are just bearers of the skill.

Work Is Meaning

The only other thing they understand is work.

A body and a mind are only useful because of the work they can together do. The soul is the work passing through the flesh.

No other race grasps this. They might ask “What are the Dead-Eyes working towards? What is their plan?”

They are working to be working. Work is the plan. Work is the point.

They will never stop. They can never stop.

They will cut cities from bare stone, tear up every vein, embellish every surface, then, when there is no unworked spot or unplanned gap, when every single piece and thing has become a channel for planned creation, when even the pebbles stare up from the floor with idly-carved eyes, then they move on.

Gems mean nothing to them except that they can be cut, or have been cut.

If one loses the ability to work and if they cannot further the ascent, they simply walk into the dark. Or sit where they are, staring at nothing, waiting to starve.

if a Dead-Eye is crippled or otherwise prevented from working, they lose any will to live. They must work, they must proceed towards the goal. It is all they are. It is everything they are.

Jealous

Yes, ok, perhaps they can be a little irrational. They are still Dwarves after all. They can be jealous of craft and ownership, especially of unique objects and materials. The RayMen and their wonderous tech inspire some of this, but many ethnogroups have a little this or that which really, really, should that not truly belong to the Dwarves?

No Dreams

They do not dream, rather they experience a lucid ebony. Its possible they are not even really unconscious, just ‘shut down’. What are the Nightmare-Men going to do? Give them a spook?

Fidget Spinners

Since they literally can't stop working, they tend to have a lot of ... odd things they do when they can't physically work, like knitting. If they are waiting, they carve stones or rock where-ever they sit down, leaving tiny faces in pebbles or maps on flat slate. (Although you never actually see them 'waiting’.)

DON'T FORGET;

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https://falseparcels.bigcartel.com/

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Deep-Carbon Observatory = £30 (-£10)

Demon-Bone Sarcophagus = £20 (-£20)

Gackling Moon = £25 (-£5)

Gawain and the Green Knight = £15 (-£20)

Silent Titans = £40

Speak, False Machine = £30 (-£20)

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ALSO;

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False Machine is now available for wholesale!

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“The Map of Five-Times-Five

pjamesstuart@gmail.com (Patrick Stuart) — Fri, 13 Jun 2025 12:35:00 -0700

The paper was flayed skin. Around its borders were these words; “A map of Signs, like those which show the way to Grace or Down to Damnation, through good deeds or bad.” I studied thus and decided that the Great Signs must be the Saints, but of the lesser Signs and lines I knew not, but went in search of one who would speak to me of such, for ‘Five-Times-Five’ had gone.”

I mean how good a map do you expect to get for one tooth?

.....

In this opening part of 'Queen Mab's Palace', our Narrator, the Scribe, has arrived in the Crypt of her Palace, in the shadow of Saint Seven, the Time Saint, and fortunately, on that Saints Holy Day, meaning they arrive in the middle of a Market, and that it would be illegal to hunt and eat them, (at least within the bounds of the Market itself, and at least till the end of this Saints Day).

In attempting to learn more about the strange, dank Fairyland in which they find themselves, they (somehow) end up in position of (someone's) teeth, one of which they trade to 'Five-Times-Five' for a map of the crypt in which they now are set.

This is that map;

What we know but they do not, is that the 'Crypt' is the broken, de-powered and/or industrial sections of a gigantic space ship. If you could see ‘the crypt’ in a 3D image of the real-life ‘Queen Mab’, it would be like dark sections, occupying most of the shitty parts of the ship, the stuff around recycling, the ‘lower decks’ main cargo bay etc.

Seen like this, the ‘Crypt’ isn’t just a single blob of contiguous space, it would weave its way through and into the ‘Courts’, like a black dirty Octopus spreading tendrils everywhere.

The division between the ‘Crypt’ and the ‘Courts’ is as much social, political and religious, as it is material and practical. The ‘Crypt’ is dark, often wet, full of naked industrial machinery, often hot, or maybe far too cold. Its population are the ‘Dwellers’ a peasant/untouchable class.

To make some sense of this, consider a Medieval Map like the Hereford ‘Mappa Mundi’, the religious centrality of things is important. Here is a medieval map of the whole world;

As you can see, the whole world is represented. In the middle is Jerusalem, the holy city, and below it is the Mediterranean. I think the UK is bottom left.

The thing in the middle of the Crypt Map is the Court of Melinoe, Queen of the Underworld and beloved by all who Dwell Below.

The Flow

The ‘Flow’ is anything the Courts (above) flush or throw away. This stuff enters pipes, (praise the pipes), unless its isolated and trapped, in which case the Gongfarmers go get it.

Then it flows down the pipes, which merge like the streams leading to a river. All joining together. Then these streams meet at a Saint.

There are Seven Saints, as you know, and these are arranged on the map, each at the centre of their own drainage network.

Finding Your Way in the Crypt

What’s on the map has absolutely no real relationship to actual distances, but does have a good rough representation of relationships, especially the Flow. (The Flow is sacred).

How you might verbally describe a location is based on the Saint, first, then the direction uses the closest other saints as compass points, to tell which way someone is meant to orientate.

The spaces between the ‘flows’ are deserts, unusually dry and sometimes warm. The more ‘flow’ there is, the more likely it is to be wet, and perhaps cold, until you get real close to the Saint the flow is flowing to, when it may warm up again. There are also more people and stuf happening generally ‘downflow’ (which may be dangerous).

‘Five Turns Sixwards of Five’ is a pretty simple instruction for someone around Saint Five; just turn ‘Sixwards’ (people nearby will probably have a good general idea of which direction ‘Five’ is), and then take five major turns in that direction.

In ‘reality’ any guidance would be way more full of oddness and cryptic stuff that only makes sense when you do it, when you already know about it or just doesn’t make sense. Like;

’when five red gates do pass,
Courtwards of the merry lass,
Venomwards of Young do mark your measure,
Riddles be sung and drips be treasure’

What the fuck does this even mean? Presumably five rusted (red) gates or portals, then moving ‘Courtwards’, so usually upflow of ‘the merry lass’, whatever the fuck that is, maybe it makes sense when you get there. Then Venomwards (direction of saint Six), of ‘Young’ (Saint five), then riddles be sung, so maybe there is something stopping you, like one of the Pythians Sons (an insane uplifted automatic door), and then ‘drips be treasure’, its really dry and you will need to conserve liquids? But you get the general vibe.

.......................

To explain a little more about the Crypt and the Saints, here is a fragment from one of the several appendicies of 'Queen Mab's Palace' where one of the Endothermic Knights describes the Seven Saints of the Crypt

SAINT ONE - THE RAIN SAINT

"Whose day is called ‘Rainsday’ and who hangs upright in a mighty vault. The Market lies beneath, where the dribs of flow trickle down the great saints side and drip a soft pattering rain. Any drop may be the Vile Flow, or the Pure, and the Many turn upwards, bare their tongues, and risk the Vile that they might taste a Pure Tear of the Rain Saint.

SAINT TWO - THE CHAIN SAINT

The second Saint is mighty, though He sleeps. He is the Chain Saint and Chainsday his day. The pipes of the Flow are fed and laced in below the holy carapace. Flakes of this are treasured. Mab herself is pleased by their colour. (You must never cut or strike them from His shell, for this is Heresy most Foul.) The Market is atop his back and each great chain around him has a small shrine at its base, past which the people climb.

SAINT THREE - THE PILGRIM SAINT

The third is the Pilgrim Saint, for the many which attend him. He is a saint-vertical and clings to His shroud of iron as a maggot clings to flesh. Blessed with a ripeness and roundness, yet also a longness and a greatness of legs, and with Hairs, and the sides of the Saint are marked with gods-eyes. Huge seeds float out from His holy Pores and gust about. They are of worth if caught, and his shed Hairs are of facility. On Pilgrimsday the Market is before his eyes, on a great bridge which crosses a rumbling and jumbling torrent of the impure flow. This he gnaws and makes into bricks of safe, pure flow-stuff which pile beneath him in a spoil, amongst which scavengers reign. Above them, on the bridges edge, Hydraulic Monks meditate by looking into his faceted black eyes.

SAINT FOUR - THE SAINT OF BLOOD

The fourth Saint is the Saint of Blood and stirs, half-sleeping in a chamber of strange waters. Soft and tasty, glossy, pulsing black, fat with blood, with a great ringed maw of infinite teeth which pulses open and closed as if dreaming of a feast. He is like a great raw steak. Rafts set out into the Blood Saints lake and carve off hunks of His rich meat. Thrice-purified blood-pipers drain thick life from within, selling it cold or warmed, by pint and vat. The Bloodsday market lies around the blood-lake rim. ‘Tis deadly land. We walk the circle round to harrow Crimes, but ill is often done, for the market shares a border with the unlit dark and the fat iron reek makes it easy to hide murder thereabout.

SAINT FIVE - THE YOUNG SAINT

The fifth day is Birthsday and is the Young Saints time. They are propped up as if sitting, with an archway set about them. Less pipemartyred than others, the Young Saint supports Theyself. The Young Saint glows a cool, bright, moonlike light. This blessed luminescence enlightens all who see it. They wriggle freely and are soothed and polished, and anointed with oils, by Hydraulic Monks, collecting Orbs of luminescent liquid pearl which hold the sacred gleam of Their dripping innards. They love the Young Saint, as do we all!

SAINT SIX - THE VENOM SAINT

The Sixth day is Venomsday and their market is set within the circle of the Saints body with great limbs spread about like the spars of wrecked ships, and we walk along the Saints flank, keeping watch. This very deadly and wonderous saint is curled in a great circle, alike unto a centipede with his martyr-pipes set into his back. The Venom Saint is wrathful and half-sleeps. He dreams of violence! Sacred lances pierce its small mind. When He twitches, the Monks cry out “more power!” and rush to huge wheels which they run inside, which thereby spark the lance of mercy. It is a safe day for all must pass the Toxic Gates, where the Monks collect the Holy Venom, and if the Saint smells blood on any man, He begins to twitch and wake, therefore none dare blood to spill. Even the Drinker of Poison cannot transform all and so deadly poison drips continually from his forcipules. At times toxic fumes mist up from the venom wells and drift across the market.”

SAINT SEVEN - THE TIME SAINT

Here is where we begin, and if you wish to know more, you must wait till the book is ready.

Go Nuts in Veins of the Earth

pjamesstuart@gmail.com (Patrick Stuart) — Fri, 6 Jun 2025 06:50:00 -0700

A Nut is an hospitable object - a surprisingly useful thing for those who make their concourse in the Veins of the Earth.

First; it keeps for a long time, is singular, storable, divisible and portable.

Second it comes from Above; few nuts grow below, (except perhaps for the equally-distant Isles of the Imprisoned Moon), and therefore it is rare.

Third; it’s hard to adulterate a nut. They can be cursed or poisoned, but that takes a meaningful investment of rare resources. A nut has good security to it.

Fourth; it is a neat compressed source of calories. Not so much as to place a painful debt on the receiver, but more than, for instance, a seed.

Fifth, finally and most important; it is a thing never before seen and which will never be seen again, lending it a certain poetic aspect in the cultures of the Veins, where secrets are adored.

Clara Peeters, Still life with nuts candy and flowers 1611

Rituals of Greeting

This makes a nut a quite generous (but not too generous) gift with which to open negotiations.

Such is the theatre of the Nut; two groups meet beneath the earth. First they scent or hear each other, then see each others light. Each makes signs of peace and the factions approach slowly until the boundary of their lamplight (roughly 30ft) meets.

One from each company is sent forth, each standing directly beneath the lamp-light of the other, proving no ill intent on either side.

Then the lamps are brought together, making a pool of shared and intensified light where the leaders of each group may sit.

Here comes the nut, (if you have one).

"Allow me please, to give a thing never before seen, and once seen, never to be seen again."

Here one displays the nut upon an open palm. The recipient gently takes the nut. Rolls it between their palms, smells it, examines its texture with hand and eye.

"Truly beautiful, a rare and unique gift."

Then the recipient may break open the nut themselves, or hand it over to one stronger of their own side, (which means something, everything said and done in the nut ceremony means something), who breaks it open for them.

The 'secret' is revealed. All present admire this heretofore unseen thing.

The recipient consumes the nut.

It’s a handshake, but a firm one. Those in poverty might offer, at least, a seed. The wealthy might offer meat, (but to offer too much would be to create a debt, almost an aggressive act). An Aelf-Adal Lord might offer a terrifyingly expensive, unique and impractical gift, this is an act of chaotic and charismatic dominance, which creates a link of fealty. Of course you cannot say “no”. A Knotsman might offer exactly what you need, with no immediate price. This is a trap and an attack on you which it may be hard to resist.

A Nut is a pleasingly minor but substantial, yet elegant, gift. It’s hard not to negotiate reasonably and in good faith with someone who has presented you with a nut.

Corporatism and Hospitality In Veins Of The Earth

The Veins could not exist and if they did you certainly could not easily 'adventure' through them.

Therefore, in the imagined world, the small cultures of the Veins; tribes, villages and pilgrims, are calmer and more corporate than many of their real-world equivalents might have been. Here are some examples of how this works in play and both diegetic and game-design reasons why this is so.

Broad Non-Aggression

It’s a war of all against all but not a lawless war of all against all.

There are 'Civilisations' in the volumes, and though their grip is tenuous and vague, it becomes more vital the slighter it becomes. The signs and symbols of power mean less, the closer to its centre one is. Out in the margins, where the power may or may not exist, its signs, symbols and promises become much more important. Exactly which Lord is everyone in fealty too, and which Coagulation do they serve?

People really do not like or want chaos or disorder. It makes it hard to live.

So there are 'Civilised' people who exist largely or nominally under the 'protection' of say a City or a Group, like perhaps they have a Knotsman Contract, and above them perhaps an Aelf-Adal Terror-Lord who rules maybe thousands of nearly-impenetrable kilometres away.

Let’s say the PCs Murder-Hobo a community, take everything they have, then roll into the next Coagulation, or into a Pilgrim People.

These new-encountered people will almost certainly know exactly what the PCs have done. Resources don't come from anywhere and they will recognise whatever has been taken. They were probably well aware of the Group the PCs murderised. They may have even been in conflict with the same group at points.

They will happily trade for these resources, (keeping a close eye and guard on the PCs this whole time). That's just being practical. If there is a real 'evil' in the Veins, it is; wasting resources.

Nevertheless, word will get back. Via Bat and trader, by psychic dream-signal or forgotten hypertechnology, first one group, then another, will discover the PCs reputation. Word will get back to the City, to the Lord, and the Lord must have Order, of a sort, in their realm.

It’s a war of all against all but it can never be allowed to blossom into chaos. There must be some form of retribution, recompense, penance, punishment or service.

The reach of the Lord is long, slow and inconsistent, but memories last down here and nothing the PCs do will be forgotten. And if the Lord is an Aelf-Adal, then their reach pierces darkness, flesh and stone. There is no escape, ever, anywhere.

Hospitality

“I let you share my light.”

No-one has any duty to keep you alive or give you resources.

However, if a deal is to be made, they should at least offer you an acorn of something drinkable, a few seeds worth of food, some light and warmth, at least until you have talked things out.

Of course you will be expected to return this in kind, even if an agreement is not reached.

In 'ideal' circumstances this leads to a cycle of functional giving, starting with letting someone into your circle of light, and ending with a handshake deal for resource exchange.

Even if things don't work out, its considered civilised to give minor gifts equivalent to the cost of the negotiation before you nope out of there.

Just leaving with no exchange at all, really fucks up your reputation.

Equivalent Exchange

If you stay with a Tribe, Coagulation or Group, for a period, benefitting from their light, their warmth, their food and presumably their ears listening for you in the dark, it’s a nearly iron law that you exchange with them resources at least equivalent to the cost of keeping you.

This can lead to different groups, say a Tribe of Once-Men and the travel caravan of a RayMan trader, occupying different sides of a river or cavern, their lights kept separate with a measurable stretch of darkness between.

They are not dicking each other over, just being very very careful about not implying any obligation or debt between them. It’s a way of keeping the peace.

Likewise, if one of these groups is attacked in the night, the other may refuse to intervene, and this would not necessarily be taken as an insult or aggressive action. Intervening in someone else’s battle creates a debt and that debt may be hard to carry.

Waiting for a group to nearly-win a fight, then charging in to help them finish it off, will not be taken as a positive helpful act. They had nearly won anyway and your intervention has created a debt they cannot deny but do not wish to suffer. Assume malicious compliance hereafter.

Game Design Terms

In terms of actually gaming this means Veins populations are actually more 'corporate' minded than many actual populations encountered during, for example, the European Age of Exploration.

A main problem for a Pith-Helmeted European explorer, apart from the environment and massive cultural differences, is simply the number of tribes you have to deal with. Each of these groups will have its own politics, its own relationships with adjacent groups, its own leaders, mood, attitude to foreigners etc etc. Thats twenty, thirty, fifty individual encounters with fifty different tribes with essentially a random generation engine whirring in the background each time, and you (the explorer) can't afford to be taxed that much with each group, and you can't afford for things to spiral out of control even once, or you die.

Empires solve this problem by simply murdering anyone who disagrees and telling whoever is left that yes actually you all live under the same rules now and no you don't get to take individual taxes or even fight each other without permission.

It was easier for a European traveller to move across the whole expanse of Eurasian Islam, (provided they could match the behavioural codes), or across the gigantic steppe empire of the Khans (provided they had the right disc from the Great Khan), than across much of Central Africa (fifty tribes again).

So the Veins are a 'bit' more 'Imperial' than they could reasonably be expected to be. Simply to make it possible to move through them. Though, there are vast areas of 'wilderness stone' where who knows what might happen, as well as disputed areas, actions and polities, reaving borderlands, unexpectedly desperate or shifty populations, general monsters, Olm, and god knows what else.

'Adventure' like 'Exploration' fundamentally requires a boundary between the more-known, more organised, and the lawless unknown. To 'Adventure' is to move back and forth across these zones, usually from a place of law and organisation, into a place with no, or unrecognised law. Resources are gathered from the margins, but they only become resources if there is somewhere else you can take them where their value is renegotiated.

A Review of 'Memoirs of Hadrian'

pjamesstuart@gmail.com (Patrick Stuart) — Wed, 21 May 2025 04:52:00 -0700

(My friend and I did a multi-hour podcast on this. You can listen to it here.)

A slender and capacious book, like the shadow of a flame on sunlit marble.

In the years around the Second World War, Margurite Yourcenar found, through study, obsession and spiritual refinement, a method to travel through time. Thus the book; the mirror of a shadowless man and his true love, and of an Empire, and an Age.

Yourcenars Odyssey

The final part of 'Memoirs of Hadrian', contains a compressed chapter of notes Yourcenar made about, and during, its creation. This alone would make a grand saga, (which is probably why she included it). Here are some very extremely compressed and cut-down highlights;

1924 - Yourcenar concieves of 'Memoirs', gets some way along, then burns the pages as the work isn't good enough. (The first of many such forgettings).

Next- Flauberts quote is discovered;

"The melancholy of the antique world seems to me more profound than that of the moderns, all of whom more or less imply that beyond the dark void lies immortality. But for the ancients that “black hole” was infinity itself; their dreams loom and vanish against a background of immutable ebony. No crying out, no convulsions — nothing but the fixity of a pensive gaze. With the gods gone, and Christ not yet come, there was a unique moment, from Cicero to Marcus Aurelius, when man stood alone."

Probably not entirely true but sounds cool as shit. Its curious that Flaubert is also someone who re-wrote the same book many many times. He re-did his 'Temptation of St Anthony' before every other major work.

1934 to 1936 - Yourcenar re-starts and abandons the project again and again. Only one sentance was retained of the 1934 edition.

1939 - Project abandoned. Despair. Off to America.

1947 - In the U.S.. Burn the notes again.

1948 - a trunk of old possessions and letters arrives from Switzerland. While going through them, Yourcenar runs into a letter; "My dear Mark...." Who is this 'Mark'? Wait! its the Hadrian book!. Re-commits to writing it (again).

1848 to 1951 - re-making the book, but also writing vast sections every night 'in almost automatic fashion' and

"the result of those long self-induced visions whereby I could place myself intimately within another period of time. The merest word, the slightest gesture, the least perceptible implications were noted down; scenes now summed up in a line or two, in the book as it is, passed before me in the fullest detail, and as if in slow motion. Added all together, these accounts would have afforded material for a volume of several thousand pages, but each morning I would burn all the work of the night before."

1951 - 'Memoirs of Hadrian' are published.

There is much more, in detail, depth, and philosophy, than I have sketched out above. The book that finally was born, is a crystallisation, combination and perhaps last cannibal embryo, of a book that was being researched, written, burnt, re-written, burnt a bit more, forgotten, remembered, re-made, for about 26 years. Consequential years; 1924 to 1951, from the death of an old world through utter catastrophe, to the birth of a new. Triply consequential for Yourcenar; she changed a lot.

This might be what makes 'Memoirs' feel more like a mirror into a living time, and a living soul, than any other book I have read. I feel like I met Hadrian.

(And yes Yourcenar may well have, accidentally or deliberately, crossed paths with those other pre-and-during WWII female historical writers; Rebecca West, (Black Lamb, Grey Falcon), and Naomi Mitcheson, (Corn King and Spring Queen), who were also writing increadible defining works about the same time - what the _hell_ was going on with women in the pre-war world? Was there really such an explosion of talent as it seems to me?)

Hadrian

He is the flame and the shadow of the flame; a god of 'civitas', a bringer of peace, defender of civilisation, reformer, liberaliser, a man who set a boundary to eternal expansion. A compelling, brilliant, charming, dark and self-deceiving man.

So much of what happens around him takes place in a gilded shadow which is in part, simply the darkness of the Ancient world, particularly its sexual politics, and is in much of the rest, the necessary darkness of Imperial power. A truly decent kind, compassionate and forgiving man would not have survived for long as Emperor. You must be half a cunt to do the job.

Really, if you are going to be ruled by a sexually predatory, occasionally mass-murdering (when necessary), assassinating, (minimally, probably), occasionally vindictive, (now and then), terrifying, (in the most gentle, kind and _civilised_ way), highly-intelligent, hyper-manipulative, high-arts loving general (for a Roman Emperor) peacenick, you would really want to be ruled by Hadrian. (At least by this Hadrian). He is sane, rational, reasonable, almost never makes political mistakes, reforms and repairs things everywhere he goes, fixes systems, ensures stability and growth, builds cities, loves poetry and the arts, governs without terror; he is a chill Napoleon.

And yet. The most beautiful darkness wavers around him.

He is probably lying to us about at least some things; either as a consequence of lying to himself, or a more simple deception. (Yourcenar claims in her notes that there were moments when she 'allowed' the Emperor to lie to her.) A few necessary assassinations here and there, perhaps some intrigue with the late Emperors wife.

It would be wonderful and frightening to meet Hadrian in person, here is a fascinating man who focuses on you utterly, disarms you, charms you, subtly excavates you, makes what use of you he can, gently amends you problems and sets you aside, He has the legal and material power to kill you and everyone you love, and everyone they love, and honestly, you can burn the city too.

He swims in liquid power like a shark in saltwater, but, even for this sensitive and self-aware genius, that power alters him and warps his world, his reality, in ways even the master cannot see.

Its the subtlety of his mind that attracts. A different story would be a more classic, punchy, and obvious fall into decadence, then rage and paranoia, of a man made, (or who made himself), Emperor of the known world. What we get with Hadrian is not that, but an alteration, a shift, as if through a lens warping. The subtlety of the mind experiencing that shift, and the fact that he may be unconsciously and directly lying both to us, but first, himself, is what makes it tantalising. Because, if he were sitting next to you, Hadrian could explain and excuse everything he does, and you would believe him.

What is Reality to such a mind, on such a throne?

The Murder of a Hawk

T.H. White, the writer of 'The Sword in the Stone', wrote a book in which he tries to raise and train an hawk in the medieval style, using the methods of a medieval hawk-raising manual.

Its something of a horror story. He has no metis, no actual practical experience of the animal he is trying to train, and day by day, piece by piece, things go horribly, utterly wrong - he accidentally destroys the animal behaviourally, creating something that cannot be used for hawking, but that cannot perhaps live in the wild. Even his constant petting of the hawks head rubs away its natural feather-oil and produces an unpleasant mess. The end is a screeching prisoner that must be murdered or kept forever.

The core of the book, and of Hadrians story, is his relationship with Antinous, a greek, boy really, who he meets on the cusp of manhood, and essentially takes, keeping him until Antinous commits suicide before the age of 20.

Hadraian’s relationship with Antinous, the love of his life, reminded me a lot of this book by T.H.White

This gets more and more discomforting the more you think about the actual ages of Antinous and Hadrian when they first met, and about the fact that this is Hadrians One True Love.

Truly, this exquisitely controlled and comprehensive man, allows no chaos in his life, almost never loses control, except for this one soul, and the event of his death. Here, for the first, last and only time, Hadrian utterly loses his shit, and loses himself.

Being the Emperor Hadrian, his vast exhalation of grief also takes the form of building an entirely new city named after his beloved where his beloved will be worshipped as a god, creating a Cult of Antinous, a new religion, or aspect of one, in which the deified boy will be worshipped across the empire, ordering statues and presumably paintings of Antinous, making more statues of Antinous, making more statues of Antinous and having those hollowed out so they can be carried around with Hadrian and set up wherever he currently is (the guy travels a lot). Also; more statues of Antinous, maybe some songs and a poem cycle as well.

there’s always room for another statue of Antinous

What is love then? If the vastness of grief is a true indicator of the depth of love, then Hadrian was certainly in love.

Still, he destroyed that boy. Picked up around 12 or 13 by the ruler of the known world. Carted around with him. Adored. Not that smart, but with a near-religious devotion to his Emperor. His final suicide comes in the form of a magical ritual which, the story suggests, was meant to be a gift of life to the man-god Hadrian.

Antinous had no way out and perhaps couldn't imagine or conceive of wanting a way out. The psychological, political, intellectual and even spiritual, (Hadrian is a god*), domination of the Emperor is so total that he warps reality around him. But it seems not everything can be so warped without breaking. Even if Antinous is not precisely a victim in the 21C Western sense, he is certainly a sacrifice.

(Hadrian; “Of course I’m not actually a god.. (I kind of am though).

Such men we cannot strongly judge, (though I just did). The gap between us, in power, psychology and distant time, is just too great.

But aren't those gaps exactly what Yourcanar was trying to leap across? She worked 25 years to put is in that room. Why then, if not to judge? Perhaps simply to see, to know. An advanced, expansive, slave-empire, bound, (which may have killed it), a high culture of subtlety and luxury described.

Just as the Emperor can never know what a slave knows every day, (Hadrian himself tells us this), there must be sights that can only be seen from the pinnacle.

(The next time someone asks me for my religious/philosophical affiliation I will just say that 'my dreams loom and vanish against a background of immutable ebony').

A Review of MALUSTRIOUS BROOD

pjamesstuart@gmail.com (Patrick Stuart) — Mon, 12 May 2025 14:39:00 -0700

A book of monsters, of visions. A 102-page pure art book with “12 iconic monsters from the pastiche swirl of d&d's fantasy pool ….

“Gnome, Nereid, Salamander, Sylph. Ogres, Hags, Dragons, Basilisk/Cockatrice, Orc, Manticore. And two Very Much d&d , the Catawhere and Eye Tyrant.";

Art, and Expressionist art in particular, is hard to review and think about, so instead I forced the artist to do that, by interviewing them! What follows is a pretty wide-ranging interview gathered roughly into the following general subjects;

Texture
Colour
Composition
Form
Orcs
Big Ideas

There are lots of close-ups of fragments of the pages, used when talking about specific elements, and because I didn’t want to try replicating any of the full illustrations other than those already included in the promotional text. I wouldn’t want you to take the impression of these fragments as the impression of the works as a whole, let along when held in hand, which creates a much stronger impression.

Texture

pjamesstuart; ok so a huge amount of the book seems to be its textures. Are these different on every single page?

SCRAP_ULTRA_WORLD; Yup different on every page, each was hand layed (with the cut out images on top) out on a piece of real estate sign for ease in scanning. This actually turned out to have some problems later because I didn't cut the real estate signage to consistent size.

pjamesstuart; Did you have any particular plan for these?

SCRAP_ULTRA_WORLD; That each monster section should have its own unique background texture. That's about it

this is printed on the paper (my photo isn’t very good)

pjamesstuart; They seem to be made up of complex layers of actual physical materials treated in various ways, and maybe of some deliberate use of digital scanning errors? What else went into these?

SCRAP_ULTRA_WORLD; I'm not sure about deliberate scanning errors..oh wait no yeah the Catawhere has some . Oh and the Orc and Eye Tyrant chapter heads.

Done by dragging or moving an image while it was mid-scan.

One of the Catawhere was done with photocopy fuckery.

Some of the process for the textures involved digging through a box of ink and texture experiments and seeing if anything was suitable.

Or just messing around with whatever paints/oils/spraypaint/ink/paper I had lying around and then letting it dry outside, and then sometimes using it but often reworking it or not using it at all.

90% blind experimentation and then selective curating the results.

Though wanting each chapter texture to have its own feel meant sometimes I went "okay no more ink shennigans , going to have find something else"

John Blanche once said that with a really good picture,
even the smallest part of it, when examined in isolation,
should be interesting to look at, which I think is true of this book.

pjamesstuart; How did working on the textures intermix with choosing and making the figures? Did it happen in parallel? In Sequence?

SCRAP_ULTRA_WORLD; For the vast bulk of it the pictures were done first, then textures created and pictures arranged as the textures were done.

However the decision to create a chapter head meant needing to create a extra page (as to keep the page count divisible by 4) , and sometimes that meant creating more drawings for the extra texture page.

pjamesstuart; Whats a 'standard' (if any could be), workflow for making a page of Malustrious Brood?

SCRAP_ULTRA_WORLD; Um.. once the drawings were "done" (i.e I thought I had roughly enough be doing a crude layout) , I'd dig through my old projects and experiments and see if there was something. If nothing , try and think of something I hadn't messed around before with and if it felt appropriate to the vibe of the creature.

Then once this , sometimes considerably back and forth, process had created a use texture page , I'd then try and arrange some of the drawings on it.

This usually resulted in frustrations that I was going to have to cover up the most interesting bits of the texture, as none of the texture pages were created with that much considerable with where anything would go on top.

Sometimes the drawings would get swapped between pages as space and overall context demanded. I tried to get all the loose sketches together and also give the more developed ones space to breathe (often giving them their own page just for them)

So yeah it was a whole process of curation , reacting and adjustment , to get the drawings to work with each textured page, there wasn't just in the way of a deliberate plan.

The Orc probably had the most planning as I wanted to have them "echo" through the background of subsquent Orc pages by photocopying and repeating some of the drawings (sometimes on transparency film).

Plus trying to get a "very angry school boy creating a scrap book of murderers , weapons and world war 2 facts" feel to it

A quick video of the boards;

SCRAP_ULTRA_WORLD; Incomplete list of things used in the textures:

Rags, stained rags, old singlet, old t-shirt, design on old singlet blown up with photocopier to giant size, lace, glue, grease, baking soda, rust, blood, ink , spraypaint, butchers paper, vinegar, pva, spray varnish , water colour, ohp transparency , sewing diagrams, house paint, translucent paper, real estate sign imagery

Colour

pjamesstuart; There are many colours in this book. Did you have any kind of conscious plan or intended method, or did you just do everything based on VIBES?

Many forms are almost like beer tankards filled with a thick cloudy brew slowly mixing into something else

SCRAP_ULTRA_WORLD; Nothing super conscious , other than seeking a more diverse palette as the project went on

If I had planned it out more , I would of made more an effort to have the Nerieds be more greens and the Sylphs be more blues. As it was they ended up blending into each a little too much.

As a fix for that I post scan adjusted the Nereids colours a little and arranged the elementals by the name <Element> Elemental <Name> so the Sylph and Nereid wouldn't be right beside each other.

pjamesstuart; Most creature-types have a main dominant colour that appears in a variety of forms, and maybe one or two other spot colours. What tells you what colours something is meant to be?

SCRAP_ULTRA_WORLD; Again just vibes. Some got a bigger range of colour experimentation (ogres) , others arguable got too little (Salamander, Gnome) . I think the monsters that already had a strong consistent design, that I myself wanted to redefine (Orcs, the Elemental Spirits) , I ended up sticking to a narrow focused palette , while the ones were it was already wide open (dragon , ogre) I just went with whatever. I'm not 100% sure why though

(Eye Tyrant might be an exception here)

Basilisks got a lot sickly colours , and I wanted to really have some jaundice yellows, bruise purples , infected pus greens in there. Anything to make this thing look dangerous.

closeup of a highly polychromatic beast

pjamesstuart; What did you use? I see pens like biros, felt tip pens? Some things look like watercolours but could be created some other way.

SCRAP_ULTRA_WORLD; Yeah good old biros, felt tip pens of a variety of quality , ethanol to bleed inks out, water colours, water colour crayons, regular crayons, twink, charcoal , ink , acrylic paint, house paint, pencils, photocopy toner

pjamesstuart; Some colouring follows the shading a form might have, other colouring is more like you poured thick liquid into a glass the shape of the creature and shined light through it. Other is like lines of energy within a beast. Do you know when you start out what you are going to do?

SCRAP_ULTRA_WORLD; I think I always start with the "line" and add lines until it's done or it needs something else , then hit it with colour using whatever medium.

Then it's a case of adding more colour or line to fix whatever just went wrong and it either working out or turning shit , in which case start again.

I heavily favour mediums that can put on top of each in any order , as I don't think I've ever successfully done the old "little pencil, colour blocking, final inking" method. I've tried it , but it looks so lobotomized when I do it, I've all but abandoned that approach.

Crayons are a pain as you can't really go over them that well but can successfully go pretty much anything else, and allow colours that lack innate opacity to go over darks.

Back to the question: I have "hunches" and "itches" but every step is a surprise and something like a friendly but heated argument .

I've got a maxim about "an Okay drawing is useless" , so if a drawing feels like it's "okay" (as in I can reliably create something with that amount of Good) , I'll keep experimenting until it hits a "high tide mark" or otherwise rare quality I'm not sure I could get again. (this might not mean it's a final drawing, it might instead be saved to serve as guidance )

Or it's completely destroyed , but valuable data and inspiration is generated.

I think of this as sacrifices to Tiamat; and sometimes you just lose a drawing that seemed to have potential , and sometimes you get a happy accident.

Speaking of which:

pjamesstuart; This isn't really about colour but; some places monster faces & other things are scratched through, or blasted over, so it feels like the page was a screen and was glitching or a photograph that was overexposed. How did you do this?

SCRAP_ULTRA_WORLD; This is the whole "keeping going until the drawing is destroyed or brilliant" thing. Sometimes the page actually rips , requiring sticking additional paper underneath. Actually sometimes something on the other side ends perfectly fitting and getting used. The eye on the Antiphoenix from Veins of The Earth is actually a mark on a piece of paper that was beneath the initial drawing . It was revealed when a hole was torn from working on too wet ink and then permanent attached to the drawing when it perfectly fit.

This is Tiamat throwing me the occasional blessing for everything in art and life that I've inadvertently sacrificed on her altar .

One of the Manticore's has a similar effect , but I think it was me scrapping back layered crayon to rework something and the underlying effect was really good so kept it. I think I added a pupil though?

Composition

pjamesstuart; Thanks for the responses! Next I want to talk about COMPOSITION, (after that will be 'form' which will be the last one).

Do you know there is a kind of natural curl to a lot of your single-page compositions? Especially for the more lithe & loopy monsters? I will try to make a little image of this.

It begins at the top left, curves into the centre or lower right, forms a pool there and spirals out into the lower left again, often as a tail or limb

Other compositions are 'blot' or 'block' monsters which are placed like they were poured into the belly of the page and then slowly spread out.

The 'loop' in particular reminds me a lot of the Z shape Frazetta often worked into his painting.

Did you have any particular plan for composing the one page and two page images, or any effect you wanted to achieve?

What was the methodology?

How do you know if a page 'looks wrong' or 'feels wrong'?

SCRAP_ULTRA_WORLD; HUH

I did not know there was this SECRET SIGIL

Out of all the haphazard intuitive processes that went into this book, composition is probably the most haphazard of all.

The considerations are mainly so each drawing gets enough "space" and doesn't too greatly mirror or be similar to the surrounding drawings (including any on a opposite page)

EXCEPT when its a collection of "concept" drawings, where I thought it grand to show or suggestion the developing of the process and the various alternative possibilities that rapidly fire off in my brain

Other considerations is to with the gutter and place the monsters, were possible , so they don't look like they are running away into the gutter (so heads to the edge, tails to the spine)

Form

pjamesstuart; Edge Detection - does your brain have this? Because the vision of the world one often gets from your work is that things often just don't have boundaries, but kind of vibrate like quantum particles, or blur like a time-lapse map of the borders of eastern europe. I mean, are edges a thing in your reality?

SCRAP_ULTRA_WORLD; Yes But No. Like there's this deep deep deep contrary instinct in me that always seeks out contradictions, exceptions, inconsistencies, stray threads and just Points Them Out. I think it manifests in art (somewhat) by a resistance to going "yes this definitely the Limits Of This Things" , and a desire to portray the buzzing border of potential movement, past movement, spiritual intensity, failure of perception, stink, noise, unclarity

So it's like Post Modernism going "look at all these things obstacles that prevent us from seeing truth"

but unlike.. whatever strain of post-modernism is that kinda goes "so..guess truth isn't really thing", instead we must see The Noise as well as The Signal

like understanding the limits of truth should make us appreciate the effort for truth and not dismiss it to seek solipsism

pjamesstuart; dang you actually have a philosophy behind this

SCRAP_ULTRA_WORLD; It's more I getting philosophy from it if I look at it and think about Why, but ultimately I do it because it's my nature

pjamesstuart; Is a body for you just a carrier for eyes and teeth? The toothed grin is like a signature for your work. (Also, did you know in miniature painting some painters emphasise 'eyes and teeth', because they seem to play some dominant role in helping people perceive and organise a facial form?) If you have EYES plus TEETH, what is the third or fourth thing you need to show what something is?

SCRAP_ULTRA_WORLD; I think they are just really good at giving a coherence to something incoherent and because my drawings risk/are total incoherent explosion , slapping the teeth and eyes in there really gives it a hook.

The spine or jawline tends to be the first thing I draw

pjamesstuart; Do you study anatomy? Some images strongly suggest yes, but it is as if there are two spirits fighting inside much of your art, one trying to locate actual things in space, with muscles and gravity and skin and stuff, and the other being more like 'wait what if there was none of that and things were basically energy and not 'things' at all'

SCRAP_ULTRA_WORLD; yeah but badly? I'm terrible at drawing things in front of me , I don't have very clear "mental images" , drawing almost feels like sculpting with twitchy ambulatory wire to me? Like the pen starts making marks and I battle with it to get it to do something I want.

But spending frustrating time trying to draw accurate from a reference does help inform this "sculpting". To that end , I've attended life drawing books, have several (Probably over half a dozen?) anatomy books (human and other animals) and spend time and effort learning about the muscles and the bones etc.

I also find it really interesting because I Too Have Bones and Muscles and The Desire To Improve Them.

But I think it's know how impactful departure from plausibility is when it comes to monster design

pjamesstuart; Do you have preferred shapes? (A slight teardrop shape seems to come up quite a bit in a lot of your art.)

SCRAP_ULTRA_WORLD; I try and avoid falling into patterns too much , but the most consistent shapes that show up when I start scribbling are:

Long shapes like snakes, eels, sharks

Beaked shapes or triangle head shapes

Ambiguous quadrupeds

Hunched over big limbed bipeds

pjamesstuart; Do you know when a form is right? How do you know?

SCRAP_ULTRA_WORLD; It's like.. when someone tells a joke and the when you realize that you think its funny? In fact laughter is sometimes my reaction to when I get a form or expression right. There's a sense of both surprise and recognition ?

When a form is wrong.. it's either because it's obvious and absent of energy (something can be obvious and Have Energy though) or like something about it interferes with its own dynamic and needs The Energy Bolded or The Blockage Destroyed . Or I guess it's just gone completely wrong and its not even recognizable.

Orcs

pjamesstuart — How on earth did you come up with so many good pictures of fucking Salamanders? 😂 There's like three bangers in a row here.

SCRAP_ULTRA_WORLD — Lizards is a good shape

Think the palette there is a bit monotonous but the expressions are really good

Conceptual I'm most pleased with my riff on the orc

pjamesstuart — Tell me what you like about the Orc concept you came up with.

SCRAP_ULTRA_WORLD — That it riffs off the old use of it meaning "spirits of the dead", Tolkiens use of as the spectre of industrialized warfare, and dehumanization monstrosity cycles.

Plus having a fancy angle in suggesting they are a memetic virus that co-opts the " immunisation" response ( the fear of the enemy becoming or being orcs is a vector for infection as people justify their increase in brutality and ruthlessness)

But also can work as a pure game utility "it's okay to kill these guys because they are distilled war criminals"

Visually I tried to get some of the Orcs to have this ambiguous mix of panic, hate , anger, fear

While others are pure hell bastards

But yeah one of the nasty things about war propaganda that is tapping into the legimately fear that any human population has a capacity for brutality, and that brutality is easily expressed on outsider groups

And by exploiting that fear , it then feeds and utilizies that capacity

To be honest my original motivation for putting design notes in between the chapters was do a bit how fucking weird dominant voices solution to "fixing" orcs was to lean hard for into "we are 1000% here all our fans making their sexy noble savage baddie OC 😍😍😍"

But nah didn't think it was worth the page space doing a The Kids Aren't Right bit

The only bit I left in like that was mentioning the extra limbs on the Catawhere

I also had a bit about manticores getting wings from Gygaxian shenanigans idk just seems like filler

Ditto some early waffle about the origins of some of these, like fuck I just wikipediaring, people can do that themselves

Big Ideas

pjamesstuart; That was all I could think of to ask about the art in a 'pure art' sense, like about the acts of creation and construction, but I haven't asked any like 'meta level' questions, (which I tend to avoid), but you did have a fair amount of complex ideas about Orcs, so;

Are there any 'big ideas' you had about the monsters?
Anything you discovered or thought you understood more?
Anything you were trying to get across?
Is there..... a SUBTEXTS???? or like a metaphor or meaning or whatever, in these images?

SCRAP_ULTRA_WORLD; Yeah any "big ideas" I tried to include in the chapter heads.

While the initial idea was "do a bunch of versions of that monster" , the process involved exploring both what is the essence of that monster both visually and conceptually/psychologically.

With both very intertwined and probably inseparable, but still distinct somehow.

think exploring the concept-essence of each monster was far more of a reductive process; like is a hag a hag because she lives in a hut in the wilderness? Or is a hag likely to be in the wilderness because she's feared ? And then why is she feared? It's her power, and what are her powers etc?

Compare a manticore being in the wilderness , to me you start losing something of the manticore if you take it out of the wilderness, there's something about the manticore that is a manifestation of an unknown wilderness and the wild stories that start coming from it.

Actually as an aside here these are actually different wildernesses. A wilderness with a hag in it , is the wilderness "beyond the hedge" , a wildness just outside your lights and most tread paths. (so could be remote villages, sewers , slums, ruins, back roads, islands etc).

While manticore wilderness is "here be dragons" wilderness; blasted nigh untamable terrains and desolate vistas.

Having a "here be hags" on very remote area of the map or a manticore living in a forest a hour away from a city , creates interesting questions but I think both are subversions or deconstructions.

As in doing something interesting with a disconnection or conceptual jolt, which only happens if something about it doesn't quite make sense.

While exploring the visual essence of each monster was (mainly) and expansive process; seeing how far I could push it basically.

But note when I talk about any of this I want to be clear it's not the "ideas, theory, then art" that art academic likes to present as The Only True Path. All this is stuff I think about in retrospect or sometimes as a weird chattering aside in my brain as I work on something; it's commentary but it's not the navigator or captain

I think ultimately art is the space the between words, if its completely reducible in words then you should just use words

Good art often makes you be able to think about stuff and come up with big strings of words and ideas , but it's a terrible mistake to think that's ultimately Is The Work

SCRAP_ULTRA_WORLD; To use a tree metaphor , it's like a fruit tree. The art is both the tree and the soil and the mycoline web and whatever else . The words you can say about it is the fruit. Fruit is portable, countable, immediately digestible and a trade good. But to think only of the fruit and the not the tree (and everything connected to the tree) is a deep and profound foolishness .

As is dismissing any fruit tree not currently having pickable fruit as basically not existing

EDIT: Though this metaphor suggests as we only plant fruit trees for fruit , we only should create art to talk about it, but I reject both of these concepts, but must acknowledge that people could think that a) That's the only reason to plant fruit trees therefore the metaphor says..

SCRAP_ULTRA_WORLD; Wait one more thing and jumping back , with a couple of the monsters (gnomes, orcs) there's like a cluster of different big tangled concepts and my reduction process would be a deliberate rejection of basically alot of the most popular , but arguably essential concepts, that exist in current culture.

Orcs I guess digs deeper into the psychological underpinnings of the "barbarians at the gates" and brings in some of the Tolkien fear of industrialization, so that's still engaging with the popular view.

While gnomes basically rejects everything anyone has done in the last 100 years and tries to include knockers and kobold mythology as gnomishiness

FINAL STATEMENT

pjamesstuart; Excellent. Finally, would you like to end the interview by saying anything grand, insane, overwrought and/or megalomaniacal? (Purely in order to maintain SCRAP WORLD brand coherence.)

SCRAP_ULTRA_WORLD; THERE'S ALWAYS FREE CHEDDAR IN A MOUSETRAP BABY

Behold; monstrum

A book of Others. A book of visions. A book where every night for a month, or a year, someone slept and deliberately had nightmares, or at least, deeply hallucinations, and each morning they woke up and drew pictures of those nightmares. (And then narrowed them down to the best.)

Every sophont dwells within a necessary cage of thought, one concept piled upon another, growing in slurries and small leaps, but only ever from one central point. Yet, in every case, the boundaries of expansion, of what can be comprehended, and of what can be imagined as comprehended, must be challenged; such is the flame of life and mind.

Thence; the Other, the known but un-known, a beast woven from what is and what may be.

The meaning of this is always discussed; mapped one way, the book of Others is just a map of self, for where else can the Other be conceived, so that, in roving further and imagining deeper, seen as a whole, the conception of self becomes more clear.

Others say 'no shut up this is actually a book of monsters' - a searchlight pointing outwards, illuminating the storm-wracked unknown, and the metaphor of a searchlight is perhaps the best; for those at one end, an honest attempt to pierce the dark, attention pointing out, but for those watching from the silence, a statement saying 'here am I'.

As critiques of course, we consider both at once.

All I dislike about it is the glued spine but book production and distribution from New Zealand is fucking nutty so take what you can get frankly.

You can buy ‘Malustrious Brood’

HERE