Monsters and Manuals

I Am Foolish, Wrong and Naughty, and I Apologise

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 19:11:29 +0000

I believe it is important in life to recognise when one is in the wrong, and apologise.

To that end, I have two apologies to make.

I owe the first to the creator of Tale of the Manticore. In my post yesterday, I posted the following review:

This self-describes as a 'hybrid between a dark fantasy audio drama and a solo D&D RPG'. In this respect it is actually quite close to what I was trying to do long ago with my dungeon novel, in which I intended to run solo explorations of a megadungeon and write them up as though fiction. I have to be honest: while the concept is appealing, and while I appreciate the effort that the creator has put into his product, it didn't quite grab me at first. It was a little bit too slow-moving and a little bit too by-the-numbers in terms of content for my taste. However, once the mechanical aspect of thing got going and the creator began to adopt an OOC perspective, I enjoyed it a lot more. I am intrigued by the possibilities of this form of storytelling - in a way, it is not altogether different from what Dickens was doing, or Amistead Maupin may generations later, in that it is essentially a narrative pieced together on an episodic basis, without too much pre-determination, but with the added element of dice to spice things up. 3.5 bec de corbins, possibly revised higher with continued listening.

It turns out I spoke too soon. Something about the episode I listened to must have intrigued me, because on the way home from my office I listened to the next two episodes and became hooked. I listened to the following two episodes today and I must say, my review was unduly harsh. The podcast is excellent listening, and I highly recommend it. I hereby give summary judgment that the original review is overturned and a mark of 4.5 bec de corbins granted.

The second apology is to fans of solo RPGs everywhere. Over the years I have pooh-poohed this practice. (I have gone back through the history of the blog to try to remember where, but there are thousands of posts to get through; all I know is that I have definitely done some pooh-poohing and even possibly some look-down-nosing. I know I definitely took a swipe at journaling here.) Well, having listened to Tale of the Manticore in earnest, and while recognising that this is not likely representative of the experience of solo play, I begin to grasp the appeal. I retract the pooh-poohs.

Here endeth the apologies.

Actual Play Recommendations Reviewed and Ranked

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 06 Jul 2026 12:35:31 +0000

Readers of this blog are people of rarefied tastes and great education and learning, and we should not be surprised to discover there is a high degree of consensus between them about matters of Truth, Justice, and the Best OSR-adjacent Actual Play podcats and YouTube videos. In my last post I asked for recommendations and, lo and behold, they are almost all exactly the same. Here I review and rank them.

3d6 Down the Line, The Halls of Arden Vul (YouTube playlist available here): This is the best of what was on offer and I am surprised to find myself saying that I genuinely really enjoyed watching the first two episodes, and may slowly but surely continue until the end. This, for those who have not seen it, bills itself from the start as really a recording of a regular, average gaming group's weekly sessions, without ornamentation or am-dram performances and 'doing voices' of the Critical Role variety, and it works exceptionally well - it is as close an example I can think of to what I have seen and experienced in my own life running and playing in D&D campaigns. There is a kind of 'let's get down to business' attitude here that I really appreciate, and that I find very comfortable and familiar: we're here to play a campaign of D&D, we know what we're doing and what we want, so let's do it. If you want to watch a group of five middle-aged men playing OSR-like D&D as it is really meant to be played, and is played, in a relaxed-but-competent way, I heartily recommend this, and it actually really got me juiced up to start running a game again after a year or so's hiatus. I have some quibbles about house rules and so forth, and I find the video version much more accessible than the podcast version, but nothing that would stop me giving it 4.5 bec de corbins.

Tale of the Manticore (I watched/listened to Episode 1 of Season 3 here; you can find the other videos easily from there): This self-describes as a 'hybrid between a dark fantasy audio drama and a solo D&D RPG'. In this respect it is actually quite close to what I was trying to do long ago with my dungeon novel, in which I intended to run solo explorations of a megadungeon and write them up as though fiction. I have to be honest: while the concept is appealing, and while I appreciate the effort that the creator has put into his product, it didn't quite grab me at first. It was a little bit too slow-moving and a little bit too by-the-numbers in terms of content for my taste. However, once the mechanical aspect of thing got going and the creator began to adopt an OOC perspective, I enjoyed it a lot more. I am intrigued by the possibilities of this form of storytelling - in a way, it is not altogether different from what Dickens was doing, or Amistead Maupin may generations later, in that it is essentially a narrative pieced together on an episodic basis, without too much pre-determination, but with the added element of dice to spice things up. 3.5 bec de corbins, possibly revised higher with continued listening.

Mystery Quest (I watched/listened to Episode 1 of their Mythic Bastionland series): This is a much slicker, professionalised 'show'; at times it is worth reflecting on how miraculous it is that we are now able to watch people playing RPGs, on demand, with better production values than broadcast television had in the days of our youth. How I would have loved to know this would one day happen if you had told me it when I was the age of 12. With that said, this is too scripted, too narrative-based, and too performance-oriented for me. I understand why it would appeal, but I don't feel that appeal personally. 2.5 bec de corbins.

Koibu or Neil Pass Erickson (I watched/listened to Episode 1 of the Voyages of Dusk and Dawn campaign): This is a grower. In the course of watching these videos I developed a theory, which is that these Actual Plays tend to function best if they can either rely on a charismatic and watchable cast (Mystery Quest), or on a very strong rules-structure and commitment to elucidating the nuts and bolts of the game (3d6 Down the Line). This falls rather between those stools. It is half like watching a group of actors performing, and half like watching a group of friends playing D&D. I think I would have preferred if these guys had just focused on the latter, and initially, I had a period of expectation-confusion in which I wasn't sure whether to expect Critical Role-lite or something much more grounded. However, I got into it once I realised that it was really more the latter but with fancy maps and some effort being made to 'do voices'. I could see myself waching the rest. 4 bec de corbins.

Legends of Avantris (here) and World of Io (here): These were described to me as being 'entertainy' channels, and I get that. Of the two, the first was much more enjoyable and some of the videos I watched were genuinely funny, as opposed to, 'ha ha, aren't we funny?', which is a line that is difficult to avoid straying over. With that said, I am disqualifying them on the basis that they are too far removed from being OSR-adjacent. They aren't for me, but that's okay.

Bring Down the Sky (I watched the first epiode here): This is something different, in the form of a mecha SF oriented campaign. The GM narrative style here is I think exemplary - very clear, listenable, and engaging (how to describe things well is a subject that is surprisingly under-discussed); there is no need for fancy visuals since this aspect of the game is done so well. I also found the speed with which this campaign cuts to the chase appealing. With that said, there is quite a bit of scripting here, it seems to me, and things begin to lean fairly heavily into the 'entertainy' end of the spectrum, which, in case you haven't noticed, isn't quite my thing. In the end, I would situate this in the middle of the pack. 3 bec de corbins.

The Dice Stormers (I watched their first episode of a CyberGenerations campaign): I have to say, I loved these guys and their vibe. CyberGeneration would not ordinarily be my thing, and it's quite a stretch to call this 'OSR adjacent'. But it put a big smile on my face to sit in on three mates just having a great time, with exactly the right mixture of comedy and straight-facedness. You can't manufacture this level of obvious good-friends chemistry, as hard as a lot of the more 'entertainy' shows might try. In its tone and atmosphere and the way the three gel it accords very closely with what it is like in the games I run and play in. A diamond in the rough. 4.5 bec de corbins.

Final ranking (apologies if I missed any contenders - do let me know if I forgot anything):

1 = 3d6 Down the Line/The Dice Stormers

3 Koibu

4 Tale of the Manticore

5 Bring Down the Sky

6 Mystery Quest

Not Ranked: Legend of Avantris, World of Io

On reflection, I feel bad for marking Mystery Quest down so low. As an example of its type, it is good. It just isn't my type. But I suppose at the end of the day I am the one in charge of the bec de corbins.

Recommend Me and Your Fellow Readers Some YouTube Actual Plays

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 21:43:56 +0000

What is the state-of-the-art when it comes to Actual Plays on YouTube? If you are reading this blog you are likely familiar with my tastes, and your own will be aligned, but for the avoidance of doubt I am looking for OSR-adjacent, or OSR-sympathetic, content with the emphasis on sandbox play. I am by no means limited in my interests to D&D. (I will merrily watch MERP, Cyberpunk 2020, RuneQuest, or any other RPG likely to appeal to the average old fart.)

I have tried to watch Critical Role, and failed entirely to appreciate whatever virtues it has. It is not for me. I also long ago (11 years ago!) watched something involving Will Wheaton, my verdict upon which was:

I would probably rather be flogged than be involved in that session, and yet at the same time I can't summon up the necessary bile to say I disliked watching it.

I would like something rather better than that. Fly, my pretties! I will watch and review whatever is recommended.

SomeBing Inspiring

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 27 Jun 2026 19:55:54 +0000

Like any right thinking person, I hate and fear Microsoft Bing. But on my office computer at work, each day a free Bing wallpaper is downloaded and automatically set as my desktop wallpaper image. They are surprisingly inspiring for campaign or adventure site ideas. Viz:

This is quite literally a ruined mountain temple complex of a lost civilisation. It therefore serves as a wonderful template for, er, a ruined mountain temple complex of a lost civilisation.

This is clearly the Makatanti Badlands, once a great formian nest-city which riddled an entire mountain range with tunnels, now haunted by their ghosts and other, Dark Sun-adjacent beings: outlaw githyanki, a thri-kreen prophet, cannibal halflings, etc.

This brings to mind a campaign in which the PCs are borrower-like tiny people, perhaps 2 inches high, trying to survive in a world of giants. Here, they eke out a living from beachcombing, dodging giant crabs and ragworms, not to mention mudskippers and seagulls (the equivalent to them of dragons).

A flooded dungeon. Beneath the cold blue waters is the lair of a sapphire dragon, an ancient wyrm who slumbers so deeply his tunnels have become a hive of lesser forms of aquatic life. To enter, one uses something like gillyweed, which provides sufficient time to swim down and explore the caves; try not to get lost.

This I take to be the corpse of a giant, which has lain semi-submerged in the bog for millennia and gradually become crusted over with rock and earth. He still carries treasure (somewhere) and his body is infested with whatever life-forms are drawn to inhabit such a grim and desolate home.

The fortress that guards the entrance to the inner realm of the Kunlun Shan, the axis mundi - a great mountain that rises to the heavens and towers over the lowlands below. It contains many palaces, gardens, orchards and wild forests, and is inhabited by hermits, magicians, kings and monsters inspired by Chinese myth.

This, meanwhile, makes me imagine a maze that sits atop a hill rising up from a thick forest. Created long ago by a wizard as a birthday present to his favourite daughter, at its heart lies a special treasure. But the daughter died on the morning of her birthday and in grief the wizard cursed his creation. It is now a demonic place into which only the bravest or most foolhardy venture - and none return...

While this at first glance could be the remain of a fortress, say, or a demon-summoning chamber, I like to imagine it as a wrestling arena for fomorians in a pseudo-Irish setting. On hot summer evenings, especially when rain storms are brewing, they descend on this spot to fight out duels and settle disputes; at other times of year, they enjoy sport and sacrifice with the people of the nearby countryside...

Here, we see what I believe to be the homes of the Desert Troll Fathers - two dozen or so hermit trolls who live in isolation in the blasted heart of a great sandy wilderness. They need next to no water and their home is thus far from any oasis or wadi; this makes it almost inaccessible to ordinary humanoid beings. Nevertheless, since it is rumoured that they are in direct contact with gods of sky and stars, there are those who attempt the perilous journey to hear their wisdom. The trolls do condescend to give it - but typically only in return for offerings of fresh (live) meat.

A town in a quasi-Tuscany, filled with strange guilds, dark plots, cloaks and daggers, sinister demonic forces, and hidden entrances to the Underdark.

I could go on all day but I'll stop now. Try it. The full archive is here.

A Hobgoblin of the Very Worst Kind

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 14:43:49 +0000

One of my offspring is quite attached to a podcast in which a woman very nicely reads (pleasingly unvarnished and unbowdlerised) fairy tales and classic children's stories. One of them is Hans Christian Anderson's The Snow Queen.

If you don't know The Snow Queen, it's framed by a sort of story-within-a-story in which an evil spirit has created a looking glass which causes everything to be reflected in a distorted way so as to appear like a twisted, sinister version of itself. The spirit and his cronies take the looking glass to heaven in order to make fun of God and the angels, but it shatters on the way into millions of tiny fragments, which then descend to earth to make various kinds of mischief.

The translation which is used in the podcast in question describes this evil spirit as 'one of the very worst kinds of hobgoblins' - a turn of phrase which never ceases to intrigue me, because of what it implies: that there are lots of different kinds of hobgoblin, some worse than others.

Having done some further investigations I'm not sure this translation is very accurate - the original Danish reads:

for det var en ond trold! det var en af de allerværste, det var "djævelen"!

And this, various online dictionaries informs me, means something like 'there was an evil troll; it was one of the very worst, it was a devil'. I don't speak Danish so I'm not sure, but I don't think there is anything here that implies there are different kinds of 'trold' ('Det var en af de alllerværste' = 'That was one of the very worst'?). MR James (who, astonishingly, translated it back in the day) rendered this 'There was a wicked troll. He was one of the very worst sort—he was the devil.' But, likewise, I don't know where 'sort' comes from here, unless it's just a way of accentuating the wickedness. The rendering of 'trold' as hobgoblin seems forgivable, because as I understand it 'trolls' in Scandinavian myth were more elf-like than ogre-like (as they tend to be in English fairy tales); somebody from that neck of the woods will now no doubt appear in the comments to tell me that I am a fool and wrong and that everything I say here is foolish wrongness. But this is the state of play as I see it, vis-a-vis translations of the opening section of The Snow Queen.

Anyway, the concept of there being different kinds of hobgoblin interests me. This is because hobgoblins tend to be unjustly overlooked in D&D, at least in my experience. The main reason for this is that they have difficulty differentiating themselves from goblins and orcs. Goblins have the 'sneaky, malicious, deceptive' humanoid angle sewn up, and orcs have the 'evil, militaristic brute' territory. What then is a hobgoblin - other than an amalgam of both?

Over the years D&D staked out hobgoblins as a sort of lawful evil counterpart to the chaotic evil orcs - the idea being that hobgoblins are regimented, militarised, and hierarchical where orcs are savage and brutal. Characteristically this was spoiled in 2nd edition by making orcs lawful evil and militaristic as well, rendering hobgoblins almost redundant But thereafter, at least as far as I can tell (I am no expert on D&D post-2nd edition) the difference has been more clearly staked out: in 5th edition hobgoblins almost seem to resemble klingons:

This is not very inspired and feels inauthentic - sort of tacked on. The good thing about goblins and orc (and any really iconic monster) is that they tap into forms of disquiet that we feel viscerally. There is something scary about a small, sneaky, deceptive, malicious trickster. There is something scary about wanton cruelty and violence. There isn't anything all that viscerally scary about having a hypertrophied sense or order or honour, which appears to be what later editions riff on when it come to hobgoblins. We may disapprove of taking those things too far, but this in itself isn't enough to strike at any nerves in a primal sense (and in any case it overlaps with what we tend to think of when it comes to dwarfs).

The implication that there are different kinds of hobgoblin frees us up a little bit. Instead of being a single monster type, it becomes more like a category or spectrum - a family, if you like, of different varieties of evil humanoids. The question then becomes, what are the different types of hobgoblin?

Well, there is the aforementioned 5th edition hobgoblin-as-klingon. You could even take this further and make them something almost like the Spartans of 300 stereotype turned to 11 - an entire race of satanic Lt Worfs without Captain Picard to keep them in check.

Then there is the hobgoblin of Warhammer, of course, who if anything, at least in older editions, was supposed to be something like a Hun, Mongol or Cossack - a nomadic steppe raider going everywhere on wolfback. I hadn't remembered this, but they were even supposed to be ruled by a 'Hobgobla Khan', the lord of the 'Mournguls':

Then there is the folkloric hobgoblin, suggested by the prefix 'Hob-'. Tolkien is the one responsible for describing hobgoblins as bigger variants of goblins (in the preface to The Hobbit); actually 'Hob' is said to be a medieval diminutive for Robert or Rob, which if anything suggests a small, familiar or even cutesy creature - more like a brownie, sprite or knocker:

These days in Britain you see Hobgoblin beer everywhere. The latest versions are very corporate and bland, but once upon a time it was a lovely, characterful beer (one of a line of ales with folkloric motifs brewed by Wychwood brewery). Here the hobgoblin is very much along the lines of a goblin, though one rooted much more in fairy tales than Tolkien - more like an evil woodsman who you might, nonetheless, enjoy a pint with in a tavern if he's in a good mood after a day's hunting:

The most interesting hobgoblin variant may be White Wolf's from Changeling: The Lost, where they can take almost any form and inhabit the Hedge, the liminal realm between the realm of mortals and faerie:

You may be able to suggest more - feel free to do so in the comment. As to which is the very worst kind (Spartan-klingon; 'Mourngul' horde; Robin Goodfellow; evil woodcutter; shapeshifting farie), you can make up your mind.

Satan Helps Elucidate Skywalker's Rescue Plot

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 21:52:49 +0000

To cut a long story short, I was recently on a long-haul flight and ended up watching The Empire Strike Back and part of Return of the Jedi on the in-flight entertainment screen.

I haven't watched a Star Wars film since The Force Awakens came out at the cinema and I don't believe I had seen any for some time before that either. But there was nothing else on that I wanted to watch (apart from the surprisingly good Everything Everywhere All At Once) and 13 hours is a long time to sit and read without a break. So I watched Empire, was reminded that it is actually a genuinely good and accomplished film, and was enthused enough by the experience that I decided to just get straight into Jedi next.

I loved Return of the Jedi as a kid and was, in a way, childishly looking forward to a rewatch - after what must be approaching twenty years. I know it is maligned in certain circles as the place where the rot set in - and at times it does have the feeling of the prequels, as it were, avant la lettre. But the Jedi I remember from my childhood remains a fun, action-packed roller-coaster ride filled with excitement but leavened by sweet and even moving moments, as when Luke reveals to Leia he is her brother, or when Yoda dies. Yes the ewoks were, in my memory, a bit of an embarrassing misstep. But I also remembered loving the Endor battle when I was a boy and feeling my heart lift every time those furry underdogs destroyed an ATAT walker with a well-placed spitball or made a Stormtrooper slip over on a banana skin or catch his toe in a mouse trap or whatever. So I was up for it, big time.

What I discovered was that Jedi is just a dreadful film for its first half - almost execrably bad. So bad indeed that I found it practically unwatchable. It is all over the place, filled with ill-judged humour (like the droid being tortured) and weird vignettes that spoil the pacing (like the dance sequence, made unnecessarily longer by Lucas's CGI meddling). And the plot to rescue Han, I thought, doesn't just make little sense, but is also internally inconsistent: I kept asking myself why on earth would Luke send R2D2 and C3PO as gifts to Jabba given that everything we know about Luke previously has indicated a total loyalty to his comrades? Why would Leia be there if Luke has a plan already hatched to free Han? Why doesn't Luke just go in first to negotiate? What is Lando supposed to be doing?

I got as far as the speeders-in-redwoods bit and gave up. Later, after landing (I don't want to suggest it was the first thing I did when getting off the plane, but it may have been in the first ten things) I sent a message to some friends on WhatsApp observing that the plot to liberate Han made no sense, and wondering why I hadn't realised this as a kid.

One friend messaged me back the following sequence of messages:

The plot makes perfect sense. It was all about lulling Jabba into a false sense of security. Lando is undercover. Chewie, Leia and the droids go in in such a way as to make Jabba think he is winning or more crafty than our heroes.
(admittedly C-3PO doesn’t know he is going in but that adds to making Jabba and his cronies believe the story and underestimate Luke)
In pre-Disney takeover canon, Bib Fortuna and Luke were meeting secretly beforehand; Luke was negotiating for Han’s release and Bib was trying to see if Luke was in some way useful to overthrowing Jabba and installing himself as leader
Bib Fortuna survived the explosion on the sail barge and then promptly had his brain removed by the spidery monks that live in various parts of the palace (who are weird Force monks that can only commune fully when their brain is in a spider-walker)

Now, one of my biggest pet peeves in life is when the plot of a film can only be made to make sense by retrospectively making it canon that ackshually it was weird Force monks, or whatever (JJ Abrams is always guilty of this type of thing in his film-making); if a film can't make sense in its own right then it is QED a film that makes no sense. But I was amused by the fact that a big exercise had evidently taken place to give a post hoc justification for the Solo rescue and today, recalling the exchange, I decided to ask Satan about it. Here's what Claude's Opus 4.8 with 'extra thinking' and tweaked by my default instructions not to be an obsequious arsehole, came up with:

Short version: there isn't a single authoritative, Lucas-stated breakdown of "the plan." What gets called the canonical explanation is mostly a charitable post-hoc reconstruction that fans and tie-in writers built to make the sequence cohere, plus what's inferable from the film and a few Legends/reference sources. The film deliberately withholds the plan so the audience is as much in the dark as Jabba. With that caveat, here's the reconstruction that's become the accepted reading:
The operation is a series of escalating contingencies, each a fallback for the one before, with a direct assault ruled out (in Legends, because the Empire had blockaded Tatooine to catch incoming Rebels).
Phase one is diplomacy and bribery. The droids arrive alone carrying Luke's holographic message: he asks Jabba to release Han and offers C-3PO and R2-D2 as a "gift." The critical detail is that R2 is carrying Luke's lightsaber. If Jabba takes the deal, Han walks free with no violence. Jabba refuses.
Phase two is stealth. Leia, disguised as the bounty hunter Boushh, uses Chewbacca-as-captive as cover to get inside and collect the bounty, then thaws Han at night and tries to slip him out. Lando is already embedded among the guards as the inside man. If this works, they exfiltrate quietly. Jabba was awake; they're caught.
Phase three is Luke himself as last resort. He walks in, reveals he's a Jedi, tries the mind trick, and is prepared to escalate. The lightsaber stashed with R2 is the ace in the hole — when everyone is condemned to the Sarlacc and concentrated on the sail barge, R2 launches it to Luke and the heroes turn the tables.
The load-bearing claim in the charitable reading is that the "failures" aren't failures: each blown phase still advances the board, getting all the players inside and ultimately out at the Pit of Carkoon, away from the fortified palace, with the weapon present. Some readings push this further and argue Luke needed Leia's capture. The supporting textual evidence people cite is that R2 holds the lightsaber back during the rancor fight and only deploys it at the barge — implying that moment, not the rancor, was always the intended endgame.
Where I'd push back on calling any of this "canonical": the rancor was plainly not planned (Luke is just surviving), the mind trick failing on a Hutt is a genuine setback rather than a feint, and the layered-intent version requires assuming Luke foresaw specific failures the film never shows him anticipating. The most defensible statement is that Lucas intended to portray a now-confident Jedi running a graduated infiltration with a weapon pre-positioned via the droids — the precise "he planned every capture" choreography is fan apologetics, not established canon.

Get that, anonymous friend, who I am sure is reading this? It is fan apologetics, not established canon.

Intrigued by the role of Bib Fortuna, I asked it about that too:

Mostly real, with two embellishments and one outright error. The core comes from a genuine Legends source: "Of the Day's Annoyances: Bib Fortuna's Tale" by M. Shayne Bell, in the 1995 anthology Tales from Jabba's Palace. Going through the claim piece by piece:
Bib survived the barge and got disembrained by the monks — accurate, but not "promptly." In Legends he escapes the sail barge explosion on a private skiff and returns to the palace. He then tries to seize Jabba's empire and actually wins a scuffle over the remaining possessions — he's the apparent victor for a stretch. Then the B'omarr monks emerge from the cellars and forcibly remove his brain. So there's a takeover-and-battle phase first; it isn't immediate. (In the X-Wing comic Battleground: Tatooine, his disembodied brain later gets subordinated to a rival Twi'lek, Firith Olan, and eventually transplanted into a fresh body.)
Luke negotiating with Bib for Han — partly real, "secret meetings beforehand" is a stretch. The story does have Bib dealing with Luke, who wants to arrange Han's return. So a Luke–Bib negotiation exists in Legends. But "secret meetings beforehand" oversells it; the summary frames it as the business surrounding Luke's approach, not a clandestine pre-arranged back-channel. The kernel is true, the cloak-and-dagger framing is your friend's gloss.
Bib using Luke to overthrow Jabba — grounded but extrapolated. Bib's overthrow motive is dead-on for Legends: he's characterized as the man with more plots against Jabba than anyone, "somehow involved in every plot against Jabba," positioned to inherit the empire no matter who lands the killing blow. So "Bib wanted to overthrow Jabba and install himself" is solid. The specific claim that he was sizing up Luke as the instrument for that coup is a reasonable inference but not something the text establishes — that's your friend connecting dots.
"Weird Force monks that can only commune fully when their brain is in a spider-walker" — this is wrong. The B'omarr Order isn't a Force tradition. They're an ascetic religious order pursuing enlightenment through total separation from the material world — they remove their own members' brains and put them in nutrient jars so the mind can contemplate the cosmos undistracted by the body and senses. Nothing Force-based about it. And the mechanism is backwards: the enlightened state is the disembodied brain in the jar. The spider-walker (a BT-16 perimeter droid) is just a chassis that lets a brain-in-a-jar move around the physical world when it needs to — it's mobility hardware, not a communion-enabler. If anything, leaving the jar to ride a walker is a concession to the material plane, not the path to fuller communion.
So your friend has the right story and most of the beats, invented a "Force monk / commune via walker" cosmology that isn't there, and slightly novelized the Luke angle.

Pro tip: it really helps if you say 'The B'omarr Order isn't a Force tradition' using the voice of the fellow in the Simpsons who tells Marge that 'Some guys at MIT are sending us a list of reasons why Captain Picard is better than Captain Kirk'.

Why, why, why, Delilah?

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 14:03:02 +0000

I recently recorded a podcast episode for higher-level backers of the Yoon-Suin 2nd edition kickstarter, in which I was subjected to some tough questions about certain aspects of the book. I liked the line of questioning, as I think it made the conversation much more interesting than a series of underarm throws ('Tell us exactly what else is brilliant about Chapter Four?'). But I wanted to expand in written form about an aspect of one question that particularly interested me.

The question was about what the interviewer called 'magical misandry', namely a theme which apparently (I hadn't realised this) crops up a few times in the book, and which I will describe as the 'Delilah motif'. This is the succubus-style female monster who uses magical or surreptitious means to deprive an, implicitly male, PC of his strength and vitality, or to kill or enslave him.

I name this the Delilah motif after the biblical character Delilah, who as you will know deprived Samson of his strength by cutting his hair while he lay across her thighs - it being strongly implied that this was after a bit of good old rumpy-pumpy. I am sure there are earlier examples if it in human myth, but this is familiar enough to have resonance.

The important thing about the Delilah motif is that, while we may disapprove of it or look askance at what it says about male-female relations, it also speaks in what I think is a very interesting way to a stereotyped feature of those relations which you can think of almost as the inverse, or evil twin, of the story of Beauty and the Beast. Why does Beauty and the Beast have particular power, such that it is basically the plot of almost every romance novel that has ever been written (woman meets strong, virile, wild male figure - vampire, pirate, werewolf, sadomasochist billionaire, etc. - and civilises him with her femininity)? It is because it speaks to a desire that appears to be deep-rooted in a great many people. The mythically or semiotically feminine transforms the mythically or semiotically masculine into something which can be good and productive in human society. Female love transforms the bad boy into a good man. And both women and men respond to that concept in fiction, at least in very large numbers.

(The list of confirmations of this truth are so many it is barely worth even beginning to start - I suppose we could write down 'Han Solo' and start from there.)

The Delilah motif interestingly and powefully inverts that notion by playing on the male fear of being civilised. Here I am drinking mead, eating syrup from the corpses of lions, swinging my dick in the wilderness and killing a thousand Philistines with the jawbone of a donkey, and it's great. And she wants me to settle down? Here feminine power is not portrayed as the redemptive power of love ('I've been saved by a woman...'), but as something which saps a man of his strength and vitality and ultimately weakens him to the point of incapacity. This is the stereotyped fear, familiar to us from sitcoms, soap operas and Hollywood movies, in the heart of the irresponsible male of being tied to a particular woman (it being no accident of course that Samson ends up being tied with rope after his seduction and impromptu short-back-and-sides).

The Beauty and the Beast story and the Delilah motif exist in a state of productive tension in almost every romcom that ever was created, with the female character functioning as both transformative saviour and threat, and the male character functioning as both magnificent untamed beast and irresponsible fly-by-night, with the tension being finally resolved in balance of the former in both instances. And this is part of their charm and what (to a great many people) is part of the joy of male-female courtship rituals in their traditional form.

What monsters such as the succubus (and those of its ilk in Yoon-Suin) really do is simply trade on the Delilah motif in a way that, while it may not sit right in contemporary mores, strikes at the heart of that tension and essentially resolves it in the opposite direction to a romcom. You might even say that this is what the great many horror films that trade on that motif also do (whether as a minor incident, as in the opening to Phantasm, or as the whole plot of the film, as in Audition). They just tip the balance from Beauty and the Beast to Delilah.

And in that regard I don't think there is anything wrong with exploring that motif in D&D monster form. No, it isn't a healthy way to imagine male-female relationhips. But since when did any monster succeed by being a healthy reflection of anything? The point of a good monster is to disturb. And one way to effectively disturb people is to take a trope with which they are familiar - and which is extremely deep-rooted across cultures - and exploit it. So why not?

And In My Last Hour I'm a Slave to the Power of Death

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 22:34:04 +0000

Apropos of nothing, here are eight ideas for megadungeons, each inspired by the title and lyrical themes of the Iron Maiden album Powerslave (1984):

Aces High - A storm giant's tower, seated on a cloud; it is reached by climbing to a high mountain peak and then casting off by glider, which limits how much treasure can be taken back or forth (and from which some loot may simply fall off). The giant's goblin servants maintain a fleet of dirigibles, and use these to wage war on the aaracokra and sylphs who inhabit the region. Within the tower itself the giant slumbers, under a curse, and guarded by his silver dragon wife. His other servants include lightning mephits, automata and giff mercenaries - but entire floors have been taken over by interlopers in the master's de facto absence.

Two Minutes to Midnight - Down in the roots of the mountains mighty forces once arrayed against one another in a confrontation that could have spelled the end of space and time - at least within a continent. One was a great demon, another a mighty archmage, another an undead lord, the fourth a dragon queen. But in order to stave off the apocalyptic conflict that was sure to ensue, a demigod placed these four protagonists in time-freeze, together with their servants, in half-mile diameter sphere of stasis. They are frozen down there still, waiting to be released - along with their servants and treasures - but the roots of the mountain are deep, and over the eons many other threats and powers have populated the tunnels and caverns which lead to the stasis-sphere. The other snag is that the only way to get at the treasure held by the four is to bring the stasis-sphere to an end...and thus release them.

Losfer Words (Big 'Orra) - A monastery of monks who cut out their tongues to approach a god that cannot be named. Their home was under a spell of permanent silence and remains so, but the monks all long ago went mad and their god with them. Now many intruders have made their homes in the Labyrinth of Absolute Quiet - but some of the monks wander still, as undead, demonic, or both.

Flash of the Blade - The greatest swordsman who ever lived, wielding a possible sword, created for himself a fortress which he populated with many varieties of servitors and guardians, and then became a recluse. Rumour has it that he has died, or gone away, and that his 3,000 year-old sword - perhaps the most puissant artefact that exists - lies abandoned somewhere inside it.

The Duellists - Two demigods are locked in eternal conflict in the lost city of Tyre. Once the two were worshipped equally and shared the city between them; then a rivalry developed and the two fought each other until no inhabitants remained - and beyond. They still haunt the streets, ambushing, stalking, each sworn that it may not rest until the other is slain. They are watched over by a ghost who referees their struggle judging from an obscure rulebook. But meanwhile in the old sewers and tunnels and catacombs beneath the city life - and unlife - thrives, boiling up from the Underdark below.

Back in the Village - A reversal, natch. The PCs are dungeon-dwellers. The village is where the danger lies. They try to raid the human world for gold and glory.

Powerslave - A ruined pyramid where the god-kings once were resident in the months before their great sacrifice and the mantle was passed to the next god-king. This was until it so happened that one such god-king declared that he would not be a slave to death but would make death a slave of his own, and that he would live forever. And sure enough, he has, though he has grown decrepit and senile in the thousand years since. His servants are smorgasbord of ancient Egyptian-style creatures (including scarab-men, jackal-headed assassins, and so on) and those desert beings (trolls, blue dragons, manscorpions and the like) who have made parts of the pyramid their own.

Rime of the Ancient Mariner - It has to be a dungeon carved into the phantasmagorical, many-coloured glaciers and icebergs of a near-frozen sea, doesn't it?

How to Semiotically Sex Up Your Campaign Setting With Celestial Symbolism

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 12:55:17 +0000

It's funny how you go down rabbit holes. Last week I happened to be in Lund, in southern Sweden, where there is a very grand and beautiful cathedral which is rightly famous. It contains a famous astronomical clock, first constructed some time around 1425, and which calls to mind CS Lewis's observation that the defining characteristic of the medieval mind was 'intricacy':

This is the clock's 'perpetual calendar'. Some more detail:

What you will notice about the calendar is that it is divided into four quadrants, each of which has a defining symbol. Going clockwise from the top, there is an eagle, a lion, an ox, and a man. Curious about what these referred to, I did a little research and discovered that these symbols are associated with the four evangelists, Matthew (man), Mark (lion), Luke (ox) and John (eagle). The first person to come up with this correspondence was apparently Jerome, writing in the 4th century, who derived the symbols from the first line of each gospel (Matthew's begins with Christ's genealogy; Mark's begins with a voice crying in the wilderness; Luke's begins with a sacrifice; John's begins with the eternal logos as an eagle flies to the sun). These in turn are supposed to also reflect aspects of Christ's character: as man, king, sacrifice, and son of God.

It turns out, though, that Jerome himself borrowed the symbols from a passage in Ezekiel in which the man, lion, ox and eagle are decpicted as accompanying the divine chariot-throne of God. And this is further thought to be derived from the Babylonian 'fixed' signs of the zodiac, with Aquarius the man, Leo the lion, Taurus the ox and Scorpio the eagle (which was apparently the more usual depiction in the ancient world) ruling each of the cardinal points of the heavens.

I was fascinated by the concentric layers of symbolism here, like a nested table, and I was immediately drawn to a comparison with the Chinese 'four symbols' (which I wrote about long ago): the Azure Dragon of the East, the Vermilion Bird of the South, the White Tiger of the West, and the Black Turtle-Snake of the North. Here, the symbolism is again multi-layered; the different colours are supposed to represent the different hues of soil in the different regions of China, but they also map to the four seasons, four time of day, and so on.

I am sure that the two sets of symbols are unrelated, but I was struck by the odd commonality of investing four quadrants of the heavens, or four cardinal points, with symbolic meaning in this way. And it got me thinking about what might be called 'semiotic geographies' in RPG campaign settings - that is to say, making the terrain of a campaign world reflect or make reference to symbolic (or even real) figures or beings of some kind.

At the most extreme and hyper-fantastical, you could imagine a world in which each corner is literally ruled at its outermost extreme by a giant beast; I am picturing here a flat earth, where if you travel far enough from the centre you eventually reach one of four semi-mystical kingdoms whose ruler is an eternal demigod of some kind (dragon/bird/tiger/turtle-snake obviously works very nicely for a pseudo-Asian setting).

At a slightly less fantastical level, it could just be that the entire world is divided ito four quadrants, each of which has its own flavour, flora and fauna, and so on. So you could have one quadrant ruled by 'Man' (which contains human civiliations), one ruled by the lion (filled with dangerous, belligerent creatures), one ruled by the ox (hulking gargantua) and one ruled by the eagle (flying creatures, obviously).

Or, at a slightly less fantastical level still, the four symbols of your choice could simply reflect something important about the nature of the campaign setting. Maybe each is a particular school of magic. Or character type. Or even pseudo-aligment.

Or it could even be that each symbol represents a season, with very distinctive moods, dangers, and effects. Azure Dragon season is spring; it is when the world blooms into verdant life, but is correspondingly filled with aggression and danger; Vermilion Bird is summer, when there is intense heat and drought; White Tiger is autumn, when things slip into a kind of bacchanalian decay - rutting and 'tomorrow we may die' feasting being the order of the day; Black Turtle-Snake is winter, when come the snow and ice. Different types of magic are more or less powerful in the corresponding seasons, and different monsters come and go.

You get the drift. Thinking up one's own four cardinal animals would be fun. Layering different variants of symbolism on them would be even more fun. You probably wouldn't want to have it permeate everything (I think probably deploying it as a subtle thematic motif in the background may be the best usage, keeping it largely implicit or unstated) as it would be easy to go overboard. But it is a way of giving a setting much greater depth than simply at the level of 'the orcs of mshjahsja live in the jungles of Ffnnnar and the dwarves of Eggegegg inhabit the Blood Mountains'.

The Implied Setting of Mortal Kombat 2 Fighting Arena Backgrounds

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 20 May 2026 11:32:08 +0000

Hear and attend and listen, O best beloved. Once there was a man who had two daughters. Each Saturday, the elder of the two daughters attended a dance school, O best beloved, around the corner from which was an emporium which sold coffee, and this was what befell and was befallen: the man would visit the emporium each Saturday to drink said coffee in the morning sun and entertain his daughters before, lo, the eldest's dance classes would begin.

And in the corner of this emporium, about which I have told you, best beloved, it so became and was become that there was a row of arcade machines, which included among their number Pac-Man, Street Fighter II, and Mortal Kombat 2. And since these arcade machines were free to use, O best beloved, the man would play Mortal Kombat 2 with his daughters and they would woop and yell with glee at the sight of the great gouts of blood that sprayed forth across the screen in the games they played. And so it was that the man learned of the mysteries of babalities, friendships and special moves, though he was mostly reduced to operating the joystick while his youngest daughter pressed whatever buttons she so chose.

Yes, I have been playing a lot of Mortal Kombat 2 recently. And last week, while performing my allotted role of joystick-operator and trying to anticipate the quixotic button-pressing antics of a four-year-old, I began to study the backgrounds in the various arenas in which fights take place, noticing that they were absolutely redolent of a type of extreme sword-and-sorcery that I have written about before - an approach to fantasy art where

magic is everywhere and poorly understood, where monsters are mythic and better understood by Freud than Darwin, where there are no farmers or cities because everyone is either Conan or The Warlock of Firetop Mountain. Something illustrated by Frazetta, Brom, John Blanche, Dali and Brueghel the Elder, penned by Leiber and Vance, and printed in 1968.

I do not claim this is what the plot of Mortal Kombat is all about (I actually have no idea, and no great interest in finding out), and I have not watched any of its various dramatised iterations - it was only in doing some 'research' for this post that I discovered there is actually a Mortal Kombat II film that has recently been released. All I know is the characters and the arenas in which they duke it out. I am talking not about its actual or canonical setting, but about its implied one. I therefore base my comments on the images alone:

What we see here is a forest of living, demonic trees: not so much an entire forest of Old Man Willows, but an entire forest of Old Man Willow's psychotic nephews. These are not mysterious, brooding treants filled with resentment of the 'quick', as we find in Tolkien's ouevre. No: they are just gleeful, sadistic tormenters of those with legs. They like murder. Tolkien's Old Forest has a soundtrack written by Bruckner. The Mortal Kombat 2 forest has a soundtrack written by Wolves in the Throne Room.

Brutal weapons. Molten metal (or lava chanelled from a nearby volcano?). The people of this world are warriors, not soldiers - an important element of the sword-and-sorcery genre. Soldiers are citizens who defend their territory in organised armies. Warriors rely on their martial prowess and concern themselves with glory, not defence. Soldiers equip themselves like hoplites. Warriors equip themselves with big, scary weapons which accentuate their power and individual strength.

What more needs to be said about this other than, floating wizards, interdimensional portal, red planet? Here, magic is great and powerful. It is to be feared and misunderstood. It can change the metaphysical presuppositions on the basis of which we orient our lives. It can transcend the barriers between worlds. There is nothing ordinary about a reality in which this is possible. This world does not contain humdrum civilisations - it is not one in which there is a comfortable Hobbiton which can serve as the base for adventure. Everything is adventure because everything is Weird.

This is a world with conflicting motifs. Yin and yang: all is harmony. Yet all is also DEATH. And WINGED (I should probably say WINGÉD) BEASTS. There is not a philosophical or epistemological consistency to this world. Rather, there is a consistent mood. It is a mashup defined by aesthetic 'fit' rather than by any notion of thing having to make sense.

There may be peace in this world, but it is a peace that is contingent. One imagines a sultry night of lovemaking between a warrior and his woman under the stars and a clear moon, with incense in the air and the distant sound of croaking frogs and insects. And yet! In the background a duel commences between a man and fire demon. Because this is just the sort of thing that happens.

It is a world where life is plentiful and cheap, for the masses, but not for the Heroic and Villainous, who are literally larger than life itself. I am reminded here of the sense one gets reading Lord of Light that there are untold numbers of ordinary people going about their business but whose concerns are completely meaningless when set against those of the Great. What defines individual importance is not the santity of life and the moral worth of the human person but what one Achieves. We are in the world of Nietzsche, not Jesus - Eddison, rather than Lewis.

This is world in other words that has been washed in a purple glaze; a world in which whenever it is not the night time it is only ever dusk; a world in which the magical and martial are of equal but oppositional status; a world in which might makes right, and a world in which whatever peace and tranquility are found are momentary, fleeting, bittersweet - because death may strike at any moment. It is a world in which glory triumphs over good, and a world in which power stands astride virtue. It is a world of sword and sorcery's value writ large.

I rather like it.

The Great Nobility of Harry Potter

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 08 May 2026 10:32:00 +0000

I am of the view that there is no pursuit that is more noble and no task that is more worth doing than writing novels. Call me romantic; call me deluded; call me a fuddy-duddy; call me a pseud. I will stand by this statement and only nuance it by adding that the most noble type of novel-writing is fantasy fiction. The real world will look after itself. Factories will be built, medicines will be administered, trucks will be driven. But the ability to complete a story in 400 pages which provides an avenue to escapism and wonder is something which we need great talents to provide for us.

JK Rowling is not a great writer in the strict sense. But she is what I would call a brilliant one. She has not defined an era or created a distinctive style or influenced the way in which novels are written - she is not William Golding or JRR Tolkien or Marcel Proust. Yet she has done something equally as important and impressive: she has given people space to imagine and dream.

One resorts to The Shawshank Redemption with great trepidation. But I will do it: the scene in that film in which Andy says to Red that people need to know that 'There are places in the world that aren't made out of stone' is I think, here, apt. People, in other words, need hope. And really good fiction provides that. It says: people can do great things, and don't have to be bound to the humdrum, the mundane, the quotidian. They can live beyond and above.

It does this on two separate levels: in substance and in the proof of its own existence. A really good fantasy novel tells the reader two things. That great things are possible in the world of imagination (a hobbit really can bring down the Dark Lord; a boy from suburban England really can bring down the..er, Dark Lord). But also that great things are possible in the here and now (a woman writing in a cafe can produce something as good as this just by trying). There are two layers of inspiration nested together, and the result is powerfully explosive.

I am a latecomer to Harry Potter. The first books came out when I was about 15 of 16 and I was too old for them. I was also snooty about anything popular (a trait I still have). I have only read them all because my daughter was interested and it was something for me to read to her at bedtime. They are all flawed; the plots don't quite make sense; the writing can here and there be clunky. But it doesn't matter - the heart of the project is good. It is the right kind of story to be telling, and it is told well enough (and with wonderful charaterisation and dialogue) that it fits the bill for what brilliant fantasy fiction requires.

Earlier this week I was at the Warner Bros Studio Tour in Tokyo, which is dedicated to the Harry Potter film. And I was gratified on JK Rowling's behalf to see so many people from all around Asia (mostly Japanese, of course, but many from Thailand, the Phillippines, China, etc.) who were embracing her world and her creation. I found it very moving; what a thing it must be to write a story which transcends borders in that way and can unite people from across a vast continent in sheer pleasure. Good for her.

I don't suspect that the great Crocodile Memory Palace novel will ever have its own Warner Bros Studio Tour in Tokyo - or Timbuktu. But one can nonetheless dream. Good luck to you, Ms Rowling. And thanks for the inspiration.

But Where Is the Owner? Or, A Wizard's Garden; Or, Ged of the Golden Stars

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 04 May 2026 12:03:00 +0000

The other day I took a walk with the kids to a plot of land, near my in-laws’ place in rural Japan, which is devoted to community use. There are some allotments, a little river walk area, a slide, and so forth. And, it being close to Children’s Day, there was a big display of koi nobori - the fish streamers that are hung up everywhere in Japan as part of the celebrations of spring.

On a weekday in term-time it was deserted. The only sounds were the croaks of frogs from nearby rice fields, the occasional far-off call of a pheasant, and the sound of the breeze as it swept through the streamers, making them dance and flutter high above us. It was like a scene from a Ghibli film, accentuated by the inclusion of a free-standing pink door, situated as though at the gateway to play. This sensation was strengthened by the addition of a tiny shrine amongst some trees nearby.

It looked for all the world like a wizard or witch’s garden, the owner of which having gone off on an errand of some kind. To be there felt like trespassing. One half expected that at any moment the owner would suddenly walk out from behind a bush or rise up out of the ground or step through the pink doorway and demand, ‘What are you doing here? How dare you play on my slide?’

This is a trope of fantasy film and fiction, of course, and a great basis for an adventure site: the wizard's laboratory, garden, mansion house, etc., which the PCs can explore, but with a trigger or time limit that will activate guardians or the wizard's return itself (or both).

This garden I imagined to be owned by a wizard, who we'll call Ged in Golden Stars. He is a 12th level magic-user who is known by the glittering robe he wears, made from dark blue silk but covered in fist-sized stars made from golden thread. It is a Robe of Stars. Using it, Ged wanders the Astral Plane, which he accesses through the pink door in his garden; in an emergency, he can remove the stars and use them as throwing stars +5, which do 2d4 damage. There are 12 stars in total, and they replenish at midnight each night after use, unless all are used, in which case the robe is neutered and useless thereafter.

He also wears a ring of protection +5, a ring of shocking grasp, and carries a stave of thunder and withering, resembling a 7' long earthworm carved from teak.

Ged in Golden Stars: HP 36, AC 4, #ATT1, DMG 1d4 (dagger), Move 120, ML 12, TT None

Spells Memorised: Magic Missile, Hold Portal, Hypnotism, Sleep, Detect Invisibility, Improved Phantasmal Force, Melf's Acid Arrow, Web, Clairaudience, Clairvoyance, Fireball, Suggestion, Dimension Door, Fire Trap, Polymorph Self, Rainbow Pattern, Chaos, Contact Other Plane, Distance Distortion, Teleport, Antimagic Shell, Demishadow Magic, Ensnarement, Permanent illusion, Prismatic Spray

Ged is normally in the Astral Plane. But he is alerted to the presence of intruders in his garden by four flower-shaped windmills place at its NW, NE, SW and SE corners. These begin to spin if a sentient being goes within 12'; Ged is then alerted and will appear in the doorway within 1d20 rounds.

The garden has SEVEN GIANT BUMBLE BEES as guardians. These patrol the vicinity and will come to attack intruders within 1d12 rounds.

Giant Bumble Bee: HD 6+4, AC 5, #ATT 1, DMG 1d6*, Move 60 (Fly 240), ML 9, TT None
*Sting causes additional 1d6 DMG on a failed save versus poison.

A line is strung up, 12' high, across the garden from roughly the centre of the N to S sides, from which hang 43 koi nobori. Within the lining of each of these banners is written a spell; these collectively function as Ged's spellbook. The spells are as follows

1st level: Audible Glamer, Cantrip, Magic Missile, Hold Portal, Taunt, Wall of Fog, Hypnotism, Sleep
2nd level: Alter Self, Blind, Detect Invisibility, Improved Phantasmal Force, Melf's Acid Arrow, Tasha's Uncontrollable Hideous Laughter, Web
3rd level: Clairaudience, Clairvoyance, Fireball, Gust of Wind, Lightning Bolt, Suggestion
4th level: Charm Monster, Dimension Door, Fire Trap, Polymorph Self, Rainbow Pattern, Rary's Mnemonic Enhancer
5th level: Chaos, Contact Other Plane, Distance Distortion, Major Creation, Teleport, Wall of Iron
6th level: Antimagic Shell, Demishadow Magic, Disintegrate, Ensnarement, Guards and Wards, Permanent Illusion, True Seeing
7th level: Limited Wish, Prismatic Spray, Vanish

The koi nobori catch the wind and hold it within their bodies. If one is removed from its position by any other than Ged, it immediately emits a blast of cursed magical wind akin to a death fog in a 10' cube. This will do 4hp damage to anybody in the area and also destroy the two koi nobori immediately to the left and right within 3 rounds. The koi nobori are lined up from S to N in ascending order of level/alphabet.

To the rear of the garden is Ged's potting shed. This contains a 24' long potting table on which sit three rows of 10 plant plots each. His treasure is randomly distributed underneath these plant pots (one item beneath one plant pot): A black opal (1,000 gp), an emerald (5,000 gp), a topaz (500 gp), a fire opal (1,000 gp), an amethyst (500 gp), a peridot (500 gp), a gold snuff box decorated with flowers (500 gp), a pair of platinum chopsticks (750 gp), a porcelain blue rose (250 gp), a pair of 1" tall porcelain ducks (50 gp), a bracelet made of chunks of glass (10 gp), the feather of the down of a peacockatrice (50 gp), a catoblepas tooth carved to resemble a mountain peak (500 gp), a potion of ESP, a philter of stammering and stuttering, a potion of undead control, a potion of vitality, an elixir of health, and an oil of timelessness.

It is watched over by a BLACK PUDDING which inhabits a 5' tall and 5' diameter clay pot decorated with a mosaic of tiny blue and orange square tiles. It emerges within 1d3 rounds of anybody entering the potting shed.

Black Pudding: HD 10, AC 6, #ATT 1, DMG 3d8*, Move 60, ML 12, TT None
*Each successful hit dissolves armour - chain mail takes one hit to dissolve; plate mail takes two; any magical '+' takes an extra round

Happiness is a New Notepad

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 11:23:00 +0000

I'm sure you'll agree with me that there can be few pleasures greater in life than purchasing a new notepad. You hand over the money and there it is: a hundred or more blank pages, waiting to be filled. With what? An infinity of options extends to the far horizon of your mind. Will it be the beginning of a novel-writing career that culminates in a Nobel prize? Will it be a book of poems that will win great plaudits and erudite reviews in the New Yorker and the London Review of Books? Will it be where you scrawl the screenplay for what will one day be a worldwide blockbuster movie? Will it provide the space for the initial sketches for great works of art that finally establish you as the greatest talent of your generation?

You have long suspected you had greatness in you. All it was waiting for was the right notepad. And now you have it in your hands! Feel it! Feel how the pages flip! Feel their delightful texture beneath your fingertips! Gaze on it in wonder! What was once a wonderful living tree that supported a miniature ecosystem of birds, caterpillars, lichen, ants and spiders has been reduced to this bundle of paper, all for you to transform into a work of power and beauty!

And then you go and put it in a drawer with the other thirty or forty blank notepads you own and half-forget about it. But at least you had the thought.

There is nowhere greater to buy stationery in all the world than Japan. I visit every 18 months or so to see family, and always come back with a few notepads when I do. Here is my latest purchase, perfect for dungeon design as I'm sure you'll agree:

It even has a beetle on the front!

Check out those numbers in the margins.

Check out those squares. Phwoar.

This type of squared notebook will be particularly prized by the aspiring DM for obvious reasons, but its original use is to help schoolchildren practice writing Japanese characters. You can order many like it Amazon. More expensive than you would be able to get them in Japan (this one set me back about 100 yen, or 50p), and nothing like as adventurous. But it will prove similarly inspirational.

Right now I am imagining using it to write 'the Kesennuma sessions' - thirty one-page dungeons inspired by the Sanriku coast. But then again it may end up in a drawer. We'll see.

I Hate Myself and Want to Die (or, Frog-People World)

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 21:40:00 +0000

Not really.

But I did just spend an hour drafting a post only for it to disappear into the ether. All the way through, I noticed that the autosave function in Blogger was not working - presumably due to some sort of connection error. But I blithely carried on regardless, and these are the consequences. I hit 'post' and the carefully crafted post I had written simply disappeared. It is not in 'drafts'. It is not in 'posts'. It is gone for good.

To write the whole thing out again would be soul-destroying. So let's do something else instead.

I went to the zoo the other day, and took some photos. Perusing them later, I thought that, put together, they would make an interesting framework for a fantasy world along the lines of Pars Fortuna, which John Stater created by randomly generating an entirely fresh set of races-as-classes for a total revamp of B/X D&D. (I believe the full list he came up with is here.)

The idea here is simple. You know elves, dwarfs, half-orcs, halflings, kobolds, and whatnot? They're all gone. It's a blank canvas. There is going to be a totally new setting with totally new races as PC classes. Here they are:

Tolo-tolo (poison-arrow-frog people): These frog-like humanoids excrete poison, and are fearless, brazen and impetuous for all their halfling-type size. Have excellent saving throws and bonuses to AC and ranged weapons, but lack the intelligence or patience for magic.

Mbalam (lizard people): These are slow-moving unless provoked, resilient, but possessing deep knowledge of powerful forest magic. Something like a mixture of dwarf and magic-user - a tough spell-caster which advances in XP levels very slowly (or perhaps, like an OD&D elf or 2nd edition dual-class human, alternates between fighter/magic-user as it goes up through the levels).

Ngulu (jungle hog people): These are cleric-types - useful in a fight, tough, but imbued with a spiritual strength and innate wisdom which allows them to tap into the spirit realm to commune with the Gods.

Mbote (okapi people): Akin to an elf, these are somewhat slowly advancing, but potentially immensely powerful, fighter-mages - mysterious, stand-offish, and cruelly beautiful.

Teenu (skink-people): Immensely fast and agile, the Teenu practice a kind of teleporting magic which allows them to perform blink-like leaps from one place to another without having to traverse physical space. They are fragile but deadly - expert backstabbers and ambushers but extremely delicate when forced into a corner.

Nioka (blue viper people): The Nioka are a race of cleric-assassins, followers of a pantheon of death gods who bestow on them great power in the practice of murder. They have very high INT and WIS bonuses, as well as saving throws, and access to various necromantic spells. But they have few HP and cannot survive for long in a fair fight.

Wolo (golden frog people): These are a blessed race, marked out by their gods with their golden-hued skin. Those who adventure are like paladins - powerful in combat, particularly against the undead, but slow to advance and rare in number.

Mayele (green toad people): The Mayele are wise and ruminate over the deep insights which their ancestors had into the workings of the cosmos. They move slowly, eschew combat, and have few other talents, but possess vast psychic strength and many strange new spells.

Truche (cassowary people): These are strange, sad, and slow - but deadly fighters. Occupying a niche a little like a dwarf, they combine shyness and pessimism with mighty force.

It occurs to me, however, having written all of the above out, that what we are really looking at here is a world with frog-men at its centre. In this reading, frog-men are the default race, as are humans in B/X or BECMI, and therefore the Tolo-tolo are something like fighters, the Wolo are like clerics, and the Mayele are like magic-users. Then the other races are identified with a single race-as-class.

This obviously suggests a tropical, jungle/swamp environment. But it also suggests a civilisation built by different types of frog-person. This speaks to me of tree-cities, or perhaps floating swamp-cities, or even semi-under(fresh)water cities. It also speaks to me of lost ruins, jungle caves, and tiankeng sinkholes. I like it, and I recommend visiting a zoo near you with your phone and a working thumb in order to come up with something of your own.

Say Goodbye to Felix - It's Dragon Talk

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 22:10:00 +0000

I was recently discussing with two friends, as one does, the important matter of whether a human being could communicate with a red dragon. Could a human learn a dragon's language? And could a red dragon learn a human's? More broadly, is cross-species communication in a fantasy world possible at all?

This is both a more simple and a more complicated question than it appears.

First, clearly cross-species communication is possible in the world which we live in. You communicate with your dog. You may even communicate with your cat - who the hell knows with them, though? Famers communicate with their cattle and sheep. Honeyguides communicate with hunter-gatherers in Africa. And so on. Clearly, the appropriate question is not whether some communication is possible between a human and a red dragon (or an orc and an elven cat, or a duergar and a desert troll, or an ogre mage and a tabaxi, or...), but whether and to what extent that communication can take place through speech.

Second, the issue may be an irrelevance if the setting operates on fairy tale logic. Nobody in a fairy tale fails to communicate with anybody else. Wherever they go, and whoever they encounter, the main character(s) can understand and be understood.

Third, there are lots of nuances. We might want to interrogate:

The Chewbacca Problem. Chewbacca can understand what is said to him, and Han Solo can understand Chewbacca. But the two are not physically equipped to make the relevant sounds in each other's languages. That works in Star Wars, but is it plausible? Are we satisfied that it is possible to make sense of sounds linguistically if we are not able at least in theory to vocalise them? My feeling is that the answer to this question is yes, given enough time for the ear to become accustomed to those sounds, but I have no reason to assume this beyond gut feeling.
The Conceptual Problem. Languages are not just made up of nouns. They are figurative and rooted in feelings and emotions. Consider: 'I hope it doesn't rain tomorrow.' Would that sentence make sense to a creature that does not have a concept of 'hope', such as an orc or kuo-toa may indeed not? What concepts to do orcs or kuo-toa have that we lack?
The Inferential Problem. Languages rely on inference, and cultural embeddedness, to work. Consider: 'I've been sitting around waiting for a response to my email for months.' Have you really been literally sitting around waiting for a response, or have you just been waiting? We all know that the turn of phrase is figurative. What about creatures which literally do not sit (because they have a snake tail, like a naga) or which do not sit when waiting? And what kind of inferences would be necessary to understand the speech of dragons, or bullywugs, or ixitxachitl?
The Embodiment Problem. Languages are spoken by physical beings with bodies, and this affects not just the act of speaking (we have mouths that can only produce a limited range of sounds) but also how we express ourselves. Consider 'I have a good grasp of X now.' To an animal which does grasp things, that makes sense. What about to one which doesn't? Does an elven cat understand 'grasping' and why that would mean 'understanding'?

The interesting question for me is whether a 'common tongue' is a remotely plausible concept. Clearly, it is useful to make a game work. But how confident are we that humans, orcs, elves, dragons, giants, trolls, wraiths, demons and locathah would share enough thought processes to be able to come up with common language that contained anything other than simple nouns? It seems likely that all of those creatures could find agreement on things like what a rock is, what grass is, what death is, and so on. But would nuanced communication be achievable at all?

Against the RPG Rulebook Spartans

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 13:32:00 +0000

I have been writing this blog, and reading other RPG-related blogs and forums, for almost twenty years (!). One thing I have noticed during this time is that there is a species of gamer who sees it as an important part of his (always his) identity that he only uses RPG materials for play and has no other earthly use for them. This type of individual always belittles and pooh-poohs any desire to make a product read well or possess any sort of literary merit; he insists instead that useability is the only valid concern. Everything about a book should serve that end - all of it ruthlessly shaped and focused for efficient use 'at the table'.

This is generally coupled with a derisive attitude to those the RPG Rulebook Spartan percieves to be interested in RPG books for the wrong reasons - the Spartan thinks very poorly of anybody who would want to get such a book 'just' in order to read it and not play it. Reading, he insists, is for fiction. And it is illegitimate for any RPG writer to aspire to create literary art. To do so would be to inculcate in the masses the foolish and corrupting notion that prose style matters. And in any case the RPG Rulebook Spartan strongly believes that only namby-pampby, friendless, introverted girlie men would want to read an RPG rulebook for entertainment in the first place. No: gritting his teeth and staring off into the distance with flinty eyes, the RPG Rulebook Spartan reminds his audience that he has seen things. He is a man of action. He sits down around a table with other men and takes with great seriousness the task of pretending to be an elf. Ideally he would want the rules of whatever game he is playing to be etched in slabs of granite or carved into tree bark. But at the very least those rules should have the decency only to present themselves as rules - and never to try to look or sound nice.

I reject RPG Rulebook Spartanism. I don't think that RPG rulebooks should only be designed with usability in mind. The only ones I have ever read and wanted to play, in fact, are precisely those that prioritise readability over usability. And I am going to out myself. I have played lots of RPGs over the years. But I also - and I am going to shock you, now - going to proudly declare that I own many RPG books that I have absolutely no earthly use for, but which I like because they are enjoyable to read and full of interesting ideas. I do not think it is a sin against God for a designer to prioritise the reading experience over the gaming one. I have no problem with confessing to reading things and enjoying the images they conjure in the mind as an end in itself.

Finally: I reject wholeheartedly the idea that readability and useability are at odds with one another. If something is enjoyable to read then it will inspire you to want to run it, and to make it a success. If something reads like a long list of bullet points, numbered lists, sidebars and the like then its flat and uninspiring nature will work against the desire to make use of it. RPG Rulebook Spartanism is in other word based on a misconceived premise, which is that usefulness can be extracted from aesthetics. It cannot and should not be.

The Holy Grail of Dungeon Representation

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 13:58:00 +0000

I read an interesting blog post today in which the author makes an eloquent and compelling case for describing dungeon locations (and, by inference, hex map locations) using only normal prose sentences and paragraphs, and without

boldings, italicizations, underlinings, smallcaps, parentheticals, bracketed asides, sidebars, lists, tables, bullets, nested sub-bullets, color-coding, font alternates, and all the innumerable other invented methods to display text.

The thesis is that the use of these 'innovations' tend to be distracting and, perversely, makes the parsing of the information both more difficult and less interesting. The post concludes with a cri de coeur which I can certainly get behind: 'The character of writing should be embraced as humans have written for millennia: in sentences and paragraphs, one after the other.'

I find myself agreeing with this, although I am a confirmed middle-aged fart whose innate proclivities tend towards agreement with any thesis that stands athwart change - or, even better, which advocates return to the antique past.

But then again I am also somebody who made an abortive attempt at writing a dungeon novel, which I consider, were such a thing to exist, to be the absolute pinnacle, the Platonic ideal, the holy grail of good representation of gameable material - something which is as enjoyable to read as a fantasy story but also usable to run games with. Or, as I put it back then:

The idea is: it's a collection of stories about adventurers exploring a dungeon, which follows their escapades in a sort of detached pseudo-Vancian narrative. Accompanying the accounts are maps, which can be pieced together. Periodically there are summaries consisting of big sections of the dungeon mapped out and keyed, detailing "the adventure(s) so far" - and at the end there is a full map of the entire thing, with contents, which you can then use to run your own parties of PCs through.

There are three reasons why I would advance the argument that this is indeed the pinnacle, and the best way to communicate the information.

1. It recognises the fact that most RPG materials are bought for entertainment as much as for use at the table, and that indeed there is a market for RPG materials which will never be used for gaming.

2. It recognises that the human brain processes information in narrative form very effectively and that reading a dungeon as a story, or set of short stories, allows the DM to imbibe a mood and a 'thick', tacit awarenesss of the contents much more readily than would be the case with simple, inert room descrptions.

3. It recognises that fantasy fiction has reached something of a dead-end in terms of genre; that there are lots of RPG players who like fantasy fiction; and that there is therefore a big gap in the market for such a product.

The chief hurdle is that which confronts any creative act: procrastination. The next biggest one is actually doing it. To which I can only respond:

A Western in Fantasy Dress

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 13:39:00 +0000

D&D can be understood as a Western in fantasy dress. The reasons for this are not complicated. D&D grew largely out of the American pulp fantasy tradition, and that tradition largely had its historical origins in stories about cowboys and Indians. This is present in the game's very DNA. D&D PCs roam around a landscape full of danger and carry out feats of derring-do in return for glory. And this is, essentially, what every cowboy in every Western does. Sometimes the feats of derring-do are unquestionably good (like The Lone Ranger or Shane). Sometimes they are morally ambivalent or even morally undesirable (like in High Plains Drifter or A Fistful of Dollars). And both of these are present in the different branches of D&D play, with mainstream games often resembling something like Rio Bravo, High Noon, or The Naked Spur, and more OSR-oriented games often resembling something more like The Wild Bunch or Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.

The genius of D&D, however, is that it (entirely, I am sure, unconsciously) recognises that Westerns have both limited shelf-lives and limited scope. Ultimately, the Western is not that interesting as a long-term proposition. Westerns work best as short stories, or as films (which are the visual equivalents of short stories). They are a chunk of concentrated action and adventure with a definite beginning, middle and end. They are not the stuff of, say, a multi-volume series of epic novels each of 1000 pages in length.

This is the reason, I think, why we don't really see many Western RPGs in general. There are only so many innocent Indian tribes to vanquish, robber barons to dispossess, stagecoaches to protect, banks to rob, and outlaws to apprehend, before things get stale. Those things are fine as one-offs. But they aren't the stuff of campaigns.

The genius of D&D lies in the fact that, just as English layers a great deal of French (and loanwords from other languages) on an underlying Germanic chassis, it submerges its Western skeleton in fantasy tropes - and thereby brings in almost limitless variety. And this variety comes in at two levels. On the one hand there is just so much more to do (you can vanquish hostile tribes, dispossess robber barons, protect stagecoaches, rob banks, and apprehend outlaws, but you can also fight dragons, defeat vampire lords, delve beneath the ocean to fight sahuagin, summon vile and ancient demigods, and so on). And on the other hand there is much more scope to improve. A cowbody is always a cowboy. But a D&D PC can go from being an ineffectual, green-around-the-gills schlubb to being in effect a demigod in his own right.

I don't think that Gygax and Arneson explicitly saw this (maybe they did), but they certainly unconsciously intuited it. Western bones + Tolkien meat = a delicious feast.

Two corollaries arise from this.

1. The Western structure also works for other genres - certainly science fiction. In principle, any type of meat can be put on the Western bones so long as the underlying skeleton is left intact.

2. It is I think also true that fantasy dress can enliven any underlying structure. Mystery RPGs on their own are quite dull and hard to make work. But the structure of the mystery may be vastly improved by making it a mystery in a fantasy setting, with all the variety that entails. There may be other examples.

Adding a Touch of Colour: Or, Blue Dwarfs, Yellow Giants, and Red Trolls, Oh My!

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 13:25:00 +0000

There is a pleasing direct vividness about colour words appearing in book titles, monster names, or fantasy geographies. 'The King in Yellow'. Red Mars. Purple Worm. 'The Masque of the Red Death'. Sir Gawaine and the Green Knight. 'The White People'. The Silver Chair. The Black Speech. And so on.

The reasons for this are not very complicated, I suppose. First, we are so alive to colour as such that it instantly appears in our mind - one need only see the word 'red' to immediately see vivid red in one's mind's eye. No mental effort required.

Second, colours often have connotations. Silver feels mysterious; white feels cold; red suggests blood or fire; green suggests nature or spring, and so on. There is a lot of semiotic significance packed into these single words.

And the third is the blunt effectiveness of these often monosyllabic, Anglo-Saxon-sounding terms. Which of these is more evocative: The Blue Mountains or the Mountains of Syllrabiastra? It is the former for a whole arsenal of reasons, but one of them is simply that 'Blue Mountains' has a ring to it. 'Blue' is a good, solid word that anybody can understand; it also doesn't beat around the bush. It goes straight at you, in your face. Most colour words - certainly the simple colour words that we learn as children, or when learning a new language - have this quality. They don't mess around.

It follows that if one wishes to add some spice and vividness in worldbuilding, one can't go too far wrong with creative use of colour in the naming of things. This perhaps shouldn't be overdone, but it is surprising how much life can be breathed into even the most hackneyed concepts with a fresh hue. Instead of the Goblins of Elrexinfrax, go for the Purple goblins of Elrexinfrax. Instead of the Dwarfs of Undermountain, go for the Blue Dwarfs of Undermountain. Instead of the Empress of Yeffinfeff, go for the Red Empress of Yeffinfeff. And so forth.

The important point here is not that the goblins, dwarfs, or empress are necessarily actually purple, blue or red (though they may be). Perhaps the blue dwarfs are called such because they mine blue-tinged iron to make their weapons. Perhaps the purple goblins make a violet dye from some strange fruit and use it to colour their skin, or for tattoos. Perhaps the Red Empress is known for bathing in the blood of virgins. Whatever. The colour both generates an evocative name - and a reason to pique the curiosity of the players - but also gets the creative juices flowing.

To this end, I recommend using this technique before coming up with any details in advance. While stocking your hexmap you decide that this area of land is populated by a race of giants known as the Yellow Giants. Why are they yellow? That's what gets the ideas flowing.

Terrain Types for Encounter Tables and Hex Maps: What Principles?

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 23:30:00 +0000

How fine-grained does one like one's terrain types, sir? And is it possible to come up with some principles regarding how many such types there should ideally be?

I ask because I happen to have been paging idly through Oriental Adventures just now, and came across in it a page of Encounter Tables by Terrain Type. These are:

City/Town
Tropical/Sub-tropical mountains
Tropical/Sub-tropical ocean
Temperate swamp
Rural
Tropical/Sub-tropical forest
Temperate mountain
Temperate freshwater
Steppe
Tropical/Sub-tropical swamp
Temperate forest
Temperate ocean
Aerial
Tropical/Sub-tropical freshwater
Temperate plain
Cold regions (all terrain types)

Clearly the designers got bored by the end - or perhaps just didn't have enough monster varieties - and decided not to bother with distinct tables for 'cold' forests, mountains, swamps and so on. There are also some oddities and lacunae in their approach. One is that there is no distinction drawn between tropical, temperate, and sub-tropical cities and rural areas. Another is that there is no concept of hills: everything is either mountain or forest, or open flatland.

Otherwise their usage is pretty consistent with what one would expect, and what I imagine most DMs resort to when populating a hexmap and writing up wilderness encounter tables.

But this does raise the (to me, at any rate) curious fact that, for all that there are more blogposts and print and digital products about how to create, populate and run hexmaps than there are grains of sand on all of the beaches in the universe, I don't believe I have ever read anything by way of principles guiding selection of terrain types for hexes. All I've ever seen are rough and ready preconceived ideas put into practice. People just do it 'by eye' and don't, I think, give it a great deal of thought. Nobody really seems to think through, in a reasoned way, why the division is between temperate forest, temperate mountain, etc., but not, for example, temperate deciduous versus coniferous forest, or dense versus light forest, or mountains above and below the treeline, or whatever. Likewise, nobody really seems to consider whether there are meaningful differences in terms of movement rates or the population of wilderness encounter tables between, say, a temperate plain versus a steppe, or tundra versus arctic, or whatever.

Without having thought the matter through a great deal, and therefore offering this post as a conversation starter more than anything else, I will suggest there are probably three main approaches to the matter:

The realistic approach: the DM simply tries as hard as he can to come up with a list of terrain types which reflects actual real-world complexity as he sees it. If he thinks a forest flatland is different to forested hills, or a rural piedmont is different to a rural plain, then he duly deploys different hex styles to reflect those differences.
The game management approach. The DM uses as many terrain types as is practically useful given the nature of the campaign. If the hexmap is mostly jungle, then he may divide the terrain into dense versus moderate versus light jungle; big and small rivers; bogs versus marshes versus swamps; forested hills; etc., so as to maintain variety. On the other hand, if there is already natural variety within the hexmap (because one area is deserted, another mountainous, another more temperate, etc.) then there is no need to get too fine-grained.
The monster-availability-led approach. Rather than starting off with the map, the DM makes a list of all the monsters he can think of and, from that, decide how many terrain types are meaningful. Why draw a distinction between arctic and tundra if the number of cold-place monster varieties is very small and the wilderness encounter table will therefore largely look the same? Why draw a distinction between dense versus light forest if there are only so many forest-dwelling monsters in the bestiary? And so on.

Have any readers given it any more thought than this? How do you decide how many terrain types your campaign map will have, and how fine-grained or abstract do you tend to get?

The External and Internal Faces of Nerd Commerce

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 15:12:00 +0000

Yesterday, I had half an hour to kill in the local city centre while waiting for a delayed train. There are two chain nerd shops not far from the train station, and almost right next to each other, so I popped into both.

The first, Travelling Man, is a cornucopia of obviously quite carefully curated delights. Not all of it is for me, of course. But it contains a big RPG section, a big board game section, a big Games Workshop section, a big manga section, a big comic section, and various others. It is almost overflowing with stock, all of it creating the impression of having been chosen by enthusiasts who really like what they are selling. There are recommendations; there are displays; there are regular customers engaging in awkward nerd-banter with the staff. I found it a very congenial space in which to spend time.

The second, Forbidden Planet, essentially sells those little Funko figurines with the big wobbly heads. And that's about it. There are one or two glass cabinets featuring other, more expensive forms of tat (a cast iron statue of the batmobile, etc.), but I would estimate that over 75% of the shop's revenue come entirely through selling Funkos. I found it alienating and depressing to be in there for more than two minutes.

I observed this - that more or less next door to each other there are these two wildly different approaches to, let's call it, nerd commerce - to a friend with a WhatsApp message and he made the following comment:

There are lots of people who like tat. Or people who don't know what to get someone for a gift but they think they remember the person saying something about Star Wars one time and so they buy them a Star Wars Funko Pop/keyring/poster etc.

I thought this was pretty astute. And it alludes to an important distinction between two aspects of nerd culture, and suggests that nerd commerce is in fact bifurcating (or has bifurcated) to meet them.

The first aspect of nerd culture is that it is very inward facing. It is insular, introspective, and indeed introverted; nerds like a special thing which only they and a very select group of other nerds know very much about. And Travelling Man meets the need of that audince. It feels like going into a clubhouse. And it would, I imagine, be quite an intimidating place for a non-nerd to go. It would be hard to figure out what half the stuff in there even is without having been introduced by somebody in the in-group.

The second aspect of nerd culture is that it is also outward-facing. Nerds like to be associated with 'their thing', I think often almost as a kind of shield behind which to hide their more private thoughts, and non-nerds will often fixate on the 'thing' that the nerd in their lives is into, recognising it to be an important facet of their personality. 'I am Bob and I am into Babylon 5' becomes a means through which Bob's friends, family and colleagues can relate to him (in much the same way that they might relate to his brother, Reg, through the fact that he is a big Motherwell fan).

These two faces, the internal and external, interior and exterior, private and public, exist in a state of tension in nerddom as such, and within the heart of the individual nerd. I perform no psychoanalysis here, but it is interesting that the two sides of the nerd personality appear to have given rise in our age to two very distinct mode of moneymaking activity: on the one hand, the studiedly hobbyist outfit; on the other, the acceptable face of nerdishness as laundered through gift-giving. To experience one or the other is almost to step into a different world - one (to me) warm and comfortable, the other cold and transactional. But some readers, no doubt, will rather like Funkos, so perhaps that's just me.

Pale as a Ghost in the Afternoon

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 14:22:00 +0000

I like the moon, and moons, as a feature of RPG adventures and settings. A while ago, I wrote that:

The moon has played an exceptionally important role in the development of the human imagination. The sun gives life; we know this intuitively, and we have long worshipped it as a result. But the moon is different. It stands there in the heavens and seems to suggest to us that our world, the human world, and the sun that gives it warmth and light, are not all that exists in creation. It calls for an explanation. It seems to have its own, cold and pale, source of light. It presents us with mysteries, at times concealing its face and at times revealing it, and sometimes looming larger or even changing its colour. Looking at it carefully, one can discern features on it, which to some cultures resembles a face, to others a rabbit, to others a woman carrying sticks. It is trite to call it 'otherworldly', but that is how even the ancients seem to have thought of it. Is it possible to imagine that human beings would have come up with science fiction if the moon did not exist?
To the hardened SF enthusiast, the moon is old hat; we have even been there. But in a fantasy, or apocalyptic, or 'dying earth' setting, the moon can be anything. Anything can live there; any rules of physics can apply; its pale white surface could conceal any kind of structure or environment one would wish...

I think the image I had in mind here, as is generally the case when I (or anybody else) envisages the moon, was of the moon at night. But of course, the moon is just as often visible during the day, appearing faint and almost translucent in the blue of the sky.

This calls to mind an altogether different image of life there. Whereas the night-time moon looks bright, cold, and full of magic and puissance, the day-time moon looks somehow both elegant and haunted - lighter (in the sense of lack of mass) and less substantive, more cloud-like than rocky.

In a book of children's poems by Shirley Hughes she describes the moon as 'pale as a ghost in the afternoon', and this conjures in the mind - or, at least, in my mind - an idea of the moon as a ghost itself. Once there was an actual moon, but it has been destroyed, perhaps by the Gods or by powerful magic. And now only its ghost remains.

This seems like it should be part of a fantasy setting, but I can't think of one - I have some vague recollections of vanished moons being an aspect of Eberron, but that's not quite the same thing. Perhaps this is a genuinely novel idea, and I am immediately struck by various thoughts:

Perhaps the ghost-moon is imbued with a consciousness, and somehow communicates with people on the world below, or even functions for a particular specialist class of priests or magic-users as a means of scrying or soothsaying (or as a medium with the dead), who offer 'gifts' of some kind in return for its aid.
Peharps the ghost-moon is where the dead go when they are dead, and people from the world can go there to try to find lost loves ones.
Perhaps the ghost-moon was densely populated and when it was destroyed all of its inhabitants became undead. Perhaps these undead visit the world from the ghost-moon to haunt it.
Perhaps the ghost-moon was once a palace, and it is now possible to go there and bring back ethereal treasures or magicks from the dead civilisation that it was once home to.

What else might be true of the ghost-moon, and what role might it play in a campaign setting?

Oh, Tell Me the Truth About Lusaphone Fantasy

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 11:41:00 +0000

Due to a strange confluence of events, my life has recently become dominated by all things Portuguese. All of my professional interactions and personal friendships lately appear to revolve around Portugal itself, Brazil, or lusaphone Africa.

The universe, I have decided, is telling me something. Ahead of a trip to Brazil which I will be taking in the coming year, I have been quite earnestly learning Portuguese on duolingo and enjoying the experience. And this has made me curious about fantasy (also SF) literature in Portuguese.

I know that there are Brazilian readers of this blog, and perhaps also from other parts of the Portuguese-speaking world. While I by no means suggest I could easily tackle a Portuguese-language novel, I am curious about what is out there by way of fantasy literature and would love some recommendations from my readers. For clarity: I am not interested in literature that has been translated into English, but 'native' work that will help me practice and learn the language better.

Reviewing the Covers of a Miscellany of Treasures Found in an Old Box in the Cellar

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 14:14:00 +0000

The other day I was doing a clearout of old junk and came across a box filled with books put into storage from a childhood bookshelf. Below, they are pasted in all their glory. Behold them, DESPAIR, and MARVEL. I will now commence to review and rank them. Reviews are based on artistic merit, excitement level, and innovation, marked in the traditional way (1-5 bec des corbins), with the marks averaged and an overall ranking produced.

There is something faintly ridiculous about this cover, for all that it depicts something fabulous and for all its technical merit. Is it really plausible to imagine that his quads are strong enough for him to ride around on those tigers all the way across a semi-frozen lake? Does he not feel the burn? Does his facial expression not lack a certain je ne sais quoi? Bonus point, however, for creative and tasteful deployment of a cod-piece.

Artistic merit: 4, Excitement level: 3, Innovation: 2.

It is a tower of destruction and it destroys. I loved this image as a child, and I love it still. Take that, innocent village of innocent villagers! Tell me that the image, while fairly by-the-numbers in the grand scheme of things, does not want to make you play the book.

Artistic merit: 3, Excitement level: 5, Innovation: 2

This, on the other hand, is, to use the technical expression, pants. Lacking in motion or vibrancy, it appears to depict not so much a demon as a vaguely non-plussed and rather sheepish looking skeleton who is not so much brandishing his weapons as showing them off to his audience. He is accompanied by two fish-men goons who appear to be almost a backing chorus. This is poorly executed.

Artistic merit: 2, Excitement level: 1, Innovation: 1

This is an example of a particular genre of RPG/Gamebook art, which depicts fantasy creatures interacting in some way with the paraphernalia associated with the game (in this case it is dice, which is normally the case, but it could be pens or paper or a rulebook). This runs contrary to my taste (I can't fathom why this approach could be considered more exciting than a depiction of an actual 'in game' event), although I do quite like the way the tigerman slobbers ravenously, and the strangely haunted looking dwarf emerging from the dice itself.

Artistic merit: 3, Excitement level: 1, Innovation: 1.

This is a decent, spooky picture, perhaps rather derivative of every early Stephen King cover you have seen, and with an oddly lacklustre horned vampire fellow here at the front. Good evil ents, though.

Artistic merit: 3, Excitement level: 3, Innovation: 1.

It is quite hard to argue that this is a good picture. Indeed, I am struggling to find merit in it. Is there any merit in it? It is, at least, distinctive. Is distinctiveness good even if the image is bad? I will leave this question to the philosophers in my readership.

Artistic merit: 1, Excitement level: 1, Innovation: 3.

I love this one. Yes, it's cheesy. But they had me at, 'An image of an army of baddies descending from a mountain fortress'. Add a glaring, self-evidently mostrously evil warlock at the top and you have some tasty icing on top of the cake.

Artistic merit: 3, Excitement level: 5, Innovation: 2.

I can remember this cover scaring me as a child. I didn't like looking at it, and the figure of the sorcerer has from time to time haunted my nightmares since then. Seen through adult eyes, I think it is a great piece, for what it is, although perhaps the facial expression on the sorcerer lacks some of the necessary bile.

Artistic merit: 4, Excitement level: 4, Innovation: 3.

This is a nicely conceived image which hits all the right notes - I love the little details, like the morning start hanging from the orc's belt, and his tigerskin whatever-it-is (cummerbund?). It also conveys a sense of mystery. What is going on? Those who have read the book will know, but put your mind into the head of a 9-year-old boy seeing it for the firsst time.

Artistic merit: 4, Excitement level: 5, Innovation: 3.

This, after the two previous highs, is a little bit of a comedown. This is not a bad picture, and I have to say I love the wicked look on the skeleton's face and the gloominess of the atmosphere. But it lacks dynamism. Okay, it's a city of thieves. But what is depicted looks small and rather uninspiring.

Artistic merit: 3, Excitement level: 2, Innovation: 2.

A totally iconic fantasy picture, for me, as The Forest of Doom was the first Fighting Fantasy I ever read, and the cover was a major part of what hooked me. It looked very grown up and very sophisticated in comparison to what I had previously been reading; I just knew, when I saw it, that I wanted to know what was inside. I still think it's a great picture, made special by the beams of sunlight filtering down through the trees, and the sheer menace of the cloaked figure on the front.

Artistic merit: 5, Excitement level: 5, Innovation: 3.

A lot of Fighting Fantasy covers are like this: an image of a monster just sort of standing there, striking a pose. It has a rote feeling to it. This is sufficient for somebody who is already bought in, and who wants to complete his set of books. But it is not inspiring.

Artistic merit: 3, Excitement level: 2, Innovation: 1.

The Crimson Tide is a strange book, and the cover image is almost surreal - two guards, one looking like a shark-man and the other a mole-man, both winged, and both wearing quasi-Japanese, quasi-Arabian armour, stand over a prisoner or slave, while other animal-headed figures lurk in the background and a throned figure guffaws with glee. What the fuck is going on? It's so long since I've read it, I can't remember, but the image is certainly different to others in the Fighting Fantasy line.

Artistic merit: 3, Excitement level: 4, Innovation: 4.

Two for the price of one. I love these pictures. The almost hyper-realistic style works brilliantly, and the images are so dynamic even if there are quibbles over composition. I wish I had the first in the Advanced series, but sadly I never got it - it was in the local library, and those were the days when 'having it in the local library' was sufficient for most purposes.

Artistic merit: 4, Excitement level: 5, Innovation: 3.

The contents of this book are forgettable - or, at least, I've forgotten them. There seemed to be hundreds of these TSR novels being churned out every year, and this did not particularly stand out. With that said, I think this cover looks great. Except for the subject matter, one could almost imagine it hanging in a gallery as an example of a piece of art from the romantic era depicting a biblical or classical scene. My one complaint is that Kaz's facial expression does not quite fit in with the action - why is he looking in the viewer's direction, rather than that of the dragon?

Artistic merit: 4, Excitement level: 4, Innovation: 4.

I like the artistic direction behind the Legends of Lone Wolf novel series (well worth tracking down, if memory serves), but this is one of the weaker covers. The sword arm of the humanoid figure (who I think must be Lone Wolfe) is all wrong, and the monster looks almost timid and retiring. Could have been so much better with the right execution.

Artistic merit: 2, Excitement level: 2, Innovation: 3.

There is something about a picture of a powerful magic user emerging from a black hole, surrounded by fire and lightning, that just speaks to me. This is a striking, expressionistic image that manages to convey something of the awe and fear that our protagonist, in chains in the foreground, must feel. I like it, and can forgive some flaws in execution (again - what is going on with Lone Wolf's arms?).

Artistic merit: 4, Excitement level: 4, Innovation: 3.

This is an image of real charm, and I remember the scene it depicts from the book very well, depite having only fragmentary memories of the series as a whole. The look on the character's face (somebody reading this will remember his name) is priceless, and the prospective reader really wants to find out more about what the scene depicts and the story in which it is set.

Artistic merit: 5, Excitement level: 5, Innovation: 3.

This is another wonderfully moody and atmospheric piece, with bonus points for being exceptionally appealing to the eyes of an adolescent boy. See what I mean about the artistic direction behind the covers in this series? This is classy work.

Artistic merit: 5, Excitement level: 4, Innovation: 3.

This is not a piece one would have hanging on one's wall. But I find it effective in an expressionistic way. The boat really looks like it is moving - an effect which is hard to achieve - and even that it is about to spring out from the cover and into reality. This book sticks in my memory because the opening scene involves Lone Wolf stabbing somebody in the eyeball, which when I read it - aged twelve or whatever - struck me as the most amazing thing ever to have been committed to paper.

Artistic merit: 3, Excitement level: 4, Innovation: 3.

This is a phenomenal image. Everything about it is great. I want this one hanging on my wall.

Artistic merit: 5, Excitement level: 5, Innovation: 3.

The flying beasts here (I wish I could remember the name of the species in question) are depicted with lovely dynamism and skill, and there is something pleasingly minimalist and stark about the overall image. One can imagine these things being about to swoop down to snatch helpless prey spotted far below - and the sun in the background, like something off a metal album cover, completes the scene.

Artistic merit: 4, Excitement level: 4, Innovation: 3.

I have not read this book since I was an adolescent, though I have fond memories of the contents. The cover image is dreadful, though - like a poor imitation of The Return to Firetop Mountain. The demon in the background looks far too cartoonish to be plausible, and what is going on with that chaos warrior's axe? Depicting forward or backward motion is one of the hardest things for an artist to pull-off, and whoever did this piece was very ill-advised in making the attempt. I quite like the bloodletter of Khorne, though.

Artistic merit: 2, Excitement level: 2, Innovation: 1.

I love the sweep of the warlock's arms here, and the sense of motion in the smoke and whatever magical dry ice is being depicted. This is really best concieved in the genre of 'powerful magic user strike a pose', which has been a feature of the covers reviewed here, and one that I have a real weakness for. Imagine looking at this image while your favourite metal riff is being played in the background, and tell me that the result is not awesome in the strict sense.

Artistic merit: 4, Excitement level: 4, Innovation: 3.

The final cover here does not quite work. It is interesting that the samurai's back banner literally means 'bad death' - although the characters are not quite right - but the way he is prancing about on that bridge is not really plausible or becoming bad guy behaviour.

Artistic merit: 2, Excitement level: 2, Innovation: 2.

Final Ranking

1 - The Dark Door Opens

1 - The Book of the Magnakai

1 - The Forest of Doom

4 - Caverns of the Snow Witch

4 - Advanced Fighting Fantasy combo

4 - Kaz the Minotaur

4 - The Sacrifice of Ruanon

8 - Crypt of the Sorcerer

8 - The Warlock of Firetop Mountain

8 - The Crimson Tide

8 - The Secret of Kazan-Oud

8 - Eclipse of the Kai

13 - Tower of Destruction

13 - Return to Firetop Mountain

13 - The Sword of the Sun

16 - Daggers of Darkness

17 - House of Hell

17 - City of Thieves

17 - The Lorestone of Varetta

20 - Temple of Terror

20 - Sword of the Samurai

22 - Fighting Fantasy

22 - Citadel of Chaos

22 - Konrad

25 - Demons of the Deep

Was D&D Inevitable?

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 22:52:00 +0000

A very long time ago, I read an anecdote in a book (I forget the title and who it was by - my memory is now like a dusty attic full of boxes covered with labels too faded to read). In it, a professor had put to his students a poser: if you were to go back in time and assassinate Albert Einstein, Gustave Eiffel, or Isaac Newton, then whose premature death would in the long term be more significant?

The professor's answer was Gustave Eiffel. Sooner or later the discoveries of scientists like Einstein or Newton would have been found out by other people, since they were indeed 'discoveries'. But nobody would ever have made the Eiffel tower if Gustave Eiffel had not done so.

The anecdote I suppose only fully works if you appreciate the Eiffel Tower very much, but the point is an interesting and provocative one: artistic achievements are more important than scientific ones. This is because science is, if you like, 'out there'. We can find it. And we will find it, given long enough. Artistic achievements, on the other hand, are genuinely unique: once they're done, they're done, and each one is the by-product of a confluence of forces - genetic, experiential, circumstantial, subconscious - that will never come together in the same way twice.

This argument, however, can only be pushed so far. It depends what level of abstraction you are talking about. It's probably true that nobody would have written The Big Sleep if Raymond Chandler had died as an infant. But it is impossible to imagine that crime fiction would not have existed even if all the major crime authors we now know of had never been born. Its creation feels inevitable given what we know about human beings; once it became possible to imagine the solving of crime as an endeavour in itself, it was inevitable that people would begin to write stories about it.

This places the fantasy genre in an interesting position. If Tolkien (and the other authors who had roles to play in the formation of the genre) had all failed to survive infancy, would people nowadays be describing the existence of a thing called fantasy? Our instincts gesture towards 'yes', although I think crucial elements of it would have been different - an interesting question to speculate about and argue over.

And it also places RPGs in an interesting position. If Gygax and Arneson had not been born, or if their paths through life had gone in different directions, would tabletop RPGs have been invented by somebody else? Is the playing of RPGs a feature of human sociality that would always have emerged, albeit in different genres? Or is it simply the case that D&D was in the right place at the right time?

My own feeling is that it was inevitable that tabletop RPGs would have been invented sooner or later, although they may not have been as explicitly high fantasy in tone. (One can even imagine them as having emerged as a sort of parlour game, perhaps more along the lines of the crime or romance genres than fantasy.) This is because of the inevitable connection between games and storytelling. When we sit down to play a game, provided it is not entirely abstract - like, say poker - we tend instinctively and intuitively to create narratives around it. We immerse ourselves in the imaginary world in which the game is taking place, and we project our personalities into the protagonists - whether they be pieces trotting around on a tabletop board or sprites in a video game. We do all this naturally, and the building blocks for RPGs are therefore always already there. And they would have been always already there for somebody to pick up and systematise; it just happened to be Gygax and Arneson who did it.

That it was those two men should not be overlooked, of course. And it raises further interesting questions: what was it about those men, and the period in which they lived, that caused them to come up with what they came out with. It also poses curious further make believe scenarios: is there an alternative universe in which Gygax and Arneson were really into Jane Austen, or Shakespeare, or Sci-Fi, or Miss Marple, and dreamed up a tabletop RPG based on that love, rather than that the 'our world' Lake Geneva boys had for Lovecraft, Vance and Tolkien?