Patrick Stuart's Blog, page 13

VEINS OF THE EARTH FOR SALE

Yo! I am selling my onlyremaining copy of Veins of the Earth on ebay,

no shade - I just NEED THE MONEY

You can look on ebay here

If you win and want it signed or a message or something let me know and I will do so

I am selling a bunch of other stuff but, other than VotE, its all within the UK only. Mainly its Warhammer stuff. HOWEVER, as a reward for reading this far I will tell you a mysterious truth - somebody sent me anonymous pornography

I DID NOT ORDER THIS!!!!

I was sent a full set of the 'Hardcover' collection from Editions Cauderette

with no reason, for free

I couldn't work out if this was a mistake as I ordered something else from them around a similar time

or did they send it to me for review or something because of my radical boomer takes on freeze peach or whatever? If you did I am sorry but I did not have the nerve to review it, I just hid it on a shelf. 

Anyway, this is also for sale but UK only as god knows what the laws are about this sort of thing.

Also I realise no-one will ever believe me about "they just sent me porn for no reason". Once I was fucking about with wood glue to try and base a mini and was having a nightmare of a time trying to get it to fit, heard a knock at the door and I opened it in t shirt and shorts, red, sweaty and stained with white wood glue. It was the postman. I even said out loud "Its wood glue! I'm gluing something..." but I can see he didn't believe me and I expect neither will you. Such is life.

New, Rentable Patrick (DRM INCLUDED DO NOT REMOVE)

 Peace unto you! The moment you read these words my propriety DRM was injected into your brain please be aware that thinking about this in a way I don't like will be considered a copyright issue. If you got this far an NDA is also in effect.

Good news everybody! Technology has advanced to the point where the means of production are falling into the hands of the creators directly!

But what does this mean for.. CORPORATIONS? How will they live? 

RENT

Production is so last century. Creation is passe. The horrible mistake of an industrial economy was that, in mass producing products and selling them to everyone, that meant that they, the consumer, NOW HAD THOSE PRODUCTS! That is not what consumers are for! Its in the name! Con-SOOOOOOOOM. 

["consume (v.)

late 14c., "to destroy by separating into parts which cannot be reunited, as by burning or eating," hence "destroy the substance of, annihilate," from Old French consumer "to consume" (12c.) and directly from Latin consumere "to use up, eat, waste," from assimilated form of com-, here perhaps an intensive prefix (see com-), + sumere "to take," from sub- "under" (see sub-) + emere "to buy, take" (from PIE root *em- "to take, distribute")."]

Over the years our finest minds have been working on amending this horrific error. Planned obsolescence, shifting fashions and instilled desires have gotten us part of the way there. But now, the problem is finally solved. 

RENT! 

The same advances in technology that allow the consumers to communicate, create and even (blech) PRODUCE amongst themselves, have given us a wonderful gift! What was once bought can now be rented, what was owned can be made transitory. Your car? rent or we cancel the OS. This toilet? Rent. That kitchen knife.. we are working on it. Rent is our future, rent is our god.

Once you seal people into a closed system and annihilate anything outside it’s really just a matter of going through your budget line by line and striking out everything you don't like the look of.

In our brave new future the only things that exist will be rent control systems and marketing budgets (to remind consumers that only by paying rent will they be part of a community).

No longer will new ideas need to be developed, we have enough. Can just keep re-releasing Spider-Man, fiddle with the numbers on Warhammer, change the genders in Planescape. Old ideas are best apart from when they are insensitive but we can change that hour by hour.

Yes, intellectual property laws may be a problem. Like with Middle-earth the most resistant IP holders just died recently and the whole thing goes into public domain in 30 or 40 years

so we only have that gap to utterly SKULLFUCK the setting, but that’s no reason not to try.

Fairness and Accessibility - in our walled these things can be invisibly disposed of through the feigned gift of INFINITE OPPORTUNITY! Everything you could desire only a click away!

Although in practice what the consumer will not find is a nice clear index of previous products and development in the order they were created, arranged in a coherent system - but a search bar and a series of recommendations created and curated by us.

Of course they can still find ANYTHING through the search bar - but the only way to know what they are looking for is to know in advance or to have been told about it by us, and results are weighted by whatever others are searching for, and by whatever the algorithm thinks they want or should want, and whatever weights have been applied to it by us

this dull and misty form of information control much much more powerful than simply banning or removing things. a hard block creates a hard counter-response, and that might encourage a competitor, or the surge of resistance and negative emotion that causes someone to actually try to leave the walled garden, but a soft block, a series of narrowing hoops, the artful use of confusion and vagueness, softens resistance and reaction.

Reaction is the enemy. Any very strong emotional response is really actually quite dangerous, since it can set up very unpredictable currents within the consumer, unregistered or unpredicted desires which the garden cannot fulfil - very bad

Softness comfort and emotional anhedonia at all levels are the way. A soft comfortable dose of mild pleasure at regular intervals creates the most valuable rent source; predictable, no anger or reaction, no unknown desires, long term, permanent.

So.......

WHATS NEW FOR FALSE MACHINE???

First - NEW APPS!

As a wonderful addition to our legal-protection community of ideas nu False Machine product protection software will randomly changing the numbers AND (for no extra cost) letters and whatever with each update, (updates will be continual).

The re-updated False Machine product will be extremely diverse, respectful, representative (of the ethnic balance of the "nicer" parts of US coastal city), and will be under continual review from a range of sensitivity readers. Let me make it clear - if you disagree with this you are a racist*.

(*Unless you are from the Chinese market or 'global south' in which case we will respectfully and sensitively edit out all of this stuff because False Machine Products are for EVERYONE; including all minority groups and the people who hate exactly those minorities)

Nu-old-re-sensitised False Machine product WILL be freshly de-coherent due to the semi-random recombination of words and letters in each FREE (open to all) downloadable (through our app, please don't try to move files outside the app) content update.

GOOD NEWS - for the low low price of [INSERT CURRENT PRICE HERE] per day, YOU can gain access to our False Machine Community, consisting of; a Discord server from which a fair proportion of the groomers have been removed, THRILLING bi-weekly updates and virtual conferences and most crucially, (this is something we are really very excited about) our welcoming and soothing decryption software.

With the all-new False Machine "Community and Decryption" app (charges separate to the False Machine "Releases and Engagement" App), YOU will be able to decrypt and actually read a wide (but not total, and continually shifting) amount of the False Machine back catalogue! Access to literally some books some of the time in some places!

And it gets better! Because we at False Machine LOVE YOU so much (this entity just wants to take a moment here to offer its thanks and very genuine love to you all, this is a real and actual relationship which this entity has with you the reader) by joining our SUPER ELITE DIVERSITY MAX program (for a relatively small extra daily charge) YOU will be able to share our content with your friends (so long as they also have the False Machine "Release and Engagement" App, the False Machine "Community and Decryption" App and have are also part of the SUPER ELITE DIVERSITY MAX program) for up to d4 hours! (Little bit of an OSR reference there,  FOR THE FANS).

Bringing people together is what its all about. In a context and manner controlled entirely by us. 

Second - NU GOBLINS!

For one of our first EXCITING roundtable updates - SHOCKING NEWS - Goblins have gone from 1HD to 2 HD creatures! And are also being re-named Derp-Thrust Gobelyns for copyright reasons.

Yes we have listened to your feedback and our community of playtesters and random twitter nutters and come together as a community to make this radical (get somehow comforting) change. 

False Machine Derp-Thrust Gobelyns! What will these changes mean for YOU? And for the META? We gather a group of employees from random parts of the company in front of a webcam to read bullet points from an off-camera whiteboard. It’s like a circle of friends who are paid to be here and told exactly what and what not to think. Community.

Why not become part of the False Machine COMUNITY and leave a comment? (Any offensive, non pro-social, 'troll', fruitlessly critical, anti-social negatively analytical comments will be moderated we try to keep our community safe for EVERYONE because False Machine is for EVERYONE).

Yes Derp-Thrust Gobelyns are now twice as Goblin as before, in a way this is exactly what our founder probably was imagining when they invented Goblins or whatever but only now with our best ruleset and system EVER can we bring you Derp-Thrust Gobelyns as they were _intended_ to be represented and at twice the previous price. And yes we have listened to our community and new  Derp-Thrust Gobelyns are fully representative of a range of gender and lifestyle choices. Failing to like the new Goblins does indicate transphobia*. There is no room for prejudice here at False Machine.

[*Unless you are  buying in the Chinese Market or Global South]

Hot new exciting and representative 2HD Derp-Thrust Gobelyns will be available to pre-order SOON. But don't worry! For those of you still (why though?) using _legacy_ goblins, we will be releasing some fucking thing who knows probably there is a PDF somewhere. Old Goblins will still be playable they will just be fucking stupid and pointless.

Third  - Good news! 

OUR DISCORD MOD HAS BEEN RELEASED FROM PRISON IN THAILAND.

Weebery Five - I Barely Survived

I am back and I have watched yet more anime. I could not stop. The original posts are here
One - Descent into WeeberyDororoRe:CreatorsInuyashiki Last Hero

Two - into the Maelstrom of ThighsGankutsuo: The Count of Monte CristoOniheiOutlaw StarFull Metal Panic!

Three - Hee hee heeThe Great PassageBannana FishKemurikusaKokkoku

Four - I Came back for MoreRanking of KingsOdd TaxiFire ForceMy Hero AcademiaJojoAttack on TitanMob Psycho 100SlimeDemon SlayerBelle


I have broken this down into categories based on general theme
1 - WHAT THE FUCKDarling in the FranxxAssassination ClassroomThe Girl from the Other Side
2 - COMEDY???Spy x FamilyLove After World Domination
3 - HARD TO BE A WOMANMiss Kuroitsu from the Monster Development DepartmentShadows HouseVivy -Flourite Eyes Song
4 - FAAAAAAAATEFate/Stay Night Unlimited Blade WorksFate/Zero
5 - FUCKING ISEKAI SSSS.GridmanDr Stone, Series 1The Vision of EscaflowneMushoku Tensei: Jobless ReincarnationThe Devil is a Part-Timer Series 1Re:Zero - Starting Life in Another WorldBanished from the Heroes Party I Decided to Lead a Quiet Life in the Countryside
6 - I FORGOT ABOUT THESE86 Eighty Six

In order to keep this to something like a sane length I will try to describe the premise to each show in AS SHORT A WAY AS POSSIBLE before moving on to note things I liked.




CATEGRORY ONE - WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK
Darling in the Franxx - what the actual fuck
Starts as a porn kind of? Gets good then goes VERY strange. Look it’s just your classic evolved-from-porn post-apoc teens in mecha show that evolves into a ruthless depictions of vampiric gerontocracy which then in the very last big turns into a cosmic galactic war, also the mecha are driven by orgones or their equivalent apparently.

WHAT DO I LIKE ABOUT THIS
The central section where the teens in a kind of fishbowl simulation of a school gradually find out that they are essentially malmukes, slaves created purely to fight to the death in defence of a society of immortal adults, that they are subhuman in that society and they will never "grow up" and become adults, either they will die in the field or die of genetic degradation since they are hybrids not made to live that long.
We find this out along the way in a range of neatly implied ways - the children’s school uniforms which look like early 20thC ritualised European school uniforms with braces, ties, garters for the socks - then we find out that these are daily-extruded plastic/paper hybrid all in one coverings with just those elements pictured or embossed on the fabric. We didn't see this because its an animation and we can't see the texture of cloth, and the teens don't know how strange it is because its all they've ever known.
It's really quite wonderfully horrific - the depictions of seemingly-empty night-cities of immortal humans who live in giant CLEAN apartments blitzed out of their minds on cyber-soma, with no actual physical connections to each other.
The "bad" things about Franxx are also things I kinda respect it for just having the balls to do. I sort of respect it for being so irredeemably porny to start with (think it actually evolved from a porn to begin with) and towards the end of the series it goes completely fucking nuts, in a way where you get the sense they knew they were not getting a second series and decided to 'Babylon 5' it, so in very quick succession you get the secret queen of an underground race of ancient, well not aliens as they are terrestrial but Archeans or Cryptids, plus the ascension of adult humanity to a bodiless state by a bunch of aliens who were behind everything the whole time, the reveal of a centauroid super-robot powered by love, war in space, pregnancy, learning to grow crops, more war in space and a cosmic gate to the far side of the Galaxy and a super-war against the aliens. It really goes balls out.
+ Vampire State/Gerontocracy = its literally all about that - OLD = BAD! BOOMERS = BAD!! Looks like Japan has already gone through everything we are about to.
+ Calls to the FBI = so much it would be mad to try to list them, the whole thing really, especially at the beginning. If you have seen this you should be on a watchlist.




Assassination Classroom
Its Goodbye Mr Chips if Mr Chips was a --- like a warner brothers monster? Or a surrealist nightmare? The moon blows up. A super-being exists and reveals to the worlds government that they blew up the moon and are going to destroy the earth and the ONLY way to stop this is to let them teach this one particular class in this one particular Japanese school and if the students in this class can assassinate the creature before the year ends the world will be saved. Honestly its a tribute to insanity that this plot actually makes sense by the end  of the series.



WHAT DO I LIKE ABOUT THIS
Basically imagine if one of those shitty High Concept series from US TV that starts "what if" and rapidly dies of being milked too much and staggers on with its desperate original fandom hanging off its withered haunches - well imagine if one of those was over and done in one series and actually managed to answer all the insane questions it brought up at the start. And was funny.
What can I say it’s Mr Chips/Dangerous Minds with heart-warming stories of personal growth and regular increasingly complex assassination attempts and various plots
+ Vampire State/Gerontocracy = not that much but the Japanese School system treating its "failures" as disposable objects is a theme.
+ Perversity/Calls to the FBI = a little, one of the students is very obviously a "trap" and this becomes a whole thing. But honestly, for anime, relatively low levels of ambient paedophilia


The Girl from the Other Side


A girl wakes up in the forest at night, heavily implied that she is a survivor of a massacre of "infected" or suspected infected people from 'the inside', this forest being the outside. Meets a weird as shit man beast monster wearing a suit who looks after and protects here while being very careful never to physically touch her as he definitely is infected and if they touch she will end up a memoryless monster like him.
WHAT DO I LIKE ABOUT THIS
It’s really incredibly strange and beautiful. Is either hand animated or pseudo-so. Storybook, well I say "dreamlike" too much but this is the most like a dream you half remember. Quite affecting. 
ANGRY though because clearly much deeper and more complex than what we were shown but we only got THREE EPISODES! WHY? Cost too much to animate? Ended in a vague bougie ambivalent symbolic way which frustrated me. It’s based on an illustrated series so may eventually pick that up.
+ Perversity/Calls to the FBI = NONE! Don't you fucking even DARE to besmirch the purity of this sacred Anime!




CATEGORY TWO - COMEDY???
Spy x Family
If you know anything about Anime you probably know about this already but I will go on. Pseudo cold-war setting. cold as ice but Heart of Gold super-spy  given mission to literally create a family, beautiful but very awkward young office girl secretly a midnight super-assassin looking for a cover relationship to get suspicion off her back, orphan girl w telepathic powers is looking for a home, all  three come together in a pseudo-family which is, in effect, a real family except we know that and they don't. The spy doesn't know the wife is an assassin, the wife doesn't know the husband is a spy, neither of them know the girl is psychic and the girl knows everything.



WHAT DO I LIKE ABOUT THIS
Do you know how fucking hard it is to do an action comedy that’s actually good and that’s for normal people? Well the first part is hard for anyone, and doing anything even vaguely normal is hard as shit for the Japanese...
Its just a really well done action comedy that’s also a very pleasurable, ridiculous and self-sustaining farce. Basically its Frasier meets The Man from Uncle. A family who don't realise they are actually a family but we the audience do! Normative Values! you probably don't think this is good from the way I described it but it fun as shit so whatever.

+ Perversity/Calls to the FBI = there are LITERALLY NONE its hard to believe! This Anime is pure! Oh no wait I forgot Yor Forgers brother has a somewhat creepy crush on her. I spoke too soon, you win again Japan.
HOWEVER, other than this, this is one of relatively few Anime that I would willingly show to normal people. 


Love After World Domination
The main guy from a Power Rangers type situation and the S&M-Themed Arch Foe from the villains organisation fall in love and have a tentative romantic relationship.



WHAT DO I LIKE ABOUT THIS
This was pleasant and the art style was calming. the warm soft roundness of the characters and ok basically I have a childs colour palette so whatever fuck you. The gags are intermittently funny but sometimes go pretty hard. I laughed occasionally. Someone clearly put a more than normative amount of effort into developing the art style at least compared to the average anime.

+ Perversity/Calls to the FBI = I don't know if an almost insane level of neuroticism and pathological avoidance and simultaneous desire for intimacy actually counts as "perversity", but its repeated so much in anime that it actually feels like it does.  I suppose this one isn’t that bad as they are partially making fun of those tropes.
Also the Miss Reaper costume is... like way too hot for a sort-of kids tv themed anime





CATEGORY THREE - HARD TO BE A WOMAN

Miss Kuroitsu from the Monster Development Department
(This is really a comedy but I needed to bulk this section out). Farcical/Absurdist workplace comedy with a young scientist trying to survive and get ahead in the crazy world of corporate but the corporation is actually the evil supervillain org from a seinen hero series - her job is monster development and all the monsters go out and get beaten up by the hero figure.



WHAT DO I LIKE ABOUT THIS
Slightly badly animated but much more directly funny than 'Love After World Domination', the workplace insanity is more cutting and feels more on point, monster designs being completely bollocked because the CEO paid a visit to the lab and 'made suggestions', a valentines themed chocolate monster being banned from use because she was poorly manufactured and is full of foreign objects, (also never make a holiday themed monster, you can only use them once a year), single-episode beat-em-up sidekick roles being sketchy single say work-for hire jobs where they bus you to another city and don't tell you what it’s about, its funnier than I'm making it sound.
+ Perversity/Calls to the FBI = male monster gets brain transplanted into the body of a hot wolf girl yeah its Japan.


Shadows House Series 1
Is it weird that this reminds me of the Korean film The Handmaiden? I really liked this one. Young girl wakes up in a box, in a servants room in a labyrinthine house, finds out that she is a 'living doll' and is meant to act as a servant for  a featureless living silhouette the exact shape and form of the main character with slightly different dress who speaks and seems to think just like a young noble lady but who emits soot in a vertical column when upset. An entire generation of shadows live in this wing, each with a 'living doll' servant, which they are physically identical to in form and shape, except that they are utterly featureless black voids. Gradually we realise that  that the 'living dolls' as well as being servants are meant to act as their shadows 'face', learning their moods and manner so well that they can walk alongside them and simultaneously express emotion in a visible way. Then our main girl and her shadow mistress are put through a range of increasingly odd and obscure tests and situations, those that don't pass "disappear".



WHAT DO I LIKE ABOUT THIS
It’s a beautiful weird country house puzzle drama. I like stuff where everyone is mannered and drinks tea and anyone could be killed at any time according to a labyrinthine arrangement of rules which are never fully disclosed. Possibly this is my British DNA showing. The first series main character Emilico, a hyper positive to the point of mental illness super-girl is great. The classic introvert/extrovert pairing of the two main girls is also great.
+ Vampire State/Gerontocracy = oh hell yes, the older generation of Shadows are effectively evil and part of an evil and consuming structure of power headed by the oldest, who is essentially worshipped by the rest.
+ Perversity/Calls to the FBI = not that bad.



Vivy – Fluorite-Eyes Song
An A.I. created "to make the world happy with my singing" is visited by another robot from the future,  in the future A.I.s go Skynet and destroy mankind. These two team up to alter events so that doesn't happen. The stage is set for a series of special-ops missions and strange investigations spread out over decades as the two awkwardly try to change fate.



WHAT DO I LIKE ABOUT THIS
Remember the Asimov film I.Robot, well its a bit like that but good, except actually very good. Really well animated - some fucking great robot vs robot vs cyborg vs human fights. Matsumoto the cube-formed time travelling robot is great, especially as time goes by and he develops more and more abilities and add-ons, all of which are cube-based. Ah and its overwhelmingly sad. Also its really beautiful, did I mention how well animated this is? Plus each episode is a strange new evolution of the relationship between men and machines, and between machine and machine.
+ Perversity/Calls to the FBI = you know I'm not sure I even saw one. A guy does fall in love with a robot at one point but the incredible sadness of how it turns out really robs it of FBI points.






CATEGORY FOUR - FAAAAAAAATE
Goddamn Fate, the Universe which started as a multiple choice story that was also kinda a porn and just got more complex from there.  Basically don't bother with this unless you like working things out of the fly or really enjoy lore. I have only watched two series of this; Fate/Stay Night Unlimited Blade Works and Fate/Zero.



A  maguffin called the 'Holy Grail' grants wishes. To reach it, seven mages have to fight each other by summoning seven 'Heroic Spirits', like ghost, tulpas or reincarnations of famous historical heroes. Only one mage can reach the magical thing at the end. 

WHAT DO I LIKE ABOUT THIS
The main interest comes from the tactical dicking about between the mages and the various skill-sets and personalities of the different mage/spirit pairings, and the conflicts between the values, personalities and ideologies of the different mage and spirit combos. In one scene Gilgamesh, gender-swapped King Arthur and Alexander the Great have a sit down to discuss the meaning of Kingship, you are unlikely to get this stuff outside Anime.
Damn the creator has a dark view on the heroic ideal and the search for meaning, in Fate Zero at least, those with the most clear "heroic" motivation are gradually corroded by those desires, leaving them mutated and morally compromised, while those who often seem if not sociopathic then very unpleasant, often gradually come to seem more reasonable as time goes by and they emerege as, at least, less hypocritical and self-deluding
+ Vampire State/Gerontocracy = not so much though the old mage families which dominate things are usually mildly psychotic.
+ Perversity/Calls to the FBI = YES. Did you want to see Gender-Swapped King Arthur tied up in a BDSM style by Gilgamesh Lord of Uruk well you are going to.





CATEGORY FIVE - FUCKING ISEKAI 
The genre that has eaten Anime like a fat fucking fuck eating everything. 
But the Isekais have been going so long that they have started to meta-evolve, a bit like the Gremlins in the film 'Gremlins 2' producing slightly more interesting variations and iterations on the basic theme. Here I throw in Isekais and a range of post, pre and semi-Isekais together.

SSSS.Gridman
Is this even an Isekai? Or even a post-post Isekai? Fuck knows. It does take place in some kind of virtual dream realm or something. A teenage boy wakes up with amnesia, his parents are 'on holiday', he tries to act normal and go to school but the city is attacked by Kaiju and things get stranger from there.



WHAT DO I LIKE ABOUT THIS
Very strange intense and horrific dreamlike feel as kids and people die horribly in monster attacks before the city is "re-set" each night, leaving no memory of the particular people who died. Only the main characters know people are "missing" school classrooms gradually becoming more sparse, happy families reduced to lonely parent and single parents unable to mourn the absence of someone they can't even remember.
Pleasing monster designs - especially towards the end where the demonic entity allowing the Kaiju to become real just grabs a bunch of unfinished ones off the shelf, resulting in some really awkward, gawky nightmare broken toy monsters that are quite unpleasant.
Also a good scene where the heroes meet with the main alien/demon guy in an ordinary roadside restaurant at night -everything is normal and low-fi and this fictional supervillain inhuman nightmare guy thing walks in and no-one but the heroes really perceive it fully.
Monster vs Robot Superhero fights with the crazed energy of a childs summertime imagination but maybe we are indeed in a dream or something like that? What is real?
+ Vampire State/Gerontocracy = not really other than the deep loneliness of the children
+ Perversity/Calls to the FBI = hmmmmmm



Dr Stone, Series 1
Mankind gets turned to a bunch of stone statues by UNKNOWN FORCES. Several thousand years later one guy wakes up and decides he is going to re-create ALL human technology from the stone-age ground up, revive ALL of humanity and also work out the Petrification thing.



WHAT DO I LIKE ABOUT THIS
Procedural science stuff! That’s basically what this series is about. Want to see how to go from a literal stone age level of tech to building a radio in a year or so? Well here you go.
The Plot armour in this one is a little ridiculous.
There are some genuinely effecting moments where stone age people experience the miracles of raw science, diseases defeated through sulphur drugs, an electric light shining in a stone age world.
Has a lot of unexplored depth where you could look at the not-all-good effects of technology and knowledge on a prehistoric culture but that’s largely unexamined 
+ Vampire State/Gerontocracy = motivation for the main villain is that in our time the place was plagued with olds who owned everything and kept everyone down so now he is going to CRUSH their frozen bodies and build a NEW SOCIETY of the young and pure! No one has told this guy that people age I guess
+ Perversity/Calls to the FBI = none come to mind... a gymnast eats cotton candy in a suggestive way..




The Vision of Escaflowne
One of the (near) original Isekai transported to a dream realm stories? and its technically Shogo. Teenage girl arrives in fantasy land where evil Wizard Scientist guy is trying to conquer everything for obscure reasons - girl faces "bellas choice" between Hot Princes whilst having adventures, also there are steampunk mecha powered by dragon hearts.



WHAT DO I LIKE ABOUT THIS
Its FUCKING BEAUTIFUL. PEAK 90s aesthetic. The backgrounds. Sky rocks hovering in the midnight air. The science-fantasy worldbuilding. The dreamy summer-ish feel. Our own planet hangs in the sky like an unreachable vision.
+ Vampire State/Gerontocracy = Isaac Newton is evil and old but he's just taking the place of God who is always evil in Anime.
+ Perversity/Calls to the FBI = I think there's a sister-brother crush in this? Not sure. But that’s about it, oooohh no I forgot [SPOILERS] one of the evil characters is actually the abducted sister of one of the good guys, transformed through dark science in to a psychotic man, yes they changed her gender and psychology thanks Japan you did it again.




The Devil is a Part-Timer Series 1
After a standard defeat-the-demon-lord story the Demon Lord in question escapes... to Japan. With a handful of his courtiers, followed by the Hero who beat him. Over here though magic is hard to come by and they are little more than normal people who have to adapt to Japanese society, get jobs etc.



WHAT DO I LIKE ABOUT THIS
Damn this thing is keeping a lot of balls in the air. In particular a strong conflict between the rarely stated background and current reality, i.e. the demon king literally killed quite a lot of human beings, including the hero girls actual family, and this is never entirely swept under the rug, but just chunders there quietly. Honestly manages to remain fun and interesting but how will they maintain it and where are they going with it?
+ Perversity/Calls to the FBI = questionable relationship with subordinate at McDonalds



Re:Zero - Starting Life in Another World 
NEET is Isekai'd to normative Fantasy World, is genre savvy but has no special powers. Turns out his power is Groundhog Day. When he dies he is returned to the last 'save point' and must live that time again till he can reach the next. He doesn't know when he has reached a save point, doesn't know anything about the vast range of conspiracies and horrible things aimed partially at him and is massively overpowered by everyone, plus when he dies its utterly horrible and traumatic.



WHAT DO I LIKE ABOUT THIS
Oddly a really innovative story structure. Everything is a mystery and the hero progresses largely through understanding *context*. 
Deep and tragic alienation of the Hero from reality as, he knows and values everyone around him deeply but from their perspective they met him about a week ago. Same applies to us as through repetitions we understand everyone’s drives and backstory.
Key Point - its really more of a horror story, or a guy trying to escape from a horror story, and the middle parts of the first series are some of the most exciting horror/nightmare stuff I've seen recently. Poor bastard dies so much and so horrifically, and is so utterly trapped by fate and astounded by impossibilities, that ultimately he does what anyone would and goes completely catatonic - just shuts down mentally for several episodes, AND THEN THINGS GET WORSE
+ Perversity/Calls to the FBI = fetish maid.



Banished from the Heroes Party I Decided to Lead a Quiet Life in the Countryside
Another derivation of the Pre/Post/During/Alternate 'Defeat the Demon Lord' story. Follows the guy who is the mainstay of your JRPG party throughout the first half of the story but eventually you load up on specialists and level grind and he's just not keeping up so you summarily dump him in an inn or something, after taking every single sword and potion you left on his person.



WHAT DO I LIKE ABOUT THIS
Prepare to see something you have never seen before in an Anime, something so surprising it may SHOCK YOU. In this story, a man, and a woman (not related by blood or even raised together), have an emotionally intimate relationship, that develops at a reasonable pace, without any insane misunderstandings, mental breakdowns, mind control, demon rape, anyone bein snatched into a parallel dimension or any we-need-to-hide-this-from-the-world bullshit, and then they fuck. 
They just fall in love, get closer and eventually have fulfilling sex. I don't know what to tell you. Has 'BftHPIDtLaQLitC' actually done the impossible and produced an anime with NO perversity? No because the guys sister kinda has a crush on him. 
I mean thats not the only good thing about this series - the slow development of how living in what’s effectively a 'Levelled' society actually works and affects people, and the weird science-fantasy inferences of how that came to be ('High-Elf Ruins look like a crashed space ship, very D&D) are interesting, plus a main character who is trying hard to avoid explicit heroism and build another kind of life with a strange skill set, good. But holy shit they just kiss, bang and have a relationship, holy fucking god.
+ Vampire State/Gerontocracy = Kami Sama seems evil but that’s relatively normal for Anime
+ Perversity/Calls to the FBI = Sister crush




Mushoku Tensei: Jobless Reincarnation
FUCK this is tiring. Did I write about this one already? Its not the original Isekai but the one that set the template for the more recent versions. NEET meets Truck Kun and is reincarnated as a baby with a nice family in a fantasy world, he keeps his adult knowledge and is naturally insanely overpowered with magic juice.




WHAT DO I LIKE ABOUT THIS
I've been writing this for a while.. It’s just really good? It’s kinda pervy but surprisingly emotionally honest compared to most Anime. This is one of the only guys where they got Isekai'd and actually genuinely tried to change who they were in their new life and genuinely and deeply struggled against their own crappy broken personality and to actually grow in ways not defined b power (though they also get to be super-powerful too HAXXXOORRR.
+ Perversity/Calls to the FBI = Oh yeah plenty. Really can't even list them all.




Category Six - I FORGOT ABOUT THESE
86 Eighty Six
Future gene-hacked society is fighting against an A.I. hive-mind someone accidentally made and which is wrecking everything but hopefully it will run out of juice soon. In order to avoid taking casualties they uuuuuussseee.. the children of refugees! Yep its child soldiers thrown into disposable mechs and sent to fight until they die. Main female character is an in-group remote force commander who starts to intuit that race-based child slave solders might be wrong somehow.



WHAT DO I LIKE ABOUT THIS
People shit on this because its depiction of racism is facile but I am old and conservative and 90% of all pop culture is somewhat like that for me anyway so whatever. 
The direction has these modernist cuts which leap directly from inference or incident right to consequence, which I quite liked and appreciated as it saves me a fair amount of time. The depictions of swarm warfare - solar-powered micro-drones filling the sky like swarms of flies or lying in great fields like crops of glass, weird mechs and super mechs, the shitty spitfire-like vulnerability of the good-guy mechs, the depictions of a decadent society which has made a terrible invisible deal; its officer class bloated, drunken and mentally broken passed out in fountains capped with statues of the glorious founder, nothing to do except remotely supervise the sacrifice by war of the Untermensch, and the bad-guy A.I. has taken to stealing the heads of human troops lost in the field, it finds some forms of originality hard to rips the heads off, freezes them and either strips the brains down to engrams or just straight up wires the heads into its mechs as an officer corp.

GOBLINS GOBLINS GOBLINS

 GOBLINS!
Here are some rules for an all-Goblin game build on the "BX Commons" chassis.

Arthur Rackham


CHARACTER GENERATION
all goblins are stealthyall goblins are thievesall goblins attend to the phases of the mooooonnot all goblins are goblinsall goblins can hide behind thingsFear COLD IRON
AMORAL - a goblin is not a hero and can never do anything because it is the "right thing to do" (in human terms at least)it has to be funny, tricksy, part of a deal, chaotic or otherwise

STR - 3d6 drop the highestDEX - 4d6 drop the lowestINT - 3d6WIS - zero, gobs have no wisdomCHA - 3d6CON - 3d6 drop the highest
d3 hit points
Climbing - all can climb *built surfaces* without restrictionSneaking - all can hide if there are shadows to hide inCrafting - all can tie & fix things together pretty well, if an unspecialised handyman could do it they can too
Genderless, or so we think, except for the Goblin Queen and for Changelings
And one of the following GOBLIN POWERS (d100);
1. can invert personal gravity 2. can spit like a hand catapult3. excellent voice impersonator4. can talk to (choose one) corvids, foxes, rats, bats, cats,5. wonderful dancer6. plays the [choose one] fiddle, whistle, harp, or sings beautifully7. can tell one not immediately disprovable lie per night which will automatically be believed8. can read, write, calculate and do accounts9. can pick locks with fingernails10. can tie things up super-fast11. acrobatic/clown skills (vaulting, tumbling etc)12. can hide under any object (regardless of size) (and opposed to hiding *behind* objects, which all Goblins can do)13. can light or quench lamps and lights in a room by snapping fingers (fires dim but don't go out)14. can whistle up a wind15. wears a coat with seven pockets, containing; string, sharp tacks, chalk, a sharp stone knife, a gold ring, a beautiful mirror and a brass bell16. detachable limbs act as floating truculent (and unreliable) servants, responding to voice command (sometimes)17. can always guess what others have in their pockets18. can swim in air as if it were water while holding their breath19. can inflate self like a pufferfish, becoming a robust, very bouncy rubberesque ball20. can throw cutlery *other than knives* with incredible accuracy 21. can roll like a hoop without end22. has a fundamentally indeterminate number of toes (i.e. they cannot be counted at all)23. has a large black "riding cat", cultured, more intelligent than they are, reluctantly obedient and largely indifferent to their desires24. a magnificent cook25. wears a wizards hat, top unscrews to reveal a pot of super-strong glue26. can enchant snails for remote communication if worn as ear buds (range 50 meters, snails whisper what is said, casting goblin must be wearing one)27. can charm others to dance as they are dancing, (music must be playing and they may not play it)28. wears heavy boots which only they can move in with prefect ease and silence, boots highly resistant to all damage, leave human-seeming footprints29. wears a red coat which is very fine, all shall remark on it30. extremely sharp teeth31. savant whistler32. extremely skilled and lucky at games of gambling or chance33. can pull an extremely frightening face34. can wiggle out of or though most impediments and restrictions (within bounds, under door gaps perhaps, not through keyholes)35. very good at hiding things36. has a pair of thick spectacles that allow them to see things very far away like an owl, because this is how they think spectacles work37. can make excellent paper planes and in fact use them as gliders38. acidic piss39. own reflection acts as a kind of retainer, can be sent on missions to other reflective surfaces, keep watch etc, must be paid in silver for each deed40. has a 'ghost costume' which, depending on circumstance, looks kinda legit41. snot is mildly explosive when flicked (equivalent to streetkid 'caps')42. can telekinetically control milk (when in field of view) if rolled twice can control cheese as well43. can easily pull rug or carpet out from underneath someone's feet (regardless of mass, floor staples, etc)44. earwax acts as a low-friction Grease45. can magically transform into small critters if they eat one (dispelled by daylight or cold iron)46. can poke, prod and pinch via power of the mind alone (line of sight only)47. can 'solid snake' small containers as un-suspectable disguises (so long as not seen moving)48. can musically control hair so long as continually playing, whistling singing etc49. can trick or fool most quadrupeds50. after being pressganged for a winter, has an encyclopaedic knowledge of the names, addresses and various naughtiness or niceness of all local children, as well as any potential access via chimney51. after slight case of vampirism, can command the sleeping to perform actions they would usually perform52. high voice, big ears, has an inaudible (to humans) ultrasound squeal that enables darkvision53. smoking habit, hacking cough, pipe, can form quite large smoke animals and objects & command them somewhat (depending on wind & tobacco access)54. can garble and disorder systems of measurement by "fiddling" with them (clocks ruined, book pages out of joint, calendars give wrong months/days etc)55. genius puppeteer56. can shed skin like a snake, leaves goblin-shaped skin-bag behind, multiple possible uses57. 'moon eyed' one eye clear white, constantly emits moonlight when opened58. can balance on anything59. if they can stick their finger up a quadrupeds arse it will do whatever they say *so long as the finger is up their arse*60. savant goldsmith61. can turn small stones to gems (limited time period)62. can swallow quite a large number of small objects and bring them up later63. has a remarkable beard, from the neck up, could me mistaken for a very old man64. has golden scissors, can shear a sheep or cut hair in a trice "with my golden scissors!"65. poops out fruit pastilles, has a constant supply, they are pretty tasty66. savant who always wins any artistic competition, (in any field) but no talent rest of the time67. swapmaster, others will always listen to their offer of a swap, usually gets the best out of any deal68. can clean and repair pretty much anything over the course of a night69. alcoholic goblin, can mix great drinks - knows them all, also compulsive drunk who will neck everything in sight70. very large nose, smells like a dog71. can roll most round objects for an undeterminedly long distance72. can balance almost anything on top of anything else73. mushrooms growing under left arm produce hallucinations when eaten, those under right arm incapacitate with sickness, crotch shrooms create agreeableness74. is haunted by a spectral capybara which appears in darkness and prophecies doom (actually quite useful information most times, is unusually specific doomsayer)75. has a witches hat stuffed with straw which contains a small owls nest, the small owl will sometimes agree to perform certain narrowly-defined tasks76. left eye is a crystal Palantir which can see the *feet* of anyone within 100 miles ( will only focus on feet), others can stare into (or steal) the eye77. can throw pennies with unearthly accuracy79. Goblin Prince,  wears a silver paper crown which bestows  *influence* (by verbal and RHYMED command only) over [pick or roll one] pigs, cows, goats, doors, kitchen implements, wool (influence more powerful in darkness, tripled under a full moon)80. has pockets full of pins81. 'door painter' can paint doors onto vertical surfaces which give goblins, friendlies and neutrals access to, if they take half an hour to paint it, the other side, or if they do it super-fast - wherever the DM finds most amusing, doors panted under full moons can go further but effect ends that night (may return next full moon)82. when saddened, weeps silvery tears which, if tears from both eyes are used to flavour food, make it delicious, or if collected in *identical* (they must be identical and unlabelled) crystal vials, the tears from the left eye make a 'first sight' love potion while those from the right eye form an donkeys-head-plus-egomania potion. These vials are easy to tell apart UNLESS *anyone* warns against getting them mixed up, in which case they are immediately mixed up.83. has a tongue of purest alchemical green which if it licks an object *all over* can turn that object into 'pure green', pure green objects are (d6) 1 weightless, 2 unearthly smooth, 3 ripe cheese smell, 4 come alive with impish consciousness, 5 emit bright green glow or 6, either wonderous sharp or leaden heavy it being whichever they were NOT before84. wears a magnificent three-piece suit and top hat and no shoes with a large spider in each pocket, the hat full of webs and another spider in their pocket watch which tells the time some of the time, spiders are somewhat commensurate to command85. very large, ripe buttocks, invulnerable to most harm, very bouncy86. carries a glass hammer which they can use to anneal (only) very soft things into each other, shape them and to make them hard87. impish ancestry, immune to fire and in fact finds it healing and invigorating, likes to sleep/dance in there88. candle goblin, head encrusted with single large white old wax candle which, when lit, allows them to summon and partially command relatively large amounts of relatively large moths, goblin depressed when candle not lit89. vantablack goblin, can hide in strong shadows, even during the day, even in villages and civilised areas, often hard to find90. wears fine glass gloves (horrible goblin hands inside) leaves human hand prints, can shatter brittle objects from a distance by rubbing fingers to make a SKREEEE sound, if glove is lost humans who find it will assume it belongs to a "beautiful lady" & seek "her" out91. egg goblin, can transform into a sinister-looking egg at-will and roll about in a dark and ominous manner92. curse goblin, can only have one curse operating at any time, curse MUST have specific, (if impossible) conditions, can also be ended on command, curses must be FUNNY (to the goblin at least), need line of sight, pointed finger and voice to curse, curse must be announced and heard by victim93. very big ears, hears like a surveillance microphone (must be aimed in right direction)94. pneumocephalic goblin, can inflate own head and other limbs, and body like a balloon and use it to float away, and for other purposes95. sack goblin, carries a bag of holding, 1ft diameter opening, sack is patched and will semi-regularly let random items loose unless constantly re-patched96. horned goblin, horns re-grow over a night if pulled off 97. gold-toothed goblin, gold teeth will re-grow (as gold) if pulled out, over about a month (teeth are not sharp goblin can only eat soft foods)98. sleep terror goblin, if it crouches on someone's chest when they are lying down and *looks at them* they will be utterly unable to get up, also terrified99. mosquito goblin, can extend super long tongue to slluuuuuuuurp up large amounts of liquids & store in expanding belly100. Goblin King, wears a golden paper crown which gives (by verbal and RHYMED command only) command over hair, eggs, shoes, golden objects, snails, prickly animals and the hearts of spinsters and very old men


GOBLIN CHARACTER IMPROVEMENT
At a new level you get a new hit *point* and one more goblin power.





"COMBAT"
(Goblins find it hard to win a straight fight with anything bigger than themselves. Especially in daylight, they will be booted like a football, kicked to death and once they are dead people will say "look its just a strange rat or hairless racoon". By morning they have calmed down, take a look at the body again and its clearly some kind of strange animal, dangerous certainly, we should get another dog, but spirits were high last night and things always look worse by moonlight eh?)
Also Goblins don't actually *fight* much. Their missions don't require it and they wouldn't win anyway. Trickery is usually better.


HUMANS ARE (CIVILISED) OGRESRun a standard Human as a 3HD Ogre. Big, slow, dumb but unlike Ogres, civilised.
HD, Morale and Resistance to Trickery of Humans goes UP relative to;
- Daylight- Adulthood- Numbers

HD, Morale and Resistance to Trickery of Humans goes DOWN relative to;
- Darkness- Moonlight- Children- On their own- Drunkeness- Madness



FRIENDLIES, NEUTRALS AND ENIMIES
FRIENDLIES (will greet Gobs in a Freindly way, Gobs rarely get into conflict with these & can get missions from them)
- Necromancer (or mad Wizard)- Witch- Vampire- Troll- A ghoul in the graveyard hanging out and waiting for a meal- Ghosts roaming about here and there- A dragon on a pile of gold (of little interest to you, you prefer cake & socks)- THE MOON

NEUTRALS (who knows how they will react, depends much on circumstance and chance. i.e a reaction roll)
- Children on their own or in small groups- Wizard (standard)- Drunk adults- Madmen- Beggars- CATS- Fairys (are twats to you, basically the Goblins Goblins)


NEUTRAL/NEGATIVE (not friendly, but won't necessarily attack)
- Farm animals like horses, cows etc- Skeletons


DANGEROUS ENEMIES (No need for a reaction roll, these fuckers will kill you on sight)
- All sane sober adults- Policeman- Priest- DOGS- (COLD IRON)- Guardian animals- THE COCK- Redcap (magical and kind of a Goblin but also a serial killer)




WHERE ARE THE GOBLINS? - THE MAP
'CENTRE' of the Goblin map is the margins of a normal 'civilised' map. More 'points of dark', so forest, moorlands, buried glens, caves, ruins of truly ancient cities,  dragon sleeping deep in a forgotten cave, hills and steep valleys like Appalachia, dry soil, no way for croplands.
'Goblin Normalcy', relatively safe places for you, even in daylight.
INNER RING of the goblin map, ruins, old forgotten graveyards, a necromancers tower, a witches hut, a vampires mansion, all far away from villages, hard for villagers to get to, no roads, or at least no obvious roads, but might be pastoralists around; shepherds, goatherds, truffle seekers, wanderers, charcoal burners, hermits. A troll bridge, - probably a rare road leads between villages, across the wilderness, but a troll there (you know them well), plenty of dungeons and stuff (you live in them sometimes).

OUTER RING of the goblin map
The villages - actually the outskirts of three different counties or duchies, (lucky for you they don't talk to each other much), managed forest, rivers grow more navigable, land flatter, roads, scarecrows, more pastoralists (likely young men and women), outlying houses, usually for the poor and old.
Then the centres of the villages - very dangerous places for goblins, even at night, can be many people around, blacksmiths, the church, DOGS, still lots of nooks and crannies, roofs to hop between, eaves to huddle under, bins, drains, alehouses. The village for Goblins is like a dungeon for humans. The castle/mansion, you would want somewhere for the Duke to live so the Goblin Queen can send you to swap his baby for a changeling.

How big would the map actually be though? You would want it to be small enough for children to potentially get lost in the forest. Probably not all that big.. But maybe distance means fundamentally different things to Goblins?


FAST TRAVEL
PCs can fast travel without random encounters so long as the PLAYERS sing a goblin song together.






GOBLIN MISSIONS
Goblin missions are meant to be somewhat absurdist, though still to involve infiltration, trickery, deception, thieving and general shenanigans. Stealing eggs from a grandmother should still be a pretty hard ask since that grandma is essentially an Ogre armed with a magical weapon (iron skillet), with a guard dog (pretty dangerous to Goblins), and not to mention the COCK - a fucking prehistoric murder machine that will not let you near those eggs.


Standard Goblin missions come from the Goblin Queen, who usually wants something completely different each time she wakes up, so you only have a single night to fulfill her desire and it will be different tomorrow.
- Causing goblin trouble for people i.e. scaring their cows, spoiling milk etc.- Stealing eggs from a henhouse.- Stealing the golden hair of a maiden.- A priests teeth not won by force.- A grandmothers cup (she won't let it go, lives on the edge of town drinks heavily, complains constantly of Goblins in her house- Goblin inception - placing something *in* a house rather than taking something *out*- Changeling-Swap (probably a high-difficulty mission)- Bring a bunch of people to dance round a mushroom circle under the moon.- A catskin cloak- A copy of the humans 'magic' (i.e. holy) book.- *Hot* tarts- Certain pale apples- A particular rare alcoholic drink- The roundest pig possible.

The Goblin Polychronicon

 What is written in green ink on the golden pages of the Grand Goblin History?
The Goblin Polychronicon: a treasure outside Time. A hyper-possible text telling the true story of the Goblins and their origins, their meaning and their end.
No exact translation has ever been written though a thousand partial commentaries exist. 
The core tome itself, split into an indeterminate number of physical volumes, (an odd number likely between eight and thirty two), is no sooner found than lost. Easy to acquire, (for the Goblins are always losing or selling one volume or more), but hard to retain, (for the Goblins always steal it back when the moon is full), many brief commentaries on the Goblin Polychronicon have been written, but none of them agree.
Why?
Well; any single volume may simply be a fake, the goblins themselves love making fakes of their own work and, being Goblins, often get them mixed up with the original. Notwithstanting that, the Goblin Polychronicon itself is a many-stranded and circular text, with alternate histories, counterfactuals, encoded allegories and outright fantasies included and commented on, and that each of these is spread across multiple volumes, linked through capacious appendicies, subtexts and fold-out diagrams, AND that the whole thing is written in multi-layered Goblin Code, and that the text itself has perhaps been infiltrated by some green goblin mycellium which mimics the shapes of Goblin words ((though some say the fungi follows the tracks of invisible ink left on the page and thence highlights meaningful secrets themselves to be combined with visible Goblin Knowledge in order to reveal yet more perspacious truths) and yet still others claim the fungal strands, gobin-natured as they are, bloat themselves on half-truths and misperceptions encoded in the Goblin Text and thence provide cunning guidance on how not to read the Polychronicon), and and as also as well we must not forget that the history of Goblins is a history of LIES and that much of the Polychronicon consists of the development of lies and the meta-structure of deceptions developed and sustained by Goblin Ontology and also that large parts of it may be made up. Maybe the whole thing is made up, who knows?
NO! The Goblin Polychronicon IS TRUE and is a real book about real things. History attests to this! It is absolutely not a scam and my lawyers can confirm. 




HISTORY OF THE GOBLIN POLYCHRONICON - HOW IT WAS MADE
Deep in the Umber Eon the ever-famed Ranulph de Goblyn, first and last chief librarian at the catastrophically ruined Goblin Pig Library heeded the summons of the Goblin King to work thereon unto "an history of thee tails & seeds of or peeple". Accepting a bonk from the purple stave Ranulph began work on the Goblin Polychronicon in "due tyme", finally and fatally passing the work on to his descendants upon the breaching of the citrus dawn.
Of course modern historians recognise that the Ranulph identity was  merely a nom de plume, probably representing a cabal or circle of Goblins who recorded the Goblin Polychronicon first through transcribing the oral histories of the Goblins, then when he (they) realised these could not be relied on, by developing time travel and returning to witness the events in question, then on unfortunately accidentally altering these events and encountering parallel versions of him her or themselves trapped in varieties of time loop, gave up on the whole thing, travelling into their (or his) her own future and stealing a copy of the Goblin Polychronicon from his fututre self (or selves), copying it quickly in a phone booth and using that as a base, making up the rest, then, on then contracting Bubonic Boils and realising he-they whomever will never live to become the future self(ves) from whom he can steal the book, imploring his(their) descendants to take on their aspect and essentially cosplay as him (or them) to make sure the time loop does not collapse, BUT! at the same time insisting that the trickery of the "false Ranulph" makes the veracity of the Goblin Polychronicon suspect and that they (or just he) should carefully check and edit every aspect of it while they (the descendant(s)) still have the time, which they both do and do not have due to the aforementioned loops.





(POSSIBLE) VOLUMES OF THE GOBLIN POLYCHRONICON
The Volumes of the Goblin Polychronicon are split into several odd-numbered groups of odd-numbered books, separated by the likelihood of them being simply made up. All of the volumes are Histories, in a sense, though they are all also something else as well, often being made up of encyclopaedias, instruction books, recipe books, biographies, puzzle books, chemical equations, spells, sigils, paint splatters, diagrams, 'information', cartoons and so on, with the historical information wovel through and explicated via these mediums, and all of these themselves explained and elucidated via subtitles, indexes, references, bibliographies, marginalia, fingerprints, food stains, the afrorementioned fungal infiltration etc.





We begin with the five initial, almost-certainly real volumes;
The True Polychronicon
Volume One - The Goblins and How They Were Known(Contains knowledge of Schemes)
Volume Three - The Ripe Ones in their First Feeling(Speaks much of Pigs)
Volume Five - Lords of the Green Moon(an encyclopaedia of Tricks)
Volume Seven - The Gold Bell Chimes(A digression on Thieving, Theft and Thefts)
Volume Minus-One - Thee Hydden Ceekrets of Thee Polygoblinomicon(A philosophical tome on Conceptual Recursiveness and Trapped Thoughts)





The Second Addendum
The 'Second Addendum' (actually (probably) the first) is made up of three volumes which might be real be who knows really. They are;
Volume Nine -  The Grand Reversal(Stars, Moonshadows, the Moon) 
Volume Eleven - The Doom Of The Gobs(Owls, the colour Grey, Ordinary Shadows)
Volume Thirteen - The Reversal Reversed, that is Made Rightwise(Considers only Green Shadows in a Green Land)





The Final Speaking
The 'Final Speaking' (not actually final) is made up seven books largely considered to be frauds, broken interpolations, strange translations, fantasies or mistakes. Nevertheless they do seem to act in all ways as Volumes of the Goblin Polychronicon (disposing secret knowings, causing madness and being stolen back under a full moon etc)

Volume Fifteen - How the Dooms Were Inverted Handwritten subtitle; Dooms2Boons inne fife symple stepps(Escapes, Maidens, Round Animals)
Volume Seventeen - The Doom of the Quicksilver Man(Charms, Illusions cast by Glass, Long Animals)
Volume Nineteen - The Doom of the Square Cups(Getting into Buildings, Magical Soups, Games of Chance)
Volume Twenty-One - Green Infinity(Impossibilities, Unlikely Reversals, Pie, Grand Strategy)
Volume Twenty Three - Thee Last Booke of thee Gobline Polychronicon(Wild Fiddling, Weaving Fates in Golden Hair, Constructing Toys)
Volume Twenty Five - Index, Addendum and Appendicies Too Thee Laste Booke(Princesses, Lying Flat, Smooth Beings, Squirming)
Volume Twenty-Seven - Be Thys Thee Ende? A Counterblaste To Muche-Puffed DOOMS(Incepting Artefacts, Looking into Smooth Water, Bogs)





The Thorts and Komenterys
The 'Thorts & Komenterys', presumed to be the (actual) final grouping, is made up of three books, one of which either does not exist or cannot be named
Volume Twenty-Nine - Thee Seecret ande Final Parte In Which All CODES be Revealed(Riding Animals Small and Large, Life with Giants, Odd Dogs)
?????? ??????-??? - ??????? ??? ??????? ???? ??? ??????? ???????(???? ??, ??? ???????, ????? ??????????, ????, ????????, ??????)
Volume Thirty-Three - Goblinomicon, Book One, Thee Begynning(Smelling your Way, the Pockets of Gods, Wardrobe TRAVEL etc)







POWERS OF THE GOBLIN POLYCHRONICON
"Power" might be the wrong word to use...
Reading and understanding what might be a volume, or volumes of the Goblin Polychronicon is said to reveal certain capacities or latent hidden aspects of reality in ways analogous to "spells"
In fact its said that many things now called "spells" are simply regulised & mundanified versions of transcriptions or commentaries on parts of the GOblin Polychronicon.
Get hold of a Volume and study it for as long as you can, (usually this involves decoding/translating it by the light of the moon, often aided by mushrooms and mushroom concoctions) before selling it off or getting rid of it before the next full moon lest the Goblins steal more than they might when they steal it back, for they have been known to make of with more than just the book itself, to whit, the name of its holder, their children or child, their shadow, the hair, the holes of their nose, the small bones of the ear.




Book Covers from here

Prescience Wars 10 - The Ouroboros Kin

Previous Entries;
1: In the Absence of God2. Who Shall Rid us of these Seers?3. A footnote on the Water-Horse Wars.4. A Glossary of the Amber Court.5. In the Memories of Stars.6. The First Amber Court.7. sumthyng lyk a mowse8. Those They Murder are Forgotten.9. Martyrs of the Glass Maze.9.5. Timeline of the Prescience Wars


1. The Children of the Amber Lords

 

Long has the Amber Court ruled in silence but for the slow chiming of bells, and what decadence results! And wealth! Prognosticators ruling from silent workshops riding chariots of gold! Near half-gods, a parliament of prophets. And how changed those who served them, for those who serve prophets must learn to live without doubt, decision, expectation or despair. As it is written, so shall it be.

 

And of their children who shall be our rulers hertobe. Those raised by the court in and its ways, born knowing their future and  educated in thereby, born unlike other mortals, even those who first formed the court, for _they_ were raised amidst us, amongst the unknowing, and though they see much, much is unseen.

 

And how shall it be if the Court predicts not only predicted lives but the lives of those who are raised _knowing those predictions_, raised by those who also know them.

 

In our own lives even the doomed can hope, and hope up until the last, blindly, feverish, relentless; that curse and blessing which allows us to endure the unendurable, but these children of the Amber Court must live without hope. They know full well what they will endure, and when, and when life will break them, and if it can. All hopes will be fruitless to them and all dooms pre-known.

 

Their morality will not and cannot be that of mortal men, though mortal they are.

 

 

[Fragment of ‘The Wounds of the Unknowing’, recovered in the 8th crusade. Believed to be of Amberist origin in the Late Amber Court years.]

 

 

 

 

 

2. On The Origins of Things

 

from where does a personality come, when it has been predicted long in advance?

 

The rulers of the Amber Court were not fools, they were intimate familiars with the concept of the returning feed, of 'thread tension' - of the flowing timeless interaction between the situation, the prediction and the steps taken to arrange it.

 

For if an army advances, and a prediction says 'they shall be turned back through such-and-such a method', and the method is employed - then where was it devised? Was it born ex-nihilo in the conjunctions of the world? Imported from some unknown strand? Hermetically self-born?

 

If a prediction says; "this person here shall learn of this prediction and thereby go mad and lose their reason, and shall die by fire", if they then learn of this prophecy and believe it, is the sheer weight and terror of the prophecy itself the ultimate factor in their madness, and then their death? For if no prophecy had been made, would they then have gone mad? or being sensitive, have suffered some lesser trauma or calamity, or none?

 

Conversely if a prophet says; "Go here at this time and you shall be happy in such a way, and your plans and dreams will end well in this way and that", and the listener does go and is happy in the manner shown, was this shaped by the prediction itself? Or would the subject have been such a person to shape a good life even without such knowledge? Or would it have been a less-perfect life? And is the resulting person truly 'good' for they decided only to follow the voice of the prediction - from where did the goodness come? And was it intensified by the voice of the prophet? Or limited? Or did it make no difference at all?

 

Always to predict is to shape, whether knowing or unknowing, and the corde predicted is a corde _in which the prediction is made_. It cannot be otherwise for never can a prognosticator say “I shall see now a future in which I make no predictions.”

 

All this the Preceptors of Glass knew well enough.

 

What perhaps they could not truly know, even if told, was the cumulative weight of this paradox upon a culture.

 

The paradox first, deepened, with one seer predicting the fate of another, and that seer predicting yet another fate from within their own seer-shaped _courde_, and the paradox _spread_, with the servants of the Amber Court increasingly certain of the verity of predictions, trained and experienced in their fulfilment and even raised from youth in full knowledge of them.

 

What must it have been to be raised in a culture of prophets and prophecies, themselves shaped by still older prophets. What would it mean to disagree in such a culture? To take an order or not take one?

 

What will be will be.

 

 

[From ‘In the Memories of Stars’, recovered from the ruins of Samaris.]

 

 

 

 

 

3. The Unspeakable Nobility

 

If they have names these may not be spoken, or even for some, imagined. The power of their King is on them and within them and as His name may now be known or recorded so neither may theirs. How they know each other we cannot tell. Perhaps they simply remember.

 

 

The Blind Sage

 

who speaks deep knowledge which has no origin
yet will at times randomly and purposely slay those around them
a solver of unsolvable problems
a maker of impossible devices and fountain of physical lore and technique
who understands none of it
but only remembers it, or knew that he would speak it
recalls it from the future
bent in horror at the emptiness of his own understanding
and the truths which come "from nowhere" from darkness
as if passed down a chain of annihilated selves

 

 

The Fool

 

a spirit of chaos and uncatchable monster
perhaps driven mad by the prediction of their own dark fate
perhaps simply a madman empowered by prescience
a terrorist, killer, criminal, manipulator, corruptor, destroyer
unkillable, uncatchable
they glory little in their greatest "crimes"
usually driven into a corner by the effects of their own plans to escape fate
a seeker for a mercy which will not, or cannot, come
waiting and praying for the ability not to kill, not to destroy

 

 

The Empty Blade

 

duellist of the Amber Court
skilled beyond the capacity of the mind to understand
death itself to those they face
consumed utterly by their predicted fate
given never at any time any expression of either joy or fear
takes no pleasure and no shame in any victory
like a ghost wearing the skin of a man
the horror of their presence so great that the rumour their attention can end wars

 

 

The Queen of Air and Darkness

 

She who would rebel against fate
a magician of unequalled ability,
one fit to bend the world
seeking always and to attempt with every breath and action to defeat and overthrow prophecy
and never succeeding
yet to never giving in
a breaker of realities wrapped in invisible chains herself
who hurls herself against the boundaries of impossibility
a wreaker of chaos and much change in the lives of others

 

 

The Dancer

 

they who play games with time
bringing strange chaos
turning events upon a pin-head
always to paths unexpected to all but them
dancing with time
what their motivations are, whether they embody fate or fight against it, none know
for who they perform, for others or themselves, who can say
they run along times cutting edge, in times and places where to live is to dance upon a burning sword
appearing where nothing should be
moving through fire and chaos like a smiling ghost

 

 

The Lady Of Sorrows

 

she who grieves for all she could not change
unable to alter what she fears she sets herself to at least feel in full
to live truly with the knowledge
and to embody herself in the moment - to be present
to live
a goddess of no mercy, but recognition at least
a tomb-queen wreathed in flowers, bent beneath the weight of infinite names

 

 

The Player of the Silver Pipes

 

a lord of knights and holder of oaths
called a witnesser of truth – he of the silver bough
he pipes the turns of beauty-in-fate
a guardian and exemplar of moments
as lively as the dancer
feared as the blade
present as the lady
he makes the music of strange times

 

[Believed to be Neo-Pathist Samidzat. Printed text used as binding for a history of The Time of Three Teasons – exact age and origin unknown.]

 

 

 

 

 

4. “Calm were the Children”

 

Deep was the calm of the children of the Amber Court, as deep as the sea, and deep was their rage, for they lived not as characters in a story who saw not the page, nor as the writers of tales who compassed a corde from beginning and end, shaping it at will, but their lives were lived halfly, between those two, knowing more of their corde than the hero in a tale, often more than even the wise can guess at, but much less than the shaper.

 

 

[Oldest recoverable statement discovered when researching the popular lullaby “Calm were the Children, Calm as the Sea”. This fragment found only as a reference in a sheet of music dated to about 55YS, itself a copy of an earlier document. It is not clear if this reference is itself a replication of an earlier statement or an interpolation or addition at the time of scribing. Whatever text it refers to is lost.]

 

 

 

5. Where Lies Meaning?

 

Where the value and the meaning in life is found not in choices made or in driving towards any particular goal, but in the nature and the quality of the experience as it happens. In being present in the moment, in fully experiencing that particular moment and in understanding its meaning as one recognises part of a tale that has been already told, where both the beginning and the end are already known, if vaguely, some lost to memory and some predicted but unclear, and so the matter of a life becomes not - what will happen - but what is the meaning of this happening, what does it feel like to be here, now, present at this time and in this time, and how does this reflect and react with all of my memories and all of my prophecies

 

What would be your own reaction to the advanced knowledge of your own life? Knowing it could not be changed. That everything, including everything you hated, was a consequence of your own choices, and that when you reached the point of decision, even a decision you hated in advance, you would freely choose as predicted, that it could not be otherwise?

 

 

[From "The Dharma of Care", by Priest-Viscount Apsanalan, Scrolls 600 to 965  concerning the Late Amber Court Wars.]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

6. An Imperfect Metaphor

 

to understand the Ouroboros Kin one must imagine a human personality unspooled, like a tight rope bound with grease and wax, pulled taught and tense through long hard use, bathed in the softest waters and gentle allowed to unravel, the curls and windings of its hairs spread this way and that,
each thread of this slowly unspooling rope as it floats in its perfumed bath decided by its placement and compression in the original bound flax.

 

[Fragment from the ‘Onerologicon’, assumed first written around 33YS. Popular scholarship makes its writer the esteemed ‘Ranulph of Cheem’, though there is no textual proof that such a single writer existed and many claim evidence of multiple writers. This part left within an excised copy as a fragment of parchment, all other pages of this section removed, presumably by the Ordos. No such section exists in any modern copy or equivalent historical document.]

 

 

 

 

Speak, False Machine

 Good news! Demon-Bone Sarcophagus is finally stumbling to a close. Files are away to the printers (though there will likely be feedback on those) and PDF editor, fees have been paid and though there may be delays with fulfilment which stop shipping until October, the book will actually definitely be made.


Bad News - I am utterly fuuuuuuucked financially.




Blame Putin. 
Also my own financial and organisational failings, VotE going out of print, our map-maker disappearing for several months without any contact, general slowness and the book being roughly eight months over my assumed timetable leading to print costs rising 40% between our first quote and our final one.
Tis truly a glorious disaster in every respect other than that the book will actually exist.
Yet the spice must flow and the end of one book means only the beginning of another. As one book is born another is already conceived, so I shall tell you now about my plans for 'Speak, False Machine', a substantial tome which will hopefully not bankrupt me (more).




SPEAK, FALSE MACHINE
test print only

Is essentially a (near) complete record of the first ten years of the False Machine blog.
"Near" because I removed anything I thought was pretty bad and anything that appeared in a different form in other books, or that is expected to appear in future books. So much of the development posts for things like FotVH and VotE won't be there.
Still its... substantial, at least in its test print version. A crown-quarto hardback with around 650 pages and half a million words.

space marine for scale

Know peace because it is not simply a chronological cut and paste with every post in order. Instead they are arranged by subject;




History of the Blog - "event" posts, these are actually arranged chronologically.
On Games; I do (or did) occasionally write about game design, broken down into 'Adventures', 'Characters', 'Gaming Culture', 'Making Adventures', 'Play', 'Time', 'Tools', and 'Worlds'.
False Readings; fiction and short stories, there were a handful of these.
Uncertain Worlds; more on the side of world building rather than just world design, 'Chivalric Encounters', 'Cryogenic Rats', 'Knights of Mars', 'Modern Heroes/Modern Monsters' and  'Fantastic Lands'.
I Read a Book; I write about the books I read, 'Culture', 'Comics', 'Fiction', 'Games', 'History' and 'Nature'.
Cryptoculture; my cultural ramblings, broken down into 'Film', 'Marvel', 'Miscellanea', 'Star Trek', 'Television', 'Warhammer' and 'Weebery'.
And finally 'Kleinplastik' where I talk about sculpture largely through the lens of minis.





ART
I am aiming for a black and white print to keep costs down. 
There are three main kinds of art in the book. The first is made up of diagrams and small illustrations which illuminate descriptions or just fill odd spaces. There are about 50 of these.
There are extensive images in the 'Kleinplastik' section, this is the only part here I worry about not having colour as many of the arguments interrelate more with colour. I was half-thinking about having a central 'photographic' section like you used to see in old books, depending on the cost.
And finally there are eight 'title pages' which I have left blank. My hope is that through the Kickstarter I can maybe get B&W images from actually-famous artists. I was hoping for Ian Miller, Killian Eng, maybe Adrian Smith? We will see I suppose.


LAYOUT
Promises to be _less_ of a nightmare than most D&D books as, compared to a gaming book, a normie book is easy mode, but still quite hard due to the sheer volume of text. 


THE EDIT
I am leaving the blog posts as they were written partly for authenticity, partly because of the huge difficulty of editing the actual contents and partly because even if I did "even them out" with spelling and layout a lot of the life and particularity of some of the more odd posts would be lost.
HOWEVER - I do want an index for the book, and considering the capacious range and strangeness of the contents that looks to be a very difficult project.



SO;
I will need;
- A layout person.- An editor willing to take on the insane requirements of the Index.- Someone to do black and white diagrams and small illustrations.
If anyone wants to volunteer hit me up in the comments or my email pjamesstuart at thecompanyweallknowmail.com. Work would be paid for via Kickstarter, which won't run till late in this year, depending on when DBS can ship out. Experience and a proven record of not being a flake is important as I can't live through the utter chaos of my last project again. Considering who I am immunity or indifference to being cancelled may be useful.
Peace!

The Makers Hand

Things have reached the point where we should probably develop some kind of classification system to describe the amount of cyberneticisation in the things we make.
This was brought to a head for me be the recent explosion in Dall-E art and others, and by a post by Chris McDowall where he shows some A.I. generated art and talks about its possible use in products.
A fair amount of OSR creations have used archive art or altered historical images, and A.I. art feels like it would fit right into that space. 
This made it clear to me that this is not a 'thing to think about' but something happening right now. It’s pretty clear that we have already reached the point where human beings are in the act of 'putting ourself out of business'. 
This concept of a classification system describing how 'Hand-Made' and how 'System-Generated' something is, is intended partly as a protection for human creators as the power of A.I. s grows and partly to help us manage the conflict and synthesis between the two cultures as they develop.
The moral weight of the difference between the two modes is very great and I imagine will probably intense swings and cultural counter-reactions each against the other. Hopefully, possibly, having a clear idea of what we are talking about will help us at least navigate this process.

FOR
There are sound reasons for the use of A.I. content in productions, an A.I.O.S.R.;
- We are all the children of cybernetics. D&D has always been poised between the polarities of a cottage industry and a centralised system. The O.S.R. has a complex relationship with cybernetics already. The movement and products would not be possible without huge web of very cheap communication (effectively free intercontinental video calls) file transfers, international fundraising and production for even small creators. 
- Specifically in the artpunk-adjacent world, there is a taste for weird alienating imagery which programmes like Dall-E seem to do well.
- Many, (most), creators are poor. If they can produce beautiful art to go with their stuff easily and for free, do we have a right to stop them?
- Same applies when the textual Dall-E arrives. When a human artist can command a story or situation be generated based on their art.
- Creators are frustrating and expensive to deal with.
The best argument for A.I. production is the most subtle and the hardest to maintain;
- We don't know what might happen. It’s an experiment. The future is not only dark. It provides threats to the nature and expression of humanity, but it does not provide only  threats. The experiment should be allowed and in fact will go ahead whether we like it or not so we may as well manage it.

AGAINST
The arguments against A.I. content should be intuitively and immediately obvious to anyone but I will state them explicitly;
- We are engineering ourselves out of the system. producing a culture which has a cornucopia for the things we want, but no place for us.
- Its use will impoverish visual artists. The O.S. has been oddly good at keeping artists fed, for a movement of people with a range of personality disorders.
- It could lead to the destruction of art, art skills and independent vision. (I think this is possible but unlikely as I intuit there will be massive counter-reaction once people fully sense what is going on).
- The destructive power of the counter-reaction. Total eschewal of A.I. development, or a frustrating unenlightening and resource intensive cultural war between the two cultures. I think is actually more likely. I can imagine very easily people screaming at each other and shaming each other over using the "wrong art" and either "betraying humanity" or being "slaves to the past" and its this uncreative trench warfare that I think we have a chance of avoiding by thinking about it ahead of time.




WHAT WOULD SUCH A SYSTEM OF CLASSIFICATION LOOK LIKE?
This is the real tricky part. the current emotional and cultural need is for a symbol and concept which delineates that over here you will find A.I. derived art, but over here you will find human-only art.
Lets try this to start with;

CLASS ZERO
Anarcho-Primitivism. A rare but not impossible situation with *only* direct human action used - a dungeon scribed on handmade paper in handmade ink.
Or more realistically - printed on to handmade or recovered paper with handmade block printing.
(Some of these may seem _unlikely_ but please don't be frustrating in the comments, try to imagine a society a generation or more deep into the situation we see now with Dall-E and its equivalents and then try to imagine the counter-reaction against that, anarcho-primitivist groups are not that strange a possibility.)

"Attempted-Zero", "aimed-zero" or "Zero-minimal" is more likely as in a high tech society making stuff without any tech influence, even in the acquisition of materials, would be very hard.



CLASS ONE
19th and early 20th century industrial technology, printing presses etc, slide rules and blueprints, but without the internet.
I think this is actually less likely than attempts at Zero productions. People deliberately attempting near medieval construction maybe, but the idea of people deliberately attempting 19th/early 20th century construction seems strange to me, but may not seem so in the future.


CLASS TWO
Late 20th/early 21stC production methods.
It’s our current world! Hello! Here are used the cybernetic communication and arrangement technology we are currently familiar with - email file transfers, computer programmes etc but with all content generated by human beings, the cybernetics acting as assistants to that.


CLASS THREE
Then we cross over into deep 21stC methods. Our current moment. Anything Level Three or above will have specifically A.I. generated content - not just AI aid in creation. Art and words which no human hand has touched.


LEVELS ABOVE THREE?
We don't really know and can't predict what might happen there but there is a lot of space to expand into?




SYMBOLS
We could reverse the order and use the symbol of the hand with the 'level' being the number of fingers held down.
The anarcho-primitivist Class Zero product would have a full, spread hand. (Like the white hand of Saruman).



The industrial but not computer-based Class One production would have the thumb down and four fingers spread.




Our current standard of cybernetic aided Class Three production would have the three central fingers spread.



A.I. generated Class Four production would have the two forefingers.


e.t.c.
(Also I realise there are already lots of symbols for 'handmade' but I wish we had some that were less twee)




POSSIBLE FUTURE RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN THE CULTURES
Its more pleasing and less depressing to imagine a meaningful cultural interchange between cultures Two and Three, artists and. creators moving back and forth, observing each others work etc.
We don't really know how human art will react to the presence of AI art. When photography began to take off, it seems to have had a huge but unpredictable effect, perhaps being a main driver of modernism.
when a human artist grows up in a world of common AI art, what art will they themselves make? We don't know but can expect a re-contextualisation of what art means, why we do it e.t.c.

..............................................................................

Since this seems like a relatively sane and good idea I expect that someone else has already had it. I expect you to notify me about that in the comments.
(Along with all your points about how my proposed system lacks discretion and detail. Propose your own systems!)

Adventures in the Kingdom of the Worm

 Long and low do lie the breathless rulers of the Kingdom of the Worm. Treasures they have and infinite time besides in a sunless realm where the nitre-tainted gold is black and the bronze so tarnished that it makes the only green in this lifeless demesne other than the phosphorescence of mycelia that bloom in wonder from the spiced limbs of long embalmed kings..
What can they desire that they may not attain? These pharaonic hierarchs who, while their flesh still blossomed, through it held, consumed and soaked-in every luxury and beat down every conquest, wounded only by their weight of crowns?
Youth perhaps, memories, the truth of long-forgotten arguments, night-blooming flowers. The Kingdom of the Worm is a land with no respect for life but much for memory, for everything has already happened in the past. Lightless, but not lifeless for here come Gem-Cutters, Feather merchants, Moth sellers Spice-Traders, Perfumiers, Embalmers, Drummers, (for one feels a drum-beat in one bones), Historians, Poets, and also adventurers, to be paid in prehistoric gems and fat gold coins stained black as coal which fall leaden from the bone fingers or Emperors unremembered in the oldest books, for the dead too have their strange desires, and will pay well for their fulfilment, in those brief eons of remembrance and selfhood which come ever more rarely in the long half-sleep of the immortal dead.



1. "A tune of my lost youth, played on great bronze bells."
Neither the bells nor the tune currently exist, travel, magic, scholarship and some exhumation would be required to research and re-make them.


2. "The skulls of each of my ten greatest foes I slayed while I still took breath."
(Some are kings in tombs, one a giants, one a demons, one a dragons skull, one utterly lost and one reanimated and actually belongs to another currently-active Skeleton Lord).


3. "A gift delivered to an old friend." 
(They are royal and long dead, gift involves a 'tombception', breaking in to a sacred tomb in order to leave something in the sarcophagus, rather than take something away.)


4. "I have neglected for .. a century? or two too long, the seals on the circle of Azalranbromith, the demon of the 9th level and my ancient foe and slave, whom I left encircled by charms and sigils in the dungeons of such-and-such a place. Those seals must be renewed lest the creature become bothersome."
(This is going to need child blood of some kind and probably the person who seals it will be trapped inside, that's what happened last time. Also this ancient dungeon now lowest level of a ruined and monster-haunted city etc etc.) 


5. "I recall a diverting experiment in thaumaturgy I left running in error, take thee this key and close it."
(Experiment is a wide-scale null-magic field, large city has grown up around it with a whole order of null-monks who think its divine. Also whole culture of the city is based on the effects of the Null-Field.)


6. "I remember I had a sword at some point, go and find it and being it to me."
(Sword was 'lost' Sauron style during invasion of the living world, now wielded by the head of an order of Templar knights.)


7. "I have an important secret to deliver to my living heir before I pass from existence."
(Their last living interaction was 5 centuries ago, tracing 'heir' locating them and somehow persuading them to come to the Kingdom of the Worm is going to be a problem.)


8. "I have been haunting the dreams of this child who is prophesised to destroy me and I want you to go and absolutely scare the SHIT out of them!. Don't accidentally fulfil or trigger the prophecy while you are doing it!"
(Child is that of worlds most powerful mage of light).


9. "Where is my cat? I want it I want my cat."
(Is one of maybe thousands of mummified cats in the labyrinth of the cat temple. There is also a cat god who doesn’t not like the cats being removed also probably other cat-themed challenges.)


10. "I want to try out to join one of these orders of knighthood they have these days. I will compete in a tournament in a closed helm just like in the stories, you will be my pages and make sure everything works out. (Also I want to romance a maiden heh heh heh)."


11. "I want it to be autumn here, I remember Autumn..."
(Realm is a lightless blasted wasteland of tombs with zero living trees).


12. "Take a message to my love."
(Long dead, no body, need to enter Hades get past guardian dog, ferryman, multiple rivers etctrack them down, deliver letter, wait for response, do the whole thing again on the way back).

Trailing Corposant 9 – The Red-Eye

(Like Ahriman returning to the scene of the crime I am back on that crack. My solution to the Rubric? wait for it.. a second Rubric. Yes I am completely confident about this one also, skip to the end for the previous parts of this series).



That little voice in your head that says ‘no’.
Such a very small voice. A whisper, not enough to command or change you on its own, but perhaps enough to allow you to understand that a choice is being made, that you are making it, and that it could go another way.
Where would you be without that voice? What would have become of you? Probably each of you have met people who just didn’t have that voice at all and likely it wasn’t obvious at first that they didn’t have it.
But if it was stripped away from you, not just removed but annihilated, and you could never get it back, What then?
Magnus is unusual in the Heresy in that his story is not only over, but may have ended before we realised. I argue that ‘Magnus’ ended on Prospero and what persists beyond that is a kaleidoscope of memories and fragments of personality plotting and planning against one another, slowly coalescing into a new personality along a timetable arranged by a mad god.
It begins with high ambitions, information control, (or lies) ,and plans for a legion of psychic super-soldiers. Because if the Emperor of Mankind likes anything, he likes the idea of a legion of psychic super-soldiers. He has his little heart set on that.
But why?


 
What Was E-Money Planning?
Probably no form or kind of knowledge or technology was more important to control for the nascent Imperium than that of the Psyker. It was one of the few things the Mechanicum were outright banned from researching but research did go on, but only in the Imperial Household or under the Emperors more-direct control.
Early experiments with the First Legion included psychic elements and apparently didn’t go that well. The Astronomicon, the Webway project, the Ordo Sinister, the Silent Sisters, the Black Ships and soul-binding of Astropaths, all core imperial technologies and methodologies and all centred around control of psychic phenomena. As were  Primarch number 19 and the 19th legion.
The creation of the 19th Primarch in particular is a hell of a strange concept. Why create 20(.5) super-beings, all roughly equivalent in power, with some depth of specialisation but quite a lot of depth and inter-operability, some of whom had some psychic powers, though usually mono-use, and then for number 19 create not just a Psyker but a single hyperintelligent mega-powerful Psyker, a being not even slightly equivalent to its brothers in that respect, and not simply more psychically powerful but an order of magnitude more powerful. Likely the most powerful human-origin Psyker in the Galaxy other than you?
That’s a lot of eggs in one basket, or more precisely one giant fucking egg in a very frail basket. Why not divide up more psychic potential amongst the brothers so there is less risk if this single one goes nuts? (This is assuming E-Money has access to, basically a jar of pasteurised demon-juice and is doling it out piece by piece.)
It might be that mastering and controlling psychic power, and its possible negative effects, do not scale ‘normally’ i.e. a power 2 Psyker is twice as powerful as a Power 1, twice as hard to train and twice as dangerous if they freak out.
Perhaps power, ability and training capacity scale in such a way that if you are going to train a powerful psyker then you may as well train a super-powerful psyker as its going to be very hard either way. Perhaps the danger of a ‘loose’ psyker also scales in such a way that its more like a pin prick in a balloon rather than a puncture in a ships hull; you stand as much risk big as small so you may as well go for that very big egg.
Maybe making a super-powerful psyker will make them easier to find and communicate with if they get ‘lost’? 
All of this depends on what the Emperor was planning. There are three main strands of possibility but, E-money being E-Money none of these necessarily preclude the others. Each could be a possible fall-back position or deliberate provocation designed to nudge an enemy into a particular stance. One thing we know about E-Dawg and the Chaos Gods is that their plans are both massively parallel, and take place somewhat adjacent to time, so setup for a fallback to a failure can take place millennia before the failure itself is suspected.

 
The small-C Conservative Plan
Maybe you can take over the webway and move humanity inside and maybe you can’t but either way you will need a lighthouse and a league of demon fighters.
The Imperium of Man, having grown up around the Emperor, essentially needs a super-powered psychic at its centre. To guide the Astronimicon if nothing else and even inf things go well, to be Humanities ‘farseer’.
If you fuck up (as in fact happens), you will need someone to hold closed the hellgate now existing in the palace, maintain the Aegis, the psychic shield around the palace, plus guide the astronomicon. 
If things go well you will likely need someone to hold open and maintain the human webway, while also guiding the astronomicon (unlikely it would be totally shut down), and what else? We know about the webway, the astronomicon and the aegis but in a ‘functional’ Imperium there would probably be more roles that only a psychic powerhouse, a single individual, could fulfil.
In a ‘successful’ webway project the 19th legion would be security guards, taking on demons that tried to break in and those that attempted to take over human worlds in realspace. they would fulfil the role the Grey Knights do now – but in a somewhat more expansionist manner, teaming up with the Sisters and the Ordo Sinister to conquer the webway and fight Demons when they burst into reality out in the galaxy.


The Insanely Maximalist Plan
Invade Hell.
Its implied but never directly stated that the Emperors ambition didn’t stop with the conquest of the webway, or with anything in the material world. He thinks the ultimate problem is the Chaos Gods themselves and there are inferences that a lot of his psychic diddling about it basically the beta-test for an invasion of Hell.
The Emperors To-Do List
• Move Humanity to the Webway (psychic elements at least).
• Kill nearly everything else.
• Starve the gods.
• Guide humanities psychic development.
• Keep iterating and developing null tech like the Sisters and the Ordo Sinister, along with whatever the 19th were meant to be, all headed and protected by a creature of near unequalled might.
• When the gods are weak enough and you have enough psychic super-soldiers, pop into the Courts of Chaos – through a hell gate (there seem to be several knocking about) and go to war against the gods, knocking them out one by one.
• Having destroyed the Chaos Gods, re-make the psychic sub-structure of the Galaxy as something more sensible and less inimical to life.


The Galaxy-Brain Plan
Set up to fail.
Of course you stole the power to make these Primarchs and super-soldiers from the Gods themselves. And you know they will be looking to fuck you over. And you know that a super-genius psychic powerhouse is going to be VERY attractive to a certain blue bird god.
And while you educate Magnus yourself over broadband, and give him loads and loads of knowledge
You never tell him directly about the gods, or about where he comes from, or exactly how you made those super-soldiers (who in this case are over-baking quite consistently).
Then one day your pet sorcerer comes home with one less eye saying he “found” knowledge in the Warp about how to stabilise his Legion.
So, if you are the Emperor, you likely know or at least suspect exactly what happened.
Then later Nikea happens and you tell Magnus to not do the one thing you made him to do, and in fact taught him to do.
Plus you know a rebellion is coming, and in fact you have planned for it (apparently not that well).
You are, essentially, dangling Magnus over shark-infested waters, waiting to see what will happen. Much like you are with all of the Primarchs. You know Chaos will be coming for them with its mind-bending crackhead Truman-show shenanigans.
Are you waiting to see which sons rebel since you know some will, and you also know that ultimately all will be challenged, in some way, at some time?
Are you actually planning for some to be eaten by Chaos as part of an even more long-term strategy? One which goes far beyond the Heresy?
In their last meeting the Emperor offers Magnus service/imprisonment, and re-acceptance, so long as he sits in the chair and lights stuff up. Magnus is wavering and asks what will happen to his Legion. E-Dawg says “those guys are tits up in a ditch but I will get you a new one”.
Magnus freaks out and fucks the fuck off.
Was this the Emperor being an autistically insane bad father or was it the specific words that would drive away Magnus and seal him directly to the fate of the 19th forever?
Bad writing, bad character or swirling meta-scheme, as with all things Heresy, you decide. 


 
What is it to be trapped in that plan?
Magnus wasn’t just lied to and manipulated by Tzeetch, he was lied to and manipulated by his Dad to really quite an insane degree. Maybe he wouldn’t have listened even if he was told.
“Son we are flying over the gates to hell, yes I mean literal actual hell with demons and four fucking super-satans. Yes it’s really hell, I mean it.”
Maybe the Magnus we know would have been right off into the hellmouth regardless, but it really explains why he has such a complete mental breakdown after he breaks the Emperors Wards.
To count of the sheer amount of mind-breaking realisation he undergoes in that moment;
• Precognition doesn’t work and can be blinded and manipulated.
• He has opened a hellgate directly into the Throneroom.
• By the way, Hell exists and its that place you visit on the regular.
• Gods are real and they are evil.
• They planned this.
• Every thing he did  was planned by evil gods.
• Including, and in fact especially, the parts where you thought you were really trying hard to do the right thing.
• Your sons are all going to mutate and turn into walking teratomas and there is no way out of that.
• You can die here or be bound to a psychic lighthouse basically as a kitchen towel trying to keep demons off the kitchen floor FOREVER.
• There was never any deal where you gave up an eye, you outwitted no-one, it was and act and you are a fool.
• Literally NOTHING you ever did or any ideal you thought he represented meant SHIT – your dad lied to you and used him and evil gods will destroy everything you ever valued, also your dickhead cosplay barbarian brother is coming to maybe kill maybe capture him.
• Oh the future looks like this also;
Be fair, that’s a lot to take in. Can you blame him for having a complete nervous breakdown?
What would you do? What could you do, when you know your every move, your every move, has already been plotted by evil extradimensional gods who have been playing you right up until this moment? And still are.
Prey animals play dead in these circumstances. It’s not a great tactic but tbh it may be the best you have got when you are already in the tigers mouth.


 
The Last Coherent Choice
Which is what Magnus does at this point. Sit in his room refusing to go out, too scared to answer emails or pick up the phone. It’s pretty sad but, again, what the fuck would you do? Every single thing he has tried to do up until this point was already accounted for and aided evil timeless extradimensional gods.
I have given Chaos a lot of shit for its, frankly often terrible schemes to corrupt Primarchs, but this time they really brought their A-Game. Feel like Tzeentch is the one competent member of the group tbh. Who else is turning up to the quarterly meeting? Maybe Nurgle but he never does anything.
I would also like to take a moment to remind everyone that to corrupt Magnus all it took was a reality-bending nightmare scheme with a Borgesian number of branching paths and all it too to turn Russ to the use of chaos was deleting the comma from an email.
The last coherent thing True-Magnus does is stumble out of his Pyramid and try to fight Russ, then on the way down to getting his back broken, sell his soul to keep his Legion and his people alive, before being shattered into a gazillion pieces. 
Bear in mind, it took the literally guillotine being on the way down the tracks for him to consciously and deliberately break.
 
Then, Fragments
Appropriately enough for Tzeentch. Little more than a field of playing pieces and a meta-personality slowly re-combining (through catastrophe and adventure), at a speed and in a manner more pleasing to Tzeentch.
Soul-surgery across eons of time…


Magnus in Publication Order
When we think of Magnus as a ‘Published Entity’ he makes a (slightly) more sense. The stories weave back and forth in time between M41, the Heresy and just post-Heresy. Still there is a pretty clear growth in the depth of his character, going from background supervillain in William Kings Space Wolf series from 2002 and culminating in the Emperors Throne room in ‘The Fury of Magnus’ in 2020

Early 2000’s - The Space Wolf/Ragnar Blackmane Series
Space Wolf, Grey Hunter – William King 2002, M41
Space Wolf, Wolfs Honour – Lee Lightner, 2008, M41
All about Ragnar Blackmane being just the best guy ever. Grey Hunter is about a Thousand Sons sorcerer trying to steal the Spear of Russ to being Magnus ‘back from the Immaterium’.
Magnus turns up at the end of ‘Wolfs Honour’, looming through a warp portal, intending to do some evil ritual on Fenris to destroy the Space Wolves and gets bonked in the face by the Spear of Russ.



(A spear which, in the tradition of Horus Heresy writing, will get more character development over the Heresy series than some living beings. At some point I should probably do a post of ‘Character Development of Weapons in the Horus Heresy).


2010- A Thousand Sons - Graham McNeill,  M31


A Major book for the 1k Sons which follows Ahriman on a journey which takes him all the way from watching his twin brother mutate in to a monstrosity under the influence of 19th legion gene seed, to Magnus arriving and ‘solving’ the Flesh-Change problem, to chilling with Magnus during the great crusade, Magnus discovering the webway, The Wolves being dicks, more tangles with the Space Wolves and finally the attack on Prospero and Magnus having his epic meltdown.

2011 - Prospero Burns, Dan Abnett, M31
Chunks of the same story but told from the Space Wolves perspective. Tldr; it took tzeentch doing quite a lot of intense trickery to fully turn the wolves, and the custodes, against the 19th legion


2011/2015 - War of the Fang, Chris Wraight, M32


Made up of ‘Battle of the Fang’,2011 and it prequel ‘The Hunt for Magnus 2015. Magnus is, once again, or actually for the first time..(?) attacking Fenris….
This time its in M32 in a (successful) attempt to stop the Space Wolves fixing their gene seed so they can become an Ultramarines-Style regional power to encircle the eye of terror. Magnus gets bonked by a Space Wolf and runs away but not before achieving the main aim of permanently retarding geneseed experimentation.


2012 to 2015 - Ahriman doing Time Loops, John French


Made up of Ahriman; Exile, John French 2012, Ahriman; Sorcerer, John French 2015 and  Ahriman Unchanged,  John French 2015.
The story of Ahriman post-Rubric, trying to recover from his crack addiction, hitting rock bottom, deciding to live and… getting right back on that crack.
Though its mainly about Ahriman this series sets the tone and feel for the 1k Sons and Magnus post-Heresy and post-Rubric. Though it will still be five years till McNeil tells us what actually happened to Magnus in the Heresy.
I’m not sure if French is the first person to introduce the idea of ‘shards’ of Magnus but I think  this is where that concept came from. Scars by Chris Wraight has Jaghatai encounter a ghostly shard of Magnus and that was published in 2015.
The concept is this; when Russ broke Magnus, he broke Magnus, splintering him into a huge number of sub-personalities which were scattered across Magnus’ timeline, and hidden in various other places. These ‘shards’ range in strength and intensity from ghostlike visions to fully embodied beings who are sure they are the ‘real’ Magnus. Each shard is based around a different aspect, core memory or expression of Magnus’ personality.
Several of the inciting elements for the Ahriman series are different shards of Magnus trying to manipulate events so they can express whatever that shards core values are. The trilogy ends with a ritual hoovering up even more shards and combining them into a stronger meta-personality.
Its also explicitly stated that Ahriman is doing time loops throughout the series, entering and exiting the Eye of Terror at different points on his own timeline, encountering people for the first time who already know him well and visa versa. The same seems to be true of the Magnus-shards who are manipulating everything. 
When does this series take place? Fuck knows. Draw a big squiggly line around the millennia M31 to M41.

2016  - Wrath of Magnus Campaign Book, M41
About 16 years ago in the Ragnar Blackmane books Maggy was trying a mysterious ritual involving screwing over Fenris and the Space Wolves.
Well this time he actually pulls it off! Chaos mass-invades the Fenris system, collapsing world after world, arriving on Fenris itself and successfully (partially) demonising it. 

Yeeeahhhhhh!

Not only that but in a neo-ruinstorm move, Maggy actually manages to crack the fucking galaxy baby! Imperium Nihilus is a thing now!

lets goooooooooo!
Plus he teleports the Planet of the Sorcerers to Prospero. 
ahh hahahah fuck you Russssss!

Then gets bonked by a Khornate Axe wielded by a Space Wolf and runs away because apparently there is only one way these things are allowed to end. This is the third time btw.


2017 Magnus the Red: Master of Prospero, M31


Picks up with whatever remains of Magnus having taken a beating and hanging about on the Planet of the Sorcerers basically fading away like McFly due to missing soul stuff. In order to set him up for the next novel he has to have a flashback to early heresy times when he was palling about with Pertuabo and encountered a Dr Who mystery on a planet which mysteriously survived the Age of Strife – definitely not via spooky methods at all.


2017 - The Crimson King, M31


Ahriman and the 1k Sons try to face up to how fucked they are and finding their Dad has magical Alzheimer’s and is also dying, they decide to put him back together using a magical fetch quest!Its just repairing a soul! How wrong can it go? When many or even most of the pieces are missing or gone…
Say hello to eventual-supervillian Magnus; The Crimson King. The guy who will, in roughly 10,000 years and after quite a few acts of gradual coelesance like this one, go on to crack the Galaxy in half.
Even having repaired Dad, and even with his major good part still missing the main desire of the Crimson King is still to get it back. He knows his ‘little voice’ is gone and wants to be whole. His method could be argued with; he will join with Horus in laying siege to the Emperors Palace.

2017 to 2020 – Bit Parts in the Heresy
In two books by John French Magnus turns up for bit parts and, along with the Sons, in ‘Slaves to Darkness’ he turns up at the end to announce he is on team bad-guy while in ‘The Solar War’ the 1k sons are some of the more-useful elements in Horus’ army.

2020 - The Fury of Magnus, M31


Magnus infiltrates the Palace with a handful of his main guys, gets a lot of the Chaos wiped off him and has some very consequential meeting with Malcador and the Emperor which do not go well at all.
He meets Malcador and asks for the good part of his soul back. Malcador tells him it simply can’t be done. (This part has already been combined with the last loyal Thousand Son, transformed into the first master of the Grey Knights and shoved through a space hole to Titan, then Titan itself shoved out of existence for a bit.
Perhaps more upsettingly, Malcador outright tells Magnus that the source of most of his problems if himself and that even without his missing soul-bit he still has enough of a personality to make good choices. This may be technically true but is maybe the best way to phrase it, and considering the sheer level of fuckery Malcador and the Emperor have engaged in, not the best person to bring it up and Magnus snaps Malcadors neck. He then meets with the Emperor who offers him a spot on the chair and informs him that the 19th Legion is a bust and always was.
(It’s not clear if these terrible attempts at persuasion are just terrible attempts or actual deliberately bad attempts. Malcador in particular seems to be expecting to die here..)
Magnus not unreasonably is not down with this and fucks right off out of the Siege. If you want to see where he appears “next” its in, I thiiink, the Ahriman Trilogy? Or possibly ‘Battle of the Fang’ as they likely overlap.
And there we are. All Wrapped up.


The Crimson King as a ‘Real’ Person
If taken as an actual personality Magnus Post-Heresy is notable for his lack of ambition and interest  in anything other than fucking over the Space Wolves. From a publishing perspective we know that this is because the Demon Primarchs are background characters in the 40k verse up until the Heresy Series really kicks off.
But it also makes sense from a personal perspective. As a lessened, crippled and frustrated post-shattering version of himself, what purpose does the Crimson King actually have? He might resent the Emperor but he has no love for Chaos and doesn’t really give a shit about the Horus/Abaddon viewpoint of ‘this galaxy is ours actually’.
He is a servant of a God who does not (consciously) worship that God and in fact hates it. His dream of a better galaxy is gone. He can’t really be a coomer for chaos. What else is there to do but scheme, dick over the Space Wolves and slowly re-assemble whatever bits of himself he can find.
Amazingly he seems to have finally accomplished all this (in Wrath of Magnus, 2016) and having cracked open the galaxy, maybe he can finally chill feeling free and happy as the more-psychotic version of himself? After all the ‘Crimson King’ has lasted a lot longer than ‘Magnus the Red’ ever did. (Plus he could always invade Titan and swallow Janus’ corpse, you never know it might do something! Maybe ‘eat every Grey Knight’ could be a new goal?


Previous Instalments
One - The HeresyTwo - HorusThree - FulgrimFour - The LionFive - The AlphasSix - The Bottle NovelsSeven - The MechanicumEight - The Short Stories