Patrick Stuart's Blog, page 67

Who is the Unbalanced Creator?

So some time in 2014 somebody created "Unbalanced Dice Games" as a publisher on RPG.NOW, made some adventures and a bunch of rather unique products for Labyrinth Lord, then apparently disappeared, then came back this year with a new adventure and some new things.

I found out about this publisher from Bryce's review of "Broken Gods Pain", so good work for him for his long toiling in the nerd mines.

They have popped back up in 2017 to extend their adventure sequence with the new epic "Perfectorium of The Golden Tentacle".

The Adventures so far are;

Broken Gods Pain - for low levels, 64 pages, note its not "The Broken Gods Pain", just "Broken Gods Pain", just like "Ud" is simply "Ud". This starts with the PCs 'cursed' in a dream to find the Broken God and transported by a magical wave to a quiet village.


Ud - for mid levels, 46 pages. The PCs receive a request from an unknown woman to find her stolen family.


Perfectorium of The Golden Tentacle - for higher levels, 166 pages, a true epic. A hot new cult, the Receivers of the Golden Tentacle is doling out utterly free and beneficial magic powers to whoever for no extra cost, buuuuuut;

"Behind the Receivers is a terrible force. Some bizarre entity manipulates everything with its tentacles. What seems wonderful becomes terrible as the months roll by."

If you enjoyed the construction of that sentence, read on.



ODD

Its difficult to describe just how odd these adventures are, not just in conception and content but in presentation, text and delivery. The only way I can describe them is its like someone was given a copy of Labyrinth Lord and no other information, just kept in a cube, and asked to invent new monsters, adventures and ideas.

Or its like a really smart 14 year old with mild Aspergers.

Or its someone, maybe they live on an island in Alaska and they just crank these things out to last through the winter when they get back from the fishing fleets.

Or its like Joesky.

"Unbalanced Dice Games" is such a common phrase that it returns a whole lot of nothing on Google. I can't find a blog or anything else to let us know who this person is.

Bryce posits a possible 'art-crime' thing with someone writing in a faux-naive voice. I hope I'm not being taken for a ride here but it seems really unlikely that is the case. As my prime exhibit I present you with this product - "Wheelies for Labyrinth Lord Players", presented with this cover image;


What is a 'Wheelie'? Well, as the text itself informs you (I have tried to maintain the spacing and sentence construction);

"Wheelies are round charts that contain game information a Labyrinth Lord player, or even the Labyrinth Lord, might like in front of him/her. Usually this information is in an attack chart, saving throw matrix or written on a character sheet. Now you can just print up a Wheelie that matches your character's class and level. Forget about writing that stuff down! The Wheelies are divided into 3 parts: the outer ring, the first inner ring and the center circle.

The center circle:
Top: Class
Middle: Saving throws based on the class level.
Bottom: Class level

The first two rings from outside in:
The outer ring: AC
First inner ring: the 20 sided dice roll needed to hit the AC in the cell adjacent to it. This corresponds to the class level in the combat matrix of the Labyrinth Lord book.

The following pages contains Wheelies for Cleric, Thief, Elf, Dwarf, Halflling, Magic-User and Fighter. 1 page for each level. Dwarf, Elf and Halfling races stop where the Labyrinth Lord game stops them. All the numbers are based off of what's in that book.

Enjoy!"

Wheelies are pretty darn remarkable. There are 115 individual Wheelies in this document, one per page. Forget about writing that stuff down!

I can't believe that the person who would individually type out 115 Wheelies and arrange them in a pdf could be faking. I think they are the real deal.



BUT HOW?

Ok, firstly the layout is manic.

It's a word doc just pdf'd pretty much. Everything is one big column (I know I have done this SHUT UP), all the paragraphs are indented and the sentences have double spaces in them. All of this remains exactly the same from section to section. The titles likewise are larger bold versions of the main text.

The pdf's do have bookmarks with a reasonable informational hierarchy and the latest adventure, Golden Tentacle, is in TWO COLUMNS.

Room or encounter descriptions commonly drift over onto other pages, sometimes just a sentence, stats or a single word will be drifting lonely on the next page.

Within the descriptions the informational transmission is deeply linear. What I mean here is that a room or encounter description is more like a story about what will happen if the PCs interact with it than it is a series of tools and prompts to help you run it.

Different creators have a number of ways of breaking down descriptions into informational chunks. Usually an overview comes first, often base on what PCs will see when they enter a space, then objects or elements that might interact or respond to investigation, then, perhaps separated into sections, deeper consequences and more info about interaction, with stat blocks for living elements. Then at the end we usually get treasure or persistent effects.

The Unbalanced creator tells the reader about an encounter as if they were simply discussing it. This is probably terrible from a gameplay perspective, or at least imperfect, but I do find it rather charming, as an aesthetic impulse to run the game it could be said to add something and, once you do comprehend the information, the elements of play are usually good. If the DM comprehends and arranges the described elements in the fictional space, they should work.

This paragraph from the starting section of 'Ud' should hopefully provide a reasonable example;


"The beavers are simple group that once resided in the area where the smoke fog is now. They don't speak human or any such language, just beaver. The Game Master should position their home somewhere close but outside of the smoke fog. If someone is able to communicate with them they will tell them of the day when Ud's fort came into being. The ground shook one bright morning and out of it a large rock like thing came out of the ground. For the first day nothing else happened then the smoke started to pour out of it. This forced the beavers to leave their home and move out of the smoke. On their way out they ran into many strange things. Pig men running around with nets and spears. Humans that walked funny and groaned for the most part. At one point something strange and golden flew through the air like a swarm of large flies. They will also tell the party that the fort resides in the center of the smoke fog. See Smoke Fog section below for more information the Beavers will tell the party about protecting themselves from the smoke fog."


This is all if you speak Beaver.

As you can see, the Unbalanced creator has a rather distinctive way with language, and candence.




ADVENTURE CONCEPTS AND ARRANGEMENT

The ideas of the Unbalanced creator operate very closely within the classic Rientsien idea space, much more than the pseudo-literary ideaspace. But within that space they are very original. Nothing is re-used from 'standard' D&D, there are no references I can find. Everything seems very pure and un-performed, and very playful and very charming.

In 'Ud', the random encounters (in the area of 'smoke fog') on the way to the adventure include (amongst many others);

- a pile of dead zombies

- mindless zombies

- mutated attack zombies

The 'dead zombies' are zombies that have 'died?' so dead bodies. This does make sense in the adventure but this strange grouping of words, like 'smoke fog', which is also accurate, and also strange, is typical of the Unbalanced creator. The mindless zombies just wander past in the fog without doing anything, the family of the woman who hooks you the quest are amongst these. The mutated attack zombies are a really cool, strange encounter, made from the simplest of materials;


"Mutated from Mindless Zombies these things appear as warped undead. Their heads are larger, the eyes are dark holes and the mouths are much larger than a humans."

And the encounter text;

"Suddenly the party starts to hear roaring coming from all sides of them. It seems they are surrounded. If they look closely they can see shadows that are people like coming towards them from all directions. It takes one round for them to reach the party, 8-12 Mutated Attack Zombies attack!"

That's a good encounter. Roaring surrounding you, then the shadows, then the zombies pelting out of the mist from every direction, then the eyes like dark holes and the mouths "much larger than a normal humans." It's made from only the simplest imaginative pieces but it has life, vigour and originality and as we read through the adventure, it makes coherent sense for the world described.

I'll break off briefly to look at the art.  It's these simple, small, scratchy little black and white glyphs, pretty obviously all done by one person. Here are the two 'Mutated Attack Zombies'





I mean, it fits perfectly. You can clearly see the mind of the creator, can you not?

The whole thing is like that, with these sparks and flares of what seems like entirely unforced originality and imaginative flair.

The bad guys fort in 'Ud' looks like a giant treasure chest, the doorway is a big keyhole with a portcullis, in the final rooms he sleeps on a bed that is also shaped like a big treasure chest, but with spikes. That's how much he likes treasure, and how evil he is.

Everything is slightly bonkers and disconnected, but, within the conceptual space created by the adventures, things generally do make internal sense. That is, once you understand the rules of the world, both the imagined world considered as a pseudo-real space, and the world-construction as considered as the product of a particular mind, players (and PCs) should be able to make reasonable decisions based on their discoveries.

Here's another example. As you work through Uds fortress, you encounter Pig Men who serve him, and Dwarf-like creatures that do magic for him and perform wierd magic/science experiments. Then you find this;


"10 Pig Man Cow Experiment

In the center of this room on top of a straw bed rests an odd creature. It has the body of a large cow but with three pig heads. Its tail is very long and appears to have a spear head attached to it. It will look at the party and two of its heads will start to laugh. The non laughing head's eyes will glow red and it will say “You are the Old generation, we will take over your duties for you. Die, die die...”. The Pig Man Cow Thing will then attack the party. If it hits a character it will shout out “The Pig Men are through!”. Once the party kills it the heads and the tail will fall off. If the party looks into the neck they will see all these gears and tubes. A bleeping noise will be audible for a few rounds and then die off.

Pig Man Cow Experiment
(HD: 5, HP: 19, AC: 4[15], Attacks: Tail Spear(1d8),
Saving Throw: 12, Move: 12, CL/XP: 5/240)"


Is anyone else getting this or am I totally out on a limb? We have a mystery here people! Who is the Unbalanced Creator?

A Review of Seeing Like a State by James C Scott

This is another very-good book from everyone's favourite lefty-Oakshott* (Oaknot?). The last book of his I read was ‘The Art of Not Being Governed’ and this is just as good.

'Seeing Like a State' re-tells the story of some of the 20th centuries biggest mass-fuckups and links them together as examples of 'high modernism', an aesthetic of hyper-rational centrally planned large-scale change driven by city-based  bureaucracies and authoritarian powers which claims to be directed towards improving and enhancing the systems it interacts with but, Scott argues, is much more about making those systems accessible to and measurable by, central power, even it vastly reduces their effectiveness.

When the thing being changed is the agricultural system of an entire nation, 'vastly reducing its effectiveness' means death.

Scott’s primary case studies are what he calls the 'High-Modernist City', based mainly around the ideas and designs of Le Corbusier, Soviet Communism, especially forced collectivisation, and Compulsory Villagization in Tanzania, which is basically the less-systematically-headfucked version of Soviet Collectivisation with a lower bodycount.

It’s a long but light, dense but clear, intricately-written but rationally arranged, deeply researched and calmly delivered book. Scott can write.

One of the most persuasive elements of Scott’s book is his criticism of the invisible madness of hyper-rationalism. A perfectly logical and superficially clear and 'scientific' aesthetic and doctrine which is perfectly accurate, within its own self-contained abstraction of the world, and totally, utterly unaware of how that abstraction is going to smash into reality like a glass meteorite.

It reminded me a lot of Ian McGilchrist’s "The Master and His Emissary" which I think Scott would probably like a lot. His description of the logic of cities almost fades into neuroscience or philosophy. This is Scott on High-Modernism;

The Dark Twin

"The planned city, the planned village, and the planned language (not to mention the command economy) are, we have emphasized, likely to be thin cities, villages and languages. They are thin in the sense that they cannot reasonably plan for anything more than the few schematic aspects of the inexhaustibly complex activates that characterize "thick" cities and villages. one all-but-guaranteed consequence of such thin planning is that the planned institution generates an unofficial reality - a "dark twin" - that arises to perform many of the various needs that the planned institution fails to fulfil. Brasilia, as Holston showed, engendered an "unplanned Brasilia" of construction workers, migrants, and those whose housing and activities were necessary but were not foreseen or were precluded by the plan. Nearly every new, exemplary capital city has, as the inevitable accompaniment of its official structures, given rise to another, far more "disorderly" and complex city that makes the official city work - that is virtually a condition of its existence. That is, the dark twin is not just an anomaly, an "outlaw reality"; it represents the activity and life without which the official city would cease to function. The outlaw city bears the same relation to the official city as the Parisian taxi driver's actual practices bear to the Code routine."



And this is McGilchrist on brain hemispheres;

"The right hemisphere needs not to know what the left hemisphere knows, for that would destroy its ability to understand the whole; at the same time the left hemisphere cannot know what the right hemisphere knows. From inside its own system, from its own point of view, what it believes it has 'created' appears complete. Just because what it produces is in focus and at the centre of the field of vision, it is more easily seen. This is one reason we are so much more aware of what it contributes to our knowledge of the world.

The left hemisphere cannot deliver anything new direct from 'outside', but it can unfold, or 'unpack' what it is given Its very strength - and it contains enormous strength, as the history of civilisation demonstrates - lies in the fact that it can render explicit what the right hemisphere has to leave implicit, leave folded in. Yet that it also its weakness. The clarifying explicitness needs to be reintegrated with the sense of the whole, the now unpacked or unfolded whatever-it-may-be being handed back to the domain of the right hemisphere, where it once more lives. This turns out to be a problem,..."

That isn’t a perfect quote to explain the similarity I’m seeing but McGilchrists book is huge so that’s the best you are getting right now.

Scott’s 'dark twin' also reminds me a lot of his views on the relationship between the agrarian state and the Zomia in 'The Art of Not being Governed', two spaces which oppose each other, on ordered and 'transparent', one 'opaque' and (apparently) disordered, yet both linked and almost requiring the other to define themselves and shape their identity.

As with 'Not Being Governed' Scott delivers another tribute to the crafty intelligence of the Peasant. The Parable of the Ants is a good example;

"Growing in the compound of the house in which I lived was a locally famous mango tree. Relatives and acquaintances would visit when the fruit was ripe in the hope of being given a few fruits and, more important, the chance to save and plant the seeds next to their own house. Shortly before my arrival, however, the tree had become infested with large red ants, which destroyed most of the fruit before it could ripen. It seemed nothing could be done short of bagging each fruit. Several times I noticed the elderly head of household, Mat Isa, brining dried nipah palm fronds to the base of the mango tree and checking on them. When I finally got around to asking what he was up to, he explained it to me, albeit reluctantly, as for him this was pretty humdrum stuff compared to our usual gossip. He knew that the small black ants, which had a number of colonies at the rear of the compound, were the enemies of the large red ants. He also knew that the thin, lancelike leaves of the nipah palm curled into long, tight tubes when they fell from the tree and died. (In fact, the local people used the tubes to roll their cigarettes.) Such tubes would also, he knew, be ideal places for the queens of the black ant colonies to lay their eggs. Over several weeks he placed dried nipah fronds in strategic places until he had masses of black-ant eggs beginning to hatch. He then placed the egg-infested fronds against the mango tree and observed the ensuing week-long Armageddon. Several neighbours, many of them skeptical, and their children followed the fortunes of the ant war closely. Although smaller by half or more, the black ants finally had the weight of numbers to prevail against the red ants and gain possession of the ground at the base of the mango tree. As the black ants were not interested in the mango leaves or fruits while the fruits were still on the tree, the crop was saved."

I could make a very slight criticism that in Scotts books the Peasant is _always_ a near super-heroic figure bursting straight from the black earth imbued with tricks and courageous wisdom with which to fool the dumb authoritarian bureaucrat sent to requisition grain for the parasitical city-dwellers, but that would be a little unfair.

Only a little though. Scott does mention some of the situations which provoked the lust for redeeming high-modernism but he never actually states outright that sometimes poor people can be fucking dumb. Sometimes they are dumb.

For particular interest for my RPG-culture readers is one of Scotts final chapters on what he calls 'Metis'. I would recommend that anyone into what's called the 'Old School' scene should pick up the book even if just to read this chapter alone;

"Metis is most applicable to broadly similar but never precisely identical situations requiring a quick and practiced adaptation that becomes almost second nature to the practitioner. The skills of metis may well involve rules of thumb, but such rules are largely acquired through practice (often in formal apprenticeship) and a developed feel or knack for strategy. Metis resists simplification into deductive principals which can successfully be transmitted through book learning, because the environments in which it is exercised are so complex and nonrepeatable that formal procedures of rational decision making are impossible to apply. In a sense, metis lies in that large space between the realm of genius, to which no formula can apply, and the realm of codified knowledge, which can be learned by rote."

This quote in particular pleased me because it brings in the necessary anarchism of people who deal with fire, which matches with what I read in 'Fire on the Rim' by Stephen Pyne;

"Red Adair's team, which has been hired worldwide to cap well-head fires, was a striking and diagnostic case. before the Gulf War of 1990, his was the only team with any appreciable "clinical" experience, and he could set his own price. Each fire presented new problems and required an inspired mixture of experience and improvisation. We can imagine, at almost opposite ends of a spectrum, Adair on one hand and a minor clerk performing highly repetitive steps on the other. Adair's job cannot, by definition, be reduced to a routine. he must begin with the unpredictable - an accident, a fire - and then devise the techniques and equipment (from an existing repertoire, to be sure, but one invented largely by him) required to extinguish that fire and cap that well. The clerk, by contrast, deals with a predictable, routinized environment that can often be ordered in advance and down to the smallest detail. Adair cannot simplify his environment in order to apply a cookie-cutter solution."

We could go a lot deeper into this, the idea of metis and the glass cage in particular would be interesting to me. Does the creation of a large, efficient, bureaucratic state necessarily shape a population who will be poor citizens?

Obedient, authoritarian, excellent at rationalising the excise of power but rarely questioning it, more closely related to the state than to each other, more interested in the state than each other (quite reasonably since it has the larger effect on their lives), lonely, alienated, since the state cannot provide the means of de-alienation and good at keeping out of trouble.

Does the state destroy the capacity of its subjects to be citizens?

Anyway, this is a fragment, go read the book.




*The man himself gets a little bit of a sly stab right at the end of the page notes;

"It is in fact impossible for most modern readers to take in the vast complacency with which Oakshott regards what the past has bequeathed to him in its habits, practices, and morals without wondering if Jews, women, the Irish, and the working class in general might not feel as blessed by the deposit of history as did this oxford don."

Encountering the Wapentake

The original, and oldest court in Wir-Heal is the Court of the Wapentake, from which all other legal rights descend.
Horribly, the documents of ownership and rights of the court have been bought by an evil solicitor; Mister Samuel Moreton (a wolf), assisted by the sinister Mister Grace (a fat pig, ten feet tall). No legal authority can overrule this court and no weapon can be wielded against it.
Mister Moreton claims to be 'Lord of the Waste Lands' and the rule of his court is one of bitterness, resentment, greed and small claims.
They charge about the countryside in an omnibus pulled by whipped Woodwose, full of pigs, boars, bears, wolves, jackals and snarling apes in pot masks like toby jugs wearing shabby black tails and top hats or frock coats and scratch-wigs. They crash through the hedgerows and snatch people out of their homes, press ganging them as jurors, witnesses or even court functionaries, then sit in state, feasting on fine food and ale with the greasy food running down the back of their masks, fining everyone for everything and holding every man and action in contempt.
The Court of the Wapentake claims lordship of any 'Waste Land' in Wir-Heal and they make sure there is as much of this as possible by tearing down walls, buildings, bridges and anything else they can find on the slightest excuse.

They also claim ownership of any ‘wreck’ left on the shore and of any stolen goods of any kind (which they certainly do not give back but rather keep).
The Court of the Wapentake is encountered either 'in the wild' as its Omnibus crashes through the countryside, or 'in session', in which case Mister Moreton has already set up his court in some building or location.
Obviously, it’s completely and overwhelmingly reasonable for you to just make up anything to do with the trial, from the roles to the crimes to the timing to the actions of the court, based purely on stuff you half remember from old TV episodes and youtube clips. You might not know what you are doing, but neither does Mr Moreton necessarily know what he is doing. What is important is that he, and you, have the authority to do it. ALL RISE!

The Power Of The Court
- Universal Authority, all NPCs (even the Devil and the Ouzel) agree on the validity of the documents of the Wapentake and will not countermand their authority.
- Compellment. Individuals are compelled to conduct themselves in their court-appointed role. PCs are unusually strong willed and may break away from this compellment with periodic WIL tests, but may then be held in contempt.
- Contempt. The Judge can inflict a range of bizarre punishments upon anyone he holds in contempt or anyone found guilty by the Court. These effects apply to anyone within sight and cannot be saved against.


Roles In The Court Two roles are always held by the same people.
Judge - "Lord of the Waste Lands, Master of the Wapentake, the Right Honourable Mister Samuel Moreton Esquire. ALL RISE!"
Clerk of the Court- Mister Grace.
Obviously, if any PC has actually committed a crime of any kind in Wir-Heal, and there is even the slightest chance that someone knows about it, then they are the accused.
Otherwise, for every PC present, and for notable NPCs if you like, roll a d10 on the table below to see what role they must adopt.
2d6 Court Role What they do 1. Council for the Prosecution. Usually one of Moretons cronies but it may amuse him to appoint a PC. 2-3 Council for the Defence. A thankless, and probably pointless task. 4 Usher Announces people. Informs the Judge of who everyone is, who is representing who, repeats every order the judge makes, essentially in charge of getting people in and out. 5 Bailiff Keeps order in the court, with violence if necessary. Can also be sent off to grab witnesses, the accused or anyone else Moreton thinks should be there. 6-7 Juror
8-9 Witness It doesn't really matter whether the PC saw or didn't see anything, they better act like they did. 10 The Accused Even if a PC is clean as new snow, they can always be accused of something.



Timeline Of A Trial
1 Identifying the Accused and the Charge - Clerk reads the charge. 2 “HOW DO YOU PLEAD?"Accused enters a plea. 3 Opening Statements from prosecution and defence. 4 Prosecution states case, enters evidence into court, brings forth Witnesses.Defence may cross-examine each witness and query each piece of evidence. 5 The Defence states its case, enters evidence into court, brings forth Witnesses.Prosecution may cross-examine each witness and query each piece of evidence. 6 Prosecution makes their closing statements. 7 Defence makes their closing statements. 8 Judge advises jury from a position of maximum hypocrisy. 9 Jury adjourns. 10 Jury returns with guilty verdict. 11 Judge sentences Accused. 12 Judge takes property of the guilty party (all property of all outlaws in Wir-Heal may be claimed by the Lord of the Wapentake.)



CRIMES!
Of course the most important crime is whatever the PCs have actually done, but if another is needed you may choose or roll below.
D50 Charge 1-2 Unpaid Debts 3-4 Gambling 5-6 Bet-Welshing - i.e. behaving as a Welshman in a bet and not paying, or paying in sheep. 7-8 Smuggling 9-10 Theft 11-12 Wrecking 13-14 Making Mock 15-16 Oath Breaking 17-18 Travelling at Night 19-20 Sharp Practice - being too effective or deceitful in business. 21-22 Building an Illegal Wall 23-24 Making an Illegal path. 25-26 Abduction of Woodwose. 27-28 Fraternisation with Woodwose - i.e. contact unbecoming. 29-30 Perversity. 31-32 Acting as a Wreaca - (not a 'Wrecker'.) Being alone or being seen to be alone too much. Behaving as an exile. 33-34 Unlicensed Wassail - drinking and singing but any improvised merry-making. 35-36 Unreasonable Gurning - this is, the making of ridiculous faces in an ill-chosen manner or time. 37-38 Becoming Invisible 39-40 Becoming Other - that is, other to yourself. 41-42 Summoning the Devil. Not that hard to do as he lives over the water. 43-44 Mask-Breaking - a much hated crime in Wir-Heal. 45-46 Observing Birds - a crime of unknown provenance and reasoning yet hallowed by time and ritual. 47-48 Occlusion - Doing something but whatever it was was not seen. Behaving in an occluded manner. 49-50 Grievance - An indistinct charge, yet a serious one



PUNISHMENT!Moretons judgements are sometimes related to the charge in question, sometimes a matter of idle whim.
The punishments for contempt are the same as those for a guilty verdict, but usually expressed for shorter periods, hours, days or weeks rather than months, years or lifetimes. You can and should choose, but here are some numbers in case you want to roll.
Sentences are usually either in days, for contempt, or years, for a guilty verdict.
D20 Sentence Effect 1 Gaol Usually in Legions Fort. 2 Were-gilt A fine. Usually a significant one of at least ¾ of the persons wealth. 3 Dunce Magical white cap appears on head causing intelligence to drop by two-thirds. Cannot be removed. 4 Foolery Fools cap appears on head. Accused cannot walk without capering or speak unless it is part of a joke. 5 MischanceHigh Misfortune Rolls d20 with disadvantage.Auto-fails any dice roll. 6 Muteness 7 Blindness 8 Murmuration On any sharp shock or surprise the target bursts apart into a flock of birds and must re-assemble themselves. 9 'Thy Shape be Amended' Polymorph. Usually into a pig, or into a horse to pull the Omnibus, but the target maintains their wits and it not automatically the property of the court.
10 Woodwosification
Can be sentenced in ‘degrees; with First Degree being immediate transformation into a full Woodwose with one automatic stage every day until full transformation complete. 11 Misfortune
Rolls d20 with disadvantage and must re-roll any other successful die roll. 12 Shivering Hands Hands won't stop shaking, minuses or disadvantage to any dexterous work. 13 Coldness Target can never be warm again. Suffers all fatigue effects as if in a cold environment. Must pass tests to sleep, and that fitfully. 14 Impoverishment Cannot own more than a minimal amount of wealth (usually 40 shillings worth of objects). Any more than this will simply disappear or roll of its own volition towards others. 15 To Be Besmirched Appears as a dirty, filthy, low-class, possibly-leprous vagabond at all times. Assumed by all reasonable people to be a Vile Creature. 16 Dexterectiomy Can't use right hand, see through right eye, or turn right. 17 Crawling Must go about on hands and knees. 18 Slithering Must go about on their belly. 19 The Gibbet Enclosure in a hanging iron cage. 20 Hanging!




Stealing The DocumentsTo make someone the true lord of the Wapentake, the documents must change hands legally, without threat of force and without deceit. Stealing them and burning them or selling them off will not amend or change any already created judgements.
However, they will prevent Mr Moreton from making any new judgements and will rob his court of its powers of compellment and contempt. He will pursue the documents madly, even to the death.

The Monkey Mountains

Of all mankind’s mistakes, teaching monkeys gunnery must be amongst the worst, for a Macaque with a cannon is a masterless beast and a Gibbon with a gun makes their own rules.


So it came to be, and still remains, in the butterfly-haunted Monkey Mountains, where the black-throated chuckling thrushes never rest, for they are shocked in droves from the branches of the banyan trees by the blasting of cannons the cracks of jezails and sad nocturnal grenados of the Bomb-Lorises. A saltpetre pandemonium silenced only by the roaring of the rainstorms that wet the powder and cool the tempers of the maddened monkey masters in their crumbling forts.

None know now who first induced in monkeys the capacity and desire for black-powder war, but for as long as memory recalls the primate population of the monkey mountain range has shared these things;

- That they speak, and think in at least a rudimentary way, at least to the equivalent of a private soldier.
- That they war against each other in clades and clans.
- that they respect, as a medium of Ares and a language of death only black powder and the high velocity round.

Gunpowder is a weapon, in some ways, quite poorly adapted for the Monkey Mountains. The hills themselves are steep, the valleys dark, the land bulging and cutting away like bad cursive script. The air is often humid and battered by clattering monsoons that pound the skies with yellow lightning and slash the trees with thick bright carving knives of warm and heavy rain. In these periods the masters of the monkey forts rest comatose, playing cards and smoking opium from Yoon-Suin, nodding in their hammocks and oiling their guns, picking lice from each others fur, waiting for the veil of rain to rise and for the wars to start again.

The Monkey Mountains are dominated by the Banyan tree, dense dark forests of strangling figs in which a single plant can send down hanging roots over hundreds of yards. The Banyan cannot grow alone, it surrounds another tree and slowly strangles it until it dies, leaving the winding banyan branches curled around a hollow column where the dead tree was.

Spirits, and eld-things of multiple sorts are often caught within the columns of these hollow trees for complex reasons of their own. Never listen to a voice coming from within a Banyan tree.

Once, the forests of the monkey mountains must have been dominated by another kind of plant, in the same way, it's unlikely that the monkey warlords built their own forts of red brick and terracotta demon-faced tile, but now only the parasite remains, the hollow root-trunks of the Banyan highlighting the ghosts of the annihilated species of trees and the piratical and proud monkey masters living in the ruined forts, themselves often so raddled by siege that they are only held together by the banyan roots looping through their walls like tying twine.

While the dense and knotted forest is more accessible to monkeys than to men, it still severely restricts the useful range of a black-powder weapon and makes transporting mortars, cannon and heavy siege artillery an absolute nightmare. This makes melee, guerrilla tactics, stealth and a defensive strategy the natural mode of combat for the environment, and all of this is ignored by the mad monkey masters who insist on forcing columns of gibbons and macaques through the dripping forest, desperately dragging bronze cannon up and down the valleys to batter down each others walls.

When these tactics inevitably fail and the field breaks down into a mad skirmish of pistols, bayonets and derringers concealed in hats, the winning warlord abducts the abandoned cannon and then tries to exactly the same thing that their opponent just tried; siege warfare in a jungle, with monkeys as troops.

It makes sense to the monkeys at least, for them simply having cannon is a confirmation of status.

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

THE ECONOMY

The economy of the monkey mountains runs on the Tapa tree, or paper mulberry, an extremely useful plant whose roots make rope, whose bark makes cloth whose leaves and fruits are edible and which is often used as medicine. Most crucially, its inner bark can be used to make a fine paper.

Small communities of human beings live in almost-hidden villages in the valleys of the mountains, they subsist of hunting (with bow and arrow only), low-level agriculture, the products of the forest, like the figs of the banyan, from eating wasps attracted to the figs and from the tapa tree.

The rituals of ownership for each tree are complex and contested, each trunk is claimed by a particular family, the branches go to certain relatives and the twigs or third-stage branches are 'gifts' traded to still-poorer relatives. In this way, each tree is a tiny feudal system and the exact laws of inheritance and descent are argued over with some ferocity, (although never with guns).

The cutting and processing of the Tapa tree provides wealth for the villages and the Monkey Warlords take a chunk of this for their 'tapa tax'. It is this tax which pays for the gunpowder and guns the monkeys love and this is pretty much all it pays for since the monkeys want few other manufactured goods.

Each village comes under the feudal rule of a monkey master in a monkey fort who ‘protects’ them from any other nearby monkey master

Those beyond the Monkey Mountains think that having a monkey for a lord must be pretty terrible, in fact, the Monkeys are extremely lassiez faire, having almost no interest in human culture beyond the tapa tax and gun manufacture, they leave almost everything up to the local authorities of each village who do their best to replicate the byzantine structures of hierarchy, ritual and oppression which they would usually get from an aristocracy for free.

The lord of the local monkey fort does insist that their guns be adored, especially the almost-immovable field artillery, which the human villagers are happy to do.

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

THE ENVIRONMENT

The monkey mountains are made from primordial coral reefs, increasing the complexity of the often Karstic terrain providing dramatic overhangs, deep creeks, disappearing streams and occasional caves. Rumours of lost cave systems are much more common than the real thing. The caves are often inhabited by Black Bearded Tomb Bats, which is the actual, real name of that species. Sometimes ancient sea shells and the curls of old aquatic snails can be found as a natural part of the bedrock, turning up in the soil of the forest floor.

The air is full of floods of black and gold butterflies, almost half a foot wide, black-throated chuckling thrushes which sound like you just said something funny, and of the banyan wasps that eat the banyan fruit and sting everyone, but which are also delicious.

(By ancient law the pirate contracts of the Crab-Man-Clans of the Selenium Isles can only be signed on paper made from the nests of wasps and the best paper from the best wasps comes from the Banyan wasps of the Monkey Mountains, so if you see Crab-Man Pirates in the hills they are usually here for that.)

Katkins and caustic fruit come from the various trees and at night Masked Civets hunt, dodging the Bomb-Lorises and often spraying unwitting wanderers with their terrible skunk-musk.

To this of course we must add the numerous spirits, memories and ghost goblins trapped in the tubular Banyan trees. Better not to interact with those.


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

THE MONKEYS THEMSELVES

Most of the monkeys of the monkey mountains are either rock Macaques, who prefer derringers and pistols, and white-handed Gibbons who like Jezails, easy for them to reload due to their long arms.

Lone, nocturnal Bomb-Lorises exclusively use grenades with extremely long, silent, smokeless fuses. The Lorises are slow and cannot throw, their medium of combat is a form of 'grenade sniping' in which each Loris will try to predict the movements of the other and move them into position directly next to a pre-placed grenade. This is an extremely subtle and strategic form of warfare (more akin to submarine war than anything else) and the night is often shaken by the explosions of the duelling Bomb-Lorises.

A small number individual apes have reached the Monkey Mountains over the years, some Chimpanzees, a handful of Gorillas and a small breeding population of Orangutans, these are often taught to speak by the monkeys and given heavy deck-guns, muskets or blunderbusses or used to drag cannon and mortars through the forest, but they do not occupy a commanding position in Monkey society (it is the Monkey Mountains after all, not the Ape Mountains).

The nature of the Monkey Master ruling the local fort will tell you something about their tactics

A Master-Macaque will prize the frontal assault, pulling his mortars to within close range of the enemy fort, distracting the defenders with skirmishing attacks.

A Class 1 Gibbon (they compete endlessly at marksmanship) prefers to duel at range and tries to take a strategic position dominating the enemy before pounding them with bronze cannon.

An Autarchic Bomb-Loris plays a deadly and almost-invisible game of feint and counter-feint in which the political and strategic are inextricably linked, all simply elements of a master plan as it unfolds, designed to trick their opponent into a vulnerable position before they are decapitated.


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

THE FORTS

The forts of the Monkey Mountains have seen better days. They are built of red brick and spattered with gunshot marks, banyan trees infest the revetments and writhe through the walls. Statues of red stone stand before many of the forts and all the statues have been worn down and effaced by time
they might be of anything, men, monkeys, or monsters.

The forts were once highly rational, many were star-forts, where space allowed, but most of the outer walls are now abandoned and the forest has reclaimed what it can. Inside, the buildings are a mess, but all of the rooms dedicated to gunpowder and weaponry are well-kept with neatly repaired roofs and safety lanterns

The tiles of all the forts are red terracotta and each one has a demons face which grins silently up at the phosphorescent day stars visible from the Monkey Mountains, and the felt-tip-yellow lightening and at the storms which send water spewing from each gaping terracotta mouth.

In 3D

Apologies for the nothing post.
I will, for the first time, be going to a 'Con', the UK Games Expo in Birmingham. I will be at the Lamentations desk for most of Saturday the 3rd of June. or at least until I have a breakdown due to the crowds, noise and social contact. Or until Raggi and I kill each other over some obscure disagreement.
So if you would like to witness my glassy smile and pained grimace in three dimensions then come along! And I will sign whatever is put in front of me. Take a 'selfie' as the kids say.
If you are not on my facebook you might not know what I look like. 
I look like this;



And here is an interesting creature I saw on a walk yesterday

A Review of 'Wrecked Lives, or, Men Who Have Failed by William Henry Davenport Adams'

(In the quotes below, the paragraphs have been added by me. Adams is a Victorian and does not really believe in them, perhaps taking them as a sign if weakness.)

I got this from the 'Scholars Select' series, which is essentially the 'print on demand from a scan' series, which means the page has all kinds of crazy copying and printing artefacts like one part where a few are missing, a few where it tilts and the first words and letters of lines are lost and one or two points where a page has been folded over and scanned.

I'm not complaining, its actually quite fun, it adds a new layer of bibliographic mystery and makes 19th Century popular writing available for cheap so that's fine with me. The cover on this is also pretty robust.

Inside are scans of the original pages so all the original typography and punctuation has been preserved.

Like any book of criticism it speaks to us as much about the critic as about anyone else and oh my god what a critic, he is the extruded essence of the Victorian Age, he lived from 1828 to 1891 and Victoria reigned from 1837 to 1876, so he only exceeded her by a decade and a half. [EDIT - SHE REIGNED TILL 1901- GOD DAMN IT]

Adams seems to have been a sort of one-man Victorian proto-wikipedia. All he did was read and write. He read everything and he nearly seems to have written everything. Even the scanned re-prints on Amazon go to over 500 books, here is a non-chronological and non-representative handful;


- Witch, warlock and magician; historical sketches of magic and witchcraft in England and Scotland.
- Lighthouses and lightships; a descriptive historical account of their mode of construction and organisation.
- Temples, tombs and monuments of ancient Greece and Rome; a description and a history of some of the most remarkable memorials of classical architecture.
- Curiosities of superstition, and sketches of some unrevealed religions.
- Celebrated women travellers of the nineteenth century.
- Womans's work in girlhood, maidenhood, and wifehood.. With hints on self culture and chapters on the higher education and employment of women.
- The buried cities of Campania; or Pompeii and Herculanium, their history, their destruction and their remains.
- Women of fashion and representative women in letters and society. A series of biographical and critical studies.
- Celebrated Englishwomen of the Victorian Era - "This book presents biographical sketches of notable women of Victorian England in an effort to display women’s intellect and thereby help the cause of women's rights."
- Child-life and girlhood of remarkable women. A series of chapters from female biography.
- Stories of the lives of noble women
- Famous beauties and historic women. A gallery of croquis biographiques.
- "In perils oft": romantic biographies illustrative of the adventurous life
- Wonders of the Vegetable World
- Egypt Past and Present
- The household treasury of English song. Specimens of the English poets
- The Sunshine of Domestic Life: or Sketches of Womanly Virtues and Stories of the Lives of Noble Women
- Good Samaritans: Or, Biographical Illustrations of the Law of Human Kindness
- The Secret of Success: Or, How to Get On in the World.
- The Catacombs of Rome: Historical and Descriptive
- Great Shipwrecks: A Record of Perils and Disasters At Sea 1544-1877
- Nelsons' Hand-Book to the Isle of Wight
- Dwellers on the Threshold. Or, magic and magicians. Vol II
- Beneath the Surface: Or, Wonders of the Underground World

And this is only a handful. I'm sure people familiar with me can see the shared interests, magic, underground spaces, tombs and heroism.

I put 'Men Who Have Failed' on my wish-list largely due to its wonderful and ridiculous title and it has not dissapointed me. Adams takes us on a tour of (to his eye) ruined lives. The effect is rather like watching Adams march sternly down a line a grieving and fragile artists and bad politicians, wielding the big, dead salty haddock of Victorian morality. As he passes by, each failed man receives a rueful, but well-deserved salty smack in the face for not being Victorian enough.

The section on Robespierre takes up nearly half the book, but we cannot blame Adams for this, the doom of the French Revolution and the Terror are just much, much stranger, more exciting and more interesting than anything else that could possibly happen. It is one of the pleasures of left-wing nutters as opposed to right-wing nutters that, because they think they are opening a new chapter in history, they tend to obsessively record everything they do, which, if they don't manage to burn it later, gives the popular historian a lot of detail to work with. So we know, for instance, that Robespierre was really into tarts, and;

"To this description of his person and character it may be added that he was temperate to an extreme, drinking water only, and passionately fond of oranges. Freron says he was insatiable in his appetite for this fruit, and thinks that their acidity acted on the bilious humours of his body, and favoured their circulation. 'It was always easy to detect the place at table which he had occupied, by the piles of orange-peel which covered the plate. It was remarked that, as he ate them, his severity of countenance relaxed'."

Which I reproduce here as an example of Adams' eye for the telling or ridiculous detail, for its inherent interest and for the intriguingly stated possibility that the problem with Robespierre was that he was too alkali.

Before the solemn judgement comes down;

"... his intense selfishness ruined him. He could govern only by silence and terror ; he could think of no other way of disarming his adversaries than by crushing them. ..... When he had swept out of his path every enemy he would announce that the Terror was no more. He was sick and weary of the Terrorists, and he wished, and had resolved, to destroy them. There can be no doubt that he was appalled at the incessant bloodshed and yet he was resolved to pour out more blood in order to arrest its flow !"

Robert Burns is next to get a kicking. It’s curious that a Victorian moralist and a modern reader would both look askance on Burns for exactly the same behaviour (he was a massive slut) but with a very different tenor.

It is lack or heroism and high-mindedness that does for Burns in the end.

We move on to Benjamin Haydon, rarely has anyone exploded in the air like Haydon. He has the perfect vector, just enough talent, ability, hard work and high-mindedness to put him high, high, high in the sky, and just enough deranged narcissism, paranoia, indebtedness and lack of self-control to make sure he goes up like a drone strike in full public view.

I offer the second part of the following quote as an example of someone utterly unlike myself or anyone else I know.

"In March 1890, the "Dentatus" was completed, and at the Royal Academy's Exhibition was submitted to the judgement of the critics and the public. This was not particularly favourable ; the general opinion being that the painter had "attempted too much;" but Lord Mulgrave liberally rewarded him with 210 guineas. Haydon, however, conceived the idea that the Academicians had not given him a good place in the Exhibition, out of jealousy ; and thus began his long warfare against the Academy, which continued during the remainder of his life, and acted on his brain like a powerful irritant.

Never was any man more impatient of criticism or more intolerant of opposition. To disagree with him was a sure and certain mark of incompetence, envy, malice, uncharitableness. His estimate of his powers was so enormous, that it was difficult for any calm, unprejudiced observer to accept it; yet, at the same time, it indisposed him to believe in the possibility that a critic might honestly regard it as excessive. Hence he waged an incessant warfare against a constantly increasing host of adversaries, for his pretensions were so disproportionate to his performance that men naturally took offence at their transparent egotism."

Haydon has a very, very sad end, but even though it should call us to sympathy, blowing your brains out in the study, knowing either your wife or kid will find you, is a particularly representative example of his self-absorption. At least leave the house to do it man.

On Heinrich Heine

Heine has the misfortune of being, not only a flake, but also German.

[Heine is salty about the English, Adams prepares and unleashes his own not-inconsiderable reserves of salt]

"Passing over the exaggeration of this passage, we may remark that "freedom" here means, evidently, something more than political liberty, or else Heine could hardly have ignored the fact that England had attained to a successful application of its principles long before they were understood by the majority of Frenchmen ; and we may assume, I think, that it signifies a general impatience of restraint ; an independence of those conventionalities which, however ridiculed by the wits, are the safeguard and the bond of society; and an arbitrary revolt against order, custom, and common  sense. If such were Heine's idea of freedom, and if this kind of freedom were his "new religion," it is easy to believe that the most intelligent Englishmen would, to Hein's perception, talk foolishly about it !"

Albion thus preserved, we move on to the real meat and Adams digs into his bag of exclamation marks;

"Alas for those powerful, fervid, irregular spirits, which so fatally mistake license for liberty, and so sadly plunge into fruitless warfare against the wisely conservative forces of established society! How pitiable is their waste of strength and effort! How surely do they prepare for themselves the doom of failure! Wheras if, instead of aiming at revolution, the would be content with reform, they might accomplish so much good for their brethren, and reap so abundant a harvest of crowned and consummate labour !"

The chapters of the book grow smaller and smaller as we go on, as if Adams is running out of a particular kind of fuel. His engine of exasperation is chugging on fumes. Even the most Victorian Victorian can only mine so much salt.

On Poe

"It is annoying, after one's nerves have been thrilled and one's fancy stimulated, by such a crowd of sepulchral images, to find that nothing comes of it, except some rhodomontade about "a sainted maiden whom the angels name Lenore" - which by the way, the angels would certainly not do. It is just as if the ghost of Hamlets father had broken his prison-bonds to inform his startled son that his mother was called Gertrude in the realm of shadows!"

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

"Towards the close of the year he produced his fine poem of "Eureka," which Mr. Ingram rapturously pronounces "the last and grandest monument of his genius." "In all probability," he adds, "no other author ever flung such an intensity of feeling, or ever believed more steadfastly in the truth of his works, than did Edgar Poe in this attempted unriddling of the secret of the universe!"

"The Secret of the Universe" however is not unriddled in this volume of vague, mystical, and pantheistic 'fine writing.'"

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

"To retrace the record has been to me no agreeable task ; but in a book dealing with "Men who have Failed" - men who, by their failure, have left us a warning and an example - I could not ignore it, for it points very vividly and with even terrible force the moral I am bound to inculcate. Alas that, with all the fervour of his imagination, with all the rich promise of his intellectual energy, the name of Poe should be entered on so sad a roll, instead of among those

"Who prove that noble deeds are faith,And living words are deeds,And leave no dreams beyond their dreams,And higher hopes and needs"!
It is a pitiful thing when of a mans life we can make no better use than to adopt it as a beacon which indicates a danger and commemorates a wreck!"

Adams seems drained, not only by the difficulty of his own research but by the moral nature of his quest. For all his high feeling at the beginning. I think it is becoming increasingly obvious to him, and to us, that we are driving along the road looking at crashed cars. There is only so much we can learn from this and even though I have a great deal of affection for Adams and his patriarchal Victorian bullshit, even I am running out of patience with him a little.

We wheedle to a slim finish with Thaddeus Kosciusko, the Polish patriot who did everything right, was heroic, self-sacrificing and high-minded, but still got utterly fucked by reality.

If, by chance, anyone buying this book today was expecting to find out anything genuinely useful from the doom of these great and talented men, then I am afraid there is little to discover here that you wouldn’t get from a Wikipedia page. Adams may be right 60% of the time, but its not too hard to point out that when Robespierre is acting like a nutter, that he is nuts, that Burns slutting around ruined some young women’s lives or that Haydon was a fucking tool.

They are worth considering, none the less, especially Haydon who is almost a living signpost to the systematic failings of the artistic mind.

Adams successfully points out that a bunch of flaky self-destructive narcissists couldn’t keep their shit together with verve and drive and from an exclusively pre-Freudian, Christian, and Victorian point of view. A modern blogger would do the same but would probably be less salty and a lot less fun to read.

If you are buying it as a mixture of historical miscellany and a romp through the popular Victorian mind, then you can certainly have a lot of fun with ‘Wrecked Lives’, it is the very living image of its creator and its time.

The Barren Baronies

Parched and rusted Knights on starved horses, their hooves clicking on the bare sandstone and kicking black clinker through the grey volcanic ash. Cracked skin, red mail, dusty scabbards closed with broken twine binding wind-sharp swords, and each knight cradling a vibrant shield of glowing glass. For their Baronies are held within their shields; curved pocket realms where waterfalls plummets from an unseen sky, birds sing in the soft dawn and usher out the dusk. Where cattle amble home to castles of pale sea-washed-beach coloured stone over age-dark draw-bridges sleeping across the beds of fish-thick moats, through oak gates lodged open by forgotten props.

The birds disappear when they migrate, somehow they can find their way through the curved prison-space of the bound realm. For anyone else, walking too far one way brings you back the other. The rivers run somewhere but no-one who takes them ever comes back. The wells draw water from the dark but tunnels twist intangibly, avoiding a deeper dark that isn't there.

Small realms, but safe, where widows weave the funeral shrouds for absent knights who rarely return alive. With everyone preparing for an invisible end. Their world is as fragile as glass.

Here in the hidden Baronies, and there in the Barren Baronies, the time-scarred knight licks water from a thorn as dawns paperback-grey eye widens in slow shock at the horizons horrors once again, a ruined land like ragged pennants snapping in a random wind.

They seek each other, these Knights, they fear each others tread and watch each others sign. They suspect everything a threat, even the absence of a threat, silence itself the track of an intangible beast they would seek.

They must. It is the war of the Baronies. It is a civil war. A savage war of all against all, of kin against kin. They must defend their people, it is a sacred trust. They must defend their land and their honour and their subjects. They are the only ones who can.

They must defend them from the other Knights, for if the shield is shattered the Barony is lost, and if a Barony is lost then the pain-wracked desert of the Barren Baronies must writhe like a snake pinioned in the sun and the stone shatter and the ranges crack like freezing ice.

And, as the unrelenting logic of death requires, the surest form of defence requires offence.

And there are old wrongs and old hatreds, deep betrayals and dark imaginings.

Yes it is quite a deed to shatter a shield, and to avenge your ancestors, and many shields were shattered in the starting centuries of the war, and the land wracked with torment and homes and families and ancient lineages disappeared like drifting smoke. Those were the early contests, and birthed the roots of many hates between the Knights.

But the Baronies were young then, and the Knights were poorly trained, ill-prepared for the broken world their war had built. They are more fierce and competent now, some near-ageless out of hate, some passing hatred on from son to son.

They know their ruined land and read its marks. A scuff on stone, a shard of wood, a still breeze carrying the scent of rust and sweat. The pause before an attack.

It would go quicker if they were willing to use bows the wars might finished in a century, but a Knight is a Knight after all. Perhaps especially after all. They go at each other with blades. Spears first, if their horses can still charge, then they take it into breathing distance.

The Knights are very good by now. They take no risks and move like tense pendulums twisted together, clicking back and forth, speechless across the sand, leaving scattered drops of rusty blood. Each has killed a hundred men by now, and shattered a hundred shields, and riven the land with terrible tortures over a hundred times.

They still carry their own safe shield, their protected Barony, glowing like a polished stone, fragile, desperately, terribly fragile. A shield with all their dreams inside it, their families, their homes, their future and their past. It's us or them. Someone has to go.

Ages ago they made fires to survive in the dark, where the dew freezes hieroglyphs on the obsidian shards reflecting cracked stars from a wounded sky. They learnt, quickly, to never sleep by their own fire, but to watch it from a distance through half-closed eyes, preparing for the attack. Then in time they learnt that all the fires were traps, that all the knights were sleeping cold. Now no-one makes a fire.

In stories the Knights fight because they think the last shield will return safely to the earth, and expand like an infinite tapestry, a green growing carpet of woodlands and peace, to fill the Barren Baronies and bring back the land the way it once was. And that’s a neat and tragic tale which gives reasonable reasons for death and makes the listener sigh.

In reality, they kill not to die. The only way they can ever be safe is if all the other Baronies are smashed and there is no-one left to hate. The last knight knows his home and family will survive, even hidden in a shield of glass, a bounded life is better than none.

People go around the Barren Baronies, the Knights who haunt it are amazingly, indescribably deadly. Watchful, cunning, amoral and cold. Even to step inside that land is to be made a piece in their game. From the moment of arrival, cold, hidden eyes observe and pained thoughts balance shifting probabilities. The Knights of the Barren Baronies have no particular interest in killing travellers, and none in keeping them alive. If you are useful dead, you will be killed. If you might become a threat, you die. If you can be a lure, provide a distraction or disguise, provoke an unexpected response or herald a telling mistake, then you might live. People do cross the Barren Baronies, some of them, gloriously unobservant, say they never even saw a Knight, don't know what all the fuss is about.

Those who do meet Knights rarely forget it. They are terrifying men. Honed and worn like a keen note from a taut string before it breaks. Violent and horribly sad, with the ruins of good manners and Knightly courtesy, and each with a carefully wrapped shield they will never expose.

They move in an invisible circle in which no-one will approach and kill with a twitch. Armed men back away. Some crawl to the border with slashed Achilles tendons, telling stories of the man in rusted mail who appeared from the stone and killed every standing man in a caravan in the time it takes to tell it. Left the rest crawling in the sand and followed them, invisibly, as they crawled and screamed towards the boundary of the Barren Baronies, making them a lure to catch another Knight.

Flamingo City

Its more of a town really, but don’t tell the Flamingo-People that. In a shoreside forest of black willow, white oak and cottonwood trees, they built* a settlement of woven bijou bower-salons, some hanging from the trees, others perched on teetering wicker towers linked by fragile walkways, if they are linked at all.
At mid-morning they fly out to the lake and spend all day ‘supping’ and conversing, in the evening they fly back. The Flamingo-People are all royalty and never do work. Though terrified of the Cold Crocodile King they all claim to be monarchists. They are served by servile Grebe-People who secretly plan revolt.
They deny they ever sleep and hate being caught doing it. In duels they stand stock still, hold the needle-rapiers in their beaks and their long necks wave back and forth in remarkable and frighting fashion.
What’s happening?1. Playing Cards2. Singing3. Performing a Display4. Conversing5. Playing Darts6. Duelling7. Dancing a slow Pavane.8. Grebe-People plotting.9. Discussing Obsidian Shore Politics.10. It’s the Cold Crocodile King in disguise.
Names 1 Prince/Princess Burgundy 2 Duke/Dutchess Carmine 3 Marquis/Marchioness Vermillion 4 Earl/Countess Rubous 5 Viscount/Viscountess Fuchia 6 Baron/Baroness Rose’
Deniable Missions1. Find the Pavonated Man!2. Destroy the Tiger Philosopher!3. Punitive expedition against the Cannibal Hamster People.4. Seek out the Green Grass Ghost in the Forest of Infinite Fear.5. Depose the (current) Emperor Pig.6. Spy upon the Lake of Thörn & find weakness of the Sky-Queen.

*By ‘built’ we mean ‘ordered the Grebe-People to build.

Adams on Robespierre on Tarts

From the book “Wrecked Lives ; Or, Men Who Have Failed” by William Henry Davenport Adams.

‘Robespierre, as a singer of songs, is opposite enough to the figure we conceive of him from his appearances on the stage of history; but we find a still more striking antithesis in his letters, which are those of a quick observer and easy writer, given to homely jesting, with a touch of sentiment raising and redeeming his badinage. The following is, as Mr. Lewes says, if we consider who its author, a very curious and suggestive letter. It is dated from "Carvins, June 12, 1788," and we adopt, in the main, Mr. Lewes's translation:-*
"Sir,               "There is no such thing as a pleasure unless it be shared among friends. I am about to give you a sketch therefore, of what I have enjoyed these last few days.                              "Don't expect a book of travels! For several years the public has been so prodigiously over-stocked with that kind of work, that it may well be satiated with them now. I can conceive an author who has made a journey of five leagues, celebrating it in prose and verse ;  and yet what is that adventurous enterprise compared with the one I have executed ?  I have not only travelled five league. I have travelled six ;  and such leagues, that the opinion of the inhabitants of the country would go to prove that they were equal to seven ordinary leagues. And yet I will not tell you a word respecting my journey : for your sake I regret it ;  you lose much.  It would have offered you some adventures which would have been infinitely interesting: those of Ulysses and Telemachus were nothing by their side.
               "We started at five in the morning. Our car quitted the gates of the city at precisely the same moment as the chariot of the sun rose from the bosom of the ocean. it was adorned with a cloth, of brilliant white, one portion of which floated in the zyphyr's breast.  It was thus we passed the guard-house of the custom-house officers [the Octroi] triumphantly. As you may suppose, I did not fail to cast my eyes on them. I wished to ascertain whether those Arguses would not give the lie to their ancient reputation ; and, animated with a noble emulation, I dared to aspire after the glory of, if possible, vanquishing them in politeness. I leaned over the side of our car, and taking off the new hat which covered my head, saluted them with my most charming smile. I counted on a suitable response ; but would you believe it? these clerks, motionless as the god Terminus at the door of their cabin, regarded me fixedly without returning my salute. I have always had an infinite self-love ; that mark of contempt wounded me to the quick ; and for the rest of the day my temper was intolerable.
               "Meanwhile, our coursers bore us onward with a swiftness which they imagination can scarcely conceive. It seemed as if they would fain rival the swiftness of the coursers of the sun who flew over our heads.... With one bound they cleared the Faubourg St.Catherine ; a second carried us to the gate at Sens. We stayed a short time in that town. I profited by the delay to examine the beauties it presents to the travellers curious gaze. While my companions were breakfasting, I ascended the hill upon which the Calvary is placed. From that point my eyes wandered, with a mingled sentiment of sadness and exultation, over the vast plain where Conde at twenty, gained that famous victory [Rocroi] over the Spaniards which saved France.
               "But an object interesting for other reasons next drew all my attention, the Hotel de Ville.  It is not remarkable for grandeur or magnificence ; but it has not the less claim upon my attention, does not the less inspire me with lively interest. This modest edifice, said I, meditatively, is the sanctuary where the hunchback T-----, with his blonde wig, holding the balance of Themis in his hand, formerly weighed with great impartiality the claims of his co-citizens. Minister of justice and favourite of Esculapius, he passed a sentence and then wrote a prescription. The criminal and the patient were equally terrified by his presence ; and this great man, by virtue of his twofold office, was in possession of the most extensive power that man ever exercised over his fellow men.....
               "We remounted out conveyance. Scarcely had I settled myself comfortably on a bundle of straw when Carvins rose into view. At the sight of this happy spot we all burst forth into a shout of joy, comparable to that which burst from the Trojans, fugitives from the disaster of Troy, when they discovered the shores of Italy. The people of the village gave us a welcome which amply compensated for the indifference of the clerks at the Meaulens gate. Citizens of every class manifested their enthusiasm for us, The cobbler arrested his awl, about to pierce a sole, that he might regard us at leisure ; the barber abandoned a half-shaved chin, and rushed out before us, razor in hand ; the huswife, to satisfy her curiosity, braved the perils of a burnt tart; I actually saw three gossips break off in the midst of a lively conversation to rush to the window. In short we tasted during our passage - which alas, was too brief! - that satisfaction, so flattering to our self-love, of seeing a numerous people occupied with us.  How pleasant, I said to myself, it is to travel!  With great truth is it said that one is never a prophet in ones own land. At the gates of your own town you are despised ; six leagues beyond it you are a personage worthy of public curiosity.
               "I was engaged in these wise reflections when we arrived at the house which represented the goal of our voyage. I will not attempt to depict the transports of tenderness which broke forth in our embraces. It was a spectacle to have drawn tears from your eyes. In history I knew of but one scene of the kind to be compared with it.  When Aeneas, after the fall of Troy, lands in Epirus with his fleet, and there meets with Helenus and Andromache, whom destiny has seated on the throne of Pyrrhus, it is said that their meeting was most affecting. I doubt not that Aeneas had a most excellent heart. Helenus, the best Trojan in the world, and Andromache, the amiable widow of Hector, shed many tears and sighed many sighs on this occasion. I am willing to believe that their transports were not inferior to ours ; but after Aeneas, Helenus, Andromache, and us, you must drop the curtain.
               "Since our arrival all our time has been occupied with pleasures. Ever since last Saturday I have been eating tarts. Destiny has willed that my bed should be placed in a room which is the depȏt of the pastry. That was exposing me to the temptation of eating tarts all night! But I reflected that it was noble to subdue ones passions, and therefore I slept though in the midst of such seductive objects. It is true that during the day I made up for this long abstinence."
[Here Robspierre indulges in some humorous verses in praise of the first maker of tarts, for which I have not room. He continues, after an allusion to the oblivion which wraps the name of ce sublime genie:-]
               "Of all the traits of ingratitude which the human race has exhibited towards its benefactors, this it is which has always most revolted me. It is for the Artesians to expiate it; seeing that, in the opinion of all Europe, they know the value of the tart better than any other people.   Their glory calls upon them to erect a temple to its inventor. I will confess, entre nous, that I have drawn up a project to that effect which I purpose to submit to the Artesian States.  I count upon the powerful support of the clergy.
               "But to eat tarts is nothing : one must eat them in good company. Yesterday I received the greatest honour to which I could aspire. I dined with three lieutenants and the son of a bailli! The whole magistracy of the neighbouring villages was assembled at our table. In the centre of the senate shone monsieur the lieutenant of Carvins, like Calypso amidst the nymphs. Ah, if you could but have seen how affably he conversed with the rest of the company, as if he were an ordinary mortal! With what indulgence he approved of the champagne which was poured out for him! With what a satisfied air he seemed to smile at the reflection of his person in the glass! I saw it all - yes, I! - and yet, observe how hard it is to content the heart of man! All my desires are not yet satisfied. I am preparing to return to Arras ; and I hope to find greater pleasure in seeing you than even in all or any of the circumstances above described. We shall meet with as much satisfaction as Ulysses and Telemachus after twenty years of absence. I shall have no difficulty in reconciling myself to the loss of my baillis and lieutenants. (However seductive a lieutenant may be, believe me, Madame, he can never enter into with you. His countenance, even when champagne has tinted it a soft carnation does not present the charm which Nature's self has given to yours ; and the company of all the baillis in the universe can never compensate for your agreeable conversation.)
               "I remain, with the sincerest expression of friendship, sir, your very humble and obedient servant,                              "De Robespierre."
In our limited space we should not transcribe so long a letter did we not look upon it as a curious psychological study when read by the light of its writer's after career.’

Bad guys from The Legion of Regrettable Super-Villains by Jon Morris

Rather than review this book, which would take actual thought, I'm just going to rip off any ideas that might be useful in RPG's and dump them here with a bunch of images, which requires only work.

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Bullseye - a criminal clown, unlike the Marvel Comics Bullsey, this individual can't be hit. Would make an interesting challenge for a low-level party and a fun spoiler for a mid level party I think.


Dr Voodoo - A servant of Lilith, goddess of all evil and her consort The Immortal Emperor.

This is Dr Voodoo trying to kill Wonder Man in space.
Note his pensive and workaday expression.
Note also also the guy with the giant yellow grin, that's the Immortal Emperor.
Comes from a dark satellite of the moon where every evil soul that has ever existed has taken refuge. Squads of "anthrozoons" using "vapor guns", "frigitrons" and a "vacuum spiral", along with a solar army of "Thermodons". Dr Voodoo actually wonders if the earth is worth conquering but his evil goddess regards it as her rightful domain so he continues.


I think I like everything about this guy? Weird weapons, solar army, comes from the Death Moon, or Death Satellite technically I think. Potential world-threat but still just doing his job so fun for the PCs to chat to.


Fang - a creature from Desolation island, a place of pure horror.

Look at his goddamn face.He was banished for being too terrible and left on an ice floe to die. He can conjure armies of terrible monsters from his imagination.


The Horrible Hand - a giant, disembodied, flying red hand in a bird cage. Apparently the hand of a devil, it can receive and obey commands.


King Killer - A giant Frankenstein, seven feet high, with a head crammed with the brains of infamous killers, thieves, hit men and gangland chiefs.



His teeth are fangs and a scar down the centre of his skull shows where they shoved in the extra criminal brains. He brings together every criminal in the United States and build a city of crime in his own new US state called Rex.



Mr Night - The living embodiment of the absence of all colour.

Otto Binder was pretty good.

The Colour Kingdom of Rainbow City, "Arbour of the Sky Spirits" is ruled by King Colour and is the place where all colours come from. Mister Night is an evil sky spirit banished from the city who now lives in the gloomy reaches of Nightland and wants to turn everything in existence jet black so that he can rule the world.



Robbing Hood - I'm going to describe this guy as he's shown on the cover as he's amazing;

A giant, maybe twice as high as a four story building, with a somewhat prominent front row of upper teeth and strong christopher-lee esque features, wearing perfectly tailored top and tails with a bow tie and a gleaming black top hat, all giant sized, and armed with a gigantic bow and arrow.

His aim is to steal from the poor and give to the rich simply on principal. I imagine him reaching down into homes and scraping out all the items. After doing this he goes off and dumps it all in front of the idle rich, who don't want it.


Sadly-Sadly - A notorious career criminal on the run gets into local theatre to make end meet. The director finds his face incredibly sad and alters it to make it even more sad. The criminals face is now so sad that anyone who sees it breaks down crying and feels so bad for him they won't try to stop him committing crimes, even turning into a mob to protect him from agents of the law.



To defeat him, make him laugh.


The Crimson Raider - a cursed, immortal, giant, pirate. Unwanted in either heaven or hell, the only way the Crimson Raider can finally rest is if he loads his pirate treasure onto someone who;

- Shares his surname.
- Uses the money for the betterment of mankind.



Inevitably the wealth corrupts the recipient and the raider has to re-collect all the gold, every piece, and start again. Each time this happens he grows another foot high.


Lord Lazee - A fat man in a horned helmet who never leaves his couch and is served food pills by his manservant Vigoro. He controls a Terrible Trio of Terrifying Robots called Terrorquake, Titdalruin and Tornadoom.



Our Man - a nihilistic artist in a robot suit.

Steve Ditkos impression of nihilistic and self-loathing art is actually more interesting
to look at than his 'positive' art, which I'm not sure he was aware of.
"Man is an incompetent nothing in a world of mystic terrors ... all without meaning and purpose." He puts on an armoured suit based on the statue which inspired these thoughts he makes his aim destroying heroic art.

The Crime Merchant - literally sells plans and criminal schemes for profit.

Sinestro the Boy Fiend - An ordinary boy with no special powers who arms himself with a bunch of gagets; a gyrocopter, an x-ray scope, a "Super-Gun" firing some kind of liquid, a flashing hypnotic light, a pea-shooter, a mask and a cape and helps out villains apparently purely becasue heroes piss him off.




GANGS; (or rival parties).

Generalissimo Brainstorm - Brainstorms gang is well suited to an aquatic adventure.. A short bald man in a self-designed military uniform. His brain powers create a literal storm of sparks and sound effects around his head at all times. Has superintelligence, telepathy and mind-control.

Chief Ooz - a scientist with a specially trained attack dolphin.

The Human Anchor - has the power of sinking and being very heavy.

Murderina Mermaid - a clockwork mermaid assassin.



The Death Battalion - not impossible to imagine running up against these guys in Vornheim.

Dr Death - an evil concert magician, he composes a "symphony of death" which kills any musician who plays it.

The Ghost - An embezzler who robs the charitable foundation he helps to run, aided by a gang dressing in frightening ghost and skeleton costumes.

The Horned Hood - A respected scholar with a secret life where he is a feared jewel thief, armed with a lethal _lead-filled club of thorns_.

The Black Thorn - A hooded man with a 'Mummy Ray' that can fatally dehydrate his enemies.

The Black Crown - An evil circus performer with a gang of other circus professionals, including a Gorilla named Gargantua.

The Laughing Skull - A masked disgraced banker for forces his enemies to read their own epitaphs before murdering them at their grave sites.

The Brain - a guy in a globualar mesh helmet who is secretly the warden of the prison they were all imprisoned in.


The Big Gang - These guys have a much more gloriously stupid Reintsien flavour. A gang of thieves who specifically, and only, steal BIG items. The worlds largest book, biggest drum, coin, organ, bell, painting and emerald.

Big Brain - "more brains than an entire college faculty".

Big Ben - Essentially keeps the gangs schedule, if only every PC party had someone like this.

Big Bertha - a woman who's arms are so strong she can hurl objects like a cannon firing.

Big Shot - A marksman with all kinds of hyper-specific firearms.

Big Deal - baffles and confused people with card tricks.

Big Cheese - "who concocts cheese with extraordinary powers" knockout cheese, cement cheese, projectile cheese.

Big Wig - who's weapons are his wigs, including at least one exploding wig.


The Headmen



Dr Arthur Nagan, Gorilla Man - a human head transplanted onto a Gorilla body by angry Gorillas. That is correct, he did not transplant his own head, the Gorillas did it as revenge.

Shrunken Bones - While experimenting with a shrinking gas he accidentally shrunk his skeleton, leaving the rest of his body the same size, his skin hangs grotesquely from his body.

Chondu the Mystic - Does mind transfer via mystic powers, current main body is has bat wings, lampreys for arms and the legs of an eagle.



Ruby Thursday - A brilliant scientist who replaces her own head with a malleable, spherical supercomputer which she can change into a variety of tools and weapons.