Patrick Stuart's Blog, page 69

March 23, 2017

The Ultimate Horror Game

Surely the ultimate horror game would be one where, at least initially, the players do not know they are playing a horror game.

Horror is brought into perspective by normality, so the best way to being would be with something like an Apocalypse Word-derived storygame set in the real world. AW is good at developing pre-existing networks of connection before the game starts so do that in a reality-based situation. Tell players that they are exploring gender or something.

Or even better, tell them that they are exploring non-privileged perspectives in the mental health field.

Start off with some normal shit and throw in some everyday stressors "uh oh, looks like I might be in danger of losing this office job/relationship".

Then you veeeery slowly start introducing reality bending stuff.

The thing is, because they think they are playing a game about mental health, at first even the players think they are seeing things that aren't there, or blacking out and imagining things that didn't happen. Of course they are scared to go to the authorities and of course no-one will believe them.

Then you throw in something that, while no-one else witnesses it directly, can only be the result of supernatural forces. But even then you don't tell them directly what's going on and one or two still think they are playing in the mental illness game.

As soon as the session is finished you just stand up, refuse to answer any questions, grab your stuff and go. They wouldn't even be certain what kind of game they had played in.
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Published on March 23, 2017 07:53

March 20, 2017

21 British Kings as NPC's

I’m reading through Geoffery of Monmouth’s glorious widescreen bullshit History of the Kings of Britain. (I’m only up to Julius Ceasar).

The names, in particular, are fantastic, much more interesting than the names of real kings, and each one is either a hero, with some magnificent quality, a villain, or simply an NPC who gets listed with no comment. Joseph Manola managed to turn Pathfinder adventure paths into OSR modules by translating time into space, so why not do the same for British history? Here’s most of (interesting) the pre-roman British kings from that book, listed as if they were all alive in the same place at the same time.


Lud - famous for his town-planning activities. He is re-building the walls of the town of Kaerlundein and girding it with innumerable towers. He orders his citizens to construct their homes in such style that no other city in the most far-flung of kingdoms can boast of palaces so fair. Lud is a warrior king, lavish in arranging feasts.


Digueillus - the son of Capoir, a man modest and prudent in all his actions, and one who cares above all for the fair administration of justice amongst his people.


Beldgabred - Called the 'God of the Minstrels' this king surpasses all the musicians of ancient times, both in harmony, and in playing every kind of musical instrument.


Archgallo - He makes it his business to do away with the noble and exalts the base. He steals wealth from the rich and in this way heaps up untold treasure. The leaders of his realm refuse to endure this any longer. Archgallo's brother, called ‘The Dutiful’ is Elidurus. All the people of the realm desire him to be king, but each time the depose Archgallo, exile him and place him in charge, Elidurus uses disguise and trickery to restore Archgallo to the throne.


Gorbonianus  - No man alive is more just or a greater lover of equity, and none rule their people more frugally. He pays due honour to the gods and insists upon common justice for his people. In all the cities of his realm he restores the temples of the gods and builds many new ones. A great abundance of wealth floods his realm, such as is enjoyed by none of his neighbours.  He encourages the country folk to till their ground and protects them from the oppression of their overlords. he rewards his young soldiers with gold and silver, making it unnecessary for any of them to molest his comrades-in-arms.


Morvidus - Would be famous for his prowess if he was not outrageously cruel. Once he loses his temper he spares no-one, committing mayhem on the spot, if only he can lay his hands on his weapons. Once he proves victorious there is not a soul alive he will not slaughter, he orders his enemies to be dragged before him and satiates his lust for blood by killing them one by one. When he becomes so exhausted that he has to give up for a time, he orders the remainder skinned alive and in this state has them burnt.

For all this he is handsome and distributes gifts most open-handedly. In the whole land there is no-one as brave as he, or who can resist him in a fight.

A monster of unheard-of savageness has appeared on the coast of his kingdom and is eating up his towns one by one. Morvidus intends to fight her single-handed.


Marcia - Wife of the deceased king Guithelin, Marcia rules until her son, the heir Sisillus reaches his majority. Skilled in the arts, she is using her natural talent to invent many extraordinary things, including a full set of laws which she intends to call the Lex Martiana.


Gurguit Barbtruc - Though called a lover of peace and justice and having adorned the City of Legions with walls and public hangings, Barbtruc is also incredibly prideful and has fought wars against all his neighbours, reducing them to subjection. He has been refused tribute by the King of Denmark and is currently building a fleet and army in order to sail there, kill the king and reduce Denmark to a state of subservience.


Belinus - Takes pleasure in the proper administration of justice, a great builder of roads, he is extending the laws of sanctuary governing temples to every road leading to a temple. he has fought many wars, both at land and sea against his brother Brennius who desires only to take the throne. Despite being victorious Belinus consistently forgives Brennius due to the passionate oratory of their mother Touuenna who bears her breasts before him, embraces him, covers him with her tears and reminds him of the terrible pains she suffered bearing them both.


Dunvallo - Excelling all the other Kings of Britain for his good looks and bravery, he has declared that during his lifetime no bandits will be allowed to draw their swords, that the outrages of robbers will come to an end and that the temples of the gods and cities should be so privileged that anyone who escapes to them as a fugitive or when accused of some crime must be pardoned by his accuser when he comes out. It is not clear how these laws will interact.

Dunvallo is currently at war with Rudaucus and Staterius. At the height of his next battle he plans to have his crack troops change into the armour of the enemy, taken from their bodies, and in this way get close enough to his opponents to kill them. Unfortunately, they have developed the same plan.


Porrex - Porrex had a brother, Ferrex. When their father became senile Porrex tried to take the throne for himself, attempting to ambush Ferrex and assassinate him. Ferrex escaped to Gaul and returned with assistance from Suhard, King of the Franks but was killed in combat. Porrex thinks himself safe but his mother, Judon, always loved Ferrex more and is consumed with grief and hatred. She plans to wait till Porrex is asleep and then, with the help of her maid-servants, hack him to pieces.


Rivallo - A peaceful and prosperous young man who leads his kingdom frugally, he is nevertheless worried as it has been raining blood for three days and two men have died from the flies which have swarmed.


Leir - King Leir rules from Leicester but has become very old and senile. He has three daughters, Goneril, Regan and Cordelia and has a really excellent idea for dividing his kingdom between them.


Bladud - Bladud rules from the town of Kaerbadum, commonly called Bath due to the hot baths he has constructed there which are so suited to the needs of mortal men. He worships the goddess Minerva and in her temple he has lit fires which never go out or fall away into ash, for the moment they begin to die down they turn into balls of stone. An ingenious man who encourages necromancy throughout his realm, King Bladud has constructed a pair of wings for himself with which he can fly through the upper air.


Rud Hud Huidibras - This king rules from the fortress of Paladur on the walls of which an Eagle often lands and gives true prophecy.


Leil - A great lover of peace and justice, Leil rules from Kaerleil, which he built, but has become so old he is now feeble and inactive, a civil war threatens to break out.


Ebraucus - A tall man of remarkable strength who loves to sail and who is, essentially, a pirate and raider, rich in stolen silver and gold. He rules from Kaerbrauc, which he built. He has twenty wives and has also twenty sons and twenty daughters. The names of his sons are; Brutus Greenshield, Margodud, Sisillius, Regin, Morvid, Bladud, Lagon, Bodloan, Kincar, Spaden, Gaul, Dardan, Eldad, Ivor, Cangu, Hector, Kerin, Rud, Assaracus and Buel. The names of his daughters are; Gloigin, Ignogin, Oudas, Guenlian, Guardid, Angarad, Guenlodoe, Tangustel, Gorgon, Medlan, methahel, Ourar, Mailure, Kambreda, Ragan, Gael, Ecub, Nest, Chein, Stadudud, Cladus, Ebrein, Blangen, Aballac, Angoes, Galaes (the most beautiful of all women who live in Britian or Gaul), Edra, Anor, Stadiald and Egron.


Mempricus - Eaten up by burning treachery, Mempricus quarrelled with his brother Malin and called him to a conference of peace before murdering him in the presence of the other delegates. He then took over the government, exercising such great tyranny that, within a few years, he encompassed the death of almost all the more distinguished men. He hates his own family and by main force or treachery has done away with anyone who might succeed him in the kingship. he has also deserted his wife and abandoned himself to the vice of sodomy, preferring unnatural lust to normal passion. He enjoys hunting but fears wolves.


Locrinius - The eldest of three brothers, including Kamber and Albanactus. His kingdom was invaded by the King of the Huns. With the help of his brothers he defeated that king but on board his ship discovered three beautiful young women, one of whom was Estrildis, daughter of the King of Germany.

Estrildis was of such beauty that it would be difficult to find a young woman worthy to be compared with her. No precious ivory, no recently fallen snow, no lilies even could surpass the whiteness of her skin. Locrinius is utterly in love with Estrildis but is married to the daughter of his ally Corineus, who's name is Gwendolin. He has had a secret cave dug and has had Estrildis hidden there for seven years. Locrinius pretends to make sacrifices to his god and visits her then. She is now pregnant.


Corineus - Corineus rules Cornwall which he prefers as it is the cornu or horn of Britain and therefore matches his name. His greatest pleasure is wrestling giants, of which there are far more in his kingdom than any other, another reason for his preference. The greatest giant in his realm is called Gogamog and they have yet to wrestle.

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Published on March 20, 2017 11:51

March 13, 2017

A Handful of Hermits

Homeless-ass motherfuckers get EVERYWHERE.

In any Knightly tale its almost invariable that the Knight will, at some point, be either dispossessed, wounded, exiled, robbed, mistaken for a woman and/or driven mad.

At these times they will almost always come upon an 'Ermite in the woods who will usually take them in and let them rest with few, or no, questions asked.



Charcoal Burner - Dark and mystical figures treated with suspicion and awe by churls. Charcoal burners spend a long time out in the ash woods carefully and continually observing their charcoal piles and muttering apocalyptic prophesies.


Outlaw - A "Sprouting Jack" or "Green Thomas". Not all outlaws wear green or pay fealty to the Spring Court, most are just escaped pickpockets and small criminals that ran for it and ended up in the woods, but many, especially the outlaw leaders, will claim some kind of loyalty to a greater cause. After all, it costs nothing and makes you look good. Better the deposed son of a a noble knight still loyal to an ancient warrant to a ruined court than John Pigglesworth, debt-ridden ex-bowyer. The Inquisition can only hang you once! (This is, in fact, not true. If you annoy them enough, the Inquisition will hang you as many times as they like.)


Lunatic "Poor Tom" - One of that narrow class of person in the Eclipsed Kingdom who's visions, delusions or mental fevers are strong or un-charismatic enough to make them useless to even the most cracked and deranged half-elf court, but also not severe enough to stop them from somehow surviving in the wild.


Witch (not necessarily a croneish one) - Witchcraft is standardised in the Eclipsed Kingdom. As the Black Church does not recognise the validity of any Earthly faith, the demons, devils and dark spirits which prey upon that faith are not regarded with any systematic abjuration. They are as inane as angels. The church has no strong objection to anyone selling their soul becasue it regards the soul as an illusion. The greatest Devils and Demons are thought of as nothing more than the spiritual equivalents of ranting conspiracy theorists, raging against an imaginary order that does not truly exist, bending aeons of effort and unceasing hatred towards the destruction of a divine hierarchy which is itself merely a breath of air.

Devils, Daemons and similar spirits are objected to only when their activities interfere with the reasonable running of the Kingdom and of the Church. The most powerful can be dangerous in certain circumstances and should be avoided or controlled appropriately.

Anyone in the Eclipsed Kingdom may indulge themselves in Witchcraft and Demonology if they think they can get away with it. Even church members may do so, though above a certain level of it is considered a rather shameful and childish hobby and a true servant of the church should really direct their efforts towards God.

Consequently Devils and Daemons are (relatively) common, ranging from the sardonic and urbane Devil of the court to the hairy-arsed goatfucking type that hides under bridges and steals pigs.


Fey-Dazzled - in love with a tree or rock or bird (1 in 6 chance if a real fey and they are actually married). This person has abandoned human society to live in connubial bliss with an aspect of the local environment. Trees are common but any discreet element, such as a stream, could be the object of their affection. Other than their sincere relationship with this aspect of the natural world, they may be a completely reasonable person, though they may sneak out of their shack in the night to fuck a tree, and will become utterly enraged if anyone interferes with their 'spouse'.


Astronomer -  Astronomers in the Eclipsed Kingdom concern themselves mainly with the Observation of Azathoth, rather than with observation of the stars (which are merely his dream). An Astronomers hermitage is likely to contain an extremely simple jury-rigged camera obscura which can project the image of god onto the walls. The astronomer will keep reams of records on valuable vellum or simply scratched onto the walls themselves, recording the horrible shifting movements of the limbs of Azathoth, as much as they may be perceived. Most Astronomers think they are close to uncovering a secret code which will indicate some cosmic meaning. Ultimately, they all commit suicide.


Goatherd - Cunning, wizened and crafty from outwitting Goats, the goatherd is a creature of twisted suspicion and murmuring fear, yet, also attains an imperious and kingly aspect towards their own goats when their rule is threatened. A well-fed goat is much more intelligent than the average churl and, having mastered the society of such creatures Goatherds form a Machiavellian peasant intelligentsia.


Shepherd - Frantic, tired, harried and depressed from dealing with the stupidity of sheep the Shepherd would probably rather be doing almost anything else. Sheep cough like men, butt your knees and seemingly want to die. They are regularly eaten by any kind of predator. The owner of the sheep is never the Shepherd and the Shepherd lives in continual moronic terror of their master when they find out that yet another dumb fucking sheep has got itself killed. A Shepherd is impossible to persuade for the finer aspects of their intellect have melted away under the caustic stupidity of the sheep, leaving only an immeasurable horror, but they are relatively easy to terrify as the exercise of power over the sheep has taught them that only brutal and relentless whacking with a stick can force the idiotic masses into anything like sane and decent behaviour. As above, so below.


Swineherd - The friendly and likeable swineherd forms and easy compact with their porcine wards. The pig is a sensitive and civilised creature, crafty of nose and susceptible to reasonable policy. Most swineherds really like their pigs and will discuss their different personalities and capabilities at length. They will wander through the woods looking for mushrooms and truffles and can occasionally make serious money through recovery of a rare specimen, this is money that they always lose through some peasant misadventure.


Egg-Thief - Despite, or perhaps becasue of, the fact that birds do not legally exist in the Eclipsed Kingdoms, the theft of eggs from bird nests is extremely illegal, the eggs being, almost literally, creations of unreasonable beings. Of course as soon as an egg does hatch, the result becomes invisible to the senses of a god-fearing individual, but up until that point it is a form pregnant with unspeakable horror, a shape and object emerging from an impossible and un-nameable potentiality and, in time, re-producing exactly such a Nightmare Being. Eggs are the currency of crime in the Eclipsed Kingdom and to be paid in eggs is the true seal of a rogue, outlaw and heretic. He who caresses an egg puts himself forever beyond the forgiveness of God or King.


Mad Knight - Knights go mad more easily than common men, for the substance of their thought is finer and nobler, more sensitive the the manifold complexities of the dream of God, and also is their burden and honour so much the greater, having the bear the mighty weight of a noble name and, perhaps, even the safety and survival of the Kingdom entire. It should not come as a surprise that they commonly throw off their clothes and run into the forest to live in a ditch.

A Mad Knight can be distinguished from a "Poor Tom" chiefly by their still-significant combat capacity and by the marks of martial training and experience still visible upon their body. They commonly go naked or in rags and are usually mute, miming a childish dumb-play to communicate. They will have thrown away their armour but their sword they will have hidden somewhere secret nearby. It's likely that someone is looking for the Mad Knight for reasons either good or ill.


Peasant Protagonist - This individual usually has some kind of complex but inane problem of  the kind distinct to churls, like trying to trick a devil out of a pig before three bridges are crossed, or something of the kind. The PC's will be meeting and/or hearing of this person again due to their adventures, though not necessarily in connection with the PC's.


A Fair Unknown - i.e. seems humble kitchen hand or swineherd but has suspiciously soft hands and is in fact heir to a major barony. The PC's will encounter this person again where they will be either rewarded or condemned/mocked for how they treated them. However, even if the PC's treated this person well, in the scene where this takes place a wide variety of other NPC's will be present and it will turn out that they treated the Fair Unknown like shit. Since they will be called out for this in front of the PC's they will deeply resent them from this point on.


Crone - The woods and hills are always full of Crones, magical or otherwise. It has been claimed that in the Eclipsed Kingdom one is never more than five miles from a crone. It is a cronish nation.
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Published on March 13, 2017 15:35

March 10, 2017

A Review of Keeping Together in Time: Dance and Drill in Human History.

This is by William H. McNeill and was published in 1995 and is available online under an academic POD scheme.  McNeills idea is that unified muscular action on the part of human groups, whether through dance, drill, calisthenics, or via some other means, plays a vital role in forming group solidarity in human societies, and that the effects of this keeping together in time have been used at various times, sometimes as a source of emotional resilience in societies under stress, and at other times as a kind of battery or power source for successful or expansionist societies.
He says a bit more than that, his initial observations are very interesting and the more reality-based aspects to his argument are compelling, but he has a flaky mind and slips easily into totalising statements and generalities more typical of the 70's than the 90's.
The strongest part of his argument is that certain kinds of work in which the muscular effort of large numbers of people are focused upon a narrow area, like a series of blacksmiths combining to beat a piece of metal in rhythm, or sailors pulling on a rope, or where all the bodies are not focused on one object but are arranged closely in space and performing the same action at the same time, like planters in a field or infantry on a battlefield, is either only possible, or massively enhanced when people act together in time.
McNeil would claim that this capacity is unique to man. or at least, he would say that the ability to move together in time, as a group, to music, is unique to man. Animals do flock and move as one, but not to music, and I do not think they manipulate as one.
The idea of this kind of very precise uniform rhythm being a uniquely human quality is fascinating to me. It lead me to consider if perhaps movement, or the body and it actions, are not the original syntax to language and that just as written and printed communication colonised verbal and spoke communication, absorbing its forms and then only slowly altering them, perhaps spoken language similarly absorbed the nature of muscular syntax, first simply emphasising motion like a tennis players grunt, then developing in complexity, then learning to create verbally the context and complexity that previously could be provided only by the body, and then expanding into new potentialities of description unbound by the body, but still ultimately rooted in it.
This would mean the existence of a pre-oral human culture that provided its basis.
Anyway, McNeill talks first about the importance of muscular bonding in small communities and in unified work, then goes on to religion and then finally to war and politics, essentially moving forward in time through all of these.
It's during the religion statement that we get the real motherload of surprisingly confident assertations and totalising statements. These are never frustrating, McNeil is a large hearted outgoing totalizer rather than a reductionist cutter-off, in which case his slight flakiness would be much more offensive, but he's still probably wrong about a fair amount of the specific stuff he says.
If McNeil is right in everything he says then muscular bonding is the secret engine behind almost every major shift in human culture, the rise and fall of empires and the identity of nations.
His work on religion is fascinating though, there seems to be a deep, permanent, continual and endless struggle for power between the head and the body in world religion. Powerful new forms of religious expression and feeling are continually being developed, often linked to complex emergent forms of muscular bonding that relate the transcendent directly through the movements of the body, then they become successful, then the hierarchy tries to tame or repress all the uncontrolled movement that originally went along with the first explosion of expression, then it happens all over again.
The body, it seems, is not just immediate, animal and rooted in the present, which we probably already suspected, but also timeless, outside cause and consequence, capable of directly connecting with the higher realities through movement. Dance as prayer. It is belief rooted in the people, emerging from their practice, often ignoring or escaping known structures of power and control.
The head by comparison, is highly aware of time and extremely aware of authority and hierarchy. It prefers to reach the godhead through introversion and separation from the body and it is continually frustrated that people keep. fucking. dancing and moving around in an irregular way.
The head is rather unaware of the achievements of the body and tends to either edit them out of its histories or just ignore them. Something carried on to the present day when we compare the staggering shitload of stuff we know about words and our comparative poverty of knowledge about movement and its place in our history and development, despite it certainly being more central and vital than words.
The chapter of politics on war looks at the development, and loss of close-order-drill (the Spartans were very dancy, Athenians refused to learn drill properly as messed with their individuality), then the loss or degradation of drill as a military technique, then its recovery in the early modern period and its effects in China and Europe.
Close-Order drill being part of a feedback loop with certain aspects of civilisation makes a lot of sense. The way it interrelates with the formation of a mass military identity, and the sometimes unpredictable way that interrelates with power structures, is interesting.
He also takes time to look at the development of calisthenics in the modern period and this is a little gem. We get to see the very different ways national cultures adopt (or refuse to adopt) the principals of civilian mass movement. The Germans are into it for masculine reasons. The Brits don’t mind women and the poor doing it but the ruling class prefer team sports. Same in the U.S. The Czechs fucking love it. The French absolutely despise it, and won't do that or sport, unless a bicycle is involved.

It's a fascinating and very short book and I would recommend it for anyone with even a general interest in the subject.
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Published on March 10, 2017 16:29

March 5, 2017

Adventures in the Eclipsed Kingdom

A Note on Gender
Whenever anyone in the Eclipsed Lands tries to disguise themselves as the opposite gender and puts on all the clothes & adopts the behaviours, that this disguise will be utterly impenetrable to anyone from those lands.
BUT - it only works across one axis. That is, if a PC dresses himself up as a washerwoman, and then commits crimes as that Washerwoman, then escapes and while being hunted, dresses up as a different woman, then the hunters will see straight through that disguise, but not the fact that they are male.
"Ah ha, Widow Gargleblast, you thought to disguise yourself!"
So effectively (so long as they have the clothes and accoutrements) every PC gets a secondary opposite-gender identity, but that identity stays stable.
Plus, depending on their gender, looks and CHA, most PC's will become extremely attractive to specific groups in their new gender role.
Young women disguised as men become highly attractive to other young women and former male enemies may now find them strangely charismatic and charming to be around.
Good-looking young men in a female role become attractive to young men and other attractive women become jealous of them, but oddly drawn to them.
Older men in a female role will become attractive to older men (to hillllaaarious effect) and will be regarded as trusted, but ugly, friends to young women.
Older woman dressed as men will commonly be taken for Priests and Scribes and be treated as trusted advisors
IT MUST BE LOVE
...........................
Blackbeard’s Prisoner
It’s the Max Von Sydow scene from Conan. A princess has been abducted, or just eloped, with an Eldritch Knight from the Eclipsed Kingdom. Her dad wants her back. A plate, or bucket or gems is on offer for anyone who returns her safe and sound.
Complications;
She’s ensorcelled (or just raised) to hate a fear all men, so to spend any time around her without her screaming continuously and trying to climb the walls you are either going to need some female characters, or, much better, dress up as her new ‘handmaids’ and get her out that way.
AND
She’s magically compelled to stay in the castle, or just with her new husband, unless a highly-specific fairy-tale challenge is met. It’s a time thing like “only when a shadow cast by the new moon lies upon the castle gate”, or it’s an endless love thing “only when the ravens* leave the ruined elvish tower” or it’s just a creepy possession thing “only if I forget the colour of your hair will I ever let you go”, so the PC’s need to go off and make sure that insane condition happens.
(*Ravens & Crows excluded from the oath of St Vish, as previously mentioned
AND
He’s eventually going to kill her, probably due to some other insane cyclic condition. Like, she has to clean the mud from his boots each night but he has a rack of infinite boots and she has to guess which are the ones he means. Or, she’s allowed to go into every room in the castle Except One, but she sleepwalks and is entering a different room each night. Or he just flies into a murderous rage whenever he has to turn left so she needs to predict every thing he might want that would cause him to have to turn left to get it and place it on his right.
So the PC’s need to run about fulfilling the fairy-tale challenge, like getting the light of the new moon and casting a shadow with it ahead of time, while also dressing up as handmaids and trying to keep this girl alive in this insane situation until they can get her out. Then once they do they have to get the fuck out of the Eclipsed Kingdom while this nutter gives chase.

..................................
The Enraptured Prince
This time it’s a guy and instead of being charmed he’s possibly just horny for some Eclipsed Girl. Maybe he was due to marry some local girl to seal the treaty between two warring kingdoms and they need him back in a certain number of days or the treaties borked and everyone has to kill each other.
Maybe fell in love with a half-elf princess and her Unseelie Mother has set him a certain-death problem to solve.
“Bring me the tears of a ghoul, freely given.”“Her wedding ring must be the eye of a Basilisk.”“She must be given away by a Slaad.”“The slats of her wedding bed must be the staves of magicians.”
His parents hire the PC’s to follow him around and make sure he stays alive while also looking for a way to either break them up or just get him married safely.
Obviously this good looking young bro isn’t going to want any chicks following him around so all the female party members are going to have to dress as lithe young men (If they aren’t already) and obviously the Unseelie Mother isn’t going to want any dirty guys around her sweet daughter so all the male members are going to have to cross-dress when dealing with her.
Obviously the Prince is going to have Strange Feelings for his new ‘buddies’ and the Princess is going to fall for her new ‘handmaids’.


..................................
Steal Back the Queens Heart
The Queen or Kings Daughter (Prince if you're into it) has had their heart stolen by an Eldritch Knight from the Eclipsed lands.
Now they are walking around with a visible hole in their chest, unable to feel any emotion. The PC’s are asked to bring back the heart.
Depending on the kind of PC’s you have, this could be a money thing or it could just be the heart of an innocent peasant girl.
The Broken Heart has been used as currency and bits of it sent to every part of the Eclipsed Kingdom. Tracing it is one part of the quest, to get each piece they must defeat, trick or serve whomever has it.
The quest is only finished if they return every piece. But if they do; hooray! An innocent can feel again.

............................
The Half-Elf's Court
Two Half-Elf nobles are getting divorced.
Half the PC's are employed by one half of one half-elf and the other half by one half of the other half elf. Meanwhile, the second half of the first half-elf tries to bribe the second half of the PC's to betray the first half of the second half-elf while the second half of the second half-elf is still secretly in love with the first half of the first half elf and tries to bribe the lawyers to sabotage the divorce without the first half of the second half-elf noticing.
It's happening in religious court and the Judge is a Bishop of Azathoth so the requirements for a divorce are strange and extreme.
For even more fun, one noble holds one part of a kingdom and the other hold the other part. As they break up, different parts get traded back and forth between the houses, so the pattern of the divorce case affects the shape of conflicts, troop movements and social changes in the world the PC’s are questing in.
For instance, they agree to split a town between them, so a new border goes right down the middle, splitting families and guilds apart, now they are technically in service to different lords all kinds of weird conflicts and opportunities are breaking out.





DREAM-BASED BULLSHIT

…………………………………………..
Find the Sleeping Spies
An Emperor or nation-ruler is having trouble with Eclipse Knights sneaking into his Empire and dicking his schemes around. They seem to have a surprising level of knowledge about how the Empire works and what his weaknesses are. They hire PC's to deal with the situation.
Turns out this guy put a shitload of his closest advisors and opponents in dungeons for life and, while they sleep, they have worked their way up the feudal hierarchy in the Eclipsed Lands the smartest one has become a Grima Wormtongue figure for a Feudal lord, meaning they can direct his knights to screw over the Empire their sleeping bodies are imprisoned in, to the benefit of both them and their new lord.
..................................
The King of the Prisoners Dreams
A high-status prisoner living in a kind of 'mafia don' situation in their prison, calls for the PC's. They don't want to be broken out of jail, maybe for dynastic reasons, maybe because they are happy with their books. Instead, every night they dream of their lives in the Eclipsed Lands. There is something they don't like about that life and they want to hire the PC's to go to the Eclipsed Lands and change something about the socio-political situation there so they can have more pleasant dreams. Maybe try to exchange their current king (in their dreams) for a better one.
(Maybe they don't want to leave as they were blinded due to a dynastic thing and they can see in their dreams so that life is more real to them now.)
...................................
A Bounty of the Mad
A bunch of high-status mad people have escaped from an asylum en-masse and gone off to the Eclipsed Lands, their wealthy families have placed rewards for their safe returns.
If PC's track them down several have become knights and may even lead their own small kingdom. Plus, the situation in the Eclipsed Kingdom is such that the mad often make a lot more sense than the sane, and are sacred to Azathoth to boot, so the PC’s may find themselves battling a kingdom of the crazed to return one of them to the desert of sanity.
................................
NOT SURE ABOUT THIS ONEDream-Inception Prison Break
The Silent Knights have taken a very powerful high-status prisoner or a very important treasure into the Eclipsed Lands. Someone wants to pay the PC's to get them back.
The Prisoner is being held inside a jail shaped from either multiple levels of other peoples dreams or with different elements made from a crosshatching of peoples dreams.
So the conical tower guarded by fearsome black and yellow armoured knights with poisoned blades might be the dream of a Beekeeper somewhere.
The Endless Stairs of Oroborous that lead down from the tower and its guard of flying snakes might be the dream of a retired theologian. Maybe the stairs and snakes are his theological problem
The Black Dragon of Carcasses might be the dream of a frightened child of abusive parents somewhere.
So you can D&D it and try to penetrate the thing and solve it in-world in the Eclipsed Lands. But each element as it is embodied in the Eclipsed lands carries clues as to who the dreamer is, and of you go back and forth across the boundaries of the Eclipsed lands, find the dreamers and either solve their problem or understand its nature, they can give you the clue to removing or resolving each threat of the dungeon so you can get the treasure (or free the prisoner).
And the Silent Knights might want to stop you doing that but, of course, they don’t want to endanger the dreamers as that would damage their protection for the treasure, and they don’t want the dreamers state of mind changed too much for the same reason, (plus they might be vulnerable outside the Eclipsed Lands, maybe having to go in disguise) so they will have to be reasonably subtle in their attempts to stop you.
Beekeeper tells you that burning a specific herb will cause the bees to fear you - this works on the Black and Yellow knights.
Helping the Theologian resolve their philosophical problem makes the snakes friendly to you, or transforms them into something else, or teaches you something that makes them afraid.
Helping the kid makes the dragon friendly to you.


CREEPY AZATHOTH RELIGIOUS STUFF
……………………………………………………………………………
No-One Expects the PC Inquisition!
That’s the Player Character Inquisition, not whatever culture war joke I can’t be bothered even completing in this sentence.
The Church of Azathoth has been creeping its belief system into neighbouring kingdoms. PC's are hired/probably something more ceremonial than just being hired, as 'Grand Inquisitors' to find the peasants who are worshipping Azathoth and restore the True Faith (whatever that is). Either by getting them to Apostasise or by whatever methods necessary.
Basically you are now the bad guys in Martin Scorsese’s 'Silence'.
This one is going to go dark and get disturbingly violent and horrible pretty quickly.
………………………   
We’re Really Serious About This Inquisition Thing
Either PC’s are simply hired by an Inquisitor of the Black Church (if they are dark enough) or if they get caught dicking around in the Eclipsed Kingdom, Nyralthotep (through the Black Pope) geas’s them into helping the Inquisition to work off their debt to society.
Congratulations, you guys are now in your own game of Dark Heresy except you have to bring back the heads of some Baku or get shrunk down to mini-size to find the Sycamore Dryads hiding in the fruit garden of the Head Inquisitor.

...............................
Dark Quest
A bunch of hardcore dangerous knights from the Eclipsed Lands are roving around the outside world grabbing people as sacrifices, killing people and taking treasures (that should really belong to the PC's). They are doing this to complete a very specific time-sensitive ritual in the Eclipsed Lands. PC's go after them to save the day
Turns out that they are extremely honourable, decent knights who are only doing this ritual to hold off the anger/notice of Azathoth/keep Azathoth asleep and that completing it will save thousands of lives and avoid disaster that would produce chaos, sending armies roving out into the surrounding lands en-masse.
They are good people doing a terrible thing for the right reasons. Will you try to stop them and if you do, are you capable of doing so?

.............................
Saints of Azathoth
PC's emerge from their current bullshit to find a Cardinal of the Black Church of Azathoth waiting for them. Extra points if the PC's are at a low point, either imprisoned or close to death and this guy/delegation saves or frees them.
The Cardinal anoints one or several PC's as 'Saints of Azathoth', whether they want it or not, saying that the Son of God has whispered to the Black Pope that this is their fate.
This completely screws the PC's in any reasonable polity as who the fuck wants the 'Saints of Azathoth' roaming around or coming to dinner? PC's become pariah's and get paladins & clerics after them.
To stop being 'Saints of Azathoth' they have to find the Black Pope and ask her to please ask Nyralthotep to ask Azathoth to remove this honour from them. There will be specific shit they have to perform to get this done.
Extra points if, by doing what the Black Pope says the PC's end up fulfilling their Dark Destiny anyway in classic Twilight Zone style.




FEUDAL PEOPLE PROBLEMS
"Who MightRid Me Of This Troublesome Knight (ifI were asking, which I am not)?"
An Eclipsed lord is being threatened by an Red Knight out in the forests around his realm. This Knight is immune to any harm if it comes due to an order or request of any king or queen. Even if such an order is given secretly, in code or via sign, and no matter how many stages of authority stand between the command and the harm done.
Nevertheless, the King, or his Vizier, or his Wizard, is just going to leave this gold right here OK?Or come up with some other cunning oblique scheme which will inevitably lead to the PC's fighting and killing the Knight without any order to that effect being given.
.......................................

Chibi Grendel
Fey lord has a terrifying monster on in the wilderness on the edge of his kingdom. All his knights afraid to go near it and run from its cry. Breaks into villages and churches terrorising people. Gets PC's to swear to defeat, in a specific way i.e. "bring me its head on a plate" it for major reward.
PC's go and find the monster, it's a naked six year old human child living alone in the woods. There is nothing special or magical about it. Nevertheless, all Fey are terrified of it.
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The Barons Peryton
The Baron loves nothing more than flying about on his giant Peryton, but it's hungry and weak. He needs hearts to feed it.
So go and get some fresh hearts. Human, not elven, half-elven or the pale hearts of dream-people, the full, real deal.
It's an open-offer rats-in-the-basement fetch quest.

……………………………………
Kill this Peasant!
The Baron is pissed off with one particular dream-person peasant and is getting tired of torturing them to death every day.
Dream people are hard to kill in the Eclipsed Lands as usually, they just wake up wherever they are at the moment of maximum terror, then come back the next time they fall asleep.
So, to get rid of them for good, the King wants the PC’s to go into the outer lands and either free that ­particular person from prison so they never turn up again. Or just kill them, eithers good.
Except this person is being held in whatever deep & terrible dungeon the DM has available.
…………………………………
Straight-Up Dream Lives
The PC’s are captured by a major enemy and kept in a genuinely-unbreakable dungeon from which they cannot escape.
BUT, they now have new lives as dream-person peasants in the Eclipsed Lands. Can they fight their way out of peasantry and impress the King/The Church/The Queen of Air and Darkness/anyone enough to get a strike team of Unseelie Chivalry sent out to free their mortal bodies from prison?
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Published on March 05, 2017 07:38

March 1, 2017

A Review of the Azathoth Cycle from Chaosium

This is a collection of non-Lovecraft stories brought together by Chaosium related to, or mentioning, Azathoth;
"That last amorphous blight of nethermost confusion which blasphemes and bubble at the centre of all infinity -- the boundless daemon sultan Azathoth, whose name no lips dare speak aloud, and who gnaws hungrily in inconceivable, unlighted chambers beyond time amidst the muffled, maddening beating of vile drums and the thin monotonous whine of accursed flutes."
So that guy.
One thing we learn is that, like Superman, Azothoth is quite difficult to write a story about. As the primal chaos at the heart of all existence, there is very little that he actually does. His stats in Dieties and Demigods illustrate that;



Most Azathoth stories are about how terrible it is to find out about Azathoth.

The Stories
Azathoth by Edward Pickman Derby
Derby is the doomed protagonist of Lovecrafts 'The Thing On The Doorstep' and this poem purports to be by that imaginary man. It's not that bad and has a certain energy, especially when we come into the presence of the Idiot God himself. I have no idea who the real writer of this was but perhaps it was Robert M. Price the Editor?

Azathoth in Arkham & The Revenge of Azathoth by Peter Cannon
These are essentially posh fan-fic of 'The Thing On The Doorstep'. That story had a mind-swap in it which left open the question of what happened to its potentially-immortal villain. These two stories follow the adventures of the immortal mind itself and of the people it displaces and bodyswaps on its way. They are ironic.

Pit of the Shoggoths by Stephen M. Rainey
This is another 'Thing On The Doorstep' deriviative about a man fleeing a failed marriage holing up in one of the houses from the story decades later, being cut off by a snowstorm and finding both a Shoggoth-summoning thingy in the wall but also the spirit of the original brainswapper. This is not especially terrible.

Hydra by Henry Kuttner
Written in 1939 this one has astral-travelling students sending urgent telegrams back and forth while dicking about with an uncovered ritual which is actually a trap for a headhunting cosmic horror. The story doesn't end where the head is cut off. This is bad but fun.

The Madness Out of Time by Lin Carter
A fake translation from the Necronomicon with some adventures of the mad arab Abdul Alhalzred. It is here that we attain true, unquestionable, unforced badness for the first time in this collection. This is a ripoff of the Hounds of Tindalos in bad pseudo 16th century language as imagined by a 20th century American with a blunt grasp of euphony.

The Insects from Shaggai by Ramsey Campbell
Another writer protagonist. (To what extent are stories about Azothoth and the compulsion that draws people towards him really about the writing of horror?) Our man finds some bad bugs in the forest and gets brainraped into witnessing their Azothoth-worshipping, planet-hopping dickery. If you imagine jews bad enough to actually deserve everything that happened to the Jews, that’s the Insects from Shaggai. Out hero slits his wrists on the final page. this story has life, imagination and invention, it is not scary. None of them are so far.

The Sect of the Idiot by Thomas Ligotti
THIS does it. In terms of plotting and worldbuilding this Ligotti story is probably the slightest and lightest of them all. In prosidy and craft it is the best by quite a way. This tells the primal Azathoth story of a man drawn through shadowy mundanity towards contact with actual cosmic horror. In terms of sheer event, nothing happens. A guy finds some scary chairs and gets mutated. This is the only one so far to give me anything like a sense of disquiet.

The Throne of Achamoth by Richard L. Tierney and Robert M. Price
Standard Sword and Sorcery prose but a really interesting and unique cosmology. Tierney links Azathoth to the Zorastonian Demiurge, creator of material reality. Instead of an introverted hero he has an ex gladiator-plus-sorcerer empowered by a fragment of the Divine Spark, making him better than just about all of humanity (in a slightly creepy semi-fascist way). The hero decides to penetrate the spheres of space in order to track down the soul of his (also super-special) dead girlfriend.
This stories depiction of our solar system as being comprised of spheres of energy, each sphere being rules by a monstrous Archon, with each Archon feeding off the pain and suffering felt by those being trapped in the material existence of its sphere, before sending on the excess pain to feed the greater Archon in the sphere beyond, with the Archon of this system in turn exporting its pain to the centre of the cosmos, is really specifically and brilliantly horrible. It's depiction of all of material reality as a hideous pyramid scheme of spiritual agony would probably please both Lovecraft and Ligotti.
Ultimately our hero penetrates beyond reality and re-unites with his God-Self outside time but, being infinite, forgets his physical existence until the actions of his super-girlfriend suck him back into reality and into contact with 'Achamoth' the Demiurge in charge of all material reality, who is also his shadow-self. The conflict between them making up what we recognise of the cosmos.


The Last Night of Earth by Gary Myers
A short, sweet story about a Sorcerer in a tower who sees Azathoth rising slowly over the horizon instead of the sun and, as more of the Idiot God's being is revealed, wracks his books to work out what he is seeing. He finds out. The end.

The Daemon-Sultan by Donald R. Burleson
A likeable and well-made story. Another introverted, driven and sullen hero is prophesied to seek out Azathoth. He has no idea who or what Azathoth is and spends much of his life seeking knowledge of him. Eventually he finds a wizened wise man in a distant city who, like some kind of dark anti-sufi, reveals that;
"He who is all, He who sits enthroned at the centre of all chaos, is everywhere, for chaos has no centre. Every point in the universe of stars is the centre, thus there is no centre and the Daemon Sultan lurks nowhere, because He is everywhere. Look within yourself."
He eventually finds his way home, but is unable to forget the terrible knowledge he now posesses;
"For idle loungers about the village, though in time they did not remember L'wei-Kath, came to regard as familiar a ragged and enigmatic figure leaning windblown in the village square: a flute player piping idiotically, monotonously, weirdly upon a carven flute held clumsily in palsied hands, endlessly piping his cacophony of eerie notes, his ululand litany to his god, to the One whose face, inscrutable, was everywhere and everything and everyone, the final derangement lying behind all being, the gibbering madness of existence, pervasive, present in the very wind, tainting the very sunlight - the Daemon-Sultan Azathoth."
The slow but total and absolute spiritual collapse of the seeker into a fluting idiot works much better than the standard 'see elder god = go insane".

Idiot Savant by C.J, Henderson
We're back with standard American prose and the story of a petty and low-ranking academic assigned to clean up and archive the office of a brilliant 'non-lateral' philosopher after a mysterious mass-death incident, who ignores a long list of horror-movie cliches in order to get himself sucked into the alterverse and turned into pulp.


The Space of Madness by Stephen Studach
This was written in 1995 and reads like it was written in 1955 and I genuinely can't work out if it was made this way for reasons of irony.
"With a grin Gary swung back around to the console to prepare a letter for Radiographication back to Mother Terra Firma."
....
"And how are you doing this segment, buddy?" Roans asked cheerfully ...."Not bad at all, friend Roans," answered Simon with a smile, "except maybe for a touch of the space yawns."
Space yawns?
This is an honest-to-goodness Science Fiction story with a space ship and everything. The people currently in charge of space find an area of 'absolute blackness'. They keep sending Astronauts into the area. The space men go insane. They have done this a few times and now they are doing it again. Nothing in this story mentions any particular plan or quality this group have space men have that has lead them to think that they will not go insane like every previous space man. It's possible this is a very subtle and genre-appropriate commentary on a horrifically materialistic and inhuman culture just tanking guys into Azathoth to see if any of them live. If it isn't satire its bad, if it is, it's dull.

The Nameless Tower by John Glasby
Expedition to Iram, the City of Pillars. Native guides grow restless. Giant tower discovered. Non-human mummies found inside. Star-mad leader guy gets inside and gets slurped up by Azathoth through an interdimensional gate.

The Plague Jar by Allen Mackey
A sort of sequel to the previous story. The framing story is an academic telling the tale to a young scholar in the US but, for once, the people doing the adventure aren't a bunch of white guys. One of the good and interesting apects of the story are the invented careers of middle-eastern scholars from Iraq and Saudi Arabia. The fundamental content isn't that different but it is nice to occasionally hear about mad scholars at the University of Riyadh rather than at Arkham or whatever.
The result is the same. They find the lost city. There's statues of evil gods and a closed crypt with big fuck off signs saying "Do Not Open: Jar of Plague and Doom". Star-mad leader opens it. Plague and doom happen. The revelation of what is actually in the jar is neatly handled. Back in the framing story the young scholar gets slurped up into a photo of Azathoth because he looked at it too long.

The Old Ones Promise of Eternal Life by Robert M. Price
This is a reasonably neat piece of psudo-scholarship that puports to link Azathoth to the Gnostic demiurge and mixes in real stuff, post-Lovecraft stories and the imagined history in Lovecraft in a reasonably interesting way.


By and large this collection of cosmic horror felt as comfortable and predictable as Sunday afternoon TV. It was like a warm glass of beer. There was some Ligotti swimming in the bottom but it didn't change the taste.
I'm not exactly angry that writing about Cosmic Horror Gods is essentially a kind of light dark fantasy writing rather than anything which might horrify and genuinely frighten, perhaps a lot of Lovecraft was like that. I do feel that Azathoth has genuine potential though. The basic idea is actually horrifying. He's hard to connect to a narrative structure but if you could, if you could do Azathoth properly, then this shit could actually be scary.
I almost want to stop people from writing about Lovecraftian deities for a few decades, at least until someone's had a really good idea. It shouldn't feel like sinking into a leather armchair. It's sad that it does.


What Is Azathoth (And What Could He Be?)
The linking of Azathoth to the Gnostic Demiurge is an interesting idea. The concept of an idiot emanation of god, one either sent mad by being forced to create the material universe, or already mad and creating it from that madness, seems apt. Likewise the idea of a Demiurge that is in some sense a slave or prisoner and who hates their work. You can probably imagine any time you have been forced to work on something you despise and how, even if you are closely watched, your contempt for the subject seeps into what you do, that would be a rather apt and nasty explanation for the world.
Regarding the Eclipsed Kingdom, the idea that Azathoth is, himself a prisoner, in interesting. That makes the world the mad prison dream of an idiot god. Prisons inside prisons inside prisons.
The idea of Azathoth being a negative version of a Sufi or mystical quest, one where instead of transcendence, you find only awful purposeless materialism, makes a neat opposite to Arats Conference of the Birds, and explains why birds and the Eclipsed Kingdom hate each other so much.
More interesting is that the word Demogorgon probably originates from a mis-reading or mis-understanding of the greek word for Demiurge. That brings up the tantalising idea of the D&D Demogorgon being the Demiurge for the world. Presumably he had his hands removed once the real god was done with him and didn't want him to make any more of it. Now he is trapped in his creation and can only angrily wave his child-lock tentacles.
(Zoroastrian)/Judeo/Christian/(Islamic) -mythology- scripture is the first textual shared universe. Everyone is literally reading each others books and using each others characters.
A can't express how pleased I was to find that King Solomon was known to have bound the devil Asmodeus to his service for a while, as I remembered that picture of him in the original Monster Manual 


and now it meant that this legendary king and the guy from the MM were linked. Part of the same universe.
Likewise the line from Paradise Lost
                              Thither he pliesUndaunted, to meet there whatever powerOr spirit of the nethermost AbyssMight in that noise reside, of whom to askWhich way the nearest coast of darkness liesBordering on light; when straight behold the throneOf Chaos, and his dark pavilion spreadWide on the wasteful deep! With him enthronedSat sable-vested Night, eldest of things,The consort of his reign; and by them stoodOrcus and Ades, and the dreaded nameOf Demogorgon; Rumour next, and Chance,And Tumult, and Confusion, all embroiled,And Discord with a thousand various mouths.
 - which suggests that Orcus, Demogorgon and Hades were all hanging around together in primal Chaos before Lucifer burst in on his way to the material plane. 

Kaos Squad - Assemble!


Both Lucifer and Night, sadly, still lack stats in D&D.
I don't think I will make Azathoth the Demiurge. It robs him of his horror. The only true horror of Azathoth is the truth of what he means. All the tentacles and ebon blackness are just fucking about. The nightmare is that there is no fundamental meaning. You get to the top of the pyramid and there's no point.





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Published on March 01, 2017 16:26

February 27, 2017

The Three Keeps of the Eclipsed Kingdom

There are many, many castles, keeps and towers in the Eclipsed Kingdom, but three above all are emblematic of that nations character, madness, faith and power. So long as these three still stand the Eclipsed Kingdom itself will still exist.

The Infinite Cathedral
In the exact centre of the Eclipsed Kingdom, and therefore in the centre of the world, directly under the black formlessness of God as he blots out the sun, and therefore at the centre of the Universe, is the Infinite Cathedral.
Here is the seat of the Black Pope; Pontifex Nigrum in Tenebras Exteriores. Here is the centre for worship and pilgrimage for a universal faith. Truly and literally Universal for not only on this world is the Gospel of Azathoth spread.
The Cathedral itself squats like a triple-lobed beast. In the centre, just below God, is the Basilica of  Nyralthotep. Spreading out in three giant limbs are the infinite naves of the Cathedral. These vast buildings send out buttresses like tentacles into the earth and, though every surface is corrugated with towers, steeples, belfry’s and sometimes entire sub-churches, which obscure the shape of the Cathedral when seen up-close, from a distance the three naves can be seen plunging into the ground like vast curling roots.
The Monks of St Culix have explained the shape of the Cathedral in the following way, though few possess the wits to follow them;
By the grace of god it is a shape with one pole and no antipole, with one surface and no edge, with three separate limbs yet they are one.


Like this, but a Cathedral.

To stand in the centre of the Cathedral, before the throne of the Black Pope, is to stand where three gigantic naves meet. From inside the naves seem utterly straight, with no turn, bow or shift of orientation. Each one proceeds off into the distance as far as the eye can see.
The wise have said that if a member of the faithful begins walking down one of the naves, they will return to the point where they began without turning either right or left. This pilgrimage has tested many, for in the distance of the naves, the windows grow dark, the air cold, and then, after a time, the stained glass is lit by the terrible light of alien suns and the pilgrims encountered may be those from other worlds.

This, but forever.

The crypts of the Infinite Cathedral are likewise without end and these form the prison in which are held  the most powerful and significant of the enemies of the faith. Also within these crypts are the souls and intelligences of those of the Clergy of the Church who have grown too weak to possess their next body and now wander without flesh.
The monks of St Culix have said that the Cathedral itself is slowly growing, relative to the world in which it is embedded, curling itself deeper and deeper into the earth yet always curling back upon itself.
It is here that the Cardinals of the Faith take their whispered instruction from the Black Pope, here that the Orders of the Holy Inquisition make their base. It is here that the power and glory of god is at its greatest. It is here that Azathoth himself will first incarnate himself on this world, when that time finally arrives, as it inevitably must.  


The Silent City Of The Sleeping King
Before the great revelation and the coming of Azathoth, this castle and the city below were the centre of a golden age and the seat of a burgeoning Feudal World-Empire. Now they are the quietest place on earth, home of the Ordinis Carcere, the Silent Knights, and of the Dreaming Court of the Sleeping King.
He is still enthroned there, still with the thirteen poisoned daggers of the first Cardinals of Azathoth in his back, still sleeping, and kept asleep only by the endless insane tuneless piping of the chained and maddened bards who ring his court.
If the piping should ever stop, the King will wake and Azathoth will come for him. All will end.
And it will end, but until that day, he sleeps here. Around him are the selves of his dream. His court. They are undying vision-people conjured from his sleeping mind, as strange, incoherent, protean, beautiful, meaningless and meaningful as dreams themselves. And just as everyone we meet within a dream is us, all of the court are the King.
They dance and speak to each other, sometimes talking idiot poetry, sometimes murmuring only the forms of words like the background players in a masque, sometimes rambling mundanities or dangerously sparking into something near consciousness, their eyes fixing on an individual like the manic targets of a mad beggar. The Fool especially, if he is present, his jokes and bawds sometimes seem to hover frighteningly close to something like awareness of the real world.
Some dream selves fade in and out over a matter of minutes, never to be seen again, some are common characters, often returning albeit in different shapes and forms. Some are monsters, some nightmares, some beauties, some heroes.
The king has been sleeping for a long time and his dream has grown strange indeed.
The only person here who is not a dream, yet who seems like one is his half sister, the Cambion Sorceress Esmerillion.
Nevertheless, this is still the centre of the Temporal Government for the Eclipsed Kingdom. Every Baron must swear loyalty to the King and they must all come here, at least once, to do it.
Not all of them make it out. Some go mad due to the pipes. Some are killed by the Dreaming court for impossible dreamlike reasons; because they remind an imaginary person of a thought, because they have the wrong sign in their name, because they are too small or too large, because they have a look, because they do not have a look.
Others are given quests and orders by a member of the Dreaming court which cannot be completed. "Become your own son", "Bring me the colour blue" "Climb a tower in a ladies eye and bring back the treasure she does not have". Though these are but the dreams of the King, to ignore them might be seen as ignoring the will of the King, and the will of Azathoth, who's prophet he is, and many high lords have been forced to set out on incoherent maddened quests to impossible places, for impossible things, before they can claim their high position.
Beyond the throne room are the silent halls.
Though they were not always of this kind, over the centuries, the Ordinis Carcere have changed and adapted the shapes of the rooms and the nature of the walls.




Perhaps this was simply to avoid the terrible music of the pipes, perhaps it was to more deeply fulfil their oaths of silence, but they have slowly encrusted the halls and rooms of the Castle with strange repeated shapes and bizarre angles until, in every room, in every corridor, there is absolutely no ambient noise.
The halls of the castle are so quiet that those entering say they can hear their own blood pumping in their veins, that they can hear their own scalp moving over their skull. Any noise made is eaten by the strange additions to the walls and ceilings, as soon as a door is closed a scream inside a room cuts out as if a switch had been turned.



The Knights themselves make absolutely no sound whatever the circumstances, moving through the dead-quiet halls like ghosts.
It is here, and in the utterly silent dungeons that the Ordinis Carcere organise and disperse their forces, ranging all over the Eclipsed Kingdom and beyond in search of people to imprison, for whatever reason can be found, and searching also always for bards, to drag them back to the Court of the Sleeping King and set them to piping, for the bards themselves wear out quite quickly and become little more than dried husks after only a few days.
Down within the dungeons are the most significant prisoners of the Carcere, (those not surrendered to the Infinite Cathedral). Many of these are themselves prison breakers and escape artists. The Ordinis Carcere loathes and despises these people especially and makes a point of hunting them down and securing them absolutely. They are chained in cages in the centre of soundproof rooms.
The Castle itself stands on a promontory of volcanic rock. Its multiple battlements tumble down the sides of the stone into the roofs and pinnacles of the Silent City.
Once it was the home of the greatest craftsmen, artists, poets and lords of all the world. Though it is half-sunken in ruin and utterly quiet, this is still where the Eclipsed Kingdom holds the best of its artisans, scriveners, scribes and the small mercantile class which the Kingdom still cannot do without.
I know he's basically the patron saint of the OSR at this point, but what can you do?
Very little can be found in the city without first knowing what you are looking for, the centres of ruined buildings may still hold secret life, unlikely alleys or locked gates may disguise secret homes or places of work. Somewhere in this city a handful of people may still be getting very quietly drunk, or playing a game of silent chess.
The burgers of the town and True Citizens of the Silent City have all had their tongues removed and communicate only by written or gestured sign. Long ago this may have been in sympathy with, or by order of the Ordinis Carcere, but by now it is simply a ritual and proud sign of citizenship and of voting rights in the city’s silent council.
The people speak in whispers, if they speak at all.
The city itself is, in effect, an extension of the prison, and of the castle. At night the streets near the Castle are spread with quiet white sand by silent churls and any sign of a footprint before dawn is investigated as a capital crime until the culprit is found. The Carcere are maddened by the idea of one of their most special prisoners escaping, especially since they might well help more prisoners to escape elsewhere! Many citizens of the city have double roles as servants of the Carcere and report back to them in a complex network of informers.
Still, there are conspiracies and lies everywhere. The Kingdom has many enemies and even within the kingdom the various orders, factions, baronies, families and lines plot continually against each other for power. Some half-elven lords and ladies are actually plotting against themselves, with one half being either unaware of what the other half is doing, or simply out of deranged mania. Some sorcerers may be plotting against future or former selves, or alternate versions of themselves.



The Castle Of The Fissure King
Of all the Keeps of the Eclipsed Kingdom, the Castle of the Fissure King is perhaps the strangest and most mutable. Though the Infinite Cathedral twists back on itself in directions impossible to perceive, it at least has a reasonably stable outer form. The Castle of the Fissure King seems to change position, shape, nature and relation according to the situation of those who seek it.
·        It is always the home of the Calicem Servi, the Grail Knights.·        It is always the resting place of the Grail itself.·        It is always somewhere in, or on, the Fissure.
Yet for all this, exactly what it is seems to vary with the observer.
Some describe it simply as a vertical castle cut into the walls of the fissure. Some as a single keep standing upon an impossible pinnacle of stone. Some as a kind of bridge-palace crossing the Fissure itself, or as two palaces mirrored, rising like recurved horns from the walls of the Fissure on each side and meeting in the middle. Some as a beautiful and classical castle poised on a mesa or hill in the valley of the Fissure itself. Some as a mansion on an outcrop of stone with a river passing beneath it.


The Fissure itself changes in its form depending on those who seek it, or who seek to cross it. On maps it is described, by most, as a deep, vast valley on the borders between the Eclipsed Kingdom and the wasteland beyond. But any map seeking to describe the Fissure will quickly tear or break, and the tear itself will be at exactly the place that the Fissure is shown in the map. It cannot be represented.


For those who have sought it out it has sometimes been a huge, verdant, valley with a river running through it, full of forests and incredible animals, even the ruins of ancient peoples and lost civilisations. For others it has been the edge of the world, a black cliff proceeding endlessly down into an unknown netherworld, the floor lost in howling mists driven by screaming winds that pile over the rim like tornadoes. For others it has been a deep crevasse, almost impossible to cross, but on the other side, a mirror world exactly like the side just left, or did the Fissure somehow turn them back on their path and return them to their origin? For some it has been a turn or curve in the world itself, where gravity twisted, as if the skin of the world turned over like the bent page of a book and continued on the other side, upside down. For some a rift valley, filled with lava and sulphuric gas with the black castle of the Fissure King rising out of the bubbling poison. Some find it the Cliffside border of a mighty black ocean that appears on no map. Some say it can only be approached from one side and that whatever side it is approached from is the only side that it has.



To seek out the Fissure King is to enter the realm of spirit and of faith. Those who are strong with faith in Azothoth may find their way easily, if their faith is true. Those who lack True Belief, or who deny his Truth may find impossible challenges and situations. Yet sometimes the Fissure will test the faithful and forgive the heretic.
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Published on February 27, 2017 11:06

February 22, 2017

A Timeline of the Zak Wars

This is my attempt to put together a timeline of the case against Zak Smith/Sabbath. I tried to do so, where possible, using only verifiable links that are publicly available for anyone to access.
In situations where harassment is alleged, its very difficult to draw the line between giving exact information and opening people up to potential anonymous abuse. If I don’t give names and links for a lot of these things the whole thing becomes an exercise in redaction. If I name a lot of names then I could easily be accused of ‘directing harassment’ towards those parties.
I’ve tried to use only links that are still publicly available and to name individuals only when necessary to precisely describe what happened in an incident.
PLEASE. Do not contact any of the people in the links below in any kind of negative or harassing way. It would be better not to contact them at all. No-one in these circles is open to persuasion and nothing will be gained. Just read what they wrote.
(My overview of the chronology is at the bottom.)

(Also, apologies to anyone sane from outside the culture that has to read through this.)

February 2010 – The Canon Puncture IncidentThe hosts of the Canon Puncture Podcast talk about Zaks game with his group. They say some things that Zak regards as condescending towards the girls in the group, Zak requests an apology and the hosts apologise. This gets spoken about on story-games.com and Zak comes in to describe the situation. You can read that thread here;
http://story-games.com/forums/discussion/11540/d-d-with-porn-stars-and-canon-puncture
Archive; https://archive.is/13HKO

February 11th 2011 – The Hyung Tae Kim IncidentAnna Kreider makes an argument against the art of Hyung Tae Kim, you can read it in full here;
https://donotlink.it/Q0Ek
Archive; https://archive.is/zJBbm
Zak disagrees and the two of them get into it. Zak calls her a prude. Later, on March 10th 2015, Kreider posts her own chronology of her interactions with Zak, you can find it below.

December 2011 – The Maxim ArticleThe US magazine Maxim carries an article about Zak and his group. You can read the article itself here;
http://www.maxim.com/women/playing-dungeons-and-dragons-porn-stars
Archive; https://archive.is/2cbyr
An argument breaks out over representation. Much of this happens on G+ and has subsequently been deleted. You can read a transcript of that (by Zak) here;
http://armsinthewronghands.tumblr.com/post/148473329613/filamena-young-attacks-the-dd-wporn-stars-girls
Archive; https://archive.is/Iv58T
This was the best evidence I could find of the origins of an important disagreement that, like everything in this chronology, piles on into the next thing. If anyone has any publicly available links describing or showing what happened then let me know.

February 29th 2012 – Zak Encounters SomethingawfulZak says that the enmity between him and the Somethingawful forum dates from this contact. In his own words;
“The backstory on this is an enmity with Something Awful beginning with me attempting to talk to them about their extreme statements here, years after noticing they took Mandy to task for having extension cords on her wish list”
Link to his post is here;
http://dndwithpornstars.blogspot.co.uk/2012/02/evil-mastermind-from-grognardstxt.html
Archive; https://archive.is/X91ji

April 2012 – The Carcosa Thread on Story-Games.comZak starts a thread about the 2nd Edition of Geoffery McKinneys Carcosa book. An argument breaks out about Anna Krieder, you can read the thread here;
http://story-games.com/forums/discussion/16258
Archive; https://archive.is/sHVHL
Zak is banned from story-games after this thread.

September 27th 2012 – The Math Skills Fight on SomethingawfulZak argues with the posters on the somethingawful forum about dice notation. During this, he is accused of misogyny in regards to one of his players. You can read about that here;
http://dndwithpornstars.blogspot.co.uk/2012/09/apologizing-in-advance-for-this-hey.html
Archive; https://archive.is/3OxeK
This adds to the enmity between Zak and Somethingawful which he has said is the engine behind the Tom Hatfield Failforward article in July 2014.

August 2013 – The Numenera Succubus Incident.Game Writer Monte Cook  releases his game Numenera. This game includes rules for a Science Fiction Succubus. This causes a massive scandal and argument (google “Numenera Succubus”) especially on RPG.NET;

https://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?697888-Numenera-W-T-F-Monte
Links are all over this post by Zak;
http://dndwithpornstars.blogspot.com/2013/08/open-letter-to-shannon-appelcline-and.html
Archive; https://archive.is/sQpvo
The post also includes Shanna Germain, Cooks partner and co-creator talking about her reaction to the arguments made against her and the game.

December 16th 2013 – The James Desborough Rape Threat AccusationAbout 10 months prior to this Ben Lehman publicly accused James Desborough, RPG writer, of being "Someone who threatens their critics with rape". Desborough has been involved in culture-war arguments with this faction for some time. Several people +1 this post.
John Stavropoulus an RPG writer not aligned with Desborough’s faction or opinions, checks up on these claims and finds no evidence to back them up.
Zak in his own words; “The short of Jon's research is this accusation turned out to be bullshit even though 80some people +1ed it and it got shared all over the RPG internet.
Now Jon didn't name names, because he "doesn't want a witchhunt". Which is respectable. But I'm not Jon and I do think the RPG community as a whole deserves an apology from every single one of these people for confusing and distorting a very real and very serious issue of real violence that actually affects peoples' lives.”

He names names. Some people retract their +1’s, others do not. I’m not going to provide a link to that post but it is still up.
Zaks naming of names on this issue is used as evidence of harassment from this point on, in particular as evidence of him having a ‘list of enemies’.

December 17th 2013 – Paul Ettin Recommends plussing the Rape Threat PostIn response to the above incident, Paul Ettin, RPG.NET moderator recommends +1’ing the accusation against Desborough of making rape threats;
https://plus.google.com/115194116430466884350/posts/jefADpVt1rJ
Archive; http://archive.is/mw3GC

July 3rd 2014 – D&D 5e ReleasedThe new edition of D&D comes out and it is revealed that Zak and the RPGPundit are counted as consultants. This marks the beginning of Consultancygate.

July 4th 2014 – Paul Ettin Admits TrollingThis is from a chat log you can read here;
http://pastebin.com/nAzfnHbj
In lines 1174 10 1178 he admits that he does not think Desborough made rape threats but plussed the accusation anyway.

July 7th 2104 – My Defence of ZakAs the abuse of Zak intensifies I write this post about him in defence;
http://falsemachine.blogspot.co.uk/2014/07/zak-smith-is-not-homophobe.html
Archive; https://archive.is/b73Rc


July 7th 2014 – The Pigfucker PostA few hours after I post my defence of Zak, I wake up to find this article in which he lays out his own (by my standards, highly aggressive) policy on internet arguments, and also accuses someone of (metaphorically) fucking a pig;
http://dndwithpornstars.blogspot.co.uk/2014/07/why-pigfuckers-fuck-pigs-and-people.html
Archive; https://archive.is/9J0Ls
July 9th 2014 – The “The Internet is Screaming” PostZak defends himself from accusations again;
http://dndwithpornstars.blogspot.co.uk/2014/07/the-internet-is-screaming.html
Archive; https://archive.is/eXjOV
The person quoted in this post subsequently retracts that statement.

July 2014 – The David Hill Death ThreatsI think it’s about this time that David Hill, game designer, claims that he has received death threats, including the names of his children’s teachers and phone calls to his address. These claims go on to become a major part of the case against Zak.
The only publicly available link I could find in which David Hill repeats them is here in post 49 of this forum thread;
http://forum.theonyxpath.com/forum/general/off-topic/1050412-white-wolf-hires-zak-smith-im-out/page4
Archive; https://archive.is/WjTp4


July 19th 2014 – The Scrap Princess DefenceScrap Princess, who is trans and who is a co-creator with me of numerous projects, makes a public statement about the accusations here;
http://monstermanualsewnfrompants.blogspot.co.uk/2014/07/just-for-record.html
Archive; https://archive.is/jzaJG
(Which is blissfully short.)

July 21st 2014 – Fred Hicks Weighs In
Fred Hicks of Evil Hat productions makes a public G+ post in which he seems to support the allegations and apologises for not doing so earlier;
https://plus.google.com/+FredHicks/posts/SJHZ8Jc5SoW
Archive; https://archive.is/KY554

July 26th  2014 – The ‘Outing’ IncidentThis is where Mandy, Zaks girlfriend talks about some of the trolls attacking her and Zak and uses a variety of openly available aliases for someone who turned out to be trans. You can read the post here;
http://mandymorbid.tumblr.com/post/92910013775/more-reasons-people-found-to-hate-me
Archive; https://archive.is/YyJyx
Going forward, this incident forms one of the core pieces of evidence against Zak in future arguments. If you read someone saying that he outs trans people as a form of retaliation or revenge it is probably referring to this incident.
Zak in his own words;
“The person was not revealed to be trans until Wordmercenary/Tom Hatfield said she was. It was not public knowledge so how could Mandy or I have known?”

July 31st 2014 – The Failforward ArticleThis article is where the real bomb goes off. From this point on the situation massively intensifies. The article is shared by a very large range of people and is cited in nearly every major attack on Zak from this point on.
https://donotlink.it/VY0M
Archive; https://archive.is/pi55s
You can read the clearest and most detailed debunking here;
https://www.seebs.net/log/articles/791/consultancygate-an-overview
Archive; https://archive.is/pYOA8

August 2014 – “Get at him” ScreencapIn August of 2014, in response to the spread of the Failforward article, Zak posts this. It is used in many subsequent attacks on him as evidence of his harassment campaign;



From the image; “hit him up? Correct him? Eat him?”
Zak – “get on twitter. tweet at him, ask questions, give links.I have a girlfriend in the hospital and 111 trolls to deal with please just either help or don’t but pls no silly nerd questions.”
Complete public text of the post (provided by Zak) here;
http://armsinthewronghands.tumblr.com/post/157572020868/complete-text-of-the-get-at-him-post
Archive; https://archive.is/AUorP


August 2014 – “Destroy” ScreencapA few days later, in response to another article, Zak says this;



I remember seeing this go up and thinking that it was the stupidest shit I’d ever seen him do. I should have said something right away at the time.
The Destroy screencap forms a major part of the evidence against Zak and is brought up in most subsequent attacks on him.
It should be noted that the link is aimed at a Metafilter thread and that you can go and look at this thread here, if you want to see if it was, in fact, destroyed:
http://www.metafilter.com/141806/Gender-inclusive-language-in-DandD-5e-raises-roleplaying-questions
Archive; https://archive.is/iXics
Here (from Zak) is the full text of the post;
http://armsinthewronghands.tumblr.com/post/157572086858/complete-text-of-the-destroy-post
Archive; https://archive.is/OLIFc

August 2014 – Zaks Response To The Claims So Farhttp://dndwithpornstars.blogspot.com/2014/08/how-dungeons-and-dragons-is-totally-not.html
Archive; https://archive.is/ZKdRP
In his own words; “it debunks, with evidence, every single claim made up until that point in every single venue”

Inexact Date but probably Jan 2015 – The Dongion AccusationEttin, the rpg.net mod, accuses Zak of running what he calls a harassment blog, the Dongion, which you can find on his tumblr;
https://donotlink.it/m0RJ
Archive; https://archive.is/pyQ7J
A link to the blog is here;
http://thedongion.blogspot.co.uk/

January 1st 2015 – Mandys Chainmail Bikini Feminist DefenceMandy makes a long post on her tumblr giving screencaps of various kinds of abuse she has received and talks in detail about the alleged outing of a trans person. You can read it here;
http://mandymorbid.tumblr.com/post/106857162470/im-a-chainmail-bikini-feminist-and-im-fucking
Archive; http://archive.is/w8Wvr

March 10th 2015 – Anna Krieder Posts Her History With ZakAnna Krieder makes this post;
https://donotlink.it/gGQo
Which is a chronology of her interactions with Zak from her perspective, so now you have a chronology in your chronology. She locates the opening of hostilities to April 2012, not February 2011 as I have above in the Hyung Tae Kim Incident.
Zak responds to this article in this post from August 2016;
http://armsinthewronghands.tumblr.com/post/148469806573/anna-kreider-wundergeek
Archive; http://archive.is/CNj7B

March 13th 2015 – The Sampat Mob Assault AccusationElizabeth Sampat accuses Zak of riling up a “mob to the point that I was assaulted in front of witnesses.”
In the link you can see one of the accused assaulters arguing with Sampat;
https://twitter.com/twoscooters/status/576553462562840576
Archive; http://archive.is/zFIHj
This is Karolyn Gehrig, disabled activist https://twitter.com/karolynprg
The other accused member of the mob was Charlotte Stokely. Adult film actress https://twitter.com/char_stokely

August 2015 – Red and Pleasant Land Wins At The EnniesZaks book Red and Pleasant Land wins multiple awards at the Ennies. Stacy Dellorfano of Contessa gives a speech to accept the award in his absence and a few people walk out in protest.

August 1st Zak documents the twitter response to his win here;
http://dndwithpornstars.blogspot.co.uk/2015/08/the-reaping-of-tears.html
Archive; http://archive.is/l687z
August 4th, Keil Chenier talks about that incident and about the abuse he got for supporting Zak here;
http://dungeonsdonuts.tumblr.com/post/125851772599/i-am-so-very-tiredtired-and-angry
Archive; http://archive.is/wbYjp

October 20th 2015 – Zak Mocks David Hills Views on Star WarsIn this post, Zak persistently mocks and argues against David Hills views on the Star Wars frachise. This has been described (in the comments below) as "a blatant attack on David Hill, using screenshots of social media accounts that Hill has said he blocked Zak from."
http://archive.is/20151021233535/dndw...

August 26th 2016 – Zak Calls His Critics PsychoticsAlso knuckle-draggers, edition-warriors and sociopaths. This is claimed to be an act of harassment by some (see the comments to this post). You can read it here;
http://dndwithpornstars.blogspot.co.u...

July 26th 2016 – The Magpie Games IncidentMark Diaz Truman, one of the heads of Magpie Games, a storygames publisher, writes an article about aspects of his gaming circles that trouble him. You can read it here;
http://www.magpiegames.com/2016/07/26/two-minutes-hate/
Archive; http://archive.is/CDQkA
He is accused of defending Zak and therefore aiding a harasser. All the usual people arrive to do all the usual things.
Peoples responses and attitudes to this article become another form of contention which is carried forwards into future arguments.

July 28th 2016 – The Invisible James Raggi AccusationsIn this public thread by Mark Diaz Truman;
https://plus.google.com/+MarkDiazTruman/posts/2aRBa37wEtf
Someone accuses James Raggi, one of Zak’s publishers, of.. something? Then deletes the accusation. You can still see the replies to the ghost accusation but not the thing itself.



July 28th 2016 – Zak Talks About Mental Illness in the RPG CommunityIn this post Zak, without mentioning anyone specific, talks about how to talk to mentally ill people;
http://dndwithpornstars.blogspot.co.u...
This has been descrbed, (in the comments below) as "an accusation that his critics fabricate and distort facts due to being mentally ill. I would argue this is a clear attack, and in the context of the previous posts can be understood as continued harrasment "

February 17th 2017 - The We Eat Blood IncidentWhite Wolf announce that they have produced an interactive text game with Zak. Their announcement is here;
https://blog.white-wolf.com/2017/02/17/a-howl-for-our-bloody-writer-artists/
Archive; https://archive.is/WGOMv
Outrage begins immediately. Numerous threads are started, the primary ones on RPG.NET (I was banned from one of these). The main charges against Zak are;
·        That he is a known harasser of transwomen, gays, minorities etc.·        That he used a false name on Reddit, impersonating Shannon Applecline, the owner of RPG.NET.·        That he named one of the characters in the game, Avery, after one of his enemies.
The SAppelcline Situation
I remembered seeing the SAppelcline identity on Reddit multiple times, very often after a thread was pointed out by Zak on G+. I was bothered enough by this that I contacted Zak directly about it.
He gave me a response with enough detail to persuade me that it was likely true. But;
·        Even if true, it still indicates questionable behaviour. Zak knew the person using the identity, treated it as a joke and did nothing to prevent them.·        It’s utterly unverifiable to any neutral observer.
The Avery Situation
Zaks argument is that;
·        This name was chosen with no particular reference to anyone real.·        The only opponent of his it could be named after is Avery Alder, the creator of Monsterhearts and they had no significant contact until the Magpie Games Incident, July 2016. He says the script for the game was finished and locked before that point.·        He regards the Avery character as a hero in the game, someone witty and funny and cool who saves your life, it would make no sense for him to name her after an enemy.·        The Avery character is directly based on Zaks (trans) friend Bailey Jay, with her approval.

February 19th 2017 – Stacey Dellorfano RespondsStacy Dellorfano, who runs the feminist Contessa event, responds to the accusations against Zak and describes the various different kinds of harassment and abuse she has received, sometimes from the same people who are opposed to Zak, whilst trying to make Contessa a thing;
https://plus.google.com/u/0/+StacyDellorfano/posts/9DgcEuirpPP
Archive; https://archive.is/cPSMA

February 21st 2017 – Sarah Horrocks RespondsThe co-creator of the We Eat Blood game, Sarah Horrocks, is trans. You can read her tumblr response to the accusations here;
http://mercurialblonde.tumblr.com/post/157525001658
Archive; https://archive.is/AF2Mt
Which include, interestingly, an anonymous commenter, without irony, explaining to a trans woman what transphobia is and that she doesn’t really understand how it works.

February 22nd White Wolf’s ResponseWhite Wolf responds to the accusations here;
https://blog.white-wolf.com/2017/02/22/breathing-the-same-shadow/
Archive; https://archive.is/BCvrq


My Overview
What follows is my opinion only.
It looks like we're looking at four major acts or periods in the history so far.

Act One. The Long Build Up/The Sex WarsFeb 2010 to Dec 2013
This probably has roots in forum arguments in the past but it enters the public record in February 2010 in the Canon Puncture Incident and proceeds through to the Desborough Rape Threat Accusations of December 2013.
This period is characterised by the relatively long periods between each incident and the fact that opponents and arguments don't always carry over or fold into the next incident. Alienation and anger build up slowly, are sometimes diffused, but don't go away.
Most are triggered by arguments over sex and responses to Zaks gaming group (mainly women, mainly models).
·        Canon Puncture Incident - Zak defends his group from condescending comments.·        Hyung Tae Kim Incident - Zak argues about the validity of sex in art.·        The Maxim Article - Zak defends his group again, from accusations that their public profile is bad for gaming.·        The Carcosa Thread - This starts off about sexual violence in the game in question.·        The Math Skills Fight - Zak defends his player, is accused of misogyny.·        The Numenera Succubus Incident - Again, triggered by the presence of sexual materials in the game.·        The James Desborough Rape Threat Accusation - Desborough angers many of the same people with his arguments about the validity of rape in games, is then accused of making rape threats.

 The First CalmJan 2014 to July(I should be clear that there are no periods of absolute calm or truce, G+ threads and twitter comments and forum threads run continually throughout the whole history, but most of these are private and low-level. The periods of calm described are relative.)

Act Two. The Summer of HateJuly 2014 to August 2014
As soon as it came out that Zak and Pundit were consultants on 5e, the attacks, accusations and counter-accusations come in thick and fast. This is a very short period of great intensity.

The Second CalmAug 2014 to Jan 2015 

Act Three. The Small Wars January 2015 to July 2016.
During this period we get mutual counter-accusations, the Ennies walkout and the Magpie Games Incident.
The Third CalmAug 2016 to Feb 2017
Act Four. We Eat BloodFeb 2017.
Zak brings out a collaboration with White Wolf and all the old accusations are resurrected and combined with new ones.
..............................................
We can see major responses and spikes whenever Zak is found to have worked, or to be suspected of working with, a different gaming company or group or whenever his popularity spikes. Firstly in the long build up, many arguments come about from the 'Playing DnD With Porn Stars' Escapist Series, which grew in popularity as it went on.
Then directly after he works on 5e we get the Summer of Hate. Then the Ennies win. During the Magpie Games Incident Mark Diaz Truman has to publicly state that he is not going to work with Zak after people allege that a planned project with Zak is the reason for his post.

Then after Zak is linked to White Wolf, we get another eruption.
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Published on February 22, 2017 14:28

February 21, 2017

A Review of the Leopard (issue Zero) by Sarah Horrocks

I didn’t want to recommend anything on this blog without knowing what it is, and reading something seemed like a much more worthy use of my exile, so I bought the Issue Zero of the Leopard by Sarah Horrocks.
(If you want to read her (likely final) opinion on ZakStorm 2017, and also see someone explain to her exactly what transphobia means, here you go.
If we imagine the emblematic Sarah Horrocks tumblr image; a fifteen year old eastern European girl wearing dishevelled clothes, staring straight into camera on something that might be a film set for a very arty horror film or an extremely grim fashion shoot, except the image seem to have been ripped from a 1980’s VHS tape, there are fragmentary bloodstains on the girls clothes, there is a line of text along the bottom which might be subtitling, except its unattributed and whatever it says could be from a Cormac McCarthy book you haven't read, a downer section of the book of revelations or a particularly grim philosopher you faked reading in school, its declamatory, if it’s part of a conversation it seems like there's nothing the other person could say to respond to it.
Well this comic is a bit like that. It's dark and alienated and enthralled with the horror of it's own passions. So, pretty much like Sarah Horrocks if you've ever listened to her podcast. It's somewhat gnomic and by no means shy of pulling an Ancient Mariner and grabbing the reader by the hand and holding them with its glittering eye to unload its doom-laden tale. With, in my case, rather varied effect. But for someone more willing to enter into its particular world, or perhaps with each issue read in a grand sweep so that the volume of events carries the reader with it whether they would wish it or not, it might be preferable.
Don't read it in a library, like I tried to.
Even if you are not into Sarah's work, if you are a serious comics nerd then you might want to pick up an issue just to look at the craft. She is very good at a variety of things.

COLOUR
So, there are two sections to this with two different narrators or main figures. The first section has a really dominant and overpowering use of colour. Strong, near-primary, panel-dominant opposing or contrasting colours, not unlike Basil Wolvertons Spacehawk.
(To be clear, this is the only way in which this is like Spacehawk. In every other sense they are n.o.t.h.i.n.g alike.)
The effect of this on mood is quite interesting, it means that for an angst-laden, body-alienated, Germanically-intense Sarah Horrocks comic, the opening section is quite lively, quite exciting. Fun is the wrong word, but the boldness and energy colour brings is there.
The colours pool in and around Horrocks people who are scratched together by her anguished line. Kind of like if a genius schizophrenic crow had learnt to make portraits of people by gouging lines into pale bark and was really, really resentful about its crow-life, but still pretty good at its job.
And we do see these people from a crow-vantage, as if a bird had become trapped in the room with them and was dashing about, not quite understanding what it sees.
And in the second half, all that goes away and colour fades and mutes into a counterpoint to the pencils which expand in the visual silence left behind to take over the theme.
This part is about a girl in a room and what seem to be smudges of colouration, more part of the artists intent than straight depiction, deepen and sharpen in redness and intensity over several pages until it seems like the girl and the room are covered in blood, which they pass through either uncomprehending or indifferent.
The only light is from flickering screens which are universally old-transmission blue even though one of them is showing the Streefighter Arcade game. It's Horrocks so even Dhalsim looks sad as fuck.
Then the lights fade and give way to blue and the final pages are a really glorious image of a storm enfolding this tiny island of pain which held the main character and then as we turn the page even that gets highlighted with white into some Boreal-Rorschach of dooooooooom.


TIME AND EMOTION
In the first section memories collapse into these shattered rectangular rivers of carefully-broken glass, and the colour effects mix with this, producing odd intensifications, signalling the readers place in time, shifting the emphasis of memory to produce a horrific effect.
The comic as a whole (so far, based on this one issue) is more a field for a great conflict of passions rather than the plot business of getting people in and out of places.
I really, really like her control of panel, (I hate most mainstream lazy-ass pseudo-movie time control), and she uses a wiiiide variety of time and place shifts controlled subtly with colour, position, text and mood. This is much more formally obvious in the first section but she is still using relatively subtle time/place/emotion shifts in the more-centred second part.
Quick example, page 10;
Top third has one panel with an in-panel time/emotion shift shown with a bisected colour front and offset speech balloon.
Narrow cross-page mid range has a callback to a thematic figure with negative image crowheads intensifying mood and probably being symbolic somehow. Colour range of the negative image leads on from the second part of the upper panel.
Bottom third has a three-panel sepia psuedo-photographic portrait triptych indicating a narration over recalled memory with a speech balloon narrative continuation and emotional intensifier/ironic or dark commentary on those memories at each end...
.....so far, so almost normal for this third, but wait...
AND it has a cutout section with the colouration matching the opening half of the first panel from the top, this has some kind of hag-figure, who is utterly unexplained. She is broken up into vertical sub-panels (this is the only time white intra-panel borders are used on this page, the rest are black or absent) as if she was somehow trapped in a sequence of her own time, also she looks like she is behind prison bars, literally held in a cage at the bottom of a page of darkly ironised memories.
Most pages show a careful intermixing of time and emotion with a similar level of fluidly-displayed skill.

LINES
You would need someone with a better eye for art than me I think to talk about her pencils.  The crow-scratch metaphor doesn't really hold past an initial glance. By the time we get to the end the lines feel more like brush-strokes (It's possible they *are* brush strokes, I don't have enough familiarity with art to tell for sure.)
Just get Zak to talk about the lines.

I asked, he said; "She has two kinds of lines: one magnificently Schieleian, one more scabby and experimental but interestingly unpredictable."

The incomparable and brilliant Matthew Adams had this to say; 

"her linework, though very fluid and looking effortless, shows great design (so does her colour) and thoughtfullness, like every line is needed, not wasteful. it is very caligraphic, and you can see the influence of good manga art. it doesn't have the intense obsesiveness of some of zaks work, like you can sorta see zak comes from the fine art/painting field and sarah comes from the comics/manga field (of course this isn't obvious in all their art, it’s a generalisation and you can see the comics influence in zak's work and fine art influence in sarah's).

SO

This comic is about two years old, I have noooooo idea where she has gone with this series since, but if you want to watch something alienating and horrific unfold slowly, with a high level of narrative skill, then here you go.
Click Me


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Published on February 21, 2017 07:01

February 20, 2017

Well, that did not take long...



It was asked for in the comments so here's the link (I think, I can't be certain as I can't go there any more) https://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?798530-Vampire-the-Masquerade-Prelude-We-eat-blood-and-all-our-friends-are-dead/
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Published on February 20, 2017 01:36