Patrick Stuart's Blog, page 7

Got poor, old etc. Been workin'**

Sorry for the lack of posts. Things have been CHALLENGING recently. Anyway, call me if you need advice on being middle aged and the least successful member of your peer group by far**.

I just finished reading a few books on WAR; 'The Guns of August', 'Onwards Towards Our Noble Deaths' by Shigeru Mizuki, 'The Poetry of Jessie Pope' and 'Rough Rhymes of a Padre' by 'Woodbine Willie'. I will try to put together some kind of review in the next few days. I usually put these on the Substack first but everything over there ends up over here eventually.

Speak, False Machine is taking its time but hopefully some news on that soonish.

In the brief meantime, my friend Dan is running a micro-kickstarter for a picture book based on a legend in which Merlin and King Arthur battle a giant Kitten.

I have backed and they only need about 20 people to actually make the thing.

The question is will this one be on the shelf or eventually sent to my niece. There is only one way to find out!

*

**This is a joke. Please do not actually call. 

Ride the Giants Development Blog, Part 2

 Part one here; http://falsemachine.blogspot.com/2023/05/ride-giants-development-blog-1.html

The Speed of the Giants 

This matters not only in general gameplay but because theinitial concept of the game was ‘a game in real time’; an adventure lasting twoto three hours, with a gaming session lasting the same two to three hours. 

There would be some, but little, compression of time. Thetime-limit was meant to add impetus to the PCs choices and get them makingdecisions faster. It was also meant to add a bit of interest and challenge tothe choices made. 

 

Estimating the Gait 

I began by asking people on Discord for advice onestimating the gait of the giants. That is, when one takes a step, how long isthe step. 

If they stood up straight, the Giants are nearly 3,000feet high. Hunched over as they are their heads are about 2,000 feet high. So Istarted with the step-length of an imaginary 3,000 foot high man. Using variousmysterious means, including reverse-engineering an equation used by the policeto derive height from step-length, the Discord homies came back with a steplength of just under 1,300 feet per-step. 

That’s just under 400 metres per step or a little under aKilometre per double-step. 

 

The Chronology of a Step 

Estimating the timing of each step is moredifficult. Giants of this size are physically impossible anyway. Largelong-legged animals have to take care of their steps as they can easily breaktheir own legs with their weight. 

I essentially just ended up eyeballing it. Each steptakes roughly a minute and a half. 90 seconds. 

10 to 15 seconds at the start for the weight to rise andthe foot to accelerate, then 30 seconds in the air, then another 10 to 15seconds landing time for the weight to fall, the foot to settle, and weight tobe transferred through the hip to raise the other foot. 

I estimate the Giants are is moving roughly 14.4 feet persecond. Which makes I think its total movement being just under 10 miles perhour. 

This sounds.. really not totally insane. Like areasonable synthesis of the impossible and pseudo-realism. 

A good one-to-three rounds of slow-foot time for you toleap up and grab on. A big "whoosh" as you travel 400 meters in 30seconds. Then the settle time at the end. 

So a human could run away from it, someone on horsebackcould run faster than it. It could be 'boarded', but with real difficulty asthe foot is only slow and close to the ground for not that long. To match theirspeed a human would need to be jogging or running. To overtake you would needto run pretty fast or have a horse. 

And a continuous 10 mph walking speed sustained essentiallyforever, would be very hard to keep up with for a long period of time I think? 

 

 

Boarding the Giant 

If you were trying to ‘board’ a giants foot, you couldprobably catch up with it, via sprinting, or if you had a horse. The reallydangerous part would be when the foot comes down. If the giant trod down ontosomething like the soil of a field, it might send up fountains of soil like animpact crater all around the foot. If the soil was wet or the water table washigh, it might send up actual fountains or more likely, dangerous torrents ofwet mud. 

In the area around the foot-fall it would be like anearthquake hit. The earth might crack open, or roll like waves. Horses mightbreak their legs and men would fall to the ground. 

If you survive all that, you have about 15 seconds at theweight of the foot settles and transfers where it will be relatively still. 

All you need to do is get to the huge curved wallof the foot, I estimate it to be about a 100 foot climb, but you don’t need tomake it immediately, just hang one, hang on hard. 

Because that foot is going to rise up into the air. Itslateral speed at its going to be about 15 miles an hour during the swing of thefoot but its speed measured across the whole of its curve till it hits soil onthe next step might be more like 20 miles per hour. 

Not insanely fast. But jarring as hell. Plus theangle of its motion is constantly curving and shifting. 

 

What Strait do they Cross? 

Depending on if or how much time we leave fororganisation the actual giant-riding part of the game might range from one anda half hours to three hours. Lets assume two hours of actual giant-riding. 

Assuming ‘real time’ that means the Giants would travelabout 20 miles. 

The idea of the game is that you only have the length ofthe game itself to solve the problem of the giants – by the end of the gamethey will have reached the Nightmare Continent and if you get off the giantafter that you are DOOMED  

Looking for real-life places of roughly the rightdimensions the first that comes to mind is the Dover strait. 

Between Dover and Calais is almost exactly 20 miles 

But nowhere near deep enough – its only 50 meters deep!

 

That’s only 164 feet! About up to the giants Knees! 

Well I suppose it’s acceptable – in their hunched overposture their knuckles will be grazing the ocean surface as they walk. It alsogives the PCs a fair amount of time to get up over the knee. Though if they arestill dicking about with that half-way through the mission is probably failedanyway. 

 

 

Climbing the Giants 

There are several problems; the linear nature of thedirectional choices on a larger scale, the curved, flowing and non-intuitivesurface of the giant and the shifting position and orientation of the limbs. 

 

The Linear Nature of the Choices 

The main problem here is that the arrangement of thegiants limbs is very much not like a dungeon. There are only a few routes andrisks. Large parts are semi-visible from various points. 

Most of a limb-climb is just getting up that limb,  and to make the adventure interesting at allI would need to make actually falling off relatively rare. Instead I would haveto produce something like the climbing in VotE; everyone can do it a bit andfailure leads to ever more nightmarish fail-states without ever quite booting youoff. 

Once a climb is begun, the route-choice is largely madeand any tension or interest comes  morefrom how challenges are met than what they will be. 

 

The Curved and Flowing Surface 

Lets Envisage the Giants Skin -What is this like? A curved,slightly-flexing, rocky surface. Even ‘smooth’ parts are like a rocky, and infact most of the giants skin is deeply corrugated. 

If you look down at the skin around your knuckles. If youmake a claw with your hand so the skin bunches up there, all those littletriangles and oblongs of skin where the lines of compression meet and cross. Imagethat as a karstic landscape, but much more wrinkly – like a very old personsskin, and much deeper in its corrugations. 

Smooth parts – like  a cobblestone road, but with the cobblesjagged and not smoothed. 

Intermediate parts – like clambering over or uplarge boulders. 

Very Crinkly parts – like clambering over and throughsharp man-sized or larger boulders

Which tilt and grind together or apart – big enough thatthe gaps make an ‘interior of sorts. 

So the smooth parts are actually very easy to fall off& quite dangerous while the rough parts where the limbs meet – the crinklyplaces of our own bodies, are relatively safe – even though they are moving andflexing, there are many holds and handholds and spaces where you can placeyourself to avoid falling off (these might be dynamic holds though). 

But, maybe if I think about the actual shape and detailsof each part of the leg, arm and side, and think deeply about how each mightmove I could come up with some general ideas or abstract some rules which wouldhelp to form encounter spaces, or interesting encounter ideas? 

 

The Shifting Gravity 

The limb orientations are shifting regularly fromnear-vertical to sloped, from climb to overhang, or from climb to scramble. 

Will you wait for the position of the limb to change - itcould shift from overhang to climb, or from climb to scramble and the potentialdanger of an opposing encounter might grow larger or smaller if you arewilling, or able, or forced to, wait. 

So that idea of having to make up, lose or gain timefeels appropriate. 

OR - you hear movement, or sense something above you, andif you wait you might be able to get a better look - but that will cost youtime. 

TIMING – if this is ‘real-life’ timing then there couldbe a metronome or something. Or you could time the giants steps minute byminute. 

I don’t know if someone’s done this before but if each 90seconds is a real-life round and an in-game round, a single step of the giant. Couldit be made to work? You would have to roll fast! 

 

 

Climbing a map of the muscle groups 

Another possibility is - making some kind of map of theMUSCLE GROUPS of the limbs and making THAT a sub-map of each ascent. 

like you can LEAP from one muscle group to another toavoid an encounter.

 

 

 POSSIBLE DANGEROUS CLIMBING ENCOUNTERS 

These could be quite minor - the main danger is that theycould drop you. They should also be 'rock beasts', cliff beasts really. (Ididn’t put pigeons in as they suck.) 

Seagull-Griffons; micro-Griffons based on seagullheads and wings but with the bodies of racing dogs. That sounds sufficientlyawful. 

Goats 

Condor-Riding Snow Monkeys – they bathe in the hotsprings atop the giants backs and form a symbiotic relationship with thesemi-intelligent condors, travelling on their backs and performing tasksinvolving fine motor control – they can crack open bones with flints andactually they have learned to work in close co-operation with the condors, the monkeyscan pull open flaps of skin, bare muscle, expose the joints of dead animals,brace cutting surfaces and put flesh under tensile strain so it cuts moreeasily. 

SUPER-TICKS – these feed upon the giants magmicblood. [The giants are tectonic inside so their ‘spots’ or pimples might bepopping lava and their sweat might be steam or thick bubbling oils. A walkingmountain has to be generating a pretty serious amount of heat. The giants back– hot, even steaming, would carry a moving column or a trailing flag of hot airabove and behind it, a layer or a stream of cloud following each of them like apennant in the atmosphere as that pillar of air rises, cools and probablycondenses. The heat of the giants would make them of much more fecund than manyother forms of similar mountain.] The blood does cool quite a bit in them butit’s still pretty hot and dangerous. Plus this is still a tick as big as a manor maybe horse. 

Animated magical kites that won't die - These werethe creation of some ancient empire of magicians far away who wanted to studythe giants – the kites were so well made they have a basic self-repair functionand can weave the substance of cloud into solidity to act as canvas or waxedpaper to sustain them – the kites are more like solid memes, or paper golems,semi-intelligent but not really alive, men can ride them but their actions maybe very unpredictable – possibly they will obey commands in the language of thelong-dead wizards. They might do slightly bonkers A.I. stuff based on garbledcomprehension of their original instructions.  

Dark Corridors

 Choice Theory 

So you come to a split in a dungeon, or you come to aroom set with three portals, each seems to lead in a different direction butthey seem identical. 

Depending on party and DM, game style and preference, youeither just pick one, or have a little conference with the team, maybe lookingat the map, or start asking weird questions like “what do the corridors smelllike?” 

Whether this is a good or bad thing depends very much onthe style of game and whether the needs and intuitions of the players and DMmatch. 

I intuit that the ‘actual’ Old School old school processhad a lot more time for no-context choices, partly due to the prevalence ofplayer-mapping, (easier to do in-person in a 70’s game session and which wouldbe part of their problem-solving procedure), partly due to what I would expectto be longer more digressive gaming sessions and partly due to a somewhatharder more ‘masculine’ quality where its expected that some decisions will betricky, oblique or apparently pointless, either due to pseudo-naturalism or aGygaxian riddlemaster element. 

I intuit that a more ‘neo’ OSR scene would have shortersessions, more likely to be online so player mapping harder, more likely towant events and drama condensed and with less tolerance for ‘dead’ time,unguided choice and apparently contextless decisions. 

Yet, in either situation, a choice must be made, and ifthe choice is to be informed at all then how shall it be so? There are greatercontext elements which can be brought into the question; general dungeon intel,the use of mapping, informers, magic and guides.

But what can be learned from the empty corridoritself? 

And as a corollary to that decision, what information canbe imbued into  thatapparently-empty corridor by the designer or DM? 

I will break our discussion into elements. In livedexperience all of these will interrelate but I will try to cover thoseinterrelations within each subject; 

·       AIR

·       SMELL

·       TEMPERATURE

·       LIFE

·       SOUND

·       STONE

 

Once I started to think about it I decided that a keydominating and synthesising element is AIRFLOW

so I will begin with that and discuss why.

Ernst Fuchs

 

Air

Based on my research for VotE, Caves and cave systems candiffer hugely in temperature and airflow. 

This depends on whether the system massivelyintra-connected or isolated, if there is running water in the cave and thegeneral temperature gradient around the cave. 

An isolated cave system with no big interconnections andno water flow within will often be a bit warm. An underground space with staticair will often maintain a steady, not-quite-cold temperature. Mines, beingclosed systems and full of people and movement, are often hot. 

Conversely, a huge cave system with many exits will oftenhave very strong airflows. Caves 'breathe', and any slight differences intemperature and pressure between its varied entries can create winds which canbe focused and channelled by narrow passages in the system itself. 

Most caves are shaped by water and many have streamsmoving through them, this creates airflow

and often cools the cave. 

 

Dungeons vs Caves 

Dungeons are more likely to be smaller and contained andmuch more likely to be made of different materials with closed doors and otherconnectors and divisions within, but airflow can still tell the prospectivedungeoneer a lot. 

Dungeons, specifically; the classic tomb buriedunder temperate soil, might not actually be cold. A tomb complex separate fromany other dungeon, well if it’s a rainy area it might be damp, but notnecessarily, it might be slightly warm, or at least no colder than the outside. 

[Question; have you actually been in an actualtomb complex? What was the temperature and airflow like?] 

An experienced dungeoneer, or the average Dwarf, shouldbe able to make some decent guesses about the nature of a dungeon just bycarefully feeling the airflow. If a system is 'breathing' with air flowing inor out after dawn or dusk; that suggests a system of considerable size. If theair flowing in or out is warmer or colder than the outside air that mightindicate the presence of moving water within, or of something else that iscooling or warming the air within, (like, for instance, the presence of life,like Goblins or an Owlbear). 

Airflow is such a dominant factor because it effects thetransmission of SMELL, SOUND and TEMPERATURE, all of which are strongly boundwithin the greater medium of Air. Conversely the absence of airflow isitself a strong negative signal which might not explicitly tell you much butdoes suggest that either this dungeon, or system, whatever it is, is eithersmall and closed, or has doors and closing elements.

 

Smell! 

Smell is life! 

The key aspect of scent is that in almost every case itis indicative of the processes of life. A dungeon with intelligent thingsliving in it for any period of time is going to STINK. 

The Food Sequence 

Acquisition, Storage, Preparation, Consumption and Disposal. 

Acquisition; alpha predators like monsters whodrag prey back to the dungeon as a lair will leave the stink of blood whereverthey are and repeated blood trails will lead to any feeding spot, as well asblood smears and fur snatched from carried prey. 

Anything bringing living or recently dead food back tothe Dungeon from outside stands a good chance of leaving marks of some kind,especially since they will be tracing the same route each time to preparationor storage spaces. 

A lot of food smells or has a distinctive scent,and in a still-air environment that scent might remain in place for a longtime. 

Storage; if left unattended, the rotting bodies ofvictims or prey will absolutely stink to high heaven. Even for unalteredhuman basic smell powers it should be pretty simple to find your way through astill-air environment to a rotting body. 

Poorly-stored non-meat foods can still rot, and willsummon their own micro-environment of insects and small mammals, all of whichcan be sensed or traced. If there are mouse droppings, that’s a sign ofsomething. 

Well-stored or dry foods are more complex, I imaginethese as leaving little scent and few biomarkers. It might be that the presenceof a particular dry and contained space might leave tangential markers but I amnot sure. 

Preparation; if something is intelligent and eatscooked food, and/or just needs warmth or light, then there will be fire. Ifthere is fire there must be smoke. If there is smoke it has to go somewhere. Soeither there is a chimney leading up out of this dungeon or the smoke is movingthrough the corridors which will leave traces stains, and scent. 

Consumption; large predatory animals willdefinitely leave bits and pieces here and there. Smaller more civilised beingsmight still leave scent, the wall-sweat of their respiration, residual warmth,stains, fragments and the small biomarkers that go along with them. 

Disposal; Poo. All of this stuff has to go somewhereand unless there are convenient rivers or pits then it is going to leave strongscent markers and all the small insects which emerge from feasting on the poo.And spiders, which feast on the flies, the webs of which will remain in placefor a long time in a low airflow environment. 

tldr; any closed system which has living respiringand eating residents is going to stink. If there is airflow, then its strengthand direction will effect where those smells go and how strong they are. Tracingthose smells might be very useful for a dungeoneer. This is one thing thatencourages me in the idea of bringing a bloodhound of some kind to the dungeon 

 

Temperature 

Warmth is co-dependent on airflow and the presence oflife within a dungeon so many of the basic concepts have already beenconsidered in those two sections. 

[Question; how much of a temperature differentialcan an average, or sensitive human being detect if they are paying attention? Couldthey intuit the presence of a living being occupying a room behind a door?Could they tell micro difference in temperature in the air between twoidentical corridors?] 

What about cold? Would any particular naturalphenomena cause a dungeon to chill unexpectedly? The first thing that comes tomind is the presence of para-normal phenomena like Magic and the Undead. Bothare often associated with rapid temperature drops. 

Conversely, super-beasts like dragons or elementalcreatures might raise underground temperatures more than you would expect. 

 

Life Respiration 

SWEATY WALLS! Why are the walls of the dungeon dripping, dank,with the nitre, so beloved of Lovecraft? It may be water flow fromoutside but more likely the combination of water and warmth coves from livingthings in the dungeon. A system of closed stone with living things within itwill naturally sweat, and drip, over time. 

What about the sweaty walls of a sleeping dragons cave?Why wasn’t the gold surrounding Smaug absolutely dripping withcondensation? Maybe it was and that is what caused Bilbo to slip and slidearound. Wet Hobbit action. 

[Question; have any of you actually been in anactual Dungeon, under an actual castle, working or not? Are they actually thecold, dark, dripping places of fiction?] 

I mean clearly they are made not to be comfortable, butsurely actual temperature would depend on how much airflow there is, or thetemperature of the living rock, if its carved into that. 

Would a dungeon under a living castle with locked doorsand no windows, truly underground

actually be cold? Or might it be temperate? It would bedamp I think due to the respiration of everyone above in the castle and theircondensed breath dripping down.

 

Lichen, Moss, Mushrooms, Insects 

I feel like Gary must have at least conceived of a grandtable of microflora and microfauna that might grow in a dungeon and have therequired and likely temperature ranges, water needs, food sources, and, in thecase of insects and small mammals, roaming distances. 

I am taking being a dungeon detective a bit too far here,into Forensic territory, BUT - IF you did actually know a lot about thesemicro-environments you could in theory tell quite a lot about a dungeon just fromobserving them as you went through. 

This should go for Rot as well, a microorganism whichleaves sensory traces. A rot wizard could tell quite a lot about living systems.There is probably an opening somewhere for someone to produce a matrix ofeasy-to-use and 'read' pseudo-realistic dungeon microfauna, not for use asenemies or 'colour' but as a kind of spread of information that can be observedto tell what kind of things have gone on in a dungeon. 

This, because of its complexity, I think I know leastabout. I know a bit about cave fauna, but the secret of that is that, beyond acertain depth, there really isn’t much of it. Without light you getnear-nothing and so far as I know, mushrooms will not actually grow on the coldlimestone of a cave wall. 

[Question; does anyone out there know if lichenwill grow in dark conditions? Or any such moss? Any fungal experts who can saywhich foods and temperature ranges are needed for fungal growth?]

 

Unknown Artist

 

Sound 

How does sound carry underground anyway? Irregularly Iwould think. It must depend a huge amount on the substance and layout of theplace. Some shapes and materials I know just EAT sound, but in others, smallsounds can travel a very long way. 

[Question; does anyone know about what kinds ofstone, material or corridor shape interact how with various sounds? Do thestone walls and floors of a classic dungeon echo with footsteps of mockinglaughter as Gothic novels claim? Can anyone confirm?] 

The most important matter must be FREQUENCEY. Specifically,is there anything in this dungeon that produces a low-bass sound, like stonescraping, or something huge moving or rolling? Those low frequency soundstravel a lot, through materials more than air. How many times on a quiet dayhave you realised a big truck is moving several street away, or a washingmachine or other large device is working several rooms, or an entire propertyaway? 

A sleeping dragon, for instance, will produce not onlysweaty gold but probably a very deep, but soft, sound that might transmitstrongly through stone. 

Doors opening and closing; if these are on hingesthere is a good chance they will be badly maintained and so screech. They mayalso thud and slam. Stone doors may produce the deep frequency sounds thattransmit so easily. 

Living things; the biomarkers we talked about in the‘Smell’ section. Is there scampering? The buzzing of flies or mosquitoes? Thecrawling of insects? 

Consistent background sounds - Water should producesome kind of distant continual sound

likewise, wind changing outside the dungeon, rain, storms,these should produce some sort of effect, unless there are many portals betweenhere and there. 

Is this place indeed as 'Silent as the Tomb'? If so that itselfmight be quite unusual.  In a state ofsuch absolute silence it might be that very super-quiet noises which areusually indiscernible could become more prominent, like the crawling of a bugfor instance, or the shifting of dust. 

At what distance and in what circumstances can we expectliving inhabitants to produce discernible sound? 

 

by Art of Raman

Stone 

Or whatever material the dungeon is made of. 

You would probably need to know a lot about bricks, orslate flags, for micro differences in them to be useful in any way, but....aren't dungeoneers (and Dwarves) exactly the type to pick up just suchknowledge? 

What could we reasonably expect a skilled observer topick up from various arrangements of building stone in separating corridors? Couldthey guess which corridor was built first? If one is a later addition to theother that should be obvious should it not? as well as the various skill andthe resources available to the builders. 

A culture in decay producing less perfect masonry, orcutting into a stone-lined corridor with one lined with brick. 

What the hell are the roofs of these dungeons anyway? Logicallythey should be braced with wood, but that would decay (or would it?), so theyshould be either megaliths or arches. 

Does stone degrade over time (without use, probablynot..?) but with use and perhaps dripping water, how does stone degrade? 

What stone would you even expect to be used inconstruction of a dungeon? Granite is too hard surely? I would expect bricks tobe the most practical and affordable and bricks do crumble both from use butalso from compression and freeze-thaw over time. 

Does sound echo across marble? How about light? In the Merseytunnel near me, the roof has been covered with black tar or pitch. it wasoriginally made with a white, reflective, opalescent roof to the tunnel. Theidea was that it would reflect the lamps of vehicles and make the tunnel seemmore full of light. Two problems; exhaust fumes blackened it, and where thatdidn't happen the improving strength of electric lights made the roof blindinglywhite so they had to paint if over. 

But if you were in a classic Carrera-marble tomb, withonly lamps, it would be pretty relatively bright surely? There can't be manymaterials like that. Do we have any idea of the reflective nature of variouskinds of stone? Would a difference between slate, bricks or granite slabs addor reduce 10 or 20 feet of visibility?

 

Viggo Johanson

 

21 Questions for Empty Corridors 

(This is my attempt to condense the discussion above intoa simple set of concrete questions, more for Dungeon designers and DMs, in astyle similar to Jeffs ’20 Questions for your Campaign World’.)

 

1.      Isthe air still or does it flow?

2.      Ifthere is airflow, where does it flow to or from, and at which times? (i.e. doesit ‘breathe’ in and out as it warms and cools with dawn and dusk like a cavesystem might?).

3.      Isthere moving water? If there is, does it cool the dungeon?

4.      Isit warmer or cooler than outside? Are any parts especially warm or cool?

5.      Arethere living things eating, breathing and pooping in the dungeon?

6.      Dothe walls sweat? Is there nitre?

7.      Isthere a food store? Are there mice or insects?

8.      Isthere fire in the dungeon? If so, where does the smoke go?

9.      Isthere poop in the dungeon? Where? How strong is the smell?

10.   Isthere rot in the dungeon? Are there flies?

11.   Dosmells emanate evenly through still air or are they carried by airflow?

12.   Ifyou followed the smells of blood, meat, smoke, spices or poop, where would theylead?

13.   Aretheir spiders in the dungeon? How stable and old are the webs and where?

14.   Dolichen, moss or fungi grow in the dungeon? If so where?

15.   Arethere any sources of LOW FREQUENCY sound in the dungeon?

16.   Arethere any permanent natural sounds like moving water or wind?

17.   Dovoices, steps or door sounds transmit in a reliable way?

18.   Wouldthe sound of fighting transmit and if so how far?

19.   Ifsomeone stays absolutely silent in the dungeon and listens, what do they hear?

20.   Arethere obvious changes in construction? Like in materials, methods, age, wearetc?

21.   Doany of the above elements come into play at otherwise contextless choices inwhich door or corridor to take?

 

Zootopia was accidentally Fascist

 

 

 

I have never been able to stop thinking about this; the2016 animated film ‘Zootopia’ is a defence of liberal cosmopolitanism soearnest and poorly thought-out that it accidentally becomes crypto-fascist.

 

 

A Quote from Matt Zoller Seitz 

"Zootopiais constantly asking its characters to look past species stereotypes, and notto use species-ist language or repeat hurtful assumptions. This all seemsclever and noble until you realise that all the stereotypes about variousanimals are to come extent true, in particular the most basic one carnivoreseat herbivores because it’s in their nature”

 

 

Some Warnings; 

This is me going full schitzo-autist on a funny animalmovie from 2016, AT LENGTH. 

None of my commentary is aimed directly at modern headlinesor intra-group relationships, but the parallels are obvious and are absolutelynecessary to the film itself, so its impossible to talk about it in detailwithout mirroring some of that stuff. 

So BE WARNED, this is what you are in for. If you don'twant to read about that then stop reading! 

 

Not Deliberate 

To be clear, I don't think Zootopia is crypto-fascism.There are no deliberately 'hidden messages'. Instead I think it presents a casefor liberalism so flawed, garbled and intense it accidentally says the exactopposite. 

So I am accusing the makers of being fools, rather thanmonsters. 

 

But What Is Zootopia Patrick? 

Zootopia is 2016 animated film by Disney set in animagined utopian city if sentient, language-using partially humanoid animals. 

“Zootopia is a gleaming metropolis populated byanthropomorphic mammals, divided into several districts including SaharaSquare, Tundratown, Little Rodentia, and Rainforest District.

 

This film begins with a jungle which fades into achildren's play about the history of Zootopia. One day, Judy Hopps, a bunnyrabbit from rural Bunnyburrow, fulfills her dream of joining the ZootopiaPolice Department as the first rabbit officer, however, she is regularlyassigned parking duty by Chief Bogo. During one of her shifts, she ismanipulated by Nick Wilde, a con artist fox. Judy unlawfully arrests DukeWeaselton at Little Rodentia and is reprimanded by Bogo until Mrs. Otterton, anotter, arrives pleading help on locating her missing husband, one of the manyrecently missing predators. To Bogo's dismay, Judy volunteers and theassignment is praised by assistant mayor Dawn Belleweather. However, Bogo getsJudy to agree to resign if she cannot solve the case within 48 hours. With Nickas a key witness of Mr. Otterton's disappearance, Judy locates the fox andcoerces him to assist her with the investigation lest he be charged with taxevasion, which he openly admitted and Judy recorded with her carrot pen, saying"It's called a hustle, sweetheart."

 

After acquiring Mr. Otterton's license plate numberfrom Mystic Springs Oasis, Judy and Nick track the vehicle from the Departmentof Mammal Vehicles to Mr. Big, an arctic shrew crime boss in Tundratown. Mr.Big spares their lives after learning that Judy had rescued his daughterearlier, and informs the pair that Mr. Otterton is his florist and had beenpicked up by his chauffeur Manchas, a black jaguar, to bring him to Mr. Big totalk about something important. However, en-route, Otterton suddenly "wentsavage" - meaning he reverted to a feral state - and attacked Manchasbefore running off. Judy and Nick locate Manchas at his home in the RainforestDistrict for questioning. Manchas describes the attack on him and mentions thatOtterton had been yelling about "night howlers". However, before hecan reveal anything else, Manchas suddenly turns savage himself and chases thepair, but they manage to escape. Judy calls the ZPD for help, but when Bogo andhis reinforcements arrive, Manchas is nowhere to be found. Bogo demands Judy'sresignation, but Nick takes a stand, insisting they have 10 more hours to solvethe case. As the pair leave the Rainforest District, Nick opens up to Judy,revealing that he was bullied by prey animals as a cub for being the onlypredator and subsequently became a con artist, resolving to live out the"sly fox" stereotype, as he felt no one will ever see a fox asanything else.

 

Nick realizes that the city's traffic camera systemmay have captured how Manchas disappeared, and the pair consults AssistantMayor Bellwether. They then discover that Manchas was captured by wolves, whichJudy assumes is what Otterton had meant by "night howlers". Judy andNick locate Cliffside Asylum, where the wolves have detained the missingpredators (including Mr. Otterton), all of which have gone savage, andeavesdrop on Mayor Lionheart consulting with a doctor about their condition,revealing that he is keeping the savage predators hidden from both the publicand the ZPD, and that the cause their strange behavior is unknown. The pairescape, inform Bogo and the police swarm the area, arresting Lionheart andthose involved. Bellwether subsequently becomes the new mayor.

 

Having developed a friendship with Nick throughout thecase, Judy requests that he joins the ZPD and become her partner, which Nickhappily considers. However, a pressured Judy describes the savaged predators'condition during a press conference as them reverting to their naturalinstincts. This confirms Judy's bigotry against foxes to Nick, who angrilywalks out on her offer after he asks her if she sees him as a savage predator(along with her almost reaching for her fox repellent after he asks if shethought he would eat her). When fear and discrimination against predatorsspread across Zootopia, a guilt-ridden Judy resigns, feeling that she madethings worse. During this time, Gazelle holds a peaceful protest and publiclyasks for the harmonious Zootopia she loves to be restored.

 

Two to three months later,[3] Judy has returned toBunnyburrow and rejoined the family business as a carrot farmer. However, shelater learns from her parents and reformed childhood bully, fox Gideon Grey,that "night howlers" are toxic flowers that have severe psychotropiceffects on mammals. Realizing that the flowers are what Otterton was referringto and that they must be the cause of the outbreaks, Judy returns to Zootopia,where she reconciles with Nick. They then locate Weaselton, who explains thathe has been collecting night howlers for a ram named Doug Ramses, who owns alab hidden in the subway tunnels. The pair finds the lab and discovers Dougcreating a night howler serum, which he has been exposing to predators viapaintball-like pellets fired by an air-powered sniper gun.

 

 

Judy and Nick hijack the lab (which is on a stillfunctional train) and race to the ZPD with the evidence but are pursued byDoug's henchrams, whom they barely manage to defeat. The train is destroyed inthe process, but Nick manages to save a case containing Doug's sniper gun andthe serum pellet.

Just short of the ZPD, the pair encounters Bellwether,who insists she takes the evidence. Realizing she is the mastermind of theconspiracy, Judy and Nick try to flee but are knocked into a pit by herhenchrams. Bellwether shoots a serum pellet from the evidence case at Nick andframes a call for help to the ZPD. Nick seemingly becomes savage and cornersJudy, but it turns out the pair was acting in order to trick Bellwether intoopenly admitting her prey-supremacist scheme to take over Zootopia and rid itof all predators, and that they replaced the dart gun ammo with blueberriesfrom the Hopps' farm. With Bellwether's monologue recorded on Judy's carrot penjust as Bellwether made her short-lived threat to frame them as she did withLionheart, Chief Bogo and the ZPD arrive and arrest her and her henchrams uponhearing everything. Upon being informed and interviewed on the matter,Lionheart denies any knowledge of Bellwether's plot, but admits to havingillegally imprisoned the savage predators, claiming it to have been done for"right reasons".

 

 

Later, Judy is reinstated into the ZPD. An antidote isdiscovered for the effects of the night howlers, and all the infectedpredators, including Mr. Otterton and Mr. Manchas, are cured. Months later (abouta year after Judy started her job at the ZPD), Nick joins the ZPD as the firstfox officer and Judy's new partner. The final scene (during the credits) hasalmost all Zootopian citizens attending Gazelle's concert while Bellwetherangrily as Doug, Jesse, and the other prisoners patting on their lap views iton a television set in prison.”

 

 

THINGS THAT ARE TRUE IN ZOOTOPIA 

Ok, imagine you are the average Zootopia resident. statisticallyyou are likely to be a 'Prey' animal. (90% according to the Wiki). 

You surround and outnumber, but are in regular day-to-daycontact with a minority group  who arespecifically designed to kill and eat you, and who could do sorelatively easily. 

But... they don't eat you. Instead they eat Fish, plant proteinand bugs. 

The Mayor of the city, much of the police force, and manyof its celebrities, are all of this minority group. 

So if you did, for instance, suspect that the minoritygroup were secretly killing members of the majority and covering it up. Or, ifa member of this minority group ‘ran amok’, , you would goto the police, who are made up of that minority, and who report to the Mayor,who is also of that Minority. 

It seems that, even when given a free choice, themajority group will vote for, promote or valorise this minority group, they arejust that much more charismatic and powerful .

 

 

There are rumours of the minority group losing control,running amok and attacking the majority. There are rumours of the minoritygroup “disappearing”. 

Its revealed that this has in fact been happening.Minorities have been ‘running amok’ and savagely attacking others at random. Asituation made much more dangerous by their terrifying natural weapons. Themayor, who is a member of this minority, has been secretly imprisoning theguilty parties and hiding the truth while he investigates this matter. 

The Mayor is fired and the deputy Mayor takes his place,this is one of the majority group. 

The police officer who revealed this scheme (one of thefew majority members of the police force), speculates that the minoritiesbiology might be behind these violent attacks. This is in some senses a truism,they a literally designed to kill you and you are their natural food. For mostof history the minority group could not live without destroying you. Theysimply choose not to. 

A chill falls over the city and suspicions rise. 

A beautiful and charismatic Gazelle music star appealsfor the return of normalcy. 

After a short interval, the same police officer revealsthe origins of the situation; the new majoritarian mayor was secretlydeveloping chemical weapons to drive select minority members violently insaneso they would attack members of the majority group, all as part of a plan toput the majority group fully in charge of the city, this whole situation arosebecause of Her scheme. 

The Majority group mayor is imprisoned, and the oldMinority group Mayor is back in charge. He says imprisoning violent members ofhis own group secretly was ‘the wrong thing, for the right reasons’. 

The problem now solved, you and the city relax,everything is back to normal. 

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

 

Now, let me know at what point any of this reminds youof; 

Blood libel conspiracy.Hitlers fantasies.Modern headlines.Alex Jones.The internal sound of your brain melting as you suffera schizophrenic break. 

 

Predators and Prey are Fundamentally Adversarial 

.. and this is the point of the film. From theWiki; 

“The primary issues centering the film, as mentioned,are prejudice and preconceived notions based on stereotypes. To furtheremphasize this, the creatures that inhabit Zootopia were limited down tomammals, to portray a sense of segregation between animals of predator and preymentality; animals such as birds and marine life were left out like most, ifnot all, are consumers of other living organisms, making it difficult to narrowthem down within the status quo of the story's conflict.” 

Of course, if you imagine a world of sentient, tool-suingand civilised compulsory carnivores, living in close integration with equallysentient prey animals, what you have is a moral horror story. All of the goodstories using this as a premise include some element of moral horror because itis inherent to the setting.

 

And ‘Zootopia’ was very nearly this. Again, from the Wiki; 

“In response, the story was tailored to center therelationship between the "predator and prey" group while reflectingmodern day society by having the story serve as an allegory for racism andprejudice. In this version, predators, despite having evolved, were generallyviewed as dangerous threats and were forced to wear electric shock collars as ameans to keep their "aggressive natures" under control at the handsof prey. The "tame collar" concept stuck through most of the film'sproduction, even being approved by John Lasseter, but when screened for theteam at Pixar, the response was negative. The city of Zootopia, in this stateof being so blatantly unjust, was deemed too unlikable, and the story too dark,whereas the goal was to create a city that the audience could fall in love withwhile making a film that—despite its serious subject matter—can still be a funfamily film”

 

 I Get "Don't Think Too Hard About It" 

But Zootopia DEMANDS you think about it! It was designedspecifically as an allegory for racism from early development. It is a very,EXTREMELY values-laden film. 

It’s all about the greatness of cosmopolitanism, howwonderful diversity is and how evil twisted members of the majority group mighttry to destroy that wonderful peaceful diversity with evil schemes. 

It is a very, very, very earnest film that is intenselyanxious about having 'something to say'. This quite intense seriousness iswritten through the whole of the film

 

 Zootopia demands you pay deep attention to exactly the ideas it cannotsustain 

One thing that hit me very hard on viewing Zootopia wasthe gravity of the scene where Judy Hops states that the minorities that ranamok were reverting to their natural instincts. 

This is treated with deep and overwhelming seriousness bythose in the imagined world and by the structure and tone of the film itself. itfeels like a grave sin against the rules and ideals of this world. 

I must be autistic as fuck as I may have been the onlyperson in the room thinking "Well yea, they are wolves, lions and tigersof course they are biologically dangerous to fucking rabbits or whatever". 

I know what the film intended. The deep tragedy,gravity and sinfulness of this statement only makes sense if we view Zootopiaas an allegory or metaphor for relations between human groups. 

In a statement about humans saying "Well theyare just biologically dangerous, of course they were going to flip out and killsomeone, its inherent to them" would be monstrous and this matches thefeel of the scene 

But as a statement about Lions and Tigers and Wolves it’sjust obviously true. 

And Zootopia insists we think about this. 

Or more precisely, it demands we think about this in preciselythis way and no other. It is so confident of its argument, itspremise and the way its scenes and message are meant to be felt and considered,that it just leaps ahead. It is a story for an audience that already knows whatthe answer is and is just waiting for the story itself to fill that in 

Prejudice  = bad 

Brining up biological differences in discussion of violentacts - horrible 

they clearly didn't think, or were so confident, or so half-Intelligentthat they didn't even consider that anyone would possibly read it any other way

 

 The Fascist Reading of Zootopia 

You surround a minority group of biologically dangerouspotential killers. 

It’s considered social death to point this out. 

This is very important; saying the wrong thing, making assumptionsabout someone’s nature just because they, for instance, have teeth and claws,is considered very terrible. so you have to not mention these very clear and obviouslyphysical and innate behavioural differences. 

Just don't bring it up. Don't bring it up or our fragile societywill implode. 

There are rumours of attacks by the minority. 

There is confirmation of attacks by the minority. 

They have been going crazy and TEARING APART members ofthe majority at random. 

The city government has been covering this up. 

The city government is headed by a member of the same minorityand the police force is dominated by them, so essentially they rule over you. 

Later another conspiracy is revealed, the conspiratorsare of the majority faction. 

They have been triggering the dangerous minority withdrugs made from certain commonly available garden flowers. The old Mayoris returned and the conspiracy ended, everything is fine now. 

You still surround a minority of potential killers,  and they could be triggered to kill randomlyat any time by the use of a commonly available chemical. 

So this is hell, surely? It’s the Liberal Polity as seenthrough the eyes of a Fascist. Fundamentally opposed groups bound together by atissue of lies under the leadership and control of elite members of thepowerful minority group with anyone who defies the lie by pointing out basic biologicaland historical fact ostracised and driven into poverty. 

 

Beastars is Zootopia Done Right

Beastars – is an animated series based on almost exactlythe same setting and concept as Zootopia; an urbanised society ofanthropomorphic sentient animals which hands, language and tools, but stillmassively different body types and huge differences in natural capacity, andwith obligate predators and obligate prey animals “trying to get along”. 

Beastars is a weird, queasy, sometimes disturbing storyand the main reason it works as anything at all is because it directlyacknowledges and is largely about the massive innate differences betweenPredators and Prey and the fact that this society is a thin strand ofcompromise over a roiling churning mass of potential conflict.

 

 

In Beastars Predators do occasionally Run Amok, and eatPrey citizens. Its not quite covered up but is down-valued by the media.Predators have secret meat markets where they go to eat flesh and criminalgroups who supply them. Many Prey-citizens live in a state of quiet helplessterror about being killed, many Predator-citizens live in a state of consumingdysphoria and self-loathing about their own nature. 

Despite being a pervy, weird, strange and intense storyBeastars feels more moral and sane than Zootopia because the characters in itare grappling directly and honestly with the unresolved darkness at the centreof their society while in Zootopia; it was all an evil conspiracy by badmajority group members and things are back to normal now.

 

 

A Review of ‘Northern Journey’

 This is a review of a videogame ‘Northern Journey’ by Sild Studios. I found out about it via this video;

 

 

I thought this would be interesting to False Machinereaders and OSR types as a game art which has a bunch of OSR-type theming andbut also as a distinct work of art by chad neurodivergent creator who made itwhile sitting in a cellar for several years.

 

(Maybe also with fans of 'Thief' and the Thief moddingcommunity maybe? It has that kind of feel.)

 

 

 

Chad Neurodivergent Creator

 

 

Interviewer - "Working on your own, you must havehad a pretty deep schedule."

 

Chad - "No I didn't really have a schedule or aplan. As you are working on something, things, story beats, come to mind. Sofor instance you might realise you want some mountains, or you want to fight awitch. Then you might be in a forest and realise you need something to gobetween the forest and the mountains or it doesn't feel right "

 

Chad - "There were a lot of things I didn't spendtime doing. Like sketching and drawing and planning enemies and whatnot. Iusually just made them then and there."

 

Chad - "The game was made in a cellar and therewere a lot of spiders there so there are spiders in the game."

 

Chad - "Anyone can make music really, you look atpictures of the place you are making music for and start making sounds."

 

So, he made the game by making the game.

 

I will return to this in the end.

 

 

The Level Design

 

Northern Journey combines vast-feeling levels andwide-open spaces with complex, nested and carefully planned challenge routes.In the interview above the creator says they often solved design problems byjust removing space, bringing things more closely together.

 

Often the routes and locations are nested vertically,with looping fishbone paths, leaps and scrambles taking you from one toanother, or caves, long diversions or surprising detours leading you back tosomewhere you have already seen from afar, maybe only a few feet away fromwhere you were standing, buy previously unable to reach.

 

The internet tells me that this is “like Dark Souls”.

 

You are almost always in sight of the promise of a futurejourney,  being shown expanses you mighttraverse, places you might visit and methods you might use. There are keys toopen doors but there is also a winch thing you can use to access ziplines whichtake you whooshing across these densely-plotted levels - you can see theziplines coming in but can't access them till you get this widget. In terms oflevel design this is in practice, just another kind of key or teleportationsystem, but it doesn't feel like that, instead it feels like an extremely coolreward for achieving stuff.

 

How could this feeling be expanded to OSR-style games?With difficulty I think. The functioning of team play using largely the mindseye and maps doesn’t work the same way as in a videogame. In Northern Journey,the ‘correct’ or accessible routes are obvious and the language of the game andmovement in its space is easy to accept. You know you can’t climb things abovea certain set incline, so you don’t bother. In an OSR game you can tryclimbing things above a set incline, and can try doing a whole bunch ofthings that wouldn’t work in Northern Journey.

 

As well, the presentation of a vertically nestedenvironment is more difficult in map form, and the sheer power of a open viewof a big landscape promising various adventures and possibilities wouldn’t actthe same way.

 

Perhaps to some extent, partial maps, rumours and‘promising objects’ serve a similar aim in D&D adventures. I tried to dosomething a bit like this in Demon-Bone Sarcophagus but apparently fucked it up☹.

 

 

The Music

 

The music is custom, nothing in its pockets but knivesand lint. It’s dungeon synth/ambient created for each environment. This isdistinctive because there really isn’t a big gap between the sounds of theenvironment, the twitchy calls of insect danger (or witches), the wind, thetreetops moving in the wind, the echoing of cave noises and whatever theambient music is for that area.

 

 

The Fucking Spiders

 

Or monsters generally, but most of them are fuckingspiders.

 

None of the spiders are the same, look the same, act thesame or interact with the environment and the player in the same way. Somecrawl in the undergrowth quietly, some swarm in gangs, some hover and leap, orhang in treetops and drop on you.

 

The enemy design, movement plans and AI loops arecarefully integrated into the environments, the spiders in the trees, thetree-tops slowly waving, the spiders in the waving grass which bob and move inthe same rhythm as the grass.

 

The juddering, weaving repetitive but incoherent attackpatterns of the insect enemies exist apparently because they were easy toprogram - presumably real insects are running something not that much morecomplex than the systems in a modern computer.

 

The deep integration with the environments means youspend a lot of time hiding, listening, watching, stalking and paying a hugeamount of attention to trees, grass, sounds and movement.

 

 

The Combat

 

I feel like there are two main ways to run the combat inNorthern Journey; Doom Style or Cheese It.

 

If you have really good twitch sensitivity and aim thenyou could maybe burst into target-rich environments and race around shootingthings while brilliantly swapping weapons for optimal effect. I absolutelycould not do this and so most of the time I just cheesed it by save-scumming,creeping forward till I trigger one or two enemies then running like fuck awaytill they are lined up behind me on an attack run, then turning round andshooting them, save-scumming and doing the same thing again.

 

The sling was an interesting embodied weapon. You get itfor free, it never runs out of ammo.

 

On pulling out the sling the p.o.v character WHUMPS itround your head, one, two, three, four, five, six times then puts it away. Youcan trigger a cast at the peak of any of those WHUMPS. If you wait till the 3rdor 4th WHUMP, the damage goes up to 100, which is actually not bad, on par withother weapons, or you can release early for a faster shot with less damage.

 

This starts as a crap and awkward weapon, but as you getbetter with it, it becomes quite workable and your skill with its timing helpsyou upgrade it along with your other stuff so it never quite goes out offashion.

 

 

Characters

 

Oddities drawn from something like a folk tale; a villageidiot, a suspicious priest, a fool in the stocks, a policeman in his hut, somemysterious crones with a bubbling pot, a doctor throwing runestones andlaughing, a sketchy soothsayer whacked out on fumes, an isolated engineerliving in a box held over an abyss; there is literally no-one normal in this village,

 

Crones - Lots of crones in this one, a large variety oftricky witches doing crazy witchy things, trying to push you off bridges,strand you in infinitely black pools, fly screaming and cackling at you onbroomsticks

 

The Mysterious Flute Player – is he Odin? A wizard? TheGygaxian Game Master? He feels a little like all of these things. He has hisown theme and you can hear him noodling on his flute as you enter some levels.At other times a dog or raven will turn up with a rune-stave message.

 

 

The Special Missions!

 

Caving, cave-diving, diving into a haunted, drowned villagein a leaky bathysphere, taking a hang-glider through super-mountains, divinginto a maelstrom & coming out the other side, slowly scaling and zipliningup a staggered and vast mountain face; 


the darkness, fear and paranoia was lovely.In particular the bathysphere mission and cave-diving was just utterly richwith darkness and a deep sense of strange otherness. Any Veins of the Earthfans  would enjoy these.

 

The Ending

 

There are parts of the end I love, and which feel a lotlike the pure mood of the game and other combat-based parts I don't loveanywhere as much.

 

It feels like a lot of supernatural problems in Norwayare solved with a midnight communal village rave to dungeon synth electrobeats.Probably this is just how they do it, who knows. The game nearly ends with whatI think should have been the final scene, a game of keep-away with a bunch ofcrazy villagers dancing in a circle around a cursed dimensional violator whilethe village idiot keeps trying to grab it and run away, while demonic rootmonsters run interference. Then there is a tower shooting bit which is lessinteresting.

 

 

Hyperreality

 

A game about an environment by a guy who lives in thatenvironment. The production loop is a hiking loop - guy goes for a hike orclimb in Norway, takes photos, records sounds, observes nature
then comes back to the spider-cellar, makes textures fromthe plants and rocks, builds the sound of streams from the recordings.

 

All of the sounds and textures in the game are made bythe creator, so those curiously pixelly textured shadows, waving plants,lichen-spotted wood, are all recovered dreams from the real world.

 

The combination of the tightly-plotted butexpansive-feeling level design, the intensity of dealing with the FUCKINGSPIDERS and this transposition and concentration of the natural phenomena meanswith Northern Journey has a kind of Hyperreality, like its NorwayPlus. The samehyperreality you would get from surrealism but driven towards a naturalenvironment, a bit like 19th century romantic paintings of guys staring at thealps where a natural view is intensified, but in this case it’s a game and aprocess of doing which includes movement, exploration and challenge.

 

(I am not saying Northern Journey is 'like being there'which I think would be a mediocre aim and which I am unable to confirm anyway,bit it is more like an intense, lucid dream of Norway)

 

 

Singularity of Vision

 

Though original, no single element is absolutely betterthan the best in other games, though much is very good. Instead we must speakof the combination and synthesis of elements in a manner original, expressiveand rare. It would be hard for a large group the make *this particular* gamebecause things were combined and "cooked" very closely and very intuitively.

 

The textures, plants, sounds, arrangements of form,living entities, (especially the spiders), etc, are all seemingly drawn fromlife and inscribed directly into the game without much pre-decision orconversation.

 

For instance; in one level the waving of grass mimics thecolour and movement of the resident spider enemy, which skitters and bobsexactly like the movement of the grass in simulated wind. in another, thetexture and size of an attacking spider means it blends with and seems to move"under" the textured knee-high foliage. Combined with its silence(which would have no significance if not for the aural tapestry of the levels),this makes it a particular paranoia-inducing threat.

 

There is a level where, after coming out of a deep darkand claustrophobic mine, you do nothing but climb and zipline up a seeminglyendless series of mountain faces, facing a rolling grey sea, it’s wonderful andarguably 'nothing happens'.

 

These things, if done as part of a group or company,would have taken meeting after meeting and description and argument afterdescription and argument. Here, done by one individual, they are simply createdand arranged immediately, intuitively, in a manner which speaks of a coherentworld, creates beauty and interest in the eye of the beholder an is 'gamic' orplayable, leading to interesting and cohesive play.

 

The whole game is like this; a collage or weavingtogether of elements, some drawn from nature, but woven coherently, subtly, tocreate a kind of hyper-reality. The sensory aspect of a Norwegianwilderness/biome, compressed, transformed and made into something that can beplayed. Any addition of complexity of the kind a corporation or marketingdirector would instantiate would disrupts this clear fluidity and directness ofapproach.

 

The credits are literally three lines;

 

The Grandaddy of Evil; Ian Watson and the Inquisition War Trilogy!

 A REGISTERED CRIPPLE 
"When they were heading away from the barricadethrough the host of pilgrims and tents, a scrawny liver-spotted hand clutchedat Jaqs hem.

 

'Charity for a registered cripple' croaked an elderlyvoice.

 

Smouldering thuribles of incense dangled on chainsfrom a gibbet-like frame. Backed up against the base of this frame was arickety cart with small iron wheels. Upon the cart crouched a ragged crone. herface was wizened with age. her stringy long hair was white. Yet her rheumy blueeyes were keen with a light of tense intelligence. In those eyes was a qualityof anticipation for which expectancy of coins alone could hardly account.

 

Grimm scrutinized her circumstances. Thethurible-gibbet protected this cripple from being trampled accidentally. Ahandle jutted from the rear of her cart. It might be pulled or pushed. Here shecrouched under the cool red sun, begging.
...

 

'Was the temple breaking your legs, mother?’ Surelythe Occidens Temple did not need to create and exploit cripples, pitifully toswell its coffers.

 

The crone rocked forward, as if in sudden anguish froma cramp of the bowels.

 

'Oh yes, it was breaking my legs!' was her reply. 'Yetnot in the way you're meaning.

 

Grimm hunkered down by the cart. Soon s did Lex andJaq.

 

The crones name was Herzady. One thing she had neverbeen was a mother. Defiantly she declared herself to be elven years old.

 

Who else on Sabulborb would dream of counting theirage in local years? She had lived long enough to arrive at double figures. Shehad endured more than a hundred and ten Imperial years - the vast majority ofthem spent in this cart. Grimm was impressed by Herzady's longevity, eventhough to a long-living Squat a century was rather small beer.

 

'Pretty impressive for an ordinary unenhanced humanbeing, particularly in such reduced circumstances!'

 

A century earlier, as a young girl, Herzady hadattended that Holy Years unveiling in company with her pious parents. Duringthe bedlam which ensued, her mother and father both lost their lives. Herzady'slegs were permanently crippled. A compassionate priest had taken pity andprovided this cart. For decades Herzady had awaited the next Holy year. Whenthe unveiling came again she was watching from a safer place than on theprevious occasion.

 

Bedlam?

 

Oh yes. At the unveiling fifty two years later therehad been homicidal bedlam once again, due to the hysteria of the pilgrimsintent on seeing... what could not be seen.

 

Could not be seen, what did she mean by this?

 

Why, Herzady had been all ears and eyes for decades.She knew that the visage had faded, aeons since, into invisibility. On theclimactic day of Holy Year when the high priest of Occidens in splendidprocession carried the requilary out along the walkway, briefly, to open thesacred container, what he would expose to the gaze of hundreds of thousands ofpilgrims was a cloth which was blank, apart from a couple of stains vaguelylocated where the eyes might have been.

 

'Pilgrims are glimpsing almost nothing sired! How theyare straining and struggling to see!'
.......

 

Gently he said to Herzady, 'Being crippled, crippledbecause of adoring him, you are partaking in His vaster malady.'

 

'I am waiting, she replied bleakly, 'for many morepersons being crippled and killed the day after tomorrow, as surely must behappening. Then I am dying contentedly.'

 

it was to witness this calamity that Herzady hadendured indomitably throughout the five decades since the previous holy year!The crones persistence was pathological. her lucidity was madness.
...
The little man prompted her; 'Hundreds of people dyingoutside that courthouse earlier on today. All imagining the True Face beingunveiled early - and panicking.'

 

Galvanized by shock, the crone sat bolt upright uponher twisted shrivelled legs. She gasped tragically. 'Herzady missing so manydeaths....'

 

Her wizened face spasmed in pain. A thin spotted handfluttered to her chest. She slumped over.

 

Lex checked her pulse. In his hefty hand her wristlooked no wider than a pencil. Herzady was dead. Of a heart attack, of a brokenheart.

 

It was Grimm who reached to close the crone's gapingempty eyes.

 

'Huh' he said, 'saved myself half a shekelanyway.'" 

 

Blanche drawing Jaq Draco as... Sean Connery?

 

BEHOLD

I return to the beginning; the original Black Librarynovel and first Warhammer 40k fiction. Dan Abnett dedicated the first volume of‘The End and the Death’ to Ian Watson, likely out of respect to this originatingseries. 

I read one book in this series many many years ago and Idid not like it at all. I thought it was dirty and weird. Uncomfortably so. 

Now I think it is a work of GENIUS! Clearly I have migratedto one end or another of the I.Q. graph meme. Which end I cannot say....

 

 

PULSING ALBUMEN-WOMB

 

“A dreary slope of great boulders, poised on a scree,extended downward into murk. Upward likewise. In the upward directionrococo-metallic towers were visible. A small fleet of grotesque vessels mighthave impacted in the terrain. Evilly flamboyant, these towers were canted atabsurd angles to one another in defiance of gravity, yet they were linked byeerily wrought bridges along which prowled tiny figures.

 

In a bilious sky hung an hourglass sun. Two suns werejoined impossibly at the waist like a double yolk within a glutinous pulsingalbumen-womb of glowing gas. This absurd sun made the eyes and the spirt ache.How was gravity thus defied? That double-sun should have cohered into one sunaeons ago. Two such celestial bodies could not exist side by side.

 

‘Chaos’, breathed Jaq in horror.”

 

 

ITS THE UR-TEXT 

It’s all about the FUKIN STAR CHILD BABY! It’s all comingback! Perfect circle!

Ok so what is this story actually about? Essentially an Inquisitorwants to bang his Callidus Assassin, that’s the main driver of the plot. 

Let me try again.. 

Our story is about Inquisitor Jaq Draco, who encounters asuper-mega conspiracy within a conspiracy of the Inquisition to create apsychic ‘Hydra’ and turn all of humanity into a giant singular hive mind andthereby ‘save’ it. 

Over the course of three books [SPOILERS] Dracoaccidently exterminatus’s a planet, fights genestealers, enters a space hulk,visits a demon world, goes to Terra and infiltrates the Imperial Palace for achat with the Emperor, sleeps for 100 years, enters the webway, visits Ulthwecraftworld, gets into the mythical Black Library and steals the book of theApocalypse, gets his Callidus assassin girlfriend killed, hides out on a nuttypilgrim world, steals a relic, escapes into the webway again and performs amysterious ritual to undo fate. Other things also happen. 

The over-plot is all about the Sensai, the Star Child,the schitzoidal mind of the Emperor 

Very old 40k lore from Rogue Trader says that when theEmperor fought Horus he cut out all the actually nice parts of his psyche andcast them into the warp so he could win. These more fluffy bits have been floatingaround out there for 10,000 years and are about ready to reincarnate into theStar Child; the actually-nice superbeing who will create the golden path tohumanities hopeful future. 

Roaming around in the galaxy are the Sensai; 40ksoriginal Woke Warriors who roam the galaxy fighting oppression yes this is realand I am not making it up.

Meanwhile in Games Workshops two active series, inthe final books of the Horus Heresy series, Dan Abnett is finally creepingtowards the Final Confrontation with Horus where all this is actually set up,and has been reintroducing the idea of secret immortals in 40k. And in the ‘presentday’ Dawn of Fire series by mainly Guy Haley I think, the idea of the Star Childand the Emperor ‘awakening’ has been reintroduced. 

So, essentially, the Horus Heresy series, the currentDawn of Fire series and this Inquisition War series, the first one published,form a coherent whole, or are being formed into one. It was all just onegiant saga all along… 

And it’s amazing how much of a 40k book it is, right fromthe offing, rich with ripe dankness. Within 200 pages of the fist book we havegenestealer purging, exterminatus, a squat on a trike, a space hulk, the Eye ofTerror!, actual Terra and a month long oddesy through the imperial palace leadby the Star Child (probably), and a MEETING WITH THE EMPEROR. The sheer amountof stuff, of details, of incident, combined with the wild euphonia of the prosereally adds up to make a funky stew

 

 

TENDRILS IN THE SPINAL SOCKETS

"During stages in Lex's novitiate as a futureSpace Marine he had been initiated dauntingly enough - by a feast of foulexcremental unfood and other formidable ceremonies.

 

The forced rite of initiation which took place like aravishment within that Chaos vessel was execrable and almost unspeakable. Howcould Lex obliterate from memory the Kiss of Corruption, the Communion withChaos, the Prayer of Perfidity, the spells and the invocations? And all thewhile he was experiencing the slither of tendrils within his spinal sockets.These invaded his nervous system, generating nauseating visions of thefragility of the comos, of the feebleness of reality which demonic fingerssought to unpluck and reknit with such vile success.

Lex in torment saw the whole cosmos burst forth from amere bubble in the energy warp. A sparrows fart the universe was!"

 

 

IT FROM THE 90'S

It’s kinda, no, scratch that, incredibly pervy, richand ripe with strange life, overflowing with crazy stuff, wild with colour. Itfeels a lot like David Lynches Dune in its gleeful perversity and generaloddness.

 

The vision of 40k is absolutely one torn from the pagesof early White Dwarf, Realms of Chaos, Rogue Trader and other early vibranttexts; 

“And so Meh-Lindi approached the monster on thethrone: a leering fang-toothed, armoured hog of a grandsire alien. Its eyesglared at her from under ridged bony brows. One of its lower, humanoid hands,adorned with topaz and sapphire rings, contemplatively stroked a fierce claw-handthat rested on its knee. One of its hooves tapped the floor. Loaves ofarmour-bone jutted from its curved spine, and it rubbed these against the carvedback of its throne grindingly, as if to dispel an itch. Its spatulate tonguestuck out, tasting.”

 

 

And is absolutely riddled with often ridiculous andsometimes really quite discomforting sexual and bodily weirdness, especiallysurrounding the Callidus Assassin Meh-Lindi who starts the book doing exercisesin a giant ritual hamster wheel and then examines herself in the mirror nakedat length while remarking on her boobs as women so often do. Then she gets apseudo-plastic Genestealer skeleton implanted in her body in an excruciatingsurgery scene.

 

 GROTESQUELY MUTATED RAMPANT GROINS

"Were the screaming tethered female prisonershallucinating while abominations were perpetrated slowly and perversely upontheir flesh? The Slaanashi Chaos Marines had certainly used hallucinogenicgrenades -as well as boltguns and meltaguns and terrible chainswords, andheavier weaponry too. Were hallucinations intensifying the already appallingsight, and the implacable cruel touch, of pastel-hyed armour exquisitelydamascened with debauchery upon the breast plates and the shoulders? Was thatwhich was already monstrous being multiplied far beyond the brink of sanity?

A few tormentors had shed items of armour, exposing grotesquelymutated rampant groins, their organs of pleasure bifurcated and more, withsquinting eyes sprouting from them, and with drooling lips.

Others had no need to shed armour. Chaos Spawn hadmaterialized: wolf sized creatures with legs of spiders and bodies of imps,with questing tentacles and phallic tubes. Jaq himself almost believed that hewas hallucinating. A snake-like umbilical cord connected these spawn to theswollen groin-guards of their master - who stood back, roaring and whinnyingwith delight, as they guided the spawn in the ravishing of their captives, soakingup the sensations of these roving external members."

 

 ITS A TOY COMMERCIAL 

Even at this early stage its clear this is about SELLINGPRODUCT. We have to put the toys on display and while I think probably Watsonenjoyed the breakneck pace and sometimes delirious invention of the blizzard ofencounters, its also true that Inquisitor Jaq Draco encounters pretty much everymodel that you can buy right now; Genestealers, Eldar, Space Marines,Chaos Marines, Harlequins, Titans, Commissars, 

And the Space Marines and others are fashionable inan exquisitely 90s Warhammer style;

 

 

 

TINY SILVER PENTACLES

"Strapped in the gimballed control seat,protected by padding and armour, the princeps faced those great slantingeye-screens. Bronze bones framed the screens. Across an array of lesser datascreens diagnostic icons shuffled like phosphorescent beetles. A spaghetti ofcables led from his reinforced mind-impulse suit into ducts. Cables coiled fromhis shoulder pauldrons, and wires from his impulse-helmet - which now swunground to scrutinize the newcomers.

 

Behind a goggle-visor: weary blue eyes. below thevisor: a hooked nose with sapphire rings through each nostril, thin lips, and adepilated chin tattooed with tiny silver pentacles. 

 

DAMASCENED GROIN-HAUBERK 

“Grimm urinated into the open helmet of the Chaos Marine.Sizzling softly, the webs became a gingery mat clinging to horrid contours abovethe gaping metal-fanged jaw. 

From one of his pouches Grimm produced a bar of marzipanand began to gobble. 

Lex snapped his visor shut to scan data and diagnostic icons.When he opened it again, he announced, ‘My waste storage unit may bemalfunctioning somewhat.’ He murmured a prayer to Rogal Dorn. 

Grimm cocked his head. ‘Does that mean your mighty metal legswill start to fill with muck? 

Lex’s gauntlet lashed out. He stayed the blow before itcould pulverize Grimms face. 

‘I can recycle and detox my own waste for two days,abhuman. This suit is ancient,’ he declared. ‘Reverently repaired.’ His groin-hauberkhad visibly been renovated with a damascened silver engraving of a potentwarrior firing a storm bolter.”

 

 A VERMLLION BADGE OF NOBILITY 

“Scar tissue on Hachards chin stood out whitely asthough he had been punched. His cheek-tattoo was of a skull skewered by adagger. His teeth were painted black as a signal that any smile of his wasdark. A vermillion badge of nobility -a stylized power axe – adorned his rightknee-pad modestly so that, whenever bending to the Emperors image duringdevotions, he should kneel upon this heraldic honour. His gloved hand strayedto the Imperial eagle emblazoned in purple on his lavender dress cuirass, as ifto emphasize his unquestioning loyalty.”

 

 

 

THE PROSE, INVENTION, DIALOGE AND TEXTURE

Its mad with dankness.

The tumbling maddening harlequinesque prose combines andoverlays with the deranged invention

Watson is very clearly going carefully and joyfully offhis tits with his prose, his word choices, idea combinations, rushing butever-uneven rhythm, hold onto your hat at the start of every sentence andparagraph because you don't know how it is going to end, like a fairground ridethat segues into some other ride in the middle, and again before the end. AKNOWING SMIRK is the emotion I am detecting here but not the joyless Dreamworkssmirk of the empty ironist who abstracts themselves from their own ID through aveneer of eyebrow, but an Orson Welles-type smirk of a plump gourmand ofwords and concepts who is about to gorge themselves on sounds.

 

 SOLIDIFYING OGRESPOOK – NIGHTMARE INCARNATE! 

“Night rolled towards them like a velvet curtain, orlike a negative of an aurora. It hid from view those leaning towers. In thesickly sky an eclipse was eating swiftly across the leftward sun.

 

This was not how night fell in any sane reality!

 

The curtain of darkness halted before it reached them.Within that darkness flapped moth-like shapes, faintly phosphorescent, visiblein violet.

 

More such moths swiftly gathered, They massed to forma giant humanoid figure bestriding the shrouded land. The hulking figure gainedsubstance moment by moment as Lex continued to engrave Azul’s eye.

 

On the shoulders of the figure were mounted whatappeared to plasma cannons. Great grasping powerhands dangled. Around theankles of that solidifying ogrespook capered shadows – reminiscent of thathorned spiked suit of armour which had lain in Ulthwe’.”

…

 

“Jaq was sighting his force rod tentatively at thelooming colossus, muttering prayers of his own. Just then an extremely low moonsailed into view. Astride the capsized crescent sat the vilest of creatures, ason a saddle. Such saucer-eyes, such a parrot-beak. That tentacled fiendresembled some kraken from the deeps of an ocean. Its tentacles trailed down,becoming vastly long threads. With these, it began to fish.

…

 

“Here was nightmare incarnate. Another thread snared aChaos Marine, plucking the armoured brute from out of the darkness. ‘That ain’tno helmet,’ exclaimed one of the Imperial Fists, ‘that’s his head – ‘

 

To the amplified horror-struck gaze of the Marine itwas evident that the grotesquely metamorphosed Chaos warrior was guffawing withinsane delight as he was drawn up to share that surreal perch with the daemon.” 

……………………

 

 

THE DIALOGUE feels like a kind of arch 70's fantasysomehow, declarative, anquished, arch, pointed, ridiculous. Theatrical. Is hejoking? Is he screwing up or screwing about, or both? We will never know… 

 

HOMOGONIZED ENTRAILS 

“Lex’s voice rumbled sympathetically. ‘I understandloss, Sir Jaq.’

 

Loss?

 

Jaq had long since lost his holy office. He had lostthe fellowship of his ordo. He had lost his cherished funereal ship, whichmight well have been blasted to pieces in that eldar dock by Imperial forcesquite incidentally. Now he had lost his…. Helpmate.

 

‘Reckon we can steal this hyper-lance?’ Grimm askedLex. ‘Can you use it? Must be ancient and revered to be so powerful. Shall wepull it free? Reckon that’s wise?

 

‘No-oh-oh-oh!’ Such a howl burst from Jaq’s throat, ahowl of universal rejection and misery. Pull the great blade from Meh’lindi’sravaged ribs and homogenized entrails? ‘No!’ he cried. ‘She shall not betreated like some harpooned sea-beast!’

 

ITS AN *ACTUAL* EPISTOLARY NOVEL

 

Or at least it tries to be for a while. 

Most 40k texts are fake Epistolary novels; remember inthe grimdank future no record can be trusted and unreliable narrators andwhatever, but *in effect* books tend to be written from a floating 3rdperson perspective and are clearly not 'in-world' texts in any way, andfurthermore, texts part of the same general series are clearly attempting totell a coherent story where all the details match up, and not presenting adracula-style collection of missives or whatever. 

So there is a certain fakeness to the 'everything is trueand untrue' shtick. But the Inquisition War, while written in a 3rd person, doesfully purport to be an in-universe text, (apart I suppose, from some framingstories where some people are reading it and asking "why did he write itabout himself, in the third person?") These ‘novels’ are actually strangechunks of paper found in the entrails of the Golden Throne, transcripts of areport of something and Eldar Farseer maybe said, or just a funky book from theInquisitorial archives. 

They kind of give up on this somewhat , actually themiddle one is the only 'impossible' report as it ends with Jaq raiding theBlack Library, 

I do love the idea of it being a theme with Inquisitorsthat they commonly write their own experiences down as pulp novels and hidethem in archives, a useful technique since the truth must be disguised withfiction and fiction with truth, an ever-deniable record which may representtrue events, or the shape of true events. 

 

FURNACES OF NAUSEOUS LIGHT

“The ribbed wraithbone walls of an immense dome rose sombrelyupward. Across the zenith stretched a lake of night. A vast sky-light orenergy-field excluded yet also revealed the void of space.

 

That funereal lake was polluted by diseased luridgases. Hues of jaundice and gangrene and blood and bile stained those billowyshrouds. Suns within the sickly veils of gas, and of vile corruption, of a cancerspreading through the void.

 

It was the Eye of Terror – where Chaos spiled intoreality. Where warped worlds of unnatural geometry orbited furnaces of nauseouslight. Where daemons ruled.” 

 

 

(many of) THE BAD BITS ARE NOT THAT BAD ACTUALLY 

Ok the perving on the Callidus assassin, including herconstantly stripping naked, putting on sysnskin, examining herself in themirror naked and noting the shape of her breasts (watson what the fuck). Prettymuch everything to do with sex is anguished, overwrought, obsessive, horrificallyand malignantly autistic in a negative sense.. however, is this Watson being a charismaticnutter or brilliantly illuminating the perverse compression of natural humandesire in a nightmare future? I refer you to the IQ graph above.. 

The meeting with the emperor is relatively well done andnot that dumb. It takes a super-competent inquisitorial team about a month toweave their way through the palace, constantly changing identities, being leada crazed path of opportunities by a prescient fragment of the Emperors soulitself and they only get through the Eternity Gate because a larger gestalt ofthe Emperor casts Time Stop and pulls them through.

 

The last book is a downer with the team hiding out on onesingle world instead of having a crazed rollercoaster time, but there are stilla host of deranged moments and a sad, hurried end.

 

 

JAQ DRACO WILL RETURN! [SPOILERS!] 

What happened to the Ordo Hydra? 

The Sensi are coming back! The original Woke Warriors forour Disney Plus future! 

The Star Child! 

At the end Jaq Draco DIES but his spirit is trapped inthe webway where he can commune with dead Eldar seers. HE COULD STILL BE INTHERE! Its going to be great if he pops up randomly in some future book. 

Meh-lindi the sexy, dangerous Callidus assassin issort-of resurrected in the end! I fucking BET Abnett or *someone* will beingback the only Callidus to successfully impersonate a Genestealer AND and Eldar(though not at the same time), she is still out there! 

Grimm the Squat! That utter legend! Will he turn up onNecromuda? 

Probably GW aims to escape the looming tentacles of thehysteric left and the pink captialists “WHAT ARE YOU DOING THERE NERDS? IS THATFASCISM I SEE?” by shattering the Galaxy, turning it into something like Age ofSigmar with bits dominated by Primarchs and godlings, and brining back theSensai and the Star Child so that you can finally tell your mum “No mum I anplaying the good-guy anti-fascists actually!”

 

Hey its from Rogue Trader, its scripture so you can’t complain.

 

JONATHAH KEEBLE NEEDS TO PERFORM THIS BOOK! 

That’s it! Imagine him reading this stuff. It would bewild!

 

 

 WE ARE MANY

“WE ARE MANY, INQUISITOR’. The voice boomed in hismind almost gently – if gently was how an avalanche would sweep away a doomedvillage, if gently was how a scalpel might strip a life to the bare, achingbones.

HOW ELSE COULD WE ADMINISTER OUR IMPERIUM – ‘

‘AS WELL AS WINNOW THE WARP – ‘

‘HOW ELSE?’

 

The Emperors mind-voice, if that truly was what itwas, had dissociated into several voices, as if his great undying soulco-existed in fragments that barely hung together.

 

‘SO DOES THE HYDRA THREATEN US?’

‘IMPERILLING OUR GREAT AND AWFUL PLAN TO STEERHUMANITY?’

‘PERHAPS, IN A PART OF US, SINCE THIS HYDRA PROMISES APATH?’

‘SURELY A MALEVOLENT PATH; FOR HOW COULD HUMANITY EVERFREE ITSELF?’

‘THEN WE MUST BE MALEVOLENT TOO. FOR WE HAVE EXPELLEDOUR SENTIMENTALITY LONG AGO. HOW ELSE COULD WE HAVE ENDURED? HOW ELSE COULD WEHAVE IMPOSED OUR RULE?’

‘YET BY VIRTUE OF THAT WE ARE PURE AND UNCONTAMINATEDBY WEAKNESS. WE ARE GRIM SALVATION.’

…..

‘NOTHING THAT SAFEGUARDS HUMANITY CAN BE EVIL, NOTEVEN THE MOST STRENUOUS INHUMANITY. IF THE HUMAN RACE FAILS, IT HAS FAILEDFOREVER.’

….

‘WHEN WE CONFRONTED THE CORRUPTED, HOMICIDAL HORUS WHOONCE USED TO SHINE LIKE THE BRIGHTEST STAR, WHO USED TO BE OUR BELOVEDFAVOURITE – WHEN THE FATE OF THE GALAXY HUNG BY A THREAD – WERE WE NOTCOMPELLED TO EXPEL ALL COMPASSION? ALL LOVE? ALL JOY? THOSE WENT AWAY. HOW ELSECOULD WE HAVE ARMOURED OURSELVES? EXISTENCE IS TORMENT, A TORMENT THAT MUSTNOURISH US. EVIDENTLY WE MUST STRIVE TO BE THE FIERECE REDEEMER OF MAN, YETWHAT WILL REDEEM US?

 

‘Great  lord ofall,’ whimpered Jaq, ‘did you know of the hydra before now?’

 

‘NO, AND SURELY WE SHALL ACT IN DUE TIME – ‘

‘YET SURELY WE KNEW. HOW COULD WE NOT KNOW?’

‘ONCE WE HAVE ANAYSED THE INFORMATION IN THIS SUB-MINDOF OURS,

HEAR THIS JAQ DRACO: ONLY TINY PORTIONS OF US CAN HEEDYOU, OTHERWISE WE NEGLECT OUR IMPERIUM, OF WHICH OUR SCRUTINY MUST NOT FALTERFOR AN INSTANT. FOR TIME DOES NOT HELT EVERYWHERE WITHIN THE REALM OF MAN.INDEED TIME HALTS ONLY FOR YOU.

 

‘WE ARE AN EVER-WATCHFUL LORD ARE WE NOT? DID YOU HOPETO GAIN OUR UNDIVIDED ATTENTION?’

‘HOW ELSE SHOULD WE SOUL-BIND PSYKERS AND OVERVIEW THEWARP AND BEAM THE ASTRONOMICON BEACOM AND SURVIVE AND RECEIVE INFORMATION ANDGRANT AUDIENCES ALL AT ONCE, UNLESS WE ARE SO MANY?

‘AND YET STILL WE MISS SO MUCH, SO VERY MUCH? SUCH ASTHAT WHICH GUIDED YOU HERE.’

‘OUR SPIRIT GUIDED YOU.’

‘NO: ANOTHER SPIRIT, A REFLECTION OF OUR GOODNESSWHICH WE THRUST FROM US.’

‘WE ARE THE ONLY SOURCE OF GOODNESS, SEVERE ANDDRASTIC. THERE IS NO OTHER SOURCE OF HOPE THAN US. WE ARE AGONISINGLY ALONE.’

Ride the Giants, Development Blog 1

As mentioned here, I am attending the 'Cauldron' Con in Germany and am trying to develop a 'real time' adventure to run there. This is a development blog for that adventure. This is what I have so far. Later blogs will probably go into more specific sections and problems rather than giving an overview.
...................................................
Ride the Giants 

Once in every century, a crowd of ancient,stoop-shouldered giants come down from the Star Mountains and stride down the Sword Peninsula towards the Titans Reach,where the Sea of Storms separates the Lands We Know from the nightmare MonsterContinent which lies beyond. 

There, at the very point of the land, the Giants slow alittle, perhaps to gaze at the wild ocean before them. Then they walk off theland, into the sea, and  wade across theTitans Reach, the sea covering them even to the neck, the mouth, the eyes. Withoutslowing, they surge through the waves and, after four hours of wading, theyrise once again to the land, walking up the shore and making their way off intothe Monster Continent. 

Where they go, or why, none know, nor how they return.Perhaps they endlessly circle the world, for in roughly 100 years, the samegiants will return, again coming down from the Star Mountains, and again,slowing, just a little, to gaze at the Sea of Storms before they plunge into itand wade across the Titans Reach. 

They do not speak or communicate in any way. They walkthrough anything in their path, pushing down fortress walls like a man pushingthrough weeds, but ignore anything beyond it. 

A century ago observers with telescopes and trained birdsnoted ruins on the giants backs, strange parasites in their rockyskin, relics and remnants of unknown actions studded across them and what seemto be mysterious temples built atop their bowed heads! 

Now the Giants come again, but this time we are ready! 

I am King Sleet and I have called adventurers from acrossall realms. I have called you. 

Not to stop the giants, for nothing can, and we fear theirwrath if we try, but to board them! 

As the giants slow before the Titans Reach, they are justslow enough that it becomes possible to climb onto their feet. 

Board a giant. Climb it. If you are quick, it should bepossible to climb their legs as they wade into the ocean, staying just ahead ofthe rising water. Investigate. For any Lore or Treasure you return, you will bewell paid. 

My small navy waits at sea. They shall try to follow thegiants, as well they can. A few experimental Hot Air Balloons await. They arehard to control but they will try to follow and assist. 

You have FOUR HOURS (in real time) until the Giants walkonto the Continent of Monsters. None who go there return! 

They come! Prepare yourselves!  

 

 

The Scene 

As you look across the ranging fields you see spots ofcolour; other groups of wild adventurers waiting with hooks, grapples, ladders,horses and a crazy range of tool and tricks. 

Far beyond the giants path, the King observes from hispavilion, and lined around him, the people of the land, waiting to see theGiants. Far out to sea, the Kings small navy prepares to attempt to follow thegiants and in the air, experimental but hard to control hot air balloons bobabout, hoping to observe and perhaps even offer rescue. 

The brass horns are blowing! The ground is shaking! Thecrowd roars! 

 

The Giants 

The Giants are proportioned like immensely strong butvery ancient men with stony skin. They walk bent over like hunchbacks, headstilted up so they can see. 

From their perspective they are not walking veryfast, but their enormous size means that, to us, their feet thunder past. Therelative movement of their bodies is very slow, but for someone on the groundas they step over, the gargantuan foot fairly flies past overhead. 

The Giants heads are roughly 2,000 Feet in theair. 

Their skin is pitted and rocky. Where an ancient manwould have wrinkles and folds, they have cracks and crevices. Their surfacelooks rough and fricative. Scrub plants have taken root in places. Some havetrees or heather, scrubland and maquis, even small trickling streams, on theirbacks. 

If a giant was static and still, an energetichiker could possibly climb one in an hour and a half. 

The giants have something like hair. Perhaps it is vinesor growth of some kind mixed with ancient hair as thick as ropes or thebranches of trees. The hair hangs down around their heads and faces. On some,hair speckles their forearms and thighs. The Giants have thick hanging crotchand ass hair, which thankfully spares the modesty of those who look upon them,and which might also prove useful to climbers. 

 

The Giants Path 

There are about a dozen Giants. They walk together in nofixed formation. They sometimes stumble and brush up against one another. (Itmight be possible to leap from one to another). 

Over the Eons the Giants have worn a shallow valley inthe ground. Rivers and streams often weave and gather in this valley, so thegiants sometimes splash through them on their way.

 

Giant Layout – Labelled

 

 

The Climb 1. The Foot 

A 50 foot cliff. Very rugged, not sheer, more like aclamber. Race to the ankle. Need to climb up over and around the ankle to theback of the lower leg. There are unlikely to be other life-forms or encounterson the foot. 

Though, as the most accessible place, there might besmall encampments of bandits, sigilites, monks or others who have mounted thegiant at some point during its great journey. Those who understand the ocean iscoming will either be about to jump off or, like you, be willing to risk a rapidascent to stay above the waters. 

This would be a good place for a goatherds shack actually.They could let their goats rove all over the giant. Maybe they are a monk. Willthey come with you as you climb or refuse to believe in their doom until thesea washes over them. 

 

The Ankle Cross 

A traverse around a moving joint. Big possibility offalling off here, it must be accomplished quickly before the giant takes toomany steps into the sea. Once on the rear of the calf the terrain becomes morepredictable and the angle of climb more advantageous. 

Of course you could try climbing the overhand of theshin, but that is madness.. 

If there are other teams or spoiling factors this would bea good first spot to knock someone off, but does not guarantee their death…. 

 

2. The Lower Leg Climb 

How far is this? About 150 feet. A hard scramble andclimb up the back of the calf, a moving surface which shifts from near verticalto overhang in pulses as the giant walks. 

This is probably the most important time-sensitive climbas reaching the knee will keep you safe for most of the journey, only thedeepest part of the ocean at the two-hour mark will reach past this 

 

The Knee Decision 

As one reaches the knee another traverse is required,followed by a decision. Should one continue to climb the frontal thigh, aimingfor the hips and lower back, or risk it all with a daring leap onto the giantshand? 

The hand swings very close to the knee over the giantsslow steps. It is certainly possible to try to jump onto a knuckle as it swingsnear the kneecap. This might allow you to climb the arm and give you a timeadvantage, avoiding whatever terrors occupy the back.. You can aim right forthe head! It’s a straight climb up past the shoulder, 

 

3. The Upper Leg 

The climb up the front of the thigh may be fatiguing butis not technically difficult and it stands the best change of keeping yourparty together. As you begin to reach the hip you are truly out of danger fromthe rising sea level and can afford to take s short break to consider. 

Will you attempt a traverse up and over the hip, aiming forthe side of the back? Or will you clamber into the giants dense ass hair? Thegrowth is thick and tangled, making the way seem relatively safe. You couldmove through the crotch like a tick, work your way through the steaming jungleof the taint and then haul your way up to the base of the spine via the asshair between the cheeks. 

It sounds horrific, but isn’t just such an investigationthe reason you are here? And who knows who, or what you may discover in thatDark Realm? 

 

4. The Back 

At last, the great tilted expanse of the Giants Back. Finallyyou need no longer fear falling off. However this is a ready environment forcombat, either with other explorers or denizens of the Giants body. Its also agood place for a Balloon to try to land, they could tie up here and wait foryou, assuming you have already made arrangements. Or Balloons could land rivalparties or pirates. 

Will you explore the karst and moorland of the back orhead straight for the head and its mysteries? From here you can probably easilymake out the tailing naval forces. You may also be exposed to any flying monsters.. 

 

5. The Head 

What is the mysterious structure atop the Giants head andwhat secrets or treasures does it hold? Can you gain access to the Giants Thoughts(and even PILOT the giant?) 

This would be a good place for a Balloon to try to pickyou up from (if possible), but the Head may be haunted by Quetzacotolous orother flying creatures, perhaps mountain lions or even super-monkeys makingtheir home in the dense forest of its hair. 

Getting through that dense hair to the temple or fort onthe giants crown will be the hard part. One must risk diving or crawlingthrough the maquis of the scalp, risking attack by whatever lies beneath, orattack from above, the whirl of strange flying parasites which circles abovethe giants highest point, riding the thermals of its exertions. 

From here you can easily see the head-tops of the othergiants. Which other adventurers have already reached their summits? Some may bebeing picked up by balloons already, others may be rotating vast cannons orlazer guns to blast at you! Or signalling more peaceful intentions, even requestsfor aid… 

This might be a good place to consider, will you risk leapingto another giant? If you traverse down to the arm it might be possible as theybrush against each other… 

Reaching the peak of the head would also give you a goodlook at the advancing line of the Monster Continent, coming closer with eachmighty step…. 

 

6. The Arm Climb 

The arm in general is a tough, vertical climb with lesshand holds and less safety. It may however be less populated than the thigh andif one can manage it, it might bring you more directly to the neck, and thenceto the head, bypassing the great Karst of the back completely. 

 

The Mysteries of the Hand! 

Do the Giants have great rings upon those stony fingers?If so can you read the cartouche of its symbols as you climb across its goldensurface? Or does the giant have something in its hand? How big is that somethingand might it drop it? Is the giants ‘skin’ around its palm and fingertipsperhaps sensitive enough that it may detect the PCs climbing it? Here theswinging force of the giants movements would be the greatest of all. 

 

The Elbow Traverse 

Like the Knee traverse but worse. The angles of thegiants arms are more vertical than their legs but its still much easier toclimb the upward diagonal of the rear of its upper arm than to risk theoverhang of the front of the upper arm. Cover is less, as the rocky ‘skin’ ofthe giant is less chunky and dense. 

 

Hair or Shoulders? 

The giants armpit hair can provide a brief respite ofillusory safety but ultimately you are going to have to get up, out and over.. 

OR – if you are feeling truly radical, and if the giantitself has long enough hair or a long enough beard, you could try another LEAPinto the giants beard and/or hair. 

 

Climbing the Hair 

The thick, foresty hair should be climbable by anyone thief-likeor elf-like. But the hair is dense, may contain even more bugs and monsters. Hugeflakes of dandruff, and is a vertical climb which, no matter the hand holds,will be challenging. Though if you fall there is s good chance of grabbingsomething on the way down. The beard (if present) could provide a useful ‘off ramp’ for the last part of theadventure. 

If one wishes to make a quick exit on the return as thegiant is rising from the waves, it might be worth abseiling or clambering downits beard and dropping from the tips, hoping to be picked up by following shipsbefore the weight of your treasure drowns you. 

 

The Giants Face 

Only by climbing the hair will you stand a chance of lookingdeeply into the giants FACE

It can be seen from far off, but what strange sadnessdoes it hold when seem from close up?

What impossible and ancient emotions might it project? 

 

The Great Shoulder Traverse 

The tricky part is getting out of the armpit via theoverhang. But once this is done it’s a fatiguing but relatively simple scrambleacross its shoulders, up to its neck. If you are quick you may well beat anyoneclimbing from the legs. 

 

The Schedule 

How long to board the foot? 

How long till you have to climb? 

 

THE SPLASH POINT 

The giants enter the sea! This should be a major deal! Asthe giants foot slashes into the waves, from this point, the water is rising! 

 

Two Hours In – The Mid Point 

The Giants are as deep in the sea as they can be

Now would be the safest time to jump off

And if you are still alive it must be because you havegot pretty high

So why wouldn’t PCs jump off at this point?

Maybe the Giants only get up to their hips? So you havetwo hours to get that high?

Then the rest of the time to get over the back and down?

Or maybe even to try your luck on another giant? 

 

Three Hours In  - race for the scalp 

 

Four Hours In – The Turnaround 

 

Design Questions ‘Encounters’ while climbing 

Or just things you find or discover there..

These could be potential treasures, life forms, bits ofhistory

Maybe whole ship fragments

In the foot-to knee area (currently the part of the giantwhere they are climbing quickly to escape the rising sea levels 

 

When might you fall off?

Lets say with climbing limbs

You are in most danger of falling off *when the limb isvertical*

And since the limb is moving in ‘real time’ you can usethat as the ‘pulse’ of the game

With some kind of real-time timer

So while climbing, each pulse of gaming would be ascramble to secure yourself, or at least not be doing anything risky, beforethe limb reaches vertical 

 

What is the Procedure for falling off and getting back on? 

I mean, if you fall from high enough, death is prettylikely

Above a certain height water, even sea-foam, is likeconcrete

But there should be some kind of possibility of gettingback on the giant

Bribing a ship captain with treasures or a balloon pilot 

 

Spoiling factors.. 

A Naval war as ships from a rival king, or even from theMonster Continent attack those following in the lee of the giants. A Trafalgarattacks! You see the ships blasting at each other from above. No idea who willwin. Will you risk leaping into the sea, not knowing who may pick you up or howlong it may take? Will you try to intervene, perhaps firing from the giantshead or even attempting to manipulate a giant into crushing your foes?

The Gravity of Cows

Over many a volume of forgotten Lore, through many an hour of Netflix and Disney dreck and many a meltdown over whatever Games Workshop is doing this week, I have pondered the interlacement of the Paracosm, the Corporation, and Autism.
Lets say instead, - 'autistic traits' or 'light autistic spectrum traits'. Strongly Autistic individuals have a very hard time and don't get to do much. Those of us with autistic traits, of whom there are many more, well we have quite a strong effect on, and relationship with, popular culture.
You might even say that we are the collective gravitational force of Genre-based popular fiction.


Part One - Evolution of the Paracosm
But first the Paracosm, the alternate world! Its primordial precursors; most religions, imagined tales of distant lands, stories of a legendary past, 
Then more recently; the philosophical disquisition given concrete form; what if there was an island where this or that happened? Or a country that was ruled this or that way? Lets imagine it in detail, not just the parts relative to the argument but the whole thing. a republic, a Utopia, a perfect king a most awful tyranny.
Then; what if we just imagined such a place but there was no (direct) political argument to it? Or at least, it did not primarily rest on such an argument. This is not, legend, history, argument or scripture, it is directly stated fancy, a fiction. A creation of the imagination, and called so,but described as if it were a real place.
Then; when does it become a full Paracosm? When it is shared between multiple people? If so then the earliest I can think of is Glassland, the imaginary world cooked up by the Brontes. 
There must be a deep forgotten history of the Paracosm because it emerges so naturally from the play of children in friendship groups and families.
E.R. Eddison, writer of The Worm Ouroboros had one with his own brother I think, which is where many of his stories were set. The serial scientific and fantastic fictions of the late 19th and early 20th century were Paracosm, but owned by their author, and usually made purely as a vector for stories, the linked stories by various authors in 'Strange Tales' in particular
The vast, many-peopled Paracosm as we understand it I think really took root in the 70s and is closely related to D&D and corporate ownership.


Part Two - Corporate Power
for a Paracosm to be projected across a vast range of people, and for those people to be able to interact in a regular and systemic way with it, and for those systems to be unified and universally communicated, requires industrial production, complex communication and organisation.
A substantially large organisation must do this. Something bigger than just a small business, and for a substantially large organisation to do this there must be a substantially large reward. At minimum enough to pay for the industrial reproduction, communication and organisation. So the beast becomes something that feeds upon itself. The more industrial reproduction and systemisation spread the Paracosm, the more people interact with it, which feeds back into greater profits, which can go into more industrial production.
But more. As we consider the Paracosm though time, (and the most active ones have not been active that long), like land, if you want it to remain coherent, that is; stable in use and nature, then it must have an owner of singular identity, but one much longer lived than any individual person.
Historically the owners of land have been; an aristocratic family, the Church, a religious order, the King etc.
To which we may now add the corporation. The aristocratic houses of our modern day, and the Paracosm a virtual barony, which, like a stretch of agricultural land, can be conserved, developed, sold off, reduced to ruination and treated in many ways as a real place.
Now the Corporation, a 'virtual' aristocratic house, has its own virtual kingdom, a place sustained and made real by the interest and investment in it.
Something happened in the late 60's and 70s. Something to do with the growth of genre, the power of information technology and industrial production, free time for nerds and corporate interlacement with the imagination.
The 60's - Star Trek, Tolkeins major growth. Marvel and DC get a boost here and are re-integrated as Paracosms though they have been running for a while.
The 70s - Star Wars, Dungeons and Dragons
The 80's - the Warhammers 
So we have a synthesis; the Paracosm, an imagined barony, and the Corporation, an imagined and potentially immortal individual. The Corporation can own a Paracosm ... forever perhaps, and can theoretically maintain a profit on it forever, and it is that profit that allows the Paracosm to keep developing. The corporation is not an author, it has no single use in mind for the Paracosmbut far from it, desires as many uses as possible across as many systems of production as possible. 


Part Three - Autistic Traits
The interest in a Paracosm is not the same as the interest in an individual book or film but is renewed and remade through books, films, comics, television, animation, games, toys, models, props, bought costumes, embodied in acts of shared social play and through gatherings. All of these methods united by their shared love for and expression of, a place, or a reality, which is not real, yet is still shared and experienced by a great many people.
DEPTH of interest.love of DETAIL.Love of OBJECTS.SYSTEMISATION of shared communion.DISCUSSION and ARGUMENT over details.
And chief and ruler of these passions, desire to be POSESSED BY THE IMAGINED WORLD
None of these are necessarily the product of light autistic traits, but as a whole they synthesise with those traits, and with the pressures and coping strategies they produce, perfectly.
And from hence comes the great and terrible danger and most subtle trap of the Paracosm, the need to MILK THE COWS, for the cows are we.


Four - The Milking Process
Those who are drawn to the Paracosm tend to have autistic traits and of those who are drawn, there is something of a curve.
Cows.Cows is what we are.
But imagine you owned a field of cows, and some cows you could only milk once a day, or even once a week, and you had to go and round them up to do it.
But there were other cows, a minority, who you could milk twice a day, three times a day, more. And you don't have to go round them up. Instead they come to you, constantly, and in fact they get quite violent if you refuse to milk them.
So originally you start out with a Dairy Farm, as we would understand it, but what you end up with is quite different. It’s a milk factory . Which, yes a Dairy Farm is a milk factory. The difference is in the proportion of attention and resources you give to each part.
By the end, the factory is the main thing and you have forgotten you even had fields. There are fields out there sure, the cows live there, but most of your time is taken up with the very productive cowsand even more with those small minority of hyper-productive cows.
Really, as accounting goes, and as your milking operation improves, becoming more and more efficient, your fields decay, and this is inevitable.
Hence the life-cycle of the Paracosm


Five - The Natural Life-Cycle Of The Paracosm
Now, we don't know a lot of this for certain. The Paracosm that most neatly fit our definition have only been going since the 30s , so even the oldest are less than a century old, nor can we guess how they will respond to copyright laws which usually max out after about 100 years, but within that time period we can see a continual process, a pulse of growth and die-back.
Following the cows.Always follow the cows.
............
(It’s beyond curious to me that after Marvel and DC essentially bricked themselves into the Comic Book stores, to milk the cows of course, and maybe 40 years later, Disney/Marvel finds itself doing exactly the same thing, bricking itself back up inside Disney Plus.
It costs less outlay, less terrifying risk and the cows come to you.
At the same time Games Workshop attempts its own Streaming Service.
There are echoes here of the Comic Shop but also of Apples 'walled garden', of a lifestyle brand where every widget and thingy integrates with every other whatever, and where you can charge people a LOT, for entrance to that garden because, in Apples case, you are essentially guarding entrance to the globalised middle class.
None of the Paracosm-guardians have managed that yet, and likely nor shall they, (because of the Autistic Traits))
............
I will venture this as a thesis; every corporate-owned Paracosm, (which is to say nearly every major Paracosm), is at any point, somewhere in this long orbit between states.
Its natural arc is to slowly decay into a nightmare milk factory.
Then once that collapses, the milk factory will be razed and the clean open fields of a fresh new farm to be opened (with the ruins still lingering beneath the soil).
Then the whole process will begin again.
At times Paracosm can be pulled back and forth between the poles. Sometimes they can totally collapse and be regenerated, either by being newly acquired or even through 'community action', but they are always somewhere between these two points and defined by the gravitational pull between milking the cows and luring more cows. Those are the tectonic forces of imaginary worlds. The Gravity of Cows.

Designing for the Cauldron

 WHATS GOING ON HERE
I have been invited to a Con in Germany called 'Cauldron' 
https://cauldron.pesa-nexus.de/en/home/
and my mum said I should go so I am going. I will be picked up in Frankfurt and driven to a castle in the middle of Bavaria.... For several days.. I am sure everything will be fine...
Anyway they asked me to run something;
"the general idea is to play mostly FLAILSNAILS compatible sessions, so that a player can play his character across the convention. .... The minimum requirement for any game system during the weekend is to award gold & treasure in the adventure commensurate with the challenges & dangers, i. e. an  "XP for gold"-standard, roughly following B/X, 1e or OD&D tables in value."
So, now I must dig through my mental 'bits box' to put together... something. A four-hour FLAILSNAILS session at least.. 
Lets think about some possible concepts;


1. GIANTS IN THE ACID SEA
A dungeon, or a series of dungeons, set 'on' the bodies of some enormous stony giants who are wading across a sea of acid. (So you can't just jump off).
Though, the problem of what to do if or when someone fals off a giant, and if or how they might get back on, would be tricky.
Mapping would also be tricky; the backs and top of the heads would be relatively easy but climbing around the torsos and faces and under the chins would be hard to depictand YES its just 'Shadow of the Colossus' or whatever was going on with those Zelda dungeons.
If its for a Con, the time factor of the giants wading the acid sea could be a neat limit. Say you leap onto a Giant as they enter the Acid Sea and have until they wade across to complete your mission. We could just say there is a real-time time limit. 
Maybe they are gradually wading so deep that only the tops of their heads are exposed and you need to jump back on the airship before they go completely underwater, or they reach the deep part of the sea precisely half-way through the session, with parts of the giants becoming un-navigable up to that point, with all the surviving creatures on the giants gradually forced up to the crown of their giant heads, then after the middle of the session the 'maps' slowly open up again until they reach the shore, then you can climb down a leg and exit via the heel.
You can jump from giant to giant. They have treasure on them, like earrings or crumbs of gold in their hair. Or you have a mission of some kind to find something.
Probably they have small temples or castles on the tops of each head and you can fire catapults or cannons from crown to crown.
For some reason I was imagining this as a knock-out 'vs' game with rival teams of adventurers clambering over the giants and trying to take each other out. Or maybe a rival tomb, or crown-robbing expedition where you leap onto the giants feet right at the start and everyone is racing to make it to the top, but also you can 'board' or jump onto other giants who are also stumbling along.


2. THE ROPE BRIDGE BROKE
An adventure starts mis-en scene with the party in the middle of a rope bridge, they are in the middle of a fight or adventure, the bridge snaps and two half's of the group are flung to either side of the ravine.
Its entirely random who ends up on which side of the ravine. Though the groups are relatively equal in number.
From that point on its a journey up along the river/ravine. The aim of the party is to get back together (maybe each half of the party has half of a magical McGuffin
There is a group of bad guys, a specific group, with their own identity and rituals. Presumably they also want the McGuffin (both halves). 
Probably the cliffs to both sides have various tombs, statues and complexes worked into the stone, so you can run along the cliff top, or if threatened, or that becomes impassable, climb across the statues and run through the tunnels of the cliffside.
(Maybe there are giants or trolls up there throwing boulders for fun so you don't want to skyline). 
The main challenge in this case is not getting past any particular problem but getting past it *quickly* and without burning a lot of resources.
Probably the enemy group is pursuing you and, since the terrain on each side of the ravine is very lumpy, the PCs on the *opposite* side can see the people pursuing you, and even shoot at them, while you can't see them yourself, and visa-versa. So part of the game might be combining your efforts to aid each other.
The end-game is you need to get to the stone bridge further upstream, but when you get there there is a big monster or something waiting and you will need to work together and hopefully use the stuff you grabbed as you ran through the tombs to fight it.


3. A RACING GAME....
this is kind of blissfully dumb but could stripmine Gaslands for rules, instead of cars, use magic animals. Players can pick toys to choose which animal their PC is riding. All PCs retain their powers and skills. 
Now their job is to win a race. Maybe they are racing for the hand of the Infinite Princess. But its an apocalyptic deathrace 2000 pod race kind of thing, with lots of encounters and strange terrain, treasure and tools hanging around plus problems its really hard to overcome without teaming up with other players, plus orc racer gang on pigs.
Will the PCs work together or try to beat each other to the finish line? Coolness of prizes goes in order of finishing so being ahead of someone might get you more XP or fun magical stuff for the next adventure.


4. LOOT THE SINKING SHIP
A ship is a nice, contained and explicable shape. A sinking ship having four real-time hours before it fully sinks and you need to get away from it to escape being dragged down. Advancing fish-creatures or mer-people. Interesting time-sensitive choices between things i.e. do you release prisoners or search for treasure. 
You might have to fight the crew, or choose between fighting or saving the crew.


5. STOP THE MEMETIC PLAGUE
This is one, really designed specifically to be a nightmare for EVERY OTHER DM AT THE CON. 
I don't know exactly how it works but there is some kind of memetic plague, maybe something that trades power for slow degradation and transmittabillaty. Like Vampirism except faster and more fun, like Fireball Vamparism where someone gets the ability to cast 'Fireball' but its transmissible and wants to keep being cast. (Also its slowly killing you).
Maybe the fire itself is the medium of transmission. 
But if the PCs screw up and the 'infection' gets out of this particular game (like the Zombie survivor who gets bitten but doesn't tell anyone), then it can 'infect' every other game at the CON that those survivors get to, and then pass on, and on, absolutely destroying Germanies FLAILSNAILS scene, if such a think exists.
I suppose a good basis for this would be the 'Fire at the Laboratory' adventure. Maybe a wizards black tower, or worse, an interdimensional TARDIS-like lair, but its burning down. (A fire burning in an interdimensional place might be fascinating). The PCs have to make choices about fighting the fire, looting the place, not getting infected by the Fireball plague, (or 'getting' infected if they are sneaky). 
The Wizards wierd mutant experiments getting out, or maybe you want to let them out, they are just experimental animals after all, its not their fault they are locked in a burning TARDIS. 
The interdimensional nature of the space makes incorporation into a FLAILSNAILS setting pretty simple since PCs could easily be vomited out wherever. It also means creatures and NPCs could 'escape' into other games, or that people or things from other games could show up in this one, having accidentally wandered in, or having been captured or whatever.


6 - One of these OLD POSTS turned into an adventure somehow;
THE WATCHMAKERS WIFE 
WHO CAN STOP THE WORLDS MOST EVIL DOG?
AN ADVENTURE IN XOPHT
THE STOLEN SKIN OF SUN

YOU MAY VOTE OR COMMENT IF YOU WISH

WALLS OF ICE

What was Africa like during the Pleistocene?
Oh it was pretty cool. (￣ー￣)


Human population bottleneck theories vary quite a bit but the most recent, most reliable synthesis I am familiar with guesses the total human population reduced to somewhere between 3,000 and 10,000 individuals for 5,000 to 10,000 years some time in the Pleistocene, say maybe about 70,000 years ago, possibly in what is now north east Africa.
WHAT IF we created some kind of RPG set within that forge of mankind? Its a tantalising reality; a closed environment, surrounded by, well probably not ice, as the ice walls would be further north, but probably dry land and super-deserts, then ice. Plus the mountains of Africa would probably have substantial glaciers so there's your 'Ice Walls', title still counts.
The entirety of humanity being about 7'000 people. If we go by Dunbars numbers and eyeball it we could say four or five 'tribes', each with say 15 lineage groups with about three bands each. So depending on the kind of game you play, you could 'encounter' pretty much everyone who exists.



WHAT WAS THAT ENVIRONMENT LIKE?
In Africa? Warm and wet I think, especially wet. BIG lakes, big rivers, Glaciers coming down from the mountains. Africa probably quite a bit chonkier side-to-side due to lower sea levels. May possibly have joined with Arabia at points. Pretty big north-to-south as well but you can't actually get north due to the arid super-sahara and beyond that.. the valley of the Mediterranean? No idea what that would have been like. North of that maybe some microclimates in the alps then permafrost for a few 100 miles then ICE SHEETS.



"In Eurasia, large lakes developed as a result of the runoff from the glaciers. Rivers were larger, had a more copious flow, and were braided. African lakes were fuller, apparently from decreased evaporation. Deserts, on the other hand, were drier and more extensive. Rainfall was lower because of the decreases in oceanic and other evaporation." - from Wikipedia



FUNKY ANIMALS
I could build you a list of 'cool' Pleistocene animals to encounter but, tbh, the African 'Big Animal' set doesn't look like it was *that much* different during that era.  There are various theories about this, the main one is that this biosphere had longer to get used to human behaviour and wasn't hugely changed when humans as we know them spread out after the last glacial maximum.
Most importantly, several cool animals were *quite larger*, i.e. Super-Hippos, Murder-Baboons. And humanity really had utterly crap technology to deal with them. 
And also some very fun art has been made of this environment

Got this one off pintrest

Its quite wonderful for a D&D type game as everything is so sublimely dangerous.



DIFFERENT HUMAN STRAINS
A fascinating but somewhat morally-complex element is the vast potential range of human strains. 
(Please don't comment about what exactly a species or subspecies or race or whatever is or is not, the matter is in development.)
A trend in Prehistory(?) currently is the gradual expansion of a much greater variety of human and humanlike 'types'. (I will just call these 'human strains'). Previously we knew that 'Sapiens' and Neanderthal co-existed, but genetics has unravelled that this bottleneck population, or something close to them, interbred with Neanderthal enough to leave a tangible trace in their genetics. We know about Florensis, the little hobbit dudes and from Denovisian Cave we know that a bunch of human strains were effectively hanging out in what seems to have been the Mos Eisley Cantina of prehistory. We also know that a lot of current African populations have 'ghost populations' in their genetics; traces of some kind of lost strain for which we have no evidence except for the faint echo they left behind in a surviving Sapiens population.
The 'out of Africa theory remains broadly in place but with massive, (I can't emphasise this enough, MASSIVE) complexification, with loop-backs, bottlenecks, strain-crossing, evidence of these strains hanging out just a lot of stuff.
If the pre-21stC version of Homo origins was a nice neat set of spreading lines and a few discreet 'subspecies' who may have barely interacted but displaced each other through environmental effects, then the new version is.. basically Jabbas Palace. Way, way way more types and strains of Homo, way more crossbreeding, way more interaction, way more messy strange bullshit. 
The very-rare nature of pre-glacial-maximum remains (plus the fact that many are probably in Africa and even with a massive input of wealth and tech, are probably covered by rainforest and won't be found without a truly sci-fi level of tech), and the massive increase in types, and genetic and archaeological evidence of mutual-existence and interaction, has strongly tilted the general view of pre-historic human-strain history into kind of more like an American post-Tolkien fantasy novel. Its not really stupid any more to say hey, maybe a surviving *Erectus*, a Neanderthal and Denovisian and a Sapiens team up to fight a fucking giant tiger or something.
Its still not probably likely but it feels way more likely than it was.

I think this is by Marucio Anton


THE GENETIC SQUEEZE-BOX
This 'Bottleneck', (both the real one and the one we are simulating in this game), may well have acted as a genetic sausage machine for a variety of human strains. This means the populations going in to the bottleneck might have a pretty high level of diversity, but the population coming out, is singular; after several millennia with less than 10,000 individuals they have the very low-diversity genome we associate with the extra-African Sapiens population.

Peter Schouten



WHAT IS THE ACTUAL GAME LIKE?
WHO is the RPG player playing? 
The tribe? The person? The Gene-line? Is this a survival/crafting game? A cultural development game? A game of genetics? A game about exploring the boundaries of your world, or a game about surviving within the boundaries of a closing world?
I honestly don't know and in fact it sounds more like a series of games.
At the 'top end' a genetics/environmental-influenced Microscope.
Below that a crafting/cultural/technology semi-simulator in the middle. Battles and diplomacy in a closed and shrinking world (maybe something patterned like Pendragon).
At the bottom end a very BX-like survive-the-monsters, gather food D&D-esque game.
I suppose you could combine these into one vast Fantasy Heartbreaker with each player playing a Gene-line at the top level, then after that 'round' of game time is played, they go down a level and play the 'tribe' or Culture-line, with abilities and developments influenced by the gene-tree, then you zoom down to the deep granular history and generate a bunch of Homo who's stats/equipment/abilities etc are all influenced by the previous two rounds. Then this little D&D team faces one of the crisis points of their small, closed world. 
Depending on how they do in that mission they get more or less points to feed back into the next loop of gameplay.


PLAYING THE GENE-LINE
I don't actually know enough about genetics to even begin to attempt this, and I think possibly humanity doesn't know enough for anyone to simulate it. So I would be really very largely making it up. Which, from a political point of view may actually be better as this is one of the most politically and morally complex and dangerous parts of this extremely politically and morally sensitive game (see below for 'Things Which Won't Be In This Game').


THE TECH/TRIBE/CULTURE TREE
This might be a very-great compression but I would probably be going from starting out something like a very-clever Erectus, who might occasionally sharpen a rock, and ending up as something a bit like an Aboriginal Australian culture.
I have to base a extra-African just-post-Glacial-Maximum culture/technology group on something and Aboriginal Australians seem like the closest we are going to get any good info on. Their tech and culture feels pretty "early stone age".



POSSIBLE TECH/CULTURAL DEVELOPMENTS
Most Important; textiles, bags, containers, glues, attachment materials, hooks and lines, woven string and rope. 
We would go from "Pick it up, drop it or bury it" to "Put it in the bag/gourd". This is a pretty big deal. Lines and cords are, as anyone who has played D&D will know, a very big deal. Clothing is maybe the most vital technology in allowing Sapiens to enter such a wide range of environments. Sewing is a killer app.
Most Charismatic; weapons, spears, boomerangs, atlatls, slings, hunting clubs, throwing sticks, early simple bow technology? Probably the simple bow was invented independently a bunch of times. Shields and armour are both important too. Aboriginal Australian cultural beliefs about shields are interesting.
Travel; canoes, (dugout and bark), initial canoes more likely to be used in lakes of which there were apparently quite a lot during the Pleistocene. I think even strapping things to friendly animals is quite a way off. Complexity of language and the cultural complexity required to receive, remember and transmit that information would be important. Going from "I will show you the way" to "I can tell you ALL the way" is a big deal and would fundamentally change the capacities of a society.
Cultural; message sticks, drumming, dance and Communal Performance as a 'living law book' capable of harmonising and transmitting a shared culture across many more people. Drumming and dance also seem really important in building shared identities and a 'communal self' probably enabling larger group sizes, mor sophisticated group actions giving you something to actually do or exchange if you go visit other humans other than just material things, and also just making life less shit. Complexity of language would be another; the development of syntax and tenses, descriptions of actual and supernatural things. This cultural complexity and the firmware needed to carry it helps you hang on to those cool inventions like slings and atlatls and sharp rocks. Most of these things were probably invented hundreds of times by increasingly clever Homo until finally someone found a way to jam them into the culture, transmit and preserve the information even if the original inventor wasn't there to show you how to do it. The relationship with, and inner conceptualisation of animals a main thing, you have to build the animal in your mind before you can interact with it.

Agricultural/Survival Shifts; from scavenging to hunting to possible-pastoralism and maybe some mild agriculture. Finding a new thing to eat and a new way to eat it is a big deal. Curiously in later pre-history there seem to have been some Neolithic culture groups who really liked fish, and others living in exactly the same environments who just would not eat fish, even over long periods. People are pretty interesting. One of the side-effects of culture may be... I suppose we would call it 'bugs', like "We are not eating shellfish fuck no not even if it means starving that stuff is banned by the spirits for a reason."
Dogs.




THE REAL-TIME GAME; EARLY HOLOCENE CATASTROPHES
All those melting glaciers, shrinking lakes, expanding land and changing rivers open the possibility for some quite-sudden catastrophic events. Not to mention the fucking MONSTER ANIMALS. Plus ALIEN HUMAN STRAINS! 
Gigantic things, or the axial points of super long-term processes, can happen over a day, or a few hours, like an ice barrier breaks, tectonic shifts tilt a super-lake slightly against a thinning rock wall, a super-lake drains away mysteriously. Tunguska events. Again not likely of *common* but at least a few of these must have happened.
Or even slightly less catastrophic sudden arrivals of super-predators, giant unbeatable animals either driven south by expanding ice walls, or displaced by warming and its knock-on events. The arrival of a *last of its kind* forgotten mega-predator in an 'alien' environment would be fit fuel for an adventure. You want to try taking on that thing with sticks?
The arrival or displacement of an 'alien' human strain (i.e anyone sufficiently different from you) would be another. Its a limited resource-poor environment after all, and you can't really leave till the glacial maximum ends. Will this be a matter of SUPER WAR where you use all your cultural sophistication to turn your whole tribe into a SUPER HUNT gathered together and synchronised at an heretofore unimagined scale. An army of hundreds in one place? 
Or could it be a Pleistocene Star Trek where your Sapiens/Neanderthal cross uses the power of imagination and intelligence to perform cross-strain diplomacy for the first time, entering into the gaze of an unknowable Other in attempts to bridge an unimaginable cognitive gap and form some common understanding?
Your kin-group is starving, your kin-group is sick, a new environmental possibility has opened up, another has closed down. Literally any kind of megafauna is fucking with you. Fucking MURDER BABBOONS?
nooooooooooooooooooo



THINGS THAT PROBABLY HAPPENED THAT YOU PROBABLY DON'T WANT IN YOUR GAME
Probably more than any other game I can imagine, this one would need a VERY long introduction, explanation, disclaimer and probably you have to sign something before you play promising not to cancel or sue the makers.
Starting with things that probably happened quite a lot in pre-history but which won't be happening (much) in this game;
RapeSlaveryPatriarchyMutilation and tortureGenocideIntensely weird sexual stuffHuman sacrifice CannibalismBatshit Xenophobia
I don't mean to say (and we don't fundamentally know) if this stuff was universal, much less common in pre-history, but what we know of many Stone Age peoples (and since) strongly suggests the normalised nature of most if not all of this.
RPG players will tend strongly towards leb-leftism, but even if they didn't, on a greater scale, there is probably a hard limit to how much rape, abduction, genocide, mutilation, human sacrifice etc ANY person can reasonably expect to actually play out.
Any game which functions *as a game* will inevitably be presenting a very 'softened' interpretation of human capacities and nature, and this is ok, so long as I am very clear about the fact that this is a fantasy with softened corners and less sharp edges. Be aware you are participating in a real-seeming dream, and NOT a simulation.
Its just a limitation of the form. It is what it is I guess.





And... GENETICS
The beloved Science of Human Inequality raises its Janus-split face. It is genetics, to a large degree, with a fair amount of archaeology, we can thank for our expanding deep-view of our own prehistoric origins and all of the wonderful and sometimes awful complexity and detail that has emerged. Our genes really are a telescope in time.
Unfortunately our own society is based around a rather hard-won principal of the broadly equality of human life, and genetics is the science of precisely-described human inequality. This 'bottleneck' whether it was one event or several, created a deep shared structure in the *extra-african* Sapiens line (which then looped back into Africa in several ways). Enough of a commonality so that when this line spread out across Eurasia and into America, it seems to have either murdered the fuck out of every big animal it could find, or at least disrupted the environment so much those megafauna couldn't survive.
We don't know how and how much genetics interacted with culture and technology to produce this hyper-successful strain but I doubt it was *zero*. And that fact that it isn't *zero* is a meaningful moral challenge to the mainstream of our society.
Gene-line or 'descent' differences aren't the same as 19th Century concepts of race, but they speak the same language and unlike race, modern genetics speaks *precisely*. Genticists have largely gotten around this with a combination of blather and mild autism; "ah yes the 19thc century concept of 'race', oh no we wouldn't use anything like that any more, rather disproven you know, anyway, here's your childs likely IQ, to within a 5 pt margin."
On a deep level the genetic history of humanity teaches interwoven strands of truth. One strand is quite nice; it’s about shared human origins, a deep diversity of human strains, a shared struggle and a shared environment where everything effects everything else. The Force does indeed bind and link us all Obi-Wan. 
But the other strand, which is equally true, is about utterly ruthless competition, hominids murdering and raping the fuck out of each other, displacing each other from environments and differences in genetic advantage cascading into and/or synthesising with cultural and technological advantages. It’s about humans as the monsters from a science fiction movie and has kind of a 'there can only be one' Highlander vibe. 
And both of these are true. It just depends which lens you look through. There is a level of choice in what we emphasise and find meaning in, and in the lessons we take, but there is no choice in the facts.
Which is a main reason this game will probably never exist, or if it does, it will come with something you have to sign before you play.




That was a little depressing so to end the article;





'POSSIBLE' THEORETICAL PLEISTOCENE DEVELOPMENTS
Previously I was working in the realm of the 'likely', based on our current understanding of history. But fuck that, what if we ignored 'likely' and went straight for 'possible'!
Pleistocene Empires baby! Can't find them? That's because their cities are UNDER THE SEA. The Inca of the Glacial Maximum! Polynesians of the Great Lakes!
We could just take *every* kind of *possible* Stone-Age technology and culture and jam it all together in a Conan-the-Barbarian style mashup of cool things. You can't prove it didn't happen! Glaciers took the evidence!
So; Very large boats. Oceanic vessels. Intra-oceanic navigation (it is *possible* as the Polynesians have proved, but what if it also happened at a previous time?) Inter-oceanic navigation (even less likely but *possible* at least in theory). A worldwide coastal empire, why not?
Super-stonehenge Ziggurat cities, cave-cities (we know they turned up later). Mass scale Imperial warfare. Grass suspension bridges with villages whose whole purpose is to continually re-weave the bridge (Inca did it). Catapults. Sieges. Terror-bird cavalry. Trained super-baboons and mega-hippos.
Neanderthal shock troops and Florensis advisors wearing capes of humming bird feathers. Super wars to crack open the gates to the Mediterranean basin and drown the Empire of the Morlocks. Eating small horses for dinner. Crowns of amber and bone. Flutes of mammoth ivory. You could do an entire Pleistocene-Elric series or 'forgotten Aztecs' game set in some early inter-glacial period when the world looked an utterly different shape. 
It would have quite an elegiac lost-summr feel as this civilisation grew too soon, and the glaciers were coming back, and then after that the glaciers were shrinking waaay too much and the seas rising so even the ruins of these Inca/Minoan/Polynesian cities were drowned and forgotten.
Honestly if you just jammed in every cool thing from every stone age 'high' civilisationand all of the 'homo' descent groups you could imagine, plus all of the Pleistocene fauna you could think of, it would be pretty fucking great. 
Like being an extinct homo species and calling your Florensis slave to your ziggurat to bring you a humming bird quill so your can write poetry on calfskin about the doom of your civilisation before riding forth on your war-glyptodont to battle the savage raiders for the last time. Behold! how an empire ends!