Patrick Stuart's Blog, page 9

A Review of 'Tomb Robbers of the Crystal Frontier' by Gus L

 

Writing AND Art! A twofer! 
PURPLE DESIGN
Has a pleasingly integrated aesthetic and informational design, everything is in shards of pink and purple.
But who did layout, was that Gus?
A pleasing unity of form.







Guss' art is not always perfect but it is always correct.


GUS L AND HIS WORKS
Gus is an old old OSR (though he is just as likely to have renounced that group identity a few times since I last read his stuff.
He ran a blog called Dungeon of Signs [http://dungeonofsigns.blogspot.com/] which was pretty good, had a huge megadungeon called HMS Apollyon, and all of his stuff was free and slightly complicated, and because it was free it never really developed a 'cult following', though he had more than enough expertise and artistic and creative power to be considered very notable.
He was and likely is also a very very left wing and very bitter man.
Now he blogs at All Dead Generations [https://alldeadgenerations.blogspot.com/] and has come to whatever self-negotiation with the spirit of capital he needed to and produced something you can pay money for, so now people will like it more.
And well worth the money it is!
Because he is writer, and artist, AND map-maker (the most important) AND (maybe?) layout person - Gus could probably make an INSANE amount of money - however since he is a Commie also he probably wont.
No judgement here - I have written about the inescapable polarity between D&D's twin roots of capitalistic systemisation and ground-up folk art, to which we can add the parasocial personality economy of Kickstarter and the friend/contact economy.
Its all a little ugly and impure but so is everything that works, the best anyone can do is decide which compromises they are willing to make and try to stick by that honourably.



A MORE FUNCTIONAL FORM OF CULTURE WAR
So while the not-right-wing-actually wing of the OSR seems to have recombined around Prince of Nothings blog it seems the not-communist-actually-you-CHUD wing (and this being the OSR, the actual political spread of creatives goes all the way from centre left, to very fucking left, with a few dots in the centre right, and then a little reactionary splurge a bit further right) has recombined (if they even needed to) around Bones of Contention and whatever purple grouping this is.
This is actually working better than it was back in the day, when all these goons had to share a forum or a G+ string or a comments thread life was 80% drama, 15% autism and 5% REEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE, now they have all effectively purged each other from one another’s spaces and, looking around in their MIND PALACES, presumably have been left with little option but to actually produce dungeons, so now we have Prince of Nothings anti-artpunk thing and this.
10 out of 10, would partition again.




IMAGINED WORLD - STATELESS BORDERLAND
Like many D&D settings this exists on the borders of political power to allow the negotiation between law and lawlessness that makes up what we typically consider 'adventure', in that there is somewhere to go from (civilisation) and go to (the 'wild'), where you can do things that are usually or often disruptive to civilisation, and then return from back to, hopefully with all the money you made.
(Other versions would be just staying in the 'to' - which is maybe survival meets empire building - you don't get to trade the 'treasure' away to somewhere else for money which is mainly useful somewhere else, instead what you have that is useful is what you have, so gold less important than dry wood, and staying in the 'from' where you are still in civilisation and may to extra-legal things but have ot keep it on the down-low, in which case, we might call that 'intrigue' or a 'crime' game.)
The game where you go from the wilds into civilisation and then go back to the wilds, I haven't seen that very much - we could maybe call that the Tarzan game, or a Conan game. Some unexplored possibilities there perhaps.)
Different to some points of crap settings, this borderland exists between two or I think three empires, one of which is gaining in strength - so it looks like there is no 'infinite frontier' but instead distant, but growing, and probably inevitable, conflicts between major powers.
This plays into the faction play of the main settlement in which the main players are represented by low level goons and the unstable power balance of the town means the PCs will probably end up getting involved in this somehow, pissing off and or pleasing one or more of the factions and, if they are successful tomb robbers, disrupting the tenuous balance of power.
There is also a nascent fourth faction mad up of revenants and fallen star people which can pop up and start blooming in various forms depending on what you do in the crystal tombs.



THE CONCEPT OF THE RAINING CRYSTAL TOMBS
An elegant conceit where a bunch of crystal meteors or stellar objects created or made into tombs by a race of elfish types who live up above the atmosphere, are plummeting through the atmosphere and landing across the 'crystal frontier'.
This answers the question of why it is a stateless borderland - giant crystal things keep plummeting out of the sky and when they land they poison the place, and why tomb robbers come there (no need for 'deep time' past empires integrated into the history of the game world)
[Interesting conflict or polarity there between OSR-adjacent creators tending to like both modularity in dungeon concepts but also loving 'deep time' and 'readable strata of empire' in their dungeons].




CRYSTALS - GOOD OR BAD?
I am on record as being against crystals both in principal and actuality. Mere ageless boxes of refracted light, they carry no stain, mark no culture and drift through rich history like raindrops across a windowpane, yet for all that it is based largely in and around crystals I cannot deny that this book makes as good a use of them as likely can be made;
Professional crystal cutters gaining access to fallen tombs (possibility of tomb manipulation as one grows in this skill).
Ballardian crystal transformation disease.
(the opportunity for Stugatsky/Cronenberg crystal doppelgangers who walk prismatic through the wastes and think they are, and may be, the originals, is missed, but can be easily added)
Crystal swords, chests, zombies etc.
The refractive capacities of light in a crystal tomb are I think not fully developed.
Actually was I wrong originally? I think I would have preferred a somewhat more dreamlike and Ballardian tinge to the setting - shimmering plains and Faberge hogs, shining prismatic ghosts watching from obsidian crags, well you can't have everything.




LIKEWISE TOMBS - GOOD OR BAD?
There is something of a limitation in the concept of Tombs, in which nearly everything you meet inside has to be a revenant, construct, ghost, immortal or trap of some kind.
This is evaded somewhat by having the main tomb be crashed for a while and penetrated already so now an animal is nesting inside, in a secondary dungeon rival groups of prospectors are already humming about outside 
and there is nothing saying further drops must be limited to tombs, there could be crystal mazes, laboratories, churches, space-forts etc etc - 
yet still they must be crystal...




THE FLOW CHART OF THIS DUNGEON
I have *tried* to produce here a very simplified flow chart of the dungeon layout which hopefully will not ruin it for anyone or tread on copyright or design



The lower red arrow is the main entry and the upper arrow a potential secondary entry and exit
Looks like basically a two-loop system, one loop obvious and the other hidden by a secret door.
If you look at the upper right branch of the leftmost vertical, irl that actually crosses *under* that point of the right vertical, if I were doing this I would have found it hard to avoid jamming in some kind of secret passing or crack there to create a third loop.
Should a dungeon be looped-to-fuckery?
Should it (like this one) have maybe one or two main loops and *possibly* more but those found only by exploration investigation or cunning?
Is there some kind of neat proportion or value between a dungeon having a certain proportion of 'open loops' and 'hidden loops'?
There is some kind of balance or at least, relationship here between the virtues of 'Flow Control' making a more Zelda-ish puzzle dungeon - like Arnold tries to do much of the time, and between ruincore or crumblecore design where there is just a hive of sneaky and chaotic ways to worm through a place as if it were rotten wood, producing a chaotic and unpredictable state of play, like I tried to do with Demon-Bone Sarcophagus.



THE MYSTERY OF WHICH ORDER TO LAY OUT A DUNGEON BOOK IN CONTINUES
There is a lot of excellent stuff in here; the main dungeon, a local town with factions etc, isometric AND flat maps, all done by Gus, plus a nice isometric area map, ANOTHER smaller dungeon with some battling prospectors.. 
(it’s a spiral which means it’s essentially a single line. I once made a spiral dungeon thinking it would be mysterious and cool but actually it turned out to just be a line and the players were tired and frustrated, not saying that is the case here but something to bear in mind)
Anyway, do you put the world stuff at the front, like an establishing tone thing, put it in the back like an appendix? Which maps do you put where? (this has literally every kind and format of map you might need, top down, isometric, for players for DM, etc,) do you arrange it to be read more like a story? to be referenced? for usage? (what kind of usage and by whom).
Anyway there is literally no good or correct way to lay out a book of this kind so...






CAREFULLY ENGINERED INTRO-DUNGEON
The Crystal Tomb has the dungeoneering process integrated into world arrangement, with an on-call group of seconds to take the place of dead party members, rewards for both deceit and honesty with bosses, probably enough XP to get players out of the one-hit-to-kill zone.
It is not as carefully engineered or toyboxy as Serpent King, and not as deranged and chaotic as DCO.
It is a *hard* dungeon I think, and especially hard for new players. The crystal wasting sickness that seems to come in at every possible exposure to nearly anything, is pretty hardcore, especially over the long term and especially for low CON players.
I think my only complaint about this *might* be that it kills too slowly for something so terminal in what might be an opener dungeon - it seems highly likely that a new players golden winner PC could make it out with enough XP to hit level 2, a bunch of interesting things to make them care about the character and some spicy in-world political takes but still essentially have crystal-cancer which is going to kill them, slowly.
This could be a good hook for adventure and role-playing and there is a rumoured witch who might be able to cure you *somewhere* in the setting but at least the way I read it - pretty much everyone is going to get the crystal sickness thing and so 'hunt for the witch' is going to be adventure 2 in almost everyone’s campaign.
I might throw in an insanely expensive elixir or drink imported from some empire, available in the main town, which you can buy for an extortionate amount - that's less interesting than going to search for a witch, for one session, but more manageable long-term than 'ok boys we need to go to the witch again' over multiple sessions
Maybe it’s a slightly boring option? depends how you cost it perhaps.



VERDICT
In terms of its 'engineering' this is a pleasingly good and solid book. 
A possible Enny winner? Maybe 5 years ago when the 'OSR' was still a thing, but probably Gus is happier that way.
Deserves a hardback release and a print run imho!
Take a look at the pdf and see if you like it
(though knowing this audience you probably all already know about it)

Imagining Roteopia

As a consequence of reading 'Cats Paws' and Catapults' I became mildly obsessed with the idea of rotational limbs in living things. WHY can't we have Segway Elephants and HOW could they evolve????
Thus I developed Roteopia, which is like that series Dinotopia but imagining an earth where creatures with rotating limbs evolved but everything else stayed at least familiar enough for the reader to understand what’s going on.

FORMAL DEFENITION OF ROTATION HERE
ITS NOT JUST WAVING YOUR ARM AROUND OK????
"By wheels we mean proper wheel and axle devices that can rotate without limit with respect to the rest of a machine. If you roll down a hill, your whole body may be a wheel, but you're no wheel and axle. So we're not talking about tumbleweeds, or about the tiny turds that dung beetles roll homeward for grubs, or about a few crustaceans that get around by rolling as a whole. Nor are we worrying about how far we can rotate our fists around our rms or our heads on our shoulders. By "rotation" we also mean something fairly specific. When you draw a circle on a piece of paper, do you rotate your hand? You may move it in a circle, but you don't truly rotate it; after all, your hand at all times points in the same compass direction. Human dances make elaborate uses of such circular but nonrotational motion, most likely because it doesn't make us dizzy. Not all dances, of course; waltzes are rotational and, one suspects, intentionally vertiginous. The wheels of a bicycle rotate; your feet and the pedals just move around in circular paths. The Ferris wheel rotates as a whole, but the seats and people just go in circles. In this precise sense - excluding both rolling as a whole and merely going in circles - the only known instance of a wheel and axle in nature is the bacterial flagellum." - Steven Vogel, Cats' paws and Catapults


(From a post by u/ExplosiveVent here)

THE GENESIS OF ROTATING BEINGS
I have two general base animals in mind depend on whether we want bones or boneless. I will start with boned.
So imagine something like a a very early form of the Angler Fish in the Cambrian era. Not quite fishlike yet, maybe flat instead of tall, but it has a spine.
This creature is highly sexually dimorphic. The females are large and the males very small. Pattern of mating is that the male physically inserts its head into one of a range of orifices in the female. This proto-womb has a muscular lock to stop the male getting away. Once penetrated the area around the males head/internal wall, dissolves, large parts of the flesh of the males head dissolve as well, allowing genetic material to enter the female. Now they are joined.
So far, not hugely different to the modern Angler Fish, which can swim around with a number of males attached to it.




At some point the mating biology mutates so that the male can 'spin' inside the muscle lock. It has a particular head shape that keeps its head 'inside' the female, and if it did manage to get out it would die anyway as now it can only gain nutrients from the females body. But it can 'swim', flex its body and turn n its own axis, part inside the female but the rear part outside.
Now we imagine multiple matings, either simultaneously or over time but with the males from previous matings remaining in place.
Now we have a vertebrae fishlike being with these mini-fish sticking out of it, and the mini fish can still swim, and crucially, they can rotate in place.
Now rotational movement, a corkscrewing, is extremely efficient, so all we are waiting for is a fluke where the males are all capable of rotating and in the right position to provide thrust and are sensitive and responsive enough to female pressure to do so on command.
So now we have a fishlike being with what are in effect, corkscrew drives. 
That’s your evolutionary pressure. From this point on the species becomes better and better at developing and maintaining these rotating 'limbs'. More and more of the species existence is spent as an actually-multiple mating group, rotating improves, adaptions to secretions and the inner wall increasing strength and decreasing friction, energy transfer between female and male improves, male body shape shifts to become more and more an efficient corkscrew, the primal rotators develop a flexible body comportment so they can group their 'screws' behind them for maximum thrust but also spread these 'limbs' for manoeuvring. 
So effectively this early fish can 'strafe', and move rapidly three-dimensionally in water.


(The G'Kek from David Brins 'Uplift' series.They were engineered and don't count.)

BONES OR NO BONES?
The other option for this was a sort of proto-squid with the rotating 'engines' at the end of the limbs. My main difficulty with these was that I want to get them on land at some point and its very rare (maybe impossible) for a non boned creature to evolve bones. Once they get to a certain size on land bones are going to be super-useful for sustaining that weight.
HOWEVER, the squid would have extra limbs, meaning it could 'push' itself along the sea floor, provide extra thrust, and have limbs left over for manipulation and hunting. I do like the idea of a huge hairy wheeled squid mammoth, or colour-shifting high speed steppe predator wheeled squid.


THE SHIFT TO THE SHORE
Moving from sea to land would happen pretty much as it did in our world, with colonisation of reefs, rotators using their screws to aquaplane the flat sea by beaches, rotator-lungfish types living in mud etc.
The evolution from screws to wheels should be _relatively_ simple. The males changing from corkscrews to full wheels and the alignment of the limbs shifting.


EARLY LAND BASED ROTATORS
Once you have even a semi-wheeled animal which can leave the water and race up and down the beach, we are off baby!
This is another situation where it might be easier to start with Squid rather than a vertebrate as they could manoeuvre and 'lock' their wheels, turning their limbs into legs, allowing them to cross rough ground probably easier and sooner than the fish-rotators.
The great difference between evolution on Roteopia and here would be the incredible SPEED of land animals really right from the start.


(Phillip Pullmans seed wheelersBUT HOW DID THEY EVOLVE PHILLIP? HMMMM?)



THE LORDS OF SPEED
What does evolution on a fast rotation-based world look like? 
Probably the world of Speed will start at the beaches and the river mouths, but could it propagate itself inland? 
I imagine giant slow rotator-dinosaurs CRUSHING their way through primeval forests, eating all the trees and pooping out a steady stream of waste that hardens into a kind of poop-asphalt to aid the way of their baby-rotators.
Could Rotators conquer and in fact synergise with different forms of plant life to create a world not of dense forests but of mixed plain-forest pathways. Plants on flat land more spread out and distributed, wider apart, with high crowns and little midway growth, but with very flat smooth roots that don't disturb the ground (an evolutionary reward bought with the high dispersal of becoming a rotators favourite food).
Or plants and ecosystems which sustain themselves by foiling the rotators, producing crazed root systems, foiling toxic hanging vines and 'trap' branches which fall like caltrops. An environmental war between the rough and the smooth.
The key thing about Rotopia is that things tend to move FAST. Super-fast rotator velociraptors chasing high-speed Stegadons. Propellor driven birds screaming past. Rotator-Orca-Dinosaurs aquaplaning out of the ocean to grab prey.


ROTOPIA - BEFORE THE ICE AGE
Yet somehow (because I say so) Humanity arrives and the world ends up looking at least a bit like our own.
What is Rotator Earth like? 
The key difference that I can see is that the plains are now more like oceans rather than deserts. The existence of vast rotator-herds means the plains, tundra and wastes are criss-crossed by desire paths, some perhaps millions of years old, made. An earth of natural prehistoric highways. Prehistoric highways spread like river systems, visible from space, with their own linear ecosystems, resource conflicts over connections and junctions and huge animal traffic jams.



And with Rotator-beasts the crossing of these plains and highways by man becomes much more achievable. Movement across huge distances can be accomplished relatively easily, due to the wonderous efficiency of the hyper-evolved wheeled limb. 
Imagine the maps of early civilisation but now, instead of societies and populations and development being clustered around navigable sea-ports, like the Aegean, Mediterranean, South China Sea, now civilisation has two forms of 'ocean'. Ships travel the sea, linking cultures and resources together, but vast caravans of high speed rotator elephants also travel the plain. Crossing the Sahara, the American plains or much of Mesopotamia is not that big a deal. 
In this world, cultural power comes not just from where seas, rivers and farmable land intersect, but from where the hydraulic web of interconnections itself meshes with the Rotational Plains.
If you have sea-ports, river travel AND a vast plain meshing together, then the plain can be crossed almost as easily as the sea and possibly faster. Now on the far side of that plain, even if there is no oceanic or river access, a new margin of cities and cultures can develop, and at the meshwork between the two systems forms of civilisation can develop which draw wealth and power from a much wider area. Lords of the Land and Sea, Empire multiplied.
High-speed mass chariot warfare - the ancients fighting like a drag race at 50 miles per hour!
(Wheeled Beings... 14 Million Years Ago!!!)

A Review of Cats' Paws and Catapults by Steven Vogel

A pretty great book! Scrap was trying to get me to read this for aaaages and I REFUSED! But I am glad I have read it now. 



WHAT ABOUT
Why do nature and mankind design things so differently?
This is a pop-sci book and it reminded me again that I am fucking stupid. Most of the difficult (for me) stuff is at the beginning, like; what’s the difference between Strength, Strain, Stiffness, Toughness, and Resilience, which in terms of building things are all quite distance properties of things.
I definitely knew this briefly at some point reading this and have forgotten since, much like most of my STEM education since birth.



THE ABYSS OF HUMAN KNOWLEDGE
One of my favourite things about this book is the way it highlights and discusses just what we *don't* know and the extent to which we don't know it.
Human knowledge like an ink blot expanding on plain paper, the area of the ink blot ever growing but if the line of the perimeter of the blot is measured, (made fractal and jagged by the grains and curls of the paper as it drinks in the ink) then this line, the zone between white and dark, between known and unknown, is growing and growing and growing all the time.
Yet we rarely feel this in our daily lives, that the abyss of unknowing is opening endlessly before us. Instead we feel the gradual advance of human knowledge, its absorbing and explaining of new domains.
Of course this is true; the ink blot is gradually spreading, so man may stand in its centre and say "I am the king of the ink blot and my empire is ever-growing". Yet, an invisible rider might dash along the rim of the ink blot and say "I am the lord of the wastes and as your Empire grows, so does mine, invisible to you".
Why?
- Mental 'distance' from the unknown; unknown things are more and more abstruse and difficult to describe to normal people. Previously you could say, "what is the sun?", but now you need an education in physics to understand what we don't know about physics.
- Recursive tendency of reason; it often 'curls back' upon itself explaining itself in terms of itself and so reason is often blind to gaps in itself.
- General logical positivist boosterism of society, (not that bad), and collapse of scientific enquiry into basically an ADHD marketing scam (quite bad).
- Fundamental difficulty of conceptualising 'the unknown' as most of the unknown is very unknown so we don't even know it is there to talk about it, and the bits we do know about are only somewhat unknown since we can actually conceive of them.


At the end of many of his chapters, Vogel takes us into some of the difficult questions about nature and humanity and what and why each does they way they do (?)
Why does nature have only one confirmed example of rotational movement, why does she not use metals, why no jet-powered birds?
Simple questions but coming at the end of complex and descriptive chapters about the structures of nature, types of levers and limbs and the development of human and bird flight, Vogel is allowed, or he provides himself with enough context and impetus to, shape the questions as something other than just a blank 'well we don't know'.
Reading this, one desired strongly to voyage to other planets with life to find out just how much of earth evolution is 'normal actually' and how much is just 'well it was random but it sort of works so we stuck with it'. These are unanswerable and, without the strong armature of detail and imagination Vogel casts around them, not unaskable, but mutely  irrelevant, self-consuming questions.


THE MORAL POINT AT THE END
As well as being an educational textbook Vogel has a philosophy which I approve of and agree with.
Which is; that the engineering domains of humanity and nature are different houses, best regarded differently. That while we have learned a lot from nature, many examples of direct copying are overstated or illusory, that often we have done a lot better when we have stopped trying to copy nature, done what we can to learn and understand basic principals and, when creating, done things our own way (i.e. abandoning years and years and years of attempted 'birdlike' flight, which was never going to work for us).
It's a distancing from the 'nature is always beautiful and always first and always right' view, but it is not the opposing Melkorist view either, but a careful and rigorous separation of two domains, insisting that each be accounted for by its own rules and considered separately, without worshipping or degrading either.
Its... sensible? It takes an entire book and point layered on careful point, with histories, diagrams and descriptions to make and reinforce this by the end, very sensible and elegant concept which once received, seems like the simplest thing in the world.

The Time of the Troll

 The age of Marketing is Over*, 





Not the internet Trolls, and not Elon when he is vibing, but the Mail Order Trolls
Remember them? Its these guys!



This idea sprang from a Goonhammer article about the development of the short-lived game Gorkamorka, which I would recommend you read first, its excellent and you can find it here.


WHATS IN THE ARTICLE
The article describes an internal conflict at Games Workshop between the Design people and the Marketing/Executive faction. To the surprise of no-one, creative lost and the future of the company would be decided by marketing. 
This happened around the time of the development of Game Workshops Kitbash Space-Ork racing game Gorkamorka and the article is mainly about that.
However it does mention that a part of the company largely forgotten in this conflict was a big fan of Gorkamorka. The Mail Order Trolls loved it.
At that time it was possible to call up Games Workshop and order 'bitz' - individual bits and pieces of various models, which one could find in printed catalogues. These would be pulled from, one assumed, vast bins and drawers of various bits and pieces and send off to the lucky gamer, who would then glue them onto whatever the fuck their Gorkamorka Orks were building The people in charge of this, and in charge of all mail order stuff at GW were called 'The Mail order Trolls'.
As the article describes, the Mail order Trolls loved Gorkamkorka because it was a kitbash-based game. Several elements of the game and setting contributed to this;
The Orks live on a giant trash planet and build their vehicles out of whatever they can find, meaning almost any part can reasonably be included. Orks naturally adopt a rather 'bricolage' handmade aesthetic, so a piece of toy glued or drilled on by a 14 year old doesn't seem out of place and in fact adds to the immersion.
From a rules perspective models were based on strict WYSIWIG, meaning if you wanted a new gun or a ram or something else on your trukk, you had to actually glue or attach it to the model. Each trukk could also only carry as many Orks as that model could actually carry, and there were few restrictions on adding insane extensions or additions, since thats what Orks would actually do.
All of this lead to a LOT of hobbyists calling up the Mail Order Trolls asking for this or that particular piece.


THE DREAM OF A TROLL-LEAD COMPANY
I imagined if, instead of a conflict between marketing and creative, which, as in Tolkiens high catholic description of a fallen world, evil will often superficially win, yet only thereby hastening its own destruction, what if, instead, the Trolls had been in the room, and had won that argument?



What would a 1990's Games Workshop run by and for its Mail Order department look like?
Games, worlds, stories and systems created specifically to maximise the volume and range of bits (not kits) manifested and to maximise the demand for those bits. A world where Gorkamkorka was not the end of a failed evolutionary branch, but the beginning of one. Gorkamorka II, Necromorka, then Warhamorka, Warhammer Fantasy Bitsamorka.
These games wouldn't be based around kits, or at least only partially around a small number of very skeletal kits, but around bits and pieces, highly individualistic arrangements of parts in imagined works where increasingly sophisticated aesthetics of bricolage were embodied in the model range, the rules and the imaginary cultures described.
Such games would start with Orks and Orcs, since they by nature love bricolage, but probably move to Chaos, with its love of additions and mutations, and then perhaps the Renaissance Dwarfs and Humans, with Rube Goldberg-esque steampunk contraptions.
Only with difficulty would they involve Elves or other factions for whom an harmony and flow of aesthetic is primary. But it is not impossible that a sophisticated enough development of a 'bitz-and-frames' culture could gradually work up to an Elfamorka, a game where each major piece was still a bespoke assemblage but where the options and possible arrangements of pieces lead almost inevitably to harmony.



BUT THE FUTURE IS NOW
The dream of a Troll-Lead Workshop suggested to me a possible path forward for GW's very slow and multivarious adaptation to the growth of 3D printing.
(I am actually pretty ambivalent about 'helping' Games Workshop with new ideas but I like having ideas so whatever.)
Much and probably most of GW's profit margins come from its highly sophisticated skills with plastic injection moulding. Specifically, adapting the complex needs of three dimensional shapes to the liquid flow of a mould across a single dimension.
Many of Games Workshops sprues are themselves works of strange industrial art.
It is an art which is dying out and they know it.
Easily available 3D printing is not quite at the level where it can beat GW for quality of manufacture and especially for ease of manufacture. (Unless you are really into it, dicking around with a printer is a big investment of time and energy compared to going to a shop).
But the ease, power and ubiquity of the printers is only growing, and Games Workshop is a company that makes its money from controlling the production of shapes. GW's expansions into the general culture area with games and especially their desire to control all fan produced narratives and bring them all within their umbrella, is probably suggestive of a company that knows it has to diversify away from the magic money well of plastic injection moulding and is trying to transform into a brand which exists across many forms of manufacture.


PRINTAMORKA
A future for Games Workshop would be to become traders in forms and arrangements, and in systems of connection, rather than in plastic kits, and the games Systems, fictions and imaginary worlds made to work this culture of printing and individual selection, would be more like the Worldsamorka I described above rather than modern games.
Games Workshop already has a well developed internet ordering site, (after experiencing many of these from different companies I have a lot more respect for how well Games Workshops site works and how useful it is in listbuilding or arranging imaginary armies). This could form the basis of a new expansion where, instead of just being able to rotate images of painted miniatures, one could rotate living wireframes of printable shapes, and could select ones own "bitz", starting with armaments and decorations, but expanding into mounts, heads, limbs, and finally the basic arrangements of form themselves.
Given the power of a digital modelling system to control or shape choices and the forms which result, producing highly modular forms which still contain and express the most organic and sophisticated aesthetics, should be even more possible.
These arrangements could be printed bespoke for you either in Nottingham or at a local Games Workshop store (a fresh and unexpected adaptation of use for those locations), and either sent to you or picked up. Or the finished pattern could be sold to you (watermarked of course) and you could print it yourself.
In this case, Games Workshop would be selling not just the model itself, but selling (probably renting, god I hate myself), access to the bespoke software, but more importantly, the arrangements of possible forms and shapes, rather than the shapes themselves.
GW is already unusually good at creating highly specific yet adaptable arrangements of shape, volume and pattern which signify and express the various characters and factions of their imagined worlds. (Have written on this previously). Now that skill, developed for one set of purposes, would be remodulated into, not design advice or design bibles communicated to sculptors (or at least not only that), but into the very systems of digital arrangement which customers use to create their models. Transformed from a series of rules into a tool.
The ghost of that failed evolutionary tree may be resurrected in a new world.


*It probably isn't over. This was wishful thinking on my part but a boy can dream.

The Hive Mind on the Hidden Genre Canon

 My recent reading of Salammbo and a post about what other hidden genre gems might exist unregarded in the corpus of otherwise literary authors lead to quite a few interesting comments collected across this blog, Twitter and Facebook.
And here are those comments, roughly collected and arranged by commenter, with a few additions by me. The spirit of G+ lives on! Just not in one place.

 

Hebemachia 

“Doris Lessing's science fiction stuff (hard to find these days, unfortunately)” 

P - This seems like a prefect response. A Nobel Prize winning author that I knew literally nothing about up until this comment who wrote a sci-fi series across a gigantic scale based around concepts of Sufism.

 

  Paperino Maltese

 

“several novel by cormac mccarthy squarely fall into adventure genre. also chabon's gentlemen of the road is full on serialized adventure.” 

“cormac mccarthy's blood meridian (western), on the road (post-apocalyptic) and no country (pure pulp thriller) are obviously genre novels. i am not sure how out of the ordinary is that for cormac but he is certainly and somewhat arguably the greatest living american novelist. added bonus is that the blood meridian is the ultimate murder hobo novel ever.” 

P – Ok, so Chabon feels like he is on the border of the nearly bougie genre author, but his main works feel a bit late to me, or they came at the post-Gaimane inflection point where it was nearly alright to be a genre author and still win awards.

 

McCarthy I regard as the premium pulp author and I have often thought that you could change his books from literature to pulp by just adding lots of punctuation and exclamation marks.

 

McCarthy doesn’t quite fit perfectly the ‘hidden genre’ pattern, he is more hiding in plain sight. 

 

Phandaal 

“Salammbo's a gem, while you're at it, check out Flaubert's 'The Temptation of Saint Anthony' which also  fits.” 

P- Ok, we got another Flaubert

 

 

Richard August

 

“I don’t think Salammbo can be considered a hidden classic? It’s one of the most republished of his works, especially in English. I dunno that it’s that rare, especially during the 19th century when genre divisions really didn’t mean anything, and the gap between ‘literary’ and ‘genre’ fiction didn’t really exist. Which I could go on about ad nauseum.” 

P – well it was hidden to me. Ok so everyone is going to have an entirely different perception on what counts as hidden or unknown, but you can buy Madame Bovary in Waterstones and have to search for Salammbo on Amazon and even then I think its Print on Demand. Plus this is my blog so my definition of ‘hidden’ will be the one we use. 

 

BUT that aside: 

“- Melville’s early work is pretty much swashbuckling, evocative sailor fiction.” 

 

Melville – maybe but Moby Dick is pretty much genre already and its his most well-known work. 

 

“- John Barth’s Giles Goat-boy is a weird, epic, fantastical journey through a vast university, and very different from the more mimetic stuff he’d done before.” 

P – I know nothing about this or about John Barth! If anyone has opinions drop them in the comments!

 

 

“- Maupassant wrote some great supernatural horror stories - The Horla chief among them - which are a sharp contrast with his naturalistic fiction.” 

P – that’s one for the bank. 

 

“- Orwell’s 1984 would pretty much constitute this, I think. It’s a dystopian, science fictional work against his previous work of sociographical journalism.” 

P – but hardly unknown, and Animal Farm came first!

 

 

 

Thor Hansen 

“The Adventures of Haji Baba of Isfahan "

P – what the hell. Ok I know nothing about this. This one is interesting. Apparently Persians enjoyed this colonial era white guy satirising Persian ways because many of them also thought Persia was a regressive place...

 

Luka Jare 

Flaubert's Temptation of St. Anthony is sais to be pretty much that also and Simplicius Simplicissimus, the german picaresque novel set in the 30 years war. 

P - Simplicius Simplicissimus, unknown to me at least so that’s something, but not part of a largler body of work by a ‘literary author’. 

 

Christopher Richardson 

I don't know if "Baudolino" by Umberto Eco would count, since his ouvre is usually fairly weird, but I think critics mostly focus on "Name of the Rose" and "Foucault's Pendulum" which are more prosaic. Baudolino is definitely high weird fantasy” 

P – I mean it probably doesn’t but if anyone wants to talk about Baudolino in the comments and argue over how genre it is, go for it. 

 

Barry Blatt 

“I don't know if it was really ignored, but Russell Hoban's 'Riddley Walker' is nothing like anything else he wrote, though It got awards from the Sc fi fans. It has an interesting post apocalyptic Kent and a culture based around Punch and Judy shows.” 

P – Riddley Walker is really good, not sure if it counts as an ‘unknown’, isn't it in one of the classic sci fi collections? Am open to arguments.

 

Zigurat Morningstar 

“Theophile Gautier's Captain Fracasse. A chivalry romance set in the 17th century. Good stuff and at time hilarious.” 

P – ok 10 points for being unknown to me, another for being from a 19thC author. Not sure how this plays out in comparison to the authors other works but interesting. There have been six films of this story! I feel like I am going to end up reading this one. 

 

Kelvin Green 

“Atwood keeps writing sci-fi but claiming she isn't.” 

P – Honestly Atwood can eat a dick. 

 

“Rushdie's Midnight's Children is basically Indian X-Men. Neither is ignored, but the fact that they are genre books is overlooked.” 

P – Ok this will likely surprise absolutely no-one reading this but on looking up Midnights Children my mind was fucking BLOWN. I had heard the name many many times but had literally no idea it has FUCKING SUPERPOWERS and was basically the fucking X-MEN. I feel like this one gets in simply because I was massively ignorant against it and it seems like a prime example of a bougie author in genre dress, or maybe visa versa. 

 

Shahar Halevy 

“The Adventures of Tintin” 

P - come on man.

Michael Weingrad 

“Blake's "The Four Zoas" is has its weird charms, and I think many of the "inverse classics" will be literally "in verse." Some of Disraeli's novels (e.g. Alroy) also occur to me, though it's not like his more successful novels are being championed by mainstream critics today.” 

P – Another mind-blown moment for me. A British Prime Minister was also a prolific, well not quite fantasy author by modern standards but a fantastic historical and mythic romance author. He wrote a shitload of these, what the hell! 

 

“For those who don't mind the slog, there is a lot of really good work by fantasy scholars and critics pushing back on the mainstream exclusion of the more fantasy-friendly work and showing how intertwined it all was and is. 

Brian Stableford had an enthusiastic entry on Flaubert back in the indispensable 1997 John Clute "Encyclopedia of Fantasy," and Stableford's many translations of French decadent, fantasy, sci-fi, and weird poetry and fiction have since expanded on that line of reading. (Paul Feval's "Vampire City" isn't canonical, but really worth a look, translated recently by Stableford.) 

Jamie Williamson offers lots of suggestions about the roots of modern fantasy in everything from the 18th century Spenser revival to 19th century Orientalist poems, in his excellent book "The Evolution of Modern Fantasy: From Antiquarianism to the Ballantine Adult Fantasy Series." 

James Machin's "Weird Fiction in Britain: 1880-1939" is more academic but roots the Weird in fin-de-siecle decadent literature with some fine leads in the decadent nexus of Wilde, Huysmans, etc.” 

P – This feels like a good mission for someone with way more time and energy than me. 

 

Dan Sumption 

“Taking things to the other extreme, I recently read a play by Lord Dunsany which read more like something by Feydeau.” 

P – I mean Dunsany is Dunsany. 

 

Solomon VK

(I combined a huge number of comments by Solomon) 

“Not as pure an example as Flaubert, however: 

Evelyn Waugh sometimes has a reputation as something like a crueller Wodehouse - but it is worth noting that he was always willing to employ the unfamiliar or to write in settings outside 1930s Britain: witness the nameless future war at the conclusion of Vile Bodies, the Gothic fate of Tony Last in A Handful of Dust or the fictional nation of Neutralia in Scott-King's Modern Europe - all this neglecting anomalies like the mysterious voices in The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold or the centralised dystopia of Love Among the Ruins. His novel Helena, about the mother of Constantine and the Invention (discovery) of the True Cross is another such anomaly. 

This is the same for Kingsley Amis, if somewhat less so - his genre influence is pretty obvious. Everyone thinks of Lucky Jim and forget stuff like The Alteration or Russian Hide and Seek. He also wrote a James Bond continuation (Colonel Sun) under an assumed name. 

EM Forster's The Machine Stops definitely counts. 

The Glass Bead Game definitely counts. The short stories in Hesse's Strange News from Another Star are pretty obvious bits of world-building as well. It's only the final entry of the Space Trilogy that works as modern conspiracy, no? But then I suppose the first chapter framing device of Perelandra and all the set-up business from the first act of Out of the Silent Planet offer a sketch of what it would be like. 

In any case, my instincts took me to another aspect of gaming altogether when I turned to Lewis: https://worldbuildingandwoolgathering.blogspot.com/2017/12/malacandra-trio.html 

Alternate history does seem to get them in for this - you've got Robert Harris's Fatherland and Philip Roth's Plot against America. But neither are very extensive in their world-building. 

Atwood's kind of got known for her genre material, though that's not where she started. Her book of essays In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination indicates that what she had/has an odd definition of Science Fiction vs Speculative Fiction. 

See also Laurent Binet, who went from an experimental novel about Rheinhard Heydrich, to an Umberto Eco-esque thriller about semiotics to 'What if the Incas invaded Habsburg Spain?'” 

P – bro… So much to think on. But that Incan invasion of Spain seems like one to add to the wishlist. 

 

Jeff Russell 

“A few thoughts, though I look forward to seeing what others say: 

- Glass Bead Game by Herman Hesse presents an extremely compelling slice of an otherwise fairly hazy future, and works as a sci-fi novel. I haven't read Narcissus and Goldmund, but the synopsis sounds like its got some elements of a good medieval picaresque 

- Possibly overly obvious: Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde. That's some gothic horror right there. 

- Maybe not as neglected, but several of Dickens's stories are pretty genre, including his best-known and seasonally appropriate, "A Christmas Carol". I also found the orphanage and street-life bits of "Oliver Twist" work rather well as inspiration for grubby city D&D 

- Doesn't *really* count, since he was well known for his genre writing, but I think Lewis's Space Trilogy knocks the socks off Narnia, and with very minor tweaking, would serve for the sinister modern conspiracy game of your choice.” 

P – I will give you Hesse, but not the rest! 

 

Noisms 

“Edmund mentioned Kingsley Amis's The Alteration above. He also wrote The Green Man, which is kind of a fantasy/horror genre story. 

HG Wells is probably the standout for The Time Machine, Dr Moreau, etc. I think I'm right in saying that later in life he was embarrassed by these genre efforts? 

Nathaniel Hawthorne's "Rappaccini's Daughter" is probably an example of what you're talking about. I think there are also lots of Charles Dickens short stories that would fit the bill. 

Possibly Shakespeare plays, especially the lesser-known freaky weird ones like Titus Andronicus? 

A lot of Margaret Atwood's stuff would be in this category, I suppose, but she always insists she doesn't write SF and is just a bit of annoying, really. 

There's also Kazuo Ishiguro.” 

P – most of those are too well known and I am not letting Atwood in on principal but Rappaccini's Daughter does sound interesting. 

 

Thekelvingreen 

“Atwood was my first thought too. "Proper" novelist, doesn't write genre, pops out a couple of (definitely not) sci-fi books, and sneaks a pretty good Conan type pastiche into another. But definitely doesn't do genre.” 

P- No Atwood! Banned! 

 

Marten31 

“Stephen King's Eyes of the Dragon comes to mind, although he isn't the non-genre-type anyways. 

Hans-Christian Andersen's The Galoshes of Fortune may count: Not the usual dark fairytale but a story with time travel and an actual alien civilization on the moon. 

For me it is quite strange to see Wells mentioned in the comments so often - to me (as a German perhaps) he was always a scifi-auhor first (and the better compared to Verne, whose characters were always crap, and Lovecraft, who assumed that encountering a non-human-centred universe must surely drive anyone mad).” 

P – King, Andersen, Welles, all too well known as genre writers. 

 

Maxcan 

“I recently read Infinite Jest and people don't talk enough about how much campy scifi is going on behind the scenes in the plot and worldbuilding of that book. We had a whole conversation about it a while back on my server.” 

P – I have not read it! 

 

Alec Semicognito 

“The works of French author Michel Houellebecq. It's not D&D, but it is mostly science fiction extrapolating from current society. His mind-bending cynicism and despair, plus his bizarre real-life personality, tend to overshadow the sci-fi elements on the public mind. 

P -  I don’t want to read Houellebecq, he seems like too much of a cunt even for me, plus in the words of Alan Partridge; “(S)hes boring and racist, I can tolerate one of those but not both at the same time." 

 

Also Atomic Aztex, by Sesshu Foster. It's a political novel, alternating (I think) chapters about Latin-Americans working in a shitty meat-packing plant with chapters where the Aztecs are destroying the Nazis in WWII.” 

P – what the hell is this another French Mesoamerican alternate history thing? Its odd that has come up twice. (My mistake, it is American not french HOWEVER, Roger left this comment below;)

Roger G-S

You think two Romance-language alt-Aztec novels is too many? (there was only one but that was my error) In 1968 the Catalan author Avel.li Artis-Gener wrote Paraules d'Opoton el Vell (Words of the Elder Opoton) about a reverse expedition from the Aztec Empire to Iberia. There's a Mexican translation into Spanish but sadly none into English.

Thank you Roger! So now there are three alternate-mesoamerica novels, one in French by Laurent Binet, one in American by Sesshu Foster and now this Spanish one by Avel.li Artis-Gener.

 

 

Montefeltro 

“I'd add The Hopkins Manuscript by RC Sheriff. He's mainly known for his play Journey's End - pretty much the archetype of a Very Serious WW1 Story - but also produced this 1930s apocalyptic sci-fi novel about the moon slowly crashing into the Earth. I'm not sure if I can wholeheartedly recommend it; the first third is a bit dull (basically the protagonist endlessly changing his mind about whether or not to worry about the impending threat) and the last section is mostly strained political allegory (a bit like the early chapters of Last and First Men, before Stapledon really cranks the oracular weirdness into gear). Nonetheless, in the middle section there's a pretty fine description of early 20th Century rural England coming to terms with imminent planetary destruction: defiant midnight cricket matches played under a moon that blots out the sky, and that sort of thing. Might be worth a look.” 

P – That does sound worth a look. 

 

Alea iactanda est 

“Simone de Beauvoir's Tous les hommes sont mortels (All Men are Mortal). It's about a guy that stops aging in the 13th century and how he lives until the present day. It's the book that 1000 Year Old Vampire aspires to be, and White Wolf's Vampire could never possibly pull off.” 

P – There is a film of this one too! Also why are the French so fucking depressed? 

“I found Fouqué's Der Zauberring (The Magic Ring) endlessly inspiring for RPG stuff. It's vast and gloomy and epic. 

Also, wait until you've finished the Flaubert, then check out Philippe Druillet's comics adaptation.” 

P – Well I have it. 

 

Hyrieus 

“Pale Fire by Nabokov might fit the bill here.” 

P – pffft, not realllly. 

 

Chryphex 

“First thing that comes to mind is John Steinbeck's retelling of Le Morte d'Arthur” 

P – I mean that’s just straight up genre, it has a wizard in it. It does win points for being by Steinbeck though. 

 

PrinceofNothing 

“You will probably already know of it but Simplicius Simpliccimus comes to mind, but fails on a technicality that it is the authors most popular work. Same goes for Xenophon's The Persian Expedition. 

Michael Crichton's Eaters of the Dead is terrific S&S and was made into the 13th Warrior, but this is not a literary author. 

No I think I shall recommend On to the Alamo by Richard Penn Smith for Appendix N status and slyly make my escape.” 

P – what the actual fuck. From the Wikipedia;  “In 1836, a sensation was created by a new book titled "Col. Crockett's Exploits and Adventures in Texas: wherein is contained a full account of his journey from Tennessee to the Red River and Natchitoches, and thence across Texas to San Antonio; including many hair-breadth escapes; together with a topographical, historical, and political view of Texas ... Written by Himself". It was published by "T.K. and P.G. Collins" (actually Carey and Hart, who had published some of Crockett's authentic, though heavily edited, writings). They falsely claimed that it was Crockett’s journal, which had been taken from the Alamo by Mexican General Manuel Fernández Castrillón and later recovered at the Battle of San Jacinto, where the General was killed. It became a huge best-seller. For over a century the book had a profound influence on the public's view of the Texas Revolution and Davy Crockett's career, despite the fact that the author's true identity had been revealed in 1884.”

So its a pseudohistory that many people thought was an actual history to the extent that it influenced real history. 

SALAMMBO! (spoilers)

 


It’s pretty good! Give it a read!
What else can I say about it?
An historical novel set in the Mercenary War Carthage fought after the first Punic war. Essentially, Carthage refuses to pay its mercenary soldiers, things spiral out of control, then they get worse, then they get really worse. The main axis of the book is built around the love/hate relationship between Matho, the leader of the mercenaries and Salammbo, daughter of Hamlicar Barca, (who is the father of Hannibal of Elephant fame). Story has slaves, war, battles, schemes, pride, jealousy, strange gods, savagery, massive orientalism and many many elephants were very much harmed in the creation of this story not approved by the animal care people at all.
This is the only book by Flaubert I have read and seems to be very much not typical for his ouvre. The rest are 19th Century French realism about relationships and stuff. I have done a series of social media posts about the relationship of literary and 'secret genre' writers and will try to pull those together in a later post.



Most images are from the amazing Sci Fi Adaptationby Phillipe Druillet


WHAT ABOUT THE WRITING?
It is a steaming pile of details! Researched, imagined, confabulated. A story of things! Very like some balladic structure stories,  lists of lists of lists, inflated and intensified by the density of the novel.
Really the book drips gems and oozes blood. If tip it over, the shining feather of a sacred hummingbird wound with old threat comes out clutched in the head of a skinned mouse which has been stuffed with mhyrr. The book is nearly smoking, its fuming, its hot in there and the bloodstench, reek of burning cities, unguents, spices, perfumes, wafts of burning bezoars drawn from the gullets of a whale, is so heavy you feel drugged, which you probably actually are.
Vividness! Everything is so particular. No vague moments, general experiences or non-specific objects. Only immediate, vivid, burning slices of a highly imagined reality.
The Multiplication of Hieraticism! Flaubert is very into his characters being Heiratic, posing, performing, existing like statues or symbols, embodying roles, which they do both diegetically in the imagined world but also generally like that in the story, Matho IS the Noble Savage Barbarian Mercinary, Spendius IS the crafty, clever cowardly greek, Narr' Havas IS the mysterious Numidian Horse Lord, Slammbo IS the moon-worshipping Pirestess/Princes object of desire and feminine principal. Hanno, the preferred leader of Carthages corrupt old man class IS.. well look at this Druillet illustration from his si-fi adaptation;





THE EMOTIONS
Characters have strong singular emotions. Oddly, the source of the strife, or its main organiser, seems to be the existence between Matho and Salammbo of something like love, or at least an emotion or range of emotions neither of them can describe, understand or adapt to, and which show themselves in these vast towers of gilded obsession.
They desire each other, exert power over each other, submit or gloat. Really almost no-one has what we would consider a normal conversation in this world. One either holds the edge of a bronze sword to another’s neck and LAUGHS while sweat and perfume is massaged into your scalp by slaves, or rolls and capers in the dust, naked and scarred, begging to kiss another’s feet. 
Its fucking nuts. When the elders of Carthage finally get Hamlicar, their best general, back to save them from their own dumb fucking screwups, in the weird masonic cult meeting that passes for their Central Command Conference, where no-one is meant to be armed, they lose their shit with him and pull out daggers to kill him, then he pulls out two(!) swords and leaps onto an altar to defy them. Then everyone realises that since everyone broke the sword rule they just agree not to speak about it. This is like if MacArthur came back from Korea and got into an armed mexican standoff with Truman in the White House, which McArthur would probably have done if he could but he was a bit like a Salammbo character anyway. 
Luckily(?) everyone in the story gets to occupy each of those positions at least once.
HATE! Nearly everyone in Salammbo seems to low-key hate nearly everyone else;  Carthaginians and Mercenaries, Matho and Salammbo, the Carthage elders and Hamlicar, Carthage and its surrounding territories, Punic Carthaginians and native Carthaginians, Moloch and Tanit, camels and elephants...
LOVE! There are only a few examples of what we would call love, or even affection; Matho and Salammbos strangulated mutual desire, Hamlicar loves Hannibal, his son but Flaubert is careful to say, he is an extension of himself into the future. The patricians of carthage seem to love their children at least enough for some of them to be reluctant to sacrifice them to Moloch. The biggest scene of love is towards the end where many of the mercenaries have been trapped and Hamlicar pulls a Joker and tells them if they kill each other in hand to hand he will forgive and employ the survivorshere we get this;
"The community of their lives had brought about profound friendship amongst these men. The camp, with most, took the place of their country; living without a family they transferred the needful tenderness to a companion, and they would fall asleep in the starlight side by side under the same cloak. And then in their perpetual wandering through all sorts of countries, murders and adventures, they had contracted affections, one for the other, in which the stronger protected the younger in the midst of battles, helped him to across precipices, sponges the sweat of fevers from his brow, and stole food for him, and the weaker, a child perhaps, who had been picked up on the roadside, and had then become a Mercenary, repaid this devotion by a thousand kindnesses.
They exchanged their necklaces and earrings, presents which they had made to one another in former days, after great peril, or in hours of intoxication. All asked to die, and none would strike,. A young fellow might be seen here and there saying to another whose beard was grey: "No! no! you are more robust! you will avenge us, kill me!" and the man would reply: "I have fewer years to live! Strike to the heart, and think no more about it!" Brothers gazed on one another with clasped hands, and friend bade friend eternal farewells, standing and weeping upon his shoulder."





THE WORLD
Gigantic! Through reach, specificity and most of all through its teeming diversity of wildly different cultures all massed and thronging together. Though to us, we could fly across every land described in a few hours, and even drive across the main areas in a day or two, to those within it, Carthage is like a strange moon orbiting through strange stars; the entirety of the Mediterranean world, from the strange misty gloom forests of the Celts and Germans to the north, the Numidian horsemen, Greeks, Romans, the strange impossible peoples of Africa beyond the desert. First the Nomads;
"They were nor Libyans from the neighbourhood of Carthage, who had long composed the third army, but nomads from the tableland of Barca, bandits from Cape Phiscus and the promontory of Dernah, from Phazzana and Marmaricia. They had crossed the desert, drinking at the brackish wells walled with camels bone, the Zuaeces, with their covering of ostrich eathers, had come on quadringa, the Garamantians, masked with black veils, rode on their painted mares; others were mounted on asses, onagers, zebra, and buffaloes; while some dragged after them the roofs of their sloop-shaped huts together with their families and idols. There were Ammonians with limbs wrinkled by the hot water of the springs, Ataranians, who curse the sun; Troglodytes, who bury their dead with laughter beneath branches of trees, and the hideous Auseans, who eat grass-hoppers; the Achyrmmachidae who eat lice, and the vermillion-painted Gysantians, who eat apes."
Then;
"First were seen running up all the hunters from Malethut-Baal and Garaphos, clad in lions skins, and with the staves of their pikes driving small lean horses with long manes; then marched the Gaetulians in cuirasses of serpents skin; then the Pharusians, wearing lofty crowns made of wax and resin; and the Caunians, Macarians, and Tillabarians, each holding two javelins and a round shield of hippopotamus leather."
We can go further! (and get waaay more racially sketchy);
"But when the Libyans had moved away, the multitude of the Negroes appeared like a cloud on a level with te ground, in the place which the others hd occupied. They were there from the White Harousch, the Black Harousch, the desert of Augila, and even from the great country of Agazymba, which is four months journey south of the Garamantians, and from regions further still! IN spite of their red wooden jewels, the filth of their black skin made them look like mulberries that had been long rolling in the dust. They had bark-thread drawers, dried-grass tunics, fallow deer-muzzels on their heads; they shook rods furnished with rings, and brandished cows tails at the end of sticks, after the fashion of standards, howling the while like wolves."
Ok we have gone through 19thC orientalism, can we go into near-fantasy? Like a Conan story?
"Then behind the Numidians, Marusians, and Gaetulians pressed the yellowish men, who are spread through the cedar forests beyond Taggir. They had cat-ski quivers flapping against their shoulders, and they led in leashes enormous dogs, which were as high as asses and did not bark."
How about EVEN FURTHER into full Realms of Chaos Warhammer?
"Finally, as though Africa had not been sufficiently emptied, and it had been necessary to seek further fury in the very dregs of the races, men might be seen behind th rest, with beast-like profiles and grinning with idiotic laughter - wretches ravaged by hideous diseases, deformed pigmies, mulattoes of doubtful sex, albinos whose red eyes blinked in the sun; stammering out unintelligible sounds, they put a finger in their mouths to show that they were hungry."
A world in the lap of the gods - divine power everywhere! Layered secret-trap temples hiding incredible histories, sacred treasures. Huge Brazen Gods that fucking shovel children into their burning mouths with articulated fucking arms.
Were you wondering where shit like this first came from?




From here! From Salammbo!
TREASURE - does treasure only exist as a vector of our desire? It would seem so, Hamlicar has his multiply-hidden treasure vault (the extra grain isn’t there, its hidden under the flagstones of his house) with the fake pit, the secret entrance, and then the even more secret entrance with the super-secret built in code so complex it is secretly worked into the pattern tattooed on his arms!
"The walls were covered wtih scales of brass; and in the centre, on a granite pedestal, stood the statue of one of the Kabiri called Aletes, the discoverer of the mines in Celtiberia. On the ground, at its base, and arranged in the form of a cross, were large gold shields and monster close-necked  silver vases of extravagant shape and unfitted for use; it was customary to cast quantities of metal in this way, so that dilapidation and even removal should be almost impossible.
With his torch he lit a miner's lamp which was fastened to the idols cap, and green, yellow, blue, violent, wine-coloured and blood-coloured fires suddenly illuminated the hall. It was filled with gems which were either in gold calabashes fastened like sconces upon sheets of brass, or were ranged in native masses at the foot of the wall. There were callaides shot away from the mountains with slings, carbuncles formed by the urine of the lynx, glossopetrae which had fallen from the moon, tyanos, diamonds, sandastra, beryls, with the three kinds of rubies, the four kinds of sapphires, and the twelve kinds of emeralds. They gleamed like splashes of milk, blue icicles, and silver dust, and shed their light in sheets, rays, and stars. Ceraunia, engendered by the thunder, sparkles by the side of chalcedonies, which are a cure for poison. There were topazes from Mount Zabarca to evert terrors, opals from Bactria to prevent abortions, and horns of Ammon, which are placed under the bead to induce dreams.
The fires from the stones and the flames from the lamp were mirrored in the great golden shields. Hamlicar stood smiling with folded arms, and was less delighted by the sight of the riches than by the consciousness of their possession. They were inaccessible, exhaustless, infinite. His ancestors sleeping beneath his feet transmitted something of their eternity to his heart. He felt very near to the subterranean deities. It was as the joy o one of the Kabirir; and the great luminous rays striking upon his face looked like the extremity of an invisible net linking him across the abysses with the centre of the world.
A thought came which made him shudder, and placing himself behind the idol he walked straight up to the wall. Then among the tattooings on his arm he scrutinised a horizontal line with two other perpendicular ones which in Channatish figures expressed the number thirteen. Then he counted as far as the thirteenth of the brass plates and again raised his ample sleeve; and with his right hand stretched out he read other more complicated lines on his arm, at the same time moving his fingers daintily about like one playing on a lyre. At last he struck seven blows with his thumb, and an entire section of the wall turned about in a single block.
It served to conceal a sort of cellar containing mysterious things which had no name and were of incalculable value. Hamlicar went down the three steps, took up a llama's skin which was floating on a black liquid in a silver vat, and then re-ascended."






ITS D&D AS FUCK
TREASURE, especially Hamlicars Vaults and Matho and Spendius' break in of the Temple of Tanith
MURDER-HOBOISM, unitary desires, consuming ambition, wild fluctuations in state power, huge diversity of peoples and the frontier of an undiscovered ungoverned (by the people in this story at least) world, mean law is power and power is law, and that means promises, schemes, negotiations, very occasional mercy and relentless betrayal of everyone by everyone.
GODS AND MAGIC!! - Is any of it real? Probably not! But everyone in the story believes it! Including you if you are there! Look out for those curses, inauspicious hours, sacred animals, angry priests, mass hysteria, dark hours, divine promises, informative dreams and so on. Also all the gods have treasure even if its just food, also the priests are stealing the food
ANIMALS, FIGHTING, HIRED KILLERS! SO MAN ELEPHANTS DIE HORRIBLY! 

The Hidden Genre Canon

 Being in the middle of reading Gustav Flauberts 'Salammbo' on the recommendation of Noisms, (I'm only in the middle so a review later)
But this is a HELLA D&D Sword and Sorcery book; orientalist opulence, raiding a gods shrine for a magic artefact, armies, slaves, chaos, strange faiths, greedy and manipulative heroes and villains, treasure vaults, bejellwed fish, a babe kind of makes out with a snake.
Point being, this is not the book people talk about when they talk about Gustav Flaubert. They talk about Madame Bovary, or the other one, the bourgeoise social dramas, not the epic orientalist adventure story.
It reminds me a little of Alan Moore brining up critics talking about H.G. Welles;
"aaalways Mr fucking Polley, the boring one, because that's the one they understand"
(actually this whole project/concept very much has an Alan Moore vibe, his reading for League of Extraordinary Gentlemen
This got me wondering if there are any more hidden 'inverse classics'; books by normie literary authors which are effectively high genre and full of all the worldbuilding, weirdness, adventure, wonder etc which we high genre fans know are good-actually but which are largely ignored by mainstream critics because mainstream critics are dull.
I DON'T mean pulp or Genre authors or books which have been ignored because they are what they are. I mean specifically books by otherwise high-status literary types which stand out from their usual works.
What comes to mind immediately are only the actually-known one, like Woolfe’s 'Orlando'
BUT CAN YOU THINK OF ANY MORE?
Usually you lot vibe off recommending books so you should enjoy this.

Bubbles of Corposant

Ahhhh the Trailing Corposant series, in which I attempt to review and describe the Horus Heresy series from both a diegetic point of view and also as works of literature and ALSO as a giant cultural meta-project, with deep-dives on the personalities and peccadilloes of the characters and writers.
Was there ever a greater example of the sunk-cost fallacy? Apart from the Horus Heresy series itself? Will I ever vomit forth the Cursed Snake of this idea from tip to tail?
No, because I have outright decided that there will be some parts of it which I am just not going to write! However, I will summarise my reasons for not writing them by section below, along with a brief precis of what I would have said
My main overriding reason is that it has been progressively longer and longer since I actually read any of this stuff and my analysis of it are increasingly failed explorations of memory pasted over with excavated research.
Anyway, what follows are BUBBLES OF CORPOSANT, a breakdown of the series yet to be written with a list of all the things I am NOT DOING and my reasons for not doing them, then at the end some things I might actually do.





CORPOSANT SECTIONS THAT WILL PROBABLY NEVER EXIST

#11 BETRAYER;  the works of Aaron Dembski Bowden
The First Heretic, Betrayer,  Master of Mankind and  Echoes of Eternity.
For someone who wrote very few books ADB may have had the greatest effect on the moral tone of Heresy of anyone other than Abnett. He did good books about Lorgar and Angron, a book I hated about E-Dawg and a book I liked, Echoes of Eternity, about.. well a lot of people but probably largely Sanguinius and Angron.
I will not write this one. I can't really talk about ABD without taking about the Great Awokening, for I take him as its herald, and about his BPD, which is discomforting to reference. I am old now and I can't stand the culture war HEAT and I can't really criticise ADB's arguments about his own work and opinions without either tacitly or directly bringing up his mental health and stuff about him I vaguely remember from the pre-First Heretic days but which seems to have been wiped from the internet, was it even real? It's an emotive moral SWAMP and I am not stepping into it. You win this round!







#12 VULKAN SHIVS - Vulkan and Nick Kyme
Nick Kyme, editor of much of the Horus Heresy, wrote a bunch of books about Vulkan! They were;  Vulkan Lives, Deathfire, Old Earth and Born of Flame.
I will not write about these books. They were simply bad. When I start thinking about them all I can do is produce deeper and more analytical descriptions of how they were bad. If I were still a man in his 20s no doubt I would go for it but I am now 40 and I can't stop imagining Nick Kymes innocent face as he somehow reads my words. He seems like a nice guy so this is all I will say about that.




#13 REEEEEEE - Pertuabo
Taking in all the Pertuabo books and appearances. 
Is there anything more I could really write about this guy? Like a lot of low-self-esteem quasi-autists, I see a lot of myself in his horrible personality. I think I wrote about that here. 10 out of 10 most competent Traitor. Could probably have won the thing if he were in charge. Thats all I have to say on this guy.




#14 CROW-MAN OF CROW-TOWN - Corax and Gav Thorpe
I will precis this one
Making up Deliverance Lost and Corax. These were OK! The fun part is Corax working his way through a super-dungeon made by the Emperor to access magic gene-tech. If people see the Emperor physically as an aspect which resonates with their own soul, then Corax is a super-good guy as he sees E-bro as simply a tired and reasonable man who wants the best for everyone. E-Dawg clearly also holds Corax in high regard as he tells him about Chaos and gives him super-gene-tech. Corax is an idealist to the point of stupidity and can't really process that he is working for a probably-deranged authoritarian, or that he is made of pasteurised demon-sauce, but this only really comes across best in his Guy Haley book. Like Vulkan there is a potentially excellent story to be told about an essentially 'good' character and what happens when the scales fall from their eyes and they awaken to how desperately morally compromised they are, and like with Vulkan, we get it only by inference. 

https://www.reddit.com/r/Grimdank/com...
#15 SIEGE OF RE-WRITES
The 'Siege of Terra has begun! Only the MIGHTIEST of writers will clash against each other to resentfully EDIT parts of the Heresy they personally thought were rubbish! Last chance guys! Get yer oar in!
I can actually summarise this here;
1. Wraight deletes Erda in Warhawk. 
Karen Took the Kids! Twice! Just like in Die Hard. Erda is a Perpetual character created by Dan Abnett in 'Saturnine' as a former ally of the Emperor involved with the Astartes project (she was their mother), wh turned against him and betrayed him and is now hanging out in Blood-Meridian-Siege-Terra. However, Chris Wraight had already created the character of Amar Astarte, a former ally of the Emperor involved with the Astartes project (they were named after her?), who turned against him and betrayed him. In 'Warhawk' Wraight says "no, we, and by we I mean I, have done that already" and has her packed away in a... vase?

2. Wraight rewrites Mortarians shitty character arc.
Mortarion is largely badly written, especially in 'The Buried Dagger' where he is basically Joey from 'Friends'. DUMB. However in 'Warhawk' a demon pops up to have a long talk with a Death Guard in which the demon explains that everything Morty did which seems utterly bewildering and fucking stupd, especially and specifically being surprised by the massive betrayal of Calas Typhon, was ACTUALLY psychological matryoshka and that really internally he knew this was happening and let it go on so actually its a dark and twisted tragedy and not an inadvertent boring comedy.

3. ADB 'Well actually's Graham McNeil.
In 'Fury of Magnus' Magnus confronts E-dawg who stuns Magnus with the offer of a return to his good graces and a whole new Legion; all he has to do is let his old Legion die. Magnus says no and flounces off to Chaos. This is either A; E-dude revealing his hidden narcissism, B - a deliberate shitty option designed to drive Magnus into the arms of Chaos on these specific terms in service to some ultra-long-term super-plan, or C - shitty writing. (Or any combination of the above).
Aaron-Dembski Bowden clearly thought 'C' and in 'Echoes of Eternity re-writes the entire scene so that actually Magnus heard something different? Or Vulkan heard something different? or the Emperor heard something different? with the customary ADB excuse for going deep on his obsessions "unreliable narrator universe!!!"

3. Anything Dan Abnett 
Dan is basically writing his own  Abnettverse mini-series in the middle of everything else - dark angels, perpetuals, multiple origins for the legend of 'Ollianus Pius', the Inquisition were originally Investigators? Cormac McCarthy planet earth, lots of wandering around, ENUNCIA the magic language of creation etc etc. How much of this will turn up in the god-help-me fractal mini-series at the end of this Siege series at the end of the Heresy series, who knows....
Anyway, if anyone spotted any other 'Siege of Re-Writes' drop a comment below.





#16 THORPE-HALL - Gav Thorpes other works
Lorgar: Bearer of the Word, The First Wall, and Luther: First of the Fallen.
These are actually pretty good or at least not-bad. I may do a small article about them.




#17 WRAIGHT-ON
Scars, Jaghatai Khan: Warhawk of Chogoris, The Path of Heaven, Warhawk, plus Leman Russ: The Great Wolf and Valdor: Birth of the Imperium.
The Wraight-verse! Has anyone done better out of the Heresy than old Chris. Ok, he and Jhagatai will get their own post, with a sub-post about Wraight and the Custodes.

#18 GUY HALEY
Pharos, Perturabo: The Hammer of Olympia, Corax: Lord of Shadows, Konrad Curze: The Night Haunter, Wolfsbane,  Titandeath,  The Lost and the Damned.
Haley probably should get his own post, not sure if I will make it but we will see. Also I need a silly name for this one.

#19 MHWA! - FRENCH KISS
Praetorian of Dorn, Tallarn, Slaves to Darkness, The Solar War, Mortis. He has written some pretty solid books! And Mortis.
Ok, I will try to make sure French will get his own post




#20 JUST THE WEAPONS
This was going to be a post discussing the more interesting weapons from the Siege, buuuuuuut, though they are fun, none are that interesting, or at least not a posts worth, so I will summarise here what the post probably would have been;
PRIMARCH WEAPONS
aLPHARIUS; basically a primarch weapon that can be broken down and re-assembled PURELY so Alan pharius can do an arming montage in the spy movie running continuously in his head.
Angron; dropping his axes they are not important except they are
Conrad; Has twin lighting claws with spooooky names think he uses them throughout the Heresy
Corax; Has a whip! Mental, plus a pew pew gun plus lightning claws I think plus his anti-gravity 'wings'honeslty a surprisingly chaosy loudout
Ferrus' HAMMER ends up with Perty. Vulkan has a bunch of hammers I think
Fulgrim; coooming to his SWORDS - Fireblade and the Laer Blade, symbolic 
Jhagatai; Has a cool sword think thats about it,can move fast like the Flash but only does it once??
Horus; Has his 'worldbreaker' mace which e-dog gives to him and which he keeps I think all the way to the end Has a talon made for him by the dark mechanicum - which you can still see on Abadoon
Lion; Has TWO SWORDS, on for kicking ass and one for really kicking ass
Morty; Big scyythe called silence and a cool raygun called lantern still has both
Rogals meat and potatoes chainsword and bolter, very 'badass normal' and memorable for being just that
Robute Oddly nothing stands out about him during the heresy weapons wise think he has a nice sword and gun but thats about it being slightly boring seems appropriate
Russ has like an axe and sword honestly for primarchs they feel pretty generic he also fiddles with a psychic spear at one point
Sanguinius Spear of Telisto shoots SOOPA RAYS, has a nice sword also
Lorgars gay mace made by Ferrus he still has it I think
Magnus is slathered in so much warp bullshit that his weapons are basically spells which are weapons or weapons which are spells, nothing really stands out
Vulkans its also a Hammer hammer Plus his lost or destoryed treasures plus the Talisman of Seven Hammers - the golden throne dead-mans switch! HAMMERS!




CHAOS WEAPONS OOOOHHHH
The Athame which takes down Horus
The evil dagger which Oll ends up with a form of Athame? has its own entire story behind it by the time we get to the end will anyone give a shit?
Various sub-athames. Robute ends up with one in Fear to Tread i think and it acts as a kind of potential obsessional focus for him giving us a glimpse of what a nurgly Robute might look like; eternal calculation and stasis.
Numerous demon weapons of various kinds most hilariously the one which ends up eating Gendor Skraivok, the cartoon vilian night lord 'Painted Count' demon weapons and demons generally tend to be a bit non-causal ie they have read the story before they turned up on the page usually wielder goes ah ha I will wield you demon weapon and the weapon goes hoo hoo ha ha I have read the last chapter hee hee
Giant chaos gates. oddly these aren't used for porting in demons but instead for normies to go visit the deep courts of chaos and make deals there for power we know there was one on Moloch the Emperor used & emerged super-powered we know Horus went in the same one and spent relative maybe centuiries in there we suspect there was one on tallarn Perty was looking for.

DAoT GOLDEN AGE PSYKER WEAPONS
Suggests a thread of DaoT tech which was largely about  containing/controlling the power of the Warp - possible anti-warp technology, is this the late-Terra 'Byzantine Empire' skunkworks in which the illuminati of that time start putting together a lot of bleeding-age, semi-impossible technology to fight demons or whatever? Lots of odd semi-magical stuff from this time.
The Lions slaved AI killer robots. We know the DA got a lot of the even more super secret Daot tech in paticular they have a bunch of sentient ai killer robots which they let out like living bombs with the batteries already 90% drained so hopefuly they just run out of juice.
The Twin Spears; One reveals the truth to whomever you stab (a bit late one would think), this becomes the 'spear of russ' and shows up pre-heresy publishing wise as part of the william king space wolf stories I think. The other shows you their truth, more useful it would seem. Valdor ends up with this one and spends much of the Siege running around murdering demons with it giving him a pretty deep knowledge and understanding of the deep structure of the Courts of Chaos which may well prove important in his possible yellow king development later, likely also requires a lot of mental mouthwash to walk off.
The Tabula Myriad; trans-dimensional hyper-dominating clockwork AI fiercely anti-chaos, also fiercely anti-life.
The Black Sword. Sigsmunds puritan sword where does this come from? Ultra-black, light-drinking, DaoT possibly, was this meant to be the Emperors sword?
Malcadors swag. Has a burning staff which converts psychic force into atomic flame, also has some kind of bio-feedback immortality collar which keeps his body going.
THE EMPEROR??? Or perhaps whatever supercharged the Emperor before or after his excursion to Moloch? My personal headcanon is super-golden anti-chaos weapon exists but can't be used. Emperor already strongest psyker. E goes to Molech and gains chaos power to make Primarchs and demon-soldiers to conquer galaxy. E then cheats, goes home and with new power, pasteurises himself with golden anti-chaos thing, likely combining with it, and using demon sauce to make Primarchs and Space Marines intended to conquer Galaxy, weaken gods and then invade hell.

RANDOM SUPER-WEAPONS
The Forgotten Ordinatus; Whole sub-plot for these, The Lion recovers these super-guns early in the Heresy and like a dingus, gives them to Pertuabo as a bribe for making him the next warmaster - thinking ah ha, we will see these guns again at the siege! Well we do not.
The Orouboros of Caliban; Is this chaosy or not? By the time of the story it definitely is but I think its suggested it was originally created as a kind of building tool for the Old Ones to make the webway? A hyperdimensional backhoe basically, thats in Caliban and plays a role in making that planet strange.
The Creepy Child Thing the Lion Hangs out with; The Lion comes across a possibly chaosy or just generally evil kind of aleph machine or a super navigation thing which has implanted itself into a childs body and is clearly creepy as fuck and the Lion 'uses' it to track and defeat Konrad though this is probably a long-term chaos plan as by extending the Thramas crusade they help keep the Lion away from Terra.
The duelling-assassins super weapons; Imperials have an evangelion-style mega-rifle built into a building Chaos guys have a warp-capacitor energy-eating super demon.
If anyone can think of any more fun or unusual ones, let me know in the comments!



#21 THE WARMASTER - Dan Abnett (the later works)
Know No Fear, The Unremembered Empire, Saturnine and whatever the end books are!
Obviously dib-dabs gotta get his own post, one of the few I can't write yet as he hasn't finished the series, but I will.

Avatar: The Way of Water! MACHINE BAD! Cat-Girl go HISSSSSSSSSSS

Look, the politics of this are so dumb as shit the only way to watch it is to let them wash over you (like water) and just vibe with it. It feels like a hippies dolphin poster from the 70's plus captain planet plus 80s Greepeace plus JRR Tolkien (MACHINE BAD), plus Jacques Cousteau. that's about it. Basically its Greenpeace; The Epic Cartoon.
If you want to see suggestively erotic blue cat people and sentient tattooed whales fight CRAB ROBOTS, evil AUSTRALIANS, BOSTOM DYNAMICS FIGHT SUITS, and Stephen Lang who is now also a CAT PERSON MARINE, then this is the film for you. I can't tell whether this is a good film as it is genuinely dumb as shit but I also had a lot of fun so who knows.





EVIL HUMANS
The one reason  think Scrap might like this is that there are some very EVIL AUSTRALIANS hunting SENTIENT WHALES and LOVING EVERY SECOND OF IT. But all of humanity is relentlessly evil and so engagingly clever and inventive that I was basically on their side the whole time. Every time they turned up in their wonderful machines to burn nature while drinking coffee from their robot arms I was like "Humanity yeah!" I want toys of all the human stuff and a tabletop game where you fight cat people for unobtanium and whale juice NO FLAG, NO COUNTRY, SORRY!


METATEXTUAL TRANSHUMANISM
The actually good actors are back. Stephen Lang is now an engram downloaded into a cat person body on a quest for revenge for his own death. He is tremendous fun. He drinks coffee! Sigourney Weaver is back as her own cat-person daughter in a role which sounds mental but which she carries off wonderfully. I feel like in a weird way Sigourney Weaver was made to do something this fucking strange as the genuine oddness of the role seems to suit her quite well. Zoe Saldana is still good as the probably-actual-protagonists who shoots arrows at Stephen Lang. The main guy is back as well, he is also present. 
So basically in-fiction people are swapping bodies, living in spliced cat bodies, wearing robot suits, living behind masks in an alien environment which they grew up in, being colonial marines with the memories of the dead but wearing the bodies of the people they are here to oppress. 
While irl everyone is jumping around wearing mocap suits, making CAT FACES, older actors playing young characters, or reborn versions of dead characters, changing age and form. Its a trip.


ONE MILLION PER CENT COMMITMENT
Everyone from Cameron down commits one bazillion per cent to whatever they are doing. No late-millennial veil of irony here! Only the sweetest most absolute CHEESE delivered with the greatest VERVE. If we were in the late 60s and had been watching 'Oaters' and Roman Sandal Operas for 30 years I would be sick of this shit but instead its the opposite and we have been watching fear-of-truth inronyclasm shit for 30 years so now this cheese smells good to me. HISSSS cat person! Machine bad! Nature Good! You want a comprehensive procedural breakdown on how we hunt sentient whales for their JUICE in this imaginary world? Well here you go! For about 15 minutes of imagined nature documentary! I like this shit so F you if you don't.
Someone really and genuinely cared about every single element of this film from the tiny dots on the cat people faces to how the trifold mouth of a sentient whale might open to water droplets coming of a cat persons ass to hiding every single (adult) cat-girl NIPPLE to how a ROBOT GENERAL might drink her MURDER COFFEE in her ROBOT SUIT. In it total commitment, massive starchiness, indifference to judgement, lack of irony, commitment to using CGI as an actual art rather than as fucking filler spackle over a directors mistakes and in its obsessive autistic world building it is the antithesis of whatever the fuck the current mode is.


IT IS GENUINLEY PRETTY DUMB
Yo, I heard you liked your noble savages, how about we gave you Noble Savages... in Tahiti! Gauguin's Tahiti! Pus Moana! Here we live in harmony with nature with our sentient whale friends and commune with the WORLD SPIRIT in the SEA and have no wierd or disturbing rituals or beliefs in any way and no underclass, no slaves, no tribal wars or headhunting, no resource problems and also we have gender equality and no old people. And we are definitely not quietly aborting or killing our un-needed young like most pre-agricultural human cultures may have been. WORLD SPIRIT BABY!
Have you heard of MACHINES! Machines bad! But also FUCKING COOL! Humans use them! Train go whoosh! Robot go THUD! Explosive harpoon go PRING. Could humans be good somehow? Maybe hippies and scientists. Also away with your MACHINE MEDICINE, here we solve medical problems with SHAMANISM and the WORLD SPIRIT! You like FAMILIES? You better because FAMILY GOOD! FATHER PROTECT!


WAS IT GOOD
 It is a late 1970s summer, somewhere a serial killer stalks, a rocket curves a line over the horizon off to deliver a shuttle to yet another moon golf game, wreathed in the embers of the sun a stick-thin hippy is carefully spraycaning (HISSSSS - like a cats hisssss) the glorious image of a breaching whale onto the side of his VW Camper van and by god if it isn't the best spray can image of a whale you have ever seen. I cannot tell if this was a good film but this is the film that it was. Way of Water Baby!

I Read "ItHot3bw" !!

 OSR CIRCLEJERK WARNING - I know Noisms well and play with Dave Greggs on the regular so strap on your circlejerk face guard.
Noisms of Monsters and Manuals has released his latest Kickstarted effort; In The Halls of the Third Blue Wizard, Volume 1, or as I shall be calling it "ItHot3bw"



So what did I think?
I liked it.
Art good = Fresco with Orcs good
Fiction Good = surprisingly not terrible at allgood elf birth scenedecent dungeon delve from the pov of a linkboya lot of potential to explore here
Adventures Good *largely* = Good inspirationGood individual contentSome issues with playabilityand most importantly, FOR ME, any problems with playability and text arrangement massively amplified by the FORMAT of the whole text


THE CONTENTS
"Offspring of the Siphoned Demon" by Ben Gibson - I did not really like this one I am sorry. If you did post a review to even the karma.
"The Black Pyramid" by Terrible Sorcery - COHERENT and PLAYABLE. Do you want to play in a dungeon that isn't a bunch of crazy pretentious bullshit and you can get it done in a session or two? Well here you go.
"The Chevrelier" by Brian Saliba - entertaining for as long as it was and probably good it wasn't longer as the idea was slight.
"Fresco with Orcs" by Joel Sammallahti - a very good illustration, my favourite of the book, I both want to know more about this world and situation, but also do not as, it would only clarify that which should remain pregnant with possibility.
"The Cerulean Valley" by George Seibold - a dense, coherent and interesting hexcrawl with a very good map - very playable, just charming.
"The Thirteen Dwarves" by J. Blasso-Gieseke - an amusing aperitif piece of dungeoneering meta-fiction about endlessly repeating dwarves, also exactly the size it is meant to be, which is short.
"Winter in Bugtown" by J. Colussy-Estes - nice side-on map, good concept might be difficult to use.
"Goblin Cave Battle" - its Kelvin Greens art, I do not love it myself but hopefully you do.
"The Hollow Tomb" by Harry Menear - a decent dungeon, compact, drowned lower level, tragic backstory.
"A Turn of Fortune" by Jose Carlos "Kha" Dominguez - Dungeon with what I found to be an inventive but maybe frustrating core concept of living/unliving statues, visible in magical mirrors, a whole dungeon layout mgical trick thing which is neat in concept. How will it play through?
"The Belly of the Fishy Beast" by Sam Doebler - an image AND a dungeon and a map, probably the most immediately playable thing in the book.
"The Beloved and Oft-Recounted Tale of the Mysterious Birth" by J.C. Luxton. A luxurious and well-written scene or story fragment from an Eld Court. Feels _very_ ItHot3bw I liked this one.
"The Transmuter" by Luca Vanzella. Excellent picture. Also feels very ItHot3bw.
"The First Fantasy World-Builder: William Morris The Well at the Worlds End by Roger SG Sorolla. Scholarly article, massive blog post and/or world creation thing? Whatever it is this feels VERY ItHot3bw - there are, or were, some bloggers who it felt were always meant to be in print - Tom K's Middenmurk was an exemplar of this, long posts with very rich language and almost as much an essay as a piece of experimental fiction and world building, more of this sort of thing please. Like, you can't lean back in your chair and smoke a pipe in your hobbit hole in front of a fucking computer, you can with a book and I feel like this is the kind of book ItHot3bw is trying to become.
"Moonrythm Mire" by Dave Greggs - ok, LOTS of caveats - know this guy, play with him, weird intense lyrical fantasy, ARGUABLY waaay too many moving parts. I liked it a lot. There were no adventures where I wanted to edit the content but many were I did want to move text around for clarity and playability and this is one. Ok I liked it a lot. Bizarre encounters in a magical mire with various Bande-Dessenie style factions and entities bouncing into each other and being weird.
"The Garden of Khal Adel" by Zane Scheider a location-based adventure in a musical-themed supercave (I think) with Goblins. Is decent, I was hoping for more orientalism from the title but ok.
Coils - a good illustration by Bert Bogaerts
"She Who Came to Oldgraves" by Autumn Moore, a dungeoneering story from the perspective of a local linkboy hired by the strangers who came to his village. Nebulous horrors and strange deaths await. Will there be anyone left to pay him his sliver piece by the end? In its content and theme this also feels very ItHot3bw. Classic Dungeoneering para-fiction. Not like 5e im-the-dragonborn-in-the-party stuff but maybe stuff like the story of the Silversmith who identified a magical ring for passing adventurers he never saw again and was perhaps cursed by dreamlike memories of an ancient time for a while, or the father of a runaway boy trying to find him, tracing his wanderings through life and death situations but always arriving after the event.
"The Devil in the Land of Rushes" -  by Noisms. Another boatload of Circlejerk warnings but I really liked this! Another really fucking dense adventure, in this case map based. Ages ago this was intended to be one part of a book of location based adventures set around where we lived. The book didn’t happen. My part became Silent Titans and Noisms part went through many and various changes over the years and now it is about as close to complete as it is going to get. If you were wondering what lies to one side of the sea in Silent Titans, well it may be this.  or perhaps this is yet another version or mirror-verse of that exact same land
This also feels VERY ItHot3bw but it would as it is Noisms and the basis for that aesthetic.
Should I go deep on this? It’s a location-based adventure about a timelocked land with the feel of North-West England in which the Devil is the main antagonist and everyone is cursed in various ways. ITs very bucolic, eerie, Alan Garners the Owl Service or Mythago Wood etc. Even 'The Sleeping Giant'.





SO MY COMPLAINTS ABOUT FORMAT AND ADVENTURES

Page Size and Column
 - A5 page size (roughly) and single column is awkward for text which has to be referred. I feel like read-across is bad when the text is dense and at these page proportions.

Adventures spread out over the book
 - so what if you want to play *just this* adventure and nothing else? And if you want to run it from the book? Not only are you flipping between small pages but you are doing so within a larger text, almost all of which you don't want at that time.

Inter-Referability is a Nightmare
Many of the adventures have some complex particular spaces and locations, plus bestiaries, if/then tables and descriptions, some fun random generators. But the pagination, titling and breakdown of information hierarchy is nowhere near bold, strong or designed enough for my taste.



POTENTIAL WAYS FORWARDS
More fiction? (if its any good, if David can get enough actually-decent fiction). The format seems made for these short, specific and dense fictions.
More scholarly articles/blog posts/essays - really the kind of thing where it is all yet none of these. The format also seems made for this kind of thing maybe even more than blogs. Like 'here's the Palace of Morpheus in Spensers Fairy Queene and here is a map of what it would be like to sneak into it and here a discussion of the metatextual adaptations of the character and here are some treasures and an encounter table kind of thing.
more ART - Of course artists are MUTE BEASTS but they can be paid readily enough. Art additions could be added to a Kickstarter relatively easily?
Interrelation of fiction/adventures to the art? don't know if Noisms would want to do this but if you could create a unified 'package' of an art piece, a bit of fiction and a playable adventure for each section that would be cool, would be a fucking nightmare to organise and edit though.
Separate adventure PDF's? Many people play from the PDF anyway and its the simplest way to make an adventure "more playable". Could be sold as a bundle like here’s the full text PDF and here are the adventures as sperate files.
Improved layout and information design for the adventures - this is expensive, time consuming etc as well, even getting things on unified spreads without hanging paragraphs would help
Playability editing of titling and information hierarchy? Clearer bold titles and section headings. I like double-column but that’s me.
Read-to-play editing of text? A taste thing. Editing adventure text so there are less hidden recursions, more say-as-they-see descriptive text.
A SPINE.. of course this is a pipe dream BUT, the density of the text, the extent to which you have to refer to adventures in order to actually use them, it would be cool if a hardback with a stitched spine could be made it turns it from more of a magazine into more of a book, and seems to fit the nascent Hobbitcore visionary aesthetic and social movement which appears to cluster about "Hot3BW".
This may sound insane but I actually believe that if the book was in hardback, better laid out, in 2 column format for the adventures, the very deep density of the adventures would be converted by some strange alchemy from quite frustrating to Good, Actually, just by the manner of their instantiation rather than their content.
One thing I absolutely INSIST ON for the next issue is an introduction written in the voice or the titular Third Blue Wizard, the editor taking on the Persona of a magical intermediary is ABSOLUTELY NECESSARY for a publication of this type!
I hope Noisms keeps this one up, OR IS IT GOING TO TURN OUT LIKE THE PERIDOT DAVID????