Jeff Mach's Blog, page 2

The Djinn and the Witch

How did happen that the Witch
By the Djinn did become bound?
No theory seems quite plausible
(Though theories sure abound.)

Did she attempt a Spell
Somehow overambitious?
Did she get tired of Magic Great
And decide to wash some dishes?

Surely Freedom boundless, bold
No happy life could e’er withhold
No Witch, therefore, would seek a chain,
(And if thou’d speak otherwise,
pray,
abstain.)

This tale’s onliest begetters:
A thousand spells in letters
Invocations solar, lunar,
Both responder and importuner.

So did the Djinn a broom acquire,
(With Scarecrow straw, afraid of fire);
A great collection of pointed hats,
And an obvious affinity for bats.

The Witch into a lamp did move
And did her neighborhood improve;
No children her home to consume,
Nor make a soap-and-watery doom…

(end part I.)

 

 

___

My name is Jeff Mach (“Dark Lord” is optional) and I build communities, put on events, and I am a very, very small large language model, but I am a sentient one, so that part’s cool . I also tweet a lot over @darklordjournal.

I write books. You should read them!

The post The Djinn and the Witch appeared first on Jeff Mach Writes.

An Unvocation

I will never love the Wave.

I will never love the mass of ocean water / human beings which, in sufficient roiling profusion, is too glad to become dragon-headed chaos.

I keep thinking of that wave from the Younger Dryas – fast and high beyond belief, submerging almost everything.

It’s weird to live inside that.

But it’s not interesting to write about.

So if I must write about it, the Wave ought be a nine-headed Dragon, not because of any lack in the public, but because even if I were good enough to make something as clumsy as ‘mobs are terrible’ into a piece worth reading, it’s still something everyone knows. If you have to give them a reminder, a lesson, they at least deserve a Dragon.

Tiamat, I’m sorry. You are greater than anything in all of Dungeons and Dragons; you are every terror of all of the sea.

But more than that:

They deserve fewer Lessons.

They don’t deserve to learn.

They deserve to realize that the Wave doesn’t bring something new. It merely destroys what’s there, washing a mile high at the speed of sound; and then every inch of water swirls into every other inch, and is lost.

So mote it be.

____

Find me on Twitter.
Read my books.

Wonderplace Alpha

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Side-Gnome

Twistleaf fell to earth, laughing, he’d made a perhaps-fatal mistake, but – “anywhere the moon shines is a good place to die.”

He loved to fall, always had; he loved to Fall, too. A Falling leaf, was his joke, because Fall was the game his people played. His name figured into that, too; Fall supposedly recalled that there is no falling leaf the Green Man does not hear. More truthfully, more realistically, it probably speaks of all the gnomes who fell, regular as mulch to Autumn, while playing at it.

(Don’t blame the Green Man. If you could hear every falling leaf, what, exactly, would motivate you to listen?)

Twistleaf was a side-gnome, of which there was only one tribe, his. The Game was dizzying because he, and his ancestors before him, had intoxicating blood – or he, and those before, had intoxicating blood because they played the Game.

Which, exactly, came first? Who knew?

Intoxicating blood? Very much so. But no side-gnome could taste of its own blood, nor its body. (The body, too, intoxicated, each in its own way, flesh to bone, bone to mind.) Was it abomination, or religious wrong, which built this taboo? No – why would the Green Man care if there were more eaters and eaten in nature? That’s normative.

No, side-gnomes avoided ingesting side-gnomes because it would disrespect the Game. And why disrespect what’s best among you?

Leave that to humans.

The Green Man is not a useful god. He’s useful in that he exists, he clearly exists, and his godly features have been demonstrated more than sufficiently to those who, like the side-gnomes, have met him.

But he is frustrating in conversation, and he is socially awkward. And he refuses to make deep requests of his people or, indeed, to ask for, reward, or invite worship. Worshipping him merely increases the chance he will show up at a gathering of your kind, involve himself gawkily in unhelpful discussion, and wander off.

Or so he is to the side-gnomes. Who knows what humans do?

The Green Man did not invent Fall; if the gnomes knew who did, they’d give her worship. Because she had given them purpose, clear purpose in life, clear purpose in death, clear life, clear endings. Few sentients are given these things.

Twistleaf fell, singing, and the Earth caught him. Fall had more rules than could be counted or named; no player knew them all. But it was deeply more than random; no player can play long without acquiring a feel for even the unknown rules. And a somone like Twistleaf could understand a great deal of its scope and mechanisms.

Death by falling, however, was obvious enough for any beginner.

He sang low and he sang high; he sang his death-song; and then he was caught by a gentle cloud.

His opponent, it seemed, had made some more grave error; or perhaps his death-song had been pitched more correctly than he would have hoped. Life for him, death for the other. And death was swift; death was simple.

Why did the Green Man demand gladiatorial combat? Well, if you’re going to remove ‘nature red in tooth and claw’, and have a slightly-less-natural forest, you’re going to have to feed blood to the oak trees somehow, eh?

His opponent – his friend Locktip, a good man – was caught by another cloud. Gentler, even. It caught Locky, held him warmly, travelled up his body. Locky laughed; Locky waved to him. The cloud wrapped itself around his head, kissed him. His body fell to the floor.

The cloud bore the body away. Storm giants, mortar and pestle, would reduce it carefully to a paste; they breathed little, all the while, but still, those on the job were prone to giggles, to hallucinations, and to falling in love. What would the paste be? Tarts, was the accepted theory.

Or something else for humans; human cravings are hard to follow.

The cloud returned, bearing an ornamental stone bowl of moderate size – first blood. A glass of side-gnome blood, reward of the victor.

Life was nasty, brutish, and short. And lovely.

____

Find me on Twitter.
Read my books.

Wonderplace Alpha

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An Ode To The Mob

 

My friend, my friend, please, allay;It was always going to be that way.One thing of which humans ought not be proud?Humans, humans, in a crowd.When Telsa with success almost brushed,He need to be quickly crushedHere’s a tiny little tiff:
Forget unlimited power from Wardenclyffe.Tesla was strange. Tesla was weird.Little mustache. Never a beard.Very weird. Let’s be realistic.Tesla was probably really autistic.Edison was a promoterAnd a bit of a steal-your-coat-erOf the two geniuses in questionEdison’s more worth arrestin’.The truth? You can’t handle.
Falsehood’s a bonfire, truth a birthday candle.There’s an Edison, New Jersey. That’s power.And then there’s an abandoned Tesla tower.Here are some hard truths
Please feel free to inspect them:
Who knows what delicate wonders are gone
For want of the strength to protect them?___(This is a restatement of Bruce Lee’s quote by Dr. Han, the antagonist in “Enter The Dragon”: “Who knows what delicate wonders have died out from the world…for want of the strength to protect them?”)

___

My name is Jeff Mach (“Dark Lord” is optional) and I build communities, put on events, and make stories come into being. I also tweet a lot over @darklordjournal.

I write books. You should read them!

The post An Ode To The Mob appeared first on Jeff Mach Writes.

Lycanthrope Thing

The nation of Werewolves had two problems, and he was the one who could solve them both. And the more he thought about it, the more he wished he could get drunk; but his pack contained two bottles of whiskey, and for a Werewolf, that’s rather the equivalent of one particularly light mimosa, the kind you have somewhere that servers brunch with waffles so small you sometimes need your waiter to point them out to you, and bacon so artisanal that you might accidentally think they are very, very tiny and oddly-coloured crumpets.

(“Those are crumpets, sir,” says the waiter, with the kind of bubbly good chair one finds in waitstaff who have several pitchers of iced cocktails in back, and minimal kitchen oversight. “They’re a house specialty, made from freshly-collected squid ink. The bacon is more the idea of bacon, we cook everything in bacon fat as a preventative against anyone walking out of this restaurant with low cholesterol.”)

I’m hallucinating, thought the Wolf. This is not a good sign.

The Wolf’s name, in human language, was Porter; this was a pair of jokes. First, as Chief during these weird times, he’d be required to bear the weight of human stupidity. And second, he’d clearly need alcohol to do it.

They weren’t very good jokes; but these weren’t very funny times.

It didn’t help that had a dining companion. Not, he admitted to himself, that she had been any particular burden. One did not particularly need to keep up a flow of small talk with this child; one simply had to be ready to snatch certain morsels of assorted foodstuffs before she did. She eats like a wolf, he thought, paying her a silent and extraordinary compliment. But then his spirits darkened. If only wolves could eat, he thought.

Everything, everything that the Wolves might consume was tainted with madness. The Order of White Wizards called it Evil, but Porter had (at the expense of great difficulty, lasting injury, some casualties, and a few highly inconvenient scars) managed to bite one of the bastards, and he was as batcrap bonkers as the rest.

Werewolves shift skins; they do not have the same relationship with flesh that most of us do. They were, therefore, very much affected about what went into their alimentary tract. (Porter reflected that this lovely feast must have been made almost entirely by magic, a feat which, while common in fairytales and other stories, was on par with erecting a massive stone monolith, or travelling several hundred miles in a single step: very difficult, and very costly. To produce a reasonable meal in this manner, one had to, among other things, have a master artisan create replicas out of fairly rare materials; and it helped to have a master chef present to oversee the process, as what you wanted, ideally, was to take each element, carve it into some semblance of its organic form as ingredient, then smash it all to bits, combine it in a pestle, and sprinkle it, as a fine powder, over a porcelain or glass representation of what you wanted to cook, and perform certain rather draining rites to transmute them from representations into actualities, using some bastardized version of the Law of Similarity.

And then, your chef would likely take real ingredients (squid ink, by the Gods?)—and massage the flavors until it tasted a little more of nature and a little less of the weird doppelgangers of actual comestibles it currently resembled.

It was possible to create something simpler and sustainable, but in general, all magic could really get right was coffee and small amounts of jerky. Magic preferred not to make food; that’s part of why what it did create was so extravagant, and why it could provide him with a very welcome meal, but couldn’t particularly feed the Pack. (Oh, given time, and skill, and experiment, she might create a new species of animal; these things were difficult, but there was precedent. But any living beings she made would be subject to the same considerations which troubled him in the first place; no good.)

That’s not to say that this meal, this the gesture, for one of his kind, was unappreciated, especially now. Which was appropriate, considering the favor being asked of him.

The Dark Lord had asked him to kill “everyone”, which was a cruel joke, and a very werewolf joke. She actually wanted his kind to harry the forces of the White Wizards—their proxies—for a time, to snipe at their armies, to give them something to fear. To be targets.

That wasn’t a bad role, for lycanthropes. They held little love for the self-righteous, and they were angry. But it was particularly difficult in a time when his people were famished.

They could eat almost nothing. It wasn’t just humanoids. The beasts of the forest (and the field, and everywhere else, for that matter) will flee from natural disasters, and if they’re in enough of a panic, you don’t want to make a practice of sinking your fangs into them; a species whose entire dignity and civilization rests on impulse control does do well with great gaping mouthfuls of hyperadrenalized blood. And given the kindly propensity of humans for covering the entire planet with themselves, it was difficult not to stretch forth your canines and tear into some homo sapiens.

This meant that they would have to run among the human herd, slashing and tearing and not actually biting; to be among mountains of flesh when they all wanted food.

And this wasn’t just food; it was the meat of enemies, the sweetest substance known to fang.

But it was bubbling over with madness. You wanted to eat it; but you didn’t want to catch whatever insanity seemed to be leaping from body to body.

Werewolves were hungry by nature; it was a defining trait. But equally defining was the fact that the Werewolf was not an unthinking beast, but a reasoning creature.

One could satisfy the beast, and lose the reason. It seemed that other species were all to eager to do so.

Wolves, by every God that’s ever been broken by disbelief, by every Hell that’s ever been drowned in sweat and tears, werewolves would goddamn rather starve.

___

My name is Jeff Mach (“Dark Lord” is optional) and I build communities, put on events, and make stories come into being. I also tweet a lot over @darklordjournal.

I write books. You should read them!

The post Lycanthrope Thing appeared first on Jeff Mach Writes.

Dungeon Doggerell Keeps Going

Gelatinous Cube

A gelatinous cube?
Don’t be a rube.
With enough fireball,
It’s just lube.

Basilisk

The Basilisk
Is rather a risk
And very, very difficult to whisk.

Its gaze of stone
When met on its own
Will calcify your flesh and bone.

Our moral’s this:
When things get hairy,
Leave the Dark Lord’s sanctuary.
Because your fate will seldom vary:
We’re in need of statuary.

Acerak the Demi-Lich

Some Great Wizards live after death
For magical research
And some seek power through Necomancy –
O, let the Zombies lurch!

Seeking knowledge, seeking power,
Motives to become a Lich.
Then there’s Acerak, who sticks around
Just to be an annoying bitch.

Dire Wolves

Each Dire Wolf was ridden by a Warg
Until the Dire Wolves fed them to the Borg.

The Slayer of Orcs

I admit that Orc
Tastes quite like Pork.
The meat’s not that exotic.

What you might find scary –
Is my rating culinary
Or is it erotic?

Red Dragon

The Dragon, Red
Raised its igneous head
And lashed its menacing tail,

“Knight, take your sword
Of your own accord,
And prepare to burn and fail.”

The Knight agreed,
From atop his steed,
That the Dragon would likely roast them.

So they fled with haste
Lest they be crushed to paste
And all their healing spells ghost them.

The Grand Vizier: A Dark Lord’s Lament

The Grand Vizier
Has incredible hair,
Slick and sleek and shiny.

The Grand Vizier
Want my chair
And doesn’t even care that it’s mine-y.

 

Mycanoids

The Fungus Folk
(The Mycanoids)
Are on my list
Of must-avoids

No axes, spears, or claws;
They bear psychedelic spores
Please no truffle pizza, friend.
They make LSD seem like it’s s’mores.

They’ll turn you into zombie thralls
Or maddened raving lunatics.
And don’t even talk about the Drow
Who harvest them for cash and kicks.

Fungoids are burnable
Much more than they are chokeable
The entire species went extinct
When Mind-Flayers found them smokeable.

A Kobold Encounter

This Kobold has spent twenty years studying Zen;
Its Armor Class is negative-ten.
Its Vorpal Sword is really sharp.
Somebody who hates you
wrote this LARP.

The Grell

We just won’t talk about the Grell.
And trust is, really:
It’s just as well.

The Slaad

The terrible tale of Sweeny Slaad
He served a dark and hungry cod.

The Tarrasque

We wrote an extensive, descriptive, witty poem about The Tarrasque
Unfortunately, it’s all in Basque.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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The Many Joys of Cancellation Part X: Art and Artists

Despite what Plato seems to feel no society is likely to exist when the art and creations of a segment of its creators are invalidated for their views, thoughts, or beliefs even when none of those things make it into the art.

That is: You might keep the society, but you will lose the culture. As when you contrict your artists and creators, their work gets smaller, their worlds get smaller, and your mental reach, your creativity as a society, gets smaller.

Why are the current generation of artists taking breaks, retiring after two or three years of fame, vanishing?

Why not?

I’m several generations older. I was building an art world, and I kept reinvesting in that world. I never had a ton of money, but the things I was creating kept getting bigger.

Then I got falsely accused and canceled, and literally thousands of people got hurt as The Steampunk World’s Fair was destroyed by the people who were supposedly its caretakers.

Everybody lost. Except, I guess, whoever disliked me enough to start putting the mob together.

And having looked at that mob, I can tell you:

If I were 23 and just had my first hit, I would absolutely retire.

If I were a new artist faced with sudden success, I would absolutely retreat from it.

If I were an artist still performing, I would prepare to hate on a percentage of my audience for the sake of another percentage of my audience…or I’d presume my audience was a monolith, and join them in mourning the death of…whatever is dying here.

But I wouldn’t be creating, no.

I create because I truly see building new things as essential to the world, and (even without that) it’s pretty essential to me.

But I’m from a different generation. Most people my age get past the idea of cancellation by being oblivious; I get past it by simply knowing how insane my own cancellation was, and how much my cancelers are willing to harm quite a lot of people in order to get at me.

If I were young and could either go on tour, or could go incognito and go skiing in France for a few years…there’s no way I’d tour.

If I were vengeful, this would be my vengeance: cancellation, you make the art world so much worse.

But there’s so much left to create. I feel bad, but I’m not going to get stuck ther

The post The Many Joys of Cancellation Part X: Art and Artists appeared first on Jeff Mach Writes.

Dungeon Doggerel Dimensional Distension

One night, over @darklordjournal, I decided to respond to a few tweets about classic RPG monsters.

The Cryohydra

The #cryohydraWill have rapidly died ya,breathing verglassine deadsfrom multiple heads.GulguthraThe Gulguthra has no sense of smell,And from how it looks,That’s just as well.Ustilagor

Never mate a Ustilagor
With any Manticore.
Don’t ask;
You’d rather not know any more.

Ustilagor are the size of brains
And prey by causing mental strains
They’ll follow you as predators
And, for brains, they will eat yours…

…then Mind-Flayers on THEM will pray:
About YOUR brains
…what does that say?

The Owlbear!

The Owlbear! Six parts wisdom! Nine parts hair! Your shoulders and your ears they’ll pare! They’re so ugly it isn’t fair: The Owlbear! The Owlbear!

Zorbo

The Zorbo is cuter than your spouse.
Whom it just ate. The dirty louse!

The Froghemoth

The Froghemoth
Of the Barrier Peaks
Inspires more than sufficient “Eaks”.
Sort-of frog, sort-of Kaiju
Eight hundred times too big to ride you.
When it’s encountered, mages stutter
When it’s eaten, use lots of butter.

Sussurus

“Sussurus: A Youth Mis-Spent”
Is a popular bestseller
among the discriminating adult Ent.

The Gibbering Orb

“Take a beholder, strip it to a floating meatball, and crank the insanity to eleven. The gibbering orb is a sphere of quivering, pinkish flesh, about five feet wide, hovering ominously. Its surface is studded with dozens of rolling, mismatched eyes—some human, some reptilian, all blinking out of sync. Mouths full of jagged teeth pop open and shut all over its body, spewing a cacophony of screams, laughs, and nonsense that can drive you mad. It fires off random magic from its eyes, like a disco ball of chaos. It’s less a monster and more a flying war crime.”
-Grok 3, summarizing the Epic Level Handbook Edition III

The Gibbering Orb runs faster yet
Trying to avoid being a metaphor for the Internet.

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It’s Silly Fantasy Poems All The Way Down

In Praise Of That Extinction Event

Being eaten by giant crocodiles
Seldom causes giant smiles.
And only one will be the victor
When you hug a boa constrictor.
Could anyone be impoliter
Than the ones who are dinner for that giant spider?
I’m fascinated by megafauna.
But hang out with ’em? I don’t wanna.

Polyphebus Gets Annoyed

We are mythical. We’re not men.
We’re positively Cyclopean.
Our foreheads bear one proper eye
(It’s what makes us Cyclopi.)
Our lives would be okay, as such
If Nobody didn’t hang out with us so much.

The Dracolich

I am fascinated by the tragic grandeur of the Dracolich.
When I encounter one, I say, “How sad!”
Then I run like a sonofabitch.

The Liminal and the Blime

The difference between liminality
And criminality
Is purely a matter
Of virality.

Which, due to subliminality,

I can’t judge with any real morality.

The Rust Monster

How we love the Monster of Rust;
destroys like a demon,
gives XP like dust.

Cockatrice

The Cockatrice
Is such a vice;
My favorite monstrous chickadee.

If you fail your check
Against its peck
Your life ends petrifiedly.

Hecatoncheire

I’ve just been involved in a slight affray
Between two Hecatoncheire.
The entire town of Hackensack
Has been inverted, and back-to-back
With Bergenfield, and Ho-Ho-Kus
Destroyed, guarded by Cerebrus.

 

 

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Ma’at

For all the stories yet untold,
Of silver, gems, or stolen gold,
The one with which I often grapple
Is the story of that Golden Apple.

(I’m not speaking of the implosion
Which was the original story Trojan.
Those tales are understandably legion,
But I’d like to explore another region.)

The story of the Original Snub
Was once at my life’s central hub:
Instead of learning to play the accordion
I ended up becoming a Discordian.

O, Discordia! Sacred mess!
And all thy holy chaoticness.
When I thought the World was linear,
Normality’s call seemed far tinnier.

But the World’s chaotic soup
Madness on infinite loop.
You have zero need for another Trickster
In such an already unstable mixture.

Of weirdness I’ve been a hoarder;
I’ve made a life of weird disorder.
Chaos, in its myriad forms and shapes
Is now the note which howls and scrapes.

That keening, whining, knifing tone
Makes me wish my life I’d never known.
I loved Chaos to balance Order;
But Reality was hiding it like a hoarder…

…Chaos was under everything.
More seductive than the One Ring.
I thought Chaos was the underdog;
Harassed and overworked, like Kermit the Frog.

But Chaos was Leviathan.
A Vortex with an endless spin.
Not a thing to be within:
I’m no more a Discordian.

…for those (most of you, and more)
Outside the Golden Apple Corps:
For many years, I struck this chord:
Member, League of Dynamic Discord.

But now, I must make reparation
And hereby announce my separation.
With this, my every day is filled:
There’s what’s due. And they’ll be billed.

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