Jeff Mach's Blog, page 58

of course caffeine is fatal

Once, in an undreaming vision through a fuzzy weave of drug-fumes,

I glimpsed a past which lay before us,

ready to be replayed

like an Edison cylinder,

scratched and old,

and full of the dark genius

which stole Tesla’s life,

and I don’t even know who Tesla is;

it’s 1704, and some madman just sold me

a healing potion that worked.

“Tea” was the name

of the delivery system,

and “caffeine” the drug,

and neither one is

sinister

because all caffeine does

is send the precious engine of your heart

screaming and pounding like

a doomed chariot,

shaving little bits

off your lifespan,

and “tea” is the best way

to take it in,

because it also provides

tannin,

whose bitter

numbing qualities

help you forget

that tea’s no safer

than coffee;

but come now,

why worry?

coffee exists

in forms too peculiar

for even you,

my dreamed, strange, future-cousins

to understand,

and besides,

I have this bedrock faith:

would the Dutch East India Company

do us harm

to make a few shillings?

So it was to a “Tea party” I went,

though Gods help me if I went to an

“opium party” or an “LSD party”; I don’t know

what those things are,

but this was worse;

SO MUCH SMALL TALK

AND TOO MUCH STIMULATION.

and yet,

even poppies have had relatively little effect

(comparatively) with tea and its devilish

companion, tea–

those monsters gave me BOILED LEAVES and GROUND UP BEANS and said

I should

DRINK

them.

And I did,

rivers,

lakes,

oceans,

melted comets’ worth,

and then I stayed awake

until

the invention

of Tequila,

and

things

went

rapidly

downhill

from

there.

~Jeff Mach

 

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 of course caffeine is fatal appeared first on Worlds of Villainy.

Eat The Paladin

Sure, he lacks the taste of sin,

But you should eat the Paladin.

His sacred glory’s bright within—

The yummy, yummy Paladin.

If purity’s a little lacking,

The Paladin will soon get cracking.

To Poverty he’s surely vowed—

Though Vorpal Swords he’s quite allowed.

Halfway Mage, halfway Priest,

He’s a sorcerous tank, at least.

A bastion of purity;

A ball of insecurity.

He dances on the head of a pin,

So go and munch the Paladin.

He’s why I drink so much Gin;

someone eat the Paladin.

His blood is shiny, sunlight-sweet

His brawny arms are Grade A meat,

Tastier than smith or farmer,

You can broil him right inside his armour!

He’s so sure he’ll always win,

Until you eat the Paladin.

Only one thing stops that idiotic grin:

Quick, quick: Eat the Paladin!

Who’s that always doing good?

Oh, that’s the rogue, Robin Hood.

Who’s that taking all the credit?

It’s the Paladin. (Yes, I said it.)

You might have seen that I’ve a grievance:

I’m wary of those who show off believance.

The Paladin’s Good’s so ostentatious

It inspires me to be voracious.

Maybe he’s everything that he is claimed,

But if he is, he should be ashamed.

For all who live by Nature’s laws

Are partly defined by our flaws.

If you think your virtue’s all-abiding,

I bring this slightly awful tiding:

You make virtue seem quite unfulfillin’;

You’re way I chose to be a Villain.

He’s certain that he’ll always win,

That’s why you should eat the Paladin,

Because his surprise tastes like yummy cinnamon,

So please,

please,

eat the Paladin.

~Jeff Mach

 

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 Eat The Paladin appeared first on Worlds of Villainy.

Fermi’s Dragons

Hello! I’d like to take a moment to address Fermi’s Paradox (the idea that sentient life ought to be abundant in the Universe, but damned if we can find any); the Philosopher’s Stone; and the existence of Dragons. Everything here is true; everything I say is true; everything is true and everything can, and does, happen.

Honestly, it doesn’t take terribly much to solve a couple of the particularly pressing questions of myth which beset us in the modern world. All you really need to do is have a working knowledge of some of the wisdom of High Atlantis, which is something you would already possess, had we not gone out of your way, historically speaking, to destroy any and all information from previous civilizations which might be helpful in maintaining some sanity in the present day.

I mean, they left us entire Pyramids and we still spent most of our time, from a historical perspective, pulling off the shiny bits off, blowing up their walls in the search for treasure, or using their stuff for cheap building materials. That latter makes sense from the point of view of the there-and-then: I get it, people who wanted a city were not comforted by having several vast and inexplicable ancient buildings instead.

Still, all we needed as an understanding that the short-term benefits of having more construction materials were outweighed by (are you expecting me to say ‘the importance of historical record? The irreplaceability of the relics of a vanished past? Art? No, my bar isn’t that high; I was going to say): the tourist revenue. I mean, it would have been nice if we possessed even an ounce or two of reverence for the possibility that those who raised up megaliths, and other enormous structures meant to last for millennia had some sort of desire to inform us, and it might make sense to look for a message or two, alongside the mad rush for treasure hunting, but honestly, it wasn’t even the most profitable alternative, in the longterm.

Then again, how often do we go around intentionally leaving really meaningful things for posterity? I don’t mean, like, grandchildren posterity, I mean, like the year 9275. It’s hard to do, especially since we aren’t always in a position to believe that we have any real understanding of the present, or that we even ought to be giving a bit of a lift-up to the future.  For at least the last several years, we’ve been at a state of such complex misunderstandings and disagreements over the nature of knowledge itself that it’s not incredibly unexpected to find ourselves unsure what wisdom we have to offer to anyone.

I mean, we have trouble recognizing that the past hundred years, while far from perfect, and frequently horrifying, nevertheless saw advances in science, medicine, technology, even, arguably, individual rights of human beings on an unprecedented scale.

(Whereas the horrifying stuff…is quite precedented. That doesn’t make it any less unique; in fact, that makes it worse. But the point still stands. We’ve improved in a lot of ways, and we seem to be actively trying to forget this.)

So our being slow to think we have anything might constitute any sort of knowledge worth passing down is…strange only if you look at it, and we try not to look at it, because life is too complicated for serious examination these days, or so we tell ourselves.

Let me be clear here: if there was an ancient and more advanced civilization which preceded our own, I’m not trying to say that they were good and we are bad. I’m just saying it takes a very long time to really understand the true expense of ignorance. Once the level of your stupidity is so great that it begins actively vacuuming out the contents of your billfold, you gain a different perspective on relativism, whether you want to do so or not.

Admittedly, a lot of our understanding of past worlds has leaked into the modern era in only the most diluted form.

For example, we have spirited discussions on the likelihood that our belief in dragons came from the bones of particularly large dinosaurs. Which makes perfect sense. And similarly, we figure that the idea of someone having a heart of gold is a metaphor, wherein we speak of the purity and beauty and perhaps rarity of the quality of compassion (a thing which, by the way, we believe resides in the heart, despite the fact that we no longer live two thousand years ago, when more people were running about strange ideas about medicine the spleen being the center of the intellect, or the liver our emotional core.)

(And they thought the Pineal Gland was relatively unimportant in the grand scheme of things! …even though it is the organ which is most specifically adapted for the purpose of trying to understand the grand scheme of things! Have these people NEVER dropped acid?)

…then again, the totality of the cosmos is terribly large and thereby frightening. So I cannot entirely blame us for not immediately picking up on the stuff which might help us perceive it with more clarity and understanding.

All right, then. Let’s get tot the bits you need to know.

In point of fact: Hearts of gold are at least partially literal. Many sentient beings have such things. No, I don’t know exactly how that works. As I have not met those species and I am neither a metallurgist nor a biologist, I can’t tell you why it’s so, but it is. I mean, speaking to you as the Narrator, would the Narrator LIE to you?

Really, there’s only one sentient species in the Galaxy whose hearts are NOT made of gold, namely:

US.

What happened is quite simple. Dragons are a starfaring race, as everyone knows. I mean, humans believe weird things, like “Dragons breathe fire”. That’s ridiculous. Nobody could possibly breathe fire. They don’t really  to “breathe”; they can just generate fire and push it out of their lungs by pulling in air molecules; what else would you expect. They are supported by some form of abiologicial internal infrastructure, which is beyond my personal knowledge or understanding, and probably yours, no offense, even if you’re a biologist; especially if you’re a biologist, probably.

(It’s not your fault that you’re looking for ways that things work, and are stymied when things which patently shouldn’t happen, happen altogether too much. It’s okay. Have a beer and don’t let it worry you.)

It could perfectly well be magic that powers Dragons. Whatever it is, though. I’ll just say that they are not earthly beings and don’t necessarily conform to the laws of Earth.

Now, human beings are extremely prolific, and one can imagine the vast horde of dragon folk taking up residence on this sphere and waiting for this vaste horde of roving edibles-to-be to gain whatever level of knowledge, compassion, and understanding lead to  the transmutation of one’s heart to one of the auric metals. Imagine the Great Lizards’ shock and dismay when they figured out that this was never going to happen.

Dragons are very long lived. So I cannot imagine how long they spent observing us: thousands of years, millions of years. They might be extremely patient. They had probably mined much of the known universe up to that time and figured they’d found a trendy new culinary delight; jokes on them, we’re basically made of plastic, soul-wise! We’re like the imitation food that restaurants put in windows to entice people into assuming that the cuisine within is much like that which is on display, only, hopefully, made of actual food. And as so often happens, the answer is “No, sorry, not so much.”

So the Dragons of this world, perhaps abruptly, all took off at once in search of greener pastures. Or at least most of them took off at once, the flapping of their wings generating cataclysmic wind; indeed, this occasioned the great tidal waves and seismic upheavals which sank the aforementioned Atlantis, which is a pity, because those cats were pretty hep and could have told us a lot more about the Universe. And to be fair, they certainly tried. But we’ve successfully ignored just about everything they tried to tell us, which isn’t the worst thing in the world; oh, it’s unfortunate to miss out on things we might have wanted to know, but there’s something to be said for making all of your own damn mistakes.

This it was that Dragons went to many other planets, upon which were species whose hearts were true gold. I said earlier that their hearts become a metaphorical gold, and then I suggested that human hearts might have become the actual metal “gold”. But there is of course, a slightly more metaphysical answer, which is that gold, as a thing which exists both as a physical building-block of matter and an immaterial-but-real spiritual component of life, might be something you could achieve with a certain level of spiritual grace, a totality of kindness to others and love within one’s whole  being. And these other species of the Universe? They’ve all got that.

Now, Dragons, as you know, like to sit atop hoards of gold. In their trans- galactic flight, which must have taken some time, perhaps the Dragons grew very large, or perhaps their manifestations on Earth were simply very small compared to their true size. Whatever it was, when they landed on those planets and sat upon them, they truly dominated, if not the entire planet (that would knock a celestial object out of orbit, killing its inhabitants and rendering them of no use to the aforementioned Wyrms) – but they were the size of  vast, vast mountains. And they took rulership over all the inhabitants of those place, and sat upon them, at least metaphorically, in the sense of ‘seat of rulership, although, for all we know, they also literally SAT upon hundreds of bodies on a given day. I mean, Dragons themselves are not terribly kind creatures.

So this is why we do not encounter other species of sentients, even though it’s likely that they exist. If they exist, why haven’t they contacted us? Easy.  Dragons are currently sitting upon all of them. That is the solution to Fermi’s Paradox AND it answers the question of why there are no Dragons among us.

In short, in the end, there was only one thing that really protected humanity from suffering the horrible fate of every other thinking species. We are a bunch of right bastards. We are disagreeable, and immune to holistic enlightenment; we are so forcefully insistent on being individuals that we would rather sometimes be dickish to one another than the united in cosmic harmony; and, in fact, this is not a bug, it is a feature. We just need to refine it so that our dickishness is a bit more focused on protecting ourselves as individuals than snarking at our neighbors, not because snark isn’t fun, but because you can always binge-watch more Vincent Price movies if you’re spending less time checking your booby-traps to see if the neighbors have come by your back porch to see if you’re edible.

Whether or not we refine our jerk-osity enough to live happier lives is unknown; as an optimist, I’d like to think so. Either way, though, I have firm faith that humanity will remain sufficiently dickish that we shall never be plagued by Dragons again. Good on you, humankind.

~Jeff Mach

 

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 Fermi’s Dragons appeared first on Worlds of Villainy.

Always Blame the Bard

The little ditty below is not meant to cast aspersions upon the noble and ancient Bardic profession. It is well-known by all educated people that most Bards are among the most noble, the most honorable, the most trustworthy of souls to be found anywhere in this world.

It’s merely sheer coincidence, some peculiar quirk of fate, that neither you, nor I, nor anyone we know, has ever met one like that. Probably just our bad luck. We’re sure that the next Bard we meet will be as upright as they are in story and song.

Or at least, that’s what their stories and songs will tell us, eh?

Pour me another pint, friend, it’s going to be a long night.

__________

Where lies the blame?

It isn’t hard:

Always blame it on the Bard.

If there’s a rule you can’t discard:

Always blame it on the Bard.

You might think that mayhem flows

From the deadly troll who boulder-throws,

Or from the Goblin, sneaking, sneaking,

Or the Pirate, havoc-wreaking,

Whose pretty, and don’t get battle-scarred?

Ten to one: It’s that damn Bard.

Why’s all our stuff thrown in the yard?

Always, always blame the Bard.

You might think that chaos reigns

On strange and demon-riven plains,

That if everything’s amiss

It’s some Wizard who did this.

But it’s almost his calling card –

Blame it, blame it, on the Bard.

Looking for trouble? Kindly regard

The lying face of that damn Bard.

If there’s a battle ‘tween Sword and Pen,

The Sword might win for now – but then

When the history’s recorded,

You’ll hear the Villain’s the one who sworded.

I tried to have faith. I tried hard.

But then I learned to blame the Bard.

When what you need’s criminal disregard,

Look no further than the Bard.

 

~Jeff Mach

 

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 Always Blame the Bard appeared first on Worlds of Villainy.

On Not Raising The Dead

Let us, for a moment, put aside the question of whether or not a particular archmage can raise the dead, en masse, from the grave. Let’s put aside the question of whether or not the Divinities of the Boneyard would approve of such an endeavor. Let’s put aside what it might do to the spellcaster (have we mentioned, of late, that all magic has a cost, and deciding to change that-which-is-dead into that-which-emulates-life is not a small alteration of reality?) Let’s also, if we might, put aside the plethora of sources which find it convenient to suggest that one might, for example, not only raise an army of one’s own dead, but that one might also raise the dead of those who oppose you, and thus, whenever one fights this force, the net result will always be that the Necromancer’s legions grow larger, which, in theory, suggests that a Necromancer would be undefeatable?)

(And, in contrast, might we put aside the human conveniences of suggesting that a certain kind of blow will stop a deathless corpse? Why in the world should a thing whose brain is no longer in sensory or bioelectrical contact with the rest of the body care if one removes its head? And yes: magic is arbitrary, but why would, say, weapons made out of silver stop the animated thing? Who writes these rules, anyway? Look: if you find yourself surrounded by zombies, don’t aim for a headshot; aim for a story with better metaphysics.)

Let’s simply cast all these considerations to the winds (the West Wind; the North Wind is still angry at us for reasons best left unmentioned at this time), and ask ourselves: why doesn’t the Necromancer raise up an army of the undead to slaughter the living?

We run straight into another question: why, in the name of the eighteen devils of Pandemonium would she?

To destroy all life? Perhaps. Although most beings who want to destroy all thinking creatures want to do so because so many thinking creatures are idiots, and that problem’s not going to get any better if you replace the thoughtless with those literally incapable of thinking.

To rule the world? This seems to be the explanation offered to us most often; but what a petty, small-minded, idiotic being you’d have to be, to have sufficient knowledge to empty the charnel-houses, and not think through the end result of your actions.

That is, what exactly are the satisfactions of ruling the world? Acclaim? Can’t really get that from the dead. Adoration? You could cause the dead to kneel before you, probably; you can probably puppet them around pretty well. But what a weird pleasure it would be, to feel a mimicry of adoration from the unliving.

A master Magus is capable of plumbing some of the most arcane Secrets of the Universe. (And many of them could really use a good plumbing; they’re so clogged up with the muck of misplaced Belief that one can barely get at them, and once one does, they’re clogged up something fierce.) If you can move things about and experiment with the building blocks of Creation, it seems strange to spend that much time mucking about in the physical world if you’re not going to take advantage of anything that the material world actually does well.

It’s not that the higher realms of Magic are devoid of either intellect or surprises, per se; but they are intellects towards which humans, even those with unearthly knowledge, bear little relation; the nanite hiveminds which generate Creation on an atomic level, for example, have much more in common with the hyperintelligent killer ant-bees from that dimension right next door, a fact which will be of no comfort to you when the latter come by for a visit.

If you’re really going to raise an army of those who cannot think, and lead them to world conquest, what do you have left? Objects. Just objects you can move around as you so desire.

And if, in turn, that sounds like some form of ultimate power to you, consider this scenario:

A child drags his stuffed animals out to sit around a table, and he places an empty teapot on the table. He then invents conversations for them to have, over imaginary cups of tea.

There’s nothing wrong with this in a child; it might indicate loneliness, perhaps, but it might not; it definitely indicates creativity and an active imagination.

But a master sorcerer who uses unholy powers to snuff out all thinking resistance, then moves everything about to suit her whims? It’s like taking real friends and making them into stuffed animals, taking real tea and substituting for it a purely imaginary liquid. The child, at least, is taking things which do not have inherent consciousness, and making a world in which they interact as if they were intelligent. The Necromancer is taking a world of thinking beings, and substituting for it a tea-party of imaginary friends.

It’s hard to create something out of nothing. It is easy, and unspeakably weak, to take a world of Something, and make Nothing out of it, just so you can play around with a world of objects that can never hurt or love or challenge you.

~Jeff Mach

 

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 On Not Raising The Dead appeared first on Worlds of Villainy.

An Unchosen Fate

It wasn’t fair for the Chosen Ones. Why would anyone expect it to be?

If you’re not aware of the grift in question, it goes like this:

In theory, there is something that counterbalances the Evil of the Dark Lord. (Why does that sort of counterbalance never seem to occur in your life? Why isn’t there a cosmic force which makes sure that every time you trip and bruise your arm, you also find some coins to make up for it? Why doesn’t it choose sides in wars between nations? Why does it somehow occur when someone puts on a dark robe, raises the dead, and refuses to play along with White Wizards? Why is Necromancy an offense that disturbs the Balance, whereas the wholesale slaughter of Goblins is just another Tuesday? Who makes up these rules?)

—but the theory, and it’s such a pretty theory, is that a Very Special One is born to restore all things to their rightful places, through the very special process of gutting the Dark Lord like a trout. This person fulfills an ancient Prophecy, a foreknowledge held by ancients who were so wise that they could foresee the future, and so apathetic that they decided to convey this information through codes and rhymes and riddles, apparently for the purpose of making life more difficult for anyone attempting to do the thing they supposedly wanted.

(It’s sometimes said that the Prophecy is coded so that the Dark One cannot forestall it by finding the Chosen One first, which is just stupid. There’s no reason to believe that White Wizards are going to be vastly better at puzzles than Evil Archmages; in point of fact, both of them spend a great deal of time decrypting the secrets of the Universe, and so neither side ought to have much trouble with millennia-old brainteasers. It seems to lead to a lot of futures in which the White Wizard gets pretty close to figuring out the clues, and arrives in the general vicinity of the Prophesied One, only to find that the Dark Lord has razed every single village in the area to the ground, leaving behind only ashes and a note that says, “This might have been overkill, but I figured, better them than me, right?”)

There may be a Prophecy, or several. The Ancients left many of those things, sometimes to convey ancient wisdom, sometimes to give warnings, and sometimes just to take the piss.

For example,

“In the time when the Moon’s face is hidden

 by the Stranger,

 only when you are surprised that you’ve never

 seen the Stranger

will you ask yourself: have I ever let others

 see the Stranger in myself?

And at that moment, all shall be as foretold.”

There. Now, if at some point, something brings these words to mind for some reason, you’ll remember that you heard them here, and realize how truly all-knowing the Narrator was.

It’s entirely possible that the earliest White Wizards, facing the earliest Dark Lords, really dig through ancient prophecies to find solutions, and really did, with the best of intentions, think that the solution was going to be found in one very special child. White Wizards have a vested interest in Destiny, having conveniently placed themselves at approximately the top of their version of the Natural Order of Things—that is, if everything is pre-ordained, isn’t it lovely that you just happen to be The Embodiment Of All Things Excellent? Dark Lords are rare; they rise very seldom, and they end…or disappear…in complicated ways. Alice is rare; there have been three Dark Lords in the last thousand years, and all of them in a single span of a hundred years. Alice has a theory about this; but Alice has theories about many things; don’t ask her about them unless you’ve got a spate of time and a jug of whiskey available.

Eventually, the whole thing just turned into a Chosen Mill.

Pick a Chosen One, equip ‘em with the next batch of disposable heroes, a questionable magic weapon, and some dubious advice, and send ‘em forth. How do you kill a well-armored knight with a dart? Throw a thousand darts; one will get through.

There’s an uncertain track record. The histories have been muddled; it’s said that Alice’s two predecessors were both slain by Chosen Ones, but the Realm they had maintained remained curiously intact, curiously hostile to White Wizards, and curiously full of Orcs, Goblins, Trolls, and renegade humans. They claimed the Dark Lord lived. The Order of White Wizards sealed off the whole area, but rumors kept escaping.

No histories agree on what happened. Where the Dark Lord had gone, none knew, but the ranks of White Wizards were sorely diminished, and it began to be understood, first by scholars, and then by those who studied with them, until finally the world knew: the Names which underly the World were accursed names; they had always been cursed; and they might never be repaired or remade. And thus began a time of despair and war next to which an Apocalypse would have been very, very pleasant indeed; because an Apocalypse ends a world, and what there was, if it could be compared to any acts of Gods at all, was Purgatory.

It was in this time that Alice arose, in her own strange way.

And when her own Darkness stood revealed, the Chosen Ones came for her.

They came, although they must have known their predecessors had died. They came, even though some of them must have heard that their Prophecy wasn’t exactly as they’d been told. And thy believed. The more of them she defeated, the more she brought down, the more they came at her, increasingly certain that her death would heal the wounds of the world.

At least they had hope; whatever insanity was eating them, it was bright and pure; they were sure that, if they could just kill her, some part of the Universe would right itself.

Alice knew that she could step off a parapet right now and, if she chose to use no spell of flight or landing, merely dashed her mortal body to bits on the hard rocks by the moat, the World would grow not one whit happier.

And that was part of why she was letting the Chosen Ones live now.

Because something was wrong. And Alice couldn’t let it go.

In the meantime, though, she didn’t want to die. Her castle was layered with wards; she was layered with protective spells, plus the armor, plus certain other precautions, some mechanical, some supernatural, and a lot of healing tools close on-hand. Once the Chosen Ones made it to her, they stood, basically, no real chance at all.

One-on-one, despite what the Chosen Ones had been told, Alice very probably could have just defeated them all in single combat, without all the other precautions. But that was stupid, of course. It is sometimes necessary to bait a trap with yourself, especially if part of the trap involves getting a very, very close look at your opponent in the moment of highest stress. It is idiotic to do so without assuming that, one of these days, you’ll slip, or you’ll miss, or someone will have more skill than expected.

No system is perfect; but there were warrior-kings, in their prime, who’d died attempting to dismount from their damned thrones. (Okay. Just the one. But Rognoth the Conqueror would forever be known as Rognoth the Clumsy, and he had earned that title.) There was no way to avoid total risk.

In this case, the flaw in the equation ought to be on the Chosen side, or the White Wizard side. They should have realized that there was a reason why no Chosen Ones ever returned. But they chose not to do so. It did not gibe with their version of reality; and so, the fact that it was true was unimportant.

It wasn’t fair for the Chosen Ones, but first off, that was hardly her problem.  Secondly,  NOTHING is fair. Many think this is because the world is destined to be a terrible place, but it’s precisely the opposite. There’s no way to ensure fairness for anyone unless we’re all cogs in a machine. And for many of us, being a cog would not be just unfair; it would be unbearable, and unlivable, and we’d take our own lives, and then everyone else would have to bury us, which would suck for them.

The world is precisely as fair for Chosen Ones as it is for Dark Lords, which is to say: believing yourself to be the Child of Destiny is believing yourself to be the property of Destiny, and once you do that, you deserve what you get.

~Jeff Mach

 

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 Unchosen Fate appeared first on Worlds of Villainy.

Building A Better Reality

I used to stay up all night playing ‘Resident Evil 2,’ and it wouldn’t stop until the sun came up.. Then I’d walk outside at dawn’s first light, looking at the empty streets of London, and it was like life imitating art.. It felt like I’d stepped into an actual zombie apocalypse..

~Edgar Wright

We keep trying to escape this reality; is that because this reality isn’t good enough?  No, not at all.

It’s just that we keep realizing this reality’s deficiencies.  Carl Sagan said, “It is far better to grasp the universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.”  And that’s true.  But…

It’s terribly damn arrogant to think we understand the Universe; and silly to think that the Universe puts a whole lot of effort into understanding us. I’ll be honest; it took me something like two years to figure out exactly how I liked my morning coffee. It took me ten years to realize that my morning tiredness wasn’t natural, but rather that I am already producing internal stimulants, and more caffeine was just a sign for my body to slow down. We seem to think that a small portion of a human lifetime is enough to tell us what’s “real”; it’s possible that no amount of human lifetimes would tell us what’s “real”, because Reality might not chose to be pinned down.

Friends, the world around is is malleable; and that doesn’t mean that it’s about to collapse, it means that even the most difficult times aren’t always as fierce as they appear. We are human beings; we are not slaves of destiny, we are not machines, we are not non-sentient programs (we might be sentient programs, but if we are, who cares?).  We change the world simply by existing within it.

That’s part of what Villainy says: “If we’re going to believe in a world full of monsters, shouldn’t the monsters be compelling and interesting, rather than banal and soul-destroying?”  This is what Zombies say: “To hell with your day job, this I-may-get-eaten-at-any-time world is more ALIVE.”  That is what every story of post-Apocalyptic survival says: “Forget the insipid joys; a real joy should be able to exist in the face of nearly complete destruction; it might even arise out of that destruction.”

We are beings of imagination and creation.  Go ahead, try to tell us what’s “real”.  We’ll fight back with a reality ridiculous and implausible, a reality flawed in every way except…

…except that as humans, we can make it real.  And that is Villainy and Renaissance Faires and zombies and Goth and Rocky Horror…but it’s also cell phones, computers, video games, and a basic understanding of history.  Reality is much less limited than anyone thinks it to be; Moore’s Law alone proves it.

We’re humans.  Our only limits are imaginary, and we can break imaginary rules any time we want; ask anyone who’s ever played Dungeons and Dragons.

Never let Reality hold you back.

~Jeff Mach

 

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 Building A Better Reality appeared first on Worlds of Villainy.

A Price of Magic

Once, there was an apprentice magician who was very curious. This is often a good quality in a mage. Or at least, it’s good for other sorcerers; it means that, if you make it through your apprenticeship, you will have left some fascinating notes when other conjurers are going through your effects, trying to determine if you left a will, wondering where the rest of the body is, and nervously muttering protective spells against whatever delightfully remarkable thing you (temporarily) called forth, just in case it’s still around.

This apprentice was once given one of the great, best-known, least-understood maxims of magic: All magic has a cost.

Let’s note that this tale will involve the Master hitting the Student with a stick. We therefore will allow you to choose your level of discomfort with the tale, assuming the idea discomforts you in the first place. If you wish to remove the sting of considering a young disciple undergoing negative corporal reinforcements, feel free to perceive the student as a massive, strapping, recently-former knight/warrior, and the magician as tiny, withered weakling using a series of small twigs, each of which break upon impact. You might lose any real sense of the story, but at least you won’t be discomforted.

Because we’d never want that.

So the student said, “And Magic has a cost because meddling with forces beyond human ken is ultimately fatal, is it not, O Master?”

“Did you not, as per instructions, use a certain spell to light last night’s candle, the one with which you then lit the flame upon our holy altar? Because if you did not, you will soon have a life of extraordinary regret. If you did do so, did you not understand the spell? Was it ‘beyond your ken’, such that you might have accidentally started a bonfire which consumed us all? Because if it was, the first regret I suggested is merely a tiny little imposter thereof, compared to the degree of pain which will mark your remaining existence.”

(There are apprenticeships within which the proper response to an angry, sarcastic Master is cringing, begging, and pleading for forgiveness. Magic is, obviously, not among those avocations; if teaching only happened when the Master was in a good mood, it would never happen at all. So the Apprentice’s voice was relatively calm, with only a slightly querulous edge): “No, Master, I lit it properly, as instructed.”

“And the world did not dissolve around you? You did not meet with a fate worse than can be imagined by the fragile mentality of humankind?”

“No, Master. I just singed my thumb a bit getting the wick right.”

“But you did the Magic correctly. And therefore, it is not about ignorance; or, at least, that’s not a real reason, it’s just a contributing factor.” The Wizard hefted his stave and clipped the Apprentice smartly across the elbow. “Ow!” complained the younger man.

“That’s for asking stupid questions.”

“You said I should ask stupid questions. You said that a Wizard bends the world to Will, and it’s never too soon to start. You said that Magic is complicated and unpredictable and you never know when you might ask something important.”

“I also said that auditory learning is sometimes best reinforced with a somatic component.”

“You didn’t say you’d be hitting me with a stick!”

“I,” said the Wizard austerely, “am a Wizard, strong of mind, small of arm. You don’t even want to think about what you’d be getting hit with right now, if you were apprenticed to a blacksmith.”

The apprentice rolled his eyes; the Magus pretended that noticing such an insignificant action was far beneath the dignity of an Adept of the Unseen Arts. There was a time when Wizards withheld information, lest apprentices study in secret and become, in time, the Masters. This was an inefficient system, in that it involved a great deal of misinformation all around, and the state of knowledge suffered. +

This was clearly intolerable, and eventually evolved into today’s much more modern system of eternal bickering. It was rather like the Socratic method, if Socrates had been an insufferable know-it-all (which he was;  but conveniently, those accounts disappeared with the Library of Alexandria.

“If it’s Secret Man Was Not Meant To Know,” said the Sage, using the Voice-That-Wizards-Assume-Gods-Would-Have-If-They-Had-Been-Smart-Enough-To-Be-Wizards-Instead-Of-Gods, “if that’s it, then go look up the Magnum Innominandum in the Library. Present me with an extempore expostulation on the subject, five hundred to a thousand words, by the Midnight Rite. Be prepared to defend your position.”

The Midnight Rite was a very, very secret ceremony, spoken of only in the most nigh-subvocalized tones amongst all the uninitiated. Only Wizards and their students knew that it consisted of locking the doors, making certain secret Signs, placing particular Wards of Bane and Guarding, and saying, “Looks like it’s midnight; spot of sherry before bed?” (Since one is revealing Guild secrets here, one can mention a little-known fact: the ritual is considered valid with either dry or sweet sherry, but not both, never both, not unless you feel like it, anyway.)

(The Wizard’s Guild is perfectly aware of the importance of having awe-inspiring secrets; it also recognizes that most real secrets of Magic are either extremely dangerous, or look like gibberish. It is therefore necessary to create some powerful, hidden, deeply mundane secrets, suitable for impressing people without preemptively bringing about a premature Earth-rending cataclysm).

The apprentice looked hopeful. “No chores, then?”

“No. Go read.”

The apprentice scampered. The Wizard sighed. He rather liked that kid. It was a cruel test, but a necessary one. The Magnum Innominandum begins by hinting that it’s about to reveal things that None May Know, and then it progresses to saying that one ought not read further, Lest One Understand That Which Ought Not Be Understood, and towards the middle, it started to say openly that Great Secrets of Terrifying Power were easily unlocked, but should never be, but if one pressed on…

It was the Xeno’s Paradox of knowledge. It brought you infinitely close to learning something useful, always with the promise that the thing was almost upon us, and it ended by saying that, now that one had finished the first reading, one would understand the Hidden Meanings of the book, if one would only read it over…

The tome was bound in a strange, very durable metal, with pages that felt like gossamer, and were, in reality, harder than the fruitcake you got four Christmases ago. And a good thing, too. Many who read it decided that they weren’t cut out for Magic, after all. The rest tended to curse and throw the book across the room; he, himself, recalled striking it repeatedly with a nearby fire-poker. Those who survived the test, then, came away with two contradictory lessons, each one important to both teacher and Student, and each part of a delicate balance.

LESSON ONE: Magic is arcane and complex, and there is a reason why one undergoes the servitude, pain, and dreadful terrors involved in learning its use. And one should appreciate the wisdom of those who are older, more knowledgeable, and wiser.

LESSON TWO: …but also, those who are older, more knowledgeable, and wiser are sometimes idiots; and eventually, there will come a time when you have to do things for yourself.

~Jeff Mach

 

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!

My new book, “I Hate Your Time Machine”, is now available! Go pick it up!

The post A Price of Magic appeared first on Worlds of Villainy.

A Clockwork Spider Lesson

Sixteen spiders of burnished gold; sixteen spiders, live and real. Two hundred fifty-six scurry-legs, thirty-two clicking mandibles.

Eight hundred shining webs, waiting for harvest.

No flies, no carrion; unlive spiders, evolving into trapdoor-makers, learning to burrow into soft earth, waiting; robot spiders, retrieving vibrations, feeding their ever-ongoing rhythm, dancing into artificial sun, raising arms, fed by sun-like rays. Breezes blow through; but no breeze can tear these webs.

Sundown; odd spider circadians; odd music, made not of pitch, but vibration. Live spiders perk; golden spiders anticipate.

Golden spiders, gears working beneath geary thoraxes, bodies sensing the dips of the great altered clepsydra. The clepsydra, looming wide and tall and sideways and grand, its odd works banging into each other in fourfold time and then four over four and then in offbeats, a torrent of ginger wine rushing through its works all the while.

Sixteen auric spinarrettes play out lines of thrillingly nectarous golden thread; thread’s seized, caught by one hundred twenty-eight legs, and pulled in the proper direction.

What lies between mazurka and do-si-do? This; this reeling hoedown of clinking metal and deft-scrabbling chitin, no tunes but the resonance of that ancient and unstately water clock. They pull and turn, pull and twist, pull and double and redouble and pass and re-pass; they make webs.

No two webs alike, no hundred webs anything but subtly not-the-same, and each web holds a silent beating eight-legged thought, each thought a different motion in the long spider tale, as long in the telling as the many planets and suns spider have known, before they were earthbound. Human skulls feel spider thoughts but vaguely, just as spiders feel only the reverberations, not the meaning or tune, of human song. They are old thoughts, they are slow thoughts; yet they are sprightly, thin and cool, then galvanic on the tongue, and lastly thrumming in the stomach, easily satisfying (and this is the part which requires caution) the desire for food, without supplanting the need. Prized are these webs; joy at the harvest.

And then the clepsydra, its profound flaw causing its works once again to jam, is stopped for a time; until, at least, tomorrow. The spiders cannot know when this will happen, perhaps cannot even know that this happens every day; for thousand-year thoughts, spoken through the birthing of children of children of children, days are very hard to parse. Yet the web is somehow complete, as if these spiders knew the dance better than its begetter.

Spider things, insensate things; and still, sun-thing falls, and one hundred twenty-eight eyes glint with oddly unison, curiously hungry satisfaction.

They don’t don’t have anything to catch, so they don’t know why they weave webs; they were simply made to do it, or so they think. They just make beautiful things, and perhaps might not even know it.

You may not know why you’re doing what you’re doing. But if it’s something you like, try deciding you were made to do it. Try deciding, not necessarily that you should stay in a bad place or do things you don’t desire, but that what you do is worthwhile, and if it’s not your future, it’s a worthy past.

Give it a shot.

You’re smarter than a clockwork spider; and you weave the strands of your life, which is more lovely and more meaningful than even the most beautiful web of gold.

~Jeff Mach

 

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!

My new book, “I Hate Your Time Machine”, is now available! Go pick it up!

The post A Clockwork Spider Lesson appeared first on Worlds of Villainy.

The Evil Overlord List: A Rebuttal

(This is a wholly standalone piece from my upcoming book, “I Despise Your Prophecy“. If you want, you can always follow me about on Amazon or Twitter to stay up to date with when things are coming out.)

_________

It doesn’t seem like one would have to say this, but it seems to be both helpful and necessary to point out that the advice one gets from stories isn’t always applicable to real life.

For example, those who’ve read a lot of tales will tend to laugh about the foolishness of the antagonists. Much is made of the fact that “heroes” often foil “villains” because the latter will, say, capture their enemies, and, rather than killing them immediately. And in story after story, the heroes then escape and destroy whatever villainous plans might be in progress, along with, sometimes, the villain.

Of course they do.

I mean, what are our sources here?

We are, in general, reading the stories of the heroes who survived.

Most people do not escape from dungeons. Dungeons Most monsters who imprison people do so with success. But we don’t hear those tales. And why would we? Who’d want to read them?

“Suddenly, when all hope seemed lost, the Hero never got out, and died of old age whilst the Dark Lord conquered the world. To fill up the remaining space in this book, we have painstakingly inserted a series of random letters and numbers, as there is no more story. Beginning now: PZ561J53 XD83K2J4 04BLE91P 12ZBPQDH4223….”

In general, it’s pretty easy to see the flaws in the plans of those who lose.

That’s not to say that Villains in general aren’t hubristic, and that predictability is the death-watch beetle of a monstrous soul.

But no: People do not often get out of dungeons. Dungeons are a millennia-old technology, not necessarily big on prisoner comfort or safety, deep underground, beneath several layers of walls, and permeated by highly insufficient light. This is not an easy place to escape if you aren’t imprisoned there.

You might think that I’m here to debunk some of these stories; to say that a Dark Lord who leaves Self-Destruct Buttons lying around ought to expect they’ll get used against her is axiomatic: yes, it’s quite dumb. But there might be reason why you’d rather have everything you did go up in flames, instead of having it captured and dissected by a group of human dunderheads who can barely grasp the concept of moral relativism.

Hell no.

Have you read somewhere that the Dark Lord will have a beautiful daughter who will want to foil her father’s plans and, possibly, hook up?

Go for it, lothariette.

This is not her first rodeo. And it might’ve been fun to see the look on Dear Old Dad’s facemask when the trick was played originally—ten or twenty years ago, perhaps.

You can’t seduce her to your side. You can, if she thinks it’ll be fun, spent an intense and exhausting evening, but you can’t make her betray her father, her kingdom and, incidentally, the throne which is going to be hers someday—just by being virtue of having a pretty face. That’s a fantasy, whispered into your ear by Cupid, who is one very desperate God right now. You might get her naked, but she’ll soon get you arrested and have your throat slit so that she can save the blood for a friend or two.

Sometimes, shooting IS too good for your enemies. If your enemies don’t exist within some fictional narrative which needs them to survive in order to tell a story and/or create sequels, then it’s potentially worthwhile to make an example of them. It’s a cost-benefit analysis; “Killing them now” reduces their chances of getaway tremendously (but not, annoyingly enough, completely). On the other hand, “Letting the populace hear their tortured screams over an agonizing two-week period” provides a very reasonable deterrent to rebellion.

Interrogating your antagonists in person is dangerous; what if someone does break free, or have some cleverly-concealed dart-shooting device? But it’s also effective; it’s not that you can’t trust your interrogators, but it’s not unreasonable to want to gain the whole experience, be there in the room asking the questions, watching their eyes, seeing how they react to you.

Any courtesy shown to the heroes could be used to your disadvantage. But that’s a corollary to the idea that any courtesy shown to anyone could be used against you. It’s possible to enact this by being discourteous to everyone; but needless rudeness isn’t an unbridled delight. Disrespecting those around you is (again) not generally a foundation for loyalty. And, to reiterate, ‘being strong enough to treat anyone however you want’ is helpful; but someday, you might actually get wounded, or summon something you can’t control, or get a very sick. What do you want—servants who’ll help you get well because it’s their job and you’re a decent boss, or servants who’ll decide that this would be the time to start that palace coup they’ve been waiting for?

In short:

Just because you’ve read about a particular weakness or foolish action bringing down a despot does not mean that you need to jump in the opposite direction.

That being said:

A wise Dark Lord has the good sense to express extreme and vocal displeasure if someone has armed themselves with the knowledge of a weakness you might not, perhaps, actually possess.

If your enemies are going the educate themselves right into their likely defeat, who are you to deny them the potentiality of a nice, closed-casket funeral?

~Jeff Mach

 

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!

My new book, “I Hate Your Time Machine”, is now available! Go pick it up!

 

 

 

The post The Evil Overlord List: A Rebuttal appeared first on Worlds of Villainy.