78. An ochre pond in an ash-grey field by a broken mill. In it there is a fish larger than a bull with archaic malice in its heart. If offered tribute of manflesh newly murdered it will vomit forth the Thanatos Flask.
Monday, May 20, 2013
Auld Crummock
78. An ochre pond in an ash-grey field by a broken mill. In it there is a fish larger than a bull with archaic malice in its heart. If offered tribute of manflesh newly murdered it will vomit forth the Thanatos Flask.
Saturday, May 18, 2013
Alchemy
So, alchemy was a peculiar pursuit wherein the transformation of materials through processes we now think of as chemical reactions were in some way representative of, or a means of inducing, a parallel series of transformations in the human being conducting the experiments. At least that is my understanding of it. I have this rather sumptuously comprehensive Taschen tome called Alchemy and Mysticism (by Alexander Roob) wherein there are hundreds of utterly arcane illustrations including many where the processes of sublimation and calcination and putrefaction and the stages of rubedo, albedo and nigredo and the actions of sulphur and quicksilver and Sal Ammoniac and a bewildering plethora of other things are represented, bizarrely, by green lions swallowing the sun and burning herons and drowning kings and a menagerie of symbolic strangenesses. This is terribly funky and simultaneously very different from contemporary fantasy.
I am consistently disillusioned by contemporary fantasy, which I guess is not that unusual in an OSR guy. There's this thing I see when I look at contemporary fantasy art where everyone looks so effortlessly cool, it's like the baroquification of old-school fantasy, everything is blown up to magnificent proportions and idealised and gleaming, like the baroque's exuberance of superfluous drapery and putti and Rubenesque folds of adipose tissue manifested as hypertrophic musculature and buckles and goggles and bondage gear, cunningly modernised such that it does not offend the aesthetic of the consumer of contemporary fantasy, an entity whose predilections my mind cannot adequatuately encompass. I understand that this is what the people must have but I prefer an approach that veers from the kitsch of awesome and cleaves instead to the kitsch of grotesque. Veers, drunkenly, out of control.
So, alchemy in contemporary fantasy is a way of drawing upon the exciting dynamism of steampunk and the brass cogs and machinery thereof and the way the bluish glare of crackling electricity provides exciting backlighting on the face of the goggle-wearing alchemist. This is not alchemy. There is a lot of mileage gained from the good old mad scientist and experimental primitive cybernetics and vat-spawn and things which ooze forth from cauldrons and quiver and pulsate and venture forth to wreak upon the unfortunate world whatsoever it in their nature to wreak, and neither is this anything to do with what was going on in the minds of the alchemists that really existed (though peradventure 'tis encroaching upon the mark). Nay, alchemists were egotists of the highest order and were participants in a discipline rare among the arts of the Occident wherein personal paths to the ineffable were made accessible by the pursuit of a series of rigorous tasks. It was somewhat of a blasphemous thing in the shadow of the monolithic One True Church to be following a path you believe will improve your metaphysical standing without the need for a Church-appointed intermediary to guide you on the way. And this was a path that required you be rich enough to be educated and to waste years of your life fucking with alembics and burning things 'til they change colour and taking in the profound significance of that. Which I guess rendered the alchemists somewhat more capable than the common hedge wizard of evading religious persecution at the same time as further restricting themselves to a periphery.
So maybe it is no surprise that people aren't enthusiastically playing characters who spend months at a time striving to transmogrify the neutered monkish toad of tallow to achieve the transcendental hermaphroditic dragon of sublimated verdigris but there are, in the infinity of possible combinations of stuff in reality, things that can be done that will be more interesting than nothing at all and could be applied to a D&D game in the Meager-Lands or your personally preferred variant thereof.
Another thing that is interesting to me regarding intersections of alchemy and D&D is the notion of the Magnum Opus and how it parallels the improvement of the D&D character, through levels, from the base lead of the first-level shitkicker to the transcendent gold of Name Level. There is a thing I keep alluding to but have lazily neglected to upack as yet wherein the economy of the acquisition of gold from threshold guardians in the underworld equates to temporal power and spiritual and metaphysical power. There is a profoundly resonant symbolic array available here with which a number of exuberant interpretive flourishes can be made. One of these which occurs to me now is that the alchemy in D&D is all of it, all the characters are in some way alchemists or symbolic proxies at large in the world and through their actions in the crucible of the Earth's bowels are astonishing transformations made.
The thing I want to do is draw sustenance from the utter strangeness of the imagery and ideas at play. It is interesting to me how much more strange the things are from the time we are in a roundabout way pretending to play dress-ups within than are the cultural manifestations we have created in vague emulation of them. The things that urge me to reinvent them are anything involving elements and elementals and the bizarre chimerae of transformations and other things which take my fancy involving poetic relationships to substantiality.
Elementals, in the classic Paracelsian form have decidedly more character than vaguely anthropomorphic animated chunks but I am inclined to go further. I recall a trendy late '90s post-apocalytpic game that embraced the elements-as-humours correspondence and had delighfully grotesque embodiments of Phlegm and Bile which I shall leech from, these and Foucauldian similitudes and manifold obtuseries and distorted misinterpretations of the thingness of things to produce a bit of fluff and crunch that shall be the philosophical path to perfection of the mad scholars of the Occidental Empire and perhaps yet-another-reason-to-go-into-holes.
So the things are made or discovered by crusty alchemists toiling in their laboratories for thankless decades but can be utilised by whoever knows the appropriate lingo; the Spagyrist's Cant or the Green Language or whatever. The things which impart XP only do so while they remain with the user, losing, destroying, consuming the thing negates the XP gained (i.e. they are lost, plunging the character back into mundane reality).
There are twenty;
1. Tenebrous Glede: burning dark and cold, a living coal of the antithesis of fire, fusing ash and drawing in smoke and transforming such stuff into that which it has previously been. The cold saps energy from those who remain too close and the overwhelming frigidity of a large conflagration in reverse is as dangerous as an inferno.
-The thing will initiate the process of burning-in-reverse to that which has been burnt. The un-fire has all of the requirements of fire such that it must be fed ashes to remain "lit". 20 XP
2. Nereid Clyster: An elemental oceanic madness inhabiting the insides of her host, appearing as green turbulence behind the eyes and the stink of brine and kelp and as fickle indifference. Imbuing the entity is a painful and bizarre ordeal.
-Usually found in a silvered basin , may require a clysterer to introduce to the host. It imparts water breathing 1/wk and renders the character Chaotic, and costs 1 point of Charisma and Constitution permanently. 100 XP
3. Bladed Chrism: A seemingly innocuous oleaginous substance embodying sharpness, simultaneously fluid and wounding. It needs keeping in a crystal decanter and will obey the bluntening glyphs inscribed thereon but spilled forth it will cut through whatever it touches, rapidly disappearing into the depths of the earth.
-80 XP
4. Russet Glimme: An excoriating cinderflicker entropy of the passage of aeons glimmering in a fragment of moment, a thing that burns though vision like the sun, staining magenta and turquoise afterimages onto the retina. A little man of rust living in a lead box.
-Whoever carries Glimme in his box triples XP gained for the duration of the partnership but that individual and any companions age 1 year every day of the association.
5. Thanatos Flask: Gilded flask with the glyph of putrefaction inlaid in cinnabar. Waves of thick odium emanate therefrom. The foetid grey stuff inside is a contagious life-in-death. Releasing it is doom all-but-certain and implacable.
- Touching the stuff requires save vs. death or die immediated in horrific agony, only to rise again in 1 turn as a fiendish mockery, anyone killed by such will rise as one also, et cetera, ad nauseam. 500 XP
6. Void Embrasure: A hand-sized triangular hole in the world in a disk of black glass , whatever is cast in is gone forever. The vast wrongness of the thing is entrancing and the inside edge is the keenest imaginable.
-120 XP
7. Calcination Sprite: Little stark-white grimacing girl who moves rapidly backwards through reality and stinks of vinegar. Her retreat will quickly sequester her in an inaccessible part of yesterday unless she is crammed in a blazing alembic where she will serve in the Work in dutiful recalcitrance.
-in the confines of a working laboratory the sprite will glean 1d12 XP a month.
8. Quacksalver's Ghost: Like a mercurial shadow wherein is couched the essence of dubious chicanery. The ghost infuses others with a false and misleading sense of the apparent truth of the efficacy of whatever ineffective remedy is in the vicinity.
- -3 Wisdom penalty to the carrier and the effect of a Potion of Delusion applied to anything resembling a potion, unguent, elixir etc. 100 XP
9. Xanthic Pigmy: Frequently manifesting as a lizardly heresiarch bowed and pious in sulphurous devotion, its muttering is a volcanic reek. At night it seems quite intent on being present in the dreams of sleepers and praying there. Fierce disruption of bodily humours accompanies this phenomenon.
- Every morning roll 1d4 for each character/hireling ;
1. Bilious Rancour - +1 to STR, -3 to CHA.
2. Phlegmatic Torpor - unflappable morale and movement halved.
3. Melancholic Insight - +2 Wisdom and -4 morale.
4. Sanguinary Dyscrasia - +2 Reaction and forget 1 spell at random.
-200 XP
10. Chrysopoeic Effulgium: Weird grey lambency, gets stuck to fingers, when wiped off onto something a remarkable transmogrification may result.
- Will transform up to about a fist-sized lump of lead into gold, gold into ivory, ivory into shit, shit into antimony, antimony into ambergris etc. 50 XP
11. Infibulated Rebis: Purest metaphysical hybrid essence of perfect completion assailed and defiled by an abominable enormity on the far side of the real. The Rebis cannot be possessed but shimmers in the mind's eye for a frozen moment. In that moment a miraculous transformation may be achieved.
- Any two ability scores may be swapped, or hit point may be traded for XP at 1:300 ratio or vice versa. Only works once.
12. Fulgurous Orm: Scorched grey vitreous serpentine thing, coiled in weird tension. It is clumsily uncouth and heavy and blind and possessed of crackling intensity lying latent within.
-Can capture lightning bolts and other electrical discharges, requires successful Charisma check to discharge captured lighning without disastrous backfiring. 400 XP
13. Many-Ken: A thing like a squinty old geezer made of parchment and angles that lives in a book and knows practically everything that can be known. This omniscience cannot be instrumentalised because the Many-Ken will only speak of that which occupies its mind at that time. Torturing him with malapropisms may assist in gleaning vaguely appropriate information.
- After 2 turns of torment there is a 3% chance he'll be able to answer something but will only do so in annoying riddle-speak. 120 XP
14. Crucible Goose: A thing of waddling ceramic with a blazing elemental furnace in its belly. It is slow and fragile and very hot. It is possible to invest essential stuff into the crucible and be empowered by the performance of procedures of purification.
- AC 8 MV 30' (10') hp 3 . XP may be recouped from treasures rendered into the goose. It can start random fires, however. XP 50
15. Nigromantic Poesy: Black letters floating in the air, spelling out incantations that unlock portals betwixt the world and a series of catastrophic unworlds as should not be breached lest doom overtake all. The characters flicker and dance and reconfigure into a variety of different yet equally inimical configurations.
- The effect is Abominable. The words are in the lost archaic Lingua Nigromantica but those who can and do read the words aloud rend a hole in the real that allows ingress of something else;
1. An Ocean of Hate
2. A flensing wind as strips the skin and blows forever and ever on
3. A Skulking Wreak of Flint Archaics
4. An Armature built in Grey Domdaniel of incinerating majesty unbound
5. Thirty million Deaths a-riding
6. Dissolution, complete
It doesn't matter what it is, reading the Poesy ends the campaign there and then and ruins the setting and any adjacent settings. 0 XP
16. Molybdochalkos Athame: A blunt knife of a dull and heavy alloy, warm to the touch and marked with a crab. It has about it the virtue of elemental neutrality and can be used to neutralise poisons and mordant humours and render caustic vapours sweet.
- Neutralises poisons, acids and alkaline substanes, after three uses it will be transformed into a blackened bone. 60 XP
17. Bird of Phlegm: The bird is a word that may be inhaled to live in the lungs and sinuses, expectorating enthusiastically and imparting unflappable stolidity.
- Permanently snotty, -1 to Con and Cha, +1 bonus to saving throws. 80 XP
18. Salamandrine Azoth: Incandescent in its elemental purity, the thing may be induced to crawl into the breast of the dead thus to reignite the stilled heart with the animate spirit of life.
- As Raise Dead. 1000 XP
19. Vortex Grail: A chalice of alabaster in which is densely concentrated whirling wind and the sound of a distant howling and the intoxicating fragrance of petrichor. Poured forth it wreaks a terrible havoc.
- A whirlwind destroys whatever isn't tied down and causes 1d8 dmg per round for 3d6 rounds in a 30' radius until it blows iself out. 300 XP
20. Carnifex Antimony: A fine black powdery stuff that can be applied as an eye cosmetic. The one to whom it is applied immediately sees the world in terms of flesh to be cloven and bones to be broken.
- +3 to attack and dmg for one day and -3 to Charisma permanently, comes is a little wooden box with three applications' worth. 200 XP
I am consistently disillusioned by contemporary fantasy, which I guess is not that unusual in an OSR guy. There's this thing I see when I look at contemporary fantasy art where everyone looks so effortlessly cool, it's like the baroquification of old-school fantasy, everything is blown up to magnificent proportions and idealised and gleaming, like the baroque's exuberance of superfluous drapery and putti and Rubenesque folds of adipose tissue manifested as hypertrophic musculature and buckles and goggles and bondage gear, cunningly modernised such that it does not offend the aesthetic of the consumer of contemporary fantasy, an entity whose predilections my mind cannot adequatuately encompass. I understand that this is what the people must have but I prefer an approach that veers from the kitsch of awesome and cleaves instead to the kitsch of grotesque. Veers, drunkenly, out of control.
So, alchemy in contemporary fantasy is a way of drawing upon the exciting dynamism of steampunk and the brass cogs and machinery thereof and the way the bluish glare of crackling electricity provides exciting backlighting on the face of the goggle-wearing alchemist. This is not alchemy. There is a lot of mileage gained from the good old mad scientist and experimental primitive cybernetics and vat-spawn and things which ooze forth from cauldrons and quiver and pulsate and venture forth to wreak upon the unfortunate world whatsoever it in their nature to wreak, and neither is this anything to do with what was going on in the minds of the alchemists that really existed (though peradventure 'tis encroaching upon the mark). Nay, alchemists were egotists of the highest order and were participants in a discipline rare among the arts of the Occident wherein personal paths to the ineffable were made accessible by the pursuit of a series of rigorous tasks. It was somewhat of a blasphemous thing in the shadow of the monolithic One True Church to be following a path you believe will improve your metaphysical standing without the need for a Church-appointed intermediary to guide you on the way. And this was a path that required you be rich enough to be educated and to waste years of your life fucking with alembics and burning things 'til they change colour and taking in the profound significance of that. Which I guess rendered the alchemists somewhat more capable than the common hedge wizard of evading religious persecution at the same time as further restricting themselves to a periphery.
So maybe it is no surprise that people aren't enthusiastically playing characters who spend months at a time striving to transmogrify the neutered monkish toad of tallow to achieve the transcendental hermaphroditic dragon of sublimated verdigris but there are, in the infinity of possible combinations of stuff in reality, things that can be done that will be more interesting than nothing at all and could be applied to a D&D game in the Meager-Lands or your personally preferred variant thereof.
Another thing that is interesting to me regarding intersections of alchemy and D&D is the notion of the Magnum Opus and how it parallels the improvement of the D&D character, through levels, from the base lead of the first-level shitkicker to the transcendent gold of Name Level. There is a thing I keep alluding to but have lazily neglected to upack as yet wherein the economy of the acquisition of gold from threshold guardians in the underworld equates to temporal power and spiritual and metaphysical power. There is a profoundly resonant symbolic array available here with which a number of exuberant interpretive flourishes can be made. One of these which occurs to me now is that the alchemy in D&D is all of it, all the characters are in some way alchemists or symbolic proxies at large in the world and through their actions in the crucible of the Earth's bowels are astonishing transformations made.
The thing I want to do is draw sustenance from the utter strangeness of the imagery and ideas at play. It is interesting to me how much more strange the things are from the time we are in a roundabout way pretending to play dress-ups within than are the cultural manifestations we have created in vague emulation of them. The things that urge me to reinvent them are anything involving elements and elementals and the bizarre chimerae of transformations and other things which take my fancy involving poetic relationships to substantiality.
Elementals, in the classic Paracelsian form have decidedly more character than vaguely anthropomorphic animated chunks but I am inclined to go further. I recall a trendy late '90s post-apocalytpic game that embraced the elements-as-humours correspondence and had delighfully grotesque embodiments of Phlegm and Bile which I shall leech from, these and Foucauldian similitudes and manifold obtuseries and distorted misinterpretations of the thingness of things to produce a bit of fluff and crunch that shall be the philosophical path to perfection of the mad scholars of the Occidental Empire and perhaps yet-another-reason-to-go-into-holes.
So the things are made or discovered by crusty alchemists toiling in their laboratories for thankless decades but can be utilised by whoever knows the appropriate lingo; the Spagyrist's Cant or the Green Language or whatever. The things which impart XP only do so while they remain with the user, losing, destroying, consuming the thing negates the XP gained (i.e. they are lost, plunging the character back into mundane reality).
There are twenty;
1. Tenebrous Glede: burning dark and cold, a living coal of the antithesis of fire, fusing ash and drawing in smoke and transforming such stuff into that which it has previously been. The cold saps energy from those who remain too close and the overwhelming frigidity of a large conflagration in reverse is as dangerous as an inferno.
-The thing will initiate the process of burning-in-reverse to that which has been burnt. The un-fire has all of the requirements of fire such that it must be fed ashes to remain "lit". 20 XP
2. Nereid Clyster: An elemental oceanic madness inhabiting the insides of her host, appearing as green turbulence behind the eyes and the stink of brine and kelp and as fickle indifference. Imbuing the entity is a painful and bizarre ordeal.
-Usually found in a silvered basin , may require a clysterer to introduce to the host. It imparts water breathing 1/wk and renders the character Chaotic, and costs 1 point of Charisma and Constitution permanently. 100 XP
3. Bladed Chrism: A seemingly innocuous oleaginous substance embodying sharpness, simultaneously fluid and wounding. It needs keeping in a crystal decanter and will obey the bluntening glyphs inscribed thereon but spilled forth it will cut through whatever it touches, rapidly disappearing into the depths of the earth.
-80 XP
4. Russet Glimme: An excoriating cinderflicker entropy of the passage of aeons glimmering in a fragment of moment, a thing that burns though vision like the sun, staining magenta and turquoise afterimages onto the retina. A little man of rust living in a lead box.
-Whoever carries Glimme in his box triples XP gained for the duration of the partnership but that individual and any companions age 1 year every day of the association.
5. Thanatos Flask: Gilded flask with the glyph of putrefaction inlaid in cinnabar. Waves of thick odium emanate therefrom. The foetid grey stuff inside is a contagious life-in-death. Releasing it is doom all-but-certain and implacable.
- Touching the stuff requires save vs. death or die immediated in horrific agony, only to rise again in 1 turn as a fiendish mockery, anyone killed by such will rise as one also, et cetera, ad nauseam. 500 XP
6. Void Embrasure: A hand-sized triangular hole in the world in a disk of black glass , whatever is cast in is gone forever. The vast wrongness of the thing is entrancing and the inside edge is the keenest imaginable.
-120 XP
7. Calcination Sprite: Little stark-white grimacing girl who moves rapidly backwards through reality and stinks of vinegar. Her retreat will quickly sequester her in an inaccessible part of yesterday unless she is crammed in a blazing alembic where she will serve in the Work in dutiful recalcitrance.
-in the confines of a working laboratory the sprite will glean 1d12 XP a month.
8. Quacksalver's Ghost: Like a mercurial shadow wherein is couched the essence of dubious chicanery. The ghost infuses others with a false and misleading sense of the apparent truth of the efficacy of whatever ineffective remedy is in the vicinity.
- -3 Wisdom penalty to the carrier and the effect of a Potion of Delusion applied to anything resembling a potion, unguent, elixir etc. 100 XP
9. Xanthic Pigmy: Frequently manifesting as a lizardly heresiarch bowed and pious in sulphurous devotion, its muttering is a volcanic reek. At night it seems quite intent on being present in the dreams of sleepers and praying there. Fierce disruption of bodily humours accompanies this phenomenon.
- Every morning roll 1d4 for each character/hireling ;
1. Bilious Rancour - +1 to STR, -3 to CHA.
2. Phlegmatic Torpor - unflappable morale and movement halved.
3. Melancholic Insight - +2 Wisdom and -4 morale.
4. Sanguinary Dyscrasia - +2 Reaction and forget 1 spell at random.
-200 XP
10. Chrysopoeic Effulgium: Weird grey lambency, gets stuck to fingers, when wiped off onto something a remarkable transmogrification may result.
- Will transform up to about a fist-sized lump of lead into gold, gold into ivory, ivory into shit, shit into antimony, antimony into ambergris etc. 50 XP
11. Infibulated Rebis: Purest metaphysical hybrid essence of perfect completion assailed and defiled by an abominable enormity on the far side of the real. The Rebis cannot be possessed but shimmers in the mind's eye for a frozen moment. In that moment a miraculous transformation may be achieved.
- Any two ability scores may be swapped, or hit point may be traded for XP at 1:300 ratio or vice versa. Only works once.
12. Fulgurous Orm: Scorched grey vitreous serpentine thing, coiled in weird tension. It is clumsily uncouth and heavy and blind and possessed of crackling intensity lying latent within.
-Can capture lightning bolts and other electrical discharges, requires successful Charisma check to discharge captured lighning without disastrous backfiring. 400 XP
13. Many-Ken: A thing like a squinty old geezer made of parchment and angles that lives in a book and knows practically everything that can be known. This omniscience cannot be instrumentalised because the Many-Ken will only speak of that which occupies its mind at that time. Torturing him with malapropisms may assist in gleaning vaguely appropriate information.
- After 2 turns of torment there is a 3% chance he'll be able to answer something but will only do so in annoying riddle-speak. 120 XP
14. Crucible Goose: A thing of waddling ceramic with a blazing elemental furnace in its belly. It is slow and fragile and very hot. It is possible to invest essential stuff into the crucible and be empowered by the performance of procedures of purification.
- AC 8 MV 30' (10') hp 3 . XP may be recouped from treasures rendered into the goose. It can start random fires, however. XP 50
15. Nigromantic Poesy: Black letters floating in the air, spelling out incantations that unlock portals betwixt the world and a series of catastrophic unworlds as should not be breached lest doom overtake all. The characters flicker and dance and reconfigure into a variety of different yet equally inimical configurations.
- The effect is Abominable. The words are in the lost archaic Lingua Nigromantica but those who can and do read the words aloud rend a hole in the real that allows ingress of something else;
1. An Ocean of Hate
2. A flensing wind as strips the skin and blows forever and ever on
3. A Skulking Wreak of Flint Archaics
4. An Armature built in Grey Domdaniel of incinerating majesty unbound
5. Thirty million Deaths a-riding
6. Dissolution, complete
It doesn't matter what it is, reading the Poesy ends the campaign there and then and ruins the setting and any adjacent settings. 0 XP
16. Molybdochalkos Athame: A blunt knife of a dull and heavy alloy, warm to the touch and marked with a crab. It has about it the virtue of elemental neutrality and can be used to neutralise poisons and mordant humours and render caustic vapours sweet.
- Neutralises poisons, acids and alkaline substanes, after three uses it will be transformed into a blackened bone. 60 XP
17. Bird of Phlegm: The bird is a word that may be inhaled to live in the lungs and sinuses, expectorating enthusiastically and imparting unflappable stolidity.
- Permanently snotty, -1 to Con and Cha, +1 bonus to saving throws. 80 XP
18. Salamandrine Azoth: Incandescent in its elemental purity, the thing may be induced to crawl into the breast of the dead thus to reignite the stilled heart with the animate spirit of life.
- As Raise Dead. 1000 XP
19. Vortex Grail: A chalice of alabaster in which is densely concentrated whirling wind and the sound of a distant howling and the intoxicating fragrance of petrichor. Poured forth it wreaks a terrible havoc.
- A whirlwind destroys whatever isn't tied down and causes 1d8 dmg per round for 3d6 rounds in a 30' radius until it blows iself out. 300 XP
20. Carnifex Antimony: A fine black powdery stuff that can be applied as an eye cosmetic. The one to whom it is applied immediately sees the world in terms of flesh to be cloven and bones to be broken.
- +3 to attack and dmg for one day and -3 to Charisma permanently, comes is a little wooden box with three applications' worth. 200 XP
Thursday, May 2, 2013
Idolatry, Iconoclasm and Familiars
The universe has, of late, felt the need to prevent me writing this shit which I get a kick out of writing, preferring to compel me to write grant applications for ecological restoration projects which are infinitely more noble but not so thrustingly glorious.
When I was at the world's third shittiest art school, being fed forty-year-old French theory by jaded generics and being too naive and lazy to know I was being fucked or do anything about it I came to be aware of the importance people attribute to the primacy of the male gaze. Much later I came to the conclusion that whoever said words to the effect of; - "when you pull down the staues of the tyrannical regime keep the pedestals, they will come in handy" - may have understood precisely how pertinent that statement was to almost all examples of iconoclasm. Every iconoclastic act produces a vacuum of precisely the right shape to accomodate another idolatry. Ironically enough the iconoclast is frequently able to produce just such an idolatry they've prepared earlier to cram into that space.
And so it goes on, because sooner or later someone is going to recognise the valuable habitat occupied by the new idolatry and find reason to seek its overthrow. Icons have the potential to completely dominate the thinking of individual humans, the conservatising forces of groupthink and cognitive dissonance compel those individuals to band together to defend their arbitrary nexus 'gainst the forces of not-the-same. There was frequently, in the Pleistocene, significant survival value in the hooting and the launching of fecal projectiles at those whose idolatries marked them out as not-the-same because there were not many other countermeasures against the inevitable dawn raid. Nowadays it's either inane self-aggrandising or nakedly groping after power.
Icons, in and of themselves, cannot hurt people. It doesn't matter if they are representations of the most offensive thing in the world, provided you are given the opportunity to not look at them they are just another irrelevant configuration of atoms or memes. In a world where there are still clitorodectomies and sow-stalls and irreversible trophic cascades leading towards mass extinction the existence of imagery that reflects the sexuality of the apes we cannot be other than is only significant to those who've got an agenda. The agenda is always power, which means evolutionary fitness, which means a tribe that is out there waiting to coalesce around your idea and give you the status you need to secure long-term survival for your germline. Because that is all there is. Isn't it?
I hold to these notions in spite of the fact I am a socially fossorial entity, nervously cleaving close to a monolithic edifice of cultural artifice that comforts me and engaging in a set of signal scrambling behaviours that are the verbal equivalent of aposematism. The presence of others abrades my consciousness, especially those who bear the insignia of the awareness of social status. I consciously feel pricklingly pained by status anxiety and mask it with petulant suppressed urge to do violence and am thus fey beyond furtiveness.
So I understand iconoclasm as a visceral thing. I empathically understand it and at the same time am able to see it rendered explicable by the idiotic machinery we keep in our chromosomes. I still think it's simultaneously repugnant and foolish to be unable to extricate aesthetic stimuli from unethical actions and to embrace this illusion of equivalency to the extent that it enables you to justify persecution of people and the infringement of their liberties.
When I was at the world's third shittiest art school, being fed forty-year-old French theory by jaded generics and being too naive and lazy to know I was being fucked or do anything about it I came to be aware of the importance people attribute to the primacy of the male gaze. Much later I came to the conclusion that whoever said words to the effect of; - "when you pull down the staues of the tyrannical regime keep the pedestals, they will come in handy" - may have understood precisely how pertinent that statement was to almost all examples of iconoclasm. Every iconoclastic act produces a vacuum of precisely the right shape to accomodate another idolatry. Ironically enough the iconoclast is frequently able to produce just such an idolatry they've prepared earlier to cram into that space.
And so it goes on, because sooner or later someone is going to recognise the valuable habitat occupied by the new idolatry and find reason to seek its overthrow. Icons have the potential to completely dominate the thinking of individual humans, the conservatising forces of groupthink and cognitive dissonance compel those individuals to band together to defend their arbitrary nexus 'gainst the forces of not-the-same. There was frequently, in the Pleistocene, significant survival value in the hooting and the launching of fecal projectiles at those whose idolatries marked them out as not-the-same because there were not many other countermeasures against the inevitable dawn raid. Nowadays it's either inane self-aggrandising or nakedly groping after power.
Icons, in and of themselves, cannot hurt people. It doesn't matter if they are representations of the most offensive thing in the world, provided you are given the opportunity to not look at them they are just another irrelevant configuration of atoms or memes. In a world where there are still clitorodectomies and sow-stalls and irreversible trophic cascades leading towards mass extinction the existence of imagery that reflects the sexuality of the apes we cannot be other than is only significant to those who've got an agenda. The agenda is always power, which means evolutionary fitness, which means a tribe that is out there waiting to coalesce around your idea and give you the status you need to secure long-term survival for your germline. Because that is all there is. Isn't it?
I hold to these notions in spite of the fact I am a socially fossorial entity, nervously cleaving close to a monolithic edifice of cultural artifice that comforts me and engaging in a set of signal scrambling behaviours that are the verbal equivalent of aposematism. The presence of others abrades my consciousness, especially those who bear the insignia of the awareness of social status. I consciously feel pricklingly pained by status anxiety and mask it with petulant suppressed urge to do violence and am thus fey beyond furtiveness.
So I understand iconoclasm as a visceral thing. I empathically understand it and at the same time am able to see it rendered explicable by the idiotic machinery we keep in our chromosomes. I still think it's simultaneously repugnant and foolish to be unable to extricate aesthetic stimuli from unethical actions and to embrace this illusion of equivalency to the extent that it enables you to justify persecution of people and the infringement of their liberties.
 |
| Vania Zouravliov is a sorceror |
-------------------------------------------------------
Familiar Hirelings: That number in the book or character sheet next to your charisma score that says max. retainers or whatever is the most awesome of numbers because it not only ennumerates your quota of spear-chuckers and lampadarii but also describes how big a menagerie of weird little entities you can accrue. I can imagine this fluff-slot being filled with a bewilderingly large variety of things, from heraldic ikons to sainted ancestor-shades to gnomic formulae personified. I'd imagine it would be useful to restrict access based upon class and languages to keep things interesting.
So for Cunning Folk (I've recycled concepts from this stuff in the dwarfs post but this came first and is really here for JOESKY because diatribes become dreary without respite);
1. Reinhardt, a Pure White Fox as old as the hills who sleeps constantly in a sack, can usually be relied upon to know the way (1-3 on d6).
2. Haruspex Cormorant with a golden band around her neck, speaks in a croaky voice in the language of the Wild, predicts the future from fish guts.
3. Brueghel the Brown-Cap, a sullen mossy brownie in a piebald dogskin coat, throws stones, speaks the Fey Tongue.
4. Black Anders, A boggart that lives in one’s shadow, can do adequate hedge magick if fed toenails and skin.
5. Griping Huldra, a belligerent cow-tailed scullion the size of a housecat, cooks nutritious fare for one from silverfish and peat and dust and glamour. 1 in 6 chance of being in an uncooperative mood.
6. Gloat the Paddock, a noxious one-eyed toad, fairly useless but may be licked daily for astonishing insight accompanied by crippling bowel cramps.
2. Haruspex Cormorant with a golden band around her neck, speaks in a croaky voice in the language of the Wild, predicts the future from fish guts.
3. Brueghel the Brown-Cap, a sullen mossy brownie in a piebald dogskin coat, throws stones, speaks the Fey Tongue.
4. Black Anders, A boggart that lives in one’s shadow, can do adequate hedge magick if fed toenails and skin.
5. Griping Huldra, a belligerent cow-tailed scullion the size of a housecat, cooks nutritious fare for one from silverfish and peat and dust and glamour. 1 in 6 chance of being in an uncooperative mood.
6. Gloat the Paddock, a noxious one-eyed toad, fairly useless but may be licked daily for astonishing insight accompanied by crippling bowel cramps.
Sunday, April 28, 2013
Heigh Ho!
Dwarfishness is sublimated male sexuality. They epitomise that archaic bargain between the attenuated male mind with its focus on extricating function from materiality and the spatulate female mind with its encompassing of social and environmental context. Dwarfs cannot conceive of the expansive thing that surrounds them but are digging and honing pointedness of purpose and covetice. The Rumpelstiltskin story typifies this bargain and appears in a large number of permutations. The story is that of the covenant between the sexes. One sex can do stuff that the other sex needs but claims mating rights in return. The other sex utilises social chicanery to evade the terms of the covenant. Hilarity ensues.
There is a way of looking at males as parasitic entities*. The fact that their investment in offspring is the lesser means they are compelled to go to greater lengths to demonstrate their fitness. Their gonads dictate this strategy - to infect viable females with endearing offspring that they will dedicate their lives to protecting and perpetuating the male's germline. Some males have this attenuated focus turned up too high: I once encountered a boy who couldn't speak but could focus for hours on rattling random objects around in a plastic container. I didn't know for sure but suspected he probably wasn't popular with girls. Such focus needs to be diluted with a little bit of context awareness.
When Dwarfs are thwarted they lose their shit. This is their schtick and sets their narratives in motion. This is what dwarfs are like and it matters not whether they are the kind of dwarf that is like a corpse that lives in the earth and hides from the sun or the kind that vies with the gods in superhuman romance epics the thing that binds them together is that autistic focus on the thing that consumes them and their tendency to fly of the handle when denied it.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Traditional Scots English is replete with terms describing dwarfs and dwarfish creatures. There are actually many more synonymous terms terms than exist in modern English. There is an extent to which the terminology is quite revealing of a negative attitude towards dwarfism and associations of sickness and deformity. I think it could be safely asserted that most of the terms refer to humans suffering from malnutrition or various disorders stunting growth but there are some that definitely refer to the mythological entities in question. Many refer to specifically deformed or squat or sickly or sinister dwarfs and obviously many are merely spelling/pronunciation variants;
Ablach, Ablich, Aiblach, Aploch, Awtus, Blastie, Bod, Boodie, Bottrel, Buntlin, Crile, Croil, Crok, Crowl, Croyl, Cryle, Dachan, Dreegh, Dreich, Droch, Fere, Herie, Knurl, Knurle, Knurlin, Knyaff, Nauchle, Nirb, Nurrit, Piz, Pizie, Pizzie, Setterel, Shaird, Shard, Sharg, Shargan, Shurf, Skeyf, Snauchle, Urf, Urling, Warf, Wratack, Wraul, Wroul, Wurl, Yurlin
(Incidentally this reminds me of one of my favourite ever OSR blog posts from the long
-------------------------------------
Dwarfs covet treasure. It is what they do. There is an extent to which it can be said that they are the embodiment of that notion. As a result of this fact and of the fact that dwarfs have been around a long time and have histories tangled up with that of treasure there is a very real chance that individual hoards and individual articles belonging to individual hoards have some kind of dwarf yearning after it and swearing bitterest vengeance against those who would keep it from them. As such, for every hundred groats worth of treasure found in a hoard there is a 1% chance that there is a dwarf that feels very strongly that he has some claim over it. This chance is much greater for legendary treasures of dweomercraft (and certain other things) 20% of which have a dwarfish claimant. Depending on their natures, dwarfs might be willing to negotiate or in some cases make bargains but, dependent upon their nature, they may just start killing . It is not always clear how they know that their beloved hoard has been unearthed but they will tend to turn up in 1d20 days.Avaricious claimant;
1. Trolde - eldritch mysteries
2. Svartling - devices of artifice most cunning
3. Trow - funerary trappings, barrow-hoards
4. Pech - beast fells, objects of horn and bone, bronze weapons
5. Blastie - fine fabrics and magical garments
6. Shargan - weird pets, strange creatures
7. Knockerman - rare ores, uncut gems
8. Bodach - figurines of domestic gods, ornate vessels and silverware
Fell Dwarfs
Grewsome Trolde: Corpse-worm white haunters of the burrowing dark. Loathsome and long-buried odium incarnate creeping through the endless night of the underworld. Dead-eyed and reeking like grave-sod they are, gnawing like rats at the world's root. Trolde seek an unspeakable mystery in the blackest chasms and shun the light that shuns them in return.
Max. Charisma 3. Equipment options:
1. Gloom Lanthorn - of battered lead, burns black bile , foils infravision 30', 20 groats
2. Iron Guthook - d6 dmg, 5 groats
3. Nadder-Stane - perforated stone through which it is possible to detect invisible 1/day with 1% cumulative chance of seeing a vagrant enormity which sees right back, 300 groats
4. Brither Bulhorn: sinister grey snail exudes 1 dose of sleep poison per day, it takes 3 turns for the snail to apply the poison to the weapon, 100 groats
5. Fenris Cur: Feral, gaunt and haggard, hairless, earless, snarling hell-jackals AC: 7 MV: 180' (60') HD 1/2 dmg: 1d3 ML: 4, 100 groats for 3
6. Ethercap's Bile: grants +3 STR and -6 INT for d6 rounds before 6 turns of debilitating vomiting, 50 groats for 3 doses
Max. Charisma 5, Equipment options:
1. Iron Mole-mask - +1 AC, +1 to saving throws vs. fire, 100 groats
2. Orichalchum Habergeon - (mail coif) +1 AC, +1 to saving throws vs. lightning, 120 groats
3. Adamant Warhammer - 1d6 dmg. +1 vs. heavy armour, 50 groats
4. Aureal Lodestone - Drawn to gold within 5', poisonous: -1 WIS per week to user, 180 groats
5. Unbreakable Manacles of blue-black steel - 150 groats
6 .Heavy Windlass Arbalest: ROF 1/2 dmg d10, 80 groats
Dun-Trow: Solitary stunted things in stone towers long-abandoned. In the brochs and duns of the bleak emptiness long forgotten and forsaken they squat, shaggy and a-glower. They inhabit a sullen brown world of sullen brown desolation. Their only occupation is hobbling about on twilit paths to the secret places of their hoarded trinkets and dancing the quaint awkward mysteries of their birthright.
Max. Charisma 7. Equipment options
1. Noxious sphagnum brew - of sovereign virtue 'gainst the pox, allows second saving throw, 60 groats
2. Toadstone - poison antidote, +2 to saving throw, 150 groats
3. Wulver-skin - Stinking black fur, +1 to AC, +1 to saving throws vs. cold, 80 groats
4. Ancestral blackthorn cudgel - 1d6 dmg, 20 groats
5. Flint Skean - Stone sacrificial knife - d3 dmg but can strike invulnerable spirit entities, 50 groats
6. Copper Eft Amulet - Coiled newt, verdigris encrusted, acts as a mystic key into seemingly impassable brochs, 60 groats
Pech: Little grey stone-ghosts from an archaic epoch. The pech are uncouth and woady, craggy-browed and unlovely - weird shades in earthy guise. They bear inscribed upon their bodies curious designs, the sigils of ancestral beast-gods and sacred trees and things unknown spiralling and coiling on the flesh. In chambers beneath the lonely hills they forge weapons and panoply of gilded bronze but guard their secrets with bestial ferocity.
Max. Charisma 9. Equipment options;
1. Leaf-shaped ancestral bronze sword: 1d6 dmg, can harm otherwise invulnerable spirits, 100 groats
Cruths (mystical tattoos);
2. Badger's Rage: +1 dmg 1/day, 100 groats
3. Salmon Leaping: win initiative 1/day, 100 groats
4. White Bull at Bay: heal 1 dmg 1/week, 80 groats
5. Heron's Vigil: only surprised on a 1, 1 hour/day, 80 groats
6. Sagacious Birch: Read Languages 1/week, 120 groats
Petty Dwarfs
Though it may seem I'm appropriating the nomenclature of the Noegyth Nibin, in truth those are actually Petty-Dwarves. I'm using the now largely obsolete pre-Tolkien plural and am nothing if not pedantic.
Blastie: Diminutive drunken gaberlunzies, tattered and lumpen. Blasties hide in the shade of mannish edifice and wheedle and gripe after scraps. They have made an art of grimacing drolleries and tumblings to elicit guffaws and alms from the bigger folk who might otherwise fear and hate and enslave them for their ugliness. Articles of finery suggestive of unobtainable gentleness and grace awake a covetous fire in their humble hateful hearts.
Max. Strength 10, Equipment options;
1. Juniper Spirit - Makes men maudlin yet malleable, +3 to reaction for potential hirelings, 3 doses for 30 groats
2. Firewater - Spit fire, d8 dmg. 10' range, ignore armour, 3 doses for 50 groats
3. Awfish Whisky - heals d2 dmg but crippling cramps (as hold person) for 1 turn, 40 groats for 3 doses
4. Tattermantle - +1 to reaction among roguish types, -1 to others, 20 groats
5. Hurdy-gurdy - CHA check to successfully play rousing tune, +2 morale if successful, -2 if unsuccessful, morale bonus only applies while tune is being played, penalty continues for 1 turn, 70 groats
6. Itching powder - DEX check to apply, -1 to AC and hit rolls for 1 turn to whosoever should be affected, failed check backfires, 30 groats for 3 doses
Max. Constitution 10. Equipment options;
1. Fess-cat: Unnaccountably fierce grey feline, AC6 MV: 240' (80') HD 1/4 dmg: d2 ML: 10, 100 groats
2. Gangrel-bitch: loathsome, stinking she-dog, AC: 7 MV:150'(50') HD: 1/2 dmg: d3 + horrors ML: 5, 120 groats
3. Flaycruke : Tatty raven with dead eyes that yet see, speaks , AC: 7 MV 300'(100') HD: 1/4 dmg: 1 ML: 8, 150 groats
4: Gnattery Sow: Small, black and furious, forages successfully almost anywhere and can be milked for nourishment for one dwarf, AC: 8 MV: 120' (30') HD: 1 dmg: d2 ML:6, 100 groats
5.Duleskin Crabbe: In an urn full of gravel and brine, can pick locks 10% 1/day, 30 groats
6. Yellerish Warbler: Quaint songbird of irksome purplish brown hue, gives warning of encroaching danger, surprised only on a 1, 40 groats
Max. Wisdom 12. Equipment options;
1. Brazen Ear Trumpet: Detect sliding stonework 1-5 on d6, 80 groats
2. Tinker Hammer: Detect stone traps 1-5 on d6, 60 groats
3. War Mattock: d10 dmg, +2 to open doors, 50 groats
4. Lantern Helm: 20' illumination, adversely affects light-sensitive entities, +1 AC, 60 groats
5. Bane-Ore:Greenish lump repels cave vermin 20' (morale check), 120 groats
6. Signal Hammer: Tapping conveys signal through 100' of stone, d4 dmg, 10 groats
Chimbley Bodach: Old men of vigorous and vehement decrepitude smothered in coal-dust and misery. Of old they may have had some role in noble servitude to the ancient heathen godlings but they are reduced to living in abandoned chimneys and seething with the peculiar resentment held by the obsolete for those who still participate in the world-in-motion. Their thieveries are exceedingly petty and indiscriminate.
Max. Intelligence 10. Equipment options;
1. Ninkip-in-the-Cauldron: Apparently dead cat, knows the way 20% of the time
2. Blinding Smut: hurled in the air requires save vs. dragon breath or blind for 1d4 rounds, 50% chance it backfires.
3. Iron Earshank; 1d4 dmg, 1d10 vs. individuals without helmets, 80 groats
4. Mordant Pizzle-reek: A clay pot full of acrid foulness, acts as stinking cloud, 20' radius, 150 groats
5. Shuck Whistle: Wandering monsters arrive in d4 rounds, 50 groats
6. Smetchy Mantle: dull black tatty rags, allow surprise on 1-3, 30 groats
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
There are or were also Dweorgs or Dvergar, the ancestral and undiminished craftsman of the morningtide of the world but they come not into this tale for they were man-high and comely to look upon and did not stink.
This is an appropriately dark and corrupted take on dwarfishness
======================================
* In the case of males of certain species of angler fish they have actually evolved to become tiny appendages attached to the female.
This is an appropriately dark and corrupted take on dwarfishness
======================================
* In the case of males of certain species of angler fish they have actually evolved to become tiny appendages attached to the female.
Sunday, April 21, 2013
Fear and Madness
 |
| Alan Lee |
The psychedelic, demonic, Dung Age/Crapsack paradigm dictates that there be things that man cannot look upon without soiling himself or gibbering and quaking like a frightened toddler. I like the insanity rules in Call of Cthulhu and concur with whoever the hell it was I read once who wrote of the insanity rules as the reward mechanic of that system.
Now I am not going to go to the extent of constructing a whole 'nother mechanic because I believe in parsimony whenever possible. I like D&D because it is like a twelve-bar blues. One need not get too ornate to be able to tell a compelling story if one uses a solid foundation.
In ascending order of frightfulness;
Daunting - make morale check (hirelings only)
Fearsome - flee in terror (as cause fear)
Terrible - faint dead away (as sleep)
Horrifying - freeze rigid in paralytic fear (as hold person)
Abominable - become utterly bewildered (as confusion)
Unspeakable - lose your mind (as feeblemind)
From Labyrinth Lord, it's not like I think you kids don't know this but I like convenient things;
Remove Fear (reversible)
Level: 1
Duration: 2 turns
Range: Touch
This spells instills courage in the subject, and potentially
removes the effect of magic-induced fear by allowing the
target a saving throw versus spells to attempt to remove the
effects. The subject receives a saving throw bonus of +1 per
level of the caster.
Remove fear counters and dispels cause fear. The subject must
be touched for the spell to take effect.
Cause fear (reverse of remove fear ) will cause a subject who is
touched to run away, hysterical, at full running movement for
a number of rounds equal to the casterÊs level.
Sleep
Level: 1
Duration: 4d4 turns
Range: 240'
A sleep spell causes a magical slumber to come upon
creatures with 4+1 Hit Die or fewer. The caster may only
affect 1 creature if it has 4+1 HD, but the spell will otherwise
affect up to 2d8 HD of creatures. Calculate monsters with less
than 1 HD as having 1 HD, and monsters with a bonus to HD
as having the flat amount. For example, a 3+2 HD monster
would be calculated as having 3 HD. Hit Die that are not
sufficient to affect a creature are wasted. Creatures with the
fewest HD are affected first. Sleeping creatures are helpless
and can be killed instantly with a blade weapon. Slapping or
wounding awakens an affected creature, but normal noise
does not.
Sleep does not affect undead creatures.
Hold Person
Level: 2
Duration: 9 turns
Range: 180'
When this spell is cast, most humanoids become paralyzed
and freeze in place. Undead and any monster of a greater
size than an ogre are unaffected. They are aware and breathe
normally but cannot take any actions, even speech. Subjects
may attempt a saving throw versus spell. This spell can effect
1d4 beings, but if directed at a single monster or character,
the saving throw is attempted with a –2 penalty
Confusion
Level: 4
Duration: 12 rounds
Range: 120'
This spell causes 3d6 targets to become confused, making
them unable to independently determine what they will do.
Roll on the following table at the beginning of each subject’s
turn each round to see what the subject does in that round.
Roll 1d10 Behavior
1-4 Attack caster’s group.
5-6 Do nothing but babble incoherently.
7-10 Attack creature’s group.
A confused character that can’t carry out the indicated action
does nothing but babble incoherently.
Feeblemind
Level: 5
Duration: Indefinite
Range: 240'
If the target creature fails a saving throw versus spell with a –4
penalty, it becomes a mental invalid. The affected creature is
unable to speak, cast spells, understand language, or
communicate coherently. The subject remains in this state
until a dispel magic spell is used to cancel the effect of the
feeblemind.
---------------------------------------------------------
I think of this system as being something that can be applied to the more bizarre chimaerae and spectral entities and things from the bottomless pit and something that complements rather than replaces the caution of players - insta-kill and level-drain creates its own fear.
-Dwarfs are next
Tuesday, April 16, 2013
Plug: Last Gasp Grimoire
| Get ye forth and visit Logan Knight's site; http://www.lastgaspgrimoire.com/ It's a gorgeous site and Logan is very clever. He has just a little bit of body horror going on, by which I mean his mind is an abbatoir of abominations loathsome to behold. He's a capital fellow, though, and seems to exorcise all his demons into horrifically mentally scarring random tables which will seriously fuck you up if you read them. The stuff is surreal and demonic and hilarious... "Your lips seal shut like they never existed and your tongue seems to double in size, it's moving around your mouth and feels like it's getting bigger, it's trying to choke you. If you bite your tongue in half you'll find that your mouth is full of black, legged maggots, and your lips were never sealed shut. 50% chance you really did bite your tongue in half" |
Saturday, April 13, 2013
Fallen Elves
"We must depart into the West, or dwindle to a rustic folk of dell and cave, slowly to forget and to be forgotten."
Saw the remnants of our people
Sweeping westward, wild and woeful,
Like the cloud-rack of a tempest,
Like the withered leaves of Autumn!
A Elbereth Gilthoniel silivren penna mÃriel o menel aglar elenath!
Na-chaered palan-dÃriel o galadhremmin ennorath,
Fanuilos, le linnathon nef aear, sà nef aearon!
which Tolkien translates as;
O Elbereth who lit the stars
From glittering crystal slanting falls
With light like jewels from Heaven on high
The glory of the starry host
To lands remote I have looked afar And now to thee, Fanuilos
Bright spirit clothed in ever-white
I here will sing beyond the sea
Beyond the wide and sundering sea
which bears some resemblance to a passage from another hymn
O Elbereth Gilthoniel
We still remember, we who dwell
In this far land beneath the trees
Thy starlight on the western seas
Despite being a lifelong atheist I've always had a powerful sense of the transcendent. These passages and the merest mention of the theme that Tolkien placed at the heart of his legendarium -the long defeat of the elves- used to make me shiver with delight when I was a child and weep piteously as a corrupt and drug-fucked young man. Though the Longfellow quote does not refer to the elves the theme is the same. There is a defeat that will consume everything and the world will pass away from us all and the only holding on is letting go. Sic transit gloria mundi.
I loved Tolkien's elves with such a fierceness that it galled me to see what happened to fantasy and what is still happening with the genericising tide of banality drowning the fierce joy and sorrow. Everyone now thinks elf means long straight hair and languid insouciant poise and my curmudgeonly intolerance waxed mightily before I realised I don't really care.
I like the idea of bypassing Tolkien whenever possible. There is enough precursor material that one can get by without plagiarising, indeed, one could be picky in one's plagiarisms and build something entirely different from; Druedain, Bombadil, Southrons, Mewlips, Numenorean oddities and Tevildo: Prince of Cats but I digress.
If you aren't very good at drawing it can help to loosen the wrist a little, and the mind also. Scribble away. This is something I stressed when I was teaching kids about art-making. Unless you know what you are doing that implement you have for mark-making is going to keep its secrets, inside every pen is a bewildering infinity of marks but only crap things will happen if you haven't the witchery to unleash it. When there are things that you can do and practices or exercises you can undertake that makes it easier then it is as though you've glimpsed some kind of sorcery beyond space and time. We as a species, as a culture, as a conglomerate entity, we have techniques available for unlocking the gate that leads to the miracle burning in the marrow of us but it's too easy to mooch around outside in a kind of desolate fecklessness. This desolate feckless mooching is where the bad things happen. It makes me think of the banal atrocities perpetrated by those whose cultures have been destroyed. It is on the outside of the capacity to experience the numinous heart of everything that these horrors are. The frustration with the world that is the frustration of the uninitiated is a haunted and famishing thing.
It makes me think also of the look on the faces of people who are on the road with a barrow-load of items while men with machetes and guns and toxic ideologies are making free with their homeland. Such people never thought the structure of their lives would be so thoroughly undone. They look as surprised that such things occur in the world as I would be.
If there are elves then they are simultaneously fickle and flighty and steeped in ancient wisdom and weird. The Good Folk and Fair Folk and Gude Neighboures are all euphemisms for what they really are; Evil and Ugly, Bad Neighbours, or at the very least Not Like Us. Not for nothing are diminished Tuatha De Danann and Vanir mixed up with the lost souls of the unbaptised dead and the pagan ancestors and fallen angels. Not for nothing is the boundary between fairy and demon and ghost a bit blurry.
It should be remembered that traditional folks have that marvellous tendency to ascribe everything to supernatural agency. Elves made you sick or killed you with magic or curdled milk, knotted horse's manes, pinched milkmaids, stole children and replaced them. It is this last relationship like that of cuckoos parasitising other birds that defines my own understanding of elves.
If elves are anything they are witnesses of the wild purity of existence. They were there, right there in the centre of things, watching the demiurgic agency ushering forth the thing-in-itself from nescience - gorging on the fugitive light. Their relinquishing of undifferentiated prime seems a defeat, a sundering, a fall from grace. Their walking with us on the earthly plane bitter to them, and they are sufficiently alienated from the human world that perhaps they care not what they do to us. Indeed they prey upon us or adorn us with flowers and bestow unimaginable pleasures upon us in turn without distinction. They are elementally amoral. The fall of the elves is like the fall of an older order of existing in the world in a purely poetic dimension of existence to a dull prosaic world. Among humans they suffer the alienation of the disenfranchised and the persecuted.
Alongside this alienness which in itself is sufficient cause for genocidal racism there is the fact that they can all cast spells. Any one of them could use magic to blind you or put you to sleep or strike you down from afar. This again brings to mind the fear of sorcery in traditional cultures. In the excellent film Ten Canoes the Yolngu men have a discussion about what would happen if you leave a turd in the bush where a sorceror could find it. They envisage different scenarios where, for example, the sorceror puts your turd up in a tree and when the branches rub together you get a sore throat. If the accounts of the burning times and the accounts of contemporary traditional cultures tell us anything it is that people have a terrible paranoid fear of malign sorcery and are happy to anthropomorphise ailments and misfortune especially if they can find a friendless old lady to brutalise. It's happening somewhere in Africa right now.
OK, well I've edited out a vague meandering ramble about setting design. Suffice to say I believe in brevity and the necessity of inducing some kind of exercise in creativity for the GM and players. The setting is always going to be a collaborative exercise. I'm more interested in establishing tone and promoting a trope-armature upon which can be hung internally consistent elements.
So I'm dealing with a Crapsack World setting where the elves are strange. The True Elves (who are higher level) live apart in hollow hills which are the otherworld and are preposterously bizarre and beyond my remit right now. The elves I am dealing with are lost in the diminishing world, grown senile and disparate and corrupt. These are the rustic folk of dell and cave.
PC elves are something I dealt with years ago and I guess remain somewhat relevant but what I am interested in doing is weaving a few little weird fragments together with a kicker. Assuming race-as-class and the existence of spellbooks there is an interesting little reward mechanic that can be used to send magic-users and elves trooping around the countryside in search of elfin magic and things to trade for it. The idea of intra-level reward mechanics needs fleshing out further later on.
First level spells vary so widely in power and utility it seems a bit ridiculous. They are a very interesting glimpse into the early game, two of the spells can be replaced by a padlock and a wheelbarrow.
Every elf is a first-level LL elf with one 1st level spell
Note on nomenclature: I've named my elves using a fair few obsolete dialect words (because it makes me feel so very clever) e.g. Sloomit Waghorn means "slovenly villain/trickster" and Habberjock means "turkey cock" and by extension "thick-lipped idiot".
Misergeist: Hold Portal - Hooky emaciated gloating buzzard-folk; Long and twisted are they and keepers of secrets . The geists are melancholy avarice embodied, hook-nosed and sallow flinthearts that spend their lives gloating over tarnished pewter in the dim and secret cysts of the margins of the world. Misergeists are vanishingly few and bereft of generative vitality; always they seek brides and bridegrooms favoured by the heavens.
Sloomit Waghorn: Read Languages - Conspiratorial manipulative lurkers in alcoves. Hidden in the Bounder-Keeps of the imperium's tattered brink are the fey and crump-horned scholars of the dead years. They keep chronicles kept in dusty archives in which are remembered the aeons of the Earth's dark prime and dynasties beyond. They seek runestones and ogham-staves and other archaic inscriptions.
Worriganger: Light - Feral outcasts shrouded in rags and dusty fur who live alone in desolation. They are dusky and angular strangers who mutter in their solitude and follow after the wayward with wolfish intent. Worrigangers are feared and abhorred such that the name is a malediction cast upon the rapist and the hearthless vagrant.
Habberjock: Shield - Thick-lipped grotesques of apparently majestic stupidity. Habberjocks are outlandishly ugly changeling children grown man-high and uglier still. their voices are thick and unctuous and their eyes dull and gleaming. They delight in the company of geese and mules and in the slow-worm and eft.
Brackenfrau: Charm Person - Burnished nut-brown moon-faced wenches with crinkly hair that lurk in the withery drears and fern-brakes of a grey autumn. Out in the dappled half-light they dwell in hovels and weave plots to capture comely admirers. They trade in stolen children and seek to use their powers of persuasion to encourage the starveling poor to part with their offspring.
Hollowback Ylfen: Detect Magic - Fair to look upon from the front but weirdly hollow and cow-tailed behind. The Ylfen pass briefly unnoticed among humans seeking articles of spae-craft hidden among the detritus of decaying civilisation. To them, all magical trinkets are their province, to be purloined and returned to the barrows where they reign in solitude.
Gluntie Queyne: Magic Missile - Gangling, bristly and ungainly fairy women. Horse-faced and haggard and possessed of an abrasive angularity of demeanour. The Glunties dwell apart in realms of fearful loneliness as their capacity to strike men dead with elf-shot makes them formidable and hated and their tendency to imbibe inebriants immoderately makes them unpredictable.
Flibbertigibbet: Ventriloquism - Far too slender and unearthly to be beautiful -glittering dark and furtive craven wispy fey who haunt the fen-lands and spinneys. They have an unwholesome predilection for leadings-astray and yearn merely to caress the placid faces of the wayward dead. The living are too too coarse and earthly for them.
Scalbert Gumph: Sleep - Shambolic fae manifest as slobbery dullards that sleep under bridges and in abandoned mills. They shamble about in the drunken twilight seeking the unwary with groping fingers and muttering dark lullabies. More than anything they desire comely sheep and black roses and locks of maiden's hair.
Ouphe: Floating Disc- Gawping outlandish pudding-headed wanderers. Mostly harmless, ouphes prance uncouthly around the peripheries of the world and laugh at thunder and cry at sunlight and sleep in ditches. What they value is hard to gauge but they have little to offer anyone that makes any sense so it matters little
Capripeds: Protection from Evil - Unctuous epicurean blackguards who traffick with strange forces. In the high hills the Capripeds dance in the new moon's dark with godless things from elder aeons, for the shades can touch them not and the awfish nymphs of the unbegotten prime harm them not for they wrap themselves in webs of glamer.
Canny Childe: Read Magic - Diminutive starry-eyed archaics of cherubic seeming. Like unto a child of ten or eleven years in aspect but with a wry glance and a knowingness beyond their apparent youth, the Canny parasitise human dwellings where they can creep about seeking the glyphs and sigils of arcane witchery and abuse the trust they elicit in their hosts to worm their way into vaults of secret gramarye.
Galadriel
Sweeping westward, wild and woeful,
Like the cloud-rack of a tempest,
Like the withered leaves of Autumn!
Longfellow -Song of Hiawatha
From glittering crystal slanting falls
The glory of the starry host
To lands remote I have looked afar And now to thee, Fanuilos
Bright spirit clothed in ever-white
I here will sing beyond the sea
Beyond the wide and sundering sea
In this far land beneath the trees
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
-----------------------------------------------------------------
These cuckoos are common where I am and use their eldritch mocking cry to distract and enrage crows and currawongs so that their nests may be parasitised.
----------------------------------------------------------
 |
| Judson Huss: preposterously bizarre |
Every elf is a first-level LL elf with one 1st level spell
Note on nomenclature: I've named my elves using a fair few obsolete dialect words (because it makes me feel so very clever) e.g. Sloomit Waghorn means "slovenly villain/trickster" and Habberjock means "turkey cock" and by extension "thick-lipped idiot".
Flibbertigibbet: Ventriloquism - Far too slender and unearthly to be beautiful -glittering dark and furtive craven wispy fey who haunt the fen-lands and spinneys. They have an unwholesome predilection for leadings-astray and yearn merely to caress the placid faces of the wayward dead. The living are too too coarse and earthly for them.
Apropos of nothing: The man is a sorceror
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)