The Danger of Creative Inaction

I’m posting this as an a reminder to my future self, a word of warning, a selfish act of self care:

Not creating is an expensive choice.

The cost of creation is often only the cheap momentary discomfort of staring in the eye your own creation.

And finding it wanting.

And that is ok.

Let the imperfect creation be, let yourself down, let yourself go so you can go do better, shinier things.

The expense of not creation is those weird niggling ideas, lack of expression, and the special regrets found in older souls.

Which one would you rather pay?

Stocking Interesting Places: a writing template for Zones

[Recently there has been a bout of ugly RPG discourse: discourse burned me much, and I decided to forego it as much as I can years ago. As opposed to discourse, I instead present a post of Praxis: documenting the process of doing things, with some of the the reason I do things this way, and some results. I hope this is helpful. Zones took a few years of practice to conceptually nail down (starting in 2011 with Adventure Fantasy Game), but here we are.]

I’ve been reading some interesting posts on how to stock megadungeons. I don’t really do megadungeons in the traditional sense: I find them a bit too big for conceptual cohesiveness, to the point where I feel they are somewhat grindy with combat encounters as opposed to exploration and toying with strange stuff and uncovering wonders (not necessarily treasures).

This, and less gaming opportunities, led me to start building smaller and denser dungeons, increasing interaction. I’m not talking about geographically denser, but conceptually, logically, thematically denser: less things but more meaningful, and easier on single sessions. Rather than “dungeon levels”, I started working with Zones: each zone a meaningful, thematically cohesive set of rooms/encounters/content.

I eventually realized that we were sitting at an intersection of several design concepts:

• the Magical Number 7 plus or minus 2.
• stocking rooms with a d6 table (also a concept present in B/X), with empty results leveraged for effect: things that are not monsters, traps, treasure do paint a world.
• the 5 Rooms Dungeon
• six half an hour encounters = three hours of play, a good play session (I forgot about where this very rough heuristic comes from, let me know if you know the source).
• recursive tiling of a hexagon with 7 smaller hexagons
• 1d6 tables with six results are perfect to create moods, mixing a good measure of variability and predictability in (and if you want more depth with the occasional oddball you can break down one of the six entries into a subtable)
• the elegance of using a weekly planner for Dungeon23.

And in this leyline crossing I found a powerful nexus. The numbers are in the 5-7 ballpark, and I’m going to use the number 6 or 7 depending on the case. Design content in meaningful groups of 5-7 elements: I’ll use six for this example because we all have those six-siders:

• six continents, each of
  • six regions, each of
    • six areas, each with
      • six locations
• six dungeons, each of
  • six zones, each of
    • six meaningful rooms
• six schools of magic of
  • six spells
• potentially six factions, six classes, six gods, six…

Following the stocking tables, this is the starting template areas and locations: an area is a small local region, possibly fitting in a 20 miles hexagon, centered around a specific locale. For example:

1. The Village of Glaschu
2. The Cowcaddens Cattle Market
3. The Rich Mount Iron Mine
4. The Old Castle Ruins, home of Robbie the Robber Baron
5. The Goblin Woods
6. The Cloisters of Saint Gentikern On The Hill

The template I follow here is:

1. The Core: this is the most meaningful element of the Zone, what gives mood to the zone, and what this Zone appears as when you zoom out. This is what this Zone is about: the tentpole where your players will go back to. It does not have to be a safe place, it could be a dungeon. The important thing is that this Zone is about this place, and is coloured by this place.
2. Not an adventuring locale, but nonetheless colourful.
3. Not an adventuring locale, but colourful and potentially dangerous
4. Possible Danger
5. Danger
6. Resource: something precious, but not easy to access.

Which is of course patterned on the Basic D&D Stocking table:

Of course all of this is just a very rough guideline, a prompt for creation, and not a prescription: when creating adventure locations I mix Zones with what can be approximated by a One Scene Adventure. Remember that this is a tool, and tools are made for us, not the way around. Don’t let templates be a chain, but a tool to get moving and free yourself from non-creation. If you find that you need a sprawling dungeon with 50 rooms that do not cluster at all, that’s good!

And now, this is what I wrote up for the Uplands, and what prompted me to write this post. It does not strictly follow the template (please ignore the template if you want), and the locations are somewhat shuffled, but these are the outcomes of the template. You can easily build on a list like this to populate your hexcrawl, use it randomize locations, and so on.

The Uplands Region

1. The Harga Volcano, Mountain of Fire
2. The Steam Vents
3. The Dead Court of King Mistletoe
4. The Moist and Warm Cave of the Squid City
5. The Troll Mines (and Court of the Hungry Troll Queen)
6. The Monastery of Ever Patient Saint Tonica on the Titan Home.

7. The Ermine Court, Hunters of the Wild
8. A Lodge of Horns
9. A Shrine to Brother Ciccio, Patron of Were- & Wolves, Animal Lover. 
10. Bear Vale
11. The Witching Tree
12. The Hunting Grounds of the Ermine Court

13. The Upland Court, Ancestral Homeland
14. The Upland Mill, Brewery, and Bakery
15. The Saint Umbrose School for Stonemasons and Beekepers
16. The Porphyry Quarry
17. A Stone Lodge in the middle of a burnt forest
18. The Stone Vaults

19. The East Vale, Alpine Meadows
20. Rams’ Looms, the Weavers’ Commune
21. The Hermitage of Cletus the Healer
22. The Magic Thermal Baths.
23. The Five Cairns of the Slayers (wights trapped under, central point is focus of power)
24. The Thousand Alps of the Thousand Herbs

25. The Tocin Vale, Gate to the South
26. The Hungry Green Pool
27. The Broken Watchtower of Gene the Giant (with lost necromancer dungeon)
28. The Maranzo Horse Farm
29. The Cave of the Mage of the Mountain
30. The Scarescarab Hunting Grounds (and the lair of their secretive riders)

31. The Bear Court, Lowlander Borderlands
32. The Big Alp Summer Pastures
33. The Copper Valley
34. Grover’s Rock
35. Skarn’s Wolves Hideout
36. Dragon Burial Grounds

Wizard Spell Selection, Making Up New Spells on the fly, and Major Arcana (possibly part 1)

Caveat: this is not a post with 22 spells, one for each of the Major Arcana. This is a post about how I do things at the table, based on a few years of practice. Maybe a post with Major Arcana spells will eventually come (or maybe Major Arcana as Star Signs). Let’s begin!

If you happen to generate a spellcaster character at my table you’ll soon hear that question: “What kind of spells would you like?”

And some lucky people have an idea and tell me. In this case, my go-to handbooks to draw spells from are Brendan’s Wonder & Wickedness and my own Marvels & Malisons. I often throw in Chthonic Codex and Johnstone’s The Nameless Grimoire as their scopes are much wider.

Some other people do not know. And this is what this post is really about. In this case I ask them if they want to get random magic, or maximally random magic.

If they pick normally random, I ask them for what kind of vibes they’d like, make myself some suggestions, then pick the most matching vibey RPG spellbook from the shelf. My favourite is Mike Mason’s The Grand Grimoire of Chthulu Mythos Magic, because I am a horrible GM that wants to see the world on fire empowering GM who loves sharing great powers and great responsibilities with players. I normally open an index page at random, point at a random spot on the page with my eyes closed, and give them that spell. This approach requires a modicum of game mechanic bending, but treating all spells as level-less does 95% of the work.

However, they almost always pick maximally random. If they pick maximally random, we get to the heart of the post. My grimoire hoard.

Flexing a Past Shame: My Spellbook Hoard

Hi, I’m Paolo, and I’m a recovering hoarder. I used to say “collector”, but let’s face the truth: I was not seeking completeness, instead I was over-nesting as a coping strategy. Anyway, liking books and magic and games I ended up with a sizeable fantasy RPG collection, and now I have a few shelves devoted to esoterica, of both the real-world and gaming variety.

These are not all my wizardy books. Some are still in Italy, and some other are shelved with the rest of their game handbooks, and some are in use. Also, you can see my altar, which I’ve turned into a random table for you at the end of the post.

Play is a creative process, let it run

Back to maximally random spell selection: I ask the player to roll 1d30, and pick the corresponding book from the top shelf. That is their spell discipline, and we randomize spell selections from the book contents: if there are spells or spell-like (like the lists of demons from Ars Goetia), we pick at random from those.

If not, I open pages at random and turn the contents into a spell. Some of those books have very adaptable content (for example tarots can be easily turned into spells). Some of those books, however, resist. The answer is to read the page until the inspiration strikes, and work that precious passage into a spell. There are many ways, these are simple suggestions:

• Use the passage as the spell name.
• Based on the passage, build the spell effect
• The passage is just a metaphor, girl! The true nature of power is hidden!
• Use a thesaurus to replace words until it it clicks.
• Pick a few spells that sound related and mash them.
• Exquisite corpse for spell effect: each player pics a fragment of spell effect, which are then composed: a player pics verb, another object, another adverb, another adjective.
• And so on.

And now you have your spell.

I understand that this might not be easy. It requires a willingness to play half-baked stuff. Maybe this will make some completely broken spells. Maybe you are afraid letting this magic into you game will let people down, if the spells are garbage or if they need to be toned down for game design reasons.

That’s ok. Grant yourself the luxury of, essentially, do some seat of the pants game design. Play test it with players straight away. Be explicit about the process with your players, and please let them contribute to the process: do not let the shared creation limit to their PCs.

Paolo, you mentioned Tarot Magic

I could have written 22 spells, one for each Major Arcanum. I even started doing so. But I do not feel that is what this post should be about. Instead, we are going for “how to make things up”. Also, this is actually what happened at the table last time, and what prompted me to share this process.

Major Arcana have strong vibes and meanings. If you want a list, Waite’s The Pictorial Key to the Tarot is a good place to start from, but skip the most of it and go straight to the Greater Arcana Divinatory Meaning list. My idea is: each Arcanum can be cast for a spell effect tied to its Meanings: as always, if you need a yardstick for spell power, match it with other spells that a caster of the same level could cast.

However: Major Arcana have a lot of meanings, especially if you are in for card “reversal” (I am normally not). This give Arcana a lot of what I call utility: an Arcanum can be used in many more situations with great effect compared to ordinary spells. I feel this might make Arcana too handy, so maybe they could have some complication to both even it out and make things more interesting (a win-win). Here are some improvised examples:

• Cost: each Arcana has its card as spell focus: they are a material component that is not consumed. Drawing a card costs 50gp multiplied by the square of the card casting level, and takes a day per card level. So if you are level 10 and have only a level 5 Chariot, you’ll be able to cast Chariot only as if you were level 5, or you can spend 10 days and 5000GP to make a fancier, level 10 Chariot card. Level 1 Wizards start with three level 1 cards from their Arcana selection, and if they know more (because of high intelligence, for example) they need to find or draw up more cards. This is a good money sink for wizards, and also lets the GM place cards as treasure. Maybe you can even cast the Arcana as scrolls, but that would be really expensive.
• Lack of Control: as each Arcanum has different meanings, we could lean on the random nature of card divination. When you cast an Arcanum, decide which Meaning you wish to bring forth, then try a Reaction Roll to see if the Gods favour you:
  • 10 or more: the Meaning of the chosen Arcanum takes effect.
  • 7, 8, 9: the GM picks a different Meaning from the same Arcanaum and applies it to the situation in a way that benefits the wizard. Good stuff, but not what you expected.
  • 5, 6: pick a Meaning from the same Arcana at random, and the GM applies it in a way that either benefits of impairs everybody, or in some snidey borderline inoffensive, random-ironic way.
  • 4 or less: pick a Meaning from the same Arcana at random, then the GM applies it in a way that incoveniences the Wizard. Be painful, but do not be too mean: Unless cast in the direst of circumstances this should not doom the wizard by itself.
• Random selection: rather than learning specific Arcana, the wizard learns a number of Arcana slots, filled at random. Decide with the players if the Arcana selection changes every day, or the single slot changes when it’s cast. If you want to be extra fancy, and stick to the concept of the Fool’s Errand, the wizard will need to go through the whole Major Arcana before cast arcana are available again.

These are only examples, and can be further developed and refined. Remember to check in with players, especially the caster. Also, very important, treat this as a work in process: before the next session you can discuss how things went and adjust, and eventually the rulings you make during resolution might become more codified, and the effects from those spells start to coalesce into road-tested game mechanics.

This is, after all, a learning experience.

Conclusion

Regardless of what happens, the outcome is this: I get the appropriate book out of the shelf, discuss a spell selection with the wizardling, they pick 3 + intelligence bonus spells, plus the spells that all magic users know how to do: Maleficence and Arcane Bulwark and Open thyne Third Eye. I then explain Empower, and we are ready to go.

The next post might be about starting inventory. Which is kind of funny, because it’s also the topic of my first blog post here, about a million years ago.

What’s on the Altar? (1d12, based on my altar, somewhat redacted)

1. a small journal filled with the tribulations of the soul. A collection of shames and pains, going from heart-rending to seemingly-innocuous-yet-causing-hangups.
2. a pomegranate, a symbol of abundance and fertility.
3. poppies, a symbol of dreaming, the subconscious, and letting go of pain.
4. an ammonite, a squid who was alive and doing its own things 240 millions years ago, which is a good amount of time to meditate about.
5. a conker.
6. CDB oil, to ease mild issues of anxiety and hypermobility both.
7. a candle, for light, fire, focus in flame meditation, and many other uses.
8. a nazar, to catch the evil eye.
9. a singing bowl, with mallet and pillow, for focusing meditation.
10. thimble and needle, at the same time meaningful symbols of needing preparation before dangerous tasks, focus for binding and healing, and the ultimate tool for the mundane sorcery that is bookbinding.
11. a tarot deck.
12. a monster hunting kit in a jute pouch.

Operating Weird Dungeon Machinery Considered Harmful

Beautiful Yet Lost features, tuckered away in its ruins, sort-of-industrial, mostly broken down machinery. Maybe it’s an automated pita maker. Maybe it’s a vat that brews brews. Maybe it’s a statue-replicator. Maybe it’s an ornithopter.

Regardless: They often do not work perfectly. And, sometimes, fail catastrophically.

This is how I’m trying to handle them.

Machine Basics

Machines have mostly three things to them: purpose, power, and health.

The purpose is the reason of being for the machine: machine are built to make things, or do things on other things, or make things happen. For example:

• a stone automated forge that makes axe-heads
• an iron obelisk that recharges fire-magic items
• a steel elephant walker, with a hut built on the howdah, and a hook on its tail, for wagon attachment
• and so on

Power is what the machine needs to operate. For example:

• mechanical power, for example a water wheel.
• heat, for example a furnace.
• star energy, for example a henge. Star power is always present, but henges are usually tuned to work at specific times with specific stars, so they supply power intermittently.

It goes without saying that you can use machines to power other machines, and engines are helpful because they convert energy to a different energy. For example:

• a big coal-fire steam engine can power many smaller machines with either steam or mechanical power
• a fire spirit bound into a demon-core (from mug-sized for a 1 hp Singe Sylph, to building-sized for a 24HD Fiery Flamingo) can provide both radiant heat and mechanical power via its crank shaft. And sometimes it cannot stop from providing both at the same time, together with pained screams, as the fire spirit it traps rages against the brass walls of its prison.

Devising application of harnessing other kind of spirits inside demon-cores is left as an exercise to the reader.

Health is how badly the machine is broken. From 6, perfect working order and totally fine, to 0, for when you do not even need to look at the machine to wanting to nope away. Health can be increased by 1 by skilled engineers spending 1d12 hours and some supplies, if they roll successfully (stat roll or skill roll or saving throw, depending on your game system and inclination).

As we are about to start having comedy health and safety accidents, machine health should not be quantified numerically, but should be strongly telegraphed to players, so that they know what is coming.

Machine Operations

First, the machine must be set up. Machines found after the catastrophe many machines are often already set up, as nobody has used them since the Catastrophe. However, as they have not been used since the Catastrophe, they might be clogged- and caked-up and might require set-up still (1-in-2 chance). If not set up, it usually takes a turn to set them to working order. Dials registered, regulators de-biased, cradles cleaned, pipes scrubbed, brass polished.

Second, the machine should be fed. Load ingots on anvils, hops in hoppers, fragrances in phials, whatever it needs. If might be far from straightforward for the PCs to understand what’s going where, but rummaging in storage, nearby supply rooms, and a bit of common sense might help. Without the correct power the machine simply won’t do anything, but if fed the wrong resources the outcome might be worse.

Third, the machine can finally be operated. Now, make a OPERATOR roll, and an BREAKDOWN roll. You want the OPERATOR roll to beat the BREAKDOWN roll.

The OPERATOR roll is 1d6:

• advantage for a skilled operator (if you do not have skills in your game a relevant PC class will also do)
• disadvantage for an unskilled operator
• disadvantage for not being accustomed to this machine
• disadvantage for using wrong supplies, like metal ore in a wine-brewer. If successful the result might be useless (rusty water), or surprising (IRN-BRU).

The BREAKDOWN roll is 1d6:

• advantage for using wrong supplies.
• advantage if the machine was not set up.
• disadvantage for a skilled operator

After rolling, check all the following conditions:

• If the OPERATOR roll is better than the BREAKDOWN roll, the machine works fine and does what it should.
• if the OPERATOR roll is worse than or equal to BREAKDOWN, the machine makes/does something bad, wrong, or bad and wrong.
• if the BREAKDOWN roll equals HEALTH, nothing is wrong, but wear and tear reduces HEALTH by 1.
• If the BREAKDOWN roll is over HEALTH, roll 1d8 on the CATASTROPHE table.

In case of Catastrophe roll 1d8

1. The machine EXPLODES. 3d6 damage to everything in the blast radius. The blast radius is 10 feet or twice the size of the machine, whatever is bigger (e.g. a 20′ wide machine will shrapnel with a radius of 40′). If present, a demon-core will breach.
2. The power supply breaks down catastrophically and must be rebuilt. Lose 1d3 Health. Demon-core breach: 4-in-6.
3. The energy supply thrashes and deals 2d6 damage to 1d6 people nearby, save for half. Lose 1 Health. Demon-core breach: 1-in-6
4. The usual health and safety accident: a person nearby at random is hurt, 1d8 damage. Loud cackles and cheering from the demon-core.
5. The machine does or produces something, something somewhat ok but overall very wrong. Decrease Health by 1.
6. The machine groans horribly from structural stress for 1d6 rounds, then roll again.
7. Nothing? Seemingly nothing? in 1d6 rounds roll again with advantage.
8. There may be a weird flash, or eerie clang, or a strange smell, but nothing bad happens.

In case the machine is not powered by a demon-core, ignore the demon-core section.

In case of demon-core breach, the demon core containment fails. The spirit is released with a magic explosion dealing 1 damage per HP of the contained spirit to everyone within 30 feet, save for half. There are ways to open safely a demon-core, but this ain’t it.

A List of 1d12 Machines

1. a star-concentrator for sideral siderurgy. A forge strapped to the end of a telescope on an equatorial mount, tracking a specific star all night to better focus its energy on the metal.
2. poisonous frog squeezer/breeding-pools, supplying antidote juice.
3. a 30-feet tall balsa-wood mecha roly-poly, really fast when rolling.
4. a pharmaceutical omnireactor: makes potions supplied with water, herbs, and alcohol
5. a car. You might think this having a car would be boring, but I’m willing to bet that your players feel differently. Vroom vroom.
6. self-catapulting glider
7. electrocuting-net auto-fishing/frying machine
8. a power condensing empowering pyramid, focusing energy from all its sides on a single point (useful for enchanting or empowering items)
9. An essential spirit distillery. It splits the content of its pot in separates essences and stores them in jars.
10. Dinosaur Kerogenator/Distiller. Slightly a misnomer, it converts any organic matter to flaming oil (not only dinosaurs).
11. The Iron Replicator. A self-propelled digger/smelter/forge with the size and mood of a grumpy cow. If fed combustible it will dig and smelt more iron to make more Iron Replicators. To prevent it from dangerous runoffs it has behavioural directives stopping it from feeding autonomously and scavenging iron. In case of Catastrophe the created Replicators will not have those directives.
12. The Patented Holy-Auto-Card-Maker. A small letterpress/papermill/hemp harvester/graveyard device. You must supply the corpse or ashes of a saint, some hemp seeds, plenty of sunlight, and a whole lot of cranking.

New Kickstarter: Yochai Gal’s Beyond the Pale. Also, Dragonmeet!

TL;DR: Yochai wrote a book. I’m producing it. It has sick art. The kickstarter goes live tomorrow. Day one backers get a free iron-on patch.

Need some convincing? We have a video!

Look at some pretty mockups to whet your need for beautiful books.

Ok, we can all make a cute cover, but this book is pretty also on the inside.

Yes, one of the dungeons is shaped like the Tree of Life. We also have a really powerful angel-summoning book detailed inside, with sigils, and powerful powerful magic requiring a heavy heavy price.

We need your help, so if you like pretty books please back the project. I hate to say this, but Beyond the Pale is a pretty book, and to make it we need to pay our fancy Estonian printer and swanky Swedish paper mill. Also, and the all-Jewish team has bills to pay too (I’m the only gentile that worked on the book).

Now, let’s take some time to discuss how this bad boi of a book came to be. Let’s begin from the beginning.

Last spring I was doomscrolling on twitter, when I see Yochai posting memes.

I’m a basic girl as there are many and I love my esoteric/dungeon/silly intersectional memes. Also, yes, the writing and art was almost done, but there is done, and done-done.

Then I see this:

Then I look at the images and… is this the most majestic goat I’ve ever seen?

Yeah, it’s Azazel. Yeah, it’s hella majestic. Yeah, it’s a goat.

Guess who slid immediately into Yochai’s DMs, half-drunk, at the local trans bar karaoke night?

Yes, me.

(Come to think about it, it might have been Lady Gaga night. I might have been tipsy at queeraoke doomscrolling while singing VENUS by Lady Gaga. Sometimes I really need to stim).

So, yeah, we are doing this thing. It’s a pretty pretty book with some pretty grim things inside. Not the same kind of grim as Gaub: different grim, different themes, and overall not only a horror book.

Somewhat related: we’ll be at Dragonmeet! All hardcover backers that come to our table at Dragonmeet will get a small freebie (while supply last). How to find us? With the map!

For a change, this year we’ll be at the Upper Trade Hall.

Should you lose the map, you can find the Lost Pages table because we have a 4.5 metres tall banner. That’s 15 feet for my metrically-impaired readers: I bough by mistake an outdoors banner, and it’s HUGE.

It does not even fit in selfies. In photo it might look big, but in person it looks positively stonking huge. I’ve been forbidden to put it up at UKGE for health and safety reasons. I’m not even kidding.

It’s also black and has a giant eye, yes 🙂

Anyway, see you at Dragonmeet. And, maybe, consider helping us with making Beyond the Pale a real book?

Beautiful Yet Lost: finding Home and restoring a culture

For the past several years my insomnia has grown to making me useless during the day so I might as well write at night.

A city is not only a bunch of buildings full of people. Cities become cities when keeping all those people fed and healthy becomes a big and messy affair, the effort so big it spreads to the hinterland. A city is a bunch of buildings full of people plus a whole lot of external infrastructure to feed them.

This is a lot of work, and it’s difficult. So difficult that cities, until relatively recently, were places where more people died than were born, their inhabitants growing only because of migration from the countryside. So, being terminally overcrowded places that generate little food, cities are kept alive by what lies beyond them.

When a city dies, its support network dies too. Food does not get paid to be delivered to the markets anymore. Structures and roads are not maintained and become unusable. The whole area becomes unsafe, as violence is not monopolized until another hegemon squeezes its iron fist.

Cities fall, and in their death throes they destroy what is closest.

* * *

To make a home
You need many things
You need a courtyard, green with ivy and ringing with starlings
And a small fountain, for warm afternoons and tired travellers
And a comfy parlour, to welcome neighbours, family, friends
And a cozy kitchen for those big feasts to better remember
And a quiet library filled with lore and wonder, for the profit of all
And a few fruit trees, heavy with citrus, almonds, pomegranates
And a couple of bedrooms for rest, slumber, intimacy, dreams, tears
And that makes a house, a hollow shell, an empty nest
Fill it with people, people you love, people you care for
Fill it with people that make it better
But, the first thing it needs, is a good heart
As plants and friends, quiet and rest, water and food, books and blooms, birdsong too
Are grey and sad if you don’t pour your heart in your home
With no heart the biggest palace is but a hovel

* * *

Home was a city. Our city. Then it fell.

We left the wreck, refugees reaching out for the safer neighboring lands. Many, poor or vulnerable or weak or old or without support or many or all of the above, did not manage, and died. As her people were displaced, Home scattered, and soon became a nowhere to avoid.

Home, empty, stopped being a city. Sad and discarded like a husk, Home could not bear life anymore.

We survived, and tried to make the best of the difficult circumstances. Some of us even prospered. Still, the feeling of being away from Home was too much.

Nostalgia strikes the migrant: not necessarily the hardest, but surely the bitterest. As times passed, occasionally some of us would travel back Home, only to find dusty ruins where once a civilization thrived.

Some went back to recover something important left behind. Some, one might say the most desperate, went back to find a way to heal the downfall and restore our Home. Some went only to visit their old, lower-case, home.

Amongst the ruins, they found some structures still in perfect conditions, but deserted. Kept safe by protective wards, some buildings as immaculate as when Home was still a bustling place. Maybe there is hope.

* * *

Beautiful Yet Lost mourns of nostalgia and diaspora with a hopeful tone. I started the manuscript a few years ago, during a very dark time. As I moved from accommodation to accommodation, I lost a home, and then lost the manuscript, and then I lost myself.

And I could not work on this. Beautiful Yet Lost is not a project that one can hack through. It is a cry, it is wistful, it is cherishing, it is about what makes home. And I did not want to write it without feeling it fully, because I could not unwrite it and write it again, once more, with feeling. It would not be the same thing.

It took me years, but now my house is a home. Finding a home, in it I found myself again: worse for wear, a few white hair, with less hope but much less need for it. So I’m on this again. Home beckons.

I made a few copies of a 12-page version and brought them to Tabletop Scotland. I got some positive feedback from people I look up to for game writing, but I have no idea if this will be a 32 pages zine, or a 100 pages book, or what else. It needs more work to shine the way I want.

Payment for the Treacherous Journey to the Hidden Valley

Money is not that useful on the way to the Hidden Valley. And, who knows, you might not even like money. Regardless, you agreed to go, even if the payment you agreed might not be what you wanted.

yes you might get a good girl

1. A little green frog with expressive eyes that soon develops a liking to you. It’s clingy and a bit clumsy and falls off things easily, but it will never fail to hang on to you. Once, when you are in a difficult situation in the Journey, you can be more like the frog, and either try again any roll and take the best result or, you know, just hang on.
2. A bell of a granny. It’s a small brass hand bell, it rings true, and will be clearly heard over any other noise by those feeling even a little bit guilty, as the noise unearths discomfort like a granny’s disapproval.
3. So much high-quality leftovers, as if someone threw a stupidly extravagant banquet and decided you were the way to not waste all the uneaten food. They are carefully prepared so to keep for the journey, in small individual packages of waxed paper or small jars, and stashed in a big rainproof satchel for your convenience. You won’t have to worry about food, only about overeating, and with much left to share. By the way, you have no idea what’s inside, but neither does the Referee: decide on the recipe for each morsel as you go through the delectable stash.
4. A copy of the Junior Hidden Valley Traveler Guidebook, a somewhat scuffled copy of the first edition. Rather than a proper survival handbook and guide it is more of a leisurely read, full of disorganized tips and advices and seemingly random pieces of knowledge. As you read it to get some sleep you’ll learn some useful tidbits, which the Referee will helpfully bring up the night before as a good advice to handle an encounter the next day. Yes, this is helpful foreshadowing.
5. A soul! in a sealed glass jar. It glows. Sometimes it whispers. Might not have been a good person in its previous life, but now it has limited agency. Not always up for conversation. Really not up for being clotted into mana-tar. Not that it has much choice, given the circumstances. Roll reaction rolls when you interact, as you develop a rapport.
6. A wood carving knife with a small curved blade. Good for beginners and experts alike. It makes whittling small items out of wood really easy and chill, nay, a pleasure. Green wood is still suitable but will not make quality nor durable items.
7. Wollie, a big goofy Bernese hound (photo above, stats as a bear). Does not really understand much, but she’s a lovable mountain of a dog. Yes, you can pet the dog. Wollie will bring you to a safe(r) place if you pass out, but if the circumstances are truly dire she might not survive the ordeal herself. Yes, you will cry.
8. Somehow they own that cottage with a nice garden, complete with a shed and a porch, in that perfect location, that you’ve been dreaming about for so long. Turns out they do not want it, so it can be yours. Right now you only have the key on a piece of string, but it already feels like home if you hold it.
9. They did some legwork and reached out and put in some good chat, and you are presented with a good friend you thought you had lost. Roll a companion character, come up with a backstory of friendship that, somehow, was interrupted for a while. Misunderstanding, circumstances, bad feelings: whatever it was that kept you aside it’s now resolved.
10. Nothing, you owe them. So not only you repay your debt, but you also make yourself scarce, as you’d rather risk the journey than stick around. The relief makes you good humored, hopeful, and I dare to say even incredibly posi. This makes you find solace in small pleasures, which in addition to be good for your soul also lets you rest even in uncomfortable situations.

A Farewell to Russ Nicholson

It’s been a few days, and right now the loss has not hit me yet, the pain a weak thrum. I wish I was a more cogent writer, and better at being in touch with my grief, so I could do him justice.

Instead, you have me.

Russ Nicholson died. He left behind his closed ones, an incredible amount of great art, and many fans that love his work in a way that is, frankly, unique. Russ was a cornerstone of old D&D aesthetic. He gave us his vision, and managed to draw absolutely iconic illustrations that we remember forty years later. And those were not cover pieces for some important handbook: they were interior black and white art for the most absolutely ridiculous b-side monster manual ever made, the Fiend Folio. Russ made some wonky gripplies into absolute icons: without him the Fiend Folio Brigade would have been largely forgotten. Instead, we are still utterly terrified about a flying tentacled brain with a parrot beak.

What made Russ art special? Sheer emotions. Russ had a way to transmute ink into feelings. His drawings made me feel emotions, mostly fear, in a way that few of his colleagues manage. Russ might have not been the most representationally skilled artist that made D&D what it is: Russ, however, made us dream.

My experience with Russ, and possibly the best thing I can say about him, is how approachable and keen to pick up new work he was. Even from absolute nobodies, like an Italian weirdo self-publishing from their bedroom in Glasgow, the city he was born in. And this made me feel a bit more legitimate at a time when I probably needed it. I’m so happy that I managed to work with him.

I want to end this post with a small silly anecdote, a levity, because I’d rather remember those that left us in mirth rather than in sadness. For Macchiato Monsters I hired about twenty illustrators to do coffee art. I suggested themes, but let them pick the subjects, because I love to be surprised by artists running wild. Russ pitches: dragon, naiads, troll. Dragon and troll arrive, and were great. Naiads took a while more. I end up writing him the dreadful “No big deal, but Dragonmeet is coming and I need to go to press next week” email because I really really wanted those naiads in the book.

And he delivers, and my jaw drops.

Do you know about naiads? Gods of rivers and lakes, they tend to not wear many clothes, largely because ancient Greek myths be like that. I ponder whether I should print it.

Russ answers: “Damn. My wife said cover up… too many tits… Sorry!”

AND THIS IS HOW RUSS MADE ME PUT NAKED LADIES IN A BOOK

They broke the mold after they made him. And he’s gone.

Aw. Fuck, it hurts now.

TARO: a lifepath tool – XVI The Tower

Tarots are incredibly fascinating. A tapestry of life, art bringing knowledge, hidden behind symbolism.

I do not know about you, but I love the metaphor of us going through our life journey beginning as Fools, in the hope of becoming whole with the World. The whole thing is definitely not linear, and at times it loops and folds, and it’s never quite clear where we are in the journey at a given time.

It is our life quest. It is pain, it is joy, it is mystery, confusion and clarity, loneliness and companionship, death and survival, creation and loss. The Tale of Tarot is the iridescent weave of our lives, the Arcana our warp and weft.

I’ve always been fascinated with Tarot cards, and have been reading them on and off for about 18 years, beginning soon after I moved to Scotland. Much has gone by since then, the relationship between me and the transcendental waxing and waning several times. Last year, though, I had the luck of falling in love with a witch, a spark that made me reconnect with the occult. The fire is blazing again.

This little project started an afternoon doing watercolours together. I had no idea what to do, and drew a thing, and then drew the Tower over it. And, while painting, the writing appeared spontaneously. A little setup, and number of questions, mostly aimed at the persona of a young wizard, initially nothing more. A system-neutral journaling game, a reverse tarot reading, using the cards not as events, but as explanations querying you for the event.

But it’s not only a game. It’s also an introspective tool, ready to ask questions when you need to give answers from yourself. It will work, whether you believe or not.

So, here we are, making clumsy, little watercolours, and writing some questions, vibing.

Let’s see the Tower. The most cursed card, the scariest, say some people. For me it’s not scary: the Tower is the collapse bringing freedom from ignorance, is the catastrophe resetting the situation to a more sustainable baseline, is the letdown bringing you down to Earth.

The Tower is, crucially, the break-up that came ten days after it was painted.

XVI – The Tower

How did it feel, how did it feel reaching for the sky? Upward! Upward! Ever upward! Light headed, merry, intoxicated by the rush? No more! You are now falling, screaming, broken, free.

What made you so optimist? What was the brilliant plan? What made you blind? What was the lightning bringing the downfall?

And now, falling:

what are you screaming?
what is your pain?
what is your shame?

Dawn of New Thaumaturgy: Abstract Magic & Concrete Magic, or the Maxilor-Passwall index

This post was originally written for Knock #3, and it’s been amended somewhat. It’s also part of the Dawn of New Thaumaturgy series of posts, which is taking literal years because most of its posts are unfinished drafts.

Classic Dungeons & Dragons is a game with a lot of very abstract rules. Combat is resolved with one attack roll per round, and success deals damage. Finding secret doors takes one turn and succeeds 1-in-6 times. Spells are cast spending their slot and performing the rite. All these mechanics are fairly high level, easy to resolve, and while there might be some modifiers they are very granular and ignore lower-level choices. This is not an oversight, but deliberate: the game is not about combat, or finding that secret door, or casting that spell, but about having an adventure. The rules do not care about any finer detail: choosing to strike the enemy at the legs to slow it down, carefully using a candle to verify if that crack in the wall hides a passage, or harvesting the mistletoe with a golden sickle do not have a direct impact on the outcomes, but are abstracted away.

The issue, though, is that these details are abstracted away: the details to support the narration at the table are absent. One way to solve this is to have more complex game mechanics, but it makes the game experience slower, more cumbersome, and rewards system expertise: I love GURPS, but it’s often too much. Where are we left? An option is to add some narrative flourish, for example how in combat we might say “the bravo swiftly steps to your left to avoid your shield and slashes at your shoulder, 4 damage” rather than just “4 damage from the thug”. Another to zoom in to a puzzle of sorts, like we often do to find secret doors and traps by deliberately poking and pulling things. Both are approaches that help push the game narrative forward and enrich our experience.

For magic, the situation is different. Spells have a greater impact and their slots are scarce, so they already have bigger chances to be momentous. The issue with spells though is that most D&D spells are both abstract and dry as hell: in the Theatre of the Mind, abstraction dries passion, and does not help with meaningful stories.

Concrete Magic: the Passwall-Maxilor index

Does anyone remember Passwall? Straight from fantasy fiction, the spell creates a magic passage in a wall. You can go through it. It’s really helpful to delve deeper, bypass a door, escape a situation, provide tactical opportunities. If the spell ends whoever is left inside the passage is crushed (or spit out, depending on the edition). It’s a good, useful spell that some GM hate because bypassing encounters is “bad”, while I think bypassing problems is great.

The Spell of the Subterranean Gullets (by Brendan S., published in Wonder & Wickedness) is an invocation to the great chthonic god Maxilor. All subterranean cavities, tunnels, and pits are his mouths, throats, and visceral cavities. This spell (or perhaps prayer?) compels Maxilor to open one such opening in stone. At the end of the spell the passage closes; whoever is still there is lost, probably devoured by the god.

The two spells are mechanically the same. They have the same effect on the game world.

Yet, one is barely a sleight of hand involving a wall, while the other is an awesome experience stepping in the moist, holy maws of a greater god, and possibly being eaten alive. The spell achieves this by virtue of being concrete: it starts with an invocation to a god, and the god has a very clear and relevant context (the subterranean gullets). The chance of becoming a tasty morsel provides some emotional colour, and also ties the spell to the Classical tradition of offering buried sacrifices to chthonic gods*.

Just add Concrete Sauce

How do we make magic more concrete? My suggestion is to write concrete spells and use those, or rewrite spells in a more concrete way. That can be a whole lot of work, possibly left only for folks as obsessed as the author (or anyone writing in KNOCK!, I would add. — Eric). The other option is to make blanket changes in how magic works: it’s more effective effort-wise, but might require more finangling later. We are introducing meaningful elements so we can have more opportunities for interesting play.

This segues into another advantage of concrete magic: as we can make more sense of the causes and effects, adjudication in complicated situations becomes a source of shenanigans, the dream fuel of OSR-style emergent play.

Here are a few ways in which you can pour concreteness into your magic. They are mostly inspired by historical European and Mediterranean esoterica, and they do blend into each other, so I strongly recommend to mix them for full potency. Find in these proposals what makes sense in your worlds and brings meaning to the table.

1. Natural Magic: the natural world has intrinsic magic qualities ready to be exploited. For example, a tree stuck by lightning makes excellent wands to cast Lightning bolt: nature (or the god of thunder) chose it for reasons that we do not understand, but we can exploit its cozy relationship with lightning nonetheless. The easy way to make this work is to add more meaningful components – verbal, somatic, material – to spells. Fly is useful, but what if you whooshed through the skies propelled by feathered fans? Web is great, but it would be much better if you needed to draw extra eyes on your face and eat a bag of flies before you can spit out strands of sticky silk from your nose? Tenser’s Transformation turns you into a fighting machine, but what if it required you to don the skin of a ritually slain bear and tear into your flesh with your nails to become a beast? Suggestion is great at convincing people to go away, but it would be even better if it was a funny limerick about that lad from Bonnyridge who jumped off the bridge (of course you’d need to come up for a rhyme that works for your circumstances). Fear is a powerful spell, but what if you cast it shouting, while drumming on cymbals?

Strive for iconic and meaningful: without going in details about sympathetic magic, use mimicry, metaphors, and similes as components. It’s not a lot of effort: it adds a note of colour to spells. It also paves the way for small adventures when gathering components. Do not make simple components hard to find, maybe just inconvenient! (Like head feathers from a dire swan, for example.) However if your wizard wants their spells a bit stronger there are plenty of adventures looking for griffon or phoenix feathers for their fans, or drums made with wolf-skin or tiger-skin or tyrannosaurus-skin.

2. Emanations & Alignment: The influence of stars and planets is an excellent source of magic. These are somehow completely absent in D&D, their role taken by alignments, planes, and gods. True to its heritage of a game created in a strongly aligned world on the brink of mutually assured nuclear annihilation (the 1970s were a fun time), D&D pits the conflicting structures of reality of Law & Chaos and Good & Evil against each other in a struggle neverending.

Let me spell one important thing out: I’m not a fan of alignments as moral compass, and moral relativism is something that many of us take for granted. This is not how the premodern mind works, though. Most of humanity in history knew gods and demons and their powers were real, exactly as we know nuclear missiles and their programmed holocaust to be real. They bow to their gods, as most of our world bowed to one or the other side during the Cold War.

The biggest direct evidence for this is that Dungeons & Dragons is a game with an in-world literal moral compass: the Great Wheel is real, the moral compass pointed by scores of Gods Enthroned. Them, and the myriads of demons, and angels, and chaos frogs dancing for them are all real as the screen you are reading on. Good and Evil and Chaos and Law are, in the game, immanent.

PCs can avoid the struggle, stay Neutral, and have their spell election reduced, or join the struggle and become aligned, therefore gaining access to aligned magic, better suited to eternal war. I believe any other use of alignments in D&D is source of much wailing and gnashing of teeth at your table. I also only use Chaos and Law.

This gives a huge opportunity to ground spells. D&D’s Un/Holy Word is a good example: spelling out the pure truth of divinity is harmful to the uninitiated exposed to it (the differently aligned), certainly too much for their heathen souls, hurting them possibly to the point of death, as clearly shown in Raiders of the Lost Ark. Turning Undead is another very good example, but limited by the history of the first D&D cleric being a vampire-hunter. Turn Undead is an exorcism, and humans through millennia cast exorcism on many, many things beside the living dead: demons, diseases, spirits, ill luck, feral beasts, the evil eye, possibly even invaders, certainly bad intentions. It’s easy to make exorcisms more diverse, more relevant to alignment, and available to aligned casters, or swap them for other rites. The key here is to find the mood or objective of the alignment and have the exorcism/rite work toward that. Also, it would maybe be possible to grant a small boon to those of the same alignment present during the rite, maybe a small bonus, or a bit of healing, or advantage on a roll.

Aligning spells might make them concrete enough, or they might require some minor alteration. A low hanging fruit is clear from the examples above: aligned magic can tell apart friends and foes. As a matter of fact, the caster won’t be able to stop it from doing so, and the issue here is that the friend-or-foe identification is not decided by the wizard, but by the spell. The wizard trades power for agency, becoming stronger but more of a conduit, a tool instrumental to an end, as the stronger-willed spells make decisions for them. And if you think the struggle is only a concern for casters, do not forget that the best D&D magic swords are aligned too, sharp gears of war eager to enroll worthy fighters into the deadly struggle, and take over their agency too.

This kind of approach can also be used with other “factions”: it works perfectly for a struggle between the four elemental-aligned factions (you might have heard of a cartoon stushie involving firebenders). One last thing: unfortunately in vanilla D&D this kind of emanations are oppositional, but they do not need to be! Maybe in your world there is space for a mingling of the opposites that does not result in permanent cosmic war?

You can also ignore all of the above, and add planets and moons: their phases affecting their spells’ effects. While you are at it, introduce star signs and give each character a random, situational, and really quirky modifier.

3. Animism: instead of channeling power to affect reality directly, you beg or summon a god, spirit, or daemon (a servant spirit) to do the job for you; for all intents and purposes these beings all lie in a continuum of increased power and crotchetiness. To start summoning daemons in your games the easy way is simply to get the spell list and associate some (or each!) spell to daemons. The daemon could be summoned either in normal casting time (to get the standard spell effect) or as a longer ritual spell, in case the summoner require the daemon do to something more involved, like teach their arts, give advice, or craft something. If you want a good example, the Ars Goetia in the Little Key of Solomon lists scores of daemons, along with aspects, personalities, competencies, a personality, and a whole lot of knowledge.

The hard part is to actually get the daemon to do your bidding (as games folk, we want to compensate for the increased flexibility). Try a reaction roll every time you make a demand: a positive result means compliance, a negative one snubbing or worse, a neutral one a delay, as the spirit demands something in return. Of course daemons would be more cooperative when it comes to carrying out tasks that please them, and sacrifices and other appeasement might make them more pliable, giving permanent reaction bonuses. You might also threaten them into compliance: in this case roll again, but at the price of a permanent negative modifier. And if the roll is particularly bad the daemon might decide to not go away, and possibly haunt the caster. Banishing it becomes the next adventure goal!

Another approach is to require spiritual intercession: for example to cast elemental spells, you need to ask an elemental spirit. This means bringing with you a live fire to cast Fireball.

* Puppies at crossroads for Hekate, or so they say.