In my end is my beginning

I've written a role-playing game. It's not the one I had expected to write. There are no fairies. Unless you want there to be.

Short and sweet, it's my entry for the The One-Page RPG Jam 2021. You play a person who is about to die. It's funny, most RPGs contain death, often lots of it, but they only treat it as a technical issue and something for players to avoid (unless they're inflicting it on someone else). There's never much space to consider what death really means. In the last few years, I have made friends with an undertaker, have lost my father suddenly, and have seen one of my closest friends publish an astounding novel about death.

Oddly, I felt the need to add "content warning: death" to this game, and it struck me as really quite peculiar that no other game I'm aware of does this, despite the trauma that death can cause.

Anyway, enough of the lecture, here is IN MY END IS MY BEGINNING

Appendix N

 

Since returning to gaming this year, I don't seem to be able to lift a stone without finding something about Appendix N beneath. Appendix N of the Dungeon Master's Guide contained Gary Gygax's "Inspirational and Educational Reading" - a list of authors who inspired Dungeons and Dragons.

I must have read the DMG dozens of times throughout the 80s, and yet I have no memory whatsoever of Appendix N. Perhaps because it didn't relate directly to gaming, perhaps because I was already reading many of these authors, and would doubtless be reading the rest in good time. Whatever, it left no impression on me at all. And so it's strange that, in 2021, it seems to be namechecked on almost every blog I visit.

So it was interesting and apt to receive an email yesterday from the wonderful Strange Attractor Press notifying me that they have just published a book called Appendix N - The Eldritch Roots of Dungeons and Dragons.

Meanwhile, here's my Appendix N:

• Viriconium Nights by M John Harrison

That's it. That's about all you need. The other Viriconium books are great, but Nights contains their pure essence. I've written before on my main blog about how Viriconium changed my life and about my recent return to Viriconium. In essence, the Viriconium books ended fantasy for me forever, they pulled back the curtain and showed the sad little men behind. Fantasy is almost entirely about epic battles of good vs. evil, it is the distillation of the lie of cowboys and superheroes. It is a load of old pernicious bollocks.

I read Viriconium Nights book in 1986, and I've scarcely felt the desire to read a fantasy book ever since. 

Read a proper book. Read some history, some psychology, a little biology and physics. Read novels by Robert Irwin, George Saunders, Magnus Mills, David Mitchell. Read "magical realism". Read old shit. Read widely and well. But, while I'm sure there are exceptions, I advise giving fantasy a wide berth.

I shall probably be buying the new Strange Attractor book. So help me.

Why Peakrill?

The Hope Valley - old OS map and my interpretation

What is a Peakrill, and what relevance does it have to this blog? Well, the what part is easy: 

Peakrel (also Peakrill, Peakril) - Pronunciation /ˈpiːkr(ə)l/  - NOUN, rare British - An inhabitant of the Peak District.

What a brilliant word, eh? And as for the why, well it relates to the campaign that I am writing. For more, read on...

Money and coinage in RPGs

Dinar of Varahram III by Ashley Van Haeften

I recently read the book Debt: The First 5000 years by David Graeber, and as well as turning my ideas about money on their head, it got me thinking about the way that money is handled in RPG rules (I'm talking D&D-alike fantasy RPGs here, although I imagine that some of these points can be applied to other genres).

All 5s and 7s poetry dungeon

 

Here is my response to Patrick Stuart/False Machine's challenge to write a poetry dungeon - in this case, more poetic than playable, and not very poetic at that - All 5s and 7s.

roll d12

Wherever possible, I use D12s in my adventures, especially for random encounter or treasure tables. Why? I don't know, I just started doing it.

I think I feel an affinity with that slightly odd, loner die, hardly ever picked for the team because of its strange shape. obviously yer d12 is not as wacky as yer d4, but yer d4 is a bit of a showy bugger. It's out to get your attention. And it works, doesn't it!

So here's to you, d12. Keep on rollin'!

Lings and related things

A ling is a type of elemental being or golem, formed from a non-organic substance with a tiny organic heart. They can control their own shape within a fixed diameter sphere (only waterlings are ever likely to be precisely spherical). The tiniest, size 1 lings, are adorable things an inch or two across, something like a blob of sentient water from a studio Ghibli movie, or those cute long-legged smuts in Spirited Away. These smallest of lings are always friendly, and will often attach themselves to a player character, burbling away at them for hours on end.

Larger lings are something else entirely. Often hostile, they range in size from a few inches to hundreds of feet across, the largest being the size 6 godling, with a size and presence similar to that of the Forest Spirit in Princess Mononoke.

Fish-maggot Paté

An artifact found in every fish folk settlement, fish maggot paté is almost always stored in a tiny jar of dark blue glass with a lid of marbled precious metals streaked with jade. Inside is a paste which looks a loose liver paté: slightly runny, pink, and homogenous save for occasional veins of deeper red. It smells sweet, sickly even, and tastes surprisingly pleasant, although it leaves a slimy, gritty residue on the tongue and roof of the mouth.

Sak Shibboleth

(Some random dumped a big load of "don't you know who I am" on me in a blog comments thread. I didn't know who that person was. I googled them, and now I do, and so I wrote this game)

You are Sak Shibboleth, some-time writer of games and game-related content. Your transatlantic flight, where you have 3 seats booked up-front for you and your ego-sac, is hijacked. Angry feminists have kidnapped you to take you to the Total Perspective Vortex.

The Adventures of Bleaklow Part 1

Pleased to Meat You

Content warning: everything.

So you’re dithering in the the street one day, trying to work out which turn to take to reach Gampforth’s Exotic Potionérie when you fail to notice a dwarf, and you walk right into him. "EX-FUCKING-SCUSE ME" he spits into your face from a distance of two inches, before grabbing you by the collar. Before you know what’s happened, he’s done some kind of headbutt-somersault pivoting around your collar, landed on your shoulders with his feet squeezeing your neck, Pulling your hair and your head straight up. He reaches down and holds a long, thin flint dagger to your neck.

“The fuck you think you’re doing? Is this your fucking street? Is it? Is It? I would slit you from gullet to sphincter, if I didn’t have places to go." His right knee connects with the back of your head, and he leaps off you as your body crumples and your face hits the dust.

Adventurer's Snap

Lard

Iron Rations

Ever wonder what's in those packs of iron rations that adventures have to encumer themselves with for any journey longer than a few hours? Wonder no more, here are the ingredients - at least, the Peak District version.

There's not actually much "iron" in them. In fact, in the southern Peak District you will find more lead than iron. In some adventuring communities this severely affects the intelligence of adventurers. Academics and gurus are rare.in these areas.

Most of these minerals come from raisins - nothing like the type we know, but tiny, hard pellets which melt in your mouth, leaving far too much grit and seed. They taste of bitter earth and charcoal.

Next come cubes of salted pork fat, brined in a special mix unique to each family or artisan. This always contains salt and some kind of vinegar, and often fruit and mountain herbs too. In Hope the people typically add linden flowers and borage to the mix, whereas in Hathersage they add rose-bay willow herb and marigold. In Castleton, cowberry and blueberry flowers are the norm.

The mix is finished off with hazelnuts with papery skin: crisp and succulent in the autum, dry and chalky by the time the next summer comes around.

Breakfast Buffet

But iron rations are not the only sustenance for adventurers on the move. Most inns have a breakfast buffet, and items from this can be stuffed into pockets and bags. While some proprietors are generous and delighted that their guests are so appreciative of their cooking, others consider "dawn-snaffling" a liberty and will even spy on breakfasters to ensure that nothing is taken.

A very popular breakfast buffet takeaway is the bacon sandwich. Adventurers can usually secrete around 6 rounds of "pocket bacon" within their clothing. Thank you to Silva Sweetberry, the halfling thief, who taught me this trick, and who gleefully offered a sarnie to every NPC we met during our 7-day in residence at The Blushing Tankard in Hupperdook, a residency which our party won as a prize in a drinking contest.

Lard

When all else fails, there is always lard.