Campaign Notes Part 3

The series continues. Minimally edited and even less playable. Enjoy?

You douse the fire. Steam and smoke flood the shore and mingle with the mist hanging on the surface of the water.

Plunged into a vault of mist - silence; you can hardly see the rest of the party  - a soft light , the low honk of a horn   - the light resolves; forms a skull in the fog; then you see the lamp  - wrought iron lantern of a edvard munch scream, white electric light pouring from eyes and mouth   - THE BOAT, the chugging of a motor; hull looks like strips of metal wasp-paper curling around a precious cargo, a cabinfull of ghoulish passengers   - a gothic combustion engine and propeller assembly at the stern churns the river into froth  - the cabin is stained glass and metal, can see silhouettes within, murmuring conversation, some passengers lean off the side but all give the ferryman a wide berth   - at the prow stands THE FERRYMAN; raises a hand and the boat pulls to a stop by the shore - two wire thralls slap a sheet metal ramp onto the beach - he is a tall hulk wrapped in fur coats and brass wire   -fishbowl helmet, inside swirling black smoke, two tiny points glowing like stars   - skeletal hands bedecked with rings and bracelets    - wields dire magics, can call the water forth to strangle and restrain, can rise on cold winds, then floats over and blasts you with a sawn off shotgun - controls the boat with one of his rings, opals in a propeller pattern    - silent, polite, stoic. You paid him after all. Doesn’t ask questions visavis being dead, but will boot you if you’re obviously not  - has 800 silver worth of rings and shit, also his eyes fall when killed and roll around inside the fishbowl, eclipsed suns, swallowing one grants CURSED ABMORTALITY

SEVEN “SOULS” RIDE THE FERRY

Outside the cabin: Bok-tet, a kaballist, human leather coat, a shard of obsidian ritual knife hung about the neck. A lucky member of the blue god conspiracy, was granted undeath by his deity before it was annihilated, you’ll find lots of ghouls from around then. The tell-tale rings of the Dead God’s touch. Rebellious, callous, harsh, still dedicated to the tenets that lead him to his forbidden worship – that death is a malfunction, the end of all mourning, etc. Aware this would lead to his starvation, now.

Mollusca Iona, skin like yellow parchment, fat and luxurious, biomechane visor, blinky light bulb jewelry; she is a frequent visitor of the market, murmurs deeply, “hope the band is more lively this year… those princes should be an interesting display… have to remember to finally sample that stew…” 

HISTORY: First bite was at a dark aristocratic dinner in the now-fallen Decapolitan city of Ulkan in the Orangelands, 900 years ago. Red candles, weeping servants. Weeping guests too, once they tasted the meat. Exquisite. Used vast wealth to replace failing organs, eyes, etc, but soon was mostly unnecessary since, like all ghouls if they last long enough, her expanding labyrinthine digestive system does all the work.

Hunder and Yuna, orphan children, skeleton siblings, look out for each other. Hunder has a floppy cap, Yuna has dressed up for the occasion, spell engines grip their spines, escaped from a mad sorcerer’s basement laboratory. Untrusting, dark jokes, Hund is glum, Yuna is a realistic optimist. Not ghouls, but welcome at their Market.

 

Inside the cabin: Ruins-Your-Life, Steppelander ghoul from the lost Tangelo tribe, a wendigo who has acquired a taste for the luxuries of settled civilization that only the Market can provide (century eggs and human pate, specifically, but also fungal cheeses and liquid memories) and is journeying there for the first time. Standoffish and unaccustomed to company. Wears a wide, shadowy sombrero, has three sets of stacked eyes like the pips on a die, very skinny and crooked.

IN THEIR PACK: Some GOLP, skipping stones, locks of kid hair, pouch of gravedirt, teeth, ghoul pants, eyedrops.

Pen name Gunja Teabag, ghoul novellista, producer of penny dreadfuls distributed through underground channels and read mainly by perverts. Maintains a writerly attitude, but in reality she’s never written a word of fiction. Every terrible thing in her books she has done or seen done. First seen by the party wiping away the last of the cocoa face paint she applies to appear human. Has unfinished manuscripts in her luggage, worth a great deal of dangerous money if completed and published. 

And finally Vynn Pozzani, once a die-sel miner, trapped by a cave-in and ate her crewmates to survive, grew twisted and dark and found her way to the Market from above many years ago, keeps their ears on a necklace even now, “Extraction Crew 077”, slipped into solipsism to deal with the event - she moves through the world like an RPG protagonist, no one else is really real. 

Of these, only Bok-Tet and Gunja have weapons other than claws - the first casts rituals that summon choking clouds and decay, the second has a hidden pouch of scalpels, hooks, tweezers, and pins that she can use and throw as daggers.

The cabin and engine are both guarded by a pair of wire thralls, patchy plaz skin sheets, LED eyes, human skeleton wound with thin copper tendons, CPU boxes in chest cavity protected by aluminum spheres bolted to ribs; reprogram or add new instruction by feeding punched cards into slot in the front (scraps of paper around their feet), external speaker visible in neck, just fucking awful to look at. Armed with truncheons, stoles depicting a field of yellow stars on a violet background.

STR: 12 DEX: 6  CON: 12 INT,WIS,CHA: 1   HP: 10 ATK: 12 DEF: 14 DMG: 1d6 MOVE: 25

Robo Scream: As long as speakerbox in throat is not damaged, starts combat by screaming.

Hugs and detonates onboard plastic explosive charge if very low HP (test to resist, else 1d12 damage)

The cabin guards are there just to make sure nothing untoward happens during the trip. The engine guards actively prevent fuckery by drawing their clubs if anyone approaches.

The engine is covered by a tarp-tent stretched over rusted poles (macabre charms hang from the tarp, bundles of chicken bones, little crude dolls, ribbons, strings of teeth, etc). Chugs along, coughs black smoke, chops at the River with a big propeller. Extra jerry cans of guzzolene strapped to the back wall of the cabin.

Campaign Notes Part 2

WHERE MIGHT THE PARTY DISCOVER MORE ABOUT THE PATHS INTO THE GREAT GHOUL MARKET????

ONE: A scuffle in the streets by the university! Two fucking ancient bastards croak and swing at each other with trembling arthritic hands! They are Historians, and these sorts of displays are all-too-common: The Wall of Mist that occludes the past makes archeology a desperately, wincingly sloppy affair. A crowd of hooting students gathers, upperclassmen taking bets.

Here we have a Folklorist of the Close Analysis School in a rage against a Phenomonologist of the Flexible Paradigm. What do they disagree on? Everything, but specifically the ultimate fate of the Kingdoms of the Dead (known only via half-legible copper tablets dredged up from the murky depths of Lago de Kloeken and a strata of compressed marrow/court finery extracted from the surrounding region), the circumstances of their fall, even their geographical placement!

The Folklorist, Hasbint Drennoti, holds that the Kingdoms were dragged beneath the earth by ravens after a lengthy succession crisis (the first of its kind, after the King, Hasbint shouts, “did the first Double Death”), eventually becoming one of the Benign Hells. The Phenomonologist, Kontrast McPoffin, holds that the Kingdoms were obliterated by a vengeful meteor after the Prince launched a curse-engine into space to impress a girl.

Speaking to the Folklorist will reveal more information about the Hells and their occasional contact with the surface. Speaking to Kontrast will be boring and confusing, but will still mention his rival's theories dismissively. The winner of the fight will collapse into a nearby dumpster and fall asleep on a bed of needles and coffee filters.

TWO: Deep within Eigengrau University's library! A book on the Hells explains that, sometimes, beneath a particularly dense concentration of souls, a Hell may extend a questing pseudopod upward from below and graze the underground underbelly of basements and sewers; and that if the enterprising urban explorer ventures deep enough into the stinky depths, they may find a tunnel newly dug, marked upon the roof with an iron ring, or a wooden staircase fresh and clean in the wall of rock, and through these uncanny passages one may pass into the liminal space between the layers of the earth, the Streets Beneath, and from there to any other place within the underworld - but beware! The trip is fraught with danger and hardship, terror and anguish! OOOoooOOOoooOOO!

Zones of The Streets Beneath:

Lit ONLY SOMETIMES by otherworldly orbs or blue fire lanterns, the sickly glow of dreams, there is no earthly way of knowing.

The main road is paved (poorly) with good intentions, snakes through, sometimes is lost; beetle pulled troikas with skeleton nobles, ghoulish backpackers (human jerky, GOLP (good old long pig)), flickering street lights which hop about on chicken legs, flee or curl darkly when startled, eat bugs and rocks.

Upside-down castle hovering above a crater lake of ooze lit from within by stolen moons chained to the bottom like sea mines, giant bats hanging off belfries, love bright sweet things -

             A princess asleep in the basement-attic gently holding a glowing lavender moon, HER CHILD: she fell in love with a passing comet and when he departed on his long orbit, as comets must, she fell into a terrible sadness and with her, her kingdom. Her cries so moved the earth that it opened up and embraced her, pulling her castle down and placing the princess into a slumber. If you take the moon she will sigh and crumble to pale dust, but the comet will return, and he will be looking for his child...

              Guarded by the noble ghosts of her knights, all of whom love her deeply, find their skeletons crumpled inside their platemail and pierce them with their own glaives to dispel the ghosts, maddening chunks of starlight originally given by the comet to his mate as gifts, now roam the inverted halls, they blind and terrify.

The River of Bones also is here snaking through, maybe you'll see the ferry, Huck-Fin steamships chugging (zombie dogs power the waterwheels, motivated by big cartoon steak on a stick), translucent drowned riverfolk in chitin canoes, all on their way to the market, huge corpulent merchants sailing their well-laden barges.

The katamari of lost things, now stuck in a ditch as it sometimes is, little child katamari circling nervously the mother as it tries to heave itself over, forgotten desiccated ape tribe/funginids (fungus is always welcome in the underworld, part of an old deal)/fossil knights compete for resources aboard the rolling trove while it is still.

Dusty dusty desert, easily lost in the storms, gray dust in your teeth and eyes and ass, lost souls travelling in circles. A sandy whirlpool that leads down into one of the real Hells, dire vultures try to fly on featherless wings, stalagmites burst through the dust, smaller ones hide beneath a millimeter of the stuff, razor sharp, meditating damned cross-legged on tall poles on their last step of atonement before reincarnation. Perhaps you will see one open their eyes and rise into the dark roof, sublimating into pure white light. Beetlejuice sandworms?

The Crossroads, a massive rusted draw bridge of sinew and keratin arcs over the river, sometimes rises to let boats past, organic groaning as the ragged barely-flesh caretakers urge the organ-bridge on by poking sensitive bits, going into "the booth" (brainstem zone) and yanking on the medulla oblongata, competing toll-takers before the bridge and after, along the road, along the shore of the river offering fording vessels, gold is pointless down here, all want increasingly bizarre and precious things - memories, senses, names, beliefs and convictions, etc.

Swamplands of the bug warlocks, primordial mosquitos piloting enchanted amber mechsuits through the eons, immortal but trapped, weird bug magic involving blood and time, sucks your blood out from a distance and puts weird diseases in it and shoots it back into you, confused and angry, if you somehow show them evidence of their tiny, much-reduced modern day ancestors they will fall to their knees and weep weird mosquito tears.

Campaign Prep Notes

The lack of content on here is a little like a bruise: I keep forgetting it's there until I bump into it wrong, and then ow, dang. I dunno man. Maybe I'll start just posting my prep notes for my current game, just to have something.

Right now I'm getting my players into Patrick Stuart's GHOUL MARKET now that they've gotten into and out of the Deep Carbon Observatory, in the greater context of Luka Rejec's Ultraviolet Grasslands. They've received a letter from an unknown group asking them to fix the Market beneath the Violet City by any means necessary; the Market is an upward expression of one of the Benign Hells and it moves around underground like a traveling cyst in the earth, stopping beneath various cities every few years like a cursed Olympics. If kept beneath the city, alliance could be made, trade could take place, deals could be brokered, or, failing all that, the Market could be invaded by the Violet Megaduchess's Subterranean Mech Corps and taken by force. Payment is promised in coins of occultum.

 

Two ways are known for the living. The first is through the Deep Streets, buried roads and cellars where the sewage runs, beneath the city. Below those are forgotten colonnades, and under those are caverns, and at the deepest point there will be a stairway cut into the stone which the Market has made. Listen hard, and you will hear the toots of terrible revelry drifting up from deep below!

The second is through the River of Bones, which runs through the Market, so spelled to split and pour and fall into the stone itself! There may be other ways of calling the ferry, but the tales say that you must fill a skull with gold and build round it a fire by the river’s edge. Start when the sun is high, and keep it lit till the night is deep, and when the embers are all out the ferryman will come slipping through the mist.

BUT BEWARE! No mortal human may pass into the Great Ghoul Market. Those who still breathe of who feast not on the flesh of their own kind best go in disguise! 

Where do you get a skull? The crypts beneath the city are well guarded against bone-thieves, a necessity in a city so full of wizards. Dr. Grondor Disophagus’ Medical Surplus Depot (There’s Nothing Grander Than Grondor!) collects all sorts of offcuts from the city’s chop-shops (surplus, as in, all the stuff left over). He’s got a shitload of skulls for sale for a ducat (and other things besides), but FUCK ME is his shop hard to find (he’s actually got an anti-orthogonal obfuscatatron hooked up in the back), and you’ll need directions.

Try those same chop-shops perhaps? Gorpie and Sons Vatworks is a great choice. Office building with a lot more tubes than usual. Classy waiting room but dingy hallways open up onto a basement-level warehouse of glass vats full of nutrient fluid and half-grown parts, overworked biomancer associates with their arms in those rubber glove windows tweaking and shuffling the stem cells around. A few operating rooms, “This won’t hurt a bit!”

Catch one of Gorpie’s titular sons (name of Benedict) smoking a cig in the back alley; he is ratty, stained, shaken, thin, easily intimidated. “The alley between 58 and 60 Looming Street. Just keep turning left!” 33 lefts. Or you can just kill a guy, no need to make things complicated.

For materials to summon the ferry: Grondor’s Medical Surplus, as written. A lingish man with a glitchy robot leg and big eyes. Go on back to Gorp Corp and shake down Benedict for info.

Another avenue of attack: head down into the crypt, but it’s full of fucking lasers and its got headache-patterns all over the walls (can’t concentrate on spells) because a hundred years ago, when the university was expanding, the fucking wizard undergrads kept stealing skeletons (use https://dysonlogos.blog/2021/03/28/ashlords-fall/ - these are the lower human crypts, merely a chunk of the greater complex physically cut off from spiritually-superior humans and the carefully mummified remains of the catlords.)

For information about the ferry: Vidalia Onion the feline librarian can set them up pretty well. The ritual is a human skull, mouth and braincase filled with gold (I don’t know, 100 pieces sounds fine) and build a fire around it, douse it at midnight. This is explained in a rotating projecto-cillynder titled “Index of Pre-Rainbow Order Folklore, Vol. 4” subtitle “That Which Could Be Remembered,” accompanied by gristly diagrams. She will let you look at it but insists that she watch you the entire time.

For information about ghouls: Mrs Onion probably has some stuff for you on that one as well. Living people who eat the dead. Touch causes agony. Tight jaundiced skin, claws, insatiable hunger, sharp, glitter-prick eyes. Might refer you to a colleague if they ask too many complicated questions - Ravishing Tugboat, necroscholar extraordinaire (one vertical half of the dude is just his vascular system, but held in the original shape by occult fields).

 

Ghouls and wendigos are the same thing, just like, one tends to hunt in the wilderness and the other tends to hang around civilization, maybe? Something about eating human flesh fucks up the spirit. Common knowledge holds that the body-soul-personality triad loses integrity like a decaying atom and degrades into something awful and dark when you dig up a guy and eat him. That’s mostly true, but they’re missing the whole part about the astral prions that corpses tend to collect without the protection of their kaba, like mars without its magnetosphere, and how they get into the souls of corpse-cannibals and start refolding their metaphysical proteins into cursed geometries.

People go to one of the Hells when they die if they haven’t cultivated any favor with any of the orbital gods, or none of them want to bother with shepherding their shit to the RECYCLING INFINITY OF NOTHINGNESS - ultimately that’s the deal that people strike with the divine. The Benign Hells are pretty tame, not much more suffering than there is in life, and Saint Mohorovicic blocked off the Serious Hells a long time ago, so no one needs to worry about them. With enough atonement and refinement, people can make it up to RIN themselves, it’s just way more difficult. Far more often they just languish there. Some debased things can come and go from the upper layers; these include ghouls.

For disguises: you’ll either have to eat the consecrated dead, which probably isn’t an option (defo not enough time, although you could I guess splurge and get pure uncut ghoul proteins), or actually disguise yourself. 

 

FOR THE SKIN: You can go to tattoo parlors (L’Ultime, run by Haruna Jebolex. dwarfy lady of great dexterity and color, only spots not inked up are two kidney-shaped bits on her back that she can’t reach) or maybe a carpenter’s for some woodstain (Iosefka the Cabinettress is a good bet, she’s fucking WILD though, farther along in the elf-infection than most halfsies, but until she walks into the Wall of Wood she’s churning out some really incredible work).

 

FOR THE CLAWS: You can always superglue some amatuer scrimshaw to your fingers. You can get some actual implants too (probably 100 silver, 150 if you want anesthetic).

 

FOR THE SMELL: There are some really exciting advances happening in the smell-sector, which tends to grow up along with biomantically-enhanced sensorial implants. To smell like a ghoul, you have to smell a little like old piss, and also gravedirt, bones, meat, all the breath stuff, but ALSO many ghouls perfume themselves with orange peels and tea leaves to better blend in, so a whisper of those. THEY DO NOT SWEAT, and this is the main challenge. Ghouls have excellent noses. 

Go to Pasand the Gland Man for a goopy solution (puts a bioport in your armpits, you can pop in various smell-generators like fucking Glade plugins for a group rate of 100 silver each, custom made smelly puff glands for 25-50 silver depending on specificity), or go a more traditional route: vials of concentrated SMELL FLUID with cotton stuffed in the top, seal up the sweats, paint the teeth, get silly.

 

FOR THE STORY: You’ll need to be prepared; the ghouls will ask questions. They’re wary of interlopers invading their carnival (the only place where maybe, maybe, they can escape the godawful shame of what they’ve done), and are also fucking HUNGRY ALL THE FUCKING TIME, so if they think you’re human they’ll gobble you up. You’ll have to know when and where your first taste was, what graveyard (“Ah, at the lost crypts of Vivex, perchance? Got my start there myself, or might have, might not have been the START, uh, but things really started in EARNEST over in Vivex, you know?”) what era of history (roll on the UVG tables).

 

Then, the Boatman!

               Nothing for a long time. But then a growing guttering, a diffuse white light, resolving into a grotesque lamp artfully smithed in the shape of a long gaping head, light spilling from the open mouth and wide empty eyes. The boatman. He(?) stands tall at the stern of his gondola, the final shape to emerge from the coiling mist, preceded by his boat, a long low vessel of black sheets of metal curled like wasp-paper around the boatman’s bundle of quiet passengers. He is draped with coats and wraps of tin wire, his hands (when you get a glimpse of them) shrunken and pale and bedecked with jewels, his head hidden beneath a matte black gas mask, those great glass bug eyes locked with yours. He drifts to a stop along the shore and beckons you aboard with a practiced, languid gesture.

The boatman grips a long lever, the throttle for the coughing combustion motor that propels his grim conveyance.

Hacking Epiphany

I

As someone who struggled in math classes and who much preferred writing papers, getting told how gifted I was, and proceeding to develop a superiority complex/motivation issues/a need for constant validation, I nevertheless find a lot of higher-level mathematics really beautiful. The Wikipedia article on "Mathematical Beauty" gives an example in Euler's Equation, eiπ + 1 = 0, the utility of which I don't really understand but which even I recognize as showing a deep, unexpected relationship between two regular numbers (0 and 1), two irrational numbers (e (which is a logarithmic thing that also has to do with compounding interest and is approximately equal to 2.71828) and π), and the imaginary number i (the square root of -1). Mathematicians love this equation very, very much; a guy named Kevin Devlin said that:

Like a Shakespearean sonnet that captures the very essence of love, or a painting that brings out the beauty of the human form that is far more than just skin deep, Euler's equation reaches down into the very depths of existence.

Which is sort of intense but I can get there.

What makes a bit of math beautiful? When I was young I would doodle cubes in the margins of notebooks, moving through the procession of dimensions, starting with a dot and then a line and then a square, and suddenly I realized that there must be shapes of a higher dimension than the three I was used to and I got onto my parents' iMac G3 and looked at pictures of tesseracts for an hour. Is that anything? What was so interesting about that wireframe model?

In a more general philosophical sense, I think sometimes about all the natural forces and laws the scientific tradition has been able to reduce to simple, comprehensible terms. "The strength of the gravitational force exerted by one object on another is inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them." There's a sense of inevitability about statements like that, a kind of falling-into, an attractive concision that they share with equations like a²+b²=c². It's not just that truth is itself beautiful; there are lots of things that are true that don't strike me with any emotion at all. 

So, what, is it that I like simple maxims which fully express complex truths? It feels true (that is, it appeals to a bunch of preconceived notions) that humans like it when complicated, stressful problems can be reduced down to comfortable, manageable explanations, probably because of *frantic handwaving* evolutionary pressures. But do we really just like efficiency? What about the emotional rush we feel when we figure something out, when we finally see how simple the complicated problem really is? 

 

II

"Never tell a pun to a kleptomaniac. They always take things literally."

 

Not exactly sparkling comedy, but it demonstrates Basic Joke Construction well enough without relying on shock or taboo. The Setup is a simple inexplicable declarative statement, which the listener's brain immediately and without her knowledge begins to try and resolve; why shouldn't you tell a pun to a kleptomaniac? After a pause of just the right length, allowing this resolution process to run for just-so long and no longer (too long and the brain gives up frustrated, or worse, arrives at the answer before the speaker), the speaker delivers The Payoff, an unexpected, incongruous, but nonetheless fitting solution to the problem.

This produces laughter and general good feelings. Why? Great question, and judging by the number of theories, many of them from ancient Greece and most of which still sound pretty believable if perhaps incomplete, the answer is probably far more complicated than anyone really understands, least of all me. But I am nothing if not foolish and prideful.

From What are You Laughing At? by Dan O'Shannon

How funny something seems to a given listener depends first of all on them; their mood, their history with the subject matter, their relationship with the speaker, so on and so forth. It depends on a bunch of external factors, like the context in which the funny thing (O'Shannon calls it "the comedic event") is experienced, whether it is read or heard, whether it is loudly shouted in a quiet library. It is modified after the telling by any number of emotional responses; feelings of shock evoked by a dirty joke may enhance the comedic event for one listener but totally spoil it for another.

The actual joke part of the event, the gray triangle in the middle, is pleasingly summed up by Kant as
"The sudden transformation of a strained expectation into nothing," a sudden playful shift in perspective that takes your brain by surprise.

O'Shannon is big on stepping back and looking at the breadth of comedy, designing a set of rules which apply to all of it, including slapstick and schadenfreude, things that definitely make people laugh but which don't really have anything incongruous or clever about them. He goes so far as to say that "incongruity resolution theory is... one of the biggest roadblocks to understanding comedy ever created." 

Okay, Daniel. Focusing exclusively on the clever triangle misses a lot about the social and emotional miasma that surrounds it, fair enough. But a big reason that philosophers have tended to miss the forest for this one particular tree is that the tree is weird and interesting. Most people will laugh when they see a stuffy foreign dignitary fall ass over teakettle down a flight of stairs, because it tends to trigger feelings of relief and superiority and shock and so on, "thank goodness that didn't happen to me," "what a boob, good thing I'm not that clumsy and embarrassing." These are intuitive emotional responses. They make a degree of psychological sense for a species navigating complex social systems all the time. It feels like something happening deeper down in your brain, near the cerebellum or something, while incongruity resolution feels like it happens in the upper, conscious parts of the mind.

I get why someone falling down is funny. It takes a lot more work to explain why I should be so delighted by this fish meme.

III

Here is my theory. The mathematical beauty thing, our love of comedy, maybe even aesthetics, that dark and skull-lined road, are all linked in their mysterious appeal to the human brain as various ways in which we have hacked epiphany.

Evolution gave us curiosity. We see it also in many other species, like rats and dogs. The drive to investigate the novel is partially a desire to reduce uncertainty in our environment; the unknown might be dangerous, and by eliminating the possibility we eliminate anxiety. On the other hand, the novel might be hiding some resource that increases fitness, so our evolution wants us to go see if that's true.

 

Again, not an exclusively human trait. But as far as I know, the rush of joy of figuring something out, the proverbial eureka in a bathtub, is an experience unique to us. Cast your mind pastwards and try and remember a moment when everything clicked, when a thousand disparate niggling facts slid lightly into place as if moving on their own, or when a new idea suddenly took hold in your brain and after hours of struggle and work you could finally understand it. I chase after that feeling of revelation.

 

I think that part of why humor is so enjoyable is that it simulates that same mental pathway of "novel incongruity→frustration→unexpected resolution" that belies discovery. The best comedic events are ones that build from one payoff to the next, following a string of twisting insights specifically designed to appeal to the part of the brain that, a million years ago, was in charge of rewarding us for finding good hunting grounds on the other side of the mountain. Same, I think, for scientific discovery, though I think it's safe to say that figuring out how atoms work must generate greater/different feelings of awe than knock knock jokes do.

Humans have invented countless similar ways of hacking our psychological idiosyncrasies, originally evolved to improve reproductive fitness in our ancient ancestors. Modern food is maybe the most obvious example, but also look at alcohol and gambling and contraception (getting the good feelings designed to make you want to reproduce without actually reproducing), and more speculatively things like cosmetics (artificially enhanced fertility/desirability markers), the monomyth (might be the optimal story structure for generating satisfaction in listeners?), meditation (might be a way of tricking your brain into positive emotional feedback loops, see here), and so on.

It's probably too much of a simplification to say that humor and beauty and music are all just human attempts to access this same "eureka" reward pathway. As always, real psychology is probably more complicated than we think it is. But it's neat to consider; if I'm designing something, should I keep this effect in mind, try and activate it in my viewers as much as possible? I feel like it's a worthy consideration especially for games and game design.