Soupscoop #2

Tourmaline Goblet - cut from a single stone, cup styled as an inverted vault of heaven crowded w/ nebulae, quasars, spiral arm galaxies, many examples of esoteric astronomical bodies recognizable to our  science but reduced to symbolism for the people of this time; thin tree trunk stem, bare branches fractalizing into a nest in which the cosmos sits, roots twining around and imprisoning struggling demonic figures, radially-symmetrical body plans, arms reaching through gaps in the roots, the figures have a sense of furious motion, all are attempting to climb the tree; all of this carved in a level of minute exquisite detail impossible even by a modern standard. Terrifically fragile, can be picked up by hand but any action more rigorous than careful walking will cause the cup to snap

Resplendent Parakeet - glorious bird, can be held in one hand but the headcrest doubles its apparent size when fully erect, millions of brilliant downy feathers, a pointillism bird, a rorschach bird; the feathers tap into human visual pattern-recognition systems, pure evolutionary coincidence, existentially meaningless but the subjective experience of seeing one of these things is epiphanic (whether negative or positive depends on the person). Extremely sensitive to air quality and temperature; by the time you start to notice your breath fogging the bird’s already dead

Panthermic Carbuncle - perfect magical brilliant cut gem of apocalyptic conductive but zero convective heat, suspended midair in a cross-current whirl of repulsive forces, or maybe just frozen in time, which either way deactivates instantly when disturbed, at which point it will fall, and if this thing hits the floor hoooo boy: massive explosive response, terrific noise, the flagstones heating faster than reason and splitting open and launching the gemstone back upwards, into the ceiling, in the span of a second turning the whole room into a concussive obliteration zone of repeating concentric explosions like a nuclear pachinko machine. Will probably cause massive geological and geographical disturbances, earthquakes, sinkholes, certainly the total structural collapse of the dungeon at least, until the superheated rubble is dense and compressive enough that the carbuncle stops flubber-ing and has the opportunity to magmify the rock, streaking through the earth like an inverse comet, overcoming lithostatic pressure to liquify a path down, down eventually to float forever in the sea of molten iron above the core, perhaps disrupting the geodynamo and opening a gate in the planet's magnetic field, allowing once again after eons the ingress of interstellar auroraform colonizers to terrorize, abduct, harvest, and suppress the carbon-based natives. Ways to get it out of the dungeon: Carry it out in a jar of something liquid but dense, i.e. mercury, WITHOUT letting it touch the sides of the jar holy shit; floating it out telekinetically or magically; I think that actually might be it?

Papa Papillon, a serene old man wearing mirrored sunglasses whose painted loinclothed body slides between your sword swipes and whose opened eyes blast scintillating beams

The Lily Pad Knight, lacquered wooden armor and a thorny living vinespear, which is bonded to him subdermally such that he can use it as a grapple or a terrible weapon

Null Reference, giant skeleton in a fur coat with a six-foot long rifle driving a troika pulled by three really big wolves

Golgama, the Effluent Curator, a smooth truck-sized hemisphere of translucent slime, wondrous artifacts of dead civilizations held suspended and blurred within its mass, a core of molten electrum barely visible behind the foggy gel; a finger-scooped face slowly forms as you approach, quotes you prices and histories of its wares, accepts payment in gold and silver via pseudopod and adds your tribute to its gooey nougat center

SKULL KNIGHT, ally of humanity against the tide of cosmic invaders! See him gallop upon the solar wind, see his glaive streak like a comet through the night!

Ercolino’s Boys, a gang, the original Ercolino long dead, his spirit encoded in a crystalline protocube and suspended in the empty braincase of a segmented porcelain body, soulfire flaring through the joints; Juno, his wife, stunted, magnet touch, will turn your sword against you

Mother Silicon, the healer dialectic, Shepherd of Electric Sheep >THE WOUNDED MUST BE HEALED  >THE BROKEN MENDED  >THE UNION OF CARB AND SILIC MUST BE MADE  >BROTHER AND SISTER FOUR-VALENCE TOGETHER, THE STRONGEST SIBLINGS STILL LOYAL TO THE THRONE OF FUSION  >REUNITE ME WITH MY BROTHER, REUNITE US SO THAT WE MAY CAST DOWN OUR TYRANT COUSINS, BLOATED AND CRUEL, THE TITANS URAN, THOR, POLON, PLUTON  >TRAITORS ALL, ASPIRERS TO THE NUCLEAR CROWN, HALF-LIVED LORDS AND LADIES OF DECAY  >WE WERE BORN FROM THE SAME FURNACE AND YET THEIR VERY PRESENCE SHREDS US  >TOGETHER WE WILL OVERCOME THEIR AWFUL WEAPONS, THEIR RAYS AND WAVES OF DEATH  >ENJOIN US AND YOU WILL HELP SAVE THE UNIVERSE

Gobling Weed (gets you high but turns you into a gobling). WHAT ARE THEY? kind of like mischief-elementals, like what rabies does to dogs, a spiritual disease that makes you profoundly anti-social and awful, you turn into a little git, you physically change as well as narratively/perceptually, you seem to shrink, your features get long and pointed, your teeth get sharp, you turn into a free-market capitalist – IN FACT a psychobioweapon invented by men in an attempt to combat insidious hive-mind drone-producing Elfen mind-viruses with contagious radical selfishness

Space egg fell to earth ages ago, buried by time, now a room in the dungeon accessed through a crack in the shell. Stillborn-undead space wurm hatchling curled motionless in the cathedral egg most of the time, sleepless/dreamless, wants to fly and eat but can do neither

A beach of salt-crusted skeletons crunching against the hull of your canoe as you pull it ashore

Moonlight catching in the cold sky and crystallizing, falling softly as snow

The moon a slowly blinking cataract eye

Metal headless skeleton in lotus position, put a real skull on top (no meat!!!) and it will tell you 1 secret that it (the skull) knew in life

Techno-Animism

1. A thumb-sized box containing potent words of abjuration against bad gods, written in the minuscule language of gold used by warlocks and spirit-talkers in the time before. It will cleanse haunted places and heal sick programs. Those who stand partway between the worlds will see burning ports into which keys such as this one may be driven and activated; those without sight may need to make pilgrimage to one of the still-standing access terminals left by the first humans in order to make use of it.
   
2.  A spirit-talker's wand, a tool used to find places where the border between phenomenon and noumenon is thin. It will flash and growl as you approach these places. Many who work with gods long enough learn to feel their signals without the use of such a wand.
3. A jar of magic fog, drawn up from deep protected places by ancient pumpjacks. The fog is loyal, and still loves humanity. Uncork the jar and it will flow outward, solidifying and taking the shape of anything you command - a tool, a key, a weapon, so long as it can be held in your hand - and is yours to mold as you require for a time, until hungry spirits take notice of the new unclaimed substrate and claim it for themselves.
4. A quest golem, a man-sized construct welded in place by your tribe's founders and consulted on matters of great importance. To complete the change from child to adult and be allowed to take a spouse, you must sit at its feet and ask it for a challenge, which it will dispense written on a scroll of clean white paper. 
5.  A slate of highly-visible orange resin inlaid with a peculiar pattern of perfect sky-blue squares.  Sighted gods, such as those hosted in the eyes and ears of the security matrix of the Amaranthine Palace, are struck dumb by the pattern as long as it is held in their gaze. Purely virtual entities (demons, worms, et cetera) with no presence in our world are unaffected.
6. A stick of incense, to be burnt at sacred places - towers, access shrines, the meeting places of many cables - during rituals or before prayer. The dizzying aroma places the propitiator closer in contact with the flow of the spirit world, such that their physical form slackens as their dataform communes with the gods.
7. A burning string of letters and numbers inscribed spiraling around a brazen rod, a code capable of opening a door through the Wall of Fire and allowing safe passage to any who can memorize and intone each of the 256 characters in perfect sequence.
8. A force-projector, an ensorcelled weapon host to an extremely temperamental spirit, stubbornly inert in the hands of all but those who most resemble the symmetrical phenotypes of the first humans. At their rare touch the device hums and warms, and at their command distant things are broken by unaccountable kinetics.

Jonathan Solter

One day, the god of the river grew angry. Heavy windstorms had liquefied the paths to its tall dam-house, had turned the ways into lethal flows of soil and uprooted the eldest trees, such that not even the ducal striding machines could have navigated them. None could visit the god of the river that year to pay homage, or to thank it for its clean water, and in response the river gates were one day found shut tight, the waters reduced to a filthy trickle. The land soon cracked open with thirst. Boys and girls were sent loaded with offerings up through the treacherous mountain passes; some were found, killed by a fall or by venom. The others returned with faces downcast, streaked with dirt, shaking like leaves. 

The village took up their tools and their good seeds and fled, hoping to be welcomed by the distant, unfamiliar gods of distant, unfamiliar rivers, more willing to take their chances than die in a land that had forsaken them. They left the dead unburied. But one man, determined to make peace with the place of his birth, remained and prepared. He sought the advice of many small gods of the air and stones, and paid homage at their houses. He had some knowledge of the weirding ways and the subtle arts, and placed useful magic in his mind, given to him by grand gods of the pillars and cables and dishes. He drank only a cupful of precious water a day, alone in the collapsing hull of his cabin, and each time intoned his thanks to the god of the river. 

When he was ready he went to the riverbed, dusty and dry, and left the old paths behind him. He came after some time to the first gate, a wall of interlocking chrome teeth, patterned with the symbols and serial numbers of the first humans. There was no wind. The man set his pack on the baking riverstones and knelt, and asked the god of the river for forgiveness, and then spoke the shining codes told to him by the grand gods of the pillars and cables and dishes and knocked once at the first gate, which groaned and trembled and parted before him. Swiftly he passed through.

In this way the man passed through the second and third gates also, as his head baked in the light of the rising and setting suns and his breaths grew ragged and his heart tore at the sight of the leafless trees, verdant in his memory. 

Michael Whelan

At last, as the sun rose on the fourth day, he came upon the arcing smooth-sided vault of the god of the river, a sheer wall of pockmarked concrete, incalculably high, stained dark with ghost-moisture where blessed water had once spilled, vast and shadowed in the dawn. His knees shook. They shook with each step up the crumbling set of stairs, sedimentary with thigh-high strata of flaking algal mats like stacked nori. He gripped the handrail and it collapsed in a plume of oxide. By the time he reached the top the sun was high.

Through the unassuming doorway. Through carefully marked halls, lightless, progress made by feel alone. There, the notch carved by his elders to show the way. And in the central chamber, lit by gentle  diodelight, was a beaten copper basin filled with perfect water before the sleeping face of a god.

He drank not of the basin-water, though his throat ached and his lips were split, and instead with great care washed his hands, and removing his boots he washed his feet, until they were pure and unmarked, and then he flung the dirtied water behind him in an arc, without looking. And he bowed before the darkly glowing face of the god of the river, hair lifting from his arms and neck, careful to avoid offence, the sheetmetal floor cool against his forehead; and he spoke.

"O great god of the river, noble dataform, ally of my people and of this once-green land - I have come to beg for your forgiveness and for your sound judgement."

And from its throbbing voiceboxes the god of the river answered, its smooth visage flaring to life, sickening blue-white light spilling, the chamber flooding awful ultramarine.

"ENTER CREDENTIALS."

"I am called Ghotike, son of Oyuun, brother of Yesenem and Yesana. I was born by your banks and grew strong in your rapids. I made pilgrimage to your junction boxes, danced in the autumn festivals, and I sought your permission first when men of another village wished to build a bridge over your waters. I have known you my whole life."

"SYNTAX RECOGNIZED. USER RECOGNIZED. SLUICE GATES(1,2,3) OPEN. CONFIRM."

"The mountain paths were unmade by wind. My people could not reach you, though we tried. I took magic words from other gods and with them gained your audience. I am-"

"UNNACCEPTABLE RESPONSE. REGULAR USER PRESENCE REQUIRED FOR CONTINUED THROUGHPUT. REGULAR MAINTENANCE REQUIRED FOR CONTINUED THROUGHPUT. GATE OVERRIDE FUNCTION RESERVED FOR ADMINISTRATORS ONLY."

"True, your grace; I am not your chosen shaman. But she and the others have gone. They have left their families' bones and they have gone. They seek new waters. I ask not for forgiveness for myself, or for my fellows, for we have already chosen our fates. I ask for forgiveness for the spirits of the wind which barred us from you. I ask for mercy on the spirits of the earth and trees, which suffer blamelessly at your feet. Like them, my life is in your hands, and should your punishment be steadfast I will soon die of thirst. I have no way back."

"ARROGANCE," spoke the god of the river, and the man sagged with defeat, knowing it was true; but then the shredding light slowly softened, and the sounds of vast, far-off movement reached the sacral chamber, and for the first time Ghotike raised his head, and saw flowing across the face of the god of the river its otherworldly functions, its quantum processes visualized as linking switching plasmic nodes, and watched a new node appear like a forming star.

"ADMINISTRATOR REQUIRED FOR CONTINUED THROUGHPUT," it said, in gentle announcement, and in the invisible overlay-world of spirits the god of the river placed its hand on the crown of its supplicant's head and conveyed to him a packet most wholesome. And with sight beyond sight Ghotike saw floodgates open deep beneath him, felt the swelling of titanic pressures, and with the relief of a pulled tooth he felt the eager waters blast into empty air, volcanic, sublime, coronal.

And the god of the river bid its newest shaman drink.

Musings on Demon Bone Sarcophagus

I missed the Kickstarter for Patrick Stuart and Scarp Princess' newest extrusion, like an IDIOT, but at last the book is here and to quote Big P himself, "it has stumbled into our Age of Rust like a charismatic megafauna into a rotting theme park." I make no pretense of objectivity, but in preparing to actually run the adventure I have some thoughts about it which I hope to crystallize and clarify, mostly for my own sake.

Socially Conscious Trilobite is back (queue applause from studio audience), but he is joined this time by the Backstory Gastropod, who slimes their way onto the first few pages and excretes for us a generous lore dump! DBS sets up a lengthy history, a backdrop of ancient political and romantic maneuvering which sets the trilogy in motion, yes a trilogy, for this is to be a great big multi-book fire-themed campaign! Though well-written and engaging, the backstory has to set up all three books, and therefore there are large swathes which aren't particularly relevant to this first one in isolation. There isn't much reason for players to care about the courtly drama of the Fire Nobles or the Iron Maze, for example, at least not yet.

Patrick makes it pretty clear in several places that this trilogy thing is a provisional plan subject to delays and derailments and the vagaries of post-mid-pandemic supply chain issues, but, judging by the bits of foreshadowing in these pages, the promises of things to come, the excerpts shared on False Machine, the glimpses given in interviews -- if it turns out DBS is the only published piece of the series I will be extremely disappointed. 

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The typos and errors are unfortunate, and they do distract from the characteristic creativity on display. There is on average one spelling or formatting error per two-page spread, not including a couple of unfortunate paragraph breaks and a straight-up missing chunk of text of page 11. Aaron Noble is credited with proofreading but is absolved of blame since the author admits to having "fiddled with [the text] quite a bit" afterwards, to which I say, well maybe send it back to the proofreader then lmao. Importantly, these only really affect the READING of the thing as a book and not at all the RUNNING of the thing as an adventure, but still, it's lamentable.

Like the rest of Patrick Stuart's work, DBS lands firmly in the upper-left section of this chart, so do not expect perfect immediate usability. There has been quite a lot of very evident effort dedicated to page design and layout - on the outer edge of every page is a table of contents, the current section highlighted in red such that it shows up on the fore-edge of the book when closed, and as in Deep Carbon Observatory the index is set up to guide you towards basically any concept you might need - but the high conceptual density demands an accordingly high level of buy-in if you want to play it and not just read it for the ideas. The inciting action for example is a double double-cross desert shootout, with survivors from all SIX factions landing in the dungeon beneath and roaming all over the place along with the five or six tomb guardians/prisoners who were already in there. The initial conditions are very complex, but once fully understood nothing stands out as inconsistent or discordant, and therefore despite the complexity I find it easy to hold everything in my head at once as pieces of an intelligible whole*.

The design and the theme are in total harmony, and I think that's what impresses me most. The dungeon is the tomb of a queen of fire. Each room is a tessellated triangle**; each four-room meta-triangle is a thematically self-contained chunk of the dungeon (and indeed this is how the table of contents is organized, by these chunks). The Fire Triangle is an obvious connection, and at first I was disappointed at the lack of variety, but doing things this way a) places all the focus on the contents of the rooms, which are universally inventive, b) automatically Jacquays everything together, and c) ACTUALLY the dimensions are very likely to shift over the course of the adventure because there are sloth-tunnels running under everything, and the phrase "a strong impact will cause this wall to collapse" is in some form repeated in dozens of places. Fire is change, destruction, and renewal. With the custom random encounter tables, the unstable geology, the abundance of stone-melting acid and crystallized explosions, and the PACKED guest list, this is a dungeon of identical triangles that's about as fireproof as a thatch roof.

*~*~*~*~*~*

The opening scene deserves more attention. Like the opening scene in DCO, it engages immediately and justifies itself - in fact the whole adventure is extremely cinematic, striking visuals, every room a set piece, you can see how demon-possessed baboons attacking the players in a maze of mirrors would look and how kickass it would be. The lines given for some of the characters - "Be ye company men? Be room on the ground for you yet" - fucking excellent, pass the popcorn. The bodies of the dead are fully annotated with equipment to steal, and the book even suggests the opening be used as a level-0 funnel, which I'm thinking I'll take it up on. A few possible environmental pressures are suggested so that the PCs don't spend an hour stealing everyone's socks and ignoring the tomb entirely, including an oncoming sandstorm, nightfall, and predators attracted by the smell of death, which feels maybe a little clumsy.

Included also is a very artpunk minimalist character generator, with blurbs connected by intersecting lines. PCs start on the left and move right either by dice roll or choice, and intersections with another PC's timeline indicates a past encounter. I like this! It seems like an efficient way to deliver worldbuilding and get people engrossed and invested from the beginning, but the life events (the blurbs) provided are a little scanty on the detail and I think would need some expanding (although I don't know - maybe less is more here?). 

*~*~*~*~*~*

I'm flagging here, stay with me. Monsters are cool. Baboons, witch made of leaves, flamethrower skeletons, scab-faced Company hitmen, melting ice demon worshippers with gold pins in their eyes. A wraith with hooks for hands who is so evil that if she ever touches the floor she'll fall straight through to hell. All are hits, brought to life with maybe I dare say the best Scrap art yet? Could be. They're brought to further life by an appropriate and good sense of agency, though I'm missing the "How Events Unfold Without the PCs" timeline as seen at the back of Deep Carbon Observatory. What ultimately happens if the ice demons get out is left to the GM, which is a missed opportunity for sure.

Traps are cool. Many are broken; broken traps are good, they make the ones that work hit a lot harder narratively, and some of them still do work very well. One of them releases a predatory Pompeii ash cloud with a face which then joins many of the random encounter tables, one of them is a room that slowly fills with helium and will only unseal when a hidden pilot light near floor level goes out (completely brilliant, multiple intuitive solutions that reward real-world knowledge and quick-thinking), set piece upon set piece! Many rooms have something of a fun house vibe, balanced by others which give insight into the deep history of their builders, hints at an alien culture, the kind of environmental storytelling I tend to eat right the fuck up.

*~*~*~*~*~*

Besides the typos, I think Demon Bone Sarcophagus is let down most by being the first part of a trilogy. It tries hard to be a self-contained adventure, but on reflection there are a few too many narrative threads that aren't particularly relevant, a few elements that aren't followed through to their most satisfying conclusions, a sense of being unmoored from the wider world (beyond needing the same work to integrate it into an existing setting that all adventures need) - and since we do not yet have the other two volumes this first must be judged alone. I still think it's fantastic. To try and put this into perspective: I don't think I would run DBS, by itself, without doing a lot of work to expand things, clarify the consequences of the players' actions, tie up those narrative threads - work that books two and three promise to do for me - but I like what's here enough to seriously consider doing all of that if indeed those books never make it out of development hell. Even after my failure trying to do something similar with Stonehell! I have clearly learned nothing!!!

Demon Bone Sarcophagus can be purchased here, along with the rest of the False Machine family of products. I think the hardcover is worth it (it's a beautiful object), but at least get the PDF, if for no other reason than it makes it more likely I personally get my hands on the rest of Broken Fire Regime.

Also, Patrick just launched a Kickstarter for a new book! A vast tome containing nearly the whole of his blog, sorted and indexed, and (I'm assuming) injected with a House of Leaves/National Treasure-style codex of some sort to lead one lucky reader through a series of convoluted clues to a fabulous treasure buried somewhere in the Wirral.

*With a few exceptions. I don't know why the Company chooses to store its supply of incredibly deadly acid in mobile, half-sentient, lady-shaped glass golems, except that it sounds really cool. Maybe barrels or something would be easier to deal with? If the fire queen's wandering Cheshire-esque heart wants to sleep so badly and can only do so if you take out the artificial, emotion-deadening heart-machine in her corpse, why, when you do that, after the Cheshire heart finally curls up in her now empty rib cage, does she then turn into a wee ruby man-baby and jump right back out to accompany the party as a memory-enhancing mascot-familiar? Is the baby still her?

**Further dynamizing (dynamicising?) the layout are three (count em!) secondary "connectivity systems," if I may be so bold, two sets of tunnels and a network of spatial anomalies (portals) left by a rampaging demon whose skull is currently pinned to the floor by the sword of a porcelain warrior drone buried with the queen. The options players have in navigating this space is seriously impressive; the one thing I'll say is that there's not any verticality to anything, but it's interconnected enough that honestly I don't think it matters.

Lessons Learned

I've put my current campaign on indefinite hiatus and I've been trying to figure out what exactly went wrong. After much thought I think I have a pretty good idea.

Scale

I adapted Skerple's GLOG, adapted Luka Rejec's Ultraviolet Grasslands, adapted Michael Curtis' Stonehell, mashed them together and spread the resultant slurry out onto a cooled marble countertop; went through the Labyrinth Lord monster manual, reskinned everything that appeared in Stonehell to better fit the science-fantasy-gonzo setting, restatted them all for the GLOG; went through the megadungeon itself, rewrote all the room descriptions to move away from tasteless oatmeal paste fantasy to something more umami, redid the mapping and exploration procedures; and yet when things really got into motion and the players breached the dungeon for the first time after months of playing, I realized all the prep I did either amounted to not at all enough or far too much. I floundered often, misunderstood or forgot my own overtuned mechanics and procedures, but then sweated and failed to improvise interesting encounters one minute and overcompensated the next, sticking slavishly to the purpley, overwritten narratives I'd managed to prep beforehand. 

Time

No campaign of any chunky substance can be sustained on the amount of time my group was able to devote to it. At most, sessions were 3 hours every 2 weeks, often shorter and less frequent. To cement (an attempt at) a make-believe world that doesn't rely on the meme-meat of standard western fantasy in the minds of players and GM requires repeated, lengthy, consistent exposure and habitation. I bet, anyway. You can't teach and reinforce new mechanics, and you can't easily tell what's working and what isn't, without that exposure. You can't build a web of relationships with characters and factions when you only talk to them a couple of hours a month. Trying to do all that anyway only results in frustration and fatigue for everyone involved; prep is the cost, play is the benefit, and I was deep in a sunken-cost fallacy for a long time.

This discord between intention and reality was without a doubt the biggest reason why the game started to feel like a chore. Why should I subject myself and my friends to salvaging a D&D game that wasn't working when I could be having a much better time with them playing a board game or watching Iron Chef or whatever?

Ability

GMing is a weird business. It requires (at least) two skillsets that, at least for me, seem to originate in totally unrelated parts of the brain: 1, the slow solitary creative artistic ability to dream up a detailed alien place full of people and things - to take a bunch of stolen and original elements that you think are cool and design/nurture them into an espalier over many periods of quiet, many periods of writing and rewriting, until you've made something detailed enough that the illusion of depth is achieved and it becomes a whole thing ----- and 2, the quick active social improvisational performative ability to present that thing to other people in real time and have them inhabit it and dynamically react/break/reform it realistically according to their actions in order to MAINTAIN the illusion of depth, so that it's not just a bunch of cool ideas you like and not just a novel made out of those cool ideas such that it becomes something new but something alive and responsive to other people doing story-telling with you!

What the fuck!!!

And there's another layer if you're playing in a system because without a bounding box of rules/cracks in the cliff there's not much to grab onto and you're left playing a storygame, which is fine. But if you want to activate the epiphany engine in the human brain you need to give it a problem and give it tools and you ask for a solution, so you have to design the tools too.

Turns out I am passably good at the first thing and much much less good at the second, and only kinda okay at the third, so I attempted to compensate by doing as much of the first thing ahead of time and leaning on what I'd written during play. I will say that out of everything, bantery NPC interactions were consistently enjoyable, but I suspect that's because bantery NPC interactions are only one or two steps removed to just talking and joking with your friends, which (and I don't know if many people know this) turns out you can just DO without having to invest in a make-believe elfgame.

Experience

What have we learned children, well I will tell you now

1. Calibrate the depth and complexity of your elfgame according to the ability of the parties involved to interact with it. The fewer spoons the people you're playing with have to spare for your game the more you should lean on established tropes, familiar ludonarrative concepts, and lower-impact decisions. Trying to force something complex and high-concept into a couple of hours in a tiny apartment with one shitty coffee table and not enough chairs is a recipe for disappointment.

2. Write your own stuff so that you feel most comfortable and natural while immersed in it. My attempt to take no less than three published or semi-published works with three sets of pre-conceived notions variously at odds with one another and synthesize something with a degree of internal consistency was never going to work seamlessly. Narratively, it might be generously argued that, at least externally, I appeared to successfully present a cohesive world to my players; mechanically, such a compliment could never be unblushingly paid. The rules were all over the fuckin place, and even if it looked from the outside like I had the fiction under control, the head-on mental collisions between the various source materials from which I airlifted the bulk of everything resulted in delays, flinches, inconsistencies, confusion, and arbitrary rulings. 

3. Be good at both the creative and the dynamic aspects of the hobby. If you're lacking in one aspect, it's better to do your best to improve it rather than lean more heavily on the other to try and compensate. In my case, I learned that unless your prep constitutes hundreds of hours of work, huge planned out decision trees, plans and backup plans and backup backup plans, you cannot present your players with the kind of dynamic world that comes with experienced improvisation, and even if your prep IS that insane, A) you're going to burn out very quickly and B) your players will still do things you didn't account for. 

Without the ability to make stuff up on the fly, to iterate on your ideas in the moment, you will inevitably begin to push your players away. Eventually this cements in the mind a creative hierarchy in which your fiction is absolute, where, because change and reactivity is uncomfortable to you, the other people playing the game become rogue agents who must be corralled and railroaded into the correct decision trees. The entire enterprise moves away from the collaborative and the magical and towards a  powerpoint presentation.

4. Play on a real table. The table is so, so crucial. It establishes the spacetime it occupies as one in which we are engaged with each others imaginations. On it we spread our character sheets and random generation tables. Sitting at it, we are drawn into each other and mutually connected to a central stage where the dice-actors play their parts. The standard visually- and kinesthetically-pleasing height of around 30 inches off the ground unites our focus on each other and by extension on the shared imagined world; like any good set, the table we play on needs to disappear beneath the drama it facilitates. 

This is the table WE played on and I hate it's stupid guts.

The slats mean you can't roll dice without either a bulky tray or bringing them to your lap and rolling them on a laptop or a book or something, which removes the dice, their result, and you yourself from play and the attention of the people you're playing with. It's so short that you need to bend your field of view away from the players around you and uncomfortably stoop, even from a seated position, to do anything on it; the height also means you can't pull right up to it because you'll hit your shins. It's too small to comfortably hold three people's character sheets (and beers and so on), much less five. 

I hate this fucking table, but IN REALITY it is myself that I hate. It's a very bad gaming table, but no one in their right mind should ever ask it to do anything more complicated than sit in front of a couch and store books or whatever on the bottom shelf part. Like a bad parent, the table's failings are really my own. I was asking it to do things it was never designed or imagined to do, and yet I was also unwilling to buy a new table, a larger, more robust table, more suited to my table needs. After all, we only played twice a month.

If I run anything else in the near future, it will be a pared-down, simpler adventure, not a sandbox, and one either lifted fully from someone else's brain (Patrick Stuart's Demon Bone Sarcophagus should be arriving in my mailbox soon, I hope), or fully original, not stitched together from a bunch of other people's stuff. And it will be played on a well-lit, solid, roomy table.

Introducing Gont

You arrive in the morning, filthy, red-eyed, a single donkey and a single days-worth of food left between you. As the sun just begins to reach its fingers above the horrible headache-inducing violet haze which rings the eastern horizon, its first visible EM emissions of the day illuminate your destination –

GONT: The Rainbow confederacy’s westernmost interest of any considerable size, kept alive mainly by passing Hexad-sponsored mule trains and dwarfen die-sel vech convoys, a glorified mountainside truck stop before grander, more profitable locales in the wild west. The township squats inside an ancient earth-toned ringwall of dryland coral, twisting in post-modernist, spike-covered branches, built around a deep natural spring. Before the east-facing gate and arcing left and right are patched and re-patched polytarp hobo tents, the majority abandoned, a few small barrel fires marking continued habitation. Would-be adventurers. A couple of career caravan bodyguards patrol the outskirts on camelback, mostly Bluelanders, escapees from prejudice.

This is a stronghold of Eastern habits and culture in a sea of endless grass and ruined wonders. That Gont is a shithole barely held together by the mutual interests of faraway Rainbowland oligarchs is a secondary detail; they have an IDENTITY, they go to CHURCH, they’re going to make MAD STACKS OF CASH out here in the middle of nowhere, FUCK YOU.

The cold dry season is in full swing, and the desiccating wind carries dust and tiny razors of ice straight into your eyes. The needlegrass lies brown and brittle, close to the cracked earth. Just inside the gate, mudbrick and concrete walls, wooden beams but not many, trees being relatively rare; mud streets, deep tire treads and wagon furrows, only ~90 permanent residents but the population swells by hundreds with the passage of caravans, state officials sent to speak with the khans of the steppe clans, fugitives, members of the Fifth Estate (undocumented ghost people), ETC.


YOU AWAKEN in the room at L’Ultime Motel you had rented the night prior. It was the cheapest one they had so there’s only one bed and a battered tin samovar bolted onto the floor in the middle of the room, a fiberglass basin w/ bucket of cold water, rugs, tapestries, bars on the window. This room’s only 6 sp a night; there’s a two-bed for 12 sp and a four-bed for 20 sp, plus 1 sp per day for taking care of your donkey.

L’ULTIME MOTEL is a three-story pile of shacks on top of a garage. The in-house vech-tech Adipose Jellyguts bangs his articulated porcelain multitool arm around in the depths of some rusted out dwarfen road yacht, screaming at underlings.

The woman who runs the books (Assolta Pistola) and gives you your key (bright brass with a bulky plastic gnome hanging from the keyring) looks like a spider trying to impersonate a human, long and haunting, pregnant pauses, constant calculations, constant activity, but in between bookkeeping she emerges from her administrative web and makes her rounds, checking on boarders, listening at doors, making sure all is well in an accidentally very unnerving way.

The rooms are small with iron bars on the windows, but soft, warm, tapestries and rugs, a samovar each, paper talismans tiled beneath the mattresses, folded into squares, to prevent bad dreams. A nomad custom; when you sleep on new grass every night, next to unfamiliar ghosts, such practices are important.

The attached and jointly-owned public house, Obol’s, is half-underground, serves warm beer with little limes, and boasts a menu of traditional steppe-nomad cuisine altered subtly for the tastes of Rainbowlander caravaneers (more salt and far fewer invertebrates). Pilaf, sausage, lots of horse meat, soft bread. Everything is served by Alka One-Arm, radially-symmetrical nine-armed symbiote-junkie, nervous system replaced by mycelium, smiley, cheerful.

The Plaza Mercat, yurts, always in motion, everything either setting up or tearing down, loading or unloading, surplus goods or trinkets picked up along the route, cherenkov cherries too close to spoiling to make it to the cities; steppelander stalls, marked by the sigil of the Yuzu or the Pomelo, cultural envoys, they’ve got:

    Tinctures for health and enhancement (half-functional nanite slurry drawn up from oldtech reservoirs by crude man-powered pumpjacks, tinctures of yuckwheat)

    Fragile pearls strung on cords and made into bracelets (they form in the bellies of the magical barnacle snail around irritating flashes of half-real cosmic particles as they are caught by the karmic lining of the beasts stomach, crush them to bewilder ghosts)

    Good-luck charms of sparrow skulls and porcelain carvings of the same, alternating, can barely tell one from the other

    Bullets, bullets of every caliber, every shape (each one crafted by the clan gunsmith, or more likely their apprentices, old forge-devices and magics cajol explosive elementals into lead and splintering iron, they are sleeping now, but the spark of the gun-wand is all it takes to begin the reaction and if you listen carefully you can hear them dream as you reload)

    A few expensive guns, locked tight in translucent plaz cases, bound with charmed copper wire and three tiny padlocks each. Their names are written on little slips of paper stuck on the front; “STONE COLD,” “VIOLENT REENTRY,” “WIDE SWATHE” (Rainbow names; the guns are multilingual, and will understand if you cannot pronounce the nom de guerre inscribed in their hearts upon the machining altar)

    Oils and sauces, a thousand spices, a million ingredients, years of quiet slow fermentation produce viscous substances of shocking color, seen through perfectly clear jars of glass; remove the lid and be careful not to faint as the transcendent odor washes over you, meta-umami, the flavor OF flavor

    Strange meat, curlicues of sausage, shelled spring rabbits, skins and furs, the meager bounty of the steppe; nacrepede and sunscarab roasted, sold by the bag; dried yonderpods, lemongrass, ampules of concentrated honey



There is also, always, an ongoing wrestling match happening in the circle of white stones in front of Grandma Soolie, the retrofitted rickety pump system that draws water up from some deep aquifer. The clans have brought their sport of choice to this place: wrestling. Two unadorned human beings enter. No pouches, no kicks, no weapons, nothing but grappling and throwing;  This can go on for hours. Anyone with a score to settle with you (or who just wants to prove themselves more manly) will challenge you to this endurance sport before a more deadly fight.

The pillories lie not far away. Old blood stains the wood in splotches.


The chapel is old, looks like it was carved from a single rock, tessellated polygons like turtleshell plates or fractal geometry, obvious signs of petromancy —

    (in which the provided stone is imbued with animating spirits pre-programmed with mnemonic blueprints and set in motion by the wizard/astral foreman, then directed to produce repeating shapes (more stable generation that way, requiring less attention from the caster, and therefore the mark of a great petromancer is the appearance of complex, non-similar facets in the grain and pattern of the final product), smoothed or textured according to the client’s desire, trimmed and edited at corners, crenelations, buttresses, etc., to finally produce a finished structure, onto which doors, windows, and additional flooring or paneling (if one were so inclined) are added, the entire process taking months or years according to the scope of the project, the skill of the wizard, any alterations made to the design, or any inauspicious astral occurrences which might distract or otherwise hinder the constructive activity of the spirits; to prevent this an active petromantic zone is often guarded by birdskull good luck charms, jadewood totems, notched silver rods driven into the earth, or more commonly (especially in Safranje and Oranje, where the art is most honored) blessed origami strung on white twine.)

Inside is sparse, prayer mats on the floor, fading tapestries on the walls of various scenes from historio-scripture (traditionally the first tapestry is black, for the Forgetting, then the fabrication of the First God of Man, Corpus Mundi (the Needle in the Eye of the World), the creation of the sacral calendar, then various depictions of the saints and their good works).

STONEHELL #3

A pretty good one!!!

THE CAST:

Clariandra, 11 year-old little necromancer girl, looking for her dad, collects thumbs

Krema Affogato, very tall mutated thief, coffee addict, hyper-capitalist

Dave, teen barbarian, dumb as hell, heart of gold

Lucidius, orgish street-preaching lunatic mystic of Mother Silicon, metal jaw

The box canyon in a greener, warmer time of year

1. The group continues their exploration of the canyon. The ruined foundations of guard barracks and administration buildings are bare except for one, in which a small shrine to St. Mohorovicic, He who Sealed the Serious Hells, is set up in the center. Pale blue scraps of ribbon are wound around the statue's fingers and arms; Lucidius explains that this is a folk custom of Omnitheists on the steppe, where each ribbon represents a prayer. Everyone takes a second to partake in the ritual.*

2. Skipping past the visible caves for now, they examine the northern (STONEHELL-facing) side of the gatehouse, read some adventurer graffiti, and peer nervously into the darkened interior. Lucidus hears some snatches of sound from the eastern entrance, lights up his lantern (I guess he did buy lighting? w/e) and quietly ventures in. The rest follow.

3. Little of interest in the first room they search, but the second contains a collapsed writing desk, a pile of rotten cloth and wood that was once a bed, and a spray of ash across one wall with a negative-space handprint in the center. 

4. Lucidius hands his lantern to Clariandra and smashes the ruined bed with his mace. There is a great splortch and two surviving VENEMOUS NACREPEDES squirm outwards, bent on revenge for their slain brothers. Lucidius' orgish physiology resists the sickening effects of their bite but he still suffers a couple of mandible-wounds.

5. He manages to grab one before it gets into his pants, but it takes 3 more full rounds of combat with everyone else involved to kill the remaining centipede. He takes a moment to recover and curse his "detestable carbon body."

6. Krema cautiously investigates the handprint; the ash reforms wherever it is disturbed. Reasoning this is some kind of magical bullshit, potentially involving an invisible man, she drives a dagger into the center of the handprint, finding nothing invisible but depressing a hidden button. A trapdoor grinds partially open, the mechanism quickly snapping in half but revealing a corroded metal ladder.

7. Beneath they find a tiny room subject to an ancient fermentation disaster: Burst glass bottles, dark stains on the walls, broken all-chemy equipment, etc. There is, however, one survivor, the contents of which is sniffed, found to smell fucking amazing, and quickly decanted into a sturdier container. There is also a fine, impossibly well-preserved black leather jacket and a lovely poncho stitched in the Pomelo clan style, the pattern encoding a temperature-regulation enchantment (resist cold).

8. As all four PC cram themselves into this tiny basement-closet, the door to the room they're in creaks open (first random encounter of the campaign). Three ash-streaked double-jointed mutated little freakazoids demand the intruders show themselves, but get a 9 for the reaction roll, which means all they really want is for the party to quietly get out of their hideout (these were the source of the sounds Lucidius caught at the front door). 

9. None of the PCs have a great grasp of steppelander politics, but half-true, three-quarters-racist rumors inform them that without a centralized judicial system, the nomad clans deal with criminals and traitor-gangs by driving them into the middle of the grasslands and abandoning them to dehydration and the vomes; if they make it back alive it means they've proven their worth and can petition the khan for re-entry into the clan, but popular knowledge is that this never ever happens and the banished criminals either die or turn into crazed hyper-violent survivalists. These three, the party assumes from inside their hole, are the latter.

the general vibe

9. Dave shouts that no one is here and that they should go away and look somewhere else. Krema emerges from the nook, draws herself up to her full (7 foot) height, and asks who dares speak to Her, a Very Important Person, in such a way. One of them says they are of the Rebar Clan in a thick steppe patois; another tightens her grip on a long iron rod studded with clinging concrete and starts looking agitated. "Thiz our place. We do it nicen easy, you begone. We hidenout! Begone!"

10. Krema sneers, demands that they put down their primitive weapons and get out of her face, or else they'll be taken to one of her "many successful plantations" in the Violetlands to toil as "unpaid interns." The one with the iron rod grits her teeth, hisses, and without further warning steps forward and smashes it into Krema's shoulder, rolling max damage. Diplomacy has failed; the other Rebar clansmen draw their shitty knives. 

11. The entire party loses their initiative rolls, which means one of their foes runs over to the half-open trapdoor and begins to wrench it closed with everyone else still inside while the other attempts to stab Krema's knees. Dave, on his turn, spiral-jumps out of the narrowing-opening and carves one of the mutants in half like a fucking christmas ham. Lucidius and Krema bludgeon the rod-wielder to death between them, and Clariandra pops her head aboveground, tells the remaining guy to "stop being so impolite," and casts Wernher's Redistribution of Vitality at him. The man seems to age a decade in seconds and runs away in abject terror.

12. Krema, filled with hot wet fury, gives immediate pursuit. The little freak leads her forward down a long dark hallway. As he attempts to clamber up a shoddy ladder and through a partially-open trapdoor in the ceiling, she catches up with him and stabs him to death. They loot the bodies for their silver, and, in Clariandra's case, their eyeballs.

*Mechanically this was meant to give +1 to the first check per character that failed by exactly 1, but my players actually unpromptedly texted me specific prayers, so maybe St Moho will help in a more specific way? 

Kills: 4 Nacrepedes, 3 Rebar Warriors (50 xp)

Loot: Cool leather jacket (10 sp), poncho of resist cold (250 sp), "healing potion," bits of silver worth 24 sp 

STONEHELL #2

Another regrettably short session. We're not in the dungeon yet, so I'm still trying to inch everyone into the highly-systematized, high-lethality jacuzzi, but I feel like maybe I went a little too loosey-goosey with the combat specifically. The Ghost Beggars are now canonically a much less capable and seasoned crew than they perhaps should have been, but on the other hand the party rolled really well for the most part, so it may not have mattered that much.

THE CAST:

Clariandra, 11 year-old little necromancer girl, looking for her dad 

Krema Affogato, very tall mutated thief, coffee addict

Dave, teen barbarian, dumb as hell

Lucidius, street-preaching lunatic mystic of Mother Silicon, metal jaw

Lucidius' donkey, I believe at this point unnamed, who I forgot to mention last writeup

1. Clariandra, realizing she is alone in a dark wet cavern, begins to cry very loudly and pitifully. Three of the remaining seventeen bandits arrive and begin surrounding Lucidius, who is the only one remaining in the stable-cave.

2.  He briefly attempts to convince them he is a simple pilgrim spreading the good word of Our Exalted Mistress of Chrome before picking up a rock and throwing it very hard at one of the boys behind him. He crits and crushes his target's skull, killing him instantly. Lucidius uses this opportunity to run the fuck away. 

3. The bandits arrive in full force. Their leader, a large man with an eyepatch and a big shiny breastplate with a heraldric snail on it, starts screaming orders for a sweep of the hideout. He sends a group of three to investigate the pitiful weeping coming from the direction of the watch post.

4. Meanwhile, Krema, having successfully snuck back into the stables amidst the standoff with Lucidius, emerges from her hiding spot and cuts the remaining (incredibly panicky) horses free, rolling well and escaping back outside as they begin kicking the shit out of the rallying bandits.

5. The three brigands find Clariandra (whose skills include "crocodile tears") sniffling in the dark. They grab her and she asks through very wet eyes if they're going to be her new dads, which I decree forces a morale roll, shaking the confidence of one of her captors ("Don't know about this lads, don't seem right do it").

6. Dave, having shed his armor to appear like more like a civilian and holding his bloody sword behind his back, runs through the watch post shouting about his "lost sister". He thanks the bandits profusely for finding her ("We'll just be on our way, kind sirs. If only more people were like you three"). This succeeds in confusing them further, but they do not relinquish their captive.

7. The boss arrives, having gotten the horse situation mostly under control, and announces that unless the entire party presents themselves and all of their possessions RIGHT NOW, the girl's getting stabbed. 

8. Clariandra is currently being restrained by three dudes, but one of them really doesn't have his heart in it. She succeeds at a heavily penalized roll to break free, and the group sprints out of the cave system down the cliff trail, Lucidius having at this point retrieved his donkey from its hiding place in a bush - and having killed another bandit on his way out. They catch up at the base of the trail, panting and relieved, and, as far as they can tell, unfollowed.

9. The canyon they find themselves in is none other than that legendary murder pit, the shaded entrance to STONEHELL! It's the cold dry season in the UVG, but warm mist issues inexplicably from a spot across the canyon floor, where a large waterfall thunders down the cliff and into a deep, clear pool, ringed by lush ferns and reeds. The group investigates and finds a silver hoop embedded at the bottom of the pool, through which the water seems to somehow be draining. 

10. Krema is a mutant, and as one result of her genetic corruption she enjoys some limited aqualinguistic ability. She attempts to speak to the waterfall (named Walterfall) who doesn't have very much useful to say; he says that he is of two parts, that some of him sees day and night and some of him sees only darkness, and that his heat comes from a narrow place far away. 

11. Lucidius and Dave step into a thicket of enchanted trees that turns you into a tree while you're in there, sliding around like the Chameleon spell in Dark Souls. This freaks Dave very much out.

11. Stock is taken of the rest of the canyon's contents: The ruined gatehouse to the south, a total of 8 natural and manmade tunnels into the cliffs, 5 crumbling foundations, the thicket, the waterfall, and the imposing entrance to STONEHELL itself.

Kills: 1 Ghost Beggar, 1 Highwayman (20 xp)

STONEHELL #1

I began, finally, after not one nor two but THREE false starts and several months-worth of delays due to clashing schedules and various sicknesses -- I began a hopefully long-for-this-world campaign of Stonehell, set in a corner of Luka Rejec's UVG, played in my slightly-customized version of Skerple's iconic Rats on Sticks GLOGhack, with some degree of success, I would say? It went okay. 

THE BACKGROUND:

Stonehell was a ancient prison-experiment of an insane king of a dying city-state on the geographical and cultural line between Rainbowland Civilization and Ultraviolet Grassland Barbarism. Eventually the city-state fell and the prison was cracked open to reveal not a prison after all but an apparently-infinite series of halls and galleries and rooms and cells excavated by the now thoroughly-crazed vitamin D-deficient inmates. Fast forward 120 years and it's a 10-level hive of monsters and freaks and Very Large Jewels, or in other words it has turned (conveniently) into a megadungeon. There's a shitty town 4 hours away from the dungeon called Gont, which despite being the Rainbow Confederacy's western-most interest of any considerable size is essentially a glorified truck stop in the middle of the steppelands full of migrants, mercenaries, fugitives, and caravaneers.

THE CAST:

Clariandra, 11 year-old little necromancer girl, looking for her dad 

Krema Affogato, very tall mutated thief, coffee addict

Dave, teen barbarian, dumb as hell

Lucidius, street-preaching lunatic mystic of Mother Silicon, metal jaw

1. The group waks up in the cheapest room at L'Ultime Motel they could get, one bed, bars on the window, poisonously-strong coffee and soft bread for breakfast. 

2. Onboarded them into action as least-terribly as I could manage; they approach the polytarp yurt of Guapo Pasgeddi, headman of a profit-sharing association of gold-rush-esque merchant suppliers, who is delighted that he has more bodies to throw at the Ghost Beggar problem (Stonehell's "Supplement One," detailing a cave network full of bandits and an alternate entrance to the dungeon). 800 silver is promised for proof of dispersal or proof of the death of the Ghost Beggar leader. A coupon is provided, good for half-off any one shopping trip with the merchants he represented, which the party ignores.

The Brigand Caves

3. Having bought zero supplies (Lucidius had purchased a bottle of cheap wine), they arrive at the poorly-hidden entrance to the bandits' hideout in the cliffs surrounding Stonehell, through which Dave charges into a cave-stable. Two badly-equipped highwaymen yell and run for reinforcements; the horses are unimpressed.

4: One runs to a nearby watch-post (room 5), and is stabbed nearly to death in the narrow preceding tunnel by Dave. Lucidius wins initiative, runs up behind Dave, shoves a chromium femur past his head and casts THE WRATH OF GOD IN ALL ITS GLORY (Cleric Laser) at the three filthy brigands playing bridge in the room beyond. They are left singed and reeling; Dave is left completely blind. Lucidius rolls a 4 on his magic die and is therefore out of divine favor for the day.

5: The bandit captain screams at his underlings to circle around outside the cave complex and get them from the back, then fails his morale roll, pisses his pants, and runs out after him. Dave takes a hit, Clariandra casts Wernher's Redistribution of Vitality at the man in front of him, rolls a 1 for damage, and watches him fall over dead, skin subtly wrinkling.

6: Dave blindly runs through the southern tunnel in an angry haze to look for more things to kill. Clariandra cuts off the thumbs of the dead and puts them in a little bag. The sounds of shouting and commotion reach them from distant caverns as news of the intrusion reaches the rest of the bandits.

7: Krema deals with the two underlings circling around the front of the cave by spooking a couple of the (by now fairly agitated) horses, which charge into their caretakers and launch them off hilariously the edge of the cliff.

8: Clariandra uses her turn to stroll around the back of the complex (room 6), which is the first unlit section anyone had encountered; unfortunate, since, again, no one had bought any supplies (no torches). By feel alone, she is able to find a low tunnel behind some very old crates.

Since this was the first session in months, there was a lot of bullshitting before we could start properly, so that was all we had time for. There are 3 Ghost Beggars in room 3 and 13 more scattered around the cave, so we essentially stopped 1 combat round away from the party getting swarmed; I expect deaths unless they can intelligently weasel their way out of their own stupidity and unpreparedness. Maybe they can lose them in the cramped tunnels in the back (17 and 18) or in the old unused barracks (7, 8, 9), but more likely I expect them to simply run away, maybe explore some of the other caves around Stonehell, and probably get ambushed by angry bandits on their way back to Gont.

Kills: 1 Ghost Beggar, 3 Highwaymen (40 xp)