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.

Soupscoop #1

I'm having trouble writing actual content so here's some miscellany

1. A familiar door.
2. The Cerebellion. Brains revolt against their meaty wardens!
3. Teneb, Queen of Ink.
4. Auto-haruspicy, desperate prophecy of martyrs and madmen.
5. Swamp Royalty.
6. Agendath and Netaim, twinned cities. They are in love with each other.
7. A thief has stolen the townhouse of an influential plutocrat, folding it up like a paper napkin and disappearing into the night.
8. Voxel-plains of delicate white salt.
9. War giraffes?
10. The vampirism curse frozen in tundra like that retrovirus they dug up in Siberia.
11. You are punished for your crimes with a single night marooned on Baboon Island. None have yet survived.
12. The theory of spells-as-creatures = the Bohr model of the atom; inaccurate and potentially misleading, but easy to understand and useful for most basic theoretical applications.
13. Dire hail.
14. A cabal of banished scientists and electro-priests are trying to find the Ideal of Horse, and this is how they are doing it. They have built a massive underground torus, festooned it with magical sensors and crystals, and accelerate up to 7.3% light speed two of the best, most beautiful horses they can find. Then they are smashed together, and the tiny giblets that appear only at the moment of impact are examined so that the gnomes may find the fabled Horse Particle.
15. Beards of waving fungal fronds infesting the mouth, providing seismological, thermal, psychic sensory information to the host.
16. Illegal, esoteric spices (wizard sugar?)
17. Silk golems that kill you by stuffing themselves down your throat and punching you from the inside.
18. Animate Objects but the objects are your teeth. Osteomancy. Calcium elementals.
19. St. Octavias, patron of the dawn, of hidden truths revealed, of the light that sears and cleans. Appears only as a feminine shadow, sharp and inkblack against the wall as if silhouetted by spotlight. Canonized for a lifetime of charity and also of burning vampires to death with giant light-focusing lenses.
20. Grandfather Posthumous. Once a popular mayor of some small town, now very much deceased, his corpse reanimated by the sheer intensity of his civic virtue. Old-fashioned politically but trying his best.
21. Cobalt, Iron, Nickel elementals once roamed contentedly the barren world, until water-bearing comets arrived and delivered a deadly plague of oxidization. The magnet elementals made a desperate pact with Stone, reducing themselves to mere immobile ore and burying themselves deep beneath to escape corrosion.
22. Hidden yet still thrumming engines in the earth, forgotten factories or vast psychic transmitters, their architects dead but their prime directives remembered.
23. Mask-obsessed fringe societies.
24. Forests of glass trees. Their lensed leaves focus sunlight and set any would-be carbon-based competitor plants alight. Prism-stems.
25. Gigantic aye-ayes roam the deep jungles, tapping their big fucking finger through your skull while you sleep.

thanks xoxo