Punth: A PDF

If you are a long-time reader of this blog, or have spent some time in the archives, you will have encounter my posts on the land of Punth and the Primer, detailing how that distant society operates. 

Well, that series has now reached its conclusion. I have taken those posts, tidied them up a little and laid all out in a PDF. The content is much the same as what you will find here - indeed, I have cut out a certain amount of superfluous material, and neither the post on Postmodern Architecture nor the discussion of who draws the best Green Martian will appear (end of this post).

However, the PDF A) draws these posts all into one place, B) lays everything out neatly on the page and C) makes the scattering of posts into something like an actual Primer - a single introductory resource. I have labelled it as a 'mechanically-guided setting', which seems correct. I don't know how much use you might have for my details of a fictional totalitarian state, but the Codes provide a novel way to interact with the setting and communicate something of the land of Punth.

As ever, the Primer makes use of The 52 Pages, found at Roles, Rules and Rolls.

You will find the PDF available at Itch.io, with a pay-what-you-want system attached to it. In future I may release a Revised Edition, or something of the kind - but for now I have no other plans for Punth. 

However, I have spoken for too long, and shall usher you in the direction of Punth: A Primer. 

Back from the Scum Quarter!

I was pleased to discover that Garth Nix's 1988 spoof Choose Your Own Adventure Down to the Scum Quarter is available online - albeit via the Wayback Machine. It was also published in the book of short stories Across the Wall, but I don't imagine any of you would care to buy an entire paperback for the sake of one brief adventure. That said, the format it is parodying is a print medium - the experience of your eye drifting across the page to other entries, or keeping your thumb at the last page you turned to are a part of the joke. 

Anyway, the whole thing may be found here. It's a broad parody of Three Musketeers-flavoured swashbuckling (Nix refers to the Richard Lester-directed, George MacDonald Fraser-scripted 1970s film adaptations), rescuing your mistress, the Lady Oiseaux (yes) from kidnappers. Nix has had the wisdom to keep it short (a hundred brief entries in all, which I believe to be shorter than most game-books) - it's possible the broad humour might grate otherwise. 

I still find this quite fun. But it has a few other uses....

Nix had to devise and lay out (fairly rapidly) an Early Modern urban environment and scene. This equipment list:

Choose Five:

Dagger

Pistol (with powder & ball for five shots)

Bag of 20 Gold Bezants

Portrait of Lady Oiseaux (3'6" square)

Scented handkerchief

Halberd

20' rope

Repeater Watch

1 Bottle 'El Superbeau' Cognac

2 Pairs Silk Stockings

A glove puppet of Cyrano de Bergerac

Small Plaster Saint

1 Bottle 'Opossum' perfume

A Five-Pronged Fish-Spear

...begs to be re-used at the tabletop. It has the same sort of highly specific, characterful equipment options as offered in Electric Bastionland or these equipment lists from Gus L's Fallen Empire. These could meet the needs of a Rogue or Fop of some kind very nicely.

Nix also draws out some swiftly-drawn locations: the Boulevard of the Muses, The Carved Heads of Past Emperors, The Street of Fishmongers - as well as the Place of Plaice and the Avenue of Champignons. (Names like Fishgut Alley reek of Lankhmar). Using the link above, you could navigate these pretty quickly and at random, scattering encounters on the way. Again, these are fairly broad pastiche, but if it were needed, an apt way to quickly produce a slice of a dense, riotous city. Perhaps there's only one or two uses in it, but I'd happily use to sprinkle a spot of the Scum Quarter into an Early Modern setting.

Now, I imagine I've made my affection for Down to the Scum Quarter apparent. But could any other game book be used this way? I don't know; I never had any great love for them. I suspect that the length and relative complexity for the Cityport of Traps*, say, means that you might struggle to use it in the same way as Down to the Scum Quarter. You are welcome to prove me wrong.

 

*I have never encountered anything else referred to as a Cityport. Port Cities, yes. Harbour towns, yes. Cityports, no. 

Hic Svnt ****ones

I recently encountered a refutation of the idea that a) dinosaur fossils and some sort of fear-of-snakes ancestral memory gave birth to the image of the dragon across a number of cultures and b) that (accordingly from a) and referring more closely to folklore) all cultural dragon-like ideas were related. The serpent-slaying myth may be very old - but it is a very old myth from a distant Indo-European culture, and there is much of the world that is not Indo-European.

Now, we obviously connect the Western dragon of Beowulf (say) with the Chinese dragon - though this is the result of translation. But a fantasy setting that uses the real world or something very close to it might (often does?) throw into the dragon family all sorts of other things. Smaug's cousin is the Hydra; his aunt is Leviathan; he went to school with the Lambton Worm and the Naga. Shadowrun, for one, did this. 

But let's step away from that idea for a moment. Let us posit that various types of dragons are not at all closely related: that Nidhogg would take comparison with Tiamat the way you or I might take comparison with a baboon. To illustrate this if we glance at the current Linnean taxonomy for baboons and humans, you have to go from Species past Genus and Family to Infraorder (the Simiiformes) to find them in the same category. There's a very clear distinction between them - aside from all the differences you might already care to name between humans and baboons.

Proposal: in building a fantasy world, you may include dragons or dragon-like things, but you cannot use the word dragon. Now, if you read this blog, I suppose the chances are you already know a dozen alternatives for dragon. Some dragon-like images deviate from the fire-breathing winged Western norm sufficiently to not require adjustment - as the Feathered Serpent or Couatl of Meso-American myth. Deliberately playing up the noble and mammalian qualities of the Chinese dragon or lung could work. But referring to the zmei brings one fairly directly to 'Slavic dragon'.

So....does one have to deliberately reshape the dragon? Referring to 'wyrm' works because of the closeness to worm, but we may want other terms. You could use something like Serpent-Prince or Lizard-King - though the latter brings us too close to the spectre of the tyrannosaur. Giant Snake is good, but leaves out other properties of the dragon. Perhaps kenning is the way to go: Hoardkeeper, Firetongue, Goldtwiner. 

Are there any additions you would care to make to this list? How can we avoid using the word dragon?

Monday Starts on Saturday

Over December and into Christmas, I read a number of books. One that stood out was Arkady and Boris Strugatsky's Monday Starts on Saturday (the Gollancz Science Fiction Masterworks edition). You may know the Bros. Strugatsky from Roadside Picnic (the inspiration for Stalker) or Hard to be a God; suffice it to say they were authors of science fiction in the Soviet Union in the 1950s and 60s. The constraints of publishing in Russia at that time are interesting and relevant to their work - the SF Masterworks editions of the above have afterwords by Boris Strugatsky detailing their difficulties - however, this isn't quite what I'm here to write about today.

Monday Starts on Saturday is (effectively) three linked novellas that deal with a young programmer who gets drawn into the 'Scientific Research Institute of Sorcery and Wizardry' - which is abbreviated to 'NiiChaVo', a pun on the Russian 'nichero', 'Don't mention it!'. Andrew Bromfield's translation renders this as the National Institute for the Technology of Witchcraft and Thaumaturgy, IE, NITWIT.  With a name like that, you will have grasped that the vein of comedy in Monday Starts on Saturday lies fairly close to the surface. 

Cover of the Gollancz SF Masterworks edition. 
I'm not over-enamoured of it, but it's not unfitting.

What you have is an organisation with somewhat similar responsibilities and power to the titular Laundry of Charles Stross's Laundry Files or the BPRD of Hellboy but, a) seemingly pretty civilian in its applications (this might simply be a matter of focus - Koschei the Deathless is locked up in the basement while prosecutors labour to complete the immense list of charges against him) and b) largely tangled up with it's own problems. At any rate, Monday Starts on Saturday is more a satire of scientific research than a blood-and-thunder adventure. Certain aspects of this passed me by - I didn't pick up on some of the veiled references to Lysenko, even if the general shape of scientific theories agreeable to the governing ideology of the Soviet Union was apparent. 

Apart from all the above, there's a certain air to the mishaps and goings-on of Monday Starts on Saturday. It's something in the vein of the campus or varsity novel - talented, spritely people in a communal setting not always doing much work, having conversations and passing among a fairly mixed group of characters. Even if the tone or setting of the books changes, both Brideshead Revisited and The Secret History serve well in this regard. Lucky Jim is a little too centred on its main character; parts of AS Byatt's Possession may also be worthy of attention. 

I don't suppose that I have to explain the present appeal of this kind of setting, but it did put me in mind of something comedic (in the Classical sense of the word) or pastoral. It's a tone not often evoked, I think, by role-play. There have been very campus-like, academic materials produced: this post on Coins and Scrolls, this post on Against the Wicked City - and one should not forget the Chthonic Codex of Paolo Greco. 

At any rate, it put me in mind of a hibernating project of my own, provisionally if cumbersomely entitled White Hot Sparks from the Crucible of the Enlightenment. There have been a few posts devoted to this, and I have been looking over a few of my old notes (I think there might even be a short story somewhere on a hard drive....). I haven't yet read Skerples's Magical Industrial Revolution (jolly well ought to) but it seems it may cover much of the same ground. 

Monday Starts on Saturday, whatever it may be 'About' or remind me of, is still a worthwhile read. If nothing else, it is a reminder of the stakes that may come from magic even when no-one is threatening you with extinction.