Troika: Some Thoughts

I hadn't read Troika when it first came out, and made a splash. I saw on sale as a PDF, and acquired it. Now, some thoughts.

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Troika: you may know - but I'm going to restate it anyway - who this is by. 'Written by Daniel Sell. Illustrated by Jeremy Duncan, Dirk Detweiler Leichty, Sam Mameli, and Andrew Walter.' These chaps are attached to the Melsonian Arts Council. 

What's it attempting to do? Time for a quote.

Here is Troika!: a science-fantasy RPG in which players travel by eldritch portal and non-euclidean labyrinth and golden-sailed barge between the uncountable crystal Spheres strung delicately across the hump-backed sky. 

What you encounter on those Spheres and in those liminal places is anybody’s guess — I wouldn’t presume to tell you, though inside this book you will find people and artefacts from these worlds which will suggest the shape of things. The adventure and wonder are in the gaps; your game is defined by the ways in which you fill them.

 

Does it achieve this? Hmm. Apologies, this is going to get into the sub-genre weeds. Now, to my mind Science Fantasy is something like CL Moore's Northwest Smith or Leigh Brackett's Eric John Stark. A twinning of Science Fiction and the Fantastical, something a touch more out there than the use of Barsoom for two-fisted adventures. 

I might suggest tentatively that Sword-and-Planet involves (whatever the mysteries required by the plot) a grasp of essential skills and understanding of the world: John Carter is of the profession of arms, and may apply himself to his chosen trade on Earth or Mars. Science Fantasy involves moving from the familiar to the strange by the characters: from the world of space flight and blasters to psychic aliens and time shifts. Cf. Star Wars: the mechanically-skilled farm boy enters not merely into a galactic war, but a journey with a spiritual dimension. Feudal Futures (or a category including Feudal Future) involve starting and staying in an unfamiliar place. 

But, of course, the most obvious influence on Troika! is Gene Wolfe's The Book of the New Sun. If you've read both, this isn't news. Reference to Cacogens, Clavigers, Alzabo, the Phoenix Throne, a familiarly phrased 'Journeyman of the Guild of Sharp Corners', Notules, golden-sailed space-faring ships....all due respect to the author, but this path of influence is fairly clear. Besides, the blatant isn't always bad: here are some tools for the Wolfe-like, use them as you will. 

Anyway, in some ways all I've written there is merely surface. The underlying meat is the mixture of science and magic, in less than clear-cut ways. In some media, the mixture or confusion is benign, and comprehensible: see the invocation of Clarke's Third Law in Marvel films, for instance, or the various magi-tech urban settings of some RPGs. In others, it is horrifying - whether one of Lovecraft's Great Old Ones is merely a incomprehensibly vast working-out of natural laws or a staggering violation of those laws, it barely matters, given the results. 

In The Book of the New Sun, it is dismaying to see such ruin as has resulted in a great confusion of science and magic, but not as such baleful. In Vance's Dying Earth, it is awe-inspiring (if still ruinous). If the melding or conflusion is thorough enough, we speak of the Weird, the uncanny. If I say New Weird, some minds will instantly move to Miéville's Bas-Lag. To my mind this is a less pure example than (say) Steph Swainson's The Year of Our War.

All this is to indicate, if I may, that Troika! reads as sufficiently immersed in its world to be more like New Weird and Feudal Future than Science Fantasy as I read it. It lacks a foot in the familiar. This probably suits its purposes, and is bolstered by the presentation. 

An example, if you will pardon me.

Troika, P.7, Character Creation

This is one of the pre-generated characters you can roll into. Now, what does this suggest to you? A retired reaver? Dad-bod Elric? Frank Frazetta's King of the Hill?

Well, here is how Dirk Detweiler Leichty chose to illustrate that entry:

There is a hammer, but not a Warhammer.

Now, Detweiler Leichty will be quite tightly linked in my mind to the grand decay and meshing of mechanical and biological and otherworldly shown in Silent Titans. Is this true for the bulk of Troika's intended audience? Perhaps. Either way, the restricted but vivid colour, the geometric slashes, the dense lines, the hints of a roiling interior, 'the interlacing of the imagined organic/personal with the imagined space', indicate a distinction from the familiar lines of fantasy art - the thousand variations on Viggo Mortensen's Aragorn on paperback covers, or the older technicolour depictions of the 'cod-archaism of a Renaissance faire'. Either way, this is a deliberate indication of something distinct: a suggestion of several moods rather than one set icon. 

So, Troika steps out boldly in a new direction. And doesn't trip over its shoelaces. 

Would I use it? You're talking to the wrong fellow, but I'll take a stab. Troika's a chunkier beast than the W-B&W-G-backed 52 Pages, but then it is seeking to indicate a mood and world definitely not D&D. Call it a hundred pages, minus the included adventure. 

The d66 system - simple enough once your head's in the right place. Luck as a stat always rings a little off to me - pace Fallout - but when other stats have been pared down so far or amalgamated into Skill and Stamina, I can see why you would want a nebulous 'significance' stat to move around a focus as desired. Thinking on it, a (relative) resignation to (or acknowledgement of) the whims of fortune or the workings of fate does seem fitting for the intended genre.

A few more words on how Advanced Skills are meant to be distributed in one's own Backgrounds would be preferable. There's some obvious models, but a step-by-step somewhere would be good.

The notion of a stack of items to indicate turns is all very well, but could be troublesome on the table -where does the stack live, who can see it, &c.

Pinch of salt to the above: this is all speculative. 

Gleanings: Things to pull out and use.

• Witch-hair ropes 'immune to manipulation via magical means.'
• 'Salt is the poor man's silver'.
• Brittle Twigs is an impressively folk-lorish spell.
• This description, from the spell Iron Hand - 'The common man does not appreciate exactly how close flesh and iron are when considered relative to, say, flesh and the smell of hot tea.'
• The Donestre: strange deadly melancholy many-headed lions.
• I think more settings can find room for Lamassu and Rhino-men.
• Beef and Liberty is apparently one of those perennial human obsessions.
• Pocket Gods seem an interesting extension on Lord Dunsany's various small deities. 

Conclusions: Well, I'm not certain that Troika hits a level of Conceptual Density for me. But then, I've read a bunch of Wolfe already, and even written something inspired in good part by him. So it might do something for you, and I cannot really regret flipping through Troika all that much. Modified rapture.

The Seven Principles of Governance

The Book of the New Sun is (rightly) a moderately famous bit of speculative fiction - the sort of thing brought up by the kind of book-reading type who blew right past Asimov, Tolkien and Le Guin long ago. I have to include myself in that - I've mentioned Wolfe's works enough times on here before. 

Anyway, of all the images or ideas or characters from The Book of the New Sun that get referred to or are popularly circulated, there's one that seems a trifle neglected: a passage on 'The Seven Principles of Governance'. This is found in Chapter XXXIII from The Shadow of the Torturer - and it is reproduced below.

I appreciate the Scholastic tone, reminiscent in its tone and form of Aristotelian Medieval thought - but clearly referential of systems of government we would not call Medieval. Which is, in a fashion, a perfect summation of a Feudal Future; though if one must put Wolfe's New Sun in a sub-genre, Dying Earth comes first. The drift into theology and mystical experience is also quietly fitting, and indicates the eventual direction of the quartet of novels. Not to chide unduly - but I hope the reader of the New Sun recalls the Seven Principles of Governance as clearly as Terminus Est.

The River People and the Sea People

Here's something. A simplification of the ancient world for the purposes of deriving a flavourful setting.

Two points of derivation, coming from recent reading (as well as a visit to the current exhibition at the British Museum): Gene Wolfe's Soldier of Sidon (and, therefore, Latro in the Mist) and The Ancient Greece of Odysseus by Peter Connolly. The latter is an old textbook I recall from school: the benefit in it coming not from the summary-style retelling of the Iliad and Odyssey, but from the links it makes to Mycenaean artefacts and Trojan archeology, being an introduction to things like the Boar's tusk helmet, the figure-of-eight shield and the Dendra armour.  This is coupled with a very pleasing set of illustrations by Connolly, that impart a slightly less clean-cut look to the Classical World (next to what one might call the 'Clash of the Titans' approach). The Greeks and Trojans have fringed skirts to their tunics - rather than the clean white edges of other visions - as well as thick-featured, stiff-bearded faces.

An illustration from The Ancient Greece of Odysseus.
Note the odd, Sea People derived 'feather hat' on Aeneas (back, right).
Note also the horned helmets!

Anyway, all this produces a certain dichotomy from a broad-brush stroke account of the ancient world: between the islands of the Aegean and the Eastern Mediterranean, and the river kingdoms of the Fertile Crescent.

Throw into this a certain form of popular history: the sort that produces web articles with titles like 'Alexander the Great: Not so Great! Six Reasons WHY'. (This sort of thing irritates me as a rule: not because it comes to such a conclusion, but more because of its use of a contradiction to the established record as a piece of clickbait - to say nothing of the kicks people get out of being the 'brave new revolutionaries'. But apparently I'm not averse to using it for fantasy settings.)

Also, because I can find a way to put him into anything, C. S. Lewis. In The Dark Tower, a paperback anthology with some of his short fiction and portions of unfinished projects one comes across a few chapters of After Ten Years, which would have been a novel about Menelaus (called Yellowbeard) and Helen after the Trojan War; it is fruitless to speculate too much, but perhaps it would have been rather like Lewis's other novel of the ancient world, Til We Have Faces. (More on the titular tale of the Tower here). Aside from a lovely first chapter detailing the squalor and discomfort of forty men squatting inside a wooden horse for twelve hours, the description of the sack of the Trojan Palace feeds quite nicely into this.

"The room was full of a sweet smell, you could smell the costliness of it. The floor was covered in soft stuff, dyed crimson. There were cushions of silk piled upon couches of ivory; panels of ivory also upon the walls and squares of jade brought from the end of the world. The room was of cedar and gilded beams. They were humiliated by the richness. There was nothing like this at Mycenae, let alone at Sparta; hardly perhaps at Cnossus. And each man thought 'Thus the barbarians have lived these ten years while we sweated and shivered in huts on the beach.' "

Naturally, looting ensues.

SO: this is the world of a new setting. Forget Plato, forget Aristotle, forget the Parthenon. The Greeks are the Orcs of this setting: savages, raiders - who live on rough islands in the salt waters. Alexander, King of Macedon? The equivalent of the Urak-Hai. Even cunning Odysseus, remember, had to prove his identity at the end of the Odyssey by a feat of arms, bending and shooting a bow. Their alignment is chaotic.

They come from the sea, from the storms. They even worship the God of the Seas, the Earthshaker, the Great Chaos!
They are raiders and fighters, for those barren islands will not support crops like the fertile river mud will. 
Some of them even ride horses, pressing their thighs against a beast of the field rather than fighting from the war-platform of a chariot.*
They don't oil their beards. They don't even wear trousers!

The civilised folk are the Babylonians, the Egyptians, the Persians who live on rivers, by the tamed water. At this point, we should note the Babylonian myth of Marduk slaying Tiamat, dragon-spirit of the salt waters.  The link between the sea and chaos is rather well established by the Chaoskampf of comparative myth. These riverfolk are also scholars: astronomers, builders of the great ziggurats, recorders of history, wisdom, law and prophecy (Leviathan and Dagon needn't be the only Biblical reference here). I would note also at this point the cosmopolitan make-up of the Persian Armies in Herodotus and the allies of Troy in the Trojan War (Ethiopians and Amazons). Lawful alignment, of course.

Goodness knows how the Phoenicians and Hittites fit into all this. Semi-chaotic profit-driven merchants for the former and mountain-dwelling dwarf-archetyple smiths respectively, perhaps.

Of course, the 300** style portrayal of Sparta fits in marvellously well here as a noble savage or barbarian hero. However, this all needs a little more work before it comes together; perhaps a map. But I'm still somewhat satisfied with the background workings of it described here.




*I'm aware that the Greeks of the Trojan War used chariots and that cavalry-proper rather than chariots, but for the sake of accentuating the difference in the setting, I'm doing this. Besides, the Old Testament-esque feel of a law against riding a horse with ungirded thighs works rather well.
**Mandatory reference at this point to the Keiron Gillen graphic novel Three, which works rather well as the anti-300, making it clear quite how unpleasant Sparta could be. Very worthwhile read; the paperback edition comes with interview-commentary by a Professor of Spartan and Peloponnesian Studies.

The Stygian Library: A few thoughts

Turns out this is my hundredth post. As a milestone of sorts, this will be a little longer than usual and as a treat it is actually immediately relevant and useful. Hoorah.

If I started the last review with a meditation on place, I cannot quite do the same here. I have been in many libraries, but never felt the same strangeness as a garden. Nor have I been in quite so many old libraries as formal gardens. But still, the manner of the structure is the same as The Gardens of Ynn. The strangeness of this place is brought forward. A place dedicated to preserving books, scrolls, collections of documents. Human-sized, perhaps – but not human friendly.

The literary antecedents of great libraries vary. The library of the Unseen University in Sir Terry Pratchett’s Discworld is the most obvious ancestor of the Stygian library; Pratchett even gets a dedication on the flyleaf. Jorge Luis Borges’s Library of Babel is the perhaps the tale that is most centred on a library – an especially inhuman one, at that. Borges may have inspired the late Umberto Eco in the Monastery’s library from The Name of the Rose (consider the librarian, one Jorge, of Burgos); the library of the Citadel of Nessus from The Book of the New Sun also seems to reference the elderly, blind Borges in the Argentine National Archives. The description of this library, found in The Shadow of the Torturer is perhaps the best fantastical treatment of book as object I have read:

"We have books here bound in the hides of echidnes, krakens and beasts so long extinct that those whose studies they are, are for the most part convinced that no trace of them survives unfossilised. We have books bound wholly in metals of unknown alloy, and books whose bindings are covered with thickset gems. We have books cased in perfumed woods shipped across the inconceivable gulf between creations– books doubly precious because no one on Urth can read them.

 "We have books whose papers are matted of plants from which spring curious alkaloids, so that the reader, in turning the pages, is taken unaware by bizarre fantasies and curious dreams. Books whose pages are not paper at all, but delicate leaves of white jade, ivory and shell; books too whose leaves are the desiccated leaves of unknown plants. Books we have here that are not books at all to the eye: scrolls and tablets and recordings on a hundred different substances. There is a cube of crystal here – though I can no longer tell you where – no larger than the ball of your thumb that contains more books than the library itself does. Though a harlot might dangle it from one ear for an ornament, there are not volumes enough in the world to counterweight the other. All these I came to know, and I made safeguarding them my life's devotion.

For reasons that should be clear towards the end of the review, I feel I should also mention the realm of horror. Think of the House of Usher, from the story by Edgar Allen Poe. Hardly short of books; choked, almost with the things. The narrator of The Raven paws over ‘many ’a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore’. The antiquarian and the scholar will be familiar to readers of HP Lovecraft or MR James.

***

From Roger Corman's 1964 film of The Masque of the Red Death.
I have mentioned Poe, and cloaked figures in different robes will enter the tale shortly...

***

Where does this leave Emmy Allen’s latest work?

It exhibits the same structural features as The Gardens of Ynn. It is clearly positioned in the same light as the previous work.

[From the Introduction: Well, people seemed to like Ynn. So, here’s more in a similar vein. Ynn was outdoors, this is indoors. Different locations and monsters, but the same basic tone and structure.  ]

Yet it doesn’t strike the same note – nor should it; the indoors versus the outdoors – the library set against the garden. The wild breaking free of cultivation as opposed to the structured storage of knowledge. But of course this defies those ever-familiar OSR aesthetics of ruin and the Stygian Library is certainly not ruined. Aside from the network of ducts and feeds, the staff – the librarians of five different coloured robes – are alive and well and kicking (or as like to that state as may be said of those mysterious folk). Scholars may research in relative peace (supposing they can get in). Food and other essentials are provided; though in a far more genteel fashion than the one-man alcoves of the Library of Babel. 

Yes, you can move through the Stygian library with relative impunity. (There is perhaps a reason Pratchett never used L-Space for much in the way of adventure). The gateways to Hell, brains in a jar, giant beehives and so forth are quite deep into this otherwise cordial realm.  This is a library; expect books. There are simple, fairly intuitive rules about how to find a given book or piece of information. The librarians might even be able to help you. You may even be able to find different source of information; one of the most emblematic parts of the library are the devices to store and contain phantoms –spirits, ghosts – an artificial afterlife, perhaps for scholarly purposes. A series of mechanical computers even exist, rather similar to Hex, an artificial intelligence of Pratchett’s Discworld.

The ultimate purpose of the library has a degree of ambiguity about it*. It is extensive and intricate yet has no obvious goal (beyond perhaps facilitating the studies of others, and it is by no means clear that this is a purely philanthropic endeavour). A dungeon (or any adventure module in a contained place) tends to pose an obvious threat even if the players have no goal. The Gardens of Ynn had definite threat to life and limb in the form of the broken down intricacies of the garden, the crumbling edges of the pocket dimension and the Idea at its centre. This is hardly the case in the Stygian Library. The name, the dealings with Hell, the spooky librarians, the phantoms – none of it bodes well, but little seems directly or overtly malevolent. The librarians would likely thank you for pacifying those portions that are.

All this means that The Stygian Library acts as perhaps the equivalent of a Rorschach test or a Trolley problem for players. How willing are they to look for trouble? What think they to the methods of the librarians? There are clearly horrifying elements to the library. We might even consider that the Stygian Library, divorced from reality, is a sort of critique of knowledge for its own sake.** There is something horrific about the place that serves one purpose, divorced from all others. Think of the isolated, unproductive, decaying mansion; the company town; the oil rig; the research station; the prison planet; the factory spewing out products unbrought by any customer. You might tolerate these places; you would not wish for them. To what end are you doing all that reading? It can’t be healthy; you need to get outdoors more. Meet some people.***

Clearly, it is not just a mechanism for offering a moral conundrum to the player. My advice on the use of it is roughly the same to The Gardens of Ynn. Take care with presentation; remember that you are in a library. It is slightly less picturesque as a book than The Gardens of Ynn, less directly evocative – but in terms of knotty problems, for a conceit, for dilemma – it is clearly the superior of its predecessor. It is indirect and as cloaked in darkness as the Stygian Library should be.

See here for Emmy Allen's blog and here for a place to purchase The Stygian Library. 

*There is a given answer, but this – quite deliberately - conceals more than it reveals.
** Or knowledge at any cost. Think of Faust, perhaps. 
***All of which brings to mind the image of hulking barbarians, poised and arrogant rogues and ironclad paladins clanking or hacking though the library, disturbing the composure of the swots, nerds and pencilnecks therein dwelling.

Punth: A Primer Ch. 2

An ongoing topic here has been Punth and the Qryth. A desert land, split by rivers, ruled by four-armed folk taller than men - who take the tongues of people for their own.

As other posts have explained, Punth operates rather like Ascia in Wolfe's Book of the New Sun. Language is purely the product of the Codes - as written long ago by the alien Qryth. A Punthite can only communicate in extracts from the Codes.

If this is to be made into something usable, some of those Codes need to be available for use on the tabletop. Whilst I do not presume to write anything meticulously complete as the books of propaganda, law and instruction that constitute the Codes, I can at least produce a comprehensive slice of them. I shall attach to these encounter tables for the land of Punth.

Firstly, the Codes' set up on the borders of Punth:

1. All that pass here must halt. All that halt must read.
2. To those who do not, a mutilation is due. To those that are mutilated, death is due.
3. This is the dwelling of the Sky Princes and all those who co-prosper with them.
4. Such lands are called by some Punth.
5. All men should live in peace, from which comes plenty.
6. Thus, the Sky Princes raised these stones.
7. Thus, the Sky Princes and the Servants of the People will the tend the ways of peace.
8. Those who do not attend to correct teaching shall leave these places by such means as are best.
9. To learn peace is to learn wisdom. To the wise will come plenty.
10. Might and Justice shall be theirs, by which peace shall ever reign.

Next, the Codes' Statement of Coupling.

1. There must be two for creation, but many for rearing.
2. Two may meet, but the many must grant their abiding.
3. To abide in peace and plenty, there must be might and justice.
4. The two may meet, but the Sky Princes must grant their abiding.
5. But no voice speaks against this. None of the Codes is against this.
6. Therefore joy is the grant of the many, of the Sky Princes.
7. Let those raised in peace and plenty ever heed and honour them!

***

A few notes on Qryth infrastructure in Punth

The Qryth were, in their first days in Punth, possessed of much foresight about the future. They planned accordingly.

It is a shame they were wrong. Wrong about the society they were building;  wrong about their chances for technological progress.

The Qryth maintain, in a semi-Medieval Near East, the sort of administrative tools that would better suit a state in the 'Western World' of 21st Century AD Earth. Border checks; extensive records of comings and goings. There are roads everywhere, carefully maintained - a great advantage in war, but a great expense (there is often less in the way of immediate funds to spend on a campaign). Moreover, they go everywhere. Not just between cities or along trade routes. They do not appear to have come about naturally.

Some seem to head out to dead ends, terminating in desolate valleys or contaminated springs. The first generation of Qryth extensively scanned Punth; doubtless somewhere beneath the sands is a great bounty of petroleum or the minerals needed to make DVD Players - but this means nothing in contemporary Punth. But the Qryth must maintain the great monuments of their ancestors. So long highways to empty places are sweated over by workgangs, guarded by Sky Princes and Gendarmes.

This is indicative of a lot of Punthite administrative practice. It is worth reading this blog post. I've not read Seeing Like a State myself, but Patrick Stuart does an interesting review. Consider also Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France - though the Qryth could rewrite so very much more than the Constitution, the Calendar and political geography (indeed, they were positively obliged so to do).

[It occurs to me that there is something reminiscent of Warhammer 40,000 in the Qryth. Tradition-bound Orwellian maniacs, stronger than anyone else in that polity, trapped within the structures - physical, political, cultural - of another, greater age.  More aesthetics of ruin, for those who care for them - but the tragedy and loss, the dislocation, of 40k's Imperium of Man has a disticnt likeness to the Qryth.]

The Gendarmes

Nominally, the Qryth are the only military of Punth. One advantage of this is that they are bigger than anyone else (they struggle with Half-Giants, but Half-Giants don't like the heat). But ultimately lesser forces were required. Sentries, quartermasters, teamsters, police forces. Therefore, a gendarmerie was created. It was even called by a word equivalent to 'Gendarme' in the Qryth tongue.

The gendarmes are the most visible military and police presence in Punth. They have some human commanders, but none above what we should think of as regimental rank. The Sky Princes monitor them closely.

Among other things, the gendarmes conduct regular border patrols (even along the desolate stretches of Punth's deserts). They act as a first line of defence - but a line of defence that is expected to fall back in good order and get one of the Qryth if attacked by a serious threat. Not that they are absent from Punth's campaigns or the order of battle.

They wear strange garments of a mustard-like colour, tight fitting and with several pouches, a little like modern police uniforms. Armour can be placed over this; it is padded at several spots to help accommodate this. There are two traceries in red braid on the flanks - roughly where the second set of Qryth arms would be. The officers sport peaked caps. Urban garrisons tend towards truncheons and lathis - at least, in most places. Outside the walls, they are armed well, often with pikes and crossbows. A cavalry contingent is maintained, as are supply trains for the outer garrisons.

[Aside from echoing the dislocated modern-world tendencies of the Qryth, this is deliberately reminiscent of the extensive interior guard or state security forces of totalitarian regimes. To look again to Recluce, Natural Ordermage and Mage-Guard of Hamor are worth referring to. ]

The Gardens of Ynn: Some Thoughts

It is perhaps a minor mark of my descent and status that I have spent a certain amount of time wandering around parklands attached to stately homes, or about botanical gardens. There is a certain odd feel to this; something a little unsettling about bright sunshine and places built to take advantage of that. It is not an environment untouched by human hands, or one shaped for a specific function, like a ploughed field (which still retains certain characteristics of landscape and place). Such gardens are larger than any mansion: they are not enclosed by a ceiling; even a greenhouse is in some sense open to the sky. If such a place is well-kept and tended, it takes on a feel of its own, quite unlike other sub-urban gardens, carefully kept in line with their homesteads, or the minor cultivation of a village green.

The process of walking through them, as an outsider, need not be off-putting (though the carefully planned village and grounds of Portmeirion was used as the set for that classic of television The Prisoner for a reason). But it is quite different from many other such interactions. A few things come close: exploring some of the sites of Classical Greece and Rome - my mind goes more towards Olympia and Epidaurus than Pompeii or Mycenae (bits of the video game The Talos Principle get close to this) I think a long time spent in the rows of a vineyard might come close. A garden centre or nursery might also be like this, in a distant and diminished way (the commercial aspect is distracting - archeological sites and stately homes only try and sell you something in the gift shop).

All this may well be by way of saying that Emmy Allen is mining a promising seam, if she wishes the Gardens of Ynn to truly be, as the subtitle has it, gardens 'of surreal delights'. What is more, I suspect that the garden element resonates a little stronger in this work than any element of the inspirations she cites - however clear the signs of Wonderland, Narnia or Ghibli are in the paths of this enchanted place.

I shall note, by way of ending this segment, that Gene Wolfe knew what he was doing in putting temporal distortions and unrealities in the Botanic Gardens in the city of Nessus (The Book of the New Sun, The Shadow of the Torturer) - and also that if you plan to run The Gardens of Ynn, it would be worth spending a few hours in a set of gardens yourself, acquiring the grammar of horticulture before attempting dialectic or rhetoric (consider also this interview with Jacob Hurst; spend some time with a flower catalogue or some other source of botanical vocabulary).

***

Of the Gardens of Ynn, then, what may be said? They are a set of gardens, in a 'perpendicular world', accessed by supernatural -if worryingly simple - means. But this once luxurious place has been devastated: it is in ruins, with the machinery that once sustained it erratic or broken. The creators are dead, fled or debased. That which destroys it lingers still - as do many of the inhabitants. [More aesthetics of ruin?]

The environment it invokes is both marvellous and pitiful: think of an abandoned or neglected greenhouse, the plants within grown too large, pushing dusty panes of glass out of shabby frames. I have emphasised above the strangeness of a well-maintained and vast garden (vast in terms of size, but sub-divided many times into discreet areas: walled gardens, hothouses, firing ranges, hedge mazes - few, if any, rolling fields). Allen provides a decent collection of ways in which it may be very much not well-maintained.  My instinct would be to allow the early stages of exploration to be in relatively well-preserved and uninhabited parts of the Gardens. The exploration system leans towards this, though it would not ensure it. Perhaps Layer Zero (that closest to the point of ingress) could have a few sub-divisions explorers wander through as a kind of overture to set the mood of the piece, though it would be likely contrary to the feel of Gardens or OSR principles of design to have this continue for long.

Those ruined locations are naturally teeming with danger. Ancient devices and magics abound - often of a genteel, tough hardly less than perilous disposition. The location details table offers a double layer of variation to all this (and could again be left of for Layer Zero). The parasite table is, naturally enough, teeming with all the horror things that grow or crawl can produce.

On top of these, the beasts and inhabitants that still roam the gardens have the same air of distorted purposes and reduced natures: golem gardeners or those decorative raptors, the peahawks. Here especially Allen shows her influences in the form of living chess sets and piscine or batrachian servants (and, yes, The Jabberwock). The presence of vast Ambulatory Puddings is inexplicable (does one make or consume puddings in the garden?) but very welcome indeed. There are twenty puddings and they are all super; I may have to make a few of my own.

All this is without considering the dreams, or mysterious musics that provide insight through 'synesthetic psychedelia'. Likewise, without considering that which devastated the Gardens, or what those Gardens become in their furthest extremities. I shall not venture to say much on either. Both are in keeping with the air of the Gardens, but there is no perfect end or final act to The Gardens of Ynn. This is quite proper: it is an interlude, a stroll in the gardens - not a forced march, an epic trek or a cavalry charge. This might be smaller, but it is not lesser, or shabbier. Besides, you are warned going in that it is for lower-level (if not lowest level) parties.

Give it a try, by all means. But it may be something that needs easing into: a tone must be evoked and set by a conscientious GM - just like any other adventure, perhaps. But certainly the case in this tight and enclosed place of magic and artifice.

See here for Emmy Allen's blog and here for a place to purchase The Gardens of Ynn.

Azoth: Ray gun as nightmare fuel

Recently having re-read Gene Wolfe's Book of the Long Sun, I am drawn to the azoth in the text. It is better and simpler, perhaps, just to transcribe passages of the original text first rather than try to describe the salient features.

'..the other object was shaped like a T. The stem was cylindrical and oddly rough, with a single, smooth protuberance beneath the crossbar; the crossbar itself seemed polished and slightly curved, and had upturned ends. The entire object felt unnaturally cold, as reptiles often do.'

'...an azoth is supposed to be controlled by something called a demon.'

'There was an unfacetted crimson gem (he vaguely remembered having heard a similar gem called a bloodstone) in the grip. It was too flat and much too highly polished to turn. He gripped the azoth...and pressed the crimson get with his thumb.
Reality separated. Something else appeared between the halves, as current divides a quiet pool. Plaser from the wall across the room fell smoking onto the carpet, revealing laths that themselves exploded in a shower of splinters with the next movement of his thumb.
Involuntarily, he released the demon, and the azoth's blade vanished.'

[All the above from Chapter Six of Nightside the Long Sun - the reader's introduction to the azoth.]

Litany of the Long Sun, containing Nightside the Long Sun and Lake of the Long Sun.
This edition by Orb Books, an imprint of Tor Books.

One take-away from all this is (though, given Wolfe, hardly the only one: the connection of demon and sword is perhaps also notable) the azoth as an interpretation of the lightsaber - a device in a science fiction work resembling the hilt of a sword, with its own power source that produces a blade made of energy that cuts through most everything.

(The quoted passage above only damages a domestic wall; rest assured it can do more. The line about reality seperating ought to be troubling enough without an example of widespread destruction.)

I hardly imagine the azoth just came about from Gene Wolfe watching Star Wars and thinking 'That seems mighty terrifying,' - but that's an angle to take away from it. It is beyond other weapons: we have a notion of bullet-proof or blade-proof: however terrifying a person wielding either might be, there is notion of escape. Not so the azoth: Silk, protagonist of The Book of the Long Sun would rather jump out a window than face one. It's a good way to think of the lightsaber or similar - a manifestation of the power of the Force, in terms of the structure of not the canon of Star Wars: an incomparable weapon, whoever wields it (therefore, let us hope it's the White Hats, not the Black Helmets).

Anyway: the central premise 'This cuts through anything' ought to be absolutely terrifying. 'An elegant weapon for a more civilised age.' Hardly! Swords and slug guns do not compare; the image a blade or built may do is real and conceivable. The azoth is invoked as demonic, otherworldly - devastating in a whole new way. (Of course, in the The Book of the Long Sun it has limits. It is nonetheless terrifying).

I have been casually throwing a few scattered science fiction remnants into certain sections of my Terrae Vertebrae setting of late - I speak of the Qryth. The High Medieval shading through to Renaissance setting of Terrae Vertebrae barely has gunpowder or the printing press. Magic is comparable, but not quite so banal - one has to chant and make mystic gestures, not just pull a trigger and point.

Either way, there are some settings where a ray gun, even a ray gun of the most ludicrous type from pulp science fiction or children's cartoons ought to be new, strange and terrifying. Terrae Vertebrae should be one such setting. The tables below allows for a variety of technological terrors to be produced.

"Tell me, what was the ray like?"
1. "Like a single thread of fire, stretching towards his body!"
2. "A rod of blinding light, a foot in length!"
3. "Nothing that one could see, a ripple of heat haze in the air!"
4. "Forked like lightening and just as swift!"
5. "Rings! Wide rings, like ripples in water! Hanging in the air!"
6. "He pointed, and there was a surge of light - think of that which hangs in the Northern Sky!"
7. "Three thin beams came out - then they joined, like the legs of a stool!"
8. "An orb, the size of a man's fist - moving with dreadful purpose!"
9. "Just as the foam on the tide as it rolls over the shore, so this moved in the air!"
10. "Bright and swift, like the sparks from the forge , leaving such sparks in its wake!"

Still from the 2004 film Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow.
21st Century pastiche, but it gets the point across.

"Tell me, what sound did it make?"
1. "As unto the crack of a giant's whip!"
2. "Like the terrible sound of thunder, from clouds just above your head!"
3. "Its passing was like ten thousand arrows in flight!"
4. "I heard only screams!"
5. "A titanic blade on the grindstone!"
6. "Great and monstrous buzzing, like a swarm of bees!"
7. "High and sharp - a mosquito's whine!"
8. "Hard, vast and unrelenting - a monstrous, tuneless bell!"
9. "Distant, high and hungry, like the eagle of the mountains!"
10. "Like water running out of a narrow drain - everything was being sucked away, displaced!"

Colours  (if you need them)
1. Red
2. Orange
3. Yellow
4. Green
5. Blue
6. Indigo/Violet
7. Brown/Beige [Bonus points to the first person to make a Beige laser pistol terrifying!]
8. White
9. Black
10. "Unnameable and terrible!"

Add Jale, Ulfire, Dolm, Fuligin, Octarine or Garrow in your own time.

All terribly melodramatic or hyberbolic, I know. But they have just witnessed something unreal, world shattering - or at least capable of shattering the substance of the world in a way nothing else can.

These are the Jokes

In writing that last post, it was brought to my attention that reference to comedy and humour is a part of world-building - possibly a neglected one. Or at least a useful tool in service of world-building.

The most obvious usage of this is in the exposition from Out of the Silent Planet just before the final act. The Sorns 'seldom got beyond irony'. The Hrossa are extravagant and fanciful. Of course, it would be a trifle on the nose to have all members of a given race of culture have uniform senses of humour.

Another prominent usage of this is by Gene Wolfe in The Castle of the Otter - The Castle of the Otter being essays, articles and the like on Wolfe's magnum opus The Book of the New Sun (if you are looking for it, find it in Castle of Days). This differs from Lewis by A) being about the sense of humour possessed by a selection of individuals - individuals largely from the same culture, but across a variety of positions within it - and B) by having actual jokes in it; one for each  of the fifteens character. The article is actually called 'These are the Jokes' and is a super little piece of fiction in it's own right, revealing elements of the people on display and the world they dwell in.

Little snapshots of life are presented by this; what are the norms of this society, the exterior elements to it; what do people feel they can laugh at. Wolfe does it very nicely - some of the jokes are even funny, and if The Book of the New Sun is lacking anything, it may be humour.

Does this mean that your characters have to be constantly making puns, or going on flights of fancy, or making cutting personal remarks? No, never constantly. But having a good notion of what would make them laugh, or what the world around them thinks will make them laugh - that is something else.

Terrae Vertebrae: Beyond Vertebrea

Vertebrea is formed something like a vast arrow, pointing north, flanked by a few islands. Land masses, different continents stretch away in roughly four directions: East of Talliz, South of Talliz; West of the Nirvanite Imperium and South of the Imperium.

This is all largely on the same basis as world building in Vertebrea, but fairly loosely sketched in - partially out of ignorance, partially out of focus. Though there are some bits I am fairly fond of and seem a touch more substantial.

East of Talliz 

Closer to Talliz one finds something reminiscent of Central Asia; nomadic tribes and vast stretches of steppe. This is comparable to the Mongol hordes or the Crimean Tartars, given their proximity and mutual hostility to the Talliz. 

Beyond such lands, the traveller might find something reminiscent of the Far East. Vast settled, civilised lands; rather better unified (in theory) than Vertebrea. Seeing as Pseudo-European nations owe their characters to national epics/vague notions of personality, the same applies to Pseudo-Asian ones. Thus, not-China is in the middle of and/or in living memory had something resembling the Romance of the Three Kingdoms.  

As far as religion goes, the most prominent one is a belief in something called The Heavenly Jury - detailed elsewhere.

Nations that bear some resemblance to Japan, Korea or Vietnam presumably exist. The furthest East one may go probably centres on a Yoon-Suin -like 'city at the end of the earth' in the midst of an archipelago. 

In the mountains of this land, the Dwarves dwell, upon peaks higher than any other. Their cities can be seen here, steep sided and bedecked with spires. They are difficult to reach and are the subject of many legends. The equivalent of Polynesia and Australasia is unknown.

South of Talliz

South of a great desert, separating the Talliz from them, lie a series of kingdoms on fertile plains sloping down from the mountains. These are most heavily reminiscent of an Africa largely free of European or Arab influences: the Maasai rather than Mombasa and Zanzibar. Far enough to the South presumably lies the veldt and the Zulu.

Some ports exist on the coast, though trade with other continents is irregular. As above, the Benin Empire rather than the Kilwa Sultanate.

West of the Imperium

Across the Traitorous Passage out of the Inner Sea lie a people dotted across the seaboard. They raise a series of proud cities, filled with amazing architecture, decorated in dizzying patterns. A remarkably ornate culture has developed. All these cities owe homage to one distant overlord, but that has not stopped them seeking their own gain, through trade and exploration.

This is, in short, all rather approximate to Islamic civilization: the Arab World of the Thousand and One Nights and the Alhambra rather than the deep desert. It is an urban - and urbane - world, and knows Verebrea as a neighbor rather than an enemy. It has never been the subject of crusades from the Faith of the Eight; the beliefs of these lands bear sufficient resemblance to the Faith to live and let live - unlike some closer to home, South of the Imperium.

Beyond the deserts, we reach two distinct areas: one is once again reminiscent of Central Asia; the Central Asia of Samarkand and Tamurlane rather than Genghis Khan and the High Steppe. Reaching far into the West is a land much like the Indian Subcontinent - which may need it's own entry.

The Dwarves of this place walk among the race of men, openly and unafraid; they have proven time after time the strength of their resolve. Their lands were hard won and hard kept.

South of the Imperium

The land of the unbelievers, the fallen. A great desert, with who knows what lurking beyond. Where ten crusades have faltered. The Land of Punth.

Babel meets Barsoom, on the sands of Arrikis. Suitable reference should be made to the Ancient Mesopotamia of history (rather than the Babel of literature), Snow Crash and the Ascian people from Wolfe's Book of the New Sun.

Verbatim from my notes....

Tharks +Ancient Astronauts + Ziggurats+ Tower Of Babel [Cf. Snow Crash?] + Ascian Language [Book of the New Sun, Loyal to the Group of Seventeen]  Tharks expy = The Qryth

Order of tyrannical Mage-Priests [NB –Cf. White Martians] impose Mind control on Vast nation in times gone by; defeated by Tharks, but psychic after effects shatter language. Tharks have to restructure – in fairly exploitative fashion. Ancient astronaut –esque cult develops around tharks, who live at top of vast Temple Towers, Ziggurats, in Deep desert, &c. All rayguns &c. now purely ceremonial / decayed beyond use / lacking ammo. Martian Barsoom-esque Grand Canal

City peoples more wedded to Ascian than rural. Cf. Fremen for deep desert people; inner resilience, strength, harshness, individuality. ‘Tharks’ remote, but rather an object of sincere faith. City folk called Punthites; Desert call themselves Ka-Punthites (that is, true Punthites). Odd synthesis of sincere faith in the Qryth combined with an awareness (the truth of which being shrouded in the mists of time and folklore) that there was a time when they were not so dominated by another species. Greater contact with northerners, traders &c. increases this feeling(cities aren’t necessarily Hermetically sealed, but not the same level of free interaction) .

Border city; ‘City of Compartments’ on pass between Kapelleron and Punth. Divided into large sections by ancient Cyclopean architecture. City run by Dwarves on top of aqueduct – main water supply.  Desert folk at one end; Northerners at the other. Tension!!! Called Austergate by the Northerners, Ermapunth by the Punth and Karnaras by the Dwarves.

I am perhaps most proud of Punth and the Qryth. Quite derivative in their way, but the notion of a relatively sophisticated Late Medieval world being jammed up against a Newspeak-ridden Barsoom appeals to me. If anything asks for more attention in Terrae Vertebrae, it is this.