Another Return to Yoon-Suin

Yoon-Suin has a second edition. I chose to do a little retrospective work when this news was announced, as you may see here. Now the new edition has arrived, something comparable is in order.

The new edition is, like the shell of a superior Crab-Man fighter, thicker, harder and glossier. There is more content in it, as the initial Kickstarter page made clear - largely in the form of new appendices (including Weapons, Treasure Tables and Collectors of Rarities) and twelve mapped adventure sites. However, the bulk of the text is the same - Opium Plantations, Elephant Shrines, Psionic Gharials and all. 

So, we turn to differences in presentation. An obvious distinction is the artwork. The watercolour-like wavering lines of Matthew Adams have been replaced by harder, somewhat pixellated artwork...by Matt Adams. This is consistently inconsistent, if you will. The artwork of Y-S1 didn't make the book: it was secondary to the table and materials inside in a way that isn't the case in a way that - say - wasn't true of something like a Warhammer Codex. I feel about the same way with the artwork of Y-S2. It doesn't get in the way, and nor should it: if each version of the Purple Land generated by a user is meant to be unique, then setting this in stone with definitive, intrusive artwork will rather get in the way of that. Generated is a curiously appropriate word. The illustrations make me think of something that a long-forgotten video game might have produced - and there are touches that make me think back to MS Paint as lovingly provided by Windows 98. There is one piece - towards the end of the chapter on the Hundred Kingdoms - that stands out in a bad way (not ugly, just out of place). None of it feels like it could exist in the Yellow City itself, which (curiously) helps maintain that degree of separation. 

(Real Yellow-City art would have to be so much more vivid and densely detailed; a sort of Rococo characterised by abundant, even excessive, use of one or two materials - and almost certainly with some kind of patina or wear. Some of the interior maps approach this.)  

Far better about setting the scene or establishing tone are the adventure sites at the end. These take on a number of forms - bounded or open-ended, above ground or as part of a dungeon - and are intended for different regions. Each seems to have a tantalising mix of the social and the violent, which makes excellent sense for Yoon-Suin's blend of cruelty and opulence. There's also some effort being made to make sure they all feel like different places, with a different set of physical challenges and distinct terrains. In several, the weather feels like it could prove as great a threat as anything else. The Mad Sorceress's Blessed Retreat hooks best in my mind. 

What's also worth commenting on is the new form of the tables. In place of the curving sans-serif font and alternating grey-and-white tables rows is something sharper, somehow more vertical. It's not always as direct, to my eye - but the tables work in about the same fashion as before. 

Perhaps the most interesting thing that I've picked up from dipping back into Yoon-Suin is how I find myself diverging from it. I certainly still admire it, and the structure and restraint it shows were very useful in conceiving some aspects of Punth. But I find that what I've worked on or written or conceived recently tends to have some strong central pillars of a culture or an intellectual system or something of that kind to be played with. This put me sort of at odds with Y-S2 on reading it. Where are the Slug-man lawmakers? The great philosophers and prophets? The conquerors and kingmakers? Even resisting the urge of great man theories of history, movements have figureheads and exemplars. Would I try to work the Purple Land's own home-grown amethyst Napoleon into full realisation? Perhaps not, but I might be tempted to build a pantheon or a set of dynasties or to build resemblances between groups in the interests of knitting all things together. 

Of course, this bodes well for play. Can one group pull together the scattered threads of the Purple Land? Knit together magic and statecraft and courage to produce an enduring legacy? One might say that the Yellow City and the great God River have seen an thousand such before, and seen their every statue crumble. If so, then we will be the thousand and first, and none the more ashamed for it. 

February-March '23 Miscellany

A few things to mention here. 

***

Layer Cake is a 2004 film. It is not about baking. 

It's about a business-like cocaine dealer in contemporary London getting into escalating situations within the criminal underworld beyond his cosy specialist niche. It may get mentally grouped with Guy Ritchie, but is in fact the directorial debut of Matthew Vaughn and adapts a novel by a chap called J.J. Connolly who appears to have done very little since. Daniel Craig as the nameless protagonist. All packed into a lovely compact one hour and forty-five minutes.

I don't suppose this is a spectacular looking film - though I do get a (vaguely nostalgic) 'Blair-era' sense from it. Not that I myself associate that period with drug deals - it's something in the way they make London look (institutions that once might have been stuffy looking open and casual), the mobile phones, the music in the nightclubs. There's some long slow sequences that work quite well. The bits dealing with the actual, tense, protracted business of being a middleman dealing in proscribed substances are worth imitating. 

You will find people who call this film 'Daniel Craig's audition to play Bond'. Not altogether untrue, I suppose, but don't go in expecting a performance like that in Casino Royale. If there is any Bond in it, it's the Bond of Fleming's books, which has only vaguely been captured by Toby Stevens in the BBC Radio dramas. 

(Perhaps also the bachelor pads, alcohol, stake-outs, tight-lipped meetings and vertiginous sense of being on over one's head contribute; Re. that last point - Fleming-Bond is not an expert in volcano lairs [is anyone?] and isn't supposed to deal with regiments of goons. Neither, I suppose, is Movie-Bond - but Pastiche, Parody and so forth eventually prevail). 

Craig offers a callous professionalism and relative lack of suave-ness. His Bond, though moderately craggy, is a rather polished marketable craggy.

Frankly, though, stand-offs and gunfights are the least interesting bits about Layer Cake. It's really about the monologues: narration from Craig's anonymous protagonist, speeches from scarred underworld veterans and his crime lord superiors - who have a wonderful sense of presence themselves; look out for Michael Gambon and Colm Meaney. 

And much of these are well-delivered and charismatic and not blatantly boastful or false - and to some degree self-serving or deceptive or manipulative. Or set rules that are promptly jettisoned when convenient. This is most obvious in the opening sequence - "I'm not a gangster, I'm a businessman whose commodity happens to be cocaine" - but it persists throughout. If gangster films are about power and society, this is a very middle-class film (that the opening sequence contrasts Craig with yobbos behaving badly abroad may be of note; see also the code-switching in the nightclub). Has the phrase 'a thriller of manners' been coined?

*** 

Pilgrim. Found at Itch.Io by Mateo Diaz Torres, who also did A Most Thoroughly Pernicious Pamphlet. Anyway...

You have been chosen. As a member of one of the tower-sanctioned expeditions known as pilgrimages, you must descend into the unspeakable chaos of the ruined old world. As you go, you will be charting unknown territories and setting foot in ancient, powerful, and extraordinarily dangerous places. Should you return alive, the rewards will be great. [...] However you see your journey personally is irrelevant to the architects. They need information, technology, and updates from the world outside to keep the horrors below on the other side of the spire’s walls. Regardless of your reasoning, it is not a choice. You must go.

Appetite whetted? It's a neat little eighty-three page setting about adventuring into the ruins of the old world, full of indecipherable tech, killer robots and yet stranger things. The comparison that struck me reading it was Philip Reeve's Mortal Engines - more in tone than content, though the megastructures of both are a more direct point of comparison. Both are very busy, bustling post-apocalyspes. 

There's some low-lying religious theming (the idea of pilgrimage, a Babel-ish tower, demons, a fallen world), but not enough to become obvious or onerous. Evocative rather than blatant: there doesn't appear to be a definite kind of story you should be telling. Which I appreciate.

It also looks good. Sketch illustrations like those in the Pamphlet, boxes and borders in a simple but distinctive style. Compare Punth: A Primer or In the Hall of the Third Blue Wizard - apparently, I'm a fan. Not so fond of the Microsoft Word shape art used to fill in some of the white space. I see what it's going for in the slightly-gnomic blocks and geometric patterns, but it needs to look a little more finished if it's going to work properly. 

But if that's my biggest problem, this is at least a work worthy of your time. Pay what you want on Itch, so go and take a look.

***

Jodorowsky and Gimenez's The Metabarons. I've been mulling over some thoughts on 'Feudal Future'-style space opera, and wanted to take this in. I'd read The Incal previously, and come across the whole semi-mythologised Jodorowsky's Dune. 

I've seen people call The Incal inconsistent, lacking in coherent world-building (which isn't everything, of course, but given the galaxy-spanning subject....). So it's no real surprise that Metabarons takes advantage of an episodic, generational tale to dart around a bit and use a series of left-over ideas - Cf. the castrated Othon von Salza and (Jodorowsky's) Duke Leto, and their method of making an heir.

Going into this knowing some of that, and plugged into the Grand Narrative of The Incal (which may or may not have been retconned?) almost makes this into, what, Funhouse Dune? The satyr play to Dune's Classical Tragedy? (But the Satyrs are Robots without the usual desire for drink and sex as a kind of meta-humour??) Though, actually, it's all too sincere and full of big Metabaronial emotion to be parodic, no matter how many times they mention 'Paleo-Marx'.  

Enough of this. Time to examine The Metabarons in isolation. It feeds you a stack of ideas and scenes and galactic institutions in quick succession. You never see an isolated farming planet; it's always a farming planet with a mystical secret at its core or a sect of psychic botanists growing beetroot the size of a Citroen 2CV by stroking iridescent beetles. Presumably there's a bunch of boring planets out there: the court of generic decadent nobles have to get their wealth from somewhere. 

And this is good fun! Inventive and notable and carefully illustrated. It's big and it doesn't stop being big. Further, it's unremittingly personal. It doesn't turn into being about Freedom or Justice or The Cause - rather, it stays about this Metabaron and their desires, and the interlocking of sexual desire and the wish for an heir. A most operatic space opera - especially how some modern productions can dial up the eroticism.  The Metabarons manages to work; that's the main thing. 

***

Random second-hand fine: Jack Vance's Emphyrio. 

I had my expectations semi-set for this from the noisms post 'On Emphyrio and Vance's Libertarianism'. Still, such an interpretation didn't stay at the forefront of my mind as I read: there's enough world-building and simple entertainment. That must be a good rule-of-thumb for quality, no? If you read an article saying X is really about Y but you read it and you note Y but also interesting ideas or images A, B and C?

Anyway, the assorted craftsmen of the planet Halma live under Lords, Guilds and a snooping bureaucratic Welfare Agency (all libertarianism's foes combined into one Legion of Doom?). The Lords, in addition to owning key portions of their infrastructure, also export their finished pieces across space. There's got to be a planet of these fellows in every feudal future setting, right? Some fiefdom in Dune turning out cabinets for Atriedes and Harkonnen alike, some ascetic cyborg Chippendale in Metabarons. The emphasis just on Halma and the city of Ambroy keeps this pleasingly 'grounded'. 

I agree, incidentally, with noisms that the father of the protagonist, Amiante, is the real hero. Ghyl Tarvoke's deeds are clearly of an heroic stature, but they feel sort of perfunctory next to the slow, careful resilience of Amiante. 

The wonder of the goods produced on Halma and the resistance to mechanical reproduction is interesting - in an age of Ikea, the care spent on these by the narrative and the characters feels desirable. Of course, this might lead one to believe that the government and culture of Halma was likewise desirable, in that it protects and sustains such things - but the snooping and sniping by the Welfare Agency rather undercuts any argument in that direction.

Tonally, it rather differs from The Dying Earth or Lyonesse (the only other Vance I know). An exception for the leaping religion of Halma, which seems like it could slot as an episode in Cugel very neatly. This actually feels a little like a weakness to the novel: religion should fill or purport to fill some human need, and quite what it offers is never as clear compared to the Guilds or Agency. 

(Is it a problem of any novel of political rebellion that we never inhabit the mind of a true believer for the regime? Ghyll spends much of the first act confused or neutral.)

The actual final revolt feels oddly Burgher-ish. Like some event from Swiss or Flemish or Dutch history, with a foreign power routed and an honest-but-angered citizenry. 

Another novel worth your time, and one that has sparked a few ideas. Watch this space.

***

Last and First Men; a strange film adaptation of Olaf Stapledon's history of the future. Released in 2020 posthumously by the Icelander Jóhann Jóhannsson and first introduced to me at Coins and Scrolls. 

I regret not watching this on the big screen. There's films that do not benefit from being watched on my laptop; this is one of them. 

I have read Stapledon, but a while back. I'm not sure there's a better way to adapt Last and First Men and still have it feel like 'a movie' rather than an art project. So: long, even narration by Tilda Swinton and lonely decontextualised cyclopian monuments. More than the sum of its parts? If properly approached. Moving? Maybe not. Something to appreciate? Yes.

***

War of the False Primarch: a blog fleshing out a conflict from Warhammer 40,000. An interesting fan-led project; a bit too Space Marine-heavy for my tastes - but it's fun seeing what people come up with an the various conversions it involves.

Stodgy to read, and I wouldn't mind a PDF of the material instead. But worth dipping a toe in the water and seeing what people have come up with.

Return to Yoon-Suin

As you are probably more than aware, there's a second edition of Yoon-Suin in the works. This is going to contain the original text - cleared up and corrected, along with several 'fully-mapped adventure sites'.

There's many a review of the first edition out there already - I won't try and do that again. But it strikes me as worth putting down some notes on the first edition (hereafter Y-S1) as a book, an object.

Dimensions first. Y-S1 was (infamously?) landscape and of very different proportions to other RPG books - see the photographs below.

Y-S1 compared with normal paperback in contrasting colours.

This gave it plenty of room to show off tables. The main thing you read in Y-S1 is tables, scanning across an entry on teahouses in the Yellow City or river tribes to determine quite what makes the House of the Rosy Half-Hour or the Mauvewater tribe unique, what assets and personality they have. 

The only book I really have of a comparable size.

In some ways, one would almost like the Journal of Laxmi Gupta Dahl to be a separate item - a pamphlet you could give players, or peruse separately. Reading this cover-to-cover is arguably a mistake. Y-S1's bestiary should be read with a particular region's chapter. 

Those regions themselves go out from the Yellow City at the delta of the God River. Mentally, between the Hundred Kingdoms* and the Yellow City, there are the haunted, claustrophobic jungles of Lamarkh and Lahag - as if in order to go from Byzantium to the Italian city-states you had to pass through Aguirre, the Wrath of God. (I know that doesn't makes much sense. I can only imagine that as you travel, you listen to this.) It's a strange contrast - the utterly untamed next to the height of (slug-man) civilisation. However, returning to the contents one sees that the Chapter on the Hundred Kingdoms follows that on the Yellow City and the Topaz Isles. 

Away from Lahag, then, on up to the Mountains of the Moon - to the tea and opium plantations. Again, we see the tables shine here, laying out the variety of commodities that drift down to the city. As that atlas of the Soviet Union above makes clear, there's a great many crops and foodstuffs that a society needs - the strategy-game streamlining of food-wood-metal never quite tells you enough. The eye dances across columns showing what this particular temple could be - and you weigh the possibilities of the options - the NPC options that would obviously compete, the rumours that they might spout, the bizarre options that may or may not fit the tone you want.

Further contrasts.

It is not for me to tell you how to hold a book while you read it - but I cannot really picture spread Y-S1 flat on the desk. The book needs to be cradled, the heaviest part resting on the inside of your forearm. It is not heavy, but its dimensions do give it a slight propensity to flop. 

Illustrations are by Matthew Adams. They generally fit the tone, but - perhaps down to the greyscale, perhaps due to the mental weight of the tables - makes relatively little impact. They punctuate the text, and (quite suitably) don't try and set the image of Yoon-Suin in stone. 

Fonts are generally quite plain - with the exception of some titles, set in something a little fancier and twining. This focuses the mind on the exoticism and wonder of the Purple Land before getting down to brass tacks. 

There is no particular conclusion to all this, of course. You will struggle to find a copy of Y-S1 anytime soon. But here's a little record of the first edition before we see what new things await us in the second.

 

*Realised in the course of writing this that Para Bellum Games named a faction in Conquest this. No especial resemblance to Y-S1, of course. The evocative name is not a hard one to conceive. 

Why do I like this book?

The book in question is a 1945 Atlas of the Soviet Union.

Well, it's not purely the content. I mean, it is interesting - but feel obliged to apply the occasional pinch of salt. This was published just as the grand wartime alliance was ending - so the creators may be a little too tempted to believe official Soviet figures. Perhaps that's uncharitable, but I feel caution is called for here.

Anyway, I like this book. I appreciate the old Penguin format anyway, but the let's not judge the book by it's cover. Take a look at the inside. There are maps detailing variously the boundaries, infrastructure, landscape, products and industry of the Soviet Union. The variety of such things is considerable, but perhaps no more than might be expected from a book of this kind. Though I wonder if the modern equivalent would be as comprehensive.

How many varieties of cross-hatching can you conceive of?
(Enlarge if you wish)

Your setting could aspire to such agricultural complexity.

These figures are presented as fairly isolated from external context; Stalin's regime is not dwelt upon or dissected. Though there is perhaps an implicit degree of praise for the extent of industrial development. Putting this aside to think about worldbuilding, one's fictional creations should aspire to such variety.

To concentrate on matters more widely applicable for a moment, consider the layout and appearance. There are only two colours used, beyond the colour of the paper. I appreciate the textured, slightly tan colour of the paper - this might be down to age, though I'm not sure how white this would have been to begin with - rationing can't have done much for paper quality; it certainly limited supply.

Speaking of paper...

This is simple and clear. Again, to compare to a hypothetical modern equivalent, I suspect it would take hyper-detialled relief maps or photographs and overlay information on them. Too much information? Perhaps. But this is purpose designed for the book.

Even the graphs and stick to this rule. Two colours, with differences represented by different patterns. I recall having a collection of historical maps of this kind - I still like this black and white effect. I like the idea that this is a way of presenting information that could be relatively easily produced with pencil. You don't even need a penny paintbox.

(That said, there is plenty of Red for Russia.)

There are other, quieter details. Looking at the maps or graphs and the explanatory texts, the font for the paragraph is sans-serif and plainer, whereas the text on the maps is in a heavier, seriffed font. This not only gives it, to my mind, a bit of gravitas but also definitively differentiates it from the paragraph.

A reminder of how much of Central Asia the USSR contained.

Why talk about this now? Well, by happy coincidence Skerples's Magical Industrial Revolution setting is coming soon and has a Kickstarter - and this does a very nice job of describing an industrial state. The detail here is worth examining if you are world-building: there are numerous crops and industries described; to feed people, to feed cattle, to clothe them, move them, entertain them, to give them chemical stimulants.

But I also look at this and wonder if one day we will look up and all the draughtsman - the simple sketch artists, the magazine illustrators, typesetters, blueprint-makers and the designers - will have gone. There will be a gentle replacement with stock photographs, computer-generated cartography and the sheen of digital mock-ups. Perhaps that is putting it a bit too far. But I'm still going to preserve this book, both in my library and on this blog.