Character Portfolio: 60 Years in Space v6

Portfolio Index

via NASA

60 Years in Space is an extremely crunchy space colonization simulator by Andrew Doull, based on the extremely crunchy space colonization boardgame High Frontier by Phil Eklund. It’s a game for an extremely specific type of sci-fi sicko (hi, it’s me, the sicko), and despite a pretty rough launch the game has been regularly updated and refined since its release. I played through a mission using the v5 rules last year, and the following v6 re-organized and streamlined a decent chunk of the game (with some changes in direct response to my play reports).

I recommend reading post 1 of that series to compare the process.

Future Dan here: I wrote most of this post in preparation for an attempted solo campaign. That campaign has successfully wrapped as I write this. It will get a writeup eventually.

1. Space Politics

Space Politics is a color-coded representation of the political zeitgeist on Earth, and how that influences who gets into space and how. It’ll stay in the background of the game, changing occasionally and modifying various rolls we make later. In v.6, Space Politics will also act as your starting Social Trend (trends being background social and technological developments occurring within your faction and the world at large - it’s where all the sci-fi sicko stuff lives).

Space Politics (2d6): 7 - War (Resource War)

“Heightened tensions between Earthside nation-states have resulted in a volatile situation in space where rockets and ray-guns can be retooled into weapons at a moment’s notice. [...] A resource war includes trade wars and fighting over depleting resources needed for space travel.”

Rolling 1d6 for my first trend impact, I get 6: Peace Talks. Looks like we’re nearing the end of said resource war, or at least a ceasefire. Little emergent storytelling prompts like this are a highlight of the game

2. Space Agency

Next up is our space agency and mission control: like space politics, mission controls have a broad archetype with a color code that will provide roll modifiers going forward. The list of archetypes has been expanded since v5, with most colors now having two or more options, and they’ve also been uncoupled from real-world organizations in the base rules, which removes a major issue I had with the previous version.

Normally I would roll here, but for purposes of story I’m going to choose #5 Trade Association, since it falls within the 2d6-2 roll I would normally be making. This means mission control is Green, my spacecraft quality is Medium, and my rank chart is Generic Green. Rolling on the launch facility tables (60Y 34-35) I get Tanegashima Space Center, which is mostly for flavor but can tie into regional events later on.

(It seems the dice gods really want me to play as Japan in this game, I got that last time as well.)

Since in this version of the base rules we don’t roll for a specific real-world group, I’m going to make one up and say that I’m playing as the Toha Industrial Workers Union.

While I’m at it, I’ll generate the factions that are already in space: I just need to go down the list and see if a d6 comes up 1. Red and Purple are in, which actually works great for me because with the space fascists and space liberals in place I get to be the rebel alliance-alike.

 

3. Mission Control Staff

New to this version of the rules is the framework to play as the space agency itself, with individual crew and staff basically being names attached to skills unless you decide to zoom in. You hire on staff and crew using Control Points, and you start with four of those and gain 1 per year. 

(Control Points can also be used to gain tech readiness with a component, pay off debt, or a bump to adjust the result of a roll by 1.) 

Future Dan here: I skipped this entire step when prepping for my campaign, because I don’t like the skill system in 60 Years all that much. It wasn’t a huge loss, since I was playing at full zoom-out, for reasons I’ll get into. 

Mission Control Staff come with a level of 5 in a single skill, which gives a +1 to any roll where they match skill levels with the crewmember they're helping. I think that's an extra thing to track that makes them mostly useless (vs providing a flat +1 to a skill), in what will become a running theme with the game. But for now, this is quite important because 6 is the magic number.

I’m going to spend all 4 of my Control Points on staff (the power of hindsight says that Control Points are best spent on staff and debt; tech readiness and bumps were effectively useless in my campaign.)

1. Head of Sciences (Prospect 5)
2. Head of Operations (Industry 5)
3. Head of Research (Research 5)
4. Chief Information Officer (DevOps 5) 

 

4.1 Crewmember Abilities 

I can have up to 8 crewmembers, which are generated by drawing three cards from a standard deck to determine the level of their primary ability (1/2 card value, rounded up; faces = 5, aces are special), which is then used to derive their skills. All their other attributes are treated as 3.

Just as an example, I'm going to go with a minimum crew of 4.There are four abilities - physical (clubs), mental (spaces), social (hearts), and capital (diamonds) - each with specific skills associated with it. Selected cards are bolded.

• Crewmember 1: 10S, 6D, KH => Social 5
• Crewmember 2: QC, 3D, 5C => Physical 5
• Crewmember 3: 4D, 4C, 9S => Mental 5
• Crewmember 4: 3S, JC, QD  => Capital 5

 Next is skill selection, which is a major problem.

 

4.2 Crewmember Skills 

Skills are wildly unbalanced between abilities:

• Physical: 2 skills (Bypass, EVA)
• Mental: 12 skills (Combat Ops, Devops, Ecology, Engineer, Industry, Medical, Mining, Pilot, Prospect, Research, Suffrage, Teleops)
• Social: 1 skill (Negotiate)
• Capital: 4 skills (Activism, Antitrust, Recruit, Trading Desk)

Nearly twice as many Mental skills as all others combined. Crewmember #1 up there is useful for exactly one type of skill check (and #2 is barely better). For everything else, the best they could start with is 4, which is the worst you can get from someone with the correct ability for it. I’m aware that you’re meant to compensate for these deficiencies using your mission control staff and increasing crew skill levels over time, and that failure is supposed to lead to interesting and often catastrophic complications. I get that. I still don't think it works in practice.

 

5. A long aside about the 60 Years skill system

Skill checks in 60 Years are 2d6 roll under your skill level, as in Traveler. This comes with complications:

• If you don’t have training in a skill, you roll under the relevant ability on 3d6.
• If you have chrome on a skill roll (from meeting certain conditions, usually ownership of a patent for the equipment you're using), you roll one less d6 for the check. 
• Since the game is designed for your crew to modify themselves, increasing your skills and attributes is a core part of the premise and rules-as-written they're supposed to be tracked per individual.
• If you have 6+ in the appropriate skill and chrome, you automatically succeed and your roll is there purely to see if you have a complication.
• You're going to have chrome for most rolls you make in the game when zoomed out (since it's pretty difficult to get your hands on a spacecraft you didn't build yourself, which means that as soon as you hit a skill value of 6, skills literally do not matter.

Now, I like the idea of the system in principle: space operations are too expensive to justify anything short of extreme operational competence and failure is liable to come from defects in the machinery (something the game tries to simulate). Chrome is basically a way to bake "don't roll if success is guaranteed" into the procedures - but it also asks me to track 21 skills per crewmember (since while crew start with only 3 skills, they will quickly gain more from participating in Operations or getting upgrades) for a mechanic that was only relevant 8 times in an entire 60 turn campaign. 

The character sheet provided in the book are pretty perfunctory and not really made for tracking changes over time, and while I could probably have made up a better layout for it I really didn't have any reason to do so: it's pretty difficult to end up with a crewmember who has anything lower than a 5 for their main ability score, and so I just said "the crew as a collective starts with a 5 in every skill, and every era that passes that value goes up by 1" for my own campaign. It worked, and it was still barely relevant.

But for the purposes of the post, I'll pick the following. "Held Skill" designates skills that are held in reserve to be determined later, per the rules.

Crewmember 1 (Social 5)

Negotiate 6 

[Held Skill] 3

[Held Skill] 2

Crewmember 2: (Physical 5)

EVA 6 

Bypass 5

[Held Skill] 2 

Crewmember 3: (Mental 5)

Pilot 6

Prospect 5

Industrialize 4 

Crewmember 4: (Capital 5)

Trading Desk 6

Activism 5

Antitrust 4  

As an alternative, you can treat the crew as a collective and start with 5 in all abilities, and then fill in four skills at 6, three skills at 5, two skills at 4, one at 3 and one at 2. 

But yeah, I dumped all of that when I ran my campaign and it was fine.

6.1 Spacecraft Overview

All spacecraft are going to have a crew module to carry people and a thruster to get them to the destination. The payload will vary according to mission type - for a bog-standard industrial mission, I need a robonaut to prospect the site and a refinery to turn into an automated factory. These components (as well as thrusters) can have additional requirements, which can be met by including reactors or generators (to produce energy), and radiators (to vent waste heat), but we’ll get into those later.

Note: Andrew told me this entire section is going to get overhauled in the next major update, though what I’m describing here will still be around as an alternative procedure in one of the other books.

Starting craft have a spacecraft quality - this won’t be relevant after you build your first factory and refit your ship, but for now it’s a way to provide variety for your maiden voyage. As a Trade Association, my starting rocket is medium quality, and rolling 2d6 on the Medium Quality Ship table (SI 191) gets me 5+6 = 11 and the following traits:

• Thruster Quality: High
• Radiator Quality: High
• Refinery included in mass?: Yes
• Refinery Quality: High
• Payloads: Substitute Thruster
• Damage: None

So I get a high quality craft with a substitute thruster. Fine by me. High quality craft sidestep a lot of the construction process, since they’re high quality by merit of all their parts working together in harmony from go, but the substitute thruster is a nice wrench in the works.

6.2. Spacecraft Construction

Substitute thrusters (SI 195) come in two varieties, robonaut and bernal. There’s no apparent roll to see which subtable you get, so I did odds/evens and got robonaut. Good thing too, bernals are heavy as shit on account of being entire space stations

Future Dan here: I am realizing now that bernals are probably only used as substitute thrusters when you’re on a mission to move a bernal, since the egregious 10 mass of the bernal is less egregious if you aren’t also carrying a thruster around.

A roll of 3 on the substitute robonaut table gets me Tungsten Resistojet which starts me with the base stats of a Hall Effect thruster. But since everything is high quality, I don’t need to build off the base, I can pop over to the high quality craft table (SI 203) and roll a d6 for my loadout: a 1 gets me the following components and stats.

• Reactor: Rubbia Thin Film Fission Hohlraum
• Generator: AMTEC Thermoelectric
• Robonaut: Tungsten Resistojet
• Refinery: Carbochlorination

• Dry Mass: 5
• How heavy the craft is without fuel
• Thrust: 1 ● 1
• First number is how many burns I can make per turn, second number is how many fuel steps each burn costs me. My craft’s mass will determine how many fuel steps I get for a given unit of fuel, so that doesn’t need to be worried about for now.
• ISRU: 3
• In-situ resource utilization - how well my equipment can deal with conditions on the ground. A lower number is better & means I can operate at sites with less water.
• Therms: 2
• How hot my equipment runs - I’ll need radiators to cool this.

Now, you might notice here that the component list is a bunch of technobabble to make Scotty proud and no stats. There are stats for components, but they’re in another book (A-Base D-Landing): this is going to get fixed in the next update, and not a moment too soon - when you get into factory building and building new ships, it becomes really important to know what components are compatible with what and what requirements they have.

Using the full info, my components are:

• Hall Effect: Mass 1, Thrust  3 ● 2, Rad-Hardness 5, Water Fuel
• Rubbia Thin Film: n reactor, Mass 1, RH 5, 1 Therms; -2 thrust, ½ fuel consumption
• AMTEC Thermoelectric: e/H-generator, requires n reactor, Mass 1, RH 6, 1 Therm
• Resistojet: Mass 0, requires e-generator, RH 5, ISRU 3
• Carbochlorinator: Mass 2, requires e-generator

This gets me the same numbers in the end, but you can see how everything fits together much better this way.

Now I take these numbers and apply the modifications from the resistojet thruster: +2 thrust, x2 fuel consumption, 1 Afterburn, and -1 Mass, which is less than ideal but not the worst it could be: Mass 4, 3 ● 2 +1AB, ISRU 3, RH 5, 2 Therms

Nearly there: to deal with that waste heat I go to the High-Quality Radiators table (SI 190) - I pick the Magnetocaloric Refrigerator: 2 Mass, cools 2 therms, requires e-generator, RH6. After that, all I need to do is stick a 1 mass standard crew module on this thing and we’re good to go. 

My craft’s final stats are:

• Dry Mass: 7
• Thrust: 3 ● 2 +1AB
• ISRU: 3
• Rad-Hardness 5
• Therms: 2 (-2)

Only thing left to do now for character creation is smash the champagne and give it a name. To keep with the theming of the Hayashida mission, this one will be named the Kui.

Wrap-Up

The greatest obstacle between 60 Years and the player is information presentation. This is to be expected from a game of this complexity, and there have been improvements since v1, but the issues remain: information is broken up between segments or even books, leading to constant flipping back and forth. The order of topics in the book doesn't align with the order of play. LATEX can't handle tables and so forces them out of order and breaks the surrounding text. Information is often duplicated where it doesn't need to be, elided when it shouldn't be, or confusingly worded.

However: I had fun putting this together (and as a spoiler for the future, the campaign was also a lot of fun.) When the issues above are pared away (in my case, by spending a whole lot of commutes reading the books and then writing a cheat-sheet for myself) the underlying systems are manageable, if wonky, and I'd say with the updates its gotten to a "recommend with big caveats" state - the game is still rated S for Sickos, but if you're the right kind of sicko, ey, you might have a good time.

The Character Portfolio

Like nearly everyone else in this hobby, I own more games than I'll ever be able to play. But making characters for games you will never play is a time-honored tradition and I figured I might as well turn it into something interesting to read.

Basic premise here is that I'm going to go digging through my archive of games looking for anything with character generation complex enough to make an interesting blogpost out of, and then I'll go through the process step-by-step, rules-as-written. The end result should hopefully be somewhere between solo play report, mini-review, and creative writing exercise. If the process for a single character isn't super in-depth, I'll make a full party slash whatever other setting building tables and procedures they have in there. 

Many of these games I've either not read in full or haven’t read in ages (or both), so I fully expect some surprises to come out of the woodwork and / or some of these to be duds that I have to toss. The list below is neither exhaustive nor a guarantee: I'm sticking it here to give a rough overview of what's available and provide a handy random table in case I need a suggestion. 

If the muses move you to start compiling a portfolio of your own, let me know! I’ll link to it down below.

Completed Characters

1. 60 Years in Space v.6 - TIS Kui

The List

1. Shattered
2. Delta Green (2016)
3. Runequest (2018)
4. Dungeons the Dragoning 7th Edition
5. Star Wars 5e
6. Hellboy 5e
7. Eclipse Phase 2e
8. Talislanta 4e/5e
9. Shadow of the Demon Lord
10. Spire & Heart
11. Red Markets
12. Ringworld
13. Pokerole
14. Nibiru
15. New Horizons
16. Mutant Year 0
17. Mistborn Adventure Game
18. LISA the RPG
19. Lancer
20. Harlem Underground
21. Halo Mythic 2.0
22. FIST
23. As the Sun Forever Sets
24. Engine Heart
25. CAIN
26. Dogs in the Vinyard
27. Across A Thousand Dead Worlds
28. [DATA EXPUNGED]
29. Open Quest 3e
30. A wide selection of GURPS
31. Sleepaway
32. Land of Eem (2022 Quickstart)
33. Armour Astir
34. Blades in the Dark
35. Deadball
36. 60Virsi0ns v.7
37. Final Fantasy d6 
38. BLAM
39. D&D 3.5 + supplements 
40. Silent Legions
41. Stars Without Number
42. Worlds Without Number 
43. Ars Magica 3e 
44. Cephus Engine 

She Sings at the End

 

crocutable

[Heads up: this one goes a bit harder than usual, enough so that I'd rather be safe than sorry and stick a warning up front. Gore, references to sexual violence, and a lot of 2026-grade hopeless bleak despair to follow.]

 

它餓

Interior. A TV kitchen set, illuminated by dim lights far above the sound stage. A pile of animal carcasses - endangered, exotic, unidentifiable - spills off the counter and onto the floor. Flies swirl in granular black clouds.

A woman stands at the chopping block, cleaver in hand, grinning out at an audience only she can see. Her apron reads:

 FUCK
 MARRY
 KILL
 THE COOK

She’s not wearing anything else.

"We really have to stop meeting like this: what will the neighbors think?"

She draws a bird of paradise from the mound and the blade falls with a wet sli-chunk. 

"The line that divides man from beast is abhorrence of the flesh. The beast harbors no illusions of its own nature; man glimpses the truth - that he is a machine designed to eat, fuck, and die - and recoils, screaming Lord take this thorn from my side!"

She sticks a feather in her hair and sweeps the mangled scraps of the bird off the counter and into a blue plastic bin.

"Desperate to prove that he is master of his own body, to prove that he is anything but a meat-fuck machine, he will kill and rape and consume and enslave and he will build a placid island of corpses on the black sea of infinity. With trembling hand and seething mind he will drive his knife deep between his ribs and carve out his own heart.”

She slices open an orangutan’s belly, pulls out its intestines, weaves them in her fingers like a cat’s cradle.

"But he can't resist the destiny of complex life, no matter how much he cuts away. He cannot rid himself of his desire and he cannot satisfy it. Sepsis blooms in his mutilated spirit… and he rots. "

She tosses the entrails off-screen and brings down the cleaver on a neat row of thylacine pups.

"Grunting in darkened rooms, they give obsequience to me."

Several heavy blows sever a giraffe's head from its neck; its purple tongue hangs out cartoonishly.

"The abyss stares back with the reflection of one's own face."

She sticks her hand up the stump of the creature's neck and puppets its mouth open and close. Glassy eyes roll in their sockets.

"NUMBER! GO! UP! YAAAAAAAAAAY!"

She smiles with gleaming teeth as the lights flicker out.

"I'm not bad, I'm just drawn this way."

The screen fades to black. White text, jittering from the film reel, displays a real-time global death count of livestock updated by the second. 

 

**

 

 

Item OΔ-TS10B CINNABAR

Blue plastic milk crate containing twenty-eight Fujifilm VHS cassettes. Recovered via dead drop handoff in 1993, last documented in 2000, current whereabouts unknown. Prior owner claimed to have purchased them from an anonymous seller in Hong Kong. 

Seven tapes currently in storage; three recovered during Operation HAVERSHAM in 2007 (prior owner claimed to have purchased them from an anonymous seller in Hong Kong in 1995), one purchased from the 2010 Black Auction, two found during 2014-2016 field storage consolidation and inventory, and one recovered in 202█ during CSC team's investigation of Agent Merriweather’s death.

 

**

 

1982: Operation GRISTMILL - Emergency activation of Hong Kong assets to counter emerging threat in Kowloon Walled City. Primary and secondary vectors neutralized; all known Three Stars Movement members terminated. Three of four agents KIA; survivor considered unfit for continued duty and retired (d. 1988; self-termination via gunshot). No further activity detected during follow-up.

 

**

 

Crumpled piece of notebook paper:
SPELL LIST
1. Enlarge
2. Know Guilt
3. Octopus Flesh
4. Fear
5. Creeping Gloom (as Cloudkill)
6. Regenerate
7. Sculpt Flesh
8. Call Down the Void

 

**

truthFINAL.docx
(Hill, 202█)

1431-page manifesto/journal in over a dozen iterations dating back to 2014. From 2017 onwards, the document is dominated by Hill’s belief in what he calls the Empire to Come; an eternal fascist state formed at the culmination of human history by the economic and social fusion of China and the United States. By virtue of being the only technological civilization to survive anthropogenic climate change (through the violent purge of “degenerate elements”), the Empire to Come would be the de-facto great power of the post-Anthropocene world, enslaving or exterminating any of the remaining “racially-inferior subhumans of the new stone age”, and later making contact with the alien civilization that originally seeded earth with life.

Hill is convinced that he is in contact with one of the Empire’s semidivine “god-eater” inhabitants, and that this entity (referred to as “the Whore” in the document) speaks to him from the future through video media. He likewise believes that service to the Whore, in the form of feeding her through the MEAT BOX, will be rewarded with a place of honor in histories not yet written as a vanguard of the Empire not yet made: itemized lists of offerings begin with store-bought meat and swiftly escalate to include wildlife, stolen pets, livestock, and ultimately human beings. Hill views his patron with equally obsessive desire and disgust; significant space is devoted to his method of keeping himself free the Whore’s influence through ritualized semen retention and meditative fantasies of sexual violence against her. 

Viewed as a whole, the document indicates that Hill’s contact with the vector exaggerated and intensified pre-existing psychological trends, with sudden shifts in 2017 and 2019 correlating to his acquisition of untitled.mp4 from a file-sharing site as part of a bulk lot of pirated pornography and Tape #0 from an anonymous online seller, respectively. It is unclear, however, how much direct influence the vector had over Hill's mental and emotional deregulation and later physical mutations.

 

**

1968: The Cultural Revolution's anti-cult operations arrest and execute seventy-six members of the Great Lady Society in Shanghai. Two survivors manage to evade capture and smuggle themselves to Hong Kong.

 

** 

 

Tape #12

Exterior. Day. 

An orange wall of burning rainforest rises above a line of blackened earth. A woman stands facing the inferno, her back to the approaching camera. As the camera turns to view her in profile, she raises a curled pangolin to her mouth and bites through its armor; scale shards cut into her gums and blood drips down her chin. She crunches for an uncomfortable minute, winces as she swallows.

“Sure hope that guy enjoys his 20,000 pictures of Rouge the Bat's big stinky feet.” 

**

2014: Photograph posted to r/urbanexploration in a thread titled "Nope. Not today, Satan." Image is of a darkened doorway with no room visible beyond. Two phrases are painted on the concrete wall: "AN ABYSS” in black, and below that in red “A MIRROR".

**

Item recovered during investigation: Black 3-ring binder with no identifying marks or labels; 55 sheets of blank looseleaf paper plus a single page containing an anonymous account of events in a famine-struck village during the Taiping Rebellion. Irregularities and errors in the text indicate machine translation. 

The passage details the arrival of an unnamed woman with noblewoman’s clothes but “a vulgar manner”. She announces that the army of Hong Xiuquan will arrive soon and is in need of provisions; when the villagers say they have nothing to give and have already started eating their dead, the woman notes that this is acceptable under the law of Heaven, but that the approaching army will be just as hungry and far more able to act upon it. With the villagers unsure how to respond, the woman reaches into her sleeve and throws a single dumpling into the mud. “Let’s see which of you is favored.”

Violence erupts among the villagers as she departs, laughing as she twirls her parasol.

 

**

 

1869: A young man, hollow-faced and grim, arrives in Shanghai. He finds work on the docks - it pays little, but he is a stranger to neither poverty nor hunger. He looks no one in the eye, only past or through them, as if forever watching something that isn’t there. Perhaps it was, once. Perhaps it will be.

**

One-star Amazon reviews for The Seventh Goddess: Reconstructing Matriarchal Anatolian Religion in Light of Recent Discoveries at Boncuklu Tarla (Iverson, 2018)

• "A meandering cavalcade of bad archaeology, worse sociology, Jungian psychoanalysis and second wave gender-essentialism. The evidence provided for the central hypothesis is cherrypicked and spurious at best, and easily disproven with other sources." 

• "Reads like a parody."

• "I’m disappointed that it doesn’t go full ancient aliens. If you’re going to be a nutjob might as well lean into it and throw some nephilim in there.

• "Author had a meltdown and deleted their twitter over one piece of fanart whomp whomp

• "Was honestly expecting an ad for yoni eggs at the back.

• "The seated woman of Catalhoyuk has never been done this dirty."

• "𒈠𒄠𒁲𒄑𒌍𒀀𒉿𒂗𒋾𒀊"

• "Spends an entire chapter desperately trying to explain how a male skeleton buried in women’s clothing is anything else."

• "They got they’re tits are out"

**

Tape #5

Snow clarifies into grainy footage of a grimy strip club. Neon lights; music bass-boosted into atonal thumping. An enormous woman sits cross-legged on the stage, surrounded by the limp bodies of naked men. She tears a big bloody chunk from a man’s neck with her teeth, bobs her head in time with music that’s not playing as she chews. Then she stands up, stretches, yawns, and looks down the camera and out of the screen. She smiles, winks, and cartwheels off the stage, bolting towards the door in the back of the club with the speed of an Olympic sprinter. The door shatters and she vanishes from view.

Tape continues for eight minutes before police sirens are heard in the distance and the screen fades back into snow.

 

**

1873: A Shanghai dockworker describes visions of heaven to those who will listen. He tells them how the weight of humanity's evil deeds has grown so great that the cycle of karma has become unbalanced. There can be no escape through virtuous acts: the Middle Way is closed off, the course of the Tao is askew. Even the foreign Christ cannot absolve what has been committed. The only means of salvation is to cast all one’s deeds onto the Great Lady, the sin-eater who takes all debaucheries and grotesqueries into herself. There is no forgiveness in service to her, but there is freedom.

 

**

Tape #17

Exterior. Night. Dead of winter.

A woman in a backless black silk dress stands in foot-deep snow underneath the arch of the Union Stockyard Gate. Wind howls, snowflakes whirl. She doesn’t react to the cold as she sharpens a knife against an obsidian whetstone. A trussed bison hangs from a noose originating out of frame, slowly drifting, twisting, back and forth. 

“The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing folks that he existed in the first place. Sinners don’t want forgiveness, they want someone to blame. They want a man with a sharp suit and a bladed tongue, stepping into their life like a pharaoh of old to offer them just enough rope to hang themselves. Someone they can outwit before the debt comes due. But they never do, and you and I both know that it’s all coming from inside the house.”

The camera pans up, following the rope to its vanishing point. A black hole and its wan orange accretion disk dominates the sky, pulsing and thrashing and lashing out with fuligin tendrils. Stars fall towards it in long, curved arcs and vanish beyond the event horizon. Low moaning grows in intensity until the endless crashing wave of noise threatens to consume all other sensory input and the camera snaps back down to the woman and the silence of deep winter. She holds a bloody finger up to her lips.

“Shhh. Don’t wake the baby.”

 

**

 

1922: An old man, now, bedridden and fading, looks out the window and watches the rain. He hasn’t worked on the docks for forty years; he hasn’t given a sermon in ten. Whether human frailty or his brushes with the divine that have brought him here, it doesn’t matter. The Great Lady Society devours itself; factionalism among the inner circle has made the situation unstable, untenable; there will be a mad, violent scramble for power the moment he dies, and some of his lieutenants might not wait that long.

But the men walking up to that precipice are no more than far-away shadows passing through his vision. He sits and watches the rain, and sixty-some years ago he huddles in the same downpour in a half-collapsed shack that he never left. Clammy and burning with fever, he is bones and rags and a pit that devours itself.

Just a few feet away, a woman lies curled in the mud, the faint rise of her ribs the only sign of life. She’d been here when he staggered in and collapsed hours ago; she might have done the same, just a few hours before that.

He prays, but his mouth is too dry for words and his thoughts slur together into meaningless chaos. Sense-memories blur together: farm, sermon, baptism, hunger, an angel in the upper air…

The woman’s lips twitch; he hears her voice, clear and steady like starlight and still water…

“Take this and eat of it; this is my body, which will be given up for you.”

He reaches out a trembling hand, and drags himself towards her.

 

**

Item found in field storage: Grey sweatshirt, XXXL. Cuffs stained with dried blood.

Item found in field storage: Article printout from a Japanese paranormal website (May 02 2018) describing sightings of a "starving woman" (ue-onna) cryptid in Iwate and Miyagi Prefectures.

Item found in field storage: Polaroid photograph of archaeological dig site. Headless skeletons lie in spokes around a small cavity containing voluptuous female figurine.

Item found in field storage: Carrying case containing 8cm black granite figurine of masturbating, obese woman. 

 

**

707 CE: A novice at Samye monastery suffers a manic episode while fasting. He steals dyed sand from the storeroom, locks himself in his cell, and when the elder brothers last they force the door open, find the novice weeping inconsolably: he has painted a mandala of the eight hot hells and at their center there is a voluptuous goddess, nude but for the black veil covering her face and the golden symbol in its center. 

 

**

Tape #10

Exterior. Day.

Howling wind; choking dust. Brown clouds veil the sun’s silver disk. A tattered American flag flaps on the other side of three layers of chain link and barbed wire. Dark shadows of low buildings are barely visible through the shroud. 

A man speaks, his voice pasted in from a lower-quality recording.

“This criticism of the president’s executive order is baseless: Class-III demographics have historically been a drain on the nation’s resources, and the federal work-settlement program finally presents an opportunity for those individuals to engage as productive members of society.”

A woman with a black umbrella walks into frame from the left. The camera moves to follow her, settling about ten feet behind as she walks through a maze of rusted vehicles in what is presumably a parking lot, past an empty guard station with a shattered barrier, and down an empty road for three hours forty-four minutes.

The empty road turns into a cluster of empty buildings. Many burned, all empty.  Shattered storefronts like broken teeth. A jackknifed semitruck blocks an intersection. Woman and camera turn right for a few blocks, then she stops and points up at a desiccated corpse hanging from a streetlight by a cargo belt. The camera zooms in to a plywood sign fastened around its neck, but whatever was painted on it has long been worn away.

“Drought is God’s punishment for sexual deviancy, or so I heard on the news. They cut to commercial right after, so I couldn’t catch the rest. The divine pleuroma hates anal penetration and loves same-game parlay, you learn new things every day.”

A gust of wind sends the corpse swinging and tears the umbrella from the woman’s hand. She watches it tumble away like a dandelion seed.

“Dingaling-ding, Dr. Pavlov; I want strange fruit for dinner.”

 

** 

 

244 BCE: A petitioner from a village outside of Sarnath, arrives in Pataliputra. He pleads with the guards to grant him an audience with the great Ashoka, telling them that his village is tormented by a mahāpreta, a ghost so hungry that it feeds on the living and ignores all offerings made to appease it. He is turned away as another beggar and madman, but for three desperate days he returns until a young captain takes pity on him and passes word to Tivala. By the time the prince persuades his father to see the pilgrim, it is already too late: the man has starved to death on his own feet.

**

 

Video #12

Interior. The camera pans over hundreds of naked, emaciated people packed into the antiseptic stainless steel of a meatpacking plant. Men with face shields and submachine guns stand along an elevated walkway and stare down at the trudging mass, implacable, bored. A man’s voice ripples over shitty loudspeakers: “And the ʟᴏʀᴅ said: “Tx’uragh dzmllik a’andlat! Again I say unto you: if a man should lay down his life in service of the Great Ones he shall be lifted up! For it is written that you shall love your enemies and forgive those who persecute you!”

Video ends abruptly.

**

Tweet: Cartoon depiction of the Venus of Boncuklu Tarla in Pride flag bodypaint, captioned “Getting kinky with it since 10,000 BC”; Posted June 15 2021 by @████████.

**

 

Tape #9

Heavily-degraded footage of a room, dimly lit by a flickering fluorescent bulb. Cracked concrete wall covered in graffiti. A pile of corpses fills the frame. A cardboard sign sits on a wooden chair, displaying an RCA test pattern and the text PLEASE STAND BY. Occasional humming and heavy footsteps can be heard from offscreen. No apparent end to footage.

**

461 BCE: The magus, his hands shaking, steps into the garden to collect himself. The night air is cool but brings no comfort: the exorcism failed. The merchant’s wife is dead, her body burst open like a rotting fruit. Jahi and Bushyasta had resided in her, and they had laughed at every invocation of Ahura Mazda until their host had choked on blood and vomit. The magus attempts to pray, but finds no solace in it. The daevas’ laughter renews itself in his mind at each mention of the holy name.

**

 

Video #3

Exterior. Dusk.

Waves sussurate on sand. From out of frame, the voice of an elderly man deliriously mumbles over and over in Koine Greek: "Lord, take this thorn from my side..."

His pleading goes unanswered and eventually fades into soft, stuttering whimpers. A large, dark shape rises from the water, backlit by the last smear of orange in the west. The tape degrades into static and then nothing.

 

**

 

3581 BCE: The men of the koryos, drunk on glory and exuberant red thoughts, put the village to the sword. A cheer goes up as flames erupt in thatch. Sky Father smiles on them today: it is a day for slaves and plunder, cattle and sheep, lamentations and gore. 

Kuonikos, son of Kuon Ghe, strikes down an old man with a spear; Hsulaʕwes barks “Posti bhebhudhi!” off to his left and Kuonikos spins to face the burning longhouse. His brain shorts for a moment struggling to square how the woman emerging from the structure even managed to stand up, let alone walk: Kuonikos has never encountered obesity before. 

Before a second thought can command his body, the woman raises her arm and points a thick finger at him. A single word booms in Kuonikos’ thoughts like the memory of thunder…

Ṕ̴̰̰̇Ḧ̴̺̓’̷̜̘̎N̶̗͔̾G̶̥̿L̷̗̹̈́U̵̬̾̈́I̶͓̿̐X̴̤͋́H̸͎̥͑Ŗ̸͔̄

…and Kuonikos, son of Kuon Ghe, is struck with the greatest pain he has experienced or imagined. All thought, all awareness, all sense of self evaporate in violence as his skin is degloved scalp to toe, his anal sphincter collapses, his guts fall out in a shower of blood and shit, his lungs rot in his chest.

It still takes three days for him to die.

**

Tape #20

Exterior. Day.

Handheld camcorder footage date stamped MAY 03 1996; recorder walks along a dirt path next to a creek. Mountains bear down over the greenery, claustrophobic. Light fog; no birdsong.

A woman speaks from off-camera:

“In times of need, when the earth and sky gave no aid, they came to the caves. Priestesses fattened on pemmican and mammoth meat, spirits ablaze with sacred psilocybe, would descend alone into the dark places to speak with the dead and the spirits of things older than the moon and sun.”

The camera emerges from the woods to a clearing at the head of a valley. The overgrown ruins of an Orthodox chapel abut the cliff-face. Warning signs in Russian and Georgian demand the reader turn back or be shot. The lopsided bulk of a Soviet troop carrier rusts where it came to rest. Faded graffiti tags splatter vehicle, church, rock wall in acrylic petroglyphs.

Stepping around brush and rubble, the camera enters the chapel through a hole in the wall. Time has reduced the iconostasis to a pile of rotting wood, bird shit, saints peeled of paint until they are faceless shapes. The altar and the stone it rested on lie disturbed, thrown aside by some moment of violence to reveal an open pit into the rock, sloping away into darkness. The camera goes just up to the edge, peering down into the gloom.

“You can fly too close to more than just the sun.”

The camera drops suddenly into the hole; the tape ends with a flash of black and then static.

 

**

 

Tape #26

Totalizing, featureless dark. Raspy breathing, footsteps on stone, the brush of a hand against an unseen wall. No light has ever reached this place.

At 11 seconds, a woman begins speaking. Unidentifiable words, flat intonation. Echoes bounce in irregular, chaotic waves. Yellow subtitles flicker at the bottom of the screen.

“My name is ████, of the ████████; my mother was ███████; her mother was █████. I was inducted into the mysteries by █████████████████. ██████ son of █████ was the love of my heart. I have no daughters nor sons.”

The mantra goes on. Her voice grows rough as recitation wears at her throat. She stumbles and skips over words, chokes on her breath, repeats phrases or names in loops, stops suddenly and starts anew from the beginning. Acoustic analysis provides the lightest implication of her surroundings.

On the 23rd cycle, she pauses midway and then resumes after an extended exertion. 

Running water is briefly audible on the 58th cycle.

On the 71st cycle, she slips and falls, and lays still for two minutes and ten seconds. All following cycles are recited with severe discomfort.

By the 110th cycle, there’s not enough space for an echo. Her footsteps transition into the shuffle of hands and knees, and then a sporadic dragging.

During the 135 cycle, she stops moving at all.

She stops speaking midway through the 294th cycle, repeating “the love of my heart” twice before falling silent. Ragged breathing continues for another seven hours and twelve minutes; footage continues indefinitely afterwards.

**

1925: China has been in a state of war, civil and otherwise, for nearly a century. Friends and acquaintances of Mr. J. Elias arrive in Shanghai by steamer ship. They will leave a string of corpses in their wake as they attempt to dismantle the Great Lady Society, and by week's end three of them will be dead, two will be in jail, and one will vanish into the night. On July 7th 1962, he will emerge from the Siberian forest, approach a Soviet guard station, request a doctor in perfect Russian, and keel over dead on the spot.

**

Tape #??

City street. Daylight filtered through smoke. A woman in an oversized sweatshirt sits atop a throne of corpses underneath the shade of a yellow umbrella. Bright red butterflies sit sunning their wings. Indistinct shouts and chaotic sounds fill the background. She is eating a charred shank of meat with a human foot attached. With mouth full, she looks to the viewer and says:

“We’ve been here before, haven’t we?”

She’s speaking in English, this time. Her subtitles are a meaningless snarled jumble: Hanzi, Mkhedruli, Avestan, Latin, Devanagari.

"You know the line already, I won’t bore you by repeating it."

She swallows her mouthful, but doesn’t take another bite. A butterfly lands on her shoulder; she ignores it.

“There were seven of us, once. The mother. The hunter. The witch. The warrior. The exile. The fool. And me. Seven sisters, not of blood but of bond, all gone. Now there’s just me. They left me behind, or I went on ahead.”

She flicks the butterfly away.

"I appreciate the company."

She resumes eating in silence, with no apparent endpoint.

**

Basement
Concrete and cinder block. High enough to stand upright, but you cannot shake the instinct to duck. Buzzing incandescent bulb; murky gold-orange light. Cool, wet air reeks of meat, shit, and fear.

• Handcuffs dangle from a pipe affixed to the wall.
• Floor drain caked in brown-black sludge.
• Bear-resistant trash disposal. MEAT BOX scribbled in paint pen over every available inch of surface space.
• CRT television with built-in VCR player on dusty workbench.
• Light blue plastic milk crate containing one VHS tape; cardboard box labeled in Hanzi by two different hands
• Bold permanent marker: DO NOT VIEW
• Shaky pencil: SHE SINGS AT THE END

  

**

Video #NaN

Exterior. Day. 

A woman in a blood-crusted Vikings jersey stands in knee-deep snow, suburban housing behind her, and stares directly down the camera barrel.

“I regret to inform you that the future is an illiterate fascist in a bunker raping his lobotomized daughters, forever. The LLM side-loaded into his proprietary brain implant showers him with praise. His sons, arrayed like the shining hosts of heaven in their electric trucks, will ride out into the concentration camps for sport and will stack the dead like buffalo skulls.” 

She stumbles sideways, as if struck by a heavy wind. The snow is undisturbed.

“A quart of wheat for a dogecoin, and three quarts of barley for an etherium; but do not damage the soylent or Mr. Beast’s kitchen.”

She grimaces, as if straining to keep down vomit. Words struggle for purchase.

“The last men on Mars will eat each other. An agoge will be built on the National Mall. The mighty ones shall cry out ‘Father! Father!’ to a god that died before the sun was born.”

Somewhere in the distance, a dog bays. She staggers towards the camera. An eye has changed: black sclera, red iris, gold pupil like an inverted Y.

“There is a worm in the heart of the universe and its law is red.”

She steps back, closes her eyes, and takes a long, deep breath. In. Out. Again. Then she opens her eyes and shrugs.

“But what are you gonna do? I’m just the-”

A gunshot cracks; the bullet hits her in the back of the head and bursts out from her right temple. She falls forward in a limp pile with a soft whumph.

She doesn’t get back up.

Twenty seconds later, two men in tactical gear and balaclavas enter the frame. They inspect the body, exchange a few muffled words, and the tape ends.

**

The final act is upon us. With the poise and elegance of a kalpa's practice, the soprano takes the stage for one last aria. She smiles at the shadowed audience, raises a hand…

It is the end of the last opera in the world.

**

Well then, here we are. This post took three years to write, possibly a bit longer, and there’s an entire scrapped essay about the process. (I still have the draft, if folks want to read it: let me know in the comments.)

Tā È will be a familiar face to longtime readers of the blog (if I haven’t borked it, those characters at the top should translate as “she is hungry” - this isn't technically her name, just the label on that first tape, but it works in a pinch). The form she takes here is an amalgamation of sources: her first iteration was a minor mod / reference to 2016 shotgun scenario Do Not View by Trung Bui (see Operation HYACINTH) where I swapped out Y’golonac for the Bloated Woman from Masks of Nyarlathotep. Then she shows up in untitled.mp4 in the Lighthouse Field Guide and TAKE-HOME CONTAINER, and then once (possibly twice, depending on how you interpret the Secret Mark recitation) in my anomalous media post.

Anyway, surprising absolutely no one, the Bloated Woman’s writeup in Masks of Nyarlathotep and the Malleus Monsteorum is absolutely terrible, and it's that special kind of bad where the part of my brain that has dumb ideas is compelled by its badness goes "you should totally make a good version of this idea as a writing challenge / for style points." 

From there she also inherited some theories I had about Tom Haan from The Magnus Archives: I totally understand why he got dropped from the show (having the most prominent Chinese character be a cannibalistic monster does skew close to some old Yellow Peril tropes), but! in 2/3 of his on-air appearances, Tom dabbles in Christianity-flavored flesh horror; I was expecting his plot to have some connection to the Taiping Rebellion (since that would be the historical context where you'd most likely get all three factors in one place), but TMA didn't go that route and I kept it in my back pocket. Hopefully I didn't fuck it up. 

I guess I do need to finish that essay now: this outro is getting bogged down with me summarizing it.

It took so much self-control to not have her drop "This is your coming century!" in the last tape.

100 Pulls from the Folk-Motif Index

The Stith Thompson Motif-Index of Folk Literature is not what I'd call a particularly useful text for real-world folkloric studies. It’s a big list of story elements shorn from their context, heavily weighted according to the biases of its composer, and full of entries that are either too broad to be a useful comparison or too specific to possibly exist in more than one tradition.

On the plus side: it’s a big list of story elements shorn from their context which means you can flip to a random page, start reading, steal everything you think is interesting, tweak as you see fit, and build up the religious and cultural narratives of whatever fantasy people you please. Here’s a link: the copyright never got renewed so this whole damn thing is public domain, baby!

For this post I just went and chose at random, but with the way that the Index reduces everything to generically-named components you can easily build a more structured myth by picking an entry you like (weddings, deaths and births are a good place to start) and build out links one by one. I might do that for a second installment. 

A Mythology in 100 Parts

1. Creator is accompanied by a dog (A33.1.1)
2. God as son of 9 giantesses (A112.5)
3. Deity born from skull (A114.3)
4. Twin (or triune) goddesses (A116.2)
5. God with 3/5/6 faces (A123.2.X)
6. Maggots in the mouth of man-eating god (A123.2.2.1)
7. God with 2 joined bodies (A123.1.2)
8. God with 13 eyes (A123.3.1.3)
9. God with 8 heads (A123.4.1.3)
10. God with a stone head (A123.4.2)
11. Goddess of war in shape of a red woman (A125.1.1)
12. God in tiger's skin (A131.5)
13. Bear goddess (A132.5)
14. God's home under tree of life (A151.7.1.1)
15. God uses interpreter to speak to women (A182.3.0.4)
16. God's elephant (A155)
17. Gods covered in red and yellow feathers (A139.9.3)
18. Dwarf god (A134)
19. God carries siblings in a basket on his back (A137.4.1)
20. Goddess appears as coral reef (A139.8.2)
21. Animal elders & the angels of animals (B1 & B1.1)
22. Dragon as modified shellfish (B11.2.1.3)
23. Man-eating mares (B16.1.3.1)
24. Ghormuhas: men's bodies, horses' heads, one leg, cannibals. (B15.7.5)
25. Burrowing swine heat ground (B19.4.1)
26. Sheep with a fiery collar (B19.4.3)
27. Giant swimming raven (B31.3.1)
28. Air-going elephant (B45)
29. Flying crustacean (B48)
30. Deer with one gold and one silver antler (B15.3.2.1)
31. Frog with magic knowledge (B126.1)
32. Animal languages learned from ghosts / spirits (B217.3)
33. Magic dead pig (D1281.1)
34. Clairvoyant tube (D1323.9)
35. Star-deity and drought-demon fight (A255)
36. Angel of the deep (A421.0.1)
37. God of the Squid (A455.1)
38. Goddess of Smith-work (A451.1.1)
39. Water spirits have hearth made of three human skulls (F420.2.5)
40. Abandoned infant lives by eating corpse of murdered father (G25)
41. Witch has 3 giant sons (G206)
42. Witch with iron teeth (G314.2)
43. Witch with 15 tails (G219.8.1)
44. Witch has extraordinary physical strength (G221.3)
45. Moon punishes for breach of tabu (C905.2)
46. Transformation: man to peanut (D222.1)
47. Magic drink causes insanity (D1367.2)
48. Blood of salamander protects against fire (D1382.13)
49. Magic red stone protects from poison (D1383.6)
50. Earth from saint's grave expels demons (D1385.1)
51. Magic sight given to child + magic sight given by dead person (D1821.6 + D1821.8)
52. Rejuvenation by song of pelican (D1889.3)
53. Covenant of friendship (P311.5)
54. Student enters competition with their teacher (P342)
55. Woman disguised as monk enters monastery (P426.3.3)
56. Impregnation by lightning (T528)
57. Lesbians give birth to monsters (T462.1)
58. Hunting is a madness of kings (P12.1)
59. King descends to bottom of sea in glass barrel (P15.5)
60. Princes as smiths (P31.1)
61. 2 brothers become pirates (P251.5.1)
62. Twins freed from mother's rotting corpse (T584.2.1.1)
63. Mother kills husband for murdering their daughter (P211.2)
64. King mourns wife's death so much he becomes a pirate (P27.2)
65. King never touches earth; carried around by slaves (P14.5)
66. Inauguration of king as espousal to goddess (P11.6)
67. Woman paints face to become pregnant (T579.8.2)
68. Child with several mothers (T589.9)
69. Children from a well (T589.6.4)
70. Child born each day for a week (T586.5.2)
71. Marriage by drinking festival (T135.6)
72. Marriage of girl to sword (T117.2)
73. Wife goes to land of dead to procure husband's heart (F81.1.1)
74. Stair to lower world (F94)
75. People of the lower world emerge to drink and dance in the evening (F108.2)
76. Journey to the Land of Women (F112)
77. Journey to Land of the Unborn (F115)
78. Submarine monastery (F133.3)
79. Witch's house at border of otherworld (F147.3)
80. Ogres harnessed to plow (G675)
81. Blood of 5 ogres: yellow, red, white, green, black (G367.1)
82. Devil employed as midwife (G303.9.3.2)
83. Woman requires 30 men (as husbands) (T146.2)
84. Wife hides husband's infidelity from emperor, shelters his mistress (T222)
85. Pot so heavy with ghosts that girl cannot lift it (E499.3)
86. Speaking and bleeding trees; reincarnated persons (E631.0.4)
87. Noah saves a giant on the ark; too big to go inside, has to stay in the rigging (F531.5.9)
88. Stolen animal's meat impossible to cook (Q212.4)
89. Punishment: Imprisonment in white-hot iron house (Q414.2)
90. Princess (queen) compelled to keep an inn (Q481)
91. Abduction by goddess's cat (R13.2.3.1)
92. Captivity in subterranean palace (R41.1.1)
93. Girl hidden in skin of dead mother (R318)
94. Intestines wagered (N2.3.5)
95. Evil spirit harpoons sleepers (F402.1.11.3)
96. Recognition by hole burned in hand when woman removes glove (H56.1)
97. Quest for golden wood for knife handle (H1359.1)
98. Wolf tries in vain to be doctor (J512.5)
99. Beaver and porcupine trick each other (K896.1)
100. Fox disguised as scholar (K1822.2)

Bookpost 21

Bookpost Index

The Author of the Acacia Leaves, Ursula K LeGuin

LeGuin writes about ant language for a few pages. It’s good, unsuprisingly.

Enchantress of Venus, Leigh Brackett

DNF 63%

Same series as Black Amazon of Mars, same issues. Prose and descriptions are decent, plot and characters are not. This is actually the second in the series, with Black Amazon being the third and last, so I'm reading them backwards. This doesn’t actually matter, because she was definitely phoning these in and their structures are identical: boring man bumbles around, encounters modestly more interesting woman who actually has a motivation and a plot, boring man helps out modestly more interesting woman.

Stark is a nothing character (picaresque novels are often in danger of this, but it’s especially present here) whose main trait seems to be randomly kissing women he has just met prior to any indication on the woman’s part that she was amenable to being kissed by him at that time. Only have 2 data points at the moment, but it’s happened twice. Sword-and-sorcery/planet authors write a male lead whose hobby isn’t serial assault challenge (impossible).

If you took the two female leads of the two Stark stories I've read and combined them, you’d have a solid main character. Doubtlessly the woman in the story that I haven’t read yet would round out the triad. Part of me wants to try and complete the experiment, but wanting to try’s never meant it’s a worthwhile effort and it would mean forcing myself through these.

The descriptions of sword-and-planet Venus are great, though. Oceans of red clouds thick enough to sail on but still gaseous enough to breathe in. 

Queen of the Martian Catacombs, Leigh Brackett

DNF 48%

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: a man with minimal personality meets a modestly more interesting woman with an actual motivation. He gets dragged along in some scheme or another because he’s useful. Along the way the boring dude meets a teenage(?) girl who helps him and it’s the same story, it’s all the same goddamn story!  

Since this is the first of the trilogy, it’s got a little more setup and a slight bit more meat on the narrative (local warlord causing issues, Stark is brought on by the interplanetary peacekeeping forces to infiltrate warlord’s inner circle before he turns Mars into a generation-long bloodbath). But also we get the reveal that there’s yet another layer to the “Stark totally isn’t black, you guys!” thing - he was raised by aliens, you see.

Oof.

There is a good description of how the inhabited part of ancient city migrated down the crater as the water dried up. That'll stick with me.

The Book of the Law, Aleister Crowley

If I judge it purely as a work of fiction, I think it’s an evocative bit of mythopoeic word-salad. Crowley knew his way around a sentence, and he was unsurprisingly skilled at writing in the voice of a bloviating wizard of yore high on his own ecstatic farts whilst pondering his orb and plotting to cause problems on purpose. Neat to know this is where "The ending of the words is..." is from, hilarious that it's fucking abracadabra. This is the extent of the good things I have to say about it.

Under normal circumstances I could shrug off the odious philosophy and laughably charlatanistic premise with "yeah, that's 1904 for you", but the Book of the Law was written as a magical-religious text, rather than fiction in imitation of one. That extra context raises my hackles and unheimlichs my stomach, which is not helped that the odious philosophy element is "Aleister Crowley was a fascist". Or a sparkling authoritarian, if you prefer. A man who wouldn't be averse to having his boots spit-shined. A true blue prototype for the modern adolescent-edgelord-slash-upper-class-twit-of-the-year-to-reactionary-violence pipeline. By about a quarter of the way through chapter 2 I was rolling my eyes and thinking "oh fuck off mate we've got the Scarlet King at home." He's not particularly subtle about how his ideal arrangement of the universe involves the brutal oppression of the many by the few, he just swaps out the nation-state for re-seasoned Greco-Egyptian mystery religion and appropriated kabbalah.

Normally I would segue into "and here's how I have turned all of this on its head" at this part, since the man's long dead and this along with a lot of his other stuff is in the public domain - but unlike the polyvocalic mess of a long-established religious tradition the reader is left with few fruitful avenues of wiggling their way out of the mess by taking advantage of internal contradictions, and unlike your average pulp story there's no real narrative to transform or characters to shift focus to: there's just Crowley here, echoing in an empty room.

Mirrikh; or, a Woman from Mars, Francis Worcester Doughty
DNF chap 5/30

The story starts enjoyable enough; there’s a psychic man from Mars visiting Cambodia (as one does, as a psychic man from Mars) and a somewhat overly-leisurely unraveling of why (I'm certain that "he just wanted to visit Angkor Wat" is not the actual answer, unfortunately, but it’s nice to imagine. I'd visit Angkor Wat if I was a psychic man from Mars). It’s basic 1890s orientalism, though in the chapters I read the main problems were all the old spellings of city names (Panompin instead of Phnom Penh) and a section of “my guy you’ve spent how many years living here how are you still this wrong about Buddhism.” It’s tolerable up to that point.

Then all that comes to a screeching halt complete with fire and shattered glass because our narrator (who is not a psychic man from Mars) decides he’s just fallen head over heels in love with a young woman who has just been stripped half-naked and whipped by an angry mob of racist stereotypes. A woman he does not exchange a single word with, whose name he does not know, who is at best half his age, and whose age is a concerning string of question marks because she’s only ever described as “a girl”.

This character, mind you, introduces himself and the story by griping about how his wife left him and how that caused him to swear off women and romance for good.

Motherfucker your wife left you because you’re in the fucking emails. You went to the fucking island. Jesus fucking Christ. 

Armageddon 2419 A.D. Philip Francis Nowlan

The first Buck Rogers story. I was expecting it to be racist, but I was definitely not expecting it to be so racist that you could quite literally pull the twist of “they were actually Martians and the whole ‘Han’ thing is a psychic disguise where the observer’s fears and prejudices were reflected back at them” and it wouldn’t contradict anything. The story is so unwilling to humanize its antagonists that they’re physically on-screen for maybe 3, 4 pages max. Everything else is just the airships. You could replace them with automated drones and only lose the racism.

It’s also astoundingly boring. Barely 80 pages long and most of that is clunky exposition padding out the space between incidents of action. Any moment that might be given to internality or character relationships is skipped right over. This would be more tolerable if the action scenes were fun, but they’re boring too! There’s no tension: a threat emerges, and then it is immediately defeated with no lasting damage or consequences. What would normally be the climactic heist of the enemy citadel is actually the leadup to the actual climax, which is the total massacre of a heretofore unseen and barely-mentioned faction. And then it just ends. The whole thing reads like a parody of itself, and this is the first installment.

Good god I need to read something written this century.

The Blind Spot, Austin Hall and Homer Eon Flint

But not before I do one more PD book for the road. Significantly better than the previous two on the grounds that its greatest flaw is being structurally frustrating.

The material components are good: house with some sort of interdimensional portal in it, a magic ring that drains the life of its wearer, competing supernatural entities who are after it. That’s all good, it’s got the fun conceptual freedom that comes with writing sci-fi before the genre expectations are codified. I could turn the premise into a middling-to-decent SCP article with little effort and into a good one with only a little more.

The problem is that the stakes of the plot aren’t established until more or less the midpoint, which is also when we toss out basically everything that had come in the first half to focus on a character we have barely met up to this point, who then interrupts the flow of events to provide us with a story-within-a-story of his time on the other side of the portal for the next 45% of the book. And this happens right when things are ramping up and characters are becoming more active and finding more clues, and the new plot of the back half feels disjointed and loose, with the new material feeling unconnected even to itself. Stakes and actions and motivations don’t make sense under scrutiny: questions are asked that don’t really need to be, questions that should be asked aren’t asked, answers that could easily clear up what’s going on are brushed off with “I can’t tell you, you wouldn’t understand”. There’s a lot of wheel-spinning when it comes to how information is dealt out, lots of “what is the Blind Spot?” without any meaningful investigation (and a lot of wasting time asking the question) until the sudden burst of productivity at the midway point.. The ending is abrupt, and multiple threads and characters are abandoned, or just confusingly written to the point where I'm not sure what their point in the narrative was. 

Being written in 1921, it’s fully in the mode of scientific spiritualism, which I felt mostly neutral on. It’s just a different kind of technobabble, end of the day, though one I don't find very interesting. 

Added bonus: all of the main male characters save one have a name beginning with H, which makes it damn near impossible to differentiate between them, which is a problem when the first half jumps between multiple POVs.

I wouldn’t recommend it outside of historical curiosity, but I’m glad that I read it.

 

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76. What do goblins smell like? What about trolls? Do elves have a particular smell?
Goblin smell can only be described as “funky”. 

Trolls smell like wet earth, musk, and piss (from territory marking)

Elf smell depends on how I am interpreting elves at that moment, and could be either:

• Floral or fragrant wood scents (either magical effect or perfumes)
• Highly muted (because they don’t sweat)
• Normal human body odor

77. What do your cleric's holy symbols look like? Are they needed for turning?
Symbols have no benefit on their own; they’re helpful because they help keep the exorcist focused, but they aren’t required for the process.

The hamsa is your generic all-purpose atropaic symbol; deity-specific symbols will typically be an emblem (think mon or adinkra) incorporating stylized / modified names or titles, iconic items, and their most prominent symbolic concepts.

78. What does the "bare minimum" for you to run a game look like?
2 players, ~2 hours, 1 dice set or a phone app; I can run Last Things Last from memory.

79. What happens at 0 HP in play, can I get a healing potion down their throat?
0 HP means a character is downed (unconscious if they fail a save), so they’ll need to be stabilized within a turn or two before I start calling for death saves. Basically just Mothership rules.

80. What happens when a character dies in your setting?
They're gone: bodily death means that the soul can no longer maintain cohesion. With no breath to sustain it, the fire goes out and the shade will go down into the underworld. It’s not a conscious or individuated entity, but it might linger around for a bit.

Alternatively, if I want to completely upend everything I have, I do something real funky with how souls, planes, and reincarnation work and make an entire foundational magic system out of it.

81. What happens when someone eats dragon meat? Drinks their blood?
It’ll give you powerful dragon magic, start transforming you into a dragon / some kind of horrible hybrid abomination, and puts a target on your back; once you’ve started on the Burning Path, you’ve been upgraded to a meaningful threat by both dragons and other ascendants.

82. What Idea or concept are you "saving" for a future game/campaign?
I have no idea how practical it is (probably not practical at all), but I'd love to try “Delta Green in the Dreamlands using Runequest magic”.
 
83. What is a generous/stingy tip to a porter, stablehand, or potboy in your setting?
Either way it’s a small enough amount that I don’t find tracking it to be fun or meaningful.

84. What is a ruling you regret or wish you would have handled differently?
See #60. I should have hit pause, explained what the immediate consequences would, and then see how they wanted to proceed.

85. What is one food that differs from ours that everyone knows about in your game?
I normally stick to real-world foods tweaked slightly (ex: river-octopus takoyaki) or eaten outside of their presumed cultural context (ex: a king in Generic Fantasy PseudoEurope eating empanadas), but with all the giant bugs in D&D-derived fantasy I have to assume that someone out there has started farming them at scale.

86. What is plate mail in your game? Does armor come with gloves/gauntlets?
Plate armor lives in a weird place in my mind: I’m so used to seeing overdesigned concept-art versions of it, and find it so linked with the class marker of “murderous zealot landlord”, that I don’t really think about it much at all and just kind of go “yeah, it’s like Laios’ kit from Dungeon Meshi” and leave it like that. Not going to get fancy with it unless I’m channeling Elden Ring and / or playing Mythic Bastionland.

87. What is the perfect hex size for the number of features you place/stock?
1 parasang. Not the actual historical measurement, a Caves of Qud parasang, where an unfamiliar unit is used Gene Wolfe style to give the audience a trackable measurement without having to worry about exact detail. Worrying about the exact spatial scale of RPG travel is less important to me than the temporal one: how many days/turns/actions does it take?

88. What method do you use for tracking turns elapsing or hit points depleted?
Frantic scribbling on looseleaf. Or a spin down d20, though I think I've lost mine.

89 What other hobbies do you possess that seep into games, subtly or otherwise?
Look, you're already reading this blog you know there’s going to be linguistics, anthropology, and astronomy deep cuts.

90. What step in the common procedures do you often forget or elide/change?
If it involves exploration turns in dungeons, I am dogshit at it. Maybe I need to just get rid of the explicit time aspect and just treat them as Arbitrary Time Units. Spending ten minutes for an entire party to case a room that often doesn’t have all that much in it just never made sense to me, regardless of its mechanical practicality.

91. What topics or themes are off-limits in your games? How do you communicate this?
I do lines and veils and establish mood / tone before the first session, and make sure that if there is heavier material in the module that people know that going in. In my DG player’s guide, I wrote this up:

“Torture and sexual assault are not going to be encountered “on-screen”; they might be mentioned as prior events either directly or through implication. PCs will often find themselves dealing with the aftermath of horrific events.”

This has, so far, been a fruitful way to thread the needle.

92. What was one major conflict/war that has occurred within recent memory?
I use the Dayr War from MSF as my conflict template, tweaking specific details as needed while keeping the core of:

• Occurred 10~15 years ago
• Wizards were involved
• Was fought outside the region of play (so veterans went out and then came back)

93. What would be the punishment for stealing a loaf of bread? A horse?
A loaf of bread will get you pointed in the direction of the almshouse and community work-crew organizer; a stolen horse will likely net you a fine for replacement cost + lost wages, plus a big black mark on your reputation. Much cheaper to just rent the horse from the public stables down by the post office.

94. What's the deal with those alignment languages in your games?
They’re the liturgical languages of major religious traditions. Should make a post about that.

95. Where does lamp oil come from/how is it made?
Seed oil and animal fat, with specific varieties dependent on your region but ultimately mechanically identical 

For adventurers far from civilization, it’s trickier to procure; your best bet is to hunt a squonk, since you can use both its oily skin secretions and rendered fat and you can sell the surplus when you get back to town.

96. Which die from the typical (or atypical!) polyhedrals is your favorite and why?
I’m a basic bastard and will just say that a nice d20 is a satisfying shape.

97. Who digs those dungeons? Why do they attract so much treasure/danger?
One of my all-time favorite fantasy tropes is the city/town/castle/dungeon/ruins built on top of something old and horrible. Something terrible happened there long ago, but whatever it is and no matter how horrible it is people will build on the site and dig deep to find it. 

98. Who is the most powerful magic user in your setting? The most infamous thief?
Most powerful magic user is a toss-up; after a certain point it just becomes comparing nuclear arsenals. But it’s likely to be either the Grey Witch or the King of Wands in any case.

The most infamous thief is, of course, Arsene Lupin. Or Robin Red-Hood. Or Sinbad the Sailor. Honestly if they're good at being a thief they’re also good at hiding their identity, so there’s a lot of pseudonymous heisting going on.

99 Why are elves immune to ghoul paralysis? How long do they live?
Boring answer is that it's just some weird quirk of how proteins bind or don't bind and how that impacts neuron transmission blah blah blah blah. Elf lifespan is either "normal human", "average old tree", "bristlecone pine", and "fondly remembers mammoths"

100. Why do dwarves and elves have that classic enmity, or do they?
Nah. You might have something like it on a community level, but it’s going to be for normal reasons of why neighboring groups might dislike each other.

That’s for “elves and dwarves are types of humans”, of course; “elves and dwarves are magical beings” has less reason for the enmity IMO, as their habitats don’t really overlap. Elves in the forests, dwarves deep in the earth.

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51. May I please see a devious trap or dangerous hazard you have created?
A fountain with a shin-deep pool of clear water. 

• [Important item] clearly visible at the bottom of the fountain 
• Starving, translucent ooze detectable only by
• Close inspection (optical anomaly in the water)
• Tossing in a small item (bounces off cell membrane)
• Reaching into the water (triggers an attack).

52. Please share 3 new/distinctive magical spells you or your players have created

• Rite of Perfect Discoverie - A scrying spell that locates an item’s possessor / possessed item if you have the other component present. Requires ritual circle and mirror; mirror displays a path from caster’s present location to target’s present location. Ritual draws attention of Beasts of Many Angles, who will appear in mirror in the peripheral vision of caster; initial response will be curiosity / investigation, further use will set them on the hunt.
• Call upon NIN-SU-GAL – A means to summon and propitiate the Lady of the Great Flesh, derived from the rites of the Lušārātum (“hairy men”). Requires ritual circle, food offering, and some medium of visual communication (television, computer monitor, mural or painting, etc). Encounters will be brief and distressing.
• Blood Clot - Triggers a catastrophic stroke in the target after ~6 seconds of sustained eye contact on failed save. Requires series of hand-signs; mouthing trigger words to maintain focus common but not necessary. Deeply traumatic to witness.

53. Share a puzzle or riddle that has produced a memorable experience for you
I’ve mentioned it in a previous post, but I’m still pleased with how I was able to use the Navajo Code Talker booklet in my Delta Green campaign. 

54. Share some common superstitions practiced by the people of your setting

• It’s good luck to spit over the side of a bridge the first time you cross it.
• The father of the gods’ favorite food is noodles; offering it to guests brings good fortune (and is just being a good host).
• Cats are messengers of the gods (when they feel like it), and so shooing one out of a shrine is extremely bad luck.

55. Show me three brand new monsters you have created for your game!

Daemonophagic Hippopotamus
An otherwise ordinary hippo that has gained a vivid red-and-black coloration from a diet of demons.

Red Fundament Footsolider
A tall, grey-skinned creature in rust-red armor like an arthropod exoskeleton. Communicates with its packmates with a series of mandible clicks and throaty wheezes. Two carry long rifles, one carries a flamethrower (as Cone of Fire)

Meat Pile
An elderly slime, no longer able to flush detritus out of its body; a sludgy mass of dirt, decaying flesh, broken bones. Stinks to high heaven. Leaves a filmy trail on the ground. Effectively immune to damage (unless you can sustain an intense burn). Will slowly pursue the party through the dungeon, squeezing through tight spaces and unseen passages to move between non-adjacent rooms.

56. Summarize your campaign setting in 2d20 words or Less
2d20 = 4 (3,1)
Things I personally like.

57. Talk about your favorite Blog/Creator for a little bit! Give them some compliments!
Arnold Kemp is the reason I started my blog, and he’s the reason I got involved on G+ back when the party was going strong. A new post on Goblin Punch is a drop-everything-and-read-it moment, and has been for over a decade.

58. Tell me about a book or movie that really influenced you in terms of these games!
It feels like cheating to say Lord of the Rings, but I’ll say Lord of the Rings. Specifically in the field of orcs: I think Tolkien kinda fell into a perfect storm scenario where he paired an extremely potent core idea with pretty dodgy execution, and D&D copying the latter without the former has led to an entire genre ecosystem of compounding issues over 50 years. But all those compounding issues fall into the “shit makes for good fertilizer" category for me, and I like the challenge that they present to me as a writer; it’d be easy to just remove orcs, but I  find it more rewarding as a writer to go “okay, here’s what Tolkien was aiming for, here’s the issues, can I thread this needle?”

Considering I have like, 7 alternate versions of orcs cooked up at time of writing, the answer is “well, at least it's a productive line of inquiry if nothing else.”
 
59. Tell me about a thing you've included "just for you" without regard to the players
Valeria (positively) described Unicorn Meat as  “VaatiVidya bait” and that’s one of the best compliments I’ve ever gotten. I fill basically everything I write with references and connections and allusions to other things, regardless of whether or not people will ever find them (though I always love it when they do). 

The best example for Unicorn Meat isn’t particularly hidden, but it’s also not directly stated in the text: if the players visit Stitches at the med hut, they’ll be told about a bunch of sci-fi paperbacks on one of her shelves. If they then go to White-Eyes’ room they’ll find more books, and that’s the only other place on the farm where they show up - which even if the players forgot the books in the med hut or never visited Stitches, the fact that White-Eyes is blind should tip them off that someone’s been visiting her (and presumably reading to her, which is a clue to the nature of the relationship).

60. Tell me about a time your players surprised you or ruined your prep/plans!
When running Kidnap the Archpriest years ago, one of my players (new to RPGs at the time) barreled into the gatehouse immediately and the alarm was raised right then and there. I didn’t really have enough experience or wherewithal in the moment to roll with that punch. The entire session basically collapsed right there.

61. Tell me about the moon(s) in the sky. What are some beliefs associated with 'em?

• There’s a demon that lives on the moon that curses women with menstruation as revenge for some past heroine or goddess getting one over on them.
• There used to be seven moons, but the dragon Bakunawa ate six of them before being defeated by the gods.
• Wizards faked the moon landing, which then spurred other wizards to land on it for real due to the one-upmanship inherent in academic vendettas.
• The moon is hollow, and Hell is located inside it.
• The moon is inhabited by bat-winged men who live in sapphire palaces.
• The moon is the corpse of Theia, the earth goddess’ twin sister
• The moon divorced the ocean and married the sun; the ocean still pines for her.
• The moon is the severed head of Ganda, the first giant.

62. What "something" wouldn't be in your game if it weren't for the players?
I don’t have any good examples off the dome, though I maintain a “if the player wants something in the game, put it in (or the closest available analogue)” policy.

63. What are 10 new things that you put on your equipment lists for purchase?
I think that shopping in rpgs is by and large a waste of time that should be abolished. If players want something not on the list they can tell me “hey I would like to buy X” and we can go from there. 

64. What are 6 things one might encounter on the way to the nearest dungeon?

1. Makeshift graves of some unlucky delvers, none more than a year or two old. One has recently been disrupted by a wild animal or monster.
2. A peddler of trinkets, tokens, relics, charms, patent medicines, assorted esoteric knick-knacks, and anything else that might be of interest to a delver looking for a bit of extra spiritual protection.
3. The corpse of some alien entity of the chaotic true depths; it managed to reach the surface, but died from the spiritual influence of the sun before it could cover two-hundred paces. Neither scavengers nor decomposers will touch it.
4. A goblin community, packing up camp and preparing to move onward now that they’ve been driven out from their home in the dungeon by another faction
5. Abandoned excavation equipment from a failed attempt to quarry out the structure.
6. Heads on stakes, left as a warning.

65. What are a few good tracks/traces for the most commonly encountered foes?

• Goblins leave graffiti everywhere
• Troll piss stinks to high heaven and they mark their territory with it
• Ghouls leave behind the cracked-open bones of their meals
• Orcs have distinct footprints (hobnailed boots with steel toes and rubberized treads)
• Undead only smell of rot if they’ve been active for a while or if it was a slapdash job
• Deep Ones naturally smell strongly of salt and fish
• Some varieties of demon alter art and text by presence alone

66. What are five frivolous things adventurers can spend their gold on?

1. Collectible figurines of popular characters
2. Painstakingly-constructed dwarvish handicrafts
3. Mayfly high fashion that falls apart as soon as it's taken off 
4. A box that you put money into and get nothing out of. Maybe one day it’ll work…
5. Hand-painted custom-order terro cards.

67. What are four legendary treasures one might search for in your game?

1. The Four Tiger Sword - A blade forged in the hour, day, month, and year of the Tiger. Extremely effective against spiritual foes, but purposefully left unsharpened for symbolic reasons.
2. The Claw - A palm-sized, teardrop-shaped sapphire reputed to have miraculous healing qualities. Belonged to an ancient prophet, currently in possession of migratory monastic order. Identified by a crescent-shaped flaw near its center.
3. The Book of Ingenious Devices - A book outlining the construction and maintenance of a wide variety of mechanical tools and devices, both mundane and magical.
4. Stopsvalinn - Heirloom buckler of a now-dissolved noble family; a rusted red octagon with blocky white symbols in an unknown script.

(Magical items in games are a field where I say less originality is better: they’re supposed to stand out and be important, recognizability or real-world antecedent can help emphasize that if used appropriately)

68. What are some common long-distance communication methods in your world?

• Postal service (letters & packages; variable speed)
• Troll stones (real-time voice; all users tormented by trolls providing live commentary)
• The Murder of All Crows (letters & voice messages; fast; pay in carrion or sweetmeats)
• Scrying (real-time voice & image; wizard-gated)

69. What are some deadly diseases/awful afflictions one might unfortunately catch?
You know, this is something I have never really contemplated before. Probably because “disease that’s interesting in an RPG” overlaps with “weird magical curse” in my head. Mundane diseases in RPGs are just mundane diseases and I don’t think “your character is feverish and shitting themselves and has to sit out this session” has much of a function in a game except for the (very useful) excuse for a missing player.

Anyway, Red Death and Black Fever would be my go-tos for in-universe historical epidemics, and then if I wanted to hit players with something specific I would probably just search the SCP wiki by tag and pick some highlights.

70. What are some interesting herbs/plants one might find foraging?
I’ve got a copy of Fungi of the Far Realms that I've never been able to use, so probably something from that.

71. What are some of your favorite resources or tools you use in your games?
Clocks are great, love a good clock. You can use ‘em to track damn near anything.

72. What are some unusual drugs/intoxicants in your setting?
I don't have a proper list, so I'd probably just crack open Esoteric Enterprises and use that. But liao is definitely an option: see through time and space, attract Hounds of Tindalos, all the hits. 

73. What are the best snacks you've found that work during a game?
I don’t have a standout best, but the worst would be the time in college when I was going to run a game, we all ordered Chinese food beforehand, and then I spent most of the evening in the bathroom choking on an insufficiently-chewed piece of General Tso’s chicken.

74. What could I bring to a game that would bribe the referee?
I don’t take bribes but I do appreciate offerings of food, previous entry notwithstanding.

75. What degree of "kitchen sink" or "gonzo" is acceptable in your games?
I like my settings to be pretty weird (understatement of the year) mashups of inspirations, but while they certainly qualify for both categories I don’t know if I’d use those terms myself. I’m all about the connective tissue that forms between elements of the setting, and kitchen sink / gonzo usually feel to me like all the weird stuff is just kind of free-floating around.

There’s bound to be a crashed spaceship somewhere, but it’s also going to be more on the hard-science side of the spectrum vs flying saucer, is what I’m trying to get at here.