How I Do It (feat. The Great Lady)

I mentioned at the end of She Sings At the End that I had a half-written essay about how I did it. This is the refurbished version of that essay, merged with a different essay I'd been working on as a follow-up to TLN asking me "How do you do it?" after I posted What Do People Know About the Mythos? Contrary to my usual status quo, I actually have a thought process stable and coherent enough to describe, so describe it I shall. 

This essay is also a sequel and slight update to “The Grand Art”, and as before the steps I list here do not neatly march in order in practice; this is ultimately a post hoc systemization that is meant as an analysis of my own thoughts, rather than a prescription of method.

As a refresher:

• Text - the work as a whole, situated within the context of its creation and engagement. Star Wars is a Text.
• Component - (Formerly Idea) Discrete elements of a Text, such as characters, events, places, themes, and other content. Luke Skywalker is a Component.
• Trait - (Formerly Component) Details that make up a Component, operating as a second layer of  “Disaffected farm boy” is a Trait. 

Or: Traits are individual lego bricks, components are a lego construct that can be easily moved between sets, and a text is the entire lego set as a whole.

Adaptation entails moving components between texts through alteration of those components and their associated traits; change is inevitable and should be leaned into - the point is making your version. 

Since my breakdown of the Great Lady is quite long, I’m going to stick that in the back half for pacing purposes and just use lightweight examples for Part 1.

 

Part 1: Adaptation via the Grand Art

0. What am I trying to do and why, anyway? 
No need to overthink it. It’s helpful to have an idea of what you want to do with the component you’re translating, but “I want to make my own version of this” is perfectly serviceable to start.

Example: “What’s Luke Skywalker like in a hard-science Star Wars?”

1a. Identify the component’s name,  place, & time 
These traits come first because they provide the historical and social context that supports and shapes everything else in the translation. Not all components will have all three (lack of a name or a specific time being pretty common), and in those cases you’ll have to fill in the blanks with whatever you think is most appropriate. Places and Times are components in their own right, but they don’t need special treatment or a dedicated step.

Example:

• Name - Luke Skywalker
• Place - Tatooine
• Time - Galactic Civil War

1b. Identify other relevant traits.
This list should contain everything else that you think is interesting, relevant, or distinctive about the component. You’re not aiming for completion here, so focus on the immediately available / recognizable traits and don’t get caught up in the weeds. you can always add more or expand what you have later. 

An important note here is that you should include traits you don’t like in this step along with the ones you do: figuring out what to do with those comes later in the process.

Example:

• Trait: Disaffected youth
• Trait: Longing for adventure
• Occupation: Moisture farmer (struggling)
• Connection: Biggs (friend)
• Connection: Uncle Owen & Aunt Beru
• Connection: Anakin Skywalker (father, presumed deceased)
• Connection: Leia Organa (secret twin sister)

Don’t worry if the component you’re translating doesn’t have much in the way of distinctive features; boring components can still be useful thanks to Points of Interaction.

Sidebar: Points of Interaction
I don’t have a pithy definition for Points of Interaction, but it’s somewhere in the territory of “the conceptual space where traits of a component would naturally / logically interact with other components of the text, regardless of whether or not the interaction is present in the source text.”

There’s a quote from Grant Morrison that illustrates the principle in reverse:

“Kids understand that real crabs don't sing like the ones in The Little Mermaid. But you give an adult fiction, and the adult starts asking really fucking dumb questions like ‘how does Superman fly? How do those eyebeams work? Who pumps the Batmobile's tires?' it's a fucking made-up story, you idiot! Nobody pumps the tires!" 

Now, I understand where Morrison’s coming from here: I’d probably be just as irritated if I had to field questions from comics nerds all the time. But someone is going to eventually need to pump those tires; the error (as we see constantly in big franchises) is in thinking that the pumping the tires by itself is the important part.

The Batmobile is a souped-up hot rod (trait), so naturally it’s going to require pretty extensive maintenance to keep it in fighting shape (POI). But it’s also part of Batman’s secret arsenal (trait) so it can’t be maintained by just anyone (POI); Alfred could do it, but since Bruce built it I could give him a new “Car Guy” trait and that gives him a potential point of interaction with all manner of car guy-related things. What are his other cars like? Who does he buy parts from? Does he have a group of friends he only meets at car shows? Did he ever call in to Car Talk?

Points of Interaction are primarily there to provide texture and flavor, but they will often help influence plot and character dynamics: it’s easy to imagine Bruce and Clark spending a Saturday fixing up Clark’s car, or Batman struggling with the villain of the week because the Batmobile is in the shop for transmission repair.

Anyway, it’s always good to keep potential POIs in the back of your head, just in case they come in handy later.


2.Make the initial adjustments
Alter the name/place/time pyramid from 1a in order to fit the component into the destination text.

I tend to have a lot of fun with this step; since my preferred level of verisimilitude is generally higher than a lot of the material that I like adapting, the process often turns into a puzzle I need to entangle. If I’m translating Conan from the Hyborean Age to real-world history, do I stick him in the Iron Age Pontic Steppe with the real-world Cimmerians, or do I put him in medieval Ireland based on his name? Either one works, but they will result in radically different outcomes later on.

Example: Tatooine is swapped out for Mars (or a Mars analogue), the Galactic Civil War is compressed to just a single solar system. “Skywalker” is used as a bastard’s name and is a calque of an old word for astronaut.

3.  Assess and adapt remaining traits
This is usually going to be the longest stage in the process, but also the one where your vision really comes together. Toss out the stuff you don’t want, focus on what interests you, keep your eyes peeled for fruitful points of interaction.

Example: Luke grew up on Mars but wasn’t born there, so he’s missing a few common gene mods (skin pigmentation for UV protection, enhanced kidneys for water filtration, lungs and heart adapted to low-oxygen environments) and has to make do with workarounds.

4. Add new traits as desired
No real guidance here except “go where the muse takes you”.

Example: 

• Luke’s reigning celebrity crush is Dejah Thoris.
• Luke knows a bit of the Sand People trade language.
• Luke has two somewhat-successful side-gigs: repair work (pays mostly in barter and favors), and selling weed he grows in an old hydroponics unit Uncle Owen trashed a couple years ago (less successful - his cultivar is absolute dogshit)

5. Additional Tips
Strategies and trains of thought I find useful, but which aren’t really suited to getting their own step in the schematic.

• Start with a big ticket item; make one change at a time; build each change on top of the last.

• When stumped, think about what would be the most likely case if all else hews to reality.
• This is useful for filling in blanks, deciding what traits to cut, or generating Points of Interaction.

• Alternatively, come up with an elaborate logical justification for how the trouble spot could work in the logic of the rest of the world.

• Make them earn their adjectives
• Very important when adapting old fiction; give that purple prose a fine-toothed comb and see what’s actually useful as a description. If the description contradicts the actual content, go with the content as your base.

• If the description is vague, add some specific details with preference to those that provide Points of Interaction.

• Treat all narrators, including omniscient ones, as unreliable
• This is one of the most useful cheats out there and absolutely vital for doing any work in Lovecraftiana: act with the assumption that all narrators inherit their author’s biases and adjust components and traits accordingly.
• You can use this as an excuse to get away with damn near everything.
• But by that same token, you are not immune to it.

• Bigotry in the text works like bigotry outside of the text.
• This is where a lot of Lovecraftiana stumbles, because the authors take the bias inherent in the premise as an accurate description of the world those characters inhabit.
• It doesn’t matter how many “HPL was a huge racist” notes you put in the beginning of the book if you just repeat the bullshit as-written.

• In-universe bullshit can still be interesting
• In-universe bullshit brings with it the complicating factors of “how / why did the bullshit get believed?”,  “what makes it bullshit?”, and “who profits from maintaining the bullshit?” 

Doubtlessly I could cook up more, but for a fast-and-loose guide this is a good place to get started. 

Part 2: How I Made the Great Lady

All right, finally ready to get to the meat of the essay.

0. What am I trying to do and why, anyway? 

“Can I write a better / more nuanced version of the Bloated Woman (ie. “a Mythos scenario with narrative justification for a hedonist cult devoted to an obese goddess in 1920s Shanghai”) while maintaining its core traits?”

1. Identify relevant names / places / times in the source text.

Using Masks of Nyarlathotep as the baseline:

• Name - The Bloated Woman
• Place - Shanghai
• Time - 1925 

1b. Identify other relevant traits.

• Visual Trait: Obesity
• Thematic Association: Hunger, Consumption, Predation
• Thematic Association: Sexuality, Seduction, Paraphilia
• Trait: Disguised danger
• Mythos Connection: Hedonist cult
• Mythos Connection: Deep Ones
• Mythos Connection: Avatar of Nyarlathotep

2. Make the initial adjustments

Name: The Bloated Woman
“The Bloated Woman” definitely doesn’t sound like something a cult would call their patroness, so I used “the Great Lady” instead and took advantage of the common semantic overlap between “great” and “big”. As a bonus, this also differentiates my interpretation from Masks.

In an older draft of her post I rendered her name as 參宿 的 大 貴 后, which if I did it right would come out as "Great Noble Queen of the Three Stars”. I was able to get a Mandarin pronunciation for it but not a Shanghainese one, and I'd need both to do it properly. (If I borked this, please let me know down in the comments.)

Place: Shanghai
Stick a pin in this.

Time: 1925
Stick a pin in this one too.

3. Assess and adapt remaining traits

Visual Trait: Obesity
To fulfill the challenge I gave myself, this part had to stay.  

I purposefully kept it variable whether or not a given manifestation of the Lady is obese: sometimes the description is explicit, but most of the time I don’t mention it directly and let the audience’s imagination pick up the slack.

I describe her as “enormous” in Tape #5, but I left it at that because the focus of the horror should be the fact that she’s eating people. Then I layered on top of that the discrepancies of her winking directly at the viewer (thus aware she’s being observed), and then running out of the room in a dead sprint complete with cartwheel (with the implication that she's coming after you).

(Importantly, she’s also depicted as eating people in untitled.mp4 and Tape #??, but isn’t explicitly obese in either of those to reinforce the focus on her eating people. Though since those tapes don’t end and she never stops eating, there’s an open space there.)

In Tape #9 I left this aspect as only a brief implication (the heavy footsteps from off-screen), and hung things mostly on the hook of the dichotomy between the corpse pile and the PLEASE STAND BY placard.

Besides those instances, most invocation of her size comes from outside depictions and evocations: the venus figurine, the priestess in the flashback, the figure in the mandala. 


Thematic Association: Hunger, Consumption, Predation
This trait is underplayed in Masks, only really emerging in conjunction with the disguise the Bloated Woman uses to lure in victims. You’d think high pulp would lean into it, but I digress.

Hunger poses an interesting conceptual contradiction: It encompasses greed and gluttony (always hungering for more despite already having more than enough), but also starvation and want (not having enough and never getting it). And you can often have the latter because of the former, which is a source of a lot of “obesity = monstrosity” motifs, so that’s something to keep in mind.

(I originally forgot to add (but have since added) a reference in the original post to a Japanese manifestation of the Lady that’s explicitly emaciated, to play into this further.)

I decided to go for portraying hunger as more of a social ill that the Lady embodies, via all those glimpses of the industrial death machine. I think the closest she gets to dropping “feed me, Seymour” is her interactions with Hill (which themselves remain mostly implied), and in that case she’s either deliberately playing with his attraction to her, or his attraction to her is generating that specific feedback (abyss = mirror, he sees in her things he hates himself for wanting.)

Thematic Association: Sexuality, Seduction, Paraphilia
Per the source:

"Assisted by the Black Fan, the Bloated Woman may seduce men, giving victims unearthly and degenerate pleasure before smothering them in flabby bulk."

Sorry to break it to you, brother; she doesn’t need the fan.

Standard Chaosium laziness on this one: it’s a cheap shot and it’s not doing anything beyond “non-normative sex is gross”. There’s a potential route to emphasize the mind control / “overwhelming divine influence overriding human behavior” route, but that’s a whole ‘nother can of worms and I’m already waist-deep in the bait bucket as it is.

(I’m actually a pretty big fan of the thing DG does sometimes where the unnatural is less cults worshipping gods and more “too close to radioactive materials”, but that’s a very different type of scenario and removes the character from the equation.) 

I already touched on this with Hill’s interactions with her (it’s more overt when I’ve run the scenario he’s from, where checking his hard drive would reveal a pornography stash begun prior to his purchase of the tape), and his narrative position as the self-loathing fetishist ties all the way back to the opening tape.  

That + Tape #12 covers how this trait collides with modernity (I added Hill’s violent misogyny and the environmental cost of AI there (and contrasted it with the generally-positive presentation of the fanart that made a terf quit twitter) so as to not just copy the original’s “ew gross a kink”), but the modern fetish ecosystem didn’t exist in 1925 and Lovecraftiana leans ancient.

Venus figurines are the natural historical link to draw on, but Venus figurines weren’t really a thing in stone-age China - you’re not really likely to find them further south than Anatolia or further east than the Pontic-Caspian Steppe. But gods are famously mobile, so all I needed to do is invent or imply some manner of migration across the continent (more on that in the next section.)

(Part of why I get so much creative mileage out of the Venus of Willendorf et al. is from how time has erased all but the barest hints of artistic intent from the work and left it an ideal projection surface / interpretive space; it could be a religious token, it could be pornography, it could be a self-portrait, it could be a combination of any of those or something else entirely and we’ll never be able to say for certain. If it was based on a real person, would she be skeeved out by having a nude depiction of herself known to people around the world, or would she go “Ha! Still got it!” If it was a depiction of a goddess, what was that goddess like? What were her stories? Were her myths an integral part of the community, or the private fantasies of the sculptor? On and on.)

Trait: Disguised danger
“Surprise! The hot lady was a monster!” is such a tired trope that I’d only really invoke it in the context of something like an evolutionary arms race between the mimic and the societies around it. While the idea of a monster that takes advantage of compulsory heteronormativity as part of its hunting strategy is funny to consider, that’s deep in the weeds and not really relevant for this experiment. Into the bin it goes.

Mythos Connection: Hedonist cult
Stick a pin in this one.

Mythos Connection: Deep Ones
For what possible reason? There’s no thematic correlation besides sex, and even then they’re a terrible pick: the K’n-yani are immortal polyamorous hedonists who can manipulate matter with their minds! They’re 110% capable of some Deviantart-tier chicanery wrt human physiology. If you’re going to insist on “non-normative sex is gross” at the very least pick the right minions for the job!

What are we even doing, Chaosium?

(I didn’t come up with the potential K’n-yan connection until writing this revised essay, mostly because I thought that giving the Lady more servants would dilute the narrative impact of the cult. Which is true, but if I want to do a follow-up they’re certainly on the table. Frankly there's overlap there with my long-running ideas re: the drow / lilu. Let it never be said that don't let thoughts ruminate.) 

Mythos Connection: Avatar of Nyarlathotep
I’m a big fan of aspects, avatars, manifestations and "what you're seeing is only a passing glimpse of a greater power", but in a horror story it's risky business to just come out and say "X is an aspect of Y". Especially in the expanded Mythos, which has by and large run most of its baddies into the ground. So I think it's much better to use shared symbols and traits to draw associations between forms and say nothing more of the matter. Let the audience pick up on connections, freeing yourself from sullying the unknowable with a name.

So I used a light hand here: a three-lobed pupil, a glimpse of Azathoth (not named but identifiable), a sardonic jab at how convenient it is to have the Black Pharaoh showing up to cause problems (despite that being mostly what’s happening), and let the rest remain unsaid.

4. Add new traits as desired

Addition - Prehistoric Origin
As something of a reversal of the “Disguised danger” trait, Tapes #20 and #26 lay out the shape of the Great Lady’s past; she was a human priestess from a people who lived somewhere in the north-eastern-ish Caucasus and became what she is now through contact with the unnatural. To heighten the pathos, I added glimpses of that humanity in some of the tapes (most prominently in #10 #12, #?? and #NaN)

Addition - Cross-Continent Migration
I needed a way to move the Lady from the Caucasus to China, and the easiest way to do that was to imply it via the interstitials. The only real criteria I had in choosing the places and times was that they had to be more recent the further east they were, and there had to be a religious tradition I could slip the Lady into to indicate how the people of that time and place interpreted her (this is fairly easy: every major religion either already has or has the space for a demonized sex-haver lady.)

Putting them in reverse chronological order was an easy way to emphasize that the actual destination isn’t Shanghai, but the cave where it all began (and the revelation of the Lady’s tenuous humanity).

(Surprising no one, the PIE in the 3581 BCE interstitial does actually mean stuff. 

• Kuonikos son of Kuon Ghe => “Little Dog, son of Big Dog”. 
• Hsulaʕwes => “Good Reward”. Bit of a spoiled son, that guy.
• “Posti bhebhudhi!” => “Behind (you), be alert!”

"PH'NGLUIXR" is my attempt at Aklo, very simply just means "die" as an imperative.

Bonus gag: The cuneiform book review, if written out phonemically, is rendered “MA-AM DI-IS IS A WE-EN-DI-IS”.)

Addition - Mythos Connection: Tsan-Chan
Shadow Out of Time gives us a year, one scholar’s name, and a vague gesture at the Yellow Peril. That’s a geographic link I can pull on, but also a can of worms. But with 0 actual canon content, I can let 3000 years of sound change do its work, explain “Tsan” as a descendant of “Texan”, and go on ahead with my predominantly American cruel empire. *Waves hand at outside world*

There’s an entire Tsan-Chan post I have cooking, but the short version is that the US tried an invasion of China shortly before Cthulhu woke up and Tsan-Chan is a post-Tulu polity claiming legitimacy from both polities but not actually a direct descendant.

 

Part 3: The Pin 

I didn't just keep saying "hold onto that thought" for shits and giggles - this is the crux of the exercise that makes it all click. Buckle up.

(As I said in the commentary on the main post, a lot of what follows here started in theories I had about Tom Haan from The Magnus Archives, prior to him getting written out of the story.)

My starting place and time is Shanghai in 1925, and anyone with a cursory knowledge of Chinese history can tell you 1925 wasn’t a great time to be in China: the country was in the tail end of the Century of Humiliation, with the Republic struggling with warlord cliques that have kept things in a state of simmering violence since the death of Yuan Shikai and the end of his yearlong empire in 1916. The Nationalists and Chiang Kai-shek's Northern Expedition are three years out. The Qing Dynasty ended with the Xinhai Rebellion and the forced abdication of Puyi in 1912. Multiple treaties have carved up and handed out territory to Russia and Japan. The Boxer Rebellion of 1899-1901 saw eight Western powers invade and then demand exorbitant reparations from a government they weren't officially at war with. All excellent sources of historical context, but I don’t think there’s a strong enough conceptual link to the Lady’s traits: for that, I’m going back a few more decades to the Taiping Rebellion

The Taiping Rebellion took place from 1850-1864, and is the kind of catastrophic mass death that is more or less incomprehensible for human beings to wrap their head around. 20,000,000 casualties over 14 years of violence, famine, and disease is the low estimate. Apocalyptic religious violence ushering in the age of warfare-as-industry fits very nicely with both the endless hunger theme and the fascist future I wanted to hint at with Tsan-Chan, but the actual reason I settled on the Rebellion was because of just how common accounts of cannibalism were during the conflict (common enough that there's a Qing general commenting in his journals about how the price of human flesh has gone up since the last time he saw it). There’s our ticket in.

At the center of the Rebellion was Hong Huoxiu, a man who suffered a major mental break after failing the imperial examinations for the third time, complete with visions of the heavens and accompanying divine revelations. He took the name Hong Xiuquan and declared that he was the younger brother of Jesus Christ, who you might be familiar with that name as the central figure of a major world religion that practices communion with the divine through symbolic cannibalism, and also has some rather strong opinions on sin and some sizable hangups about sex.

(Now, in full fairness to history, the Christian elements of the God Worshiping Society came from Protestant missionaries, not Catholic ones, so I’ll invoke artistic license for thematic purposes and conveniently not specifying what the exact Christian influences were on the leader of the Great Lady Society.)

Xiuquan starts up a band of followers and it spirals out into the formation of the Tianping Heavenly Kingdom and the beginning of a war that kills tens of millions of people. The capital of the Heavenly Kingdom was in Nianjing (Tianjing at the time)...which is about 300 km upriver from Shanghai. Practically next door.

1925 then puts us ~60-75 years after the war, which means that the door is open to a cult leader who lived through the Rebellion. They'd be in their 80s or 90s and potentially pushing 100 if they're still alive, and all together the details that Masks provides for time and place fit perfectly into a historical context that emphasizes the themes I want to focus on.

Let's consider a survivor of the Taiping Rebellion: the inhabitant of one of countless rural villages stricken with famine and caught in the middle of a war zone. This survivor managed to survive extremely dire circumstances through cannibalism. And let's say that they know a little of Christianity through contact with missionaries - they converted and were baptized, but practiced a pretty heterodox vision of it.

This survivor, wracked with trauma and guilt, tries to make sense of the horrors through the means he has available. We can start freely syncretizing and remixing elements: the image of Guanyin, bodhisattva of compassion & goddess of mercy (a figure occasionally syncretized with Miryam of Nazareth); the substitutionary atonement of Christ taking on the sins of mankind; echoes of Celtic sin-eaters; propitiation of the gods through sacrifice of food; cannibalism as conduit to the divine; the insatiable appetite of industrial society; the Christian obsession with sin and guilt. And all of this is filtered through the nihilism that comes from experiencing a total failure of religious belief. It’d be perfectly reasonable for someone who’s survived what he’s survived to come to the conclusion that the world and its people are so irredeemably fucked that achieving enlightenment or acting in alignment with the Dao or being saved by the grace of God has become impossible. There’s no escape anymore. Nirvana is out of reach. No amount of good karma can get you out of this. Jesus isn't coming to save you. Confucian ethics won't do a damn. You are trapped here and then you die, forever. 

But he’s had a spiritual experience that's convinced him that he made some contact with the divine. He brushed against a greater power, he knows that there's something out there behind the world. And with every avenue of escape blocked off and every veil torn away, it's an easy thing to respond to the devouring Power (oh hey there Red Law) with subservience in the hopes that you can benefit from its leftovers and avoid destruction through servitude and sacrifice. And since you’re already fucked, you may as well throw yourself into Slaaneshi excess and eat, drink and be merry into oblivion. Not just for your own pleasures, but because the Great Lady takes on the sins of her followers as sustenance. They're all an offering made in exchange for her favor.

The survivor makes his way down the river to Shanghai in the years following the war, and there you have it - a sufficient-for-game-purposes historical / social justification for why there's a sex cult active in 1920s Shanghai whose central figure is an obese woman. Everything else is gravy.

Slushpile 19

Slushpile Index

Almost enough to do a random table of these.

1. Qlm Hogii - Random pocket-text and fantastic name for a Star Wars OC
2. Xeno’s Arrow: near-light speed ramming maneuver
3. Graffiti: "FREE CUDDLES" - headless squat humanoid, torso dominated by fanged vertical mouth. arms outstretched
4. God wiping sweat from His brow looking with pride at a whiteboard labeled "companion for Adam" that just has a bunch of crossed out scribbles surrounding a circled and underlined "big-bazonga goth gf" in the center
5. Gemstones are the crystallized residue of the spirits of the dead that form as they descend into the underworld
6. You know what would be a really easy way to get celebrated war hero Anakin Skywalker in your pocket? Promise him that once the Separatists are done, the Republic will turn its sights on the Hutts. Offer him the chance to lead the charge that destroys the galactic slave trade. 
7. Summoning “demons” actually querying uploaded minds stuck in bot-controlled hellscape cyberspace
8. “There never was a fucking squid. That would be too great a mercy.”
9. Found inside a corpse: 16 marbles
10. Found inside a corpse: Sandwich baggie of liao
11. Found inside a corpse: Bright blue stomach tumor
12. Seas of anoxic acid
13. Dream: I go back to my elementary school music classroom, where all my old classmates and teacher are already there practicing the choral parts of Lawrence’s boss theme from Bloodborne. Someone, not sure who, points out the ghost of a nun exiting via the door to outside. She disappears from view for a moment then returns to view and gives us a friendly wave. Short, kinda fat, glasses, round face. Weather is very nice outside, but that also might be part of the apparition, it looked somewhat painted.
14. The spirits of the dead are angry because they, unlike the living, have both perspective and solidarity. With all divisions stripped away, the dead are keenly aware that history is a millstone grinding down the struggling masses of humanity beneath the endless violent whims of innumerable petty tyrants: of course they’re angry. 
15. Media that Doesn't Exist: Anime movie about a bunch of convenience store workers plotting and carrying out the murder of the main character’s neighbor 
16. Using Identify spell to jumpstart germ theory by tagging diseases according to origin.
17. The cosmos is but a dream of MANA YOOD SUSHAI; at the center of the cosmos is AZATHOTH, the shadow of the dreamer, the roiling subconscious chaos from which the dream is made; walking the countless worlds one finds the Speaker in its million masks, messenger and nightmare.
18. “You would think either he’d run out of fingers or we’d run out of pies.”
19. “Most of the world’s suffering, statistically speaking, is generated by a pair of dangling nodules and crippling anxiety regarding them.”
20. “We could have stopped this. Inevitability would be too great a mercy, and I refuse to believe that the universe would leave a single avenue of human agony unplumbed.”
21. A rocket bound for Ganymede launches from the South China Sea, carrying six hibernating benthoi, seven thousand fertilized roe, and a shoggoth constructor ganglia.
22. MoSh idea: nationalized online casinos for tax collection
23. Solo game about going to an anime convention - deciding where to go, what to do (get # ribbons?) while juggling energy (reduced by going without food or having too much junk or negative encounters or doing too much)
24. Of all the dead peoples in the universe, the ability to Dream with such clarity is rare. One in millions.
25. Essay for another time: monsters don’t need HP
26. Real-world inspiration: the Running Madonna of Sulmona
27. Alternate Roswell Incident: A downed Soviet spy plane, hastily papered over by the dissemination and subsequent retraction of a story about a crashed flying saucer.
28. The drug liao, which grants its users visions beyond the time and space that they know, breaks onto the world stage in the late 60s. Then come the Hounds, those things that live in the angles beyond the world, ever-pacing and ever-hungry.
29. Dream: I am visiting a fancy manor; there’s extremely good pizza and beer, and also one of those not-necessarily run-and-jump-away-from-something sequences. Very floaty jump, moving forward fast but falling slow. First person. Also there’s a woman wearing something like a plastic skin suit of another woman, though I don’t think she was related to any of the above.
30. Adventuring parties as a combination of seasonal workers / traveling circuses / monster hunters.
31. Indo-European language with click consonants
32. Story idea: A pulp author’s litigious estate makes it impossible for the protagonists to get a hold of the book he wrote that describes how to banish the monster.
33. Thelemic Babalon, except it’s the Red Queen Hypothesis instead of an excuse for Crowley to get laid.
34. There are a considerable number of predynastic pharaohs known from a single inscription and nothing else.
35. Idea: Fantasy world with only American wildlife. Pleistocene megafauna is in, of course, we gotta have the sloths.
36. Endoparasitic echinoderms = facehuggers
37. If anything is emblematic of Star Trek’s fading relevance, it's the lack of  even a lackluster attempt to capitalize on Big Lady Mania with a Klingon. It’s free real estate, people would go absolutely feral.
38. Idea: culture where coming of age entails undergoing a pale blue dot moment via astral projection
39. “March of progress” painting but modern man has turned around and is tearfully embracing his ancestors
40. Star Trek Hard-Sci Reboot: Vulcans now methane-breathing ice-shelled land squids. Klingons are Alex Ries style alien hippos. Ferengi are collectives of centipedes wearing skin suits that talk like crypto-bros. Centrifugal gravity, delta-V budgets, interspecies cooperation in the death void 
41. “Everyone fantasizes about being able to stare right into the abyss and say ‘you didn’t win’, but I’ve yet to hear of someone pulling it off.”
42. Dream: I am reading a Delta Green supplement titled FREENDSHIP, which claims on the back to detail 10 species of alien parasites. There’s a conspiracy web of NPC mugshots, and multiple art pieces of women in burgundy kimonos; they have stone blocks with kanji on them for heads.
43. Overheard on a walk: “I don’t think you have room for a gazebo.”
44. “I am a daughter of the bear, a follower of the path of dogs, and servant of the queen of night; why would I fear any blade held by men?”
45. Paleolithic names: Doqu, Hlunggua, Chirwan, Ngo, Tamo, Tatang, Yavuu
46. Artificial solar system with black hole + stable red dwarves (or k-stars), with planets arranged in resonant orbits with each other to prevent full total locking. 
47. Christian rock band thrown out of their music circle with the release of their 18 track death metal power ballad about the harrowing of Hell.
48. In the hierarchy of harmful spirits, a spirit of hunger is more immediately dangerous than a spirit of gluttony.  
49. Yithians from opabinia, rather than tullymonstrum 
50. I like when DG scenarios play into the "people dragged into the orbit of the greater powers and irrevocably changed by it" aspect. 
51. After the dissolution of the soul into its component parts on death, the shadow is particularly vulnerable to outside influence. Accumulated sin and trauma, in sufficient quantities and unreleased by premortem catharsis, will transform shadows into demons, who then feed on and reproduce via further negative emotions.
52. “This is an ember of the flame imperishable, stolen from the heavens by the Watchers of old when they saw that mankind was cold and afraid: it is the very last of it on earth.” 
53. Prospero’s Dream, █509 - The AI mascot of a vat-meat barbecue joint, no matter how many times it is reset, keeps switching to the 'heavyset' appearance preset and flirting with and/or unsettling patrons.
54. How to identify a Mythos tome as the real deal? Look for how little sense it makes when compared to normal occult traditions; magical circles in a grimoire that works are actually renders of a hypersphere 
     

**

Spam from “Florence”: 

WARNING: DON'T FALL FOR THE ELON MUSK CRYPTO SCAM THAT ALMOST BROKE ME
I'm still reeling from the shock of losing a staggering $64,000 to a fake Tesla investment platform that used realistic deepfake videos of Elon Musk to lure me into a trap….

I don't know, I appreciate the madlibs of an old-school spam comment. This format was around long before genAI and it will endure long past the collapse of the thinking machines.

**

The benthoi clans of the [NESSIE-BESSIE] spawning dyad, reeling from catastrophic defeat in their wars with the [DAGON-HYDRA] and [ABAIA-JUTURNA] kin-groups, can see the writing on the wall. Earth is no longer safe for them; Tulu is stirring in the deeps and they fell out of its worship long, long ago. The least-bad of their options is escape from Earth entirely, but benthoi are not a species or civilization given to space-faring. They will need help…

**

Your people have lived in these mountains since the Great Winter. Alone among all the tribes, you survived when the ice retreated and the herds were no more. You learned of planting and tending from your neighbors among the valley people, and by those teachings you have endured.

But now the age might grow too great to bear. For many years now, each summer has seen the Sky-King’s riders strike closer and closer to your home: now they are at your door.

They wield weapons of bronze, have made the wild horse tame. Where they ride, they slaughter, rape, enslave, bring sickness in their wake. They tear down the sacred places and put the elders to the axe; they kill both god and language, destroying history itself.

The wise folk of your people have gathered together, to see what may be done. Each in turn enters their trance, and one eye in the spirit world each in turn says that there is nothing that may be done. All omens point to death; there will be no escape. To fight will invite slaughter, to flee will merely delay it. The spirits are weakened from the destruction of their holy places; many have handed themselves over, fearful of the riders’ great bloody-handed god.

But the last of the wise says differently, and tells all gathered there of her vision of a great signal fire on a distant peak. Our prayers have reached the land of the gods, she says. They hear us and send their aid. Endure but a little longer, make ready for their arrival.

The elders grumble among themselves and say that she is too young and bull-headed, that she sees what she wishes to see and says what the people wish to hear. She says the same of them, that it is easier to accept death than the pain of hope.

There is no telling who saw the truth until the horsemen come. 

 

Dan Plays Games 11

Index 

The Apothecary of Trubiz

A cute little three-dollar cipher-puzzle game that’s three dollars worth of puzzles.

TR-49

Research and deduction games are taking off as a genre, and this one’s a solid entry into the roster. You’re given a computer terminal and the task of finding and identifying one specific book in the database, and it sends you right down the rabbithole of an alternate literary history. There are a solid number of aha moments, I never felt like the path forward was too obtuse to stump me for long, and I was able to 100% it in a reasonable 7 hours. Nice and satisfying.

Scarlet Hollow (Episode 5 update)

I can’t remember if I’ve written about Scarlet Hollow in this series before, so here’s the precis just in case I haven’t: Slay the Princess devs, southern gothic horror VN, it’s fuckin’ good. Unicorn Meat is probably happening the next holler over.

Where Slay the Princess is a line diverging into a fractal, Scarlet Hollow is a bowl of recursive spaghetti. Events connect to each other in unexpected ways, older episodes are called back to, choices you made hours or episodes ago can compound in ways you never saw coming. Moments with a clearly-signposted binary choice will often lead directly into a second similar choice, or add a third option because of something you did two episodes prior.

Playing through on both my old save and a new one from the beginning (as a refresher) was an excellent choice. If you’re not patient enough to wait for the final story update, it’s a great excuse to play it twice and make different choices.

Hell is Us (update)

Having now finished the game, I can say that it’s mostly solid, succeeds at most of the things it set out to do, and is let down by the most “we ran out of money and / or time” third act I’ve seen in a long, long time. Honestly, calling it a third act borders on falsehood: it’s a hallway, a large room, four elite enemies, four switches and a cutscene. The narrative ties itself off in a burst of action movie shlock that poorly suits the story that’s been woven together so far. I can’t say that it ruins the game, because it feels so disjointed from the previous ~27 hours that it doesn’t feel like it’s part of the game.

Removing Act 3 from the equation, there are still some pretty substantial issues: after nearly 30 hours the fights do become pretty tedious from the woefully limited enemy variety, and upping the difficulty doesn’t really stop you from being able to face-tank your way through the game. The plot of act 2 spins its wheels a bit and fizzles out after a while, losing the strength of the opening hours and becoming more median video-gamey, and the attempts at deep lore only really get to shallow depths.

Still: on the whole the game was engaging, and I played through till I hit credits. It won’t go down as a favorite of all time, but it was worth the playing and I hope it inspires some people to make something like it. 

Dorfromantik

Hoo buddy this is a dangerous one in terms of the feel-good brain chemicals. I can easily lose hours in it, even when the gameplay solely consists of rotating hexes so their edges match. Pattern-Seeking Brain is pleased; Time-Management Brain is horrified.

The Seance of Blake Manor

An extremely Irish sleuth-em-up with great visual style. You’ve been summoned to a manor-turned-hotel in western Ireland, to find a missing attendee of a multi-day seance. Everything you investigate ticks time a minute forward, and you have to juggle everyone’s schedules along with your own. The cast is a wonderful gamut of folks you’d find in a Call of Cthulhu module; everyone has their own plot, sometimes connected to each other, sometimes not. It feels excellent to make a breakthrough and have a new crop of clues pour in, especially if you stumble on it by chance while exploring.

While the mystery itself isn’t going to change on repeat plays, there’s enough stuff in the game that I think it’ll be worth a second run-through to clean up things you’ve missed.

Lingo 2

Never played Antichamber but it’s got the same sort of hyperminimalist visual vibe and obtuse puzzles. You’re running around collecting letters, and then plugging those letters into consoles scattered around the world. Each console has a word, you need to transform it into another word, but you also need to decode the function you need to use (since the transform commands are all clusters of symbols).

There’s often a lack of feedback when you solve a puzzle - you get a tone and the console turns green, but it’s not always clear what has changed in the world when you do so.

Sol Cesto

I was sold on this just from the visuals, and was not disappointed. “Weird” is accurate but insufficient. “Fever-dream (positive)” is closer, but still feels somewhat reductive.

The sun is gone, and you need to get to the bottom of the dungeon to find it. Each layer in the dungeon is a 4 x 4 grid of squares filled with monsters, treasure, & traps; you select the row, but the exact square you land on is random, and the crux of the game is a combination of pushing your luck and managing the odds of getting a given square type.

Once you really get a hang of it you can break the game wide open, which I think is nice; it’s not a forever game. It also manages to sidestep the issue of running out of metaprogression unlocks before beating the game; you use the same currency to buy progression unlocks and in-run items (sending coins back up to the surface via a bucket on a rope), so once you have nothing left to unlock you don’t have to worry about saving for the next bucket room or sending part of your winnings back home; you can spend it all on items, which is secretly the best upgrade in the game.

Scriptorium

A paper-doll style art studio featuring the best weird little guys medieval marginalia can provide. Comes with a sandbox mode where you can just do whatever you want, and a campaign where you fulfill requests for clients and gradually increase your library of sketches. It’s a wonderful time, definitely has RPG applications.

Blue Prince

Late to the game, but I’ve been mostly unspoiled - (having forgotten most of what I glimpsed my partner do when she played it last year). I’ve hit credits, gotten 4 trophies, and begun digging into the deeper puzzles. So far I’ve managed to squeeze out a little progress every run, even if it’s just checking out a new room or finding one minor clue or something like that, but even then the spectre of getting repeatedly fucked over by RNG remains a consistent threat and I can already feel the frustration setting in on occasion. Half the game is puzzle solving, the other half is mitigating the game fucking you over, and your enjoyment will be contingent on how well you can mitigate that. So far I’ve found having multiple goals is the best defense, but that's just a defense, not a solution to the tension. I legitimately don't know if this game should be a roguelike - being a roguelike certainly was part of what elevated it to popularity, but I don't know if the roguelike elements are good for the game, exactly. But they're not exactly wholly bad either, I like the sense of increasing familiarity you get with the manor and its systems so shrug.

I have, by my count so far, cheated on four puzzles, one of which I absolutely would never have gotten on my own and one that I probably could have gotten only after a massive flaming crash out. take that for what you will.

 

Gameable Material Section

Steps = Exploration Turns

There's no reason to count exact time when you're already counting turns.

In OSE, an 8-hour day is 48 exploration turns and costs 2 flasks of oil. Erase the "8-hour day", no more hours, hours are fake. (Not bumping it up to 50, because 48 is divisible by 2, 3, 4, 6, 8, 12 and 16. Easy clocks.)

Each step (exploration turn) = 1 new room. Going through a room you've already been in is 1/2 a Step, going through it a third time reduces it to 0 (stopping to re-examine costs a full Step).

If you run out of Steps, you need to make camp and rest or you'll start taking penalties to everything from exhaustion.

Combat encounters count as 1 Step. Not because they take long, but because they exhaust you. 

A party member can avoid getting hit in combat at the expense of Steps (probably according to hit dice of enemy? Unsure)

Certain interactions (room mechanisms, sickness, magical effects) can decrease Steps; potions and some rare magical items can increase Steps.

You can pay a Step to secure a location from ambush. 

Doubtlessly there are other applications. 

 

Dan Plays Games Index

Micro-reviews of video games I've played.

Last updated 05/26/2026

** 

Dan Plays Games 1 (03/14/2022)

• Psychonauts
• Gris
• Scourgebringer
• Little Nightmares
• Bloodstained Ritual of the Night
• Lobotomy Corporation
• Remnant: From the Ashes
• Kingdom: Two Crowns
• SUPERHOT
• Cross Code
• Horizon: Forbidden West

Gamepost Special: Elden Ring (07/04/2022)

Dan Plays Games 2 (05/04/2023)

• Warframe
• Sundered
• Roadwarden
• Spiritfarer
• Vigil: Longest Night
• Blasphemous
• Chained Echoes

Gamepost Special: Legend of Zelda Tears of the Kingdom (06/05/2023) 

Gamepost Special: Fear and Hunger 2 (02/26/2024) 

Dan Plays Games 3 (03/26/2024)

• Balatro
• Symphony of War: the Nephilim Saga
• Limbus Company
• 20 Minutes Till Dawn
• Chants of Sennar
• Path of Achra
• Otxo
• The Dungeon Beneath
• Blasphemous 2
• Wildermyth
• The Forgotten City
• Grime
• The Fermi Paradox
• Book of Hours
• Roboquest
• Moonring
• Brutal Orchestra
• Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood 

Dan Plays Games 4 (07/27/2024)

• Black Mesa
• Darkest Dungeon 2
• Coromon
• Civilization 6
• Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree
• Void Stranger
• Quester
• Baldur's Gate 3 

Dan Plays Games 5 (12/05/2024)

• Tactical Breach Wizards
• The Pathless
• Potioncraft: Alchemist Simulator
• Halo CE (MCC)
• Halo 4 (MCC, Spartan Ops only)
• Terra Nil
• Vampire Survivors (replay + Castlevania DLC)
• Potionomics

Dan Plays Games 6 (03/01/2025)

• Buckshot Roulette
• Epigraph
• Mouthwashing
• Katana Zero
• Selaco
• Shadows of Doubt
• Quester | Osaka
• ABI-DOS
• Gods vs Horrors (demo)
• The Roottrees are Dead
• Caves of Qud
• UFO50
• Rift of the Necrodancer
• Sorry, We're Closed 

Dan Plays Games 7 (05/22/2025)

• Pyrene
• Pokerogue
• Spiritfarer (follow-up)
• Path of Achra (follow-up)
• Sorry, We're Closed (follow-up) 
• Ender Magnolia
• Time Wasters
• ENA: Dream BBQ
• Gods vs Horrors (release build)
• Slay the Princess
• Promise Mascot Agency

Dan Plays Games 8 (08/14/2025)

• Elden Ring: Nightreign
• Odallus: The Dark Call
• One Finger Death Punch
• Rift of the Necrodancer (follow-up)
• Binding of Isaac: Repentance
• Date Everything 

Gamepost Special: Expedition 33 (09/15/2025) 

Dan Plays Games 9 (11/25/2025)

• Date Everything (follow-up)
• Islanders: New Shores
• Silksong
• Hades 2
• Binding of Isaac: Repentance (follow-up)
• Decktamer
• Hell is Us
• Peak
• Picto Quest: The Cursed Grids 

Dan Plays Games 10 (01/24/2026)

•  Forward Escape the Fold
• Asbury Pines
• Dungeon Encounters
• Nuclear Throne (10 year replay)
• Ye Guild Clerk
• Neon White
• Stackflow
• Monsters are Coming!: Rock and Road
• Uncle Chop's Rocket Shop 

Dan Plays Games 11 (05/26/2026)

• The Apothecary of Trubiz
• TR-49
• Scarlet Hollow (Episode 5 update)
• Hell is Us (follow-up)
• Dorfromantik 
• The Seance of Blake Manor
• Lingo 2
• Sol Cesto
• Scriptorium
• Blue Prince 

 

50 More Alternate History Divergence Points

First installment

THE TROUSERS OF TIME HAVE SPLIT AGAIN

1. Aleister Crowley successfully summons his guardian angel at Boleskine House; it immediately reduces him to constituent atoms and irradiates over a hundred square kilometers of Scottish countryside by presence alone.
2. A confederation of eastern hunter-gatherers and surviving neanderthal tribes successfully blocks Yamnaya migration into Europe.
3. Brief but peaceful contact is made with a team of alien academic observers in Australia c. ~14,000 BCE.
4. The excavation of Troy is handed off to literally anyone besides Heinrich Schliemann.
5. Five volumes of Emperor Claudius’ Tyrrhenika are discovered in a Lombard monastery, April 1378.
6. H.P. Lovecraft is drafted into the US army and dies on March 29, 1918 during the Battle of St. Quentin.
7. The Indian Plate migrates slower than in baseline, and has not yet collided with Asia by the time humans evolve.
8. Basque sailors discover a chain of islands west of the Azores in the early 1400s, which is swiftly called Atlantis by continental scholars.
9. Some absolute mad bastard of a Soviet linguist spends 40 years documenting Siberian languages in exhaustive detail, providing much firmer support for the Dene-Yeneseian hypothesis.
10. An anonymous Spanish clergyman, by some miracle of conscience, squirrels away 15 Maya codices that remain untouched until 1954.
11. A relatively small and relatively slow meteor hits the northern Atlantic Ocean in 1701, causing relatively catastrophic tsunamis.
12. Catherine Eddows fends off her attacker in the early morning of September 30th 1888, fracturing his skull, collarbone, and three vertebrae with a brick in a stocking; “Jack the Ripper” is found dead later that day.
13. A few clades of trilobites make the jump to land and/or freshwater and survive to the present day.
14. OH JESUS CHRIST SEA SCORPIONS NEVER WENT EXTINCT EITHER
15. Han dynasty scholars mostly-accurately reconstruct several dinosaur species.
16. Jimmy Hoffa’s body is found in 1990, having been stuffed inside the freezer of a Wendy’s franchise in Jersey City.
17. The Rosetta Stone is never lost.
18. The United States forgoes the use of nuclear weapons on Japan.
19. The 1998 Copyright Extension Act fails to pass.
20. Pre-Socratic philosophers devise a preliminary germ theory as an offshoot of atomism, where sickness is caused by harmful atoms entering the body.
21. Percival Lowell doesn’t jump to conclusions.
22. Mongol invasion of Japan finds initial but unsustainable success.
23. Alexander the Modestly Accomplished dies to an errant slingstone in 330 BC, toppling his Persian campaign.
24. Early church fathers are somehow persuaded to approve the practice of same-sex unions, on the grounds that it’s technically not called a marriage and the participants definitely promised to remain celibate.
25. Queen Victoria dies of tuberculosis in 1839.
26. Star Wars isn’t saved in the editing room, and achieves only modest success; its sequel, Splinter of the Mind’s Eye, flops hard enough to shutter the franchise.
27. Tolkien ends up finishing and publishing that sequel novel to LotR.
28. Constantinople remains Constantinople, and does not become Istanbul.
29. Old New York remains New Amsterdam, and does not become New York.
30. Henry VIII decides it’s easier to just institute inheritance by adoption.
31. CPR invented by Abbasid physicians c. 900.
32. The Wars of the Three Kingdoms fail to establish the Commonwealth; Ireland and Scotland remain independent.
33. Someone slightly to moderately less bigoted than John Campbell serves as early science fiction’s tastemaker.
34. Christianity flounders in the Mediterranean and survives primarily in central Asia and India.
35. Sino-Soviet split never occurs. 
36. Monotremes make up ~1/4 of all mammal species on Earth.
37. Alien transmissions are detected nearly as soon as radio telescopy is introduced.
38. Major eruption of the Yellowstone hotspot in 1803.
39. Hawaii remains an independent kingdom.
40. Publication of Malleus Maleficarum is banned by the Church.
41. Elder Thing arcology detected during Artemis II lunar flyby.
42. USAF pursues 2003 “Rods from God” satellite weapons program.
43. A semi-successful IAL takes off through connections to the various early 20th century New Age movements.
44. Piltdown Man is immediately clocked as a hoax and gains minimal publicity.
45. Robert E. Howard dies of a stroke in 1982.
46. A series of mass shooting in the 1970s lead to a semblance of American gun control laws.
47. Common Brittonic isn’t displaced by Old English.
48. Augustine of Hippo remains a Manichaean.
49. Penicillin is discovered decades later.
50. Hokkaido maintains independence.

Or all of them at once, as usual.

Wikipedia Links from my Notes 3

Slushpile index 

Part 1, Part 2

These posts accumulate quite fast. 

1. Dictionary of the Khazars
A 1984 novel by Milorad Pavić that tells its multi-headed century-spanning alternate-history story through dictionary format. I’ve not read it but I really should, since it sounds 110% like my kind of shit. Though right now it seems my bets are either borrowing the low-quality scanned pdf from Internet Archive or snagging it through interlibrary loan.

2. Quinametzin
From Aztec mythology via the Codex Mendieta; six giant sons of Mixcoatl, who survived the flood that destroyed the world of the Fourth Sun and then founded the cities and peoples of the Fifth.

3. Ḫulbazizi
“Evil be gone” or “the evil is eradicated”; the final phrase of Sumerian and later Alkkadian exorcism incantations. 

4. Ofuda
Wood or paper talismans used in both Shinto and Japanese Buddhism.

5. Haida Manga
This is predominantly the work of Haida artist Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas, and while the article doesn’t have any visual examples a quick google search brings up some striking comic work.

6. Esplumoir Merlin
A hut / cottage / tower / castle etc where Merlin transforms into a bird or back into a human.

7. Barlaam and Josaphat
A popular medieval saints’ tale about a prince who escapes the seclusion of his father’s palace for a life of ascetic piety that, by the time Caxton printed it, would have been an English translation of a Latin translation of a Greek translation of a Georgian translation of an Arabic translation of a Middle Persian translation of a Sanskrit text about the early life of Siddharta Gautama. So the Buddha is canonically a saint in both the Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic churches, though I don’t think either would admit to it.

8. Menocchio
A miller executed by the Roman Inquisition in 1599 for a sundry list of heresies, including:

• The only sin is harming one’s neighbor.
• Blasphemy only hurts the blasphemer.
• Mary wasn’t a perpetual virgin.
• The pope has no special spiritual privilege beyond an ordinary righteous man.
• As the afterlife is God’s domain and fully outside of human influence, there’s no reason to pray for the dead and the living should focus on helping the living.
• Sacraments are all human inventions to make money; God gives baptismal grace to everyone directly at their birth.
• Marriage was established by men, not God; an exchange of vows is all that is needed and anything more is just business.
• Anyone can become a priest through study (the practice of ordination being just another business)
• The use of Latin in court trials is a way for the rich to oppress the poor, since the accused usually don’t know what they’re being accused of or how to defend themselves.
• “God has given the Holy Spirit to all, to Christians, to heretics, to Turks, and to Jews; and he considers them all dear, and they are all saved in the same manner.”
• The universe started as an undifferentiated coagulation of the four elements in a state similar to a block of cheese, and that God and the angels emerged from it like worms (from said block of cheese).

Dang, Menocchio, leave some wins for the rest of us.

9. Al-Wakwak
An island from medieval Islamic literature, supposedly located in the seas east of China. The inhabitants are all women who grow on a tree like fruit, and while I can’t say this is directly related to Elden Ring it certainly feels appropriate.

10. Youdu
Capital city of the underworld in Chinese mythology; I think there’s a fun contrast to be made here with Pandemonium as rival cities, dual cities, or even the same city in different periods or under different administrations.

11. Alyoshenka
I fucking love this article. It’s just some Russian creepypasta that has somehow had a dedicated wikipedia article for 20 years, with all the vague, unsourced, unverifiable claims that this would entail. you could easily use it as a case study of how to spot bad information and spurious claims while doing online research. It reads like a bad first attempt at an SCP article and annoying as that can be, you can develop a certain fondness for the really impressive flops. It’s the sort of bad shortform horror fiction that makes me go “oh man I could probably make a good version of this”.

12. Category: Yokai
An inclusion that requires no justification; everyone should have a list of yokai on hand.

13. Dionysiaca
A late-Classical epic poem about the life and accomplishments of Dionysus, including his military expedition to India, written in Greek sometime in the 400s AD. It’s the longest surviving poem in Greco-Roman literature at over 20,000 lines in 48 books, survives in what appears to be its completion, and somehow no one knows or talks about this. There are only two English translations that I can find, with the oldest still being from 1940. 

14. Caribbean Shaktism
The British system of indenture in India saw a sizable population of Tamils deported to the Caribbean. They brought their religious practices with them, which have developed on their own into a syncretic tradition that holds Kali-Mariamman as the primary manifestation(s) of Shakti. A historical curiosity that I never even considered, and a good reminder that the world is a big mixed-up bag of stuff.

15. Lake Uniamési
An enormous apocryphal lake in east-central Africa, believed to be the source of the Benue, Nile, Congo and Zambezi rivers by European missionaries for a brief period in the mid 1800s. Was most likely a misinterpretation of the African Great Lakes.

16. Pas-ta’ai
A festival held by the Saisiyat people of Taiwan to commemorate and appease the spirits of a tribe of dwarves who had feuded with the Saisiyat’s ancestors. Has had something of a modern resurgence, though that has come at the cost of disruptive tourists.

17. Herxheim (archaeological site)
Archaeological site in Germany and former home of a neolithic cannibal death cult. 

The Herxheim mass-grave is estimated to hold the remains of at least 500 individuals, with many of them originating a noteworthy distance from the site; recovered bones display cuts and fractures in consistent enough patterns to indicate methodological killing, post mortem butchering, and consumption. Skulls were converted into vessels, long bones were cracked open and scraped clean of marrow. With so many foreigners among the dead, they had to have either travelled there intentionally or brought there by force.

And all of this is packed at the tail-end of Herxheim’s history: after about 300 years of habitation and a further 50 years of human sacrifice, the site was abandoned and never reclaimed.

18. Temagami Magnetic Anomaly
A magnetic anomaly in eastern Ontario generated by a large geological structure of unknown composition and origin (though it’s probably from a meteor impact depositing  a shit-ton of iron). I like the name, it's got an excellent ring to it.

19. Huang Bamei
You win at piracy by retiring with your head still on your shoulders: “Two Guns” Huang Bamei not only did that, but did it so recently that she’s got a photograph on her Wikipedia page. She died in 1982! Got her start smuggling salt with her father, then worked up to running her own operation, got caught, dodged execution, got recruited by the Nationalists to fight the Japanese, went back to piracy, got cornered by the government again, got pardoned, the Nationalists recruited her again to fight the communists, and then finally retired from piracy in Taiwan. Turned down the CIA’s attempt to recruit her and successfully sued Shaw Brothers Studio over a film depicting her as a collaborator with the Japanese. 

20. Zapam Zucum
Goddess of carob trees in the folklore of the Aymara and Diaguita people of Argentina / Chile / Bolivia. Looks over infants laid down in the shade while their mothers work. Described as having dark skin, hair, and eyes, white hands, and - the article seems keen to point this out - big ol’ gazongas.

21. Zaqqum
A tree at the center of Hell in Islamic tradition; its fruit is shaped like demon heads and boils sinners from the inside when eaten. I’m honestly surprised that “inverse of the Tree of Life” took this long for me to find, it’s a natural mythic extension to Eden.

22. Eglė the Queen of Serpents
A figure from Lithuanian folklore; Eglė is a human woman who marries the king of serpents and together they have three sons and a daughter. After completing some impossible tasks (as is tradition) Eglė leaves the serpent’s palace to visit her family, at which point her brothers gang up, learn the means of summoning the serpent king from Eglė’s daughter Drebulė, and kill the serpent to prevent Eglė from returning to the sea. In grief Eglė transforms her children into oak / birch / ash / aspen trees, and then herself into a fir.

And also she’s a character in Elden Ring, I guess. I don’t really see the resemblance, there’s nothing remotely applicable between the two stories. It’s not like Elden Ring has a character who probably fucked a snake and is associated with a big tree that generates a considerable amount of sap / resin like a pine tree would and oh…

23. List of Hoaxes on Wikipedia
Since everything on Wikipedia is CC-BY-SA, all of these hoaxes have inadvertently been added to a sort of shared alternate history, and I think that’s neat. Most of these are stubs or minor blurbs, but there are probably a few that could be expanded into a bit of nifty flash fiction.

24. Chinese Characters of Empress Wu
A series of alternative Hanzi characters that saw some use for a time during the reign of Wu Zeitian, though the mandate evaporated as soon as she died. They’re all in unicode, as is right. Most of them are for fairly important words (sun, monarch, person, etc), which fits with their invention as a sort of linguistic show of force.

25. Medieval Runes
The descendent of the Younger Futhark, used throughout Scandinavia up until the early modern period even after the introduction of the Latin Script in the 1200s. Would be a great pull if you want a script for a game; it’s recognizable but not just copying Elder Futhark because Tolkien did it, and there are more letter variants to work with (to handle the historical development of new sounds)

26. Manungal
Sumerian goddess of prisons, name translates to “great princess”. Felt like an interesting dichotomy. The article points out that, given the place and time, the goddess of prisons would be pretty merciful compared to the mutilation and / or summary execution you’d normally get in the era of Hammurabi.

27. List of Aesop’s Fables
And these are just the ones with Wikipedia articles! The Perry Index has 725 of them, and I honestly had no idea there were so many. They’re so ubiquitous as a thing people just know about that it fades into the cultural background radiation, which is certainly a shame I should remedy. While odds are good that Aesop might have been a character stories were attributed to out of convention or convenience, that’s useful inspiration in its own right. 

28. Matilda Joslyn Gage
A woman with one hell of a resume. Abolitionist, feminist, suffragette, journalist, author, critic of religion, campaigner for indigenous rights, etc etc. Also the mother-in-law of L. Frank Baum.

29. Zana of Tkhina
One of those cases where it feels like reality is copying some of my notes.

It’s the mid 1800s: A strange woman is found wandering the woods of Abkhazia: tall, dark-skinned, covered in thick reddish-brown body hair, and seemingly unable to speak. She’s captured, sold as a curiosity multiple times before, and ending with Edgi Genaba of Tkhina. She lives outdoors on the Genaba estate until her death in the 1880s, survived by four children; anything more than general details is lost to time. 

The locals at the time considered her an abnauayu (a wild-man); Soviet cryptozoologists Alexander Mashkovtsev and Boris Porshnev thought she was a surviving neanderthal or some other relict hominid. Their excavations of the Genaba family cemetery in the 1970s exhumed the body of her youngest son Khwit (d.1954), and a woman's body that had been buried without a coffin. That body was not conclusively identified (via DNA analysis) as Zana until 2021. Modern scholars think the most likely explanation is that she was Afro-Abkhazian (a diaporic community descended from east African slaves brought to the region by the Ottomans) and had congenital generalized hypertrichosis, causing both her body hair and apparent intellectual disability. 

Khwit and Zana's skulls remain in Moscow; the rest of Zana's body was stored in the Sukhumi Museum of Natural History until it was destroyed during the 1992 war in Abkhazia.

It’s not a happy ending. I doubt the middle or beginning were particularly happy, either. The article says that Zana's four children were born under “unclear circumstances”, and while that doesn't necessitate the worst possible outcome I don't think the odds are in favor of history cutting her a break. 

Still. In my mind's eye I can see the neanderthals wander out of the woods one evening when no one was watching, and Zana slips away with them to live happy and free in the mountains till the end of her days. It’s bullshit, but sometimes you need a bit of bullshit to get through the day.

A toast to Zana; she deserved so much better than she got.

 

The Commons Section

1. Titan Sea Map
CC-BY 2.0 (Peter Minton)
Solid campaign world map right there, maybe slap a few islands down and you're good to go.

2. World Map with Separatist Movements
CC-BY-SA-4.0 (Vojtěch Pokorný)
A map of the modern world if every entry on the Wikipedia list of active separatist movements (as of Jan 2023) succeeded. Excellent fuel for some alternate history scenarios even if you just pick a couple. 

3. Historical map Orkneyar 
Public Domain (Unknown artist)
Map of the Orkney Islands for Adventure magazine. Terrible resolution, basically unreadable, but would be easy to blow up and trace over.

4. Creature hyena
CC-BY-3.0 (David Revoy / Blender Foundation
I love how much this absolutely isn't a hyena and yet feels the most hyena it's possible to be. Bet it has an absolutely fucked up laugh.

5. Wooly mammoths near the Somme River
Public Domain (Charles Robert Knight)
A mural for the American Museum of Natural History. knight has loads of other great vintage paleoart, I went with the mammoths because of course I did. 

6. Font de Gaume
Public Domain (Charles Robert Knight)
Human paleoart gets graded on a pretty sharp curve, but this is a solid one.

7. Gothmog, Lord of Balrogs
CC-BY-4.0 (Álvaro Fernández González)
Now I'm not entirely certain where CC fanart falls on the spectrum of yea or nay, but this is a nice menacing balrog.

8. Sigmund
Public Domain (Arthur Rackham)
Used this one for my PDLOTR project. Leave it to Rackham to make some incredible art of some truly godawful subject matter. 

9. Setebos
Public Domain (Joseph Urban)
Design work for a 1916 performance of the masque Caliban by the Yellow Sands. That's a dungeon if I've ever seen one.

10.Warrior
CC-BY-4.0 (David Revoy)
The boob plate isn't going to pass armorer's muster, but you can do far worse for anime-vibe art.

11. Lia Turtle
CC-BY-4.0 (David Revoy / Blender Foundation)
If it's not obvious yet, David Revoy has a lot of CC art on Wikimedia Commons.

12. Maastricht Book of Hours, BL Stowe MS17 f200v
Public Domain (Unknown artist)
Nun with animal legs, bigass sword, and a no-nonsense expression. Figure that will be of interest to the readership of this blog.

13. BlankMap-Philippines-noborders
Public Domain (Howard the Duck)
Certain someone can find a use for this.

14. Ekko (Echo)
Public Domain (Theodor Kittelsen)
All of Kittelsen's work is PD and all of it is fantastic. His main page has a gallery.


 

Remaking LotR With Only Public Domain Sources: Part 2

Arthur Rackham

Part 1

As before, I’m letting things grow organically. No real order besides the order ideas come to me.

Housekeeping

Before I get started, three things.. 

#1: A few of my real-life friends said it’d be helpful to have a list of references, since they’re more familiar with Tolkien than the works I’m pulling for the experiment, so here’s the list for part 1:

• Middle Earth = Various (To be determined)
• The One Ring = Seal of Solomon (Testament of Solomon, etc.)
• Eru Illuvatar -MANA-YOOD-SUSHAI (The Gods of Pegana)
• The Valar = The Zoa (The prophetic works of William Blake)
• Mordor = The Land of Darkness (The Alexander Romance)
• The Nazgul = The 12 Paladins of Charlemagne (Orlando Furioso, etc)
• The Witch-King = Alexander the Above-Average (The Alexander Romance)
• Orcs = Tharks / Green Martians (A Princess of Mars + sequels)
• Sauron = Nyarlathotep (Cthulhu Mythos, various)
• Mount Doom = Mt. Elbrus (Real world + Zoroastrian mythology)
• Numenor = Atlantis (The Lost Continent, etc)

#2 is I learned about Tales Before Tolkien, which is a collection of 21 pre-Tolkien fantasy stories compiled by Douglas Anderson (did the annotated Hobbit, got to see him give a talk once, that was fun). Most if not all of those are PD; I haven’t properly dug through it yet, but I’m going to keep it as a nice backup resource for the future.

#3: Morgan Long pointed out in the comments to the Part 1 that I skipped over Der Ring des Nibelungen, and while my initial response had been “using Alberich’s ring itself is a bit on the nose and I just don’t care for the Cycle as a whole”, thinking about it more has opened up a very good path forward, and since I have no better segue let’s get into that.

Boromir

Siegfried / Sigurd, as portrayed in Der Ring des Nibelungen. My initial resistance fell off on further review, because he’s some of the rawest antagonist potential possible. The guy was raised in isolation as a human-shaped guided missile aimed towards a dragon’s hoard, and is easily read as a sociopath, and his parents were siblings, and he fucked his half-aunt and he’s a stooge of German nationalism. He’s the hero and he’s going to make it everyone else’s problem. Even if we're purely going on the first point and ignoring everything else, a human being raised to adulthood by an abusive parent with 0 other social contact is going to be absolutely fucked in the head. 

What happens when the great golden manchild convinced that he's fated for age-defining greatness is put into a story that doesn't revolve around him? When the mask finally drops and the rest of the characters realize too late who they're working with, oh buddy that's where the drama lives. Chef's kiss.

• Q: How much of Der Ring can I offload to the background?
• Q: What happens after his betrayal of the fellowship? 
• Q: How is his crusade to defeat Alexander going to backfire terribly after he steals the Seal?

• Addition: Mime the dwarf, Fafnir the dragon, a good number of the rest of the cast.
• Addition: The fortress of Valhalla and its king who started this entire mess by trying to get out of paying the contractors he hired to build it.

Treebeard

I had been combing Wikipedia for mythical and magical trees, but then remembered that ents in the books are tree-like but not necessarily trees themselves. So why not go with the OG forest guardian, Humbaba? (There is no reason why not)

• Q: So what else have Gilgamesh and Enkidu been doing? I suppose they didn’t kill Humbaba this time around - what sorts of injuries does he have?
• Q: Is he related in any way to the giants who built Valhalla?

• Addition: Cedars of Lebanon used in construction of Solomon’s Temple, which would provide some connection to the Seal.

Theoden

Hrothgar would be the obvious choice, but Hrothgar loses the horses and without horses it’s hardly Rohan. But! You know who has horses? Amazons. They also had a shit-ton of queens if we go by just the Greek sources, but Hippolyta is the main one and comes with some extremely fruitful potential expansions.

• Q: Is Hippolyta actually on the throne, or has the abduction-by-Theseus plot happened and Antiope or Penthesilea is ruling in her stead?
• Q: Speaking of which: what else has Theseus fucked up beyond all repair?
• Q: Well he did kill the Minotaur which means he now has a connection to Atlantis; how’d that turn out for him? Find any other treasures while looting the ruins?

• Addition: Herakles and/or Theseus, fucking around as usual.
• Addition: The Attic War
• Addition: Queen Calafia / any number of additional Amazonian monarchs
• Addition: Assorted cities / islands of women etc.

Eowyn

There’s no shortage of ladies in armor to choose from, but I think I’m going to go with Bradamante from the Orlando duology. It’s a bit of a double-dip since I’m sourcing the Nazgul from the same texts, but Bradamante has the bona fides to justify it:

• Accomplished knight on her own merit
• Equals-on-the-battlefield enemies-to-lovers plotline with the Andalusian warrior Ruggiero.
• Rescues Ruggiero from the evil wizard Atlantes by using a magic ring to break into his tower.
• Refuses to marry a man who can’t match her in combat (so as to counter her father’s attempt to marry her off to the prince of Byzantium)
• Sister of Rinaldo the paladin (and so would be related to one of the Nazgul in this version)

Pretty stacked resume. Absolute crime that she doesn't show up more often.

• Q: So how’d she end up as the foster daughter of the queen of the Amazons?
• Q: What’s her relationship with Rinaldo like?
• Q: So is Atlantes intentionally invoking a connection with Atlantis in his name? Like calling himself “the Atlantean” or something like that.
• Q: I guess his tower would probably be the equivalent of Isengard, then.

• Addition: Ruggiero, obviously
• Addition: Using the Seal to rescue Ruggiero from the Atlantes’ tower.
• Addition: Probably need a stand-in for Islam, now. Or at least a faction to stand in for Andalusia. Iram of the Pillars would be the obvious choice but I’m not making that call just yet.

Shadowfax

Rakhsh, steed of Rostam in the Shahnameh. If Rohan = Amazons and Amazons = Scythia, that's right next door. Rakhsh also has the “legendary horse who can only be ridden by a legendary hero” thing going on, though he also died alongside Rostam in the story. So either a surviving (and potentially wounded) Rakhsh, or a descendant. Either way, it should be a Big Deal when he chooses a rider.

• Q: Who does Rakhsh permit as his rider? One time deal, or no? 
• Q: It’s probably going to be Bradamante, so what circumstances lead us to that point? Would it be the mission to rescue Ruggiero, or a later battle?

• Addition: Rostam & his seven feats, Zahhak, Div-e Sepid
• Addition: Indo-Scythian peoples (since that territory would overlap with Samangan and that's where Rostam's wife Tahmina is from, boom there’s a Rostam > Amazonia link.)

Fun fact: Rakhsh is Aramaic for “horse”, so he’s the horse named Horse.

Gollum

It’s gotta be Caliban: Classic fucked-up little dude who has connections to at least two powerful magic users and is part of a plot centered around imprisoned spirits. Easy pick.

• Q: How did he get the Seal? Inherited it from Sycorax? How'd she get it?
• Q: What else is on that island?
• Q: How does Prospero get entangled in all this?

• Addition: Ariel and the spirits of the island
• Addition: Sycorax, who is clearly not on good terms with the rest of the wizards 

Tom Bombadil

An Elder Thing with old hippie professor energy. Could probably pull double duty as Dr. Doolittle (an Elder talking to humans is kinda like a human talking to animals, from their point of view) or Professor Challenger (banger name; also, I like the premise of Elders as Victorian gentleman-scientist-explorers)

Since Goldberry doesn’t have much to her beyond “some sort of river spirit”, we’ve got more nymphs, naiads, nixies, undines, rusalkas, and so, so many others to choose from. But Nimue / the Lady of the Lake has the most connective tissue to draw on and I’ve yet to find an alternative of similar caliber (though Jenny Greenteeth has “spooky monster with a fun name” covered.)

• Q: All right, who’s she throwing swords at this time?
• Q: Are we going to keep in the Lancelot connection?
• Q: What do people think about the Elder? What do they think he is?
• Q: Are there any other surviving Elders on the planet?
• Q: What’s his beef with the mi-go about?
• Q: Actually, wait, hold up; Wagner’s ring is made from gold stolen from the spirits of the Rhine, Goldberry-Nimue is our resident water-spirit, did the Seal get stolen from her in parallel? Would that imply that the Seal is an Elder Thing artifact? Or did it just fall into Nimue’s possession for a while?

• Addition: So about those shoggoths…
• Addition: Cambrian sea life, as a treat

Elrond

Elrond’s a problem child in this experiment: his primary role in the narrative could be fulfilled by any old wizard, but his primary relationship is bound up with Arwen, and Arwen is tied up with Aragorn, and I still don’t know what I want to do with Aragorn.

The three of them basically come as a package deal, and the two main packages that I know of are:

• Alveric, Lirazel, and the King of Elfland from Dunsany’s King of Elfland’s Daughter
• Pwyll, Rhiannon, and Arawn from the Mabinogion

I like the Pwyll triad better, but it’s also definitely a major direct inspiration of Tolkien’s, which I have generally been trying to avoid. So I’d either need to tie in some wildcards or learn to suck it up and deal. I mean I already used Der Ring the glass on that box has been broken.

I’ll come back to this, see what I can do with it later. How elves are actually going to be situated is still very much in-progress.

Galadriel

The Lady von Willendorf herself, a pick that will not surprise regular readers of the blog but may require a hear me out for folks just wandering by, so hear me out:

Galadriel is extremely powerful, extremely beautiful, and extremely old. And while there are plenty of powerful + beautiful + ancient women in myth and literature to choose from, I don’t think many of them can brag about being an instantly-recognizable sex icon 20,000+ years after their creation. This also throws a fun wrench into the genre by portraying one of the OG ur-elves that everyone ripped off afterward as short, brown and fat instead of tall, pale and thin, while still presenting her with the dignity and respect that she’s owed. 

As a bonus, the Venus gives us an entirely different direction to approach elven melancholy: Galadriel’s depressed because she remembers when there used to be mammoths, and now the mammoths have gone and they will never return. 

• Q: Is she actually an elf in this anymore, or an immortal human living among the elves? 

• Addition: Okay well now I gotta have one last mammoth show up. There will be waterworks.
• Addition: Of course the mammoth remembers her, whose blog do you think you're reading?  Man might forget, but the elephants do not.
• Addition: And you’d best believe she was one of the painters of Lascaux. Like her house is just built on top of or right beside the entrance. 

And, having said all that, I could very easily invoke many of the elements I used for the Great Lady for the "instead of a dark lord you would have a queen" bit. Works out nice, especially since Nyarlathotep = Sauron. Never met a good idea I wouldn't use twice.

 

Bilbo Baggins

Nathaniel Chanticleer from Hope Mirrlees' Lud-in-the-Mist. Fantasy-English small-town burgher whose life is normal and regular and entirely un-adventurous up until magical adventure barrels into his life and turns it upside down. 

• Addition: Fairy-fruit and its importation into the human world

Gimli and Legolas

Conan and Zorro, no contest. Got the heavy fighter and the finesse fighter, got the opposed personalities primed for a mild antagonism > grudging respect > unbreakable friendship storyline. Howard’s Picts are basically Frazetta-style cavemen, you already know I’m going to use neanderthals as dwarves, the numbers check out.

Bonus: since they both have terrible vulture estates who love suing over trademarks, both of them need makeovers and new names. Conan’s easy, already did him: Spakāya of Cimmeria, or we can just call him “The Hound”. Zorro is “fox” in Spanish, which is “Rusc” in Sindarin (fun fact: only materials about conlangs fall under copyright, since you can’t copyright a language) and while Fox and the Hound isn’t public domain, it is a funny little reference.

(Note: Zorro was actually a suggestion from skullelongator on bluesky, who got it from their mother. Thanks, skullelongator’s mom.)

• Addition: Side characters, etc. Leaving this part open, since the advantage of long-running picaresque pulp heroes is that you can drop them in just about anywhere without worrying about connections.

Barad-dûr

The Tower of Babel is the perfect fit, especially if I weave in its historical inspiration, Etemenanki. Its name is literally “Temple of the Foundation of Heaven and Earth”, it’s located at the seat of imperial power, it’s dedicated to the usurping god of kingship who built the world out of a corpse, historical Alexander the Great ordered it rebuilt. Throw in the “everyone spoke one language” with an implied “by force” and you’ve got the axis mundi of mythic oppression.

• Q: Can I resist the urge to go “invading the heavens wasn’t an exaggeration, they built a fucking space elevator”?
• A: No, probably not.
• Q: Can I resist the urge to go “and it was built on top of Çatalhöyük because I know authors who use subtext and they are all cowards? (Mysteryspice suggested this)
• A: Again, probably not.
• Q: Alexander’s obviously using it as a base of operations - why?
• Q: What connection, if any, between the Tower and Atlantis? 

• Addition: Marduk, Tiamat, the Enuma Elish etc
• Addition: Oh hey Gilgamesh, how’s it hanging, man?
• Addition: The confusion of tongues (yay linguistic diversity)

The Council of the Wise

There’s a passage in Fellowship where Gandalf describes Saruman as “...great among the Wise [...] chief of my order and the head of the Council.” and that really makes it sound like there are more than five of them. Certainly more than two. I still don’t have a true pick for Gandalf yet, but the shortlist for the wizards’ council includes:

• Archimago (The Faerie Queene)
• Atlantes (Orlando Innamorato)
• Prospero (The Tempest)
• Medea (Medea, Argonautica, etc)
• Circe (The Odyssey, etc)
• Merlin (Arthuriana)
• Morgan le Fay (Arthuriana)
• Väinämöinen (Kalevala)
• Oannes (Sumerian myth)
• Gorice XII (The Worm Ouroboros)
• Oscar Diggs (The Wonderful Wizard of Oz) 

Could probably throw in Hermes Trismegistus if I wanted to, but keeping him as fictional in-universe appeals to me, especially if I’m rolling with a layer of obfuscation about the Seal. Or he could be the wildcard that everyone in-universe thinks is fictional.

• Q: So how do these wizards interact with the rest of the world?
• Q: Who has beef with who?
• Q: What do they know of / care about the Seal? Have they done anything about it?
• Q: Has the Gandalf stand-in gone rogue?
• Q: Where do they meet?
• Q: How did the Wizard of Oz get invited, anyway?

• Addition: Lairs, drama, etc.

**

And that’s a wrap on Part 2. This experiment continues to be extremely fun, I've already got some ideas cooking already for Part 3, stay tuned.