Remaking Lord of the Rings out of Only Public Domain Sources: Part 3

Ilya Repin

Part 1, Part 2

Home stretch, let’s go.

The Balrog

How did I skip the Balrog? Absolutely shameful.

Anyway:  dig too deep and you’ll find a guardian of the underworld, so I’ll roll with Ox-Head and or Horse-Face from Chinese folk religion because honestly if there’s a giant horse-headed monster wrecking your day who looks like this, yeah I’m going freak the fuck out a bit.

• Q: Who was fucking around with the underworld enough to bring these guys to earth?
• Q: Is anything going screwy in the underworld now that they’re busy here?

Shelob

A jorōgumo, which both gives me a giant monster spider and allows me to take a shot at Shadow of Mordor’s drearily uncreative sexy lady Shelob (since jorōgumos have the shapeshifting into a lady feature built in.)

Pseudo-Shelob will in turn be the rebellious bad-apple daughter of Spider Grandmother, who will be replacing Ungoliant; this marks a total inversion from the source text, since Spider Grandmother is a positive figure in the lore of indigenous peoples across the southwest and beyond. More on that in a bit.

Wormtongue

Well he’s gotta be some kind of evil vizier, a trope which has existed as long as there have been viziers. Or court eunuchs, for that matter. But the trope is also like one of the standard-issue Orientalist tropes so if he’s going to be attached to Themiskyra or Iram of the Pillars or what have you he should be sourced  from a story on the right side of the Bosphorus.

I’m going with one of the OGs, Haman from the Book of Esther. Who, now that I think about it for more than 10 seconds, is actually a perfect fit for multiple reasons:

• Book of Esther is set during the height of the Achaemenid Empire, and if we presume that Ahasuerus is supposed to be Xerxes I (as most people do) much of the central government has moved out of Babylon but the city and territory is well within the empire (easy connection to the Tower of Babel)
• Makes total sense for not-Persia to send a diplomatic envoy to the Amazons, being both neighbors and culturally-close (easy reason why he’s in Themiskrya).
• If Queen Hippolyta has been kidnapped by Theseus and her sisters are acting as regents, that’s a perfect opportunity for a scheming vizier to scheme a major power play.
• Rather than following the Book of Esther’s plot directly, I can just extrapolate it into “Haman is more than willing to inflame existing ethnic and religious tensions for his own benefit” (good justification for his antagonism)
• If Bradamante is going to ride Rakhsh, that means Rostam is dead (potentially fairly recently)...

…which means that fantasy!Persia (where Haman would be from) is also likely in a state of political disorder (not aided by Alexander the Great running his operation out of the Tower)...

…because if Rostam is dead it means that Siyâvash (son of the shah Kay Kāvus, who has an eagle-powered flying throne he used to fly to China) is also dead… 

…and if Siyâvash is dead then it means his wife Farangis has fled the country with their son Kay Khosrow…

…which means that we have either an elderly ruler with no heir apparent or a recently dead ruler with a very young heir and that is a textbook scenario for a regency.

Which is a long way of saying that Gondor is fantasy Persia.

• Q: How does a weakened Themiskrya benefit Haman? What’s his end goal?
• Q: Who supports him back in the Empire? Who supports him here?
• Q: What stops people from just killing him?
• Q: What existing tensions is he going to take advantage of?

• Addition: Mission to rescue Hippolyta
• Addition: Theseus and his incredibly underwhelming and stupid death (some jobber named Lycomedes throws him off a cliff)

Denethor

Surprisingly a lot more difficult than Haman for Wormtongue; I can’t find a regent in the Shahnameh (in my defense, there are a lot of characters in the Shahnameh and I’m flying by the seat of my pants), Googling “regents in folklore and mythology” got me nothing but pages about revenants and ents, and the relevant TVtropes pages are in similarly dire condition.

From Arthuriana there’s King Lot, who I could syncretize with Biblical Lot, and I could even have Farangis fill the role if I need to, but this might be the first case of the knock-on effects from the changes rendering it unnecessary to port over a Tolkien character.

If we already have an old king, a missing heir, and a scheming vizier, what point does pseudo-Denethor have? He wouldn’t be Sigurd’s father, so that’s out, and pseudo-Faramir is going to be the same deal. 

So yeah, I think this is going to be a solid Not Applicable.

Faramir

He lives in the woods with a bunch of outlaws, wears green and has a bow: he’s Robin Hood. Non-zero chance Tolkien intended the connection anyway. 

With Denethor out of the picture and Boromir-Sigurd having no narrative room for siblings, what remains is the guerilla war against Alexander’s forces minus the direct connection to Persia-Gondor. I could maintain his relationship with Bradamante and make him Ruggiero and call it a day, but that feels a bit too pat.

Going further afield for a more radical change, I’ve entertained the thought that Faramir could serve as a representative / leader of some sort of alliance among indigenous peoples of Middle Earth in their fight against Alexander. Tolkien frustratingly doesn’t entirely overlook this front of the war, but reduces the Druedain to isolationists who aid the Rohirrim in one key operation but are otherwise wholly absent from the narrative.  

The premise of the project being what it is, most sources will get me boilerplate noble savage at best. It’s possible to write those characters with more nuance, but even then there won’t be a lot of grist for the mill.

But…  roll with me for a moment.

So I said a couple entries ago that Spider Grandmother / Spider Woman is taking the role of nega-Ungoliant. 

If Gondor = Persia, the climate where pseudo-Faramir would be operating would be a lot drier and hotter than Sherwood Forest: Grandmother Spider is associated primarily with the peoples of the American southwest, a region that is also a lot drier and hotter than Sherwood Forest.

In Navajo narratives, she goes by Na'ashjé'ii Asdzáá (Spider-Woman) and she directly aids the hero twins Naayééʼ Neizghání (Monster-Slayer) and Tóbájízhchíní  (Born-for -Water) in their fights against all sorts of giants and monsters.

Witch-King Alexander the Above-Average doubtlessly has a lot of giants and monsters on his payroll (metaphorical; they don’t get paid); if pseudo-Faramir is an outlaw leading a guerilla war against two much larger imperial powers all while killing the nastiest monsters around, not a big leap for people to call him Monster-Slayer. Especially if he has some sort of boon from Spider Woman. The line between mortal man and legendary hero can get mighty blurred, after a while.

• Q: Is there going to be an equivalent to Prince John and the Sheriff of Nottingham?
• Q: What are the odds he lives in Humbaba’s Woods?
• Q: Wait hold up is Humbaba also one of these giants?

• Addition: Anaye / Nayéé’ (aforementioned monstrous giants)
• Addition: The Merry Men
• Addition: Gifts from Spider Woman
• Addition: Another outlaw leader filling the role of Born-for-Water?

Gandalf

Gandalf I am still sorta figuring out because I’ve got two options that could work both combined into a single character or as two separate but related characters, and I still haven’t decided which I like more. So here’s both.

Option A: Glinda the Good Witch
Meddlesome in favor of heroes, delivers quests, and - for a touch of meta appropriateness via Sir Ian McClellan - outrageously gay. The lady canonically lives in a palace with the 100 most beautiful women in Oz. 

Claims that she was based on Matilda Joslyn Gage don’t seem to have any substantial foundation, but Matilda Joslyn Gage was certainly about as close to “meddling witch on the side of good” as you can get in real life.

Source B: The Angel of Eden
The one with the fiery sword and all that. They don’t have a consistent name in any of the apocrypha; you’ll find some people saying Uriel, though I can’t find any textual source to back that up. I’d probably sub in a Sumerian name for the vibes (probably Uanna / Oannes).

Anyway: I’m fond of the idea that this particular angel has grown attached to humanity via proximity and acts as a sort of Prometheus figure in the Fall. Strong shades of Aziraphale there, but by a different route.

• Q: What other forms have they taken?
• Q: What’s their relationship with other angels?
• Q: What’s their relationship with the other wizards?
• Q: What’s their bigger game plan wrt the Seal & Nyarlathotep?
• Q: Can I resist K6BD vibes? (No, I cannot)

• Addition: Gigantic fiery sword

The Peoples of Middle-Earth

All right, got a lot to work through here.

Orcs are tharks, did them in Part 1. 

Uruk-hai are going to be soldiers grown from dragon’s teeth, which happens a few times in Greek myth via Jason and Cadmus. (Friend of the blog Dandibuja, who has been an immense help with this project, suggested that this could be tied into Archimago hunting dragons as a way to get into the good graces of society: I think that’s a killer idea.)

Goblins is goblins, but in the folkloric sense of just being every weird little magical guy possible. You can just call anything weird a goblin, them’s the rules. Between the Denham Tracts and the Gazu Hyakki Yagy, I’m spoiled for choice.

Ents and trolls are going to be played by a wide variety of ogres and giants. Plenty of ogres and giants from all over the world, people love asking “what if there were big people”. 

Dwarves are neanderthals, no muss no fuss. There’s overlap there with REH’s Picts but I’m going to lean heavier on reality than Hyboria for that one.

Humans (or to crib Dungeon Meshi parlance, tallmen) are are going to broadly reflect the major populations in prehistoric Europe and the Mediterranean (adjusted with a bit of anachronism for artistic flair) - Tolkien prepped the layup for me on this one because he was aware that there was a migration into Europe that displaced or absorbed the peoples already living there and kinda-sorta modeled it into the relationship between Rohan and the Woses / Druedain and between the Edain and the Easterlings. 

Since it’s very easy to get both far too into the weeds on this (archaeogenetics is extremely complex!) and also fairly easy to run into some issues (go too deep and you straight up just start sounding like Measurehead even if you’re being careful), I’m just going to strip the moral judgements and flesh out Tolkien’s general shape of things with modestly more historically appropriate material.

• Druedain = Western Hunter Gatherers
• Edain = Early European Farmers + Western Steppe Herders.
• Those dang Indo-Europeans with their horses and wheeled carts, I tell ya.
• Easterlings / Rhûnedain - Other Indo-European speaking peoples (Anatolians and Indo-Iranians)
• Numenoreans = Atlanteans, which in this case means that the mi-go have been fucking around in their genome for Mi-Go Reasons™.
• Honestly this excuse lets them pull triple duty as both Valyria and Melnibone if I want to go that route. 
• Additions: Non-IE speaking groups

(If I was ever to actually do a project using Nostratic this would be the place to do it, but like many crank theories requires too much elbow grease to be feasible. Existing conlangs would be easier.)

Elves, continuing on the threads set out by my picks for Elrond and Galadriel, are going to be WHGs who got magic through contact with the Otherworld (Annwn, Tír na nÓg, etc). This sets them up nicely as a thematic counter to the Seal by giving their magic a source in reciprocal relationships with the spirits of the world and the world beyond. It also gives them more of a material reason to be isolated from the rest of humanity than just being ethereal and sad (i.e. they, as effectively the Tuatha Dé Danann, lost the war)

Hobbits are tricksy; there’s no shortage of little folk in folklore and early fantasy to choose from - “what if there were small people” is about as universal as “what if there were big people” - but the hobbits’ size is mostly thematic, a way to reflect them as distinct from capital-M Men visually as well as culturally, and to reinforce the idea that evil isn’t defeated with power. They’re not particularly magical and they’re protagonists rather than figures the protagonist encounters, which puts them at odds with the rest of the literature. Doubly so when we consider that hobbits are first and foremost idealized English villagers.

Those themes don’t require little people to function, and during brainstorming I found the little people options tended to cut off the stronger picks for the main quartet. So I going to go for a fairly radical move and split hobbits as a people from the main quartet of Frodo, Sam, Merry and Pippin.

For hobbits the people, I’m going to take a major swerve and go with Arthur Machen’s little people, asterisk.

Machen’s version is that the folkloric little people of the British Isles (same tradition that Tolkien was pulling from) were based on a population of relict hominids driven to the most remote wilderness and / or underground by the arrival of the Celts. This idea was enormously popular with both Lovecraft and REH, and through them the rest of weird fiction and onward.

It’s also just as gross and racist as you’d expect for the time period. Not satisfied with making his little people rapists and murderers, Machen presents their mere existence as abhorrent instead of one of the most important scientific and anthropological discoveries in history. Oh no they’re short and brown and use stone tools come the fuck on Arthur that’s just homo erectus (note: h. erectus was not discovered until after Machen wrote The Black Seal).

(Learning all this has really made me appreciate what Tolkien did with the Hobbits; the situation was dire wrt little people in fantasy fiction back then.)

(Early science fiction honestly kinda hates any field outside of material science. New alloys and rays and objects are good and cool, everything else is bad.)

I’m getting off track. Hobbits as a people are descendents of homo erectus (close to floriensis, obvs) who live out in the deep wilderness, but are no more horrible than anyone else. Honorable mentions go to the Pygmies of Paracelsus, Lilliputians from Gulliver, Munchkins from Oz, but those I would include as cultural groups.

The Hobbits

The hobbit quartet have a few key prerequisites I need to carry over to their analogues:  they’re young, they have no political / martial / magical power, they have no prior connections to major goings on in the world, and they come from farm country. Frodo is technically landed gentry but that’s simple enough to work around.

Merry and Pippin are easy: Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. Search your feelings, you know it to be true. That just leaves Frodo and Sam as the final replacements to make.

(Add a drumroll here if you’d like.)

Frodo and Sam are going to be played by Dorothy Gale and Princess Ozma. They’ve got the intimate friendship across a class divide thing down pat, and Glinda spearheads the quest to find Ozma in a display of good Gandalfian meddling. Being royalty of Oz does violate the “no political power” thing, but that can be worked around in a fair number of ways (Oz being a small backwater kingdom, Oz still being under the rule of the Wizard, Oz not operating according to real world political logic, etc)

(Actually now that I mention it, the Shire is split into four farthings, and Oz is split into four countries along the same lines…)

For purposes of the story, I imagine that the quartet would be older than in their source material and would have had at least the general shape of their adventures happen to them. Kansas probably doesn’t exist, but there’s certainly a place very much like Kansas out there. Probably the farmland upriver from Lud-in-the-Mist, since I decided that’s where Biblo’s from.

• Q: Whose body got exhumed the night Tom and Huck went to the graveyard?
• Q: Were the resurrectionists in question Dr. Frankenstein and Herbert West? (Yes)
• Q: If Jim is included, how do I best handle everything else his inclusion entails? There are a couple novels from the time period I could pull from, but this would basically require a dedicated post. 

• Addition: Assorted early-book Oz side characters (Lion, Scarecrow, Tin-Man, Wogglebug, General Jinjur, Mombi the Witch etc)

 

Final Roundup 

• Frodo & Sam = Dorothy and Ozma (Oz series)
• Merry & Pippin = Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn (The Adventures of Tom Sawyer) 
• Gandalf = Glinda the Good Witch / Angel of Eden (Oz series, Book of Genesis)
• Legolas = Zorro (The Curse of Capistrano et al.)
• Gimli = Conan the Barbarian (The Phoenix on the Sword et al.) 
• Boromir = Siegfried (Der Ring des Nibelungen)
• Aragorn = Pwyll (The Mabinogion) 
• Elrond = Arawn (The Mabinogion)
• Arwen = Rhiannon (The Mabinogion)
• Galadriel = The Venus of Willendorf (Real life) 
• Gollum = Caliban (The Tempest) 
• The Balrog = Ox-head and Horse-face (Chinese folk religion)
• Shelob = Jorogumo (Japanese folklore)
• ungoliant = Spider Grandmother (SW Indigenous American folklore) 
• Saruman = Archimago (The Faerie Queene) 
• Theoden = Hippolyta (Greek myth)
• Eowyn =  Bradamante (Orlando Furioso, etc)
• Wormtongue = Haman (Book of Esther) 
• Shadowfax = Rakhsh (The Shahnameh) 
• Treebeard = Humbaba (The Epic of Gilgamesh) 
• Denethor = Not included
• Faramir = Robin Hood + Monster-Slayer (British + Navajo folklore)  
• Tom Bombadil = Elder Thing (At the Mountains of Madness)
• The Council of the Wise = Many assorted magic-users 
• Bilbo Baggins = Nathaniel Chanticleer (Lud-in-the-Mist) 
• Middle Earth = Various composite sources
• Humans = Assorted archaic populations (Real world)
• Elves = Real-world archaic population + magic
• Dwarves = Neanderthals (Real world)
• Hobbits  = H. erectus descendants (Real world + a bit of Machen) 
• Orcs = Tharks / Green Martians (A Princess of Mars + sequels)
• Uruk-hai = dragon's-teeth soldiers (Greek myth)
• Goblins = goblins (Various folklores)
• Ents & Trolls = orges, giants, etc (Various folklores)
• 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)
• Barad-dûr = The Tower of Babel (Book of Genesis) 
• The Nazgul = The 12 Paladins of Charlemagne (Orlando Furioso, etc)
• The Witch-King = Alexander the Above-Average (The Alexander Romance)
• Sauron = Nyarlathotep (Cthulhu Mythos, various)
• Mount Doom = Mt. Elbrus (Real world + Zoroastrian mythology)
• Numenor = Atlantis (The Lost Continent, etc)

**

And there we go. Experiment successful beyond my wildest predictions. 

My takeaways at the end are fairly similar to those I had in the beginning: this is the most fun I've had writing in recent memory. I kept surprising myself with how well features clicked into place with each other, without me intending to leave an opening. Rambling forward with no plan and just doing what seemed right in the moment turned into something with a stronger weave than expected, and perhaps stronger than if I had made them up on my own.

While I’m satisfied with this as an endpoint for the experiment (no outline for the story, at least not now), I really want to keep going and I probably will. There’s so much out there to play with, but few people do and more people should. I want to encourage as many folks as I can to do stuff like this. Pardon this box of soap, no idea how it got here…

We live in a world where less than a dozen companies control the overwhelming majority of media you encounter. If they had their way, there’d be even fewer companies and they’d control all of it. They benefit from making people think that stories are objects to be owned, that there’s only one way for them to be, that there is a canon to be clung to with all the dogmatic fervor of an early church father. Making a silly public domain mashup isn’t going to change that, but it’s going to be better for you as an artist and as an audience. It's self-care, a little moment of freedom where you can fly above the powers that want to own the thoughts of every synapse in your head.

You don’t have to go watch a version of the Odyssey subsidized by Morocco’s colonial engine in Western Sahara. You own the Odyssey as much as Christopher Nolan does. What makes his version special, that there’s money in it? You don’t need money to make a good version of the Odyssey. You don’t even need to write it down. 

Give yourself a little freedom today.

Even More Short Reviews of Delta Green Actual Plays

 Part 1, Part 2

This will likely be the last one of these for a while: got thoroughly burnt out on the whole thing as I was drafting it, and I’ve stopped listening to all of these in the months since I started compiling the post. At some point I’ll probably resume one or two, but who knows: my podcast listening has taken a hit across the board thanks to changes at work eating up my attention for much of the year so far.

Black Flare

I find this one complicated to recommend: It’s well-put together, the Handler knows their stuff, and the idea of having players new to Delta Green as an RPG playing characters new to Delta Green the organization is appealing. I don’t think it works in practice, though: the opening opera is too open-ended and slow-paced for players new to this sort of investigation (especially when they have a tendency to treat the investigation like D&D characters grilling a shopkeeper) and that makes for bad radio in spite of the generally high quality of all the individual components.

The anomaly in season 1 was too vague and hands-off to be an interesting threat. There’s an episode that’s nearly entirely devoted to the tedium of muddling through some difficult-to-visualize spatial fuckery effects, which never gelled together as something spooky. 

 (I think the spookum was a lloighor, so my bias is on active and on the field already) 

There’s a really good interstitial episode (the cell meets their handler on a freighter ship in the aftermath of a battle with Deep Ones) but then the first five and a half episodes of Season 2 are a red herring with enough feet dragging that it felt more of “oh fucking finally” when we finally got to the real hazard instead of a satisfying build up to it. The action was great when things finally started popping off, but the path to get there was frustrating.

Another issue, which is very much down to personal preference even more than the last, is that I really don’t like how Hollis’ player runs the character; Hollis acts as a sort of continual obstruction to the others, vaguely dancing around questions and being purposefully unhelpful with a blunt “It’s need to know and you don’t need to know”. I can’t tell how intentionally frustrating they’re supposed to be - it’s not an unreasonable part to play in the story - but I think it compounds the bad radio problem by impeding the other PCs from being active investigators and pushing them towards passivity, which doesn’t play well with the already slow pace. 

Hand on the Door

Not as goofy as PTBP, but probably the closest to it tone-wise out of everything I’ve listened to, and I think it does a decent job of threading the needle. It’s absurd, but not so absurd that it negates its own stakes with that absurdity. That said, it does have a tendency to meander and it’s another slow burn investigation despite the threat being something that should have everyone freaking the fuck out. There’s no reason for the PCs to know that the guy they’re investigating is messing with shoggoth biomatter, but the characters knew by the time I stopped listening that the perp has figured out how to refold proteins through unnatural means and the players should probably be leaning into the entirely reasonable panic of “Jesus Christ someone could make a transmissible prion disease with this shit”.

Chaos Springs Eternal

Civilian PCs in a weird little Louisiana town stumbling into the supernatural. More CoC than DG, to the point where I wouldn’t really call it a DG actual play. 10-15 minutes of non-game talk at the beginning of each episode, which is too much for me to sit through without skipping but might not be for other folks. It’s a slow burn and I was with it for a while, but fell off when they got to the helpful magical ghoul character. I like a helpful magical ghoul character from time to time but this one felt too Call of Cthulhu for me, if that makes sense. Not enough of the DG razzle and / or dazzle.

This Line Isn’t Secure

A dedicated Impossible Landscapes run. Very much on the audio drama side of the spectrum, and very good at it. Players and handler work together like a well-oiled machine. Editing / effects / sound quality are extremely good, deft balance of horror vs humor and how the absurd surreality of Carcosa lends itself to both. I feel better about the character arcs than in something like Redacted Reports because we know how this ends, there's not going to be any tail end that stretches out past the climax. Definitely want to return to this one, and I give it a very high recommendation.

Delta Pink

Someone affiliated with the show left a comment on one of my older roundup posts asking if I might do a review: Unfortunately, it didn’t really pan out.

After listening to Session 0 and most of episode 1 I feel like Delta Pink, like Get in the Trunk, is goofy in a way that doesn’t really land for me. The group behind this AP typically plays Shadowrun, and that influence shows like the proverbial and thematically appropriate pink mohawk. They’re still playing Shadowrun characters here in Delta Green; goofy stereotypes unmoored from reality. Factor that as you will into whether or not you want to check it out.

Stories and Lies: God’s Teeth

It’s unfair to compare anyone running God’s Teeth to the original AP, but it’s also unavoidable. 

Go Forth opens like a hammer to the face. Here’s the mission; do it now. You’re immediately in the shit and on the back foot, scrambling for purchase when all your options are bad and you have no time and no resources. I think it’s the most powerful opener in RPGs by a country mile, with Deep Carbon Observatory coming in second.

So I feel like Stories and Lies is doing a disservice to the module by portraying Clove as stable and put-together and having the agent who read the folder beat around the bush during the briefing. The urgency that makes the opening work has been lost and at that point I don’t know why the module was chosen.

 

RPPR: The Labor of Dogs

The only one of these I am actively listening to at time of writing: this one's an all-timer. Not just the name (which is an all-timee in and of itself), but in just how good the component missions are - I think we're done with 3/5 at this point, and each one has been a very distinctly 2020s flavor of awful and weird. Like I would almost call it cringe horror? It's leaning into the ripped-from-the-headlines reality of "sorry, the villains here are evil and stupid and their vapidity is matched only by their temporal power and they will combine the two into lethal danger for everyone around them in an attempt to squeeze a bit of profit they don't need from a source they don't understand." That's the good shit. The real danger isn't Cthulhu, it's some C-suite trying to exploit Cthulhu in stupid ways.

Final Notes

Most of this post is just a simple divergence between what I want to listen to and what people want to make. So it goes, no harm no foul. My perspective is skewed six ways to Sunday on this matter so everything I’ve said so far should be taken with a sizable grain of salt. I don’t know. I feel kinda bad about being down on nearly all of them. Ah well. There will always be more, and maybe I'll come around to one or two when I'm in a better state for what they're offering.
 

The Arrangement

 

Nottsuo

Agent Delfino leaves the car at the end of the driveway, right in front of the rusted gate and its corroded “DANGER - NO TRESPASSING” sign. He steps out of the car, opens the trunk, and hoists the lifeless body of Agent Wallace over his shoulders in a fireman’s carry.

The overgrown gravel path is dimly lit by Delfino’s red-filtered flashlight. Twin rows of pine trees block out all but a thin strip black sky. It can’t take more than a minute, minute and a half, to reach the house. The adrenaline cedes ground to hazy, sluggish exhaustion.

It would have been a nice house, eighty years ago when the mill in town was still open and the GI Bill meant you could own a home on a single income. Economic entropy bears down on its shoulders with decades of repair jobs put off till money’s less tight; what’s left of the overgrown lawn fights a losing battle against encroaching undergrowth. There’s no porch light, no light at all from inside. All the windows are boarded up, blackout curtains drawn.

Delfino presses the doorbell button, hears nothing; he presses it again, and it fires off a harsh electric buzz.

He waits, idly sucking at his lip.

Dead bolt slides, chains rattle, door swings inward.

The pale woman standing there could be anywhere between 24 and 49. Long black hair, lank and unwashed, falls down to her waist. Dark circles highlighting grey eyes. Faded blue pajama pants, no socks, a Frazetta pastiche t-shirt where an eight-breasted, phallus-tailed monstrosity holds a uselessly branched sword towards the unreadable broken-stick-and-burn-scar name above its head.

“What.” It’s a command, not a question. Delfino swallows, and says what he was trained to say.

“Excuse me, ma’am, would you be able to spare a moment for our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ?”

Asset FENNEC gives him a joyless smile of crooked, nicotine-yellow teeth.

“You can try, but I take my eucharist tartar.” Her voice is bad whiskey, each syllable weighed down with vocal fry and rolling waves of gothic apathy. An intrusive memory mutters in Delfino’s head:

 Azarath, metrion, zinthos…

The woman’s eyes linger on Wallace’s corpse for a moment.

“Sure hope you’ve got something to pay with this time, I’m done taking credit from you fuckos.”

Delfino digs in his pocket and removes two small copper coins, their faces worn down to indistinguishable nubs. These he offers to the woman in an open palm: she plucks them out of his hand, gives them a sniff, and nods in slight approval. 

“Aw, you’re learning. Ain’t that cute.”

“Plus the body,” Delfino says, though he wishes he could say anything else. Fewer loose ends this way. An unsolved missing persons report is less trouble, on the whole. They’ll do a brief search, find some planted evidence, and conclude that he wandered off and committed suicide somewhere he couldn’t be found.

The woman nods.

“Bring it round back, I’ll meet you at the garage.”

She shuts the door, and there’s the rattle of chain and the shunk of the deadbolt falling back into place.

**

Fennec sticks the two aes of  Zul-Bha-Sair into the pocket of her bathrobe and shuffles back through the dark house. She pokes her head into the living room where BB, washed in silvery-blue light from the glowing TV, takes up most of the sagging couch. A half-built Unit-00 model lies in pieces on a standing tray. Fennec leans over the couch arm and gives him a kiss on the cheek, and wants nothing more in that moment than to say fuck the Arrangement and return to her couch and cuddle up next to her man and let the green triangle idiots shoot themselves in the balls like they always do. But the Arrangement is the Arrangement, and it is bound with greater ties than words and paper.

“Pause it for me, love. Shitshow to deal with.”

BB grabs the remote, and Paul Hollywood’s face freezes mid-sentence.

“What do they want?”

“The usual. Begging for help as soon as they need to get some dead asshole’s passwords. So much for knowledge is death.”

BB throws up his hands in mock despair.

“Help, help, I can’t look at a fucking book without going craaaaaAAAAAAzy.”

Fennec mock-swoons like a Harlequin cover heroine.

“My god, I'm all the way up to my ankles in the black seas of infinity; guess I’ll just die.”

“How dare those nasty nasty fish men exist; they’re almost as bad as the Welsh!”

Fennec snrks, shakes her head, fishes a joint out of her breast pocket. “Yog, what a fuckin’ joke.” 

BB wordlessly hands her a lighter.

“Want me to keep an eye on them?”

“Yeah. Just one tonight, doesn’t look stupid enough to cause trouble but better safe.” 

BB nods, and then waves a hand at the TV. The lighter click-click-clicks behind his words.

“Can you believe this guy?” 

Fennec takes a long drag and blows a cloud through her pursed lips.

“Right? Who wants a fucking ganache for a s’more? Is nothing sacred?”

**

In the kitchen cupboard to the left of the sink, a spider passes by two inexpertly-spun ceramic mugs belonging to DOPEY SHITHEAD and FUCKASS THUNDERCUNT.

**

The garage door rattles up; Fennec looks no more amused than before, despite the joint now dangling from her lip. She waves a hand at a work table covered in a blue plastic tarp.

Delfino lays Wallace out on the table. Three hours ago, he was complaining about his sciatic nerve and munching his way through a bag of banana chips. Now he’s just empty lungs.

Fennec paces around the body, prodding at it occasionally with a finger (nails painted black, goetic sigils in silver; Paimon, Astaroth, Stolas, Decarabia, Buer) then leaning in for a sniff.

“Egh. Lipitor always gives me the shits. What do you want and how far back?”

Delfino weighs his words like a Scrooge & Marley balance sheet.

“The last fifteen minutes,” he says at last. “Everything after he went into the barn. We need to know what he saw, what was in the book, and what killed him.”

Fennec narrows her eyes, and the hint of a smirk crosses her lips.

“Oh, you really fucked this one, didn’t you?”

Delfino doesn’t take the bait. Grenadine says nothing.

“We need to know.”

Seemingly satisfied, Fennec pulls a switchblade from her bathrobe pocket and starts cutting open Wallace’s shirt along the seams. She flicks her eyes up at Delfino.

“Watching costs extra. If that’s your bag, I've got a cousin out in Ann Arbor who gets real slutty with it.” She jerks her head towards the garage door. “Wait out there. I’ll get you when I’m done.”

**

On the wall in the den, a framed photograph depicts a skinny woman in an enormous sunhat and a very fat man in a Hawaiian shirt standing po-faced and rigid in their best American Gothic in front of the Salem Museum of Witchcraft.

**

Delfino wanders off a few steps and waits, his flashlight illuminating a circle of grassy driveway at his feet. A thousand generations of homo erectus tense their shoulders in the shadows of his mind.

There are noises from the garage: smacks, gurgles, slurps, wet coughs, sharp cracks, crunching and grinding and gulping. Delfino imagines a pair of speakers propped up on top of the garbage, playing a recording; Fennec just stands there, pulling on her joint with self-satisfied smugness. Wallace is simply gone from Delfino’s vision, vanished from the table by trap door or some similar stage magic contraption. That’s all.

The bushes rustle nearby. Delfino catches a pungent whiff of pond-scum and fish-rot, jerks his flashlight up and on to catch a glimpse of something large and bluish and shimmering through the underbrush; an enormous silvery eye contracts its pupil and blinks its nictitating membrane before Delfino instinctively dips the flashlight back to his feet.

“You planning on being a Keystone Cop tonight?” The voice from the dark brush is deep and slightly slurred, as if spoken through novocaine.

Delfino has enough wherewithal to answer “No, not tonight.”

“Then we don’t have a problem. Pretend I’m not here.”

There’s no more voice and no more rustling; just Delfino desperately trying to not think about the pink elephant crouched less than twenty feet away.

**

By-The-Blood-of-Our-Most-Precious-Savior Brown was fourteen when his father was hung as a witch. By that point BB had already buried three of his step-siblings and he had no tears left to shed, though his father deserved none of them in any case: For-the-Glory-of-God-Alone Brown was the sort of a man who only needed an excuse.

For the next twenty years BB lingered in the decaying cabin, living off of what remained of the family fortune and what odd jobs a reclusive man of letters might find. The sickness that had gripped him since childhood progressed unimpeded: his hair fell out, his body bloated to thrice the size of a normal man, his skin grew pale and blueish, his eyes bulged in their sockets.

Shortly after turning 35, he received an unexpected caller. A woman with an isopod tongue claiming to be a cousin from his mother’s side of the family, carrying an invitation. It would all make sense in a few days more, as soon as they reached Y’ha-nthlei.

**

The memories of Agent Wallace swirl around Fennec’s inner eye. Mostly garbage: eat enough brains and the scope of human experience turns into a muddy brown slush even before factoring in screen time. She flushes out the childhood traumas, parents’ divorce, FBI academy, social security number, middle-class ennui, passwords, code phrases and clandestine meetings and brushes with the supposedly unnatural. The green triangle folks - whatever the hell they were calling themselves nowadays - kept plenty of secrets. Their half of the Arrangement held provisions for brutal retaliatory violence should any of those secrets be breached, but in nearly 50 years Fennec hadn’t seen anything worth sharing. It’d be like spilling the beans on a 1st-grader’s hide-and-seek spot.

Fennec winnows down the record of a man’s life to the last fifteen minutes, holding onto the briefest whiff on context. Something about a crooked man with a crooked book using a bit of crooked religion in the new old-fashioned way  to collect a crooked harem blah blah blah dark triad banalities. Fucking wizards. Hand a wizard the barest scrap of actual power and the creativity just vacates his skull. Treasure hunting or sex crimes, no other options.

Wallace-Fennec throws open the barn door, bringing their gun up to aim at a haggard, grey-haired man in dirty underwear with age-crinkled tattoos spattering his arms and neck. They squeeze the trigger and put three bullets in the target’s center of mass before he can get a single syllable out and he collapses to the dirt floor next to the altar he made of fruit-crates.

Wait Wallace-Fennec thinks. He was talking to something.

Wallace-Fennec whips their head around, checking corners. Six bullets left. Nothing moves. Delfino will have heard the gunshots, he’ll be here soon.

The book is open on the altar, the pages a snarl of asemic pseudoglyphs layered like a magic-eye puzzle. Wallace's gaze flits to the page and Fennec doesn’t recognize its contents at first glance. Something clicks in Wallace's head and he sees it, and Fennec sees it too.

She sees [JABBERWOCKY] hanging in the air above the altar, [AND THE MOME RATHS OUTGRABE], and her brain attempts to identify [THE JAWS THAT BITE, THE CLAWS THAT CATCH] through process of negation but before it can go further than the first [IT IS NOT] her reflexive defenses slam the emergency eject button and she violently sprays a chunky bile-brown slurry across the concrete floor. The memory cuts out like a yanked power cord and is devoured by a suicide-rush of specialized phagocytes.

**

Fennec doesn’t remember the name her parents gave her. She doesn’t remember their names, either: she was six when smallpox swept up the valley and her world was obliterated. Memory holds on to the faceless shapes of parents, friends, all her extended family, the village and its neighbors - all gone because of 186 kilobase pairs of DNA.

Maybe she could have made it to a village on the other side of the mountain. Maybe she could have lived for a while off of what she knew about good plants and bad; maybe she could have. But she was six years old and everyone she had ever known was dead, and the terrified thoughts clutching her numbed heart told her that she was sick, too.

She stayed in the village, too scared to leave and not knowing what to do even if she could. She scared off wild animals from the bodies for as long as she could: shouting, throwing stones, waving a stick around. Days passed. She didn’t get sick.

She got very, very hungry.

**

The garage door rattles up, gravel crunches underfoot.

“The fuck did you do? What the fuck?”

Delfino can’t help a moment of deer in the headlights as Fennec storms out into the driveway. The dimmed red flashlight can’t fully hide the ashen tinge of her face or the blood around her mouth; Delfino’s pattern-seeking brain, oblivious to context, compares it to a toddler’s first spaghetti dinner.

The pink elephant moves behind him. The h. erectus chorus screams RUN, and to their terror Delfino’s feet remain frozen.

“Fuck! Hold it!” she shouts to the form in the undergrowth before turning her eyes back to Delfino. “What the fuck were you two doing?”

“I don’t know! They just told us he had the book, they never told us what it was!”

“Yog fucking- are they trying to get people killed?”

Delfino makes some gesture between a shrug and throwing his hands up in despair.

“It sure fucking feels like it sometimes. Were you able to get anything?”

“Nothing, not a fucking thing. Did you burn it?”

“Yeah. It’s gone.”

“Good.”

Delfino makes a spur-of-the-moment choice that will have consequences, but not immediate ones.

“They wanted us to bring it in.”

Fennec snorts.

“Of course they did. Of course they fucking did.” She pauses for a beat before making a similarly consequential choice. “Jesus fucking Christ. Never let them tell you it's secrets man was never supposed to know. Bullshit. Knowing about fission isn’t dangerous; trying to build a breeder reactor in your back yard is, and the world is filled with fuckheads all trying to be Evan Hahn.”

**

The Arrangement: Without warning or announcement, one or more human bodies will be delivered. Information stored within their protein-based processing cores will require extraction and transmission, as dictated; the remainder will require disposal. Payment will be rendered on delivery. Secrecy will be maintained. Violations will be met with lethal force.

**

The car pulls out of the driveway and its engine fades down the road. BB emerges from the brush, his size reduced from hippopotamus to human once more.

“You alright?” he asks.

Fennec takes a deep breath and combs her memories: there’s a sharp, instantaneous cut between cracking Wallace’s skull open between her teeth and standing, hunched over and gasping and tear-blinded, bracing against the table with a splatter of vomit on the floor.

“Yeah. It’s out. Universe heard us talking shit and decided to knock me down a few pegs.”

BB shakes a fist at the dark sky and hisses. 

“Zeusss…” 

That gets a weak laugh out of her, followed by a twinge of stomach pain and a hand pressed to her side.

“Ow. How dare I be punished for my excellence in hubris.”

“Second only to your mastery in humility.” The brief humor drains out of BB’s face “Should we put out a notice?”

Fennec nods, wipes her mouth on the back of her hand.

“Yeah. Not fucking up twice on this one.”

“Mm. You go let everyone know, I’ll clean up the mess.”

“Do we have room in the freezer?”

“If I thaw out the salmon my cousin sent us, yeah.”

“Good, wrap it up and stick it in there. I’ll figure out what to do with it tomorrow.”

Pre-dawn is upon them by the time they finish up and shuffle to bed. The mystery of the ganache will wait for another night.
 

**

Using Fennec and BB in a Game

• Fennec & BB provide a solution to a couple problems that agents are liable to run into (needing information from a corpse, trying to get rid of a corpse), so a couple minor inconveniences are built in to avoid them fully negating those stressors:

• They take payment primarily in the currency of Zothique (or other assorted preternatural-adjacent valuables. Junk from Green Boxes, basically, but it's got to be the special junk.)
• The Arrangement started in the Cowboy Years, and the Program proper doesn't actually know about them, and neither do the Outlaws. The PCs will find themselves with an Asset that will put a target on their backs if they aren't careful.
• They'll help as far as the Arrangement dictates and anything beyond that is up to whim.
• They have friends in low places in case the PCs try to double-cross them.

• They work better in higher-pulp games, naturally, though you could easily tone them down for something more serious. They're also best for downtime between sessions, since that way you can slow-burn the reveal of who they are and what their deal is, and maybe weave in a shotgun scenario for when you have missing players. 

• They've been together for 187 years and they've made it work. Lean into that. 

• The actual origin of the Arrangement still lives in undefined narrative convenience land, because it doesn't really matter. They're the weird NPCs who "help" because it's less of a hassle that way, and because they know they'll be around long after the last green triangle is gone.

• I actually wrote these two up as part of a "Dan writes a romantasy" post, under the auspices of "I want to write about an extremely stable and healthy long-term romantic relationship where the two leads are, by most human standards, visually repulsive". We didn't get to see much of that side of them in this story, but I still have the old draft so expect more in the future.

• Why not, here's here's their original descriptions:

Fennec - Ghoul. Professional wizard hunter. Skin pale grey-brown and heavily calloused. Disconcertingly thin. Terrible posture. Hair stringy and long, limited to mane on neck. Large eyes that reflect light like a cat. Enormous Dorito shaped ears. Head somewhere between a jackal, a horse and daeodon, thin-skinned and skullish. Yellow teeth fit for tearing meat and crushing bone. Band T-shirt (Divine Tumor Ultradeath Corpse-Magus 2019 US Tour). Olive cargo shorts. Fluorescent pink-blue Crocs (only footwear wide enough to accommodate her weird cloven feet). Laughs like a strangled hyena. Smells like rotten meat and some unidentifiable oily musk.

By-The-Blood-of-Our-Most-Precious-Savior “BB” “Bubbles” Brown - Deep One hybrid. IT specialist, web developer, open-source enthusiast, veteran Wikipedia editor. Approximately the size and shape of a hippopotamus. Soft cephalopodic body pulses with chromatophores and luminescent dots underneath plates of crustacean armor. Towards the front, where most of the tentacles are, the exoskeleton forms a sort of clamshell hinge surrounding his primary mouth and the remains of his body

Despite being a New England Puritan by birth, BB is not part of the [Dagon-Hydra] clan - his lineage originates with the [Scylla-Cetus] dyad, who were forced out of the territory by Dagon-Hydra in the early 1800s.

Like all Deep Ones, BB is a sequential hermaphrodite - male throughout most of the year, then transitioning to female for the summer mating season (as is typical in an environment with few or no females)

**

These posts are fun, and I've still got several in the tank. The Mythos Kick continues. 

 

 

 

 

A response to Dead Letters' review of Unicorn Meat

"The Unicorn in Captivity" from the Rochefoucould Unicorn Tapestries

Sam Sorensen (plus Misha and Walid) did a review of Unicorn Meat over on the Dead Letters podcast earlier this week and I think it touched on some important points and quite a few bits worthy of response, so I’m breaking the prime directive and writing up a response.

(And just to defuse any worries that any beef is involved here, Sam directly encouraged me to write the response up like this instead of just letting it go as DMs.)

This will, of course, make very little sense if you haven’t read Unicorn Meat or listened to the episode, since I’ll be responding to specific critiques in the latter with stuff from the former. 

**

Re: Bullet Points
Sorry, Sam; you’ll have to pry them from the cold and vicelike grip of my mummified corpse.

Joke aside, I do have a reason for why I gravitate towards that style of information presentation: that’s how I take my notes, and that’s what I convert an adventure into before I run it. Writing the adventure in bullet points saves me from having to translate it into full prose for the book and it saves me from having to translate it out when I want to run it. Practicality and convenience carries the day.

 

Re: UM feels like it never had an outline
It technically did, but only in as much as what chapters came after which. Practically speaking it didn't have an outline, because I generally treat outlines and first drafts as synonymous.

Re: Best adventure ever
Aw shucks, Misha, appreciate it!

 

Re: Formatting and Layout
I've grown rather fond of how rough and ugly UM is, but Dead Letters is correct in calling out the weird placements of things like the page of legends and the list of things that aren’t in the module: those were added to fill space so that each chapter would start with the header and art on the left-hand page. In retrospect I should have just added more stuff to the preceding chapter, but so it goes.

 

Re: The scenario hooks
Those definitely needed more polish, no disagreement there. Depending on your game you could probably run the opening of God’s Teeth as-is and then segue towards the farm.

(Fun fact: I didn’t listen to that AP until a couple years after UM was published) 

 

Re: Information Pacing & Spacing
This is another point where I know that I could definitely have done it cleaner, but I do have a reason for why the book is structured the way it is: I wanted the module to converge on the inevitable from the outside inwards.

Chapter 1 is the outer corona: scenario hooks, timeline, guidance, and White-Eyes; it sets the  stage with the most general and gamey layer of the onion. 

Chapter 2 is an overview of the carvergirls and the tables for generating them. It draws the players in, gives them opportunities to build out their characters and their characters’ connections. What does that memory mean? What did White-Eyes or her Buchas do that made you go “she needs to die”? Does your name mean anything?

The remaining chapters go Farm, Swamp, Factory, Caves. It’s a descent. I wanted the gravitational pull of the factory and the caves below to extend into the text. You can bum around in town or muck through the swamp for a while, but eventually, you need to descend. Bethlehem ain't gonna slouch towards itself.

White-Eyes’ character writeup is 70 pages before she shows up in person because I wanted her to be present in the GM’s mind (and through them, the players) from the beginning.

Re: The Tower’s split description
The Tower gets written up 10 pages after it’s introduced because it’s inaccessible when players first encounter it: you have to force your way into it, and players probably aren't going to do that without exploring the rest of the town. But it’s impossible to explore the town without seeing the tower, so you get the external description first and then the internal one later.

Re: The Dorms not being on the map
Whoever said they’re on the map & just not labeled is correct, that is the case. Same with the factory. A minor hiccup that got lost in the mess of putting it together.

Fun fact: the description I gave Gus was that the maps looks like the shitty coloring page on the back of a children’s menu from a rural diner (I think he did a great job)

Re: None of the named NPCs are are given age grades or have locations listed
Both of these I thought were easy enough to glean from context: as faction leaders and other noteworthies they’re going to be old and experienced enough that no one else has taken the position, so I didn’t feel like it was worth enumerating.

As for locations this critique confuses me; everyone but Pugs and Birdie are opposite their location on the same spread (and Pugs and Birdie next to each other so no location gets in the way).

If I can make something a 2 page spread, it’s gonna be a 2 page spread.

Re: Termagant Street Dumpling Company
Not a Warhammer reference, actually: I was referencing the thing the tyranid unit is named after, which is the vaguely-defined entity dreamt up for The Song of Roland as a “pagan god” worshiped by Muslims (Baphomet is actually the same deal); less than ideal as a street name in that light, but streets can get named after all sorts of things.

If people don’t recognize it, it’s just a cromulent word; if people do recognize it, if they’re a freakazoid like me maybe they’ll think “huh, I wonder if this street was unflatteringly named after the people who lived here? And why’s there a dumpling company there now?” There can be, if one wants, an entire implied little history of an ethnic neighborhood in some corner of the Commonwealth extrapolated from a logo on a shirt.

I do think it’s odd that this was the reference that got time devoted to it, when you can get a 666 HOT SOUP tattoo from Stitches; if I was going to make a Warhammer reference it’d probably be something about enemies hiding in metal boxes (The cowards! The fools!!).

Re: Disconnect between art and textual descriptions
The discrepancy is there, but it's there because I wasn’t terribly fussed about exacting accuracy: I gave Rowan a loose description for each piece and left the rest in his hands, because I knew he’d get the vibes right.

Re: The Machine 
The physical description of the machine itself is obtuse, but the hosts treat it like the passage to the caves isn’t signposted at all and that’s objectively not true:

• The vibes are especially rancid and given the first bullet point = “yes, this is important”
• There are footprints leading to one of the hatches =  “someone went inside the Machine”
• There are no footprints leading out of the Machine = “they didn’t come out of the Machine”
• There are teeth on the inside of the chamber = “it can probably bite” 
• There’s fresh blood around the hatch with the footprints =  “whoever went inside did so recently, and they fed the Machine to do it”
• White-Eyes was previously in the factory and is no longer there = “White-Eyes is the one who went into the Machine.”

If all those signposts still aren’t enough, there are four Buchas in the back who worked on the killing floor (that’s why they’re the Buchas, after all) who can tell the PCs whatever clue they’re not picking up (ex: Bucha 1: “I saw it take Scrungle’s arm off last summer.” Bucha 2: “Yeah because she reached in to grab her bracelet when it was still hungry.”)

Not to mention that the players, if they’re carvergirls could just ask the GM “what do I know about the Machine?”

Also, Sam describes entering the Machine as if losing a limb is a guarantee. Quote the book:

“Entering a chamber without damaging the flesh within first (via fire, tanning fluid, cleaning supplies, etc.) or providing a sizable meal (6 units of meat or a person) triggers a chewing reflex. Save vs DEX to escape with a mangled limb or die.”

I should have added some kind of sound effect to indicate hungry vs satiated states, but the rest is a straightforward trap. Don’t go into the giant mouth without fucking it up first.

 

Re: The swamp
Yeah, probably should have added something about being able to find a guide to a specific location, but that’s not a particularly difficult thing to implement in the moment.

Re: The load bearing clue (and a lot else) is something players can miss
Unicorn Meat is designed around not having a full picture and not being able to get everything. All the locks have a key and some clues out there in the world, but they’re not going to be handed out to the players willy-nilly. Happenstance and random chance can and will drastically shift how a run through it will shake out, and yes, it is on the GM to go “all right, they’re hanging out around the Big House a lot, I’ll give them a nudge towards the kirin-horn sword via Birdie” or “well, Noodle doesn’t have a clue written down for this part, but I’ll give them one anyway. I can’t plot and prep for every single possibility; what I can do is spread the clues out enough that the players will find at least one of them, or be in circumstances where they can be directed towards one.

 

Re: The Noodle doll should be given to the players earlier
Yeah, it would be cool to do as suggested and hand it off early and give each location and character a description. This is also an extremely easy fix: if you think it should go earlier, put it earlier.

Re: Random things that have no payoff
The random details with no payoff are there because that’s how reality works and that’s how stories I like work: Bilbo finds a talking wallet in a troll’s pocket. Jonas tells Severian a story about magic beans that he never gets to finish. Ripley hails Antarctic Traffic Control. There was an age before the Elden Ring. SCP-173 was moved to Site-19 in 1993. Luke Skywalker asks “You fought in the Clone Wars?”.

The page of legends is another interstitial buffer page in the wrong place, but it is what it says on the tin: they’re stories carvers tell each other. If the reader wants to make them deliver a payoff they’re free to do so, or they can ignore them, or they can just enjoy thinking about them for a minute or two. The part of Unicorn Meat that needs to deliver is White-Eyes’ story and the carver’s ultimate fate.

One of the hosts says “Don’t tantalize me with good ideas” - if I don’t give the reader stuff to inspire them to engage with their own imagination beyond what I’ve written, I consider that a failure. It is my job to tantalize with good ideas.

Now in fairness to the critique, there are a good number of things that weren’t connected as well as they should have been: the Nightwatch Tree, several of the swamp special locations, some of the signposts for things like the Kirin-horn sword and the like. That all needed a second pass for better connectivity.

Re: Worthwhile additions of things not featured in this module
Page 66 really got the hosts’ collective goat, in a way that I thought was both kind of inexplicable in general and inexplicably venomous. The placement is wonky (it’s one of those buffer pages padding for left hand chapter starts) no pushback from me on that part, but the level of offense they take to it is weird. And I, in principle, agree with them on the point of “games that introduce things that could be interesting and then do nothing with them are lame”

The criticism that the cool ideas on the list would make the module better if they were meaningfully included, that’s fair; several of them could have easily been added without bloating and could have replaced or buffed up lackluster elements that did make it in. But the stuff on that page isn’t in the module because it isn’t in the module, and I said so right in the header. I wasn’t leading anyone on by promising something and not delivering. Nothing on that page existed in my version of Unicorn Meat at the time I was writing it - maybe it should have, but it wasn’t - but everything listed there could exist in someone else’s version of Unicorn Meat and maybe they didn’t know it until they got a push in that direction. 

Eclipse Phase is my go-to example for the principle Sam is getting at: there are multiple major parts of EP’s setting (the Factors, the Iktomi, the ETI being the 3 most prominent) that are set up as major mysteries that matter a whole lot to the setting as the whole, but are given 0 material or meaningful answers. You could cut them and lose nothing but an annoyance. It’s worse even than Call of Cthulhu’s handwavy and vague monster writeups. 

The difference between EP and Unicorn Meat, though, is that I explicitly don’t try to pin anything in the adventure to the stuff on page 66. It doesn’t exist in the module as-written. It's all non-canon… but I also think canon is a suggestion that doesn’t go any further than what’s on the page. If someone says “man it’d be cool if like, Rochefoucauld was selling unicorn meat to the moon beasts, what if a galleon of Leng shows up at the end”, I say “Fuck yeah that’s cool! You should do that!”

That doesn’t mean I’m going to include Leng-men showing up in a flying boat as part of the adventure, even if I might use it at the table when I run it. That’s not really that onerous of an edit to make, and it’s a fair sight easier to throw in some unexplained lights in the sky when the PCs get to sleep, or to replace an encounter with Brother Bones and imply that he’s Satan. 

All this is just a really good display of a fundamental disconnect between how Sam and I play and conceive of games, and something that I think needs addressed with how Dead Letters approaches critique. I’m going to call it Gundam Style vs Lego Style.

Gundam Style = You have your model, you have your directions, and while there’s some room to modify the model there are pretty firm limits to what you can do unless you really want to roll up your sleeves and get deep into kitbashing. You’re going to end up with something cool, but it is by and large going to be what the maker intended.

Lego Style = You have your model, you have your directions, and you are beholden to neither. You can dump all those pieces in a big old bin, toss out the booklet, and just throw stuff together according to your own foppery and whim. You’re going to end up with something cool, but even if you follow the directions at first eventually you’re going to make something that the creator didn’t intend, and they wanted you to do that. 

Now, I’m not going to try and persuade Sam that Lego Style is better, because I don’t think either of them is. He’s entitled to his own artistic preferences, and I like a nice Gundam from time to time. But I am going to say that when the other hosts asked “Are we hypocrites?”, my answer is “yeah, you kinda are.”

This is fine. Everyone’s a hypocrite about something, usually several things, I’m no exception there. A little hypocrisy about things that don’t matter is part and parcel for the human experience. The hosts have strong opinions about design and they’re “advocating for a certain way of doing things”, and I certainly have the same; but that can reach a point where it’s no longer productive and flips over into bad faith, and I think this section of the review hit that point. 

It’d be silly to criticize Jackson Pollock for not being photorealistic, in the same way that it’d be silly to criticize a toddler for not being Jackson Pollock. Criteria by which art is judged are situation-dependent, and the critic has to be able to give some amount of leeway to that. I might get frustrated by all the worldbuilding gaffes and iffy relationship dynamics and very narrow view of what fantasy can be in the romantasy books my partner reads, and I can drum up convincing arguments for why those things are bad, but I gotta step back and go “well, I don’t like it, but it’s also not operating in a space where my complaints are fully relevant”. Because if I don’t step back and let it be on its own terms, I’m just being an insufferable jackass and my partner has been entirely in the right to call me out on that when it happens.

One of the first things I say in Unicorn Meat is:

“Change or remove whatever you need to in order for people to be comfortable at the table and enjoy their time playing.” 

That doesn’t stop just with the content warning, that applies to everything. If the reader doesn’t like something, I want them to change it. If they want to add something that’s not there, I want them to add it. If they don’t care about this that or the other thing, I want them to ignore it. I don’t give a shit about how it’s played; the fact that it’s played at all and people are having a good time is enough. I brought my toys to the sandbox for other people to play with and I wouldn’t be here blogging if I hadn’t found a community of people who just made shit up for games and didn’t worry over making everything fit perfectly. 

So I think Dead Letters lasering in on this single page as Unicorn Meat’s greatest sin is aimed, in the name of “advocating for a certain way of doing things”, directly towards insufferable jackass territory. The hosts went and stuck to their criteria in a situation where it was less relevant or even not relevant at all, and calling Lego Style deficient because it’s not Gundam Style isn’t useful critique. It’s just dogmatism, and it makes the show really hard to get through: I don’t think I’m going to listen to another episode, independent of the hosts’ opinions of UM. The value of the critique - which was quite high when it was pointing out the problems with UM compared to other Lego style works - was only worth the cost of the rest of the experience because I had skin in the game. I don't really want to listen to them tear into someone else's work.

Re: “It’s like Appendix N but worse”
The list on page 66 is not a curated list of inspirational material, so it's not really an Appendix N; secondly, this statement completely misses the purpose of Appendix N. It’s not homework. Running and enjoying a game without being intimately familiar with its inspirational antecedents is the default experience. Providing a curated list is an option available to readers if they want a glimpse into the headspace that made the sausage.

(I don’t know, would Sam also take issue with the existence of Appendix M-DAN?)

Prime example, I’m fairly certain none of the Dead Letters guys have played LISA the Painful/Joyful, because someone would have brought it up given that it’s the ur-text for Unicorn Meat and the module wouldn’t exist without it. That 666 HOT SOUP tattoo is a reference to a song that plays when you’re fighting a guy named “Gary the Hot Soup” and that part doesn’t matter; the chaotic-manic aggressively grating off-kilter fuckery elicited by the song is what matters, but it only matters in as much as “this is what Dan had going through his head when he was writing the book.” And this post for that matter.

(Honestly, I should dig up that UM playlist I wrote up a while back and never finished.)

(The final confrontation with White-Eyes, in my head, gets you the one-two whammy of “The End is Nigh” and a specific remix of “All American Badass”.) 

Re: Caves and traversal time
The caves are supposed to be flux space (“Progress is slow: 1d4 hours moving between points”), the room writeups are the sections worth noting. Should have been more clear on that.

Re: Stitches and White-Eyes’ relationship
Yep, gay. The main clue is for eagle-eyed players to catch that there are sci-fi paperbacks in the med hut and White-Eyes’ room, but nowhere else on the farm. Players with a decent eye for such things can also be able pick it up from Stitches’ appearance in the final confrontation (White-Eyes and Stitches being the carvers alienated furthest from the rest of the farm; putting them together when they’ve been isolated otherwise should trip some bells), but if the players don’t pick up on that they’ll at least be able to figure out that they’re collaborators. 

Re: Theotokos
Sam calls this an obsession of mine, which I think is unfair. One blogpost and an adventure module is a preoccupation: it’s what I’m about to write that upgrades it to obsession.

Herod the Great dies in 4 BC., splitting the kingdom of Judea into the Herodian Tetrarchy. Taking advantage of the upheaval, a bandit named Judas son of Ezekias raids the town of Sepphoris, making off with loot and weapons from its treasury and garrison and kicking off one of the endless little brushfire rebellions of the time and place. He’s a thorn in the Tetrarchy’s side until 6 AD, when Herod Archelaus is expelled from power and the Tetrachy’s territory is converted into the Roman province of Judea, now under the jurisdiction of the newly-appointed legate of Syria, Publius Sulpicius Quirinius.

Quirinius orders a census, as one does when there are taxes to collect. Judas and his men continue their banditry/revolt with renewed vigor, striking again at Sepphoris and the surrounding countryside. Quirinius sends troops to stamp out the revolt, and they do so. First death, then taxes: the Roman way.

For purposes of narrative pacing, this is the part where I mention that Judas son of Ezekias is better known to history as Judas of Galilee. Sepphoris sits less than 4 miles from Nazareth, and in at least a few apocryphal traditions it’s considered the birthplace and hometown of Mary.

You can see where I’m going with this.

To make it abundantly clear, I’m not planting my flag on this particular hill because I want to pull a Behold the Man. The reverse of that, actually. If Jesus’ biological father was a Roman soldier (or one of Judas’ bandits) - whether by direct violence, coercion, or Mary acting in self-preservation - think about what that means for the rest of the narrative.  If Jesus was sired by assault, what does that say about Mary and Joseph? Strip out all the miracles and reduce it to if > then: Mary didn’t seek out an abortion. Joseph didn’t divorce her and raised the child as his own. Jesus ended up a wandering apocalyptic preacher, yes, but one whose ethical teachings are preoccupied with the treatment of the poor and marginalized.

And if you’re me, someone who grew up Catholic (not tradcath, but definitely above-average cath levels) and left because (among many other things) the only thing the Catholic Church loves more than Mary is denying that she was a human being who lived and existed within time and space (let the woman buy a jar of wine and have a nice night in with her husband, for fuck’s sake), this radical restructuring of a foundational text into something that subverts two millennia of accumulated dogmatic bullshit and is extremely relevant to the current social climate and is relevant to my own lived experience (as I’ve said before, I spent six months living in the woods where the bulk of my human contact was with a dozen or so sex offenders every work day)... that’s the sort of thing that easily becomes a creative axis mundi. Strip out all the miracles and all the dogma and remove God from the equation and you are still left with a story that has happened to real people somewhere in time and space. If not these particular people, it has happened to others. Making a myth of it, and returning to that well over and over again to explore the questions it offers, is a way for me to square what it means to exist in a world where this shit happens. Rome comes with death and then with taxes, and we’ve been trapped in that world since we began. Gods don’t exist, and that’s what makes them useful: They give faces and names to the things that have none, playing out a story we can use as a mirror to the world.

Anyway, bringing it all back around to Unicorn Meat: White-Eyes is 100% using her son as an instrument of her revenge, but she still loves him. The PCs arrive at the Bottom of the Pit just in time to see her holding him, drawing out the moment because it will be the last and only time she will ever be able to. That’s why there’s the time-displacement effect there: it’s a contrivance so that the PCs will always arrive just at the critical moment. Her assaulter is never named, and appears only as a skull at the bottom of a chamberpot: he gets what he’s owed, and he doesn’t matter in this equation.

(Also you should watch Justin Sledge's video on this topic, he does a much better job than I at laying out the context.)

Re: Disappointment that the bottomless pit has a bottom
Quote the description of the Bottom of the Pit:

“An awe-inspiring Brobdignagian form stirs underneath, obscured by placental tissue.”

Whenever you think you’re at the bottom of the barrel, there’s always another barrel just below it.

Re: The Theocarnequs
Reverse-EVA was not intended (or at least, I don’t remember intending it), but it is on-point and a generally accurate description. If Shinji had been marinating in a cocktail of unicorn blood for months as the preliminary spiritual refinement needed for apotheosis.

Re: Dark Unicorn Trinitarianism 
Can’t remember if it was intentional or not, but it’s certainly applicable. 

Re: No lore for the Beast Below
With the space I had available, there’s nothing I could have written that would have added any value. It is very old, very powerful, very far away, and very bad news. Anything further would be overdoing it. That may indeed be a cliche, but I’d rather evoke that cliche than the dreaded sin of Lovecraft pastriches and overdo it while still saying nothing.

 

Re: “It’s almost cool but it isn’t actually. It’s gesturing towards such cool ideas but, like, does not actually connect them”

I kid, I kid. But I really do talk with my hands a lot, my friends poke fun of me for it.

I don’t connect the elements explicitly in many place, because I think implicit connections are fun. That's part of the game of me. I’ve written how many thousands of words of unhinged Elden Ring theoryposting? Valeria called UM “VaatiVidya bait” and that's the one of the best compliments I’ve ever gotten about anything.  I like giving readers that moment of “holy shit is this evil unicorn trinitarianism!?”, because even if it isn’t, I at least got them engaged.

Re: The Finale
Sam’s critique of the finale glosses over a critical part of the encounter: the first thing White-Eyes does is give the PCs the option to just turn around and leave. It’s meant to be a choice players struggle through. If I’ve done my job right, it should be something that the PCs (or better yet, the players) have to struggle through. By the end of the adventure they should have seen and experienced enough horrors that they’ll at least consider taking White-Eyes’ offer and letting the world burn.

(I remember getting tagged by a woman on Twitter (can’t remember her name or dig up the post, now, apologies) who said that her players were divided so strongly on this point that they actually argued it out at the table.)

In its unmodified form, there’s nothing remotely close to a happy ending in Unicorn Meat unless the players manage to dumb-luck their way into finding one specific chunk of rock in the swamp and get it to the right person. That’s the point I’ve been hammering home the entire module: there is nothing good at Sunny Smiles Unicorn Farm. 

But by that same token, if someone wants to change that ending I encourage them to do it: friend of the blog Michael Kennedy was one of my playtest DMs, and he included an entire subsection of the adventure where the PCs went into White-Eyes’ subconscious dreamscape and were able to get Stitches to break through to her that way. It fit in with the tone and vibe of that campaign better than the ending I wrote in the module, and that’s cool!

**

And there we have it. I still technically have twenty-some minutes left in the episode, but like I said up above it's gotten pretty hard to listen to and the returns have diminished. I think the hosts made a lot of good points about nuts and bolts (stuff that will definitely make it in to future adventures should I ever write another), but fell off sharply when they moved beyond that. Still, I'm glad they did the episode and hope the show does well. No harm no foul.

 

Update: Sam left a response to the response over on bluesky, in case you want to read that as well

Quick, where's this NPC from?

This started as list of replacement mission control nationalities for 60 Years in Space, which is why the distribution is uneven. Roll 1d6, then again as directed.

1
Atlantis

2
Carcosa

3 (1d6)
1-2: Mu
3-4: Thuria
5: K!n-Yan
6: Tsan-Chan

4 (1d6)
1: Y’ha-nthlei
2: Atvatabar
3: Pegana
4: R’lyeh
5: Barsoom
6: Pnakotus

5 (2d6)
2: Caspak
3: Satanazes
4: Opar
5: Averoigne
6: Xebico
7: Zothique
8: Dylath-leen
9: Oriab
10: Oz
11: Tsalal
12: Kadath

6 (3d6)
3: Sannikov Land
4: Xuchotl
5: Ulthar
6: al-Waqwaq
7: Onigashima
8: Lyonesse
9: Laputa
10: Celephais
11: Erewhon
12: Kitezh
13: Brob Ding Nag
14: Libertalia
15: Ooth-Nargai
16: KwaKukuana
17: Patusan
18: Leng

Language Dungeon Spitballing

I've had an idea floating around in my head for a puzzlebox dungeon (system and setting indeterminate) centered on decipherment of the dungeon-builder’s language, Chants of Sennar or Heaven’s Vault style. Pulled off right, it could be a really fun diegetic challenge for players; pulled off wrong, it’ll be a tedious pain in the ass. This post is me thinking aloud and seeing what sticks.

Need: Complementary Components  

The concept would naturally attract language enthusiasts, but I don’t want to limit the focus so that they’re the only people who would enjoy it - for that, I could just make a wickedly hard decipherment puzzle. Things like pronunciation and spelling would also need taken into account: it’s no fun for anyone if the DM is constantly stumbling over describing the puzzle.

Ideally, the language-puzzle should exist side-by-side with the dungeoncrawl without overwhelming it, serving as another tool players can use to navigate the environment and the hazards therein. 

Need: Onboarding Clues / Trailheads

Throwing players directly into the deep end with no leads would be a bad move if the goal is engagement, but I also don’t want to give them a complete key to the puzzle from the beginning.

 

Trailhead Option: Give players a document written by a known party.

Epitaph did this nicely by giving players the one Roman source mentioning this people has a few root words and the names of two kings, and that worked pretty well for that game. You just need to give the players some context clues so they can identify the dignitary or god or what have you:  if you had a king named “Ran the Tiger” and then there’s a statue of some imperious looking guy with a tiger pelt, you can make some guesses about which words on the inscription are what if you have “here’s how Ran is spelled in the ruin script” or another king nearby to compare inscriptions to (could get titles or numbers from that).

Trailhead Option: The script is still used in the modern day 

This would entail giving the players the key to the known version of the script (or just using the Latin alphabet) as one of the opening clues. Some of the symbols would be used for the same sounds, while others would be repurposed, left out, or used in nonstandard ways.

Trailhead Option: The children’s book

Hand someone a copy of One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish in a language they know nothing about, even if they can’t read the script, and within moments they’ll know five words, where adjectives are placed in relation to their nouns, and maybe even plurals. 

This option requires a bit of finagling for your typical generic vernacular fantasy setting, but it’d work excellently in Mothership or other sci-fi settings; stumbling across the classroom of an abandoned colony would be a treasure-trove in this sort of puzzle-dungeon.

Pulling on that thread a bit…

Trailhead Option: Use players’ existing knowledge as starting point

Making up an original text for the above scenario would be easy enough and a good clue; but you could also hand the players a book titled “Ozad Shungan Hluneitsan” with a little girl, a metal man, a scarecrow, and a lion on the front cover. Players will immediately clock that the words on the cover translate to "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz" and that’d be both a good clue and a way to encourage engagement because it’s something players already know.

Question: Script or no?

Script here meaning anything not the Latin alphabet; nearly all games of this sort involve translating glyphs directly into their semantic equivalents in English. This is a method that works (Heaven’s Vault, Chants of Sennar) but it's a method that bypasses phonetics and most grammar: relying on it is going to typically result in a logographic language, and those tend to have enormous glyph lists (hello, hanzi) to make up for the fact that you can't really just spell out a word as it's pronounced. So that's either a very truncated glyph library, or a load of extra work.

Using a different kind of script drastically decreases the number of symbols but introduces the new step of symbols no longer being directly connected to concepts. But that's not as big of an issue as it could be, because even if you don't know how the symbols are pronounced, Pattern-Seeking Brain will still be able to figure out that this string of glyphs means this or that with the right clues

Real-World Example: Koga's Koffing

So back when I was 8 or 9 or so, I was able to pick up that の meant possession in Japanese despite knowing absolutely nothing about the language, because I had some Japanese Pokemon cards (couldn't tell you how i got them) and when you've got cards you know are "Koga's Koffing", "Koga's Weedle", and "Misty's Starmie", you can process-of-elimination your way through it.

• The strings of matching kana on the Koga cards must be his name, so the rest of those names must be Koffing and Weedle, respectively.
• If I port the word order over, Misty and Starmie's names should follow the same pattern.
• の is a shared element on the cards that isn't part of their names, so the only thing remaining is that it marks possession (or, as I understood it at the time, it's the Japanese version of apostrophe + s). 

**

 All right, I think I've got enough to work with here.

• Mothership adventure set in abandoned colony previously inhabited by a group that kept to themselves (for whatever reason); colonists have their own language spoken nowhere else.
• Computer systems are either down (so you can't just google-translate them) or locked behind figuring out passwords, program names, and executable commands.
• If there are any survivors, they need to be encountered after the main language puzzle is solved. 
• There's a classroom for the colony children with books printed on-site. Since this is a treasure trove for solving the puzzle, there needs to be some sort of obstacle between the players and getting in that can't just be forced. The reveal that it's a classroom could be really meaningful if the players don't know what's behind the blockage until they get in.
• Signs, warnings, and maps are easy ways to get some clues and basic words in.
• Assigning sounds to symbols will need some sort of video or audio component. There could be subtitles on a video, or you could cross-reference the A/V clue with another document (a work schedule, an attendance sheet, etc)
• This is going to involve a LOT of handouts: these will need to be formatted for home printing & cutting out sections (numbered index cards?)
• Add a horrible monster and some reason the PCs can't leave until they do something, and you've got a stew going.  

Solid start, I'll keep you posted if it goes anywhere.