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.

On Creativity; or, the Grand Art

FMA does a good magic circle

Prelude

The post to follow is my methodology for basically any creative endeavor - the answer to "how do you do it?". It's a semi-conscious process, and one that's really only been laid out in concrete terms while writing / revising this essay (which has taken entirely too damn long and entirely too many revisions), and it took me like six months and a fortuitous shower thought to realize that if I spun out the mess in my head into discrete steps it is nearly word-for-word the FMA principles of alchemy. That transmutation circle ain't just for show, it's symbolic. Alchemy all the way down. Cue the theme music.

(God, FMA is still so good.)

The Three Stages

• Comprehension - I take the source material, whatever it might be, and I hone in on the components that it consists of and how they connect.

• Deconstruction - I pull out the components I like / find interesting.

• Reconstruction - I build something new out of those components, arranging them in a different way and re-laying to connections between them.

Easy enough to start, let's get things rolling.

Comprehension & Deconstruction

The first two steps are so inter-connected that they are applied together - I can't really comprehend the thing without looking at the parts inside.

First you have the Text. This is the artistic work as a whole and it primarily comes into the foreground when analyzing the relationship between the Text, its creator(s), the temporal context of its creation, and the assorted other external circumstances that surround it.

Example: Star Wars is a Text. Dealing with Star Wars at the Text level will include looking at how it was shaped by the ideas of Joseph Campbell (boo, hiss), how it was a response to and divergence from other science fiction of the time, and the overall zeitgeist of the late 70s in film.

Discrete parts of the Text are the Ideas. Characters, locations, events, elements of the setting and plot, all of these get bundled under Ideas.

(In the war of Lumpers and Splitters, and in this regard I lean Splitter. Or a Splunter. Every Lump can be Split down into a family of related components, and it is often very conveniant to organize things on a general level and then descend into specifics as you need to.)

Example: Luke Skywalker is an Idea.

Ideas can be broken down into constituent parts, which form our third and final layer of Components, which are the parts of an Idea that are directly portrayed within a Text.

Example: Luke Skywalker includes the following Components

• Disaffected youth
• Longing for adventure
• Occupation: Moisture farmer
• Location - Tatooine
• Connection: Uncle Owen & Aunt Beru
• Connection: Anakin Skywalker (father, presumed deceased)

Tatooine itself is spun off into its own set of components (where people are from is a vital component of who they are.)

Desert world

Settler-Indigenous conflict

Imperial presence

Interstellar truckstop

Shithole in the ass-end of nowhere

We're not going the TV Tropes route here. No cutesey names: Components should be functional and descriptive. Writing them out like this in a list is primarily to show how it works in my head and is only representational, not accurate. And, of course, different people will gravitate towards different components they want to focus on.

Next is Reconstruction where all the fun happens. 

 

One More Thing...

Sticking to Star Wars as my example might give the impression that this process is neat and orderly: it is not. All those Ideas and Components are thrown into an enormous sargasso soup pot to simmer together and intermingle.

A more accurate interpretation of the process is, to channel a random example:

macuahuitl uses obsidian need active volcanism aztec association rainforest association heavy mesoamerican association deviations from cultural coding noteworthy let's try that alternatives polynesia pacific northwest japan iceland mount etna prison of typhon location of hephaestus' forge religious ceremonial usage warrior priesthood let's bring japan back in mediterranean climate rocky archipelago shugendo and other strange syncretic buddhist sects in the mountains vesuvius also in italy pompeii and herculaneum add buried city at base of mountain necropolis specify relationship of priests to the dead later right this is enough to get started don't forget typhon

Accurate, but not great for a full post unless I want to turn As I Lay Dying into an RPG. 

 

Reconstruction

There are a lot of ways to reconstruct our pile of Components.

Cross-Pollination - Dipping into our Sargasso Soup and transplanting Components and Ideas between bowls is a vital part of the exercise - if you aren't mixing your influences, you're just repeating what you started with and that's boring as sin.

Example: If we dip into the 'Hard sci-fi' bowl, Hoth is now not simply an ice world, but a Titanian ice world with a hazy, hydrocarbon-rich atmosphere and lakes of liquid methane. How might this change the events that take place there?

Association - Drawing a link between an Idea or Component to something outside of the Text. Sometimes there will be an association already extant in the source material and we're just bringing it to the spotlight

Example: Leia's a space princess in space feudalism, we can make an association to the Rear Palace of Imperial China where there's a formalized system where daughters of nobility are sent to be concubines to the emperor (both as a way to jockey for the favor of the emperor, and as a way of keeping the lower nobles in line) - Since Leia is out and about having space adventures, if I make this association I'm also going to add an elder Organa sister.

Connective Tissue - Drawing a link between Ideas and Components that did not originally have a link in the Text.

Example: Jabba smuggles equipment, goods, and people underneath the nose of the Empire - therefore the Rebellion is probably in deep with him and those like him, and that's going to cause trouble in the future.

(Aside - Association and Connective Tissue are basically the same thing, I split them up because there's a difference between "This element is similar to the storming of the Bastille" and "this element is directly connected to the storming of the Bastille.")

Exegesis - Taking Ideas and Components and extrapolating further detail from the other information that is provided to us in the Text. This is probably my favorite of the lot, as it allows you to get to some really interesting places just by going 'Well if X is true, then it only makes sense that Y is as well.'

Some examples:

• Luke, growing up where he did, should probably have an accent, one that likely leads to most of the Alderaani troops to dismiss him as a hick.
• Luke, growing up where he did, probably had a hell of a time adjusting to Yavin (humidity, all that green, insects, etc)
• Luke sharing a last name with a famous war hero is pretty conspicuous unless Skywalker is used as the generic name for slaves, orphans, bastards and people who don't traditionally have family names. A Jon Snow type name. There are ten billion Skywalkers in the galaxy.
• On that note, it's weird that Uncle Owen is not a Skywalker, and that leaves us with several options:
• Option A) Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru aren't actually Luke's aunt and uncle, he just calls them that.
• Option B) Owen married into Beru's family and took her surname of Lars.
• Option C) Beru is Anakin's sister.

It is a rabbit hole and should be treated as such, but it's so much fun.

Execution - How Ideas and Components are presented to the audience. This isn't about introducing new material, but how to arrange what is already there to get a different emotional response from the audience.

Example: There are a whole lot of ways to frame the death of Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru. Not all of them work in the framing of an ordinary feature-length film, but that's the principle in action - changes in medium necessitate changes in execution.

Refocusing - Part of Execution. Drawing the audience's focus to aspects of the Text not typically focused upon.

Example: Viewing the Galactic Civil War from the point of view of the aliens who were excluded from Republic politics, devastated during the Clone Wars, oppressed by the empire, and don't think too highly of a bunch of privileged human Core Worlders asking for their help to restore a government that didn't do shit for them.

Deviating from the Path - Storytelling often relies on familiar patterns. Purposefully deviating from those patterns can lead to some positive results, even if you don't stick the landing exactly.

Example: An actual one that has happened this time - Legend of the Galactic Heroes, like any good thief of Star Wars, has its own Death Star in the form of the Iserlohn Fortress. Instead of destroying it, however, the Free Planets Alliance captures it, and possession of the fort and its hyperlane chokepoint position flips back and forth between sides across the whole of the series. Its raw destructive power is of secondary importance to the way possession of the thing shapes events around it.

Final Thoughts

Finally, the damn thing is out of my draft doc. Not even sure if it's any use to anyone, but I need to get back into just slinging stuff on here without worrying if it's good or game-changing.

Some Thoughts About 60 Years in Space

 

[Note from Future Dan from the dark future of 2026: This post was written shortly after 60 Years came out, and isn't really representative of where it's ended up in the three years since - the updates that have happened since I wrote this have radically changed the game and greatly improved it - it's still a mess, but it's a playable mess now and I've pretty significantly changed my tune on the game. So just keep that in mind]

Buckle up folks, we've got a wild ride ahead of us. 

Off Into the Dark Wild Yonder

60 Years in Space is a game prescision-crafted to pander to me, while simultaneously triggering incredible frustration at every opportunity. Here is your white whale, but it is unfortunately dead on arrival.

What is it, you ask? A tabletop adaptation of the notoriously complex board game High Frontier, written by Andrew Doull. It consists of five books at ten bucks a pop:

• 60 Years in Space (Core Rules)
• This Space Intentionally (How to actually play the game. Missions and travel)
• A Facility with Words (Additional travel & combat rules, ecosystem & Species Designer)
• All Errors My Own (Trends in society and technology)
• A Lot of Zeroes (The far future - intersolar missions, planet generation, aliens)

As a work of science fiction and as a source of inspiration, I have many, many good things to say about it. We'll get to those (much) later (like in a different post later), as there is a more pressing matter at hand.

As a tabletop game, it is unfit for purpose. And that's a rough thing to say about something that was a one-man, eight-year project, but despite the fact that I do legitimately love the core idea of this game and many of its components, I can't be handing out passes on what Could Have Been.  

To whit:

• The text arrangement on the cover is...a choice.
• There are no pages devoted to rules summaries or procedures of play in the core book - not a flow chart or bullet list to be found. Directions are located scattershot through the text, and they are often very confusingly worded as to why you are rolling, or on what, or what systems are in play.
• Mission outlines are not included in the core book.
• Key terms are neither bolded nor italicized.
• Reference tables are not numbered.
• Headings and subheadings are not numbered.
  
• Directions are confusingly worded.
• References to other concepts or mechanics will nearly always be made without page reference. Some of these concepts or mechanics will be either actually missing, or so difficult to find that it doesn't matter.
• The index has internal hyperlinks (Good!) There is no way to tell that this is the case unless you mouse over the table and pay attention to your cursor (Not good!)
• The core rules do not contain an itemized procedure of play.
  

While I admit it is not particularly fair to drag a one-man team for an eight year project, these are basic issues here and should not have been an issue even for a one-man formatting job. Not to mention that, if we bop on over to Atomic Rockets and dig around we can find a link to a google doc of the 3rd edition High Frontier rules, compiled by the board game's creator Phil Eklund, which avoids most of these errors and is overall a much better reading experience for it despite the fact that I am missing half the context.

Enough of that. Let's walk through making a crew. The steps here are my doing, the book does not specifically enumerate them.

Step 1: Roll for Space Politics

Space Politics is not your team's politics, but the overall mileau of space at the start of the game. In what is going to become a recurring theme, the table has multiple columns but does not indicate if these columns are meant to be rolled individually, or if the table is supposed to be read across with each row as a single entry. I get 'Red - Authoritarian'; "The space race has effectively been won through military, political or technological superiority - usually through force of arms - and the victor is able to control which colonists are permitted into space."

There is a column for card suits, which is for "randomly generating outlooks" - there is no page number or link to outlooks, explanation for what they are, and a whole lot of white space. I err on the side of caution and read the table in rows, so our suit is Clubs.

Step 2: Mission Control

In which we skip over Chapter 3 (Eras) right top Chapter 4 (Mission control), and find ourselves in the first bad omen. Chapter 3 is all background material - important stuff, mind - common technologies, attitudes, things to remember - for each of the major eras...but those major eras are not numbered. They're named - Baseline, Upported, Colonization, Exoglobalization, Futures, Breakthroughs - but they don't have numbers and they don't include the starting years in the header (ex. Upported starts in 2040, but that's in the body description or at the chart at the end of the chapter.)

Interesting stuff, we will return here, there's good material here especially for Mothership. But it is also in the way of making our crew and that makes me a grumpalumpagus.

Okay, mission control. We get a nice table labeled "Second Wave Mission Control Social Units", where we roll for our what sort of organization will be running our mission. Once again, there is no indication if the table is meant to be read in rows, or each column rolled individually. As with Step 1, I am reading it as rows. There's no roll here,as the recommendation is that we are playing as a National Space Agency, which is politics White (Nationalistic / Conservative), has Spacecraft quality Medium, crew quality High (they have experience in LEO and their crew module is spun at 0.6 G), their Contract Age (not explained here) is 36+3d6 (I get 44), and the mission is science.

Alas, my Green ancoms in space will have to wait for another day.

Now some notes - the explanations for aspects of the Mission Control Social Unit are not provided in the order of the table (giving us Crew Quality first and then Color), and they cut up information that should be put together (ie, there is an elaboration of what colors mean outside of the section with the color heading). Also the important mechanical aspect of having a high-quality crew ("the crew will not suffer Microgravity risks until the crew module is damaged.") is not located in the section headed High Quality Crew. If you are navigating this by headers - an absolute necessity with something this dense - you are fucked. Doomed to miss useful information.

Our White social unit color gives us...

• "White BSUs are religious, nationalistic or family focused organizations"
• "social units are nationalistic, conservative and family oriented and rely on limiting personal freedoms because of their moral beliefs but also in rewarding hard work and limiting the role of the state."

Oh joy. Positively frabjous day. With luck our re-entry capsule will disintegrate.

There is a secondary table for the type of National Space Agency you are, and I get Privatized.

"The national space program has been privatised but still has an implicit government guarantee and monopoly on space travel.

I feel like a mutiny is in order.

I should also mention that the headers for the different types of Mission Control Units are not numbered, and don't contain the color associated with them (if, indeed, there is a specific color associated with each and we weren't supposed to roll for each column)

Skipping the subtables for the other MC types, we move on to Launch Site. There are no tables to determine what country we are, or what non-country we are, or anything else about our organization other than that we are a privatized National Space Agency.

The Launch Site header is located below the table that it is connected to. I end up rolling the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, which means my launch corridor is not only complete bullshit and...hrm. Yeah I do not like my options for nationalistic/conservative factions operating out of the Baikonur Cosmodrome.

Next up is Crew Module Design, which splits the tables of Major and Minor Spaceports, despite the Major table having a result that says "roll on the minor table" and the minor spaceports table is absolutely able to fit on the same page as the major table.

Also the Crew Module Design table is not on the same page as the heading.

I roll up...I don't know. It has a Mass of 1 (which is 40 tons of payload), Rad-Hardness of 4, Thruster of 6 * 8 AB 2 (I don't know if that asterisk is mean as a multiplier or a placeholder, the explanation says "thrust * fuel consumption need to enter each burn, with the AB indicating the thruster can afterburn an additional two steps of fuel to increase the thrust by 1." It's also got ISRU 4, which is In-Situ resource utilization, which measures water gathering and resource scouting for building the factories that I keep hearing about but seeing nothing.

There's also a column labeled 'platform', which is additional functions of the module. I get Missile and Raygun. Neither are explained here beyond handwaving at combat applications, and I am referred to the This Space Intentionally supplement (no page number given) or the rules for the High Frontier board game.

Step 3: Other Starting Factions

Now's when it starts getting confusing. To generate other factions, we roll 1d6 for each color not our own, and if the number is equal to era number + 1, so we need to roll a one or a two. I think. I am honestly entirely unsure, because the next heading is "First Wave Crews".

We are, according to the table way up at the beginning of Step 2, a second wave crew. But waves haven't been mentioned before this and what does that mean for era? Are we Baseline, or are we Upported? Back in the Eras chapter it says that Upported contains the tech we need to start playing the game, but if that's the case why is Baseline even mentioned as a starter here, and does that mean that the waves are equivalent to eras? Does this mean that we start at Era 2?

Well, I rolled for Era 1, because you start counting at one. And the only faction I got was Green, who I guess we are on very poor terms due to the space politics roll. Let's jump ahead to page 317 (it's actually page 319) to look at the faction designer.

The faction designer is a thing I don't like.

So. There are three types of factions. Crews of other ships, factions that want to set up colonies, and social factions for everything else. All three get their own waves, which are not bulleted, and they all use different waves. Apparently you can get third-wave crew factions by emailing the author.

There are only 5 major factions allowed total, and only one per color. Makes sense, it's a crowded game. Everyone else is minor, they build infrastructure but don't have their own dedicated map markers (i think?)

Factions have Origin Stories, Doctrines, Ranks (we haven't even touched on ranks yet so I have no idea how this applies to anything else), an org chart, upgrades (found in an entirely different chapter, but at least it has a page number), encounters, faction missions...and one sample.

Yeah you're making up all that save the type of doctrines they faction has (and even then it says that they'll usually have custom versions), generic rank benefits, and a generic Color-based org chart. There's a list of potential colonist factions in the appendix, which is better than nothing, but it is not mentioned in the Faction Designer. You are on your own.

There's some crunch about colony factions but at this point I am irritated enough that I am ignoring them. We're still making characters, remember?

Step (Checks Notes) 4: Crew Demographics

The fluff for the crew comes before the mechanics. Fair enough.

First heading is "Mission Control Nationalities",and is followed by this paragraph:

"When determining crew demographics, some mission controls will restrict the possible nations that a crew member can come from. If this is the case, roll 2D6 for each crew member. If this number is less than or equal to the Nationality Mix Number for the Mission Control, then roll for the crew’s nationality normally; if it is greater the crew member will have the same nationality as the nationality of the Mission Control. Factions without a Nationality Mix Number use 2 if the faction is Red, 3 if White, 4 if Green, 5 if Purple and 6 if Orange."

But here's the thing. That Nationality Mix Number doesn't exist. It pings three time in the 352-page pdf, and all three of them are in this paragraph. If my faction is White, does this mean my number is 3? Or does it change because I have a National Space Agency? Is the crew nationality table where I actually choose what National Space Agency I am working with? or was that listed elsewhere? Shouldn't the launch site be determined after I figure out which country is involved? Cause it would be really weird to end up as Venezuela and be launching out of Baikonur which is objectively worse than French Guiana let alone halfway around the globe.

I didn't end up as Venezuela, because this is the part where I quit. There are tables for ethnicity, language, pronouns, callsigns, and while on their own they might be worth playing with in the future, for the right now I am stuck with hundreds of pages of directions that don't make sense, mechanics that either don't exist or are very well hidden, and no remaining patience.

Actually you know what, I will roll up a crewmember severed from the rest, just to show you what you can get. Next table is nationality.

"Roll 1D6 twice; except roll 2 is 2D6 on roll 1 result of 5. If roll 1 is a 6, roll 1D6. Use a result of 3-6 as roll 1 on the Colonist Nationalities table on the following page. Otherwise roll 3D6 on this table."

I rolled boxcars and I cannot parse this sentence.

(Deep reading has lead me to this: roll 1d6; if result is 1-4, roll 1d6. If roll is 5, roll 2d6. If roll 1 is 6, roll 1d6, and if that roll is 1-2, roll 3d6; if it is 3-6, use that result as Roll 1 on the colonist nationality table.

(Nested tables, gods above and below)

So Roll 1 is 6, then roll 2 is 6, which means that I go over to the colonist table, go down to 6, and then roll 2d6 to get my actual nationality. 6 + 3 = 9 so my crew member is from Iran.

Sweet baby Ganesha on his cute little rat

I go to the Ethnicity and Language table, roll 2d6 on the Iran listing. Get a 5, so I am Azeri (Azerbajani) and I speak...I don't know, what is this notation?

Ethnic language >= 2. Persian <= 3.

I rolled a 4, so... I think I speak Azerbaijani? Do these ranges overlap? Is it "greater than or equal to 2 and less than or equal to 3",  or the reverse?

Gender table I roll an 8, which is Female. Public pronouns apparently change with every Era influenced by space politics, and if this is indeed Era 2, I suppose I should roll. 1d6 minus 1 for Red,and I get a one, so now zero, and...

"I/Me/My/Mine/Myself, You/You/Your/Your/Yourself and We/Us/Our/Ours/Ourselves merge the first and third person so they are no longer distinguished, suggesting a partial or complete erasure of individual accountability, replace by collective responsibility and identity."

While this, grammatically and socially, sounds like an absolute nightmare, it is our first example of something I actually do like in this book, which is that when interesting cultural things crop up, they tend to be very interesting indeed. This is the public pronoun table, not the personal one, remember.

Though I still find it awkward how all of these are based on English when there are so many languages (including this obscure one called Mandarin Chinese) that get by with something much simpler. I guess it's justified by everyone speaking English as well as their normal language? Or they're more just examples to indicate attidues. I like that option best.

(The gender table is more of a sex table on the whole, but it has a solid selection of options including transhuman ones for later eras. Though the explanations of the results are neither in the order of the table nor in alphabetical order.)

My callsign is Rotor Excellence - PCs only get callsigns (because name tables for all those background options would be extremely cumbersome. I think this is a good move.)

 

Final Thoughts

I'm calling it here, because I ain't making three more of these chuckleheads. I did make an interesting character and the hints at the setting have the imagination running, so it certainly succeeds in that respect. There's a solid section on safety tools at the beginning of each book.  It's all the surroundings that's choking out the brilliance that is here.

There's skills and there's assets and upgrades and risks and infrastructure and travel and other stuff, four entire books that I haven't touched on, but I'm not going to review that. I will certainly write more posts about it, but the review is over, for one reason more egregious than this

There is no rules summary nor procedure of play section in the core book. Indeed, if you want to get an idea of how to actually play the game, you need to piece together a bunch of disparate fragments found across multiple books and that is fucking unreasonable. I am not psychic. I am not immortal. I am not 17 with unlimited time and low standards. If one is writing a game, and the game is intended to be played, it must be written reader-first. Especially when dealing with complex information. Especially when trying to teach complex information. I want to play the game: Let me play the game.

I brought this up in the itch page discussions, and it wasn't productive. I was told that the game both "assumes you have bought and played the board game" and "It is entirely standalone", and that the basic information necessary for play is not even contained in the core rules (it's all in This Space Intentionally, a fact that is exhausting. There is indeed a numerical list of steps to take, and it is not in the core rules), but the fact that the author of the game can pull an entire 180 in the space of two posts wrt the necessity of outside reference material has, if nothing else, confirmed that "standalone" no longer means anything.

Sigh.

There is, I swear, a whole lot of good in 60 Years in Space - it's just that none of it is actually the game. The flavor, especially in All Errors My Own and A Lot of Zeroes is fan-fucking-tastic. And I say that with total sincerity, it's some of the best sci-fi idea work I've seen in RPGs. Steal it for Mothership or Solarcrawl or something else. Or just read it, it's a good time.

But as a game? As a system of rules intended to be read and learned and taught and used at a table to play a game of imagination?

Unfit for purpose. Needs an editor with a keen eye, a red pen, and a hacksaw - at minimum.

Next post I write about it will be positives, because I ain't letting these random tables go to waste. Paid 50 bucks for these books and honestly despite the disaster of the game's presentation.

And it doesn't even have the benefit of Creative Commons.

How to Easily Make a Diverse Fantasy Setting

Lots of words have been spilled on the matter (again and again and again, as the ttrpg disc horse tends to run in circles), but I can't recall any practical guides on how to do it. This is my method & thought process for both Mother Stole Fire and my Mothership material, though normally I don't use discrete steps and just re-iterate all the pieces in no particular order as I go along (and keep all the maps in my head, I must admit).

You will, no doubt, tweak it as you see fit need to fit within your own settings.

A FOREWORD

A diverse fantasy setting is of value because human experience is diverse. That is the long and short of it. We live in a universe of endless fractal complexity, and it does not suit us as artists or audience to let ourselves be fooled into believing that the world or its people are simple.

This foreword is now over.

PART 1: THE STEPS

1) Open up your map in image editor of your choice

If you don't have a map, or don't want a concrete geographical map, a relational map is fine. Just throw location names on a blank page in the appropriate arrangement in relation to each other, and leave it at that. Make sure to note mountains, coastlines, major rivers, any other important bodies of water and geographical features. The most important for later will be those that make life easy, those that make life difficult, those that facilitate travel, and those that get in the way.

2) Add the following layer groups: 'POLITICAL', 'CULTURAL', 'LINGUISTIC', 'RELIGIOUS' 'APPEARANCE'

Each of these groups will have however many layers as are relevant for your map, and you can always add more as you need. Treat the map as a living document - something you can always come back and add things to or change.

The most important thing, for any of these layers, is that the borders are fuzzy and porous. They are generalities, because we're working at a region or world map-level and hard borders are fake and made-up.

3) Set opacity down to 50% or so for each layer (adjust as necessary).

You want to be able to see where regions overlap.

4) Color in each layer.

Start with the polities / cultures / languages that you already have in mind. You can (and will) add more later, and edit them as more ideas come to you. You should be hiding layer-groups you're not using for your own sanity.

5) Make sure you have overlap

I repeat this point to drill it home. Even when there are natural borders like mountains or coastlines, they're not impermeable. Some regions will be more isolated, some will be more cosmopolitan, but there will always be overlap.

People move, and they take their languages and their cultures with them. Cultures and languages change over time, and through contact with other cultures and languages. Political borders are

6) If you have some large, awkward blobs, break them up into smaller ones. Add more elements!

This step is pretty straightforward - it's a natural tendency to generalize far-away places, but it is also reductive and leads to focusing on what outsiders think / want a place to be, rather than what it actually is

7) Continue until you are satisfied (for the time being)

There is always room for more.

[Aside] This would have been better with a visual component, but the draft has been sitting listless for months and since this process is normally all in my head, I don't have an example on hand. Maybe sometime in the future. My MSF map is out of date anyway [/aside]

 

PART 2: The Components

Here I'm going to go through each of the layer groups with some more guidance and detail.

GEOGRAPHY is where people live. It is a foundation on which everything else is laid - resource availability and scarcity, available modes and ease of travel, available foods and goods, the necessities of survival.

POLITICS is how people organize themselves. While this often manifests as kingdoms, city-states, empires, confederations, the-guy-you-pay-taxes-to and so on, it encompasses all forms of participation in organizational hierarchies. While there is always the temptation to make nice big blobs with clearly-defined borders, that is an invention of the modern era. Reality is always more complex. It is important to not limit ourselves to the political structures we take for granted simply because we do, indeed, take them for granted.  

CULTURE is how people live. This is an incredibly broad category encompassing everything from family structure to food to clothing to art and architecture. It is how we are born, grow up, settle down, and die. It is shared traditions. Any given person in any given place is going to exist at a cross-section of multiple overlapping cultures, and those layers will change a great deal as you zoom in or out (what might appear a singular group at a great distance will always be much more complex on closer inspection) There is no such thing as a monoculture, nor one that remains still to let the years wash over it as water upon a stone. There will always be gradients, variants, change.

Just because a given CULTURE is not the focus, it is no less complex than the ones you are dealing with up-front - it's just not what you're focusing on. Reduction is a means of narrative convenience and easing cognitive load - acknowledge this, use it as needed, but do not forget that it is a reduced representation of the real. It is not a pipe.  

LINGUISTICS is how people talk. The languages they speak and the way those languages interact. It is the vehicle of CULTURE, POLITICS, and RELIGION - sometimes all at once, and sometimes each has its own tongue - and the means by which they spread and perpetuate. Languages mesh with each other, change each other; they are historical artifacts of their own, describing long histories of contact both peaceful and not.

RELIGION is what people believe. It is the art of relationships - between humanity and the cosmos, between humanity and the self, you and your neighbor. It contains cosmology, philosophy, ethics, spiritual traditions, values and anathemas, all those pieces that go into building a worldview, regardless of if there are gods involved. It might be the lapdog of POLITICS or its bitter adversary. It may remain within a CULTURE or spread across them, linking groups across the lines of POLITICS and CULTURE and LANGUAGE.

APPEARANCE is what people look like. That's it. POLITICS, CULTURE, RELIGION, that's just what you're taught. Anyone tries to claim there's a correlation between them and APPEARANCE is trying to sell you something and the product is not worth your time. Folks who look practically identical might not have a single point of overlap between them elsewise, and folks who don't look a thing alike might as well be kin in the way they act. Human beings have a great internal itch, somewhere deep in the electrochemical cocktail of our souls, to wander - so don't expect a connection to GEOGRAPHY more strenuous than a trend. In fact, it is best to only ever think of this component as a trend, leaning perhaps one way or the other but never written in stone.

 

Part 3: Other Unsorted Advice

Basically just do the opposite of Talislanta - a setting where every people has one culture, one language, and one religion, and there's no variation or overlap between them. Sure there are no elves, but every people of the world just has the one stereotype.

***

The dichotomy of "civilized" vs "barbarian", while a central part of fantasy literature, is unhelpful for our purposes here, and generally an attitude I encourage all and sundry to challenge in your own works. While an awareness of who speaks Greek and who doesn't is important for this exercise, it is vital to approach these divides with equal parts neutrality and empathy - people and groups of people are ever-willing to dream up justifications to excuse their poor treatment of others, and it does not behoove us to buy the justification simply because the side giving it had sharper swords or more guns. The Greeks were not morally superior because of their cities, nor the Scythians inferior for their pants and warrior women. (Indeed, the Spartans were 'civilized', and their fascist trash-fire of a civilization was built on the backs of a slave class supermajority and a culture of formalized and socially-accepted sexual abuse.)

***

There is a piece of Elder Scrolls art by Michael Kirkbride, found in the Pocket Guide to the Empire, First Edition, which features a line that has stuck with me ever since I found it some years ago.

> "There are some Nordic tribes on the fringe; settlements that have never even heard of Septim or his Empire."

There is a vastness in this little statement of fact. For all the pomp and power of the empire that dominates Tamriel, there are still places within their own ostensible borders that go about their lives in total ignorance of what calls itself the civilization at the center of the world.

***

Think of your POLITICAL layers as containers, that will be filled with mixtures of the other layer groups - but also that the elements poured into the political container are not limited to just one jar. Additionally, it is important to remember that LANGUAGE, CULTURE, and RELIGION are often spread at swordpoint and gun barrel - favored tools of POLITICS. If you ever want to find the worst bastard in the room, look to see who makes demands that others should give up CULTURE or LANGUAGE or RELIGION for the benefit of POWER.

***

Joe O'Connell, of the Youtube channel Beyond Ghibli, phrases it like so while talking about Golden Kamuy:

> "[The Ainu] are presented as a culture in flux. When we explore other cultures in our media, especially the oft-exoticized native people of any land, they are a fixed point: a laundry list of interesting divergences from our own cultural norms. The Ainu in Golden Kamuy are an evolving people, portrayed in the middle of an intergenerational divide. Asirpa speaks of her people's customs and beliefs, and in her more-traditional grandmother we see these routines upheld and respected, but Asirpa considers herself a 'new Ainu woman, for a new age'. 'Only old people do that,' she states, when asked why she doesn't feed her guardian spirit. It's in wonderfully observed moments like these that exemplify an earnest depiction of the Ainu as a living people, instead of a simplified snapshot of a culture boiled down to their bullet points."

Or, as I like to say "people is people, wherever you go."

***

One of the most important things to keep in mind with CULTURE is travel - who is moving, how, and where. What are the best paths to take, where are the obstacles? Much easier to go down a river than over a mountain chain.

***

Cultural / religious / ethnic minorities will always exist, there will always be some sort of cultural exchange or interaction going on even in the most isolated and tiny locales. Migration and diaspora are written into our souls (for is it not said, that the open road still softly calls?)

***

A hopefully short aside on coding: semiotic coding is using some sort of short-hand signifier used to draw a connection between the content of the text and something else. The author references something outside the text that the audience is also familiar with to draw a connection between the contents of that text and the thing being referenced.

On its own, coding is neutral; it's a pretty inescapable aspect of writing fiction (communication strives for efficiency, and referencing "this is like that" is nothing if not efficient). It is a tool to be used. And like a lot of tools, you should be aware of where you're swinging it - you can make a real nice birdhouse with that hammer, or smash your thumb. Or hammer someone's head (which you shouldn't do, but that doesn't stop people from trying.)

There is, as you no doubt already know, a very long and very virulent tradition of using coding in fiction to spread harmful stereotypes of real-world groups. Disney's queer-coded villains, Star Trek's antisemitic stereotypes via the Ferengi, James Cameron's inexplicable love of the noble savage trope (But blue! And in space!), and more examples than we have time for in RPGs and fantasy as a whole.

[Aside] I have heard several different explanations for "this is what the ferengi are actually based on", and I find none of them convincing [/aside]

[Aside] The reductive slurry of spec-fic monocultures I blame on Star Trek. Orcs in generic vernacular fantasyland are just green klingons and that's why we are stuck in endless cycles of discourse samsara. [/aside]

To make a long and complex topic brief and pithy, the best approach is to write with intent and awareness (funny how that is usually the solution). What external information am I referencing? What auxiliary information am I trying to get across? Is it rooted in stereotypes or misinformation? What am I saying about this aspect of the fiction, what am I saying about the thing I am linking it to? I should probably double check things with someone who knows what they're talking about.

So, so many problems in the RPG and spec-fic sphere come from a combination of the nerd impulse to categorize combined with a sort of unwillingness to think about what is being signified - they're just repeating the signifier, thinking nothing of it.

***

There is a good example of the underlying principle here in Tolkien's work, of all things: elves, dwarves, orcs, all consist of different cultural groups found in different regions of Middle Earth. Lothlorien elves and Mirkwood elves. Blue Mountain dwarves and Iron Hill dwarves. Moria orcs and Mordor orcs. As with most of the good parts of Tolkien, it has been soundly ignored by large swatches of people.

***

Simulated Knave down in the comments suggested I link the ACOUP articles on the wibblyness of Celtic as a term and on the complexity of Roman ethnicity. More ACOUP is always good.

 

PART 4: A Worked Example

To give a practical worked example, let's look at our old friends Pen and Tam and what layers they belong to.

GEOGRAPHIC - P & T live in the northeastern Hill Country along the Mora River. The climate is temperate, the biome primarily broadleaf forest, the landscape is the hilly remains of some truly ancient mountains (the region's explicitly based on Pennsylvanian Appalachia). River, rail, and road access provide a convenient link to Bensael and other cities on the rivers, and it's a doable journey over the hills to Orlei, but there are few crossings to the south, meaning a more limited connection to the Low Country. The North Country is much more accessible.

POLITICAL - Bensael is the nearest major city-state, and Olen is part of its network of connected towns. It's not really a case of direct rule as we would think of it, but more along the lines of...okay so in a lot of the Hespermont there is a principle of governance that, since I don't have a real-world term to use just yet, would be rendered as "social well-being" or "social connectedness" or "mutual goods", which started out as a way of describing networks of gift economies and inter-clan alliances, and it's evolved to a modern-day iteration that operates similar to but perhaps not exactly quite like socialism. The Mora-Pono system has between four and six major nodes of this network (Redgate, Bensael, Rivershead, and a few others that I haven't made up yet along the Pono). The old clan and tribal affiliation networks remain, and are entirely too complex to get into here.

CULTURAL - The overall culture of the Riverlands / Middle Hespermontane is descended from the southern branch of the elder Longhouse Culture, like most everything else north of the lower hills. P&T in particular sit in a nook where there's further overlap from Bensael. Primary neighbor-cultures are the peoples of the North Country (themselves cousins by way of the Longhouse Culture), the Forest Peoples (their own group, descended from a completely different source), and Orlei (heavily influenced by Eostremontane cultures).

RELIGIOUS - Hespermontane religious practices are anthropogamist (Gods of Man) traditions and local folkways. The Solar Church has no real presence in the region, though eastern-style religious orders (such as the Order of the Sable Maid) imported from Orlei (where they have long been syncretized with the Gods of Man) have grown more popular in the wake of the War. There is a sizable congregation of Okavim in Bensael but it has not dispersed far into the surrounding country.

LINGUISTIC - P&T live in a very linguistically diverse region.

Their primary language is the Bensaeli dialect of Riverlands Hespermontane, a language that I have previously described as "Breton that's been mixed with Mohawk", chosen as an appropriate illustration of Bensael's role as a major engine of cross-cultural exchange. It is the admixture of languages from neighboring regions - Orlei in the east, the lower North Country, the Hill Country proper and those regions to the south - that has since become its own language.

Those neighboring languages all fill the roles of secondary languages in the Riverlands and Hill Country, and thus P&T are either additionally fluent in or have a passing knowledge of what would, in this analogy, fill the roles of French, Scottish Gaelic, and the Iroquoian languages.

(Now, bear in mind, that I use these real-world languages as illustration and comparison - evocative analogy rather than exact description. They are close enough for petanque, as it where, and my main methodology remains mostly "what sounds / looks good", with perhaps some phonotactical limitations if I want to evoke a specific cultural influence or the equivalent of Dog Latin. I am a monolingual dabbler in this stuff and certainly not someone with any sort of subject-matter expertise, judge me accordingly.)

These are not the only languages in use, though - there are the languages of the Forest People and those who live up in the mountains, both of which isolates, there's the old northern language of the Second Empire (served here by Greco-Latin) brought here from the Eostremont, which is mostly the domain of wizards and historians. The equivalent of Spanish/Italian is from the Lower Arivienne and is somewhat mutually intelligible to those who know Orleian. The Okavim have region-specific dialects of their own language. The Lilu-Voya dialect is the most commonly-spoken of the subterrene languages in the various lilu enclaves in the region. These languages would be the ones P&T know of and can recognize, but would have to find a translator if they didn't share another language with the speaker (Tam does know some Wizard's Imperial thanks to her work, but since she wasn't on a translation team her knowledge of it is limited.)

APPEARANCE - People in the Hepsermont fall, generally, into six very broad/loose visual categories, which I have just assigned letters to because they are broad categories and, as has been established before, strict categorization of such things is the source of many problems in spec-fic I would rather avoid (and, indeed, have written this entire post in the hopes of avoiding). Traits listed are common, not exhaustive nor exclusive - people move, populations mix.

MSF as a setting (by design), does not really have a conception of race - certainly not one anywhere close to the bullshit we are shackled with in reality. Cultural / clan affiliation is much more important than what one looks like, and correlation between the two is not considered to be a set thing. But it's still useful to know what people look like.

Following in the lead of Hail Santa, I am using the Phonecian alphabet to represent population groups as an out-of-universe shorthand. There are arranged, very roughly, in chronological order according to when there was a major migration of that population into the Hespermont. The very generalized home region is at the end.

•  𐤀 Alep - Slate grey, grey-brown, deep brown or red-brown skin; speckling or mottling of darker colors common; coppery or deep brown hair; beards very common; anakim build; broad facial features; Hill Country (Forest Peoples)
•  𐤁 Bet - Very deep brown skin; black hair; lilifio build; Hill Country (Forest Peoples) & Riverlands (other bands)
•  𐤂 Giml - Brown skin (shades vary from light to dark), brown or black hair (straight or wavy, occasionally curly); beards very common; epicanthic folds common; North Country, Riverlands, Hill Country, Arivienne, Low Country; the Hespermont in totality.
•  𐤃 Dalet - Pale pinkish or beige skin; brown, red, copper, or sandy hair (straight or wavy); North Country and Riverlands.
•  𐤄 He - Dark, deep brown skin, black hair (bold), occasionally sandy/gold/white; epicanthic folds common; Low Country, Lower & Upper Arivienne, Orlei, some Riverlands.
•  𐤅 Yaw - Mid brown skin (tan, bronze or olive common); brown or black hair (tight curls or straight), occasionally sandy/gold; Low Country, Lower Arivienne, Riverlands.

[Aside] many thanks to Enziramire for informing me that there's a people in Madagascar who call Afro-textured hair "bold" and straight hair "quiet", which is such a good descriptor. [/aside]

In very, very, rough chronology...

• Alep, Bet, and Giml have been here long enough that they are considered autocthonic populations. Alep and Bet are the oldest - oral history accounts of contact between them and Giml exist, and are old enough that they cannot be accurately dated.
• As best as can be determined through anthropological survey and mythic-historical records, the Dalet population migrated to the North Country during the collapse of the First Empire and the Years of Chaos, and swiftly integrated into the Longhouse Culture. A place of origin, and any related peoples, remain unknown.
• He migrated from the Belt and up the Arivienne during a period of major instability in the region.
• Yaw has migrated from the Eostremont into Low Country and Lower Arivienne in sporadic waves for most of history; they are placed as most recent in this list due to the influx of Eostremontane peoples during the 2nd Empire occupation.  

And now I pop back in to say that all this description more or less doesn't matter because the matter is not this simple. There are lots of dark-skinned folks with red hair and blue eyes up in the mountains, plenty of folk in the north with epicanthic folds. Small percentage of general population will have traits of anakim or lilifio descent (certain peoples will have much higher rates). There are enclaves and isolates such as the Lilu, Wendish, Dhorch'maeh, Acephavarans, the Dayrdani, and none of those are monolithic either. Doesn't even mention the Idaltu, who were there even before the Forest Peoples. Travelers and immigrants. Lots of mixed families, lots of generations of mixed families (there's hardly a difference between Giml and Yaw in a lot of places). Nothing remains set. On and on. No hard borders. 

Do not be seduced by the lie of simplicity.
 

Final Thoughts

Having spent a lot of time being long-winded about this, a TLDR:

All factors of a setting influence each other

You will never have a place on the map - no matter how isolated - that will be only one people, with only one culture, with only one language, and only one religion. Even if it's as small as "they put red ribbons instead of green on their shrines on the other side of the hill", there will be differences.

Don't be like Talislanta, where depth is ignored in favor of superficial breadth.

There is no such thing as a monoculture and anyone who wants there to be one is dangerous.

Draw from real life - it is always more complex than expected.

People are people, no matter where you go.