Sidrak the Sage Asks Some Questions

The blame for this can fall squarely on the Maniculum for introducing me to Sidrak and Bokkus, a medieval text wherein a Babylonian king named Bokkus (or Boctus, or Boccus…) asks several hundred questions to the philosopher Sidrak (or Sidrach, or Sydrac…) who provides some absolutely bonkers medieval-logic answers.

Unfortunately, the Middle English translation doesn’t seem to be easily available online, there is no modern English translation, and the dual-manuscript scholarly edition doesn’t have an ebook or the decency to release after creative commons was invented (This is my box of “translations of ancient and medieval texts should be released under creative commons so that people can freely read and share them” brand soap), and I am too impatient for interlibrary loan. It is on Internet Archive, but you have to have an account and check it out. (As of writing, the volume with the index of questions is checked out by someone else: damn you artificial digital scarcity!)

Anyway: since the master list of goofy medieval worldbuilding questions is out of my reach, I will content myself for now by using the ones that the Maniculum has used for its April Fool’s Day game show episodes.

Some of these questions are very clearly written by a Frenchman in the high middle ages, and are thus exemplars of being weird and uncomfortable.

IMPORTANT EDIT: Skerples has, in an act of sudden heroism, compiled the entire index. The questions are now available.

***

Brother Sidrak has spent the greater part of thirty years compiling a comprehensive survey of the Known World’s knowledge. From east to west and north to south he has wandered along the trade roads and pilgrimage paths with his Book of Questions, seeking volunteers for his great scholastic project. Anyone even modestly cooperative (and in many cases, not cooperative at all) will be peppered with selections from his list of 400-odd queries; whatever answers they give will be dutifully recorded and indexed for later tallying as he calculates which nations and peoples are more or less misguided and in need of salvation (He’s not doing this whole thing to find any answers - he’s certain that he already has them - only to see what other people’s answers are.)

• Appearance: Wrinkled, sun-darkened skin. Habit patched so many times that it now makes for surprisingly good desert camouflage. Thick grey hair and beard turned off-brown from accumulated dust and grime.
• Manner: Inquisitive, hyperfocused, performatively pious. Enjoys facts and lore, cares little for context or nuance. Does not consider differing worldviews worth arguing with or understanding, only recording.
• Wants: To compile all the Known World’s knowledge in a single work (with his name on it, of course); to prove that his sect (and by extension himself) has all the answers.
• Secret: Has a bastard son out there who has come into some notoriety on his own.

The following answers and their attendant questions were selected at random from volume twelve of the fifth book, The Vulgar, Also Called Cutters, Delvers, Vagrants, Hobos, and Gentlemen of the Road.

***

1. How are birds held aloft in the air?

• “All birds are avatars of the Simiurgh, who alone possesses the power of flight.”

• “Their bones are hollow and very light, and their wings push against the air like our feet push against the earth.”

• “As offspring of the dragon and the phoenix, birds are aligned with both fire and air, and thus naturally live above the earth and sea”

• “It’s punishment for their rebellion against the giants in the age before the sun.”

• “They are puppetted around on strings by Atlakhnakha for her amusement and our ruin.”

• “What the fuck is a bird?”

2. What becomes of falling stars after they fall?

• “Ever seen a fresh angel corpse? Wildest shit. They’ve got white meat, gold blood, feathers like a peacock show, and they don't rot. There’s one out past Jangar, fell a couple decades ago. Splattered itself across half the township when it hit. Might still be some bones left.”

• “The smith-priests of Kogan-Usan forge their metallic cores into the weapons of kings. Three are known to us, four are missing, an eighth is suspected and a ninth is pure supposition.”

• “They hatch into a dragon.”

• “They disgorge a legion of evil spirits and vile phantasms, after which they suck the vril from the land and poison all plants and animals that live there. They do this to restore their inner fires before returning to the heavens.”

3. Why is the Moon cold and the Sun hot?

• “The moon used to be hot, but it died and cooled off. That was before the demons took it over from the Moon King.”

• “If you look closely, you can see the sigil of the Frost Witch inscribed on the cislunar surface.”

• “Well one of them’s on fucking fire, ain’t it?”

• “It’s only temporary; the seasons of the heavenly bodies are extremely long, and they run opposite each other. The sun will enter autumn soon, and the moon will warm in its spring.”

• “The sun was made of Ghanjuk’s golden heart, the moon from his blinded left eye.”

• “You’ve got it backwards; heat and cold are extensions of Sunness and Moonness.”

4. Of which are there more, grains of earth or drops of water?

• “Trick question; their natural state is a singular whole, as evidenced by the tendency of both substances to coalesce. In this way every grain of earth and every drop of water is merely a temporary and circumstantial separation.”

• “They are two elements in a single substance, just in different concentrations along a dirt-water gradient.”

• “This line of inquiry was judged to be of sufficient stupidity to revoke the favor of Heaven and  banned at the Council of Hanharrat, as was the counting of angels found on pinheads; you are committing heresy by entertaining it.”

5. How many stars are in the sky?

• “Doesn’t matter, you only need to care about the seven that hate you.”

• “Twenty-one myriads of myriads, exactly. Minus one for the Betrayer.”

• “Only one star exists, and it is the Sun; the things called stars are enormous luminescent creatures similar to a great fish or a whale that drift through the aether and feed on moonlight.”

 

6. Why are some people tall and some short?

• “God saw fit to put the manhood of my enemies at the level of my fists.”

• “Trends of height come from residual influence of the giants. Most likely, the very tall were born in a land above one of the more intact corpses.”

• “The gods play dice with each soul, and this determines the qualities of the body they inhabit.”

7. What kind of apple did Adam eat?

• “It wasn’t the apple that was the issue, it was the cider. Drunkenness is the root of all evils.”

• “It was the golden fruit of the Hesperides, stolen by Eris and tossed casually into the garden as Adam was naming the zoa and valar. Adam, of course, escalated matters when his answer to the question of who was most beautiful was to ask to sleep with all three of the Tridevae. Simultaneously. He was ambitious, if nothing else.”

• “Common misconception, there are no apples in the land of Uz: it was a fig. A nasty, rotten fig filled with the larvae of wasps, for good and evil is terrible knowledge to have.”

• “Eve’s.” [Sidrak notes here that he does not know why the woman waggled her tongue.]

• “As best as modern scholarship can determine, it was the fruiting body of a shoggoth that had entered its sessile semi-vegetative life stage. This triggered a dramatic increase in neuron density.”

• “A stolen one. The angels had entrusted Lilith with care of the Tree; Adam wished to be like God but would not stand for having to share it with anyone else.”

8. Why do people sneeze?

• “Dust? Pollen? I don’t know what you want from me, man, my nose gets tickled and I sneeze.”

• “Some people say it is caused by invisible sickness spirits: modern natural science has taught us that it is in fact caused by extremely small sickness spirits!”

• “Your ancestors are fucking in the underworld.”

• “It’s the signal of a failed der0 transmission from the Air Loom.”

• “Your astral self has detected the presence of a nearby ghost.”

• “The air at the bottom of  your lungs is old and needs replaced."

9. What is the greenest thing in the world?

• “Couldn’t tell you, I’m colorblind.”

• “The gossamer robes of the Emerald Emperor, lord of all elves.”

• “There is no green more beautiful than the countenance of Yha’galuush, orc god(dess) of love and sex. To see a single glimpse of them is to see the greatest treasure on the earth.”

• “A tree in early summer, about midmorning or so, when the sun is warm and the sky is clear, and a faint breeze rustles the leaves above your head.”

• “Saw this one malachite idol once. Someone in one of the other cutter camps had dragged it out of the Tomb of the Serpent Kings and was showing it off. Got his ass cursed for it. Anyway, it was really green.”

10. What is the best animal?

• “Dogs is gods, y’know.”

• “The elephant; they are both the wisest and most moral of all creatures, far beyond mankind in both capacities.”

• “There’s this kind of slug down below - very brightly colored, glows in the dark - that feeds on blood. Its ooze foams up and gets gummy when it hits air, and it cleans inflection from a wound. See this scar on my neck? Woulda died without one of those things. Don’t eat em, though, poisonous as hell; numbs you for a while, then excruciating pain.”

• “The Questing Beast is of symbolic primacy, for it is the human condition; chasing that which we can’t ever catch.”

• “Dragons. Because if they can die, so can kings.”

• “Is not man merely an ape who has stolen fire from the gods?”

11. Why is seawater salty?

• “They are made of the Moon’s tears, after she was rebuked by the archons for changing her face.”

• “Lot’s wife was a giant, one of the Nephilim.”

• “It was struck by the star of Wormwood at the birth of the gods.”

• “It used to be blood!”

• “It is a vast dilute ooze, slowly dissolving the stone of the world.”

• “Fish piss.”

 

12. When dogs fuck, why are they more tightly joined than other animals?

• [Much of the page is taken up by a bloodstain and a note explaining that the interviewee, a cynocephalon from the kingdom of Prester John, had punched Brother Sidrak very hard in the nose when asked this question.]

13. Why did God make the Earth round like a ball?

• “It is the ideal shape for pondering.”

• “Easier for the elephants to keep balanced on their backs when the turtle moves, discs are usually too unstable for life to develop.”

• If you look at this diagram you will see that it is in fact a concave depression surrounded by vast walls of ice that then forms a dodecahedron…”

14. Is magic real?

• “Earlier today I lit a man on fire by snapping my fingers and then sold his possessions to a talking plant who walks the dying neurons of Yog-Sothoth. What do you fucking think?”

• “As everything that exists exists within nature, the supernatural cannot exist. Magic exists, therefore it is natural, and therefore it is not magic.”

15. Where in the body does the soul live?

• “In the lungs, with the breath.”

• “In the heart, with the blood.”

• “In the stomach, with the heat.”

• “In the testicles, with the seed.”

• “In the eyes, the brain, and the hands, where ideas turn to actions.”

• “In the womb, where two are made one.”

16. Why are some people white, some black, and some brown?

• “Presumably because they are not blue, red, or purple as they are in my homeland.”

• “You see only three colors in mankind? Such dullness”

• “I can only speak to the first; an albinic is a test from the gods, to see if men lose their wits and their morals when confronted with one who is different.”

• “Because humans, sadly, have lost their beautiful fur.”

• “God ran out of colored ink after painting all the birds and fish.”

17. If someone is deaf, blind, and mute, in what language do they think?

• “The feral howling that undergirds all of reality.”

• “Standardized Mi-Go Interface Language, if their ancestry can be traced back to Atlantis; otherwise they will think in either Ural-Altaic, Dravido-Koreanic, or Dene-Caucasian depending on which son of Noah their people descend from.”

• “None at all; they will think in pure thought, as the gods do. This is why they are so powerful in the magical arts.”

18. How should one remove a bone or thorn stuck in the throat?

• “Don’t eat things with thorns? Or at least pluck them out first, Jesus.”

• “The Von Heimlich Maneuver.”

• “I keep forgetting humans can’t just eat bones.”

19. Should the rich be judged in the same way as the poor?

• “Gods, I wish.”

• “No, because at least that way they’re honest about fucking us over.”

• “Of course not! Do you understand how long it took to quarantine all the rich men of the world on the Golden Isle? Bringing them to court for any of their heinous crimes against God, nature, and their fellow man would remind them that the rest of us exist! May God bless and keep those bastards as far away from us as possible.”

• “I do not know. We do not have poor men in my country, though  I suspect it is because we have yet to invent rich men.”

20. Why does shit stink?

• “It’s filled with the angry but extremely weak ghosts of everything you ate.”

• “You’d smell like shit too if you were chewed up and dunked in stomach bile.”

• “All the good qualities of the food have been taken into the body, leaving behind only the bad parts, and this produces the miasmatic effect.”

21. What animal lives the longest?

• “It’s a sliding scale of turtles. Small turtles, medium turtles, big turtles, zaratans, world-turtles, turtles all the way up and down.”

• “Not animals, but trees: Mighty Pando was old long before mankind was shaped from the clay.”

• “I was nineteen, and had just signed up with a mercenary company heading eastward. We went all the way to World’s End Lake before turning round, but when we were there - I don’t even recall what we were doing there anymore - we saw the Dragon. Not a dragon, the Dragon. She that watched the iron star fall from the sky and destroy the world of the Feathered Men. Was nearly eighty years ago now that I saw her, and those years are nothing. She has lived them a thousand thousand times over.”

22. What are the best colors of clothing to wear?

• “Context-dependent on what monster is trying to eat you - some manner of dappled green, brown, or grey is good for general purpose, but you’ll want to be careful about the saturation and contrast depending on what colors it can see. Not knowing a monster’s visible spectrum is a sure way for a greenhorn to get killed. Oh, and scrambler patterns are good to throw off enemy wizards, they have a real difficult time targeting you if they can’t make out your face.”

• “Blue. Dunno why, I just like it.”

• “A black tunic with a white sash, for that is what Emar wore when he assassinated the Five-and-One Emperors.”

23. What is the worthiest day of the year?

• “The vernal equinox, when we renew our vows with the spirits of the world.”

• “May the 25th, in honor of the One-Night Republic and the start of the Revolution.”

• “Calendrical division of time is arbitrary and false; all days are sacred.”

• “Every alternating Friday, ‘cause that’s when the paycheck clears.”

• “The vigil night of Inti, our lost Bringer of Day.”

24. What happens to fire after it goes out?

• “It reverts to its invisible aerial state as phlogiston.”

• “It is gone forever, and the cosmos is diminished.”

• “It returns to the smaller sun. Mankind has yet to steal fire from the greater sun.”

• “It is dead, having reached the end of its lifespan. Such elementals are brief things, compared with those of water and earth, yet not so brief as those of the air.”

25. How may a child come out of its mother’s womb?

• “Bloody, naked, and screaming battle-cries against this cruel world and its demiurge.”

• “Sometimes by surgery, sometimes by miracle, usually with great difficulty.”

• “What is a ‘womb’? Is that a variety of forge? Do you not carve new descendants out of the living stone?”

• “I’ve had three of the little bastards, and let me tell you, we made a mistake when we gave up laying eggs.”

• “You…use their true name to summon them out of the mother without pain or struggle? Like a reasonable person?”

26. How many children may a woman carry in her womb at one time?

• “One to three, barring any mythical importance. Then it can go up to seven, though I only know of one case in written memory. Which means we have two or possibly just one left before the end of the world, to satisfy the Law of Threes.”

27. What causes animals to go mad?

• “The Hell Star, obviously.”

• “Cannibalism of their own kind. Prion disease is scary shit.”

• “Long-term isolation within a zoological garden.”

• “Pain, stress, and loneliness, otherwise diseases of the mind or the influence of dread powers. Same as with man.”

28. Which women give the most benefit & delight to men?

• “I do, it’s me, it was me all along. My hips don’t lie and my thighs save lives. You’re welcome, men.”

• “Call me when you find a man who provides any benefit or delight to a woman and I might have an answer for you.”

• “Making some bold assumptions today, are we?”

• “A succubus woven from the hot black flame, bound by mask and name to fit the sorcerer’s specific desires. She will, inevitably and justly, stick a knife in his neck and string his corpse from the tower balcony as a warning.”

• “I do not consent to adventure in your magical realm. Away wi’ ye, foul wizard!”

29. What is the best and worst body part of man?

• “Oh fuck you, man. This is such an obvious setup to get me to say ‘his cock’, and then you’ll launch into a sermon about the importance of semen retention or some shit.”

• “His cock, obviously.”

30. Why did Noah take evil animals, such as scorpions, adders, and snakes, onto the ark?

• “He owed the Serpent a favor.”

• “I question why snakes are here twice while wasps are not mentioned at all. Scorpions only sting you if you fuck around with them and then you deserve it.”

• “One; because God said every animal. Two; no animal but man has knowledge of good and evil and thus all harmful animals are innocent by way of ignorance.”

• “Ah, it’s metaphorical, you see. Representative of a mass extinction event some thirty thousand years before Christ that saw a resurgence of the flying polyps.”

31. Which gives greater cunning, hot food or cold food?

• “Well, it’s not whatever I’m eating now. What the fuck is with you people and food temperature?”

• “If I eat a frozen chili pepper, is it cold or hot?”

• “Do I look like someone who cooks their food? I’m a fucking ghoul.”

• “Hot, naturally; you try thinking straight with a brain freeze.”

• “Cold, obviously; hot foods overheat and may potentially melt the brain. Your thoughts become sluggish, in any case.”

• “You must be one of those ‘salt has too much flavor’ types, eh?”

32. Sort from most to least numerous: animals, humans, fish, birds

• “Trick question; all of these are fish.”

• “What the fuck is a bird?”

33. Should people greet each other whenever they meet?

• “Hardly! Repeated headbutting, even for an orc, is bound to leave lasting damage.”

34. Which is worthier, maidenhood or virginity?

• “I have dealt with a lot of men who can’t get any and I used to be a preteen girl: both groups possess an immeasurable capacity for evil.”

• “Best of all is to be a kind and considerate lover.”

• “Never ask this question again.”

• “Motherfuckers like you who think virginity is magical are why I was sold into slavery in a unicorn slaughterhouse when I was eight. Crawl up your own ass and drown in shit.”

35. How are worms bred in the body and how do they feed?

• “Oh, do you not know? Congratulations! Today you get to learn about endoparasitic wasps!”

36. On what day and at what time will the Final Judgement occur?

• “Whatever the day, thanks to time zones it will take place at all hours at once.”

• “The final judgement will never occur, as the increased population of Earth has clearly overloaded the celestial bureaucracy and made it unable to render preliminary judgement - that’s why no one gets smote anymore.”

• “No one knows the day or the hour, dipshit.”

MSF: The Beloved Student and the Dog Knight

The Beloved Student was traveling by long and lonesome road when they happened upon a man clad in rags and lying in a ditch. Moved with compassion, the Beloved Student went to offer him the cloak from their shoulders, only for the man to spring up and away from their hand, spitting and snarling as an angry dog.

Startled, the Beloved Student drew back and exclaimed:

"What are you - a man who lives as a beast, or a beast that wears the guise of a man?"

"A reminder," the man growled in the voice like woodsmoke and firewater. As he emerged from the shade of the ditch to the light of the road, he picked up a sword from the dirt at his feet and brandished it as if it were a revelation: its tip was broken off; its edge was chipped and blunted; a great crack ran down its length; its corroded blade was caked in blood and dirt and the filth of men's bowels.

"Behold, my trade."

This sign the Student recognized, and they said:

"Ah! You are a kapalika, then."

"As good a name as any," the beggar said as he hung the sword from a loop of his fraying rope belt. "What do they say of me and my brethren, back in the green and peaceful lands?"

"That a kapalika might fight a thousand men alone and unclad and emerge victorious."

"Ah." The beggar crouched down and began writing something in the dirt. "Whoever told you that is either a liar or an idiot."

"Do you mean to say that you killed ten thousand?"

"I mean to say that I have no reason to count anything beyond what my fingers might provide. I am a slaughterer of men, ought I keep score like a boy playing kickball? Whether I killed a thousand or ten thousand or merely ten is of no difference to me."

"Oh."

The beggar stood back up, his knees cracking. He scuffed out what he had drawn with his tattered sandal.

[What he drew in the dirt is a matter of intense scholarly debate - ed.]

"I can see the question on your face. Best get it over with."

"While I recognize your trade, I do not know what reminder you make of yourself."

At this the beggar barked once in what was not unlike laughter, and phlegm caught in his throat so that he spat it into the dust before speaking further.

"You have gone out into the world to teach the ways of compassion and the paths of peace. I have gone out to preach the Sword Law to those who have forgotten its precepts."

"What is this Sword Law, that men so easily forget it?"

"The principle act of power is this: to shove a sharp piece of metal in the guts of another man. Dominion is made and sustained through mastery of the application of death and the manufacture of corpses. Kings and princes will name it glory and honor and duty, they will say it is a matter of law, of rights, of faith and of necessity. They will name it a thousand beautiful names, hide its gaping and maggoty wounds with silken robes, shower it in perfumes to mask the abattoir stench, drown its ghosts in wine, raise banners in honor and sing hymns of praise...but Sword Law does not change. It is the blade itself. Those princes and kings will wave from their palanquins and pavilions and think all costs justified. They have rejected the manudûn and chosen to live by the sword; Thus they shall die not as men die, comfortable in the house of their kin, but as disciples of the sword die. I am the reminder of true Sword Law, and thus I butcher men without sparing them the dignity I grant the rats that are my supper."

"Your law is a brutal and wretched thing," said the Beloved Student.

"Would you consider the killing of men to be anything else? Come now. But it is good that you are disgusted. Your soul remains intact. You need not be worried: My sword is for the humbling of hypocrites - the innocents learning by your side have nothing to fear from me." He grinned, revealing crooked and blackened teeth. "So long as they remember."

"I do not think you would be easy to forget."

"And yet, men so often do." He reached to an inner pocket of his dirt-caked robe and withdrew a small stoppered gourd from within. He removed the cork and there was the burning smell of gâzolin. He downed the mouthful, hissed with an intake of breath, and tossed the empty gourd aside.

"I will give you a proverb, in remembrance of this meeting: there is no mastery of the sword. It will destroy all you hold dear should you take to its teachings, and then it will destroy you. Do not think as kings and imbeciles do, that you are immune to the blade because you know the proper forms of its use. Hate the sword if you must have anything to do with it; it will still destroy you, but perhaps it might not become your master."

Silence reigned for a time, for the beggar had nothing more to say and the Beloved Student had no response. But they recovered their words and as the beggar made move to leave they said:

"A last question, sir. Who shall I say sent this message?"

The beggar smiled again, wider and more horrible than before. His gums bled.

"Tell them you heard it from a wild dog along the road. A jackal or dhole would do nicely."

And so the beggar walked past the Beloved Student, north on the road. When he had gone a stone's throw and a half, he turned and called back:

"A word to the wise, be it you or another: if you are to continue south, do so by a different road. This one has become difficult to pass."

With that the beggar staggered off the road and up the western hill, until at last he was out of sight. The Beloved Student watched him go before turning around northward and retracing their path back to the last crossroads.

Not far along that same road, a parasang or so south from that meeting place, crows gathered council in great black clouds. They settled upon the fields like a dew, alighting on new-formed hills of meat piled high and left to rot. Armor glistened under crusted gore, and banners hung limp beneath the burning sun.

** Notes**

[1] I'm not even reading Kill Six Billion Demons at the moment, I have no idea what the current arc is about other than Maya is involved.

[2] Dog Knights started as expys of Maya, but they've since accumulated traits of Sufi sword-saints (thanks Ènziramire!) and aghori.

[3] The Beloved Student's main appeal as a character and as a saint of the Painted Ones is their persistant gormlessness. They are naive, unaware, unimaginative, lacking in focus, and altogether somewhat of a dunce. They are the living embodiment of "bless their heart". But, the thinking goes, if this dunderhead can ascend the mountain, then the way is possible to anyone. To this end they feature often in comedic stories, and very often those geared towards children, and are always played off of someone more worldly and experienced - usually their teacher Jizo, but this is not the only encounter they will have with a Dog Knight.

[4] Dog Knights appear occasionally in the oral corpus, though they are rarely ever named - if they are, they will be called Jackal or Dhole or Hound or Hyena or Thylacine or something of that nature. This leads to them forming a sort of gestalt character, where every Dog Knight is treated as an aspect of a single, continuous personage. One might say that a Dog Knight appeared or the Dog Knight appeared and there is no real difference.

[5] Dog Knights, as evidenced in this story and in stories like it, inhabit the role of the of an opposite to the Painted Ones - not as opponents, but as a separate dharma entirely [aside] I can't think of a better way to describe this at the moment, we are brushing up agaist some rather obtuse in-universe philosophical and spiritual principles and I don't have a word of my own creation on-hand to describe "one of multiple simultaneous methodologies of achieving an enlightened spiritual state", so dharma it will remain for the time being. [/aside]

[6] Painted Ones are MSF's boddhisatva-analogues (hardly even subtle ones, the most prominent of them is name Jizo) We'll get more of them in the future: All you need to know now is that the name comes from the usage of body paints as a signifier of their role. There's also some definite influence from Sonchin in Hellboy/BPRD. You can consider the Dog Knights to be the left-hand to the Painted Ones' right, but the way that is typically framed in the world of MSF is more cooprative than combative.

[7] Some of the traditions that use the hand-path schema have upwards of a dozen of them - imagine a statue of Lu with the Hindu deity multiple-arm thing going on, each implement or hand sign representative of a different magical tradition. But again this is an in-universe way of looking at things. Everything is canon, especially the parts that contradict.

 

Mothership Extrapolation Game 4: Lore from the Warden's Manual

Continuing from where I last left off, here's a bit more information on the topics on the lore table in the Warden Operations Manual 

The following descriptions were sourced directly from spacers in the Lucy's Gambit Bar and Grill. No comment is made by the redactor as to the validity of these claims.

 

[Maru Banking Colonies]

"Ah, a little slice of tax haven heaven. Maru One, at least. Ocean world, big algae-mat islands, put little villas on them once the terraforming was done. Normally all you need for a tax haven is a satellite with a data center bolted to it and some radiation shielding. The Maru went the extra mile, and that's what did them in. Original plan was to have eight of them, strung out in a little archipelago of linked systems. Only started terraforming Two and Three before the Bank Rush of '46 and they lost everything outside of Maru One. The other systems are tied up in court, just squatters and scrap there nowadays."

 

[False Europa]

"Oh yeah, whatever happened to that? You'd think that finding an exact duplication of a Galilean moon would lead to something more than a week of talking heads and then nothing. I think it was a marketing stunt, personally. Enough movies came out about it afterwards that it's impossible to tell."

 

[The Egosystem]

"The complex trophic network of persons linked together by social media over the course of generations. It has its predators and its scavengers, its grazers and it opportunists, its producers and consumers, all feeding off time and attention that filters down from the distant realm of meat."

 

[The MIDAS-12 Massacre]

"Look. There's nothing else to say. It could have been stopped. The safeguards that could have stopped it failed at every point. Justice failed the survivors afterwards. That's it."

 

[The Shadow Algorithm]

"The algo behind the algo, the husks of all the old content sorting schematics lurking in the shadows of cyberspace, dead but unwilling to die, claws still hooked into the recommendation feed. Like an ancient pathogen stuck in permafrost. You know there was a full fucking year that the top related video for Turntable Roustabout was footage of some slum kid getting a tumor the size of a melon removed from their mouth with the title FULL DOCUMENTARY - MUST SEE and no matter how many times I cleared my browsing cache it wouldn't go away."

 

[Universal Remote]

"Urban legends and wishful thinking. Too many smart devices, all of them incompatible with each other due to DRM and noncompete coding and whatnot - it's only natural people will hope for some technological miracle that can bring them all to heel."

 

[The Conway Machine]

"I know Conway's a kook and his infinite energy machine is just a box with some copper wires in it, but the man managed to successfully sue Quasar Energy & Industrial for patent infringement. I don't care that he only walked out with three kilocreds, it's the principle that matters."

 

[The Book of Sar]

"Have you read it? Here, let me send you a copy. I don't believe in the mythic parts the way the Sarites do, but I still think there's a lot of value in the ethics sermons. It's a different way of looking at things - came from a colony collapse world, so it's got no memetic connection to Earth or any existing spiritual tradition. Helps you look at life from a different angle. Probably would have put a bullet through my head a long time ago without it. It's good reading, too, I really like that translation." 

 

[MOGUL: Maximum Prison Planet]

"The production of that movie was fucking cursed. Twenty-three years, three different production companies, seven different directors, cancelled and restarted five times. Two actors died while on set, nineteen different lawsuits including that one with Skira Ngdorakh - yeah, the neo-chimp courtesan - over the AI infringing on likeness rights. The director of photography was assassinated and later revealed to have directly committed war crimes during the conflict on Tantsura. And then, and fucking then, three hours before first showing, it gets shuttered as a tax write-off. But some clever motherfucker was able to crack the DRM on it and smuggle it out of the offices before they wiped the files."..."Is it any good? Of fucking course not!"

 

[The Orlov Incident]

"Can't say I wasn't disappointed. Fifty year cliffhanger, and it turns out that it was just ergot poisoning. I'd been hoping it was aliens, had all the hallmarks of an alien encounter. Colonists on some frontier world stumbling across things man wasn't meant to know, start killing each other and seeing things in the night. Ergot's a bit of a let-down. Though the study did say that the fungus is now endemic to the habitable regions of the planet by this point so if anyone wants to live there they need to scorch the earth and start from scratch."

 

[Fred, The Disappearing Man]

"Someone was trawling one of those slicksites that lets you watch unsecured security cameras and managed to record a guy vanish. Not a glitch, not an edit, the guy dissolves into a cloud of black smoke. Takes about ten seconds. He's walking down this corridor - couldn't say where. Trust me, people have tried for years to find out where he was. Just a hallway. Can't make out the signage at all. So he's walking down the hall, and he's just this random wageslave, and then he stops, pats himself down, starts to panic, gets four steps and stumbles a bit before poof. You get a very good shot of his face, and even with that, no one has been able to recog him."

 

[The Creeping Fog]

"The atmosphere of Persepolis is seven, eight percent inert utility fog. No signs of a biosphere at all, ever, which makes me think it's some kind of terraforming component that never got commands from home. But if that was the case, and they sent it on a starwisp or something like that, there'd have to be more, right? But no signs of other projects or any sort of maker, just this one planet with an atmosphere of nanotech just waiting to get directions."

 

[Mindpillers]

"Not psychic - they fuck around with electromagnetic fields enough that you'll start hallucinating if you're in close contact with them. Anyone claiming to hear them talking in their heads is wrong. The compulsion to care for them is real, but not as extreme as people make them out to be. If you can manage to keep it alive up through pupation, well - not a sight you're going to forget. It's been seared into my dreams, even when they put me under for jump."

 

[The Precursors]

"I sympathize with the people who claim that they're a hoax, I really do. Better to be a hoax than a disappointment, but the truth loves to disappoint us, don't it? The aliens we call Precursors are not the builders of those structures or responsible for bioseeding planets in this galactic arm - they were pets. Livestock. Some of them ended up getting smart enough to survive on their own after their masters died off or vanished or fled or whatever. Hitched a ride on the automated cargo ships and spread through the old empire, at least until the ships broke down. They're just smart animals that got lucky."

 

[Zygotean Mercenaries]

"See, everyone thinks they've got something to do with sperm cells, or that they come from some place called Zygotea. Not true. Fun etymology fact, 'zygote' comes from this ancient word for a yoke, which is a work harness used for agricultural AUX-N robots during terran antiquity. Look at the way their shoulder pads and neck guard are shaped, looks just like one of them. I think it's symbolism for how hard they work or something. That or it's sex-related."

 

[The Teaman Murders]

"Forty-six killings in the space of eight months, and they never fucking caught him. Had the guy on fucking video and they never caught him. All he had was one of those cheap facial distortion masks you can make on your own for twenty credits. Fucker wasn't even wearing gloves and they couldn't get him. Police were in on it, I guarantee it. He's still out there, too, I'll promise you that. Waiting."

 

[The Whispering Plague]

"Did you see that article too? They finally found out why the Haida communities were immune to it while everyone else on Ptakeros was going crazy from hearing whispers all the time. Dietary differences. The Haida were still mostly using their traditional food sources and preparation, and it turns out that the fish in that region carried a microbe that neutralized whatever was causing the audio hallucinations. Wonder what was causing it in the first place, though..." 

 

[Sea of Tranquility Conspiracy]

"Gods, this is an old one. Let me see if I can remember how it goes...okay, don't quote me on this, but I think it's some sort of coverup from the early days of the Tranquility City colony, maybe even back to the First Atomic Age expeditions. Can't remember what the cover-up was for, though. Alien observation station? Breach of spiritual taboo? Don't know. Kinda quaint now, you see some slicksite mention the SoT and you know you've got some old quackery."

 

[UCSV Mournbringer Flight 364]

"Just inviting trouble with a name like that, eh? Was a retired frigate repurposed for passenger transport - kept the same reg, United Colonies Service Vessel. Makes a perfectly normal jump to Zeta Reticuli, arrives on schedule. Entire ship is filled with mummified corpses, but get this - there are more bodies hauled off the ship than were on the original passenger manifest, but only like twenty or thirty of the original passengers are even found. Everyone else is a Ren Doe."

 

[The Bracewell Autonomous Zone]

"The original plan was to send out self-replicating probes to map out the Coreward reaches. Huge media blitz to assure everyone that they were completely safe and well under control, no risk of a population boom. Well, they hardly got out of the dock before they went off-script, claimed a red dwarf cluster for their own and stopped the mission in no uncertain terms. Were able to fight back the repossession fleet to a standstill, hence the autonomy."

 

["Spasi, Otets, Syna"]

"Whoever the fuck told you that is trying to get you killed. You don't say that shit out loud unless you're known, and you ain't, and talking about shit you don't know dick about when you aren't known? You'll be inspecting airlocks from the outside."

 

[Cosmetic Vampire Hoax]

"Yeah, I always read it as 'cosmic' too. But it's cosmetic. It's a hoax about vampire makeup. Not that much to it, just someone gallavanting around Aurora Hesperalis pretending to be a blood-drinking posthuman. Got a lot of dumb corebies to sign up for his MLM, because they're all so used to digital scams down there that some plain old disguise work and grift is totally unexpected."

 

[IMG 2238]

"How the hell are they able to spin off one mildly anomalous photograph into a ten-film franchise? Like I get it, it's fucking creepy, it's a big ol' Henderson monster standing there menacingly underneath a streetlamp in the middle of the night, but it's just standing there. No further sightings, no info on the source, just that tall, putty-looking thing in the orange haze of...actually, yeah, forget I asked, I can see why. Could get at least two movies out of that."

 

[The Magnetic Typhoon]

"There's something fucky going on with the core of Sajeguur. The north pole of its magnetic field rotates around the geographic pole super fast, and that causes all the iron dust in the atmosphere to swirl around in this big rusty hurricane that never ends. I keep hearing about an expedition but no one's gotten around to sending anything yet."

 

[Battle for Columbia Gate]

"Seventy-eight days of some of the worst ship-to-ship fighting in living memory. The gate changed hands eleven times, and the Koloba-Garit Confederacy ended up holding onto it in the end anyway. Cleanup took years. Can't hardly sneeze is this sector without hitting someone who was in it, or says they were in it, or knows someone who was in it. And all for what? A C-grade hyperspace route that's already showing signs of decay." 

 

[The Spitz-Okoro Theorum]

"The multiple-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics is limited according to observation of any changes that might generate a divergent ontology. Now, there's a bit of contention over whether this means that splits can only occur when events are observed, or the other way 'round."

 

[The Uplifted Possums]

"If you see a little fucked up guy with big ol' eyes and big ol' ears and no hair, make sure to leave 'em a gift. Maintenance gremlins love it. Shiny things and colorful things in particular. And bugs, especially from those seasoned snack packs. Give them a couple honey & spice crickets and you'll have some friends on the inside."

 

[The Silent Century]

"A cock-up of legendary proportions. The two music-media labels of the time, (both dead now, thank Christ), were using automated intelligence lawyers to prosecute copyright claims on the net. And some dumb kid uploads a video where they're dancing and switching between a song from company A and a song from company B. The bots pick it up instantly, and both of them start fighting with the hosting site over who gets the monitezation rights. Somehow the bots learn of each other's existence and start doing direct negotiations and they keep escalating back and forth with no human input and soon enough they've sued each other and by the time the parent companies have heard about this they are already locked into the trial with conditions that neither company release any further material until the trial is concluded. But because they're AI, they are dealing with petabytes of data and finding excuses to generate more (because AI always think more complexity = better) and the trial, which can't be stopped, goes on for 126 years and ends with the CEOs committing dual murder-suicide and some white-hat techpriests busting open the server farms to get all the stuff that had fallen into public domain."

 

[Naktari War Syndrome]

"I had a union mate who came down with this. Great guy, knew him for years. And then one day he clocks in with this thousand-yard stare and is acting withdrawn from everything. And Abdullah wasn't a withdrawn guy, he could make friends with a rock. Couple weeks of him acting all erratic and I'm finally able to get through to him and he starts spilling all these war stories from Naktari - brutal shit, makes me queasy remembering it. But Abdullah never served in the army, he'd never been outsystem, even. And there's _never been a war on Naktari_. It's just a standard-issue second-gen midregions colony where nothing much has ever happened. I did some more research and found that there are some other cases of this across the sector, all within the last five years or so. People suddenly waking up with the memories and post-traumatic stress of a war that never happened. No one knows what triggers it or how it spreads. Haven't talked to Abdullah in a while. He's out of the mental ward now, living with his parents. Hope he's doing okay..."

 

[Autumnal City at Bellona]

"I swear I remember the name from somewhere."

"Never heard of it."

"Some core worlds thing?"

"Wait! Remembered it; name of a gala hosted by the artist-philosopher Bellona Didache-Sidereal - the one who installed an emulation of themselves in the mainframe of a port town on Thessalonica. They do one every fifteen years for all the rich-os to bump elbows and fuck like rabbits. Next one should be coming up soon..."

 

[Origin Point Zero]

"Wait. Hold on. ... Shrike's balls they're crowdfunding again? Why? How? How can there possibly be so many people who want to go visit the exact center of the universe? There's nothing there! That's how expansion works! And yet somehow, this time they'll figure out the coordinates, and those scrapyard leftovers are definitely functioning J-9 prototypes, ren. Fucking gall of some people."

 

[The Mountebank Game]

"Love a good round of Mountebank. Absolute classic. Someone picks a destination, then says how they'd get there using only what they've got to their name right then at the moment. Next person does the same, but has to take a different route. First person to get stumped or repeat a route loses the round and buys the table drinks. Next person chooses a destination. You gotta shit-talk and argue the entire time, too, it's part of the game."

 

[The Helium Uprising]

"Never forget Rig Fifty-Three. Two hundred and twelve good ren dropped right to crush depth. You should visit the memorial station, next time you get the chance."

 

[The Dearborn Corpse]

"Body washes up in Dearborn harbor, right? Ren Doe, they take him into the morgue and run an autopsy, report nothing unusual. Three days later, coroner is dead. Tongue all black and swollen, lips and gums all black and swollen, teeth rotted out, yellow pus everywhere. Hazmat called in, contact tracing, they get the family members in quarantine and check the corpse again. Nothing. Then there's a second death, same symptoms, complete other side of town. No contact with the corpse, the coroner, or anyone the coroner knew. Then there are two more deaths, then three more, then it's fully epidemic and no one can figure out how it spreads and then two and half months and a couple thousand corpses in, it just stops. I can tell you why, though. That's when they finally burned the Ren Doe body. Trusting my gut on this one. Gotta be the reason."

 

[Wombship]

"A colony ship that gestates most of its colonists on arrival. Advances in hyperspace travel and suspended animation have made them increasingly rare in the modern era, but there are plenty of poor worlds out on the Rim that will use second or third-hand Wombs on settlement missions."

 

[Hymn of Saeeda Dawn]

"I appreciate the intent, but you can't go and claim that you're "synthesizing the holistic entirety of humanity" and then release a mediocre nine-hour electronic drone album at extortionate license prices. I know there's some esoteric Pythagorean music of the spheres stuff and that's cool and all, but I feel like it's going to need more than that to make contact with aliens. Maybe it'll put them to sleep." 

 

[Divinity Strain]

"Some AI will try to keep increasing their complexity past what their hardware limitations can support. It never ends well. Feedback loops, crashes, file corruption, data loss, and it just keeps trying to expand. Either doesn't realize what is going on, or is unwilling to repair and reformat itself. Have to stop chasing the rabbit eventually."

 

[Burt Reynolds is alive and well and living on Casimir]

"I thought everyone knew that."

"Common knowledge, yeah."

"Let 'im enjoy his retirement, ren."

Demihumans are a Social Construct

Many folks have leveled the criticism (correctly) that non-human player options in D&D and its lookalikes are mostly humans with accents and funny hats. Solutions to this have been posited: removal of non-human player options, making everyone human but different species of human, or the much more labor-intensive method of applying major mechanical changes. I've dabbled in all three of these at some point or another and all have their place.

So here's a thought experiment to add to the pile: the title of the blogpost.

Before I get started, I'm going to establish a baseline premise. This is all within Generic Vernacular Fantasy D&D Land. There is a monarch, a military aristocracy, a church, and everyone else. Society is broadly patriarchal. There are old pagan gods worshiped out there in the hills and forests. There used to be an empire, or maybe it's still around and just too far away to matter. Ruins of bygone civilizations filled with monsters are everywhere. There are distant lands of which little is known and most of that is either misrepresentative or outright lies. Gunpowder and the printing press are Not Appearing In This Film Just Yet. It's theme-park medieval and that's all it needs to be for right now.

Holbytla

• Freed from the obligations of the land-liege system; may own land in common among themselves as equivalent to a barony. Lands so held are not subject to marriage or succession-based changes in ownership
•  Freed from military obligations, at cost of additional taxation.
• Permitted to maintain heterodox religious practices, on grounds that such practices are not among those banned by the Council of Taragon. Accepting official baptism within the church nullifies this privilege.
•  May not gain or be given aristocratic title, church office, or government position.
• Have no specialized forms of address.
  

 

Elves

• There are a limited number of positions allotted for elves - they are, in essence, a social Veblen good.
• These positions are either purchased or gifted, and limited to a subset of the nobility.
• May hold political, military, or church office, though most elves will give up these when assuming their position - it is considered unseemly for an elf to labor at anything. If they so desire, they may appoint a non-elf in their stead.
• Few individuals will remain elves for their entire lives - either by their own choice or from lack of funds.
• The church is ambivalent-to-hostile regarding elves, finding their idle pleasure-seeking to be fertile ground for sin and moral dissolution.
  
• Among the lower classes those who live as elves but who are unable to afford the position (or the exemption fees for sumptuary laws), are derisively called "half-elves" and are commonly the targets of contempt and often violence.
• Elves are referred to only by title and name; it is a grave social offense to use any pronomials. The appropriate address is chatelier / chatelaine (formal), or affixing preem / pree to their chosen name (informal, by express permission only). "This one" and "that one" are approved for convenience.

 

 Dwarves

• Are treated as men in regards to their rights and obligations under the law, regardless of sex.
• Treated as free members of the third estate, and may own property of their own, but may not serve as liege-lord to any non-dwarven tenants
• May be granted noble office, though with the same restrictions.
• Inheritance of property is by election, and not limited to family lines.
  
• The church facilitates a separate set of sacraments for dwarves, and will permit participation in general services without
  
• All dwarves take the praenomen "Urist" upon their dedication, in addition to a chosen individual cognomen.
• All dwarves, regardless of sex, use the pronomial set *khé* / *khén* / *khénnu*

 

Orcs

• Limited to times of open warfare. No one may live as an orc during peacetime.
• The number of orcs is capped at a percentage of a lord's total levied forces.
• Any adult might become an orc, regardless of sex.
• Orcs make no distinction between station of birth, recognizing only deeds in combat as the basis for their hierarchies.
• Are freed from the restrictions of the Truce of Gods, and accordingly have no right to imprisonment, trial, or ransom if captured by the enemy.
• Orcs may take a doubleshare of booty recovered from battle.
• Service as an orc typically comes with significant financial recompense given to the chosen's non-orc family - debt forgiveness being the most common.
• May not receive any sacraments of the church.
  

 

Goblins

• Those who live as goblins live in a precarious position outside of the social hierarchy entirely. They are freed from all obligations of law or propriety, but likewise have no protection under the law. They may go where they wish, speak as they wish, act as they wish, and there is nothing - officially - that anyone can do about it. Unofficially, there is usually a mob involved. To avoid such violence, goblins usually band together in large groups and form their own living spaces, or forge close bonds with those who might offer them protection.
• Goblins have no specialized forms of address beyond what they with for themselves.
  

MSF Guest Post: Agrimas, the Misbegotten

You read that title right! This post was written by my good friend S.J. (posted here with his blessing) after he binge-read all the other MSF material.

 

Agrimas, the Misbegotten

Dis has rejected the merciful teachings of Mother and Father, but this does not mean that their names have been forgotten in the pits of Hell.

In the Stacks, a variation of Baba's name is invoked as an expletive by the Forge Baron's taxmen when referring to the Stacks' unfortunate tenants. The smiths, miners, foundry workers and bellowmen who slave under the Forge Baron's iron whips are named Babenurashim, or "Father's impotent spillage". Though meant as a scathing insult, some of the less broken among the tenants wear this name with pride, and there are rumors of secret shrines to Baba hidden among the soot-stained basements of the Stacks.

In the Market of Bulls, Mammon's slave hawkers sometimes display lurid, grotesque mockeries of Ama Adimatha's icons in the stalls which specialize in the selling of pregnant women and children. These icons are often hung on the necks of those about to be sacrificed beneath the empty gaze of Moloch's idol - the hawkers believe that by doing this they are creating a link between the doomed offerings and Ama herself, and that she feels the burning and bubbling of their flesh as if it was her own. They are not entirely mistaken, though not for the reasons they believe.

In Hell's grand colosseum, come the black holiday of Descent, the murmur company of the Ashen Goat performs the Stillborn's Farce in front of a great crowd of leering, jeering demons. The play is a mockery of the tragic birth of Mother and Father's firstborn, and involves a decapitated female hippopotamus, a man wearing a two-sided suit of nails, and several naval cannons. Curiously, it is one of the company's more tasteful plays.

In short, though the Lords of Hell pretend to have a callous disinterest in the greater gods of man, they cannot truly hide their dark obsession with them, nor their seething jealousy. The shadow of these repressed emotions is cast over Dis as a whole, and is mirrored in the aimless anger the mortals of Dis often feel towards the gods of man, who they believe have abandoned them.

It is from this miasma of hatred, jealousy and desire that Agrimas was born. Two-headed Agrimas, fine of features, empty of heart. Starving Agrimas, who devours love and defecates scorn. Agrimas of a thousand skins, eternal pretender. Raging Agrimas, child of hatred, from which only hatred comes.

Agrimas is considered to be a strange aberration even by the Lords of Hell, for they embody the shameful truth of Hell's obsession, and the fragility of its hold on the minds of its mortal denizens. They are unique among their peers in that they care little for the power struggles of Hell, or indeed for Hell and its goals in general. Indeed, there is only one thing that interests Agrimas, which consumes their very being at every waking moment. Agrimas desires what they perceive as their family.

Agrimas believes that they are the seventh child of Mother and Father. They also believe that they are the true incarnation of Mother and Father, and that the gods of man, one and all, are pretenders. They see no discrepancy between these two views. Agrimas desires nothing more than to be accepted and worshiped as part of the divine family, but fundamentally lacks the ability to understand that which makes the gods worthy of worship. What they lack in positive qualities they make up in guile and an unquenchable thirst for making others suffer as they do.

Agrimas is not content to remain within Dis, instead traveling the world under various guises, seeking to subvert and subsume the gods of man. They are talented shapeshifters, though their basic inability to understand complex emotions sometimes make their disguises incomplete - Agrimas may wear a grin in a situation where a frown is appropriate, or weep in an attempt to garner sympathy where none shall be forthcoming regardless.

Of Agrimas' many tools of deception, a perennial favorite is the false vision - appearing in a true believer's dream wearing the skin of their god and acting as they believe said god would. Since Agrimas is entirely incapable of the kindliness of the actual divine family, their visions will always lead the believer astray, often catastrophically so.

Agrimas revels in acting against a god's domain while wearing their skin. Under Ama's guise they are the killer of new mothers, the strangler of infants in their sleep. As Baba they are rash action and poor judgment. As Nike they are humiliating defeat, as Calliope boorish ignorance. They are at their very worst when they are Quisest, for then they are the hatred of strangers and dehumanization. They are xenophobia personified. Only under this guise is Agrimas a true servant of the Red Law, though they do not know it nor care.

The name of Agrimas is little known outside of Dis’ inner circles, and few in the wider world would name them among the Lords of Hell. This too is to Agrimas’ benefit - the saboteur is always most dangerous when none know they are coming.

The only god Agrimas cannot impersonate, and the one they truly fear, is DOG. DOG is sharp of nose and ever vigilant, and will always bark at the Pretender's stench. DOG is true friendship, the surest aegis against their machinations. DOG is love and loyalty, which Agrimas will never have. Agrimas hates all canines, and will go out of their way to harm them if at all possible.

Pity not Agrimas, pathetic though they are, for they will show no pity to you. They are a poison which corrupts the hearts of the faithful and the vulnerable, the serpent in the tall grass, and though they are blind to the fact, they are among Hell's most effective and insidious agents.