athornton

The Painted Wastelands

Fri, 04 Oct 2024 00:35:04 GMT

I'd had my eye on Tim Molloy and Chris Willett's Painted Wastelands for some time. I'm a huge fan of Luka Rejec's Ultraviolet Grasslands and this had a similar vibe and art style. Indeed, I was a little worried it would be suspiciously similar (it isn't). Sure, there's UVG in it, but there's also Acid Death Fantasy, Isle Of The Unknown or Carcosa, and Lovecraft's Dreamlands. The visual style is (like Rejec's) quite Moebius-influenced but Molloy goes for a ... well, I guess there's a better word for this, but, a very Oglaf color palette, lots of purples and pinks and blues, not the more muted tones of most of UVG.

The beta PDF arrived, and the same week a friend who runs a UVG group, who didn't want to put in his usual prep because it was his birthday, asked me to do a guest slot. We had an absolute blast.

I'm not going to explain anything about the following. If you've got the PDF you will recognize these things, and if you don't, you may be intrigued.

I murdered the party in the long hall of Tomb Of Horrors to start (I didn't tell people much about what we were playing, and started them off in a place that, knowing me, they quickly recognized and feared), and then they came to in a canyon where they met The Painted Skull and then were rescued by Gorto, although my Gorto's name was the first seven notes of the Terrapin Station main theme (as with the UVG game I ran for a couple years, I've leaned heavily into the 1970s psychedelic rock aspect; the end of the game included a long discussion of the merits of various eras of Blue Öyster Cult renditions of "The Last Days Of May").

He sent them to get one of the Perpetual Concert tapes, which took them via the Sorcerer's Market to the King Forgotten To The Ages (since it was a one-shot, I montaged most of the actual travel) and eventually the King's treasure room. The grasping chains turned out to be a tougher fight than I expected, although later on they got very lucky with the Knight and he didn't last long. Since I'd planned that to be the climactic fight I was slightly disappointed, but the dice were on my players' side.

My players are excited to go back sometime and play through some of the other locations and stories. Prolix The Bleak seemed to be a fan favorite. We played with Risus rules, and one of my characters needed to heal off some damage to her Eco-Terrorist cliché; Prolix, in his trove of forbidden knowledge, naturally enough had a book on tape of Edward Albee reading The Monkey Wrench Gang. The Market in general was a very good place for the players to get a feel for the vibe of the world, meet some weirdos, and get some leads on where to go next; having specific merchants made it easy for me to know who was selling what and to not have them be Generic Fantasy Shops.

The whole thing riffs really well. It was very easy to roll with whatever weird-ass direction my players wanted to take things (and with Risus, you tend to get very lateral-thinking solutions to problems). The Molloy art is delightfully specific. Not that I don't adore Luka Rejec's art as well as writing, but in UVG it is rare that I can describe something and then just paste a picture of that thing into the group chat. In this four-hour game, I probably dropped ten pieces of artwork on my players to show them exactly what they were seeing.

The Painted Wastelands setting is not just fun to look at and read, it works really well at the table too, which is not something I can say about all the cool RPG things I've picked up over the years. If you're into a desert hexcrawl informed by stoner rock, you'll enjoy it.

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Something sweet

Thu, 04 May 2023 03:18:17 GMT

I recently was told one of the sweetest things I've ever heard.

It came from Sam. Sam is the son of Simon. They were both players in my UVG game. Simon died early this year of cancer, and I miss him greatly.

Sam decided to start running his own Ultraviolet Grasslands campaign and invited me to join. As it happens, I'm the only legal adult in the game--everyone else, broadly speaking, is Sam's age, which is to say "in high school."

So I thanked him, saying, "thank you for putting up with an old fart like me," and he replied, "you're not an old fart you're basically the Aragorn to our hobbits," which is one of the sweetest things anyone has ever said to me.

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The Times, They've Been A-Changing.

Mon, 12 Dec 2022 00:37:16 GMT

Truly we live in an age of miracles.

$70 for half an ounce. When I was in HIGH SCHOOL--which was, let's be clear, 35 years ago--weed cost the same, $35 a quarter. And that was not some fancy "Banana Hammock" hybrid strain weighing in at 16.71% THC, no, that was for shitty Georgia ditchweed where what was getting me high was probably the paraquat sprayed on it.

Seventeen-year-old me would have been astounded at the following sentence on so many levels: "Yeah, I mean, sure, the tax break is nice, but honestly I don't smoke enough weed to justify the expense of the medical card."

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Capitalism

Fri, 27 May 2022 07:03:01 GMT

I literally watched capitalism claim another victim today.

I went to the 1702 Brewery with my friend Amanda, who is leaving my project. It was her birthday and I wanted to take her out and visit a little before she left.

1702 was slated to close tomorrow because it just couldn't stay profitable.

We ordered some beer and pizza. Eric, the owner, brought it out. He said "hot hot hot" and set the pizzas down. And then he kneeled down and grabbed Amanda's arm. We asked "are you OK?" and he didn't answer. Then after a few seconds he said "I'm sorry" and keeled over and started kicking and screaming.

I froze up, but fortunately someone said "YOU. CALL 911," and one of my old UA friends, Nirav Merchant, who was also having a closing-it-down-lunch at 1702 stepped up to do first aid.

I got to rip the cushion off a chair (I mean fuck it they're closing tomorrow, right) and get that under his head so he didn't hit it while seizing, and eventually the paramedics got there and got him a little post-ictal, and took him away.

So I don't think 1702 will be open for its last day tomorrow, and I hope I wasn't the final straw for Eric, but...well, fuck capitalism.

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Inauthentic Avgolemono

Tue, 02 Nov 2021 17:56:13 GMT

I'm not Greek.

I was introduced to this dish, which is the present-in-many-cultures chicken soup convalescent food. This version is cobbled together from several different internet sources and then some experimentation.

What follows is a slightly time-intensive, but not labor- or thought-intensive, rendition from someone who doesn't have the cultural background to know what this soup is supposed to be.

In short, your Greek grandmother will probably curse me if you ever make this and serve it to her.

Makes a little more than a half gallon.

8 to 10 cups of water
1 or 1-1/2 lbs of chicken (once the bones are removed)
2 lemons
3 or 4 medium-to-large eggs
1 onion
1 cup rice
1-2 tablespoons (yes, I said tablespoons) whole black peppercorns
2 carrots
2 stalks celery
4 cloves garlic
4-6 bay leaves
a little olive oil
salt

Peel and roughly chop the onion (into quarters or eighths). Put the onion chunks, the chicken, and the peppercorns into the water. Bring to a boil, then reduce to a simmer. Let simmer for 45 minutes.

While it's doing that, chop the carrots and celery. Sautee the carrots, celery, and bay leaves in the olive oil for a few minutes, and then add the garlic. Turn the heat off quickly, so the garlic is sauteed but not caramelized. Leave the sauteed stuff on the stove for now.

After the 45-minute simmer is done, get the chicken out of the pot and put on a cutting board. Strain the stock, reserve two cups separately (with the rest back in the pot), and throw away the onion pieces and peppercorns.

Add the rice to the stock, bring to a boil, reduce to a simmer, and let cook for 20 minutes.

Shred the chicken (with two forks, or your fingers).

After the 20-minute simmer is done, add the sauteed vegetables and chicken back to the pot. Salt to taste (I use maybe 2 teaspoons for the whole pot; other people like salt more than I do). Bring back to a simmer.

While that's simmering, squeeze the lemons and strain out the seeds and lemon solids. Beat the eggs in a smallish bowl. Then beat in the lemon juice. Then, slowly at first, pour the two cups of hot stock you reserved into the eggs to temper them, beating them while you do (this keeps them from separating in the soup; if you make Hollandaise or Bearnaise sauce, this is a similar process). Once that's done, add the contents of the bowl to the cooking pot, stir to mix thoroughly, turn off the heat, and it's ready to serve.

I like it with crusty bread, but that's a lot of starch and (along with the rest of the recipe) not authentic.

It'll last a couple days in the fridge and quite a while in the freezer. When reheating it, don't let it boil: get it to just-barely-a-simmer. You don't want the eggs to separate.

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Misaddressed email, part two

Sat, 20 Feb 2021 17:22:21 GMT

This one's a little happier. Andrew Thornton of Glen Burnie, MD, is scheduled for his second vaccine dose on March 10. Good for him!

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Misaddressed email in the age of COVID-19

Tue, 15 Dec 2020 18:32:19 GMT

You may know the XKCD comic https://xkcd.com/1279/ "Reverse Identity Theft".

That's me. I get dozens of misaddressed emails a day. Most of them are harmless: there's some guy in England who really likes sports bikes and spends a lot of money on them. Someone keeps buying gas and I get her receipts.

Occasionally there has been family drama that I have been inadvertently witness to.

But today. Oh boy.

I got an email with a form that the recipient was to sign and return ASAP. It was a form someone's daughter was signing on behalf of her mother, to move her to palliative hospice care. The daughter had to sign because the mother was unresponsive.

I wrote back and strongly suggested they find another means of contact so they could find the daughter's actual email address.

This has torn me up emotionally, way more than I expected. I'm sure most of it is my anxiety about my parents and COVID-19.

Tell your loved ones that you love them.

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Show fights in UVG/Troika!

Tue, 15 Dec 2020 05:42:14 GMT

Luka Rejec, author and artist of Ultraviolet Grasslands, asked me to write this up as a blog post. So here we are.

In my UVG/Troika! game, the party has decided to fund their trip to the Black City by staging gladiatorial combats at the places they stop, either just against one another, or against local heroes. In other words, they are basically a professional wrestling promotion, but they use real weapons. (They also use metal folding chairs, fluorescent light bulbs, tacks, and barbed wire, because that's the way hardcore wrestling works.)

I am using a very simple mechanic for this: combat proceeds as usual, but any hit does only one actual stamina damage. The rolled damage is applied to "apparent stamina" which starts the same as real stamina at the beginning of the fight. When apparent stamina is 0 or less, a combatant is out of the fight.

But there's a twist. If someone critically hits, that's real stamina damage (and, of course, since it's critical damage, it's doubled!). This introduces an element of real risk, since just less than 3% of all swings are going to be critical hits.

It seems to be working well so far.

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Open letter to Lindsey Graham

Mon, 09 Nov 2020 04:31:34 GMT

Seriously, dude,

What the fuck does he have on you?

It's not just that you're gay, because _duh_. We've all known that for years. No one cares.

So it must be something much, much worse.

What the hell is it?

Sincerely, the American People.

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GM advice

Tue, 28 Jul 2020 06:40:57 GMT

I got a sincere question today.

"Any advice for a new GM?"

The answer to this depends on how much time you've got. An answer could take seconds, or years.

I'm just going to start typing thoughts, in no particular order.

Players are dumber than you think, but also smarter than you think. Constructing clever puzzles for them is going to be frustrating for you, for them, or both. If you think of a thing and a way to solve it, odds are good that they won't think of it. And if they come up with something else and you don't allow that to work, they're going to be mad.

So come up with problems, and for at least problem it's probably a good idea to come up with at least one solution, just so that if they all die you don't look like the jerk when they say "how were we supposed to survive that?" and you answer "no clue. Figured you'd come up with something. Sucks to be you."

Don't be afraid to steal things from movies and books. Your players are likely not to recognize them, and if they do, so what? And if they just start replaying however the hero of the book or movie solved it, well, you can either let that work, or you can change the script. You thought this was _Big Trouble In Little China_? Well forget it, Jake, it's _Chinatown_.

Your role is to enable fun. It's not to show off how clever you are. It's not to beat the players. Nor is it to give them everything they demand. The point of a game is that you take risks in order to win rewards. Both the risks and the rewards have to be real (in the fictive universe of the game) for it to be fun. And part of the fun is the knowledge that it could have gone horribly wrong.

Don't be afraid to kill characters. Killing them without warning is kind of a dick move, unless you've pre-given that warning by, for instance, saying, "OK, kids, tonight we're playing _Tomb of Horrors_ so pull up your big boy pants and get ready to meet a horrible fate." Basically you're in the memory-creation business, and people remember their characters' demises, particularly if they were the result of epic failure or epic stupidity. No one is gonna remember being whittled to death by a pack of 10 orcs twenty years later, but they sure as hell will remember clamping a stick of dynamite between their jaws, lighting the fuse, and then diving into Father Dagon's mouth.

No one cares about your worldbuilding. No one cares about your NPCs. No matter how cool either one is, none of your players are going to pay enough attention to see how hard you worked. Sure, if doing the work, so that there *are* all the hidden connections that make it all make sense, is something you enjoy, knock yourself out. But your players will never know whether you invented an entire culture with its own internally-consistent constructed language, or just plopped down three elves that you named after prescription medications. You're almost certainly not J.R.R. Tolkien or M.A.R. Barker, and it's exhausting to try. Just name your Dark Lord Of Evil "Chad" and be done with it.

Don't sweat the small stuff. Don't sweat rules mastery. If your players try something and you don't know the rules around it for goodness sake don't bring everything to a halt for 25 minutes while you try to make sense of the grappling rules. Is it something that's a 50/50 shot? Great, flip a coin. Probably won't work, but not a bad idea _per se_? Works on 1-2 on d6. Long shot? 1-in-6. Sure, try it if you really want? 1 in 20. And do get a set of place value dice so you can actually roll a one-in-a-million shot. You'll almost certainly never see it happen, but if it does you and your players will be talking about it until your dying day.

Likewise, don't sweat nickels and dimes. If it's pretty reasonable a character could find a thing and afford it, then let 'em have it. If it's ridiculous, make them go on a perilous quest to get it. No one is going to care how exquisitely balanced the game was in ten years, either.

Rolling dice is inherently risky. If you're rolling, something bad could happen. The better way is to present a plan so the GM nods and says, "sure, that'd work." The best way is to make the GM laugh.

Failure is often more fun, and cooler, than success. A nice thing about fantasy RPGs is that there are plenty of fates worse than death. But even so, capturing the players and then putting them in a situation they must escape from is probably more fun than shaving their hit points away until they finally keel over. And if some of the party dies, it's always fun to stage a raid on Hell to get the dead characters back.

Your NPCs and your monsters don't want to die either. There's no reason they have to fight to the death. They probably don't even want to fight. If the party doesn't seem like chumps, then the anatgonists are probably going to want to run away rather than risk trying to kill you and maybe failing. NPCs and monsters can surrender too. Or have changes of heart and decide to come work for the party. Or surrender and keep looking for their chance to escape or betray. All of these are more interesting than just subtracting hit points until someone runs out.

That's probably enough for a brief answer. Maybe I'll write more of this if I think of good stuff. Maybe I won't.

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SIMPLE KOMBUCHA RECIPE

Thu, 02 Jul 2020 20:21:46 GMT

This recipe is based on the one I got from Vanika Hill. It's easy to make, but it assumes you've already sourced a scoby from somewhere.

Makes 1 gallon.

Ingredients:

20 teabags; sure, you could do this (probably more cost-effectively) with bulk tea as well. It'd be about a half-cup of tea leaves. I have had good results with the following:

* 6 teabags Constant Comment
* 6 teabags Earl Grey
* 4 teabags Green Tea
* 4 teabags Citrus Chamomile tea.

1 cup sugar

1 gallon of water

Process:

Put teabags and sugar in water, bring water to boil, let it boil for 10 minutes or so, depending on how astringent you like your kombucha, cover it, let it cool down to room temperature (which generally means: overnight).

Once cool, pour into a glass container, slide your scoby in, and cover with a cheesecloth or a paper towel secured by a rubber band. The point is to use something that will allow the scoby to breathe, but will keep out dust, flies, dog hair, and all the other nasty stuff floating around your kitchen.

Let it sit on the counter at room temperature for at least a week, up to a month.

When you're ready to stop the fermentation and drink it, pull out the scoby, put it in a glass container, and cover with a little of the tea, and then put the cheesecloth/towel back over it. As long as you keep it wet with something that has some sugar in it, the scoby will be fine more or less indefinitely. You can turn right around and start a new batch, or you could also let the scoby rest for a while.

Then strain the remaining tea through a fine strainer into another container, which you then put in the fridge.

You're probably going to want to strain your kombucha when pouring it to drink, too: even though you strained out most of the scoby, some bits of it got through, and it will happily grow inside your fridge, just at a reduced rate. Nothing bad happens to you if you consume it, but it is kind of like unexpectedly swallowing the world's biggest loogie, so I prefer to strain before drinking.

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Understanding the works of Gene Wolfe

Mon, 08 Jun 2020 03:47:11 GMT

There are two major themes throughout the work of Gene Wolfe: you become what you imitate, and you are what you eat.

This obviously invites the questions, "what should we imitate? What should we eat?"

The answer in both cases is the same: God.

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A brief note on current events

Wed, 03 Jun 2020 22:03:57 GMT

All cops are bastards. Fuck Donald Trump, and fuck the police.

Thank you for coming to my TED talk.

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Super-simple kimchi

Mon, 06 Apr 2020 17:02:14 GMT

EASY KIMCHI

I based this recipe on https://www.feastingathome.com/how-to-make-kimchi/ but have simplified it somewhat.

Ingredients:

head of cabbage
garlic (I use a head per head of cabbage, but that is a lot of garlic for most people)
ginger (I use maybe a 6" piece for a head of cabbage; that's a lot of ginger too)
chili flakes (use whatever; pizza-pepper red pepper works fine, or you can use something Asian. I use El Guapo Chile Queberado because it's cheap)
And then optional stuff: carrots, radishes, fish sauce, shrimp paste--all things you can add to flavor or color the kimchi, but all totally optional and it will work fine without any of them

Tools/Containers:

Two large bowls
Colander
Jars or bottles (one head cabbage is going to make 3-4 quarts of kimchi)
Paper towels/clean T-shirts/something that lets air but not much solid through
Rubber bands, one per jar/bottle
Vegetable peeler/paring knife
Chef's knife
Strainer or slotted spoon
Blender or food processor, or a knife and a lot of patience

It's really a very easy thing to make, and the resulting product is (at least, I think so) really tasty. It's also not precise at all. As long as you have enough salt in your brine and you have some sort of breathable-but-keeps-random-kitchen-inhabitants out for the fermentation jar, it's going to work, and don't worry about the proportions much.

DAY ONE

First, wash your hands.

Start with the head of cabbage. Peel off the outer two layers of leaves and discard; those are the ones that other shoppers have touched with their filthy COVID-19 hands. Peel off another layer and set those leaves aside (you will need them in a day or so, so a Ziploc bag in the fridge is a good idea).

Chop the cabbage into 3/4" or so chunks. The way I do it is this: cut the head in half. Cut out the solid core at the base. Then take each half, put it flat side down, and just slice it, on one pass vertically and on the other horizontally, with the cuts 3/4" or so apart. Then kinda bash at the stacks thus created to separate them out into individual leaves.

Take a big bowl, and add 1/4 to 1/2 cup of salt and two quarts of water. Stir until all the salt that's going to dissolve dissolves. Put the cabbage in the salt water, and then put a lid over it. It doesn't have to fit the bowl, just make sure that almost all the cabbage chunks are under the water.

Leave this on the counter overnight. At least 8 hours, as much as 24...or probably more. When I make it, this is Day One, and then I come back sometime the next day to continue.

DAY TWO

First, wash your hands.

Peel your garlic and ginger. I use a whole head of garlic and about six inches of ginger for a head of cabbage, but this makes for a very pungent kimchi. If you live with another human, or don't like garlic as much as I do, you might want to ease off the throttle a little. Once peeled, chop them coarsely--you're about to blend them so no point in going crazy here.

Put the chopped ginger and garlic in a blender or food processor, and add the chili flakes. 2 Tbsp is pretty mild, a whole 3/4 oz. package is fairly aggressive. You could also add fresh chilies or whatever here. Dip a little brine out of the cabbage bowl and put it in the blender so that everything will blend. 1/4 cup is probably enough.

If you want to add fish sauce or shrimp paste for a little funk and _umami_, this is the time to do it. It'll be fine if you don't; I like a couple tablespoons of fish sauce in it.

Blend it to a fairly smooth, pungent paste.

Drain the cabbage. Take your other bowl, put the colander in it, and strain out the cabbage into the colander. Once you've done that, press it to squeeze the brine out. Take the collected brine and pour it into the first bowl, and put the cabbage into the second bowl.

If you want to add any other things to the kimchi, this is the time to grate or chop them and put them in the second bowl. Carrots, radishes, celery, whatever. All totally optional, as much to make it look more interesting as to flavor it. "Nothing" works fine here too.

Add the paste to the cabbage (and other items if you added them) and toss it around, getting everything all coated.

Now, take the chili/ginger/garlic-covered cabbage and put it into the jars. When it's mostly full, pour enough brine in to cover the cabbage. You may need to shake the jar to let the brine get all the way through the cabbage. Once you have the cabbage submerged, put one of the saved cabbage leaves on top--this will keep the kimchi from floating up and not being submerged.

Now put the paper towel or cloth or whatever on top of the jar and secure it in place with a rubber band, so fermentation gases can get out and air can get in, but flies/dust/fingers can't get in. Set it on a counter or somewhere out of the way, and leave it there for three days (or more).

Now, wash your hands before you touch your eyes. Trust me on this one.

DAY FIVE

Put a lid on the jar and put it in the fridge. It's ready to eat at this point, but don't feel like you have to be in a hurry.

Kimchi keeps pretty much forever. If you have stuff on top that isn't fully submerged, it might get slimy or even moldy. If that happens, you don't have to throw away the whole container. Just fish out the nasty stuff and throw it away--everything that's still under the brine is fine. It is fairly unlikely, if you like kimchi, that you're going to have it long enough for that to happen.

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Ultraviolet Grasslands

Fri, 20 Mar 2020 00:40:13 GMT

The dreams won't stop.

Visions of endless steppes stretching from horizon to horizon, dotted with strange beasts, semi-savage tribes, ancient and malevolent machines of the Long Long Ago, ruins of forgotten technology or magic or both. Endless weeks and months of crawling beneath the unforgiving sky, towards the sunset. Sometimes you'll see it on the horizon: the Black City, slumping blocks piled atop each other, in endless almost-repeating patterns, crouching on the shore of an oily, sullen ocean. It wants you. You want it.

You've been having these dreams every time you try to rest for months now. Lately you've been seeing the visions while you're awake too.

Maybe you're a Rainbowlander, one of the inheritors of the dying earth. Maybe you hail from one of the hermetic societies of the Fast Stars, sent to the surface as an opportunity or a punishment. Maybe you're from one of the Old Colonies on other of the tired sun's planets or their moons. Might be you're a cacogen from beyond the Slow Stars, brought here by chance, accident, or plan--aboard a Golden Barge sailing the humpbacked sky, or frozen in a sleeper-ship. You might even be from another time, or another celestial sphere. Maybe you're human, maybe you're not. Possibly the question of whether or not you are isn't meaningful anymore.

It doesn't matter.

What matters is that you heard the Call, or it might have been that the Call found you. It wasn't difficult to find out where to go: you're not the only person to have received this summons. Far from it.

And so, however you got here, you've arrived at the Violet City, at the Left End of the Right Road. Beyond here, there are no roads, but it's not as if the steppes are entirely unknown. There are caravans. The Ultraviolet Grasslands have things the Rainbowlanders want, and the Rainbow Lands produce things that the peoples of the Grasslands desire. The caravans are always going and coming. They're always looking for people. A lot of people who go to the Grasslands don't come back. Violent mechanicals take some of them. Others just drift off in search of their visions. Maybe they find enlightenment. Hard to say.

So, if you need a frame story: you all meet in a tavern in the Foreigners' Quarter of the Violet City. You have learned to recognize your fellow pilgrims by the haunted light in their eyes. Caravan masters recognize that look too. All that remains is to introduce yourself to your tablemates, choose a caravan, and start the journey.

==========================

What this means in practice:

I'm running an _Ultraviolet Grasslands_ game, using _Troika!_ rules (mostly) (see below for links). It will occur on Thursday evenings at something like 6PM MST and go for 3 or 4 hours a session. It will initially be online, probably over Google Hangouts. Once COVID-19 has passed or become an unremarkable feature of society, we will start having a local table in Tucson videoconferenced in to remote participants.

This game will be an episodic, location-based, pointcrawl. There is no particular need for session-by-session continutity. If you're not there for a while, the assumption will be that you went off with another caravan, and those caravans have met again somewhere in the wastes. Typically each episode will be travel, trade, and/or exploring a location or structure looking for valuable trade items.

However, the campaign as a whole is going to work by Rientsian rules, such that if you're still in the middle of an adventure (as opposed to safely(ish) back at camp) when session time runs out, there's going to be some terrifying table you roll on to determine your fate, which might range from escaping-with-only-a-minor-loss-of-wealth-or-health to wide-distribution-of-your-soul-across-time-and-space.

It's a FLAILSNAILS game. Bring in a character you like and I'll work with you to write it into a Troika!-looking format, or create a new character just for this game. I don't think we're going to care much about jejune matters like game balance. Most things out in the UVG are pretty squishy. Many are not. Some might as well be gods. Maybe some are, or once were, or aspire to someday be, gods. There will always be things you can defeat easily, and things that can crush you without blinking. These things will not always be easily categorized without engagement, so combat should rarely be your first resort.

The flotsam and jetsam of a trillion crystal spheres have washed up on the edge of the Circle Sea. Your character can be anyone or anything. Don't feel like they have to fit any particular genre.

If you lose a character--and you very well may--well, a new one can always jump on board the caravan at the next oasis.

The goal, if there is one, is for your character to make their way to the Black City and meet/confront/embrace whatever it is that's been drawing them. It's a very long way through the Ultraviolet Grasslands from the Violet City to the Black City. There might be some sort of emergent arc. There might not. Maybe you can create one. Isn't it pretty to think so?

====================

How to join: just let me know. You probably saw this on Discord, and direct messaging me there will work. I'm not on Facebook or Twitter. I read my email, but only occasionally--you can try emailing me but no promises it's going to work very well.

Be persistent. I'm disorganized. If I don't reply I probably just didn't see your request.

====================

Resources:

The Ultraviolet Grasslands are a psychedelic-metal inspired setting. You can get a free version at https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/241606/The-Ultraviolet-Grasslands--Free-Introduction
. Troika is a system that simulates...I dunno, British New Wave SF if
you poured a whole bunch of Gene Wolfe all over it? https://www.scribd.com/document/346627037/Troika-Free-Artless-Edition-10539920-pdf

Things to listen to: Blue Öyster Cult, Sleep (especially Dopesmoker), Godspeed You! Black Emperor, early Black Sabbath. Watch _Heavy Metal_. Smoke too much indica and wander around Ico or Shadow Of The Colossus. Or even maybe Zelda: Breath of the Wild.

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Making Old Systems Accessible Via The Web

Wed, 14 Aug 2019 16:47:03 GMT

I started out with a bunch of simh (well, and klh-10, and dps8...) processes running on a couple of Raspberry Pis; I had their consoles set up under GNU Screen, which let me attach and detach easily, and have everything more-or-less in one place.

For non-console access things were a hodgepodge of telnet-reachable ports; most of the systems had virtualized dz devices (dx busy-waits, which made it undesirable for packing a lot of guest systems onto a small number of hosts) listening on a host port, but some had full TCP/IP stacks and their own telnet daemons.

I got a little sick of remembering which port was which system, so I wanted to build a menu to manage that for me. Remember the early 90s, before consumer TCP/IP was really a thing, where you'd dialup into a terminal server (a text-mode thing then, not the fancy-pants remote desktops we have now), and type the name of the host you wanted to connect to? Like that.

I'm going to tell this story as if it all happened in a logical fashion and made sense, but the actual development was a lot more chaotic. You know how it is.

For writing the menu system I had a couple of design goals. First, since I plan for the list of systems accessible to change as I play with different things, it needed to be document-driven rather than keeping the menu in the code. Second, I wanted to write it in Go, because I haven't really gotten to use Go since changing to my current job back in 2016, and I miss it.

The basic design was very simple: show a menu, take an input selecting a menu item, and exec telnet with the proper parameters to connect the user session to the guest system. Once I'd blown the dust off my Go knowledge, it didn't take a lot of implementation. https://github.com/athornton/tmenu .

Well, that certainly helped; I just needed to run my menu and I didn't have to remember what host and port each system was accessible on. Next I figured I could make this network-accessible, and went to set it up as an inetd service. Well, really these days, it's a systemd service, but same idea: hook up a port to the process standard input and output.

Turned out I was going to have to implement telnet options in both the front and back end to do things like not-echoing-the-password when a user connected, and that didn't seem like fun, and so I decided, "hey, why don't I just put it inside a web-accessible terminal?"

I knew this was likely to work. I work on JupyterLab in my day job, and it has an excellent terminal emulator in it, which is based on xterm.js. So now the problem collapsed to "is there already a websocket terminal application?"

A little Googling got me to "gotty". It seems to have been abandoned, and it didn't quite build with current Go versions, but a little bit of work got me to a version that works just fine. I submitted a pull request, in case it hasn't been abandoned. You can get a buildable version from https://github.com/yudai/gotty/pull/259 .

So now I could run gotty from systemd, and be listening on a particular port (I chose 6180) for HTTP connections, which would upgrade to websocket connections, and let me run my menu.

Well, that's nice and all, but still cleartext, and would require me to open a cleartext port back into my network to expose it. However...at this point, given a web server, which I have, it shouldn't be hard to build a reverse proxy. I use Apache 2.4, which is a little trickier than Nginx (which is what my project at work uses), but it wasn't too tough. The magic setting that took a while to figure out was ProxyPreserveHost On.

With that in place, I just gave the thing a name ("mvsevm.fsf.net"), added it to my Let's Encrypt names, acquired a certificate for it, and then I had a proxied TLS-encrypted web interface to a text-mode front end for a bunch of ancient systems.

comments

Exploring old Unixes

Sun, 02 Jun 2019 17:29:19 GMT

EXPLORING OLD UNIXES

INTRODUCTION

I recently bid on a PDP-11/70 and a VAX-11/730. I don't expect to win either of those bids, but I thought I'd spend some recreational time installing operating systems on (emulated) PDP-11s to get more familiar with the architecture. I run an OpenVMS system on an emulated VAX and have installed NetBSD on it as well, so I feel like I'm already pretty familiar with the VAX architecture.

I also have an 11/23 in need of restoration. Once I trace its power supply problems (it keeps blowing fuses) it's probably just going to run RT-11 since it only has an RX-02 drive, 256KB of memory, and no MMU. I think I can initially boot it from tu58fs and then build an RT-11 boot floppy pretty easily, and then that's about as far as that one goes. RT-11 is basically like DOS or CP/M: little, single-foreground-process, command-line interface. Boot it, swap floppies, and load your BASIC environment or MACRO-11 or whatever. It doesn't take long to feel like you've basically seen what it's about.

It's the larger PDP-11s that are a bit more interesting, and I thought I'd give the various Unixes available for them a try with SIMH. Think of this as a companion piece to my review of The Unix-Hater's Handbook (https://athornton.dreamwidth.org/14272.html), with a similar methodology: try it out and see what it feels like these days. I'm going to go chronologically by version, rather than by the order I tried them in.

It's worth remembering that Unix was developed as, basically, a word processing and typesetting system for production of Bell Labs patent documents: the system existed to support "roff", a descendant of Multics "runoff". The syntax of "roff" is basically the same typesetting language that still exists in man pages today. If you have a Unix-like system handy, say MacOS or Linux, open a terminal and type "man roff" (if that doesn't work, try "man groff") and you'll find out about the historical environment for which Unix was developed, delivered to you through that very text processing pipeline, almost 50 years later.

PDP-7 UNIX

The earliest Unix available, and very nearly the earliest Unix, period, is a pre-v1 Unix for an 8kword (words are 18 bits) PDP-7. SIMH supports the PDP-7 nicely. This version is basically an archaeological reconstruction. A lot of the original material has been lost, and there's a project on GitHub that builds a runnable system: https://github.com/DoctorWkt/pdp7-unix .

The runnable system build relies on a hosted toolchain to assemble sources and to build a filesystem image. Once it's done that, you can boot from a paper tape and get a shell (kind of) inside the Unix kernel. It's also got a DCI interface for a serial-attached terminal, which SIMH presents as a TCP port, so you can telnet to that port and work from a terminal that is not the system console, if you like.

The user experience here isn't much like Unix. Directories don't work like they later would--rather than a hierarchical filesystem as such, you link things from other directories (there is, I think, only one layer of directories) into your current directory. Good old "ed" is at least familiar enough to use, so you can create a file and then put it on the console with "cat". "ls" works; "ls -l" is even there. It took me a while to figure out that "rm" was "chrm" and required a first argument of the directory from which to remove the file.

Once it's booted, it's possible to reassemble the kernel, which results in a 5767 word(?) file. I have no idea from there how to install the kernel in a bootable location, but presumably that's possible.

UNIX V1 KERNEL WITH V2 USERLAND

From here on out we're looking at the PDP-11: a sixteen-bit architecture, with various schemes to allow 18 or 22-bit physical addresses and various methods to overlay physical address ranges into the 16-bit space.

This particular Unix is the earliest PDP-11 Unix available, and basically the earliest there is, although the userland is v2 rather than v1. It runs on a 32KB PDP-11/20.

This one also relies on a GitHub project to build a bootable system. https://github.com/jserv/unix-v1 is the repository. It functions much the same as the PDP-7 version, but from significantly more complete sources. You build a cross-assembler and a filesystem creation tool, assemble a kernel, and then load it by depositing a bootloader at a particular memory location. In SIMH this is loading a binary file into the simulator; I think you would have had to toggle this into the front panel to cold-boot Unix on a real PDP-11/20. (Once cold-booted, there's a bootloader that gets copied to the warm-boot area of the disk, so if it's not completely powered down, a restart would be much easier.)

Version 1 feels significantly more like Unix, mostly because of the hierarchical filesystem. You use chdir (not cd, and I can almost guarantee you will type "cd" the first time almost every time you try to change directories) and slash-separated paths to move around; most of the devices in /dev look familiar ("mem", "tty", "tty[0-8]", "tap[0-7"], and so forth); the passwd file is in a colon-separated format.

As far as I can tell there's not anything in the way of terminal handling yet, and pipes won't show up for a couple versions yet, but the shell is mostly-familiar, there's a userspace tape-handling program, and quite a few of the utilities we know and love ("who", "wc", "sort", "od", "nm", etc.) and, maybe most importantly, there's a C compiler.

It's a pre-K&R C (described at https://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Applications/Early_C_Compilers/primevalC.html, and some idiosyncracies are mentioned in https://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Distributions/Research/Dennis_v3/Readme.nsys ) which is kind of interesting. It lets you play even faster and looser with char-to-int-to-pointer casts than K&R, and "+=" is backwards, but it's recognizably C.

It only produces files named a.out, so you have to move the file into place yourself, but there's a script to build the last1120c compiler, which can, once built with that script, build itself. Fascinating stuff, and this system manages to feel Unixy in a way that the PDP-7 version just didn't. Like it, you get some terminal devices, although lacking a screen handling library, you're still pretty much using a teletype, whether at the system console or not.

THE GAP

As far as I was able to determine, there are no V2 kernels, and no V3 or V4 Unix, that survive in an easily-runnable form. This is too bad, because two of the very Unixy things happened during this gap.

The first is that Doug McIlroy twisted Dennis Ritchie's arm into introducing pipes to Unix during the v3 period, although separating pipe syntax from redirection by using "|" rather than ">" didn't appear until V4. That made composability of small, sharp tools easy. If you read the "roff" man page earlier, you may have noticed the section "The roff Pipe" which talks about the use of a pipeline in the text-formatting role for which Unix was designed, in which pre- and post-processors, chained together with pipes, perform tasks within the typesetting workflow such as rendering tables ("tbl") or equations ("eqn") within the overall markup processing.

The second and arguable even more crucial item, is that V4 marks the point at which Unix was rewritten in C, making ports to architectures other than the PDP-11 contemplatable. This, however, was not actually done until V6.

It *is* possible, with a good deal of elbow grease, to run a system from between V3 and V4 (closer to V4, according to Warren Toomey): that V3 "Readme.nsys" describes how, armed with a V5 system, you could take the "nsys" tape image as modified by Warren Toomey and produce a V4ish system on a V5 filesystem, that would mostly work. That said, the V4- you get doesn't have the pipe() system call and therefore doesn't have the thing that distinguishes the environment--and arguably Unix As We Know It--the most from the V1/V2 we already have. I have not myself made the effort to run it.

The late, great Mike Mahoney (disclaimer: he was my thesis advisor for the Ph.D. I never completed) did an interview with Doug McIlroy that's still hosted on the Princeton History of Science web pages, that tells a gorgeous story about pipes and about how the evolution of the "Unix philosophy" was a combined...not really effort, more of a jazz-riffing combination of Doug, Brian, Ken, and Dennis all playing together. It's at https://www.princeton.edu/~hos/mike/transcripts/mcilroy.htm and you should read it. There are also interviews with Brian, Ken, and Dennis, and you should read those too. The thing is, the index page doesn't point to the right pages, so you follow the same pattern: https://www.princeton.edu/~hos/mike/transcripts/<lastname>.htm, where "<lastname>" is replaced by one of "kernighan", "thompson", or "ritchie".

It's also in the Unix V4 manual that we are proudly told "there are now more than 20 Unix installations." In 2019 I'm willing to bet there are more than two *billion* Unix installations, if we count Linux and thereby Android as Unix (which we absolutely should). The majority of them are Android devices, in second place we have iOS (which, like MacOS, is basically a BSD userland atop a Mach kernel), and non-Android Linux runs a distant third. Everything else except maybe MacOS is down in the noise, but it's worth noting that Microsoft Windows now ships Windows Subsystem For Linux, which means there's very little out there these days with anything you could call a general-pupose OS (which, as computing gets cheaper, becomes smaller and smaller and sillier and sillier devices) that doesn't have some Unix somewhere in it.

A SLIGHT DIGRESSION (OR IS IT?)

While I was writing this, I came upon the new (at the time of writing) paper "A fork() in the road" at https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/uploads/prod/2019/04/fork-hotos19.pdf

Its basic thesis is "fork() considered harmful" but it's very interesting to consider in terms of the Unix philosophy as we're playing with these early Unixes.

It is probably true that fork() is no longer the best way to do process management if you have complex user-facing applications with many threads of control inside a single process.

Which, er, is why we have posix_spawn(), which gives a lot more control to the user over how the process works. But it's a kind of funny place we've ended up in.

It's not obvious from a modern perspective, but if you look at process creation and *especially* passing open filehandles between parent and child processes in other late 1960s/early 1970s designs, it's a mess.

Unix did something very elegant with fork(): it's a complete copy of the first program, including its open file descriptors. The only difference is the return code, which lets the process determine if it's the parent or the child (or if the call failed). Traditionally then the child would immediately exec() to replace the in-memory process image with one loaded from disk--but retaining the same open file descriptors.

This is an amazingly easy way to do it compared to...pretty much all of Unix's contemporaries. And in a model where a process was expected to do one thing, and that thing was generally: take input on stdin; transform that input somehow; put output on stdout; put errors, if any, on stderr, then that's a wonderful fit.

But in today's world, because we have billions of Unix devices, the predominant applications are no longer byte-stream transformers. They are user-facing, multithreaded, interactive applications, for which fork() really isn't a very appropriate model after all.

Nevertheless, the authors draw the wrong conclusion entirely. It's a whole lot easier to explain fork() than posix_spawn(); it's perfectly fair to say, though, "if you're writing a mobile app, which statistically you probably are, don't do process creation the old-school way anymore."

But isn't it weird and wonderful that a system that was designed for sequential stages of text processing (formatting patents for Bell Labs) has ended up in the position where it's running most of the world's handheld devices?

UNIX V5

The surviving V5 is a single disk image. Consequently it's pretty easy to get going. Of note here is that there's now a disk bootloader; no need to feed the system a paper tape, or deposit a bootloader into memory with the front panel. You just have an RK05 image, you boot from the RK05 device, and when it says "@" you type "unix" (which loads /unix into memory) and away you go.

Once you're there...it's a Unix system. The command "cd" is still spelled "chdir". It doesn't seem to have "tar" or "tap", and there's no "man" yet. The lack of man pages means that the behavior of "stty" is still mysterious, but finally there's source code (in /usr/source/s2/stty.c), but you can't do very much with it, not even set the baud rate.

The kernel is a whopping 25802 bytes. There's "sync" but no "halt", so finally you can at least type "sync" three times (the second and third are to give your fingers something to do while the disk is actually syncing) before you pull the plug (or, much more likely, type Control-E to break to the SIMH command line, and type "q").

I think with a good bit more work this image *could* have a lot of software built for it and it would be a pretty useful Unix, but the image that is available and easy for hobbyists to run isn't really it. So I pretty quickly moved on.

UNIX V6

There are two primary reasons V6 is known and remembered. The first is John Lions' magnificent opus, the _Commentary_. Its Wikipedia page is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lions%27_Commentary_on_UNIX_6th_Edition,_with_Source_Code

. Distributed as _samizdat_ for many, many years, it's how people just a

tiny bit older than me first learned about Unix internals; I first saw it in nth-generation photocopied form in a three-ring binder, but didn't actually get a copy of my own until the 1996 release of the Peer-to-Peer Communications version. It's still a wonderful read; the 6th edition source is clear and lucid (but still very much terse C which doesn't care much about fussy distinctions between ints and pointers), and the explanatory commentary is masterful. If you're interested in the construction of elegant systems in constrained spaces, you should read it. A number of free softcopy versions are linked from the Wikipedia article.

The second reason is that it was the first Unix to be ported to something other than a PDP-11; in this case the Interdata 7/32, which was a 32-bit platform. You can run that as well in SIMH, but I stuck with the PDP-11.

This Unix is the first to be installed in SIMH more or less as you would have done it on the real iron. Instructions are at http://gunkies.org/wiki/Installing_Unix_v6_(PDP-11)_on_SIMH, and it goes like this: you tell SIMH your tape image is write-locked, attach three rk06 drives, toggle in a six-word octal sequence that's a minimal tape bootloader, and run that to slurp the beginning of the install tape into low memory. Having done that, you jump to address 0 and that puts you into a standalone tape-to-disk restore program. You copy a boot block from tape to the first disk's first block, copy the rest of the root filesystem image to the rest of the disk, and then boot from the disk.

That gets you a single-user Unix. Rebuild the kernel (this is a time before scripting languages, so you build a little C program that accepts a very terse definition of devices you want to build into the kernel on stdin, which then builds a little assembly language routine that specifies the available devices). Move the resulting kernel (30346 bytes, if you're doing the stock SIMH install) into place at /unix, build your devices with mknod, use dd to copy the next couple of tape files to /usr/src and /usr/doc (on the second and third rk06 devices), put the mount statements in /etc/rc (yes, a time before /etc/fstab!)...and generally do a bunch of other stuff to turn your system into a workable multiuser Unix system.

This is very recognizable as installing a Unix system from scratch. You can imagine needing to do this in a modern context if for some reason you needed to install a system with truly minimal distribution media and no network; it's not that much worse than bringing up Linux in the mid-1990s before distributions were really a thing.

There's *still* no "halt", "cd" is *still* spelled "chdir", but at least "stty" lets you set a reasonable bit rate on your terminal and remap erase and kill. You still have to use Control-? as break.

In any event, it's about time to move on.

UNIX V7

Version 7 is the Big Dog. There's a contingent that stridently insists that this is the last *real* Unix before AT&T commercialized it and screwed everything up and kicked off the fragmentation that became the Unix Wars. It is the last Research Unix from Bell Labs.

You install this one from the install tape (this time, no toggled bootloader needed). You format your disks with the first non-bootstrap file on the tape (users of more modern Unixes may be surprised that there's no partitioning step; there were not very many varieties of disk and their geometries are hardcoded, so the system knows how big your rp06 is and there's no way to split it into multiple partitions that I know of), restore the root partition from the next, boot the kernel into single-user mode, and proceed pretty much as before.

There are already some nifty convenience features: there's a makefile in /dev which creates a bunch of devices for you, for instance. The "stty" program *finally* accepts '^h' for an erase character and knows it means Control-H. Most importantly, from my perspective, "cd" works, but it's also really nice that "man" is installed. The shell is, finally, Bourne shell. The C compiler is the language described in the "white book"--that is, K&R C at last.

There's still no "halt". Sync three times and pull the plug.

Good old /usr/include is there too. While V7 doesn't ship with "curses.h" I'm sure it's available...although you'll note there's something very very important to Unix that has been missing all through this narrative, and is still missing here.

Right. There's no TCP/IP stack.

This isn't actually that big a deal; there were multiple implementations of TCP/IP for V7, and "tar" is present in all its glory, so it wouldn't actually be that much work to take an implementation, tell SIMH to treat the tarball as a tape device, and it's K&R C, which I speak reasonably fluently. It's nice that "make" is already there, too.

The primary impediment is that the system editor is *still* "ed".

V7 is a thoroughly usable Unix. If you've used one of the minimal containerization-focused Linuxes, where you get busybox (and a shell that is much closer to Bourne than to bash) and not much else, and imagine that with development environments (you also get F77 in V7), you're not far off in terms of feel.

It is in fact so usable that I have followed some instructions from the 'net to replace the included serial driver (DCI) with the DZ driver, which is interrupt driven and therefore doesn't burn a CPU spinning and polling. The tricky bit was driving ed and sed to edit some assembly files; compiling the driver and linking into the kernel was child's play. My v7 kernel is now 54866 bytes, so you can see the bloat beginning to happen.

But most of the reason I didn't worry about TCP/IP for V7 was that it was just easier to install the next and final PDP/11 Unix in my survey.

2.11BSD

This is the end of the line. I leapfrogged a bunch of other Unixes that would run on the PDP-11. 2.11BSD was released in 1992, so it's basically contemporaneous with the release of Linux on the i386.

Installation is still a lot like V7. Boot from tape, do disk partitioning from the first file on tape (you still, in 1992, had to know your disk geometry and calculate sector ranges and stuff yourself), format your disks with the second file, use the third file to restore the fifth file to the root partition, and then boot your system from the disk to restore the rest of the partitions (/usr and /usr/src).

It's a little odd; the console comes up in single-user mode and you have to exit the resulting shell to go to multiuser. I didn't bother to set up terminal devices, because 2.11BSD comes with a TCP/IP stack. I'm running mine on an emulated PDP-11/70 with 3MB of memory, and SIMH uses the Linux tap device to create a virtual ethernet. So I can just telnet to the machine.

This is a modern Unix. If you've used a BSD, you know how to drive this. Kernel source is in /usr/src/sys, the configs live in the "conf" subdirectory, you copy GENERIC to the name of your choice, and edit a bunch of configuration statements, which are largely whether you have any of a particular kind of peripheral, and if so, how many.

Since this is a modern Unix, you've got vi, so you don't need to grit your teeth and struggle with ed anymore. Rebuilding the kernel is as easy as editing your config in /usr/src/sys/conf, running "config" in the same directory with the name of your config as its argument, changing to the directory thus created, and running "make" followed by, if successful, "make install".

However, we can also see why this is the end of the line. If you're doing much--for instance, recompiling Adventure--you're going to be getting a bunch of messages like this:

May 28 13:31:06 pdp11bsd vmunix: coremap: overflow, lost 560 clicks at 055755 May 28 13:31:06 pdp11bsd vmunix: coremap: overflow, lost 608 clicks at 057035 May 28 13:31:06 pdp11bsd vmunix: coremap: overflow, lost 446 clicks at 044566 May 28 13:31:06 pdp11bsd vmunix: coremap: overflow, lost 1 clicks at 012174

What's going on here? That 64K address space just isn't big enough, even with clever overlays and memory management, and even when instructions and data live in separate segments. You can tweak this in the kernel definitions in your configuration, and you can move overlay pieces around in the Makefile, but there's very little room to play. I'm getting these errors all over the place with NBUF set to a conservative 32, MAXUSERS a measly 4, and and NDE (DEC Ethernet) and NSL (Serial Line IP) enabled. I would get a little more room back if I turned off SLIP, but the fundamental problem is that a kernel plus an Ethernet driver plus a TCP/IP stack doesn't leave a lot of room for user programs.

And indeed we see that in the kernel image: /unix is 139573 bytes. 2.11BSD and a TCP/IP stack is about far as we can push a 16-bit system. Of course, by 1992 PDP-11s were nearing the end of their lifespan as general-purpose computing machines (they survived for a great deal longer--some to the present day--in process control and industrial applications). The availability of the Intel 386, a 32-bit extension of the 8086 architecture line, in inexpensive PCs, meant that by the early 1990s you could run Unix or a Unix-like system on a relatively inexpensive microcomputer (I installed Linux the first time in 1992 or 1993 on a 4MB i386 that I got when I went to college; I think the system cost around $2000 new in 1990. I installed the brand-new and still-quite-shaky Linux rather than 386BSD (or was it BSD/386?) for the very pragmatic reason that Linux let me defragment my hard drive and repartition it so I could share the disk between DOS+Windows 3.0 and Linux; as an undergrad there was no way I could afford another disk).

THE SIMULATION ENVIRONMENT

It's worth noting that my explorations here all happened on a Raspberry Pi Model 3. That's a Linux computer. It has a 4-core 32-bit ARM CPU running at about 1GHz, and it has 1GB of system memory. It costs $35 brand new (you do have to supply your own mass storage in the form of an SD card; a 16GB class 10 card is going for $6.40 at Amazon at the time of writing). The case probably added another eight bucks, so total system price is about $50. It's the size of a deck of playing cards. Power consumption is usually well under a watt and maximum draw is about five watts.

The PDP-11 emulator running V7 is being a hog and consuming 12.2% of a CPU core and 1.4% of the memory, while the Honeywell 6180 on the same machine running Multics is consuming 4.6% of one CPU core (remember, there are four cores) and 14.3% of the memory. The TOPS-20 system is roughly 2%/4% and ITS is using about 0.7%/0.7%. So all three of the beloveds of the Unix Haters, plus a pretty big PDP-11/70, are collectively consuming about 6% of the total CPU and about a fifth of the total memory.

Granted, those machines are basically idle; but even when an emulator consumes an entire CPU core, I can still run all four flat out at once. Response time is basically instantaneous; I am sure that performance of any of them is far better than it would have been on the actual machine.

And, of course the system running these simulations is Linux, which is to say, fundamentally Unix. Not bad for a 50-year-old typesetting system, really.

My editing stack is also Unix. Specifically, it's MacOS Mojave 10.14.5, which is a BSD userland atop a Mach microkernel (but which provides all the usual BSD system calls through a compatibility layer). I'm writing this in GNU Emacs 26.2, with line wraps injected at word breaks before 72 columns by text mode with auto-fill, and when I'm done I'm going to format it for my blog with a tool that dates back to ancient days: "fmt" with an argument of "-w 9999" to make each paragraph a single line so the HTML rendererer can do its own job of layout.

USABILITY

This is largely a callback to my earlier review of The Unix Hater's Handbook (https://athornton.dreamwidth.org/14272.html). In that I talked about Multics, TOPS-20, and ITS, three systems remembered very fondly in the early 1990s by people who hated Unix.

I basically stand by what I said there, although I'm using ITS a bit more (I'm trying to port Frotz to it as part of my abiding fondness for Infocom games). I still don't like it and I don't think DDT is a pleasant programming environment.

However: where do these systems stand in usability with respect to very early Unixes, rather than one with all the modern conveniences of windowing systems and well-integrated networking and capable ANSI terminals?

That in turn comes down to "which would I rather use?"

Let's start from newest and work our way back. I'm certainly more productive in 2.11BSD than I am in TOPS-20 or Multics. Now, granted, a lot of that is that I am very comfortable in Unix, and the other two are pretty foreign to me. But if I had to spend a week writing documents or code to perform a task in any of them, it'd be BSD.

Would it be V7 Unix? That's the interesting question. I think it probably would, but I'd cheat. The big thing it's missing out of the box (OK, OK, other than a networking stack) is a screen editor, and more generally sophisticated terminal handling. But it in practice would not be that big a deal: I'd find a curses implementation for V7, I'd get it built, and then I'd get a screen editor built on top of that. Give me vi and I can get by. I'd prefer Emacs, and I presume Gosmacs or an early GNU Emacs exists in some form that will build on a PDP-11. Armed with Emacs and V7, I'd have an easier time than in TOPS-20 or Multics. (Even armed with vi and V7, I'd have an easier time, but I'd resent not having the editor that I've now got more than 30 years of muscle memory for.)

Also, it's basically the 7th Edition that Kernighan and Pike _The Unix Programming Environment_ documents, and like so many other people I read that book to pieces. Because of that, probably more than anything else, 7th Edition feels like home in a way the earlier ones don't.

Maybe that's why I'm not sure I'd say the same about V5 or V6 being more comfortable than TOPS-20 or Multics. A lot of it's cosmetic but I feel like I'd have to do a lot more work to get the system in a shape I'd like to use. The combination of having to write my own "cd" wrapper (OK, OK, that's not really hard), having a shell that isn't quite Bourne yet (as it were), a dialect of C that's not quite K&R, no "man"...effectively, I'd have to fight a lot to turn the userland into something resembling V7 before I wanted to use it, and I feel like it'd be more pleasant to just use Multics or TOPS-20. V5 is still better than ITS.

I can't say the same about V1 kernel plus V2 userland, or PDP-7 Unix. But both of these are the equivalent of the dinosaur skeleton that's mostly concrete with a few original bones imbedded in it. Even so, I can't imagine that the original systems were much more functionally pleasant than their reconstructions. I can do more in ITS than I can in them, and there's a better existing software library, and, crucially, several high-level languages. Sure, ITS C is pre-K&R and is probably basically equivalent to the dialect that exists in the V2 userland, but it at least exists, as well as FORTH and LISP...and also LOGO if I feel an irresistable urge to do turtle graphics.

CONCLUSION

By V7 Unix was about as usable as Multics ever had been, in terms of the experience for a programming or engineering end-user. It existed on machines that could be bought for a fraction of the price of the Honeywells that could run Multics in 1975, when 7th edition was released: the Honeywell 6180 cost about $7 million. A well-specced PDP-11/45 would have been roughly 1% of that: $70,000.

I have had less luck finding the price of a PDP-10, but it looks like large PDP-10 processors cost in the quarter-million dollar range, so it's probably not too wrong to figure that a PDP-10 beefy enough and with enough peripherals to run TOPS-20 happily (TOPS-20 wouldn't be released until 1976, but from this distance, that counts as contemporaneous with V7) is, logarithmically speaking, halfway between the Honeywell and the PDP-11: that is, on the order of $700,000.

And ITS fans...I still think it's some weird combination of nerd snobbery, Stockholm Syndrome, back-in-my-day-uphill-both-ways-blizzardism, and blindingly rosy nostalgia goggles. You could have an equivalently miserable experience elsewhere for a lot less money--which pretty much tracks what I have heard about the MIT experience in general, come to think of it.

So I think my reaction to The Unix Haters' Handbook is still quite reasonable. In some ways the user could get a better experience on a TOPS-20 or Multics system, and a given system could support many more users, but the price tag put these machines far out of reach for almost all of the customers who could afford a reasonably high-end PDP-11. Sure, the documentation was generally better and the overall feel a lot less scruffy, but given the price differential and the fact that the day-to-day user experience was just about as good...well, Ken and Dennis and Doug and Brian and Rob really knocked it out of the park, didn't they?

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The UNIX-HATERS Handbook, a review

Thu, 16 May 2019 21:08:53 GMT

(note: this was first posted on Google Plus in something like May of 2018)

_The UNIX-HATERS Handbook_

Edited by Simson Garfinkel, Daniel Weise, and Steven Strassmann

_The UNIX-HATERS Handbook_ dates from 1994. I read it when it came out or very shortly thereafter, I think. I was a lot more invested in operating system wars back then.

Almost twenty-five years later I decided to revisit it. From today's perspective, it's an interesting cultural artifact.

The tl;dr is:

This book has not aged well. As a book it's incoherent. It's a bunch of loosely-agglomerated chapters about things people hated about Unix in the late 1980s and early 1990s; most of it is drawn from the UNIX-HATERS mailing list starting in about 1987.

The thing it reminded me most of, to be frank, was some dreadful book my late grandfather-in-law had about Obama. That book devoted a whole lot of energy to How Horrible The Negro-In-Chief was without ever stopping to consider that if he was a secret Muslim then he probably wasn't taking orders from a honkey-hating Christian minister, and if his wife was the brains and brawn behind their marriage then he probably wasn't a mastermind of the Black Illuminati. Like that, this thing is a litany of Things Someone Hates About Unix, whether or not those things are mutually contradictory.

From a two-decades-plus-later perspective, the gripes can be filed into one of just a few categories.

The first is, "no, you're wrong. This actually was a sensible way of doing it." That applies to things like "files are just streams of bytes" and "pipe things together." I mean, it's not like we haven't had our share of pipeline systems that dealt with things at the object level. The two I happen to know reasonably well are Powershell and CMS-PIPELINES. Both of those have much, much more complicated interfaces. That makes them somewhat more powerful (in that you don't have to explicitly serialize your stream before passing records or objects to the next stage) but also way, WAY harder to use and to document, because you have to care what your input records are. Now, I adore CMS PIPELINES, and Powershell is...OK, I guess?...but the cool part about Powershell isn't that you're passing complex objects around, it's that you have access, from the shell, to all the DLLs in the system, and thus every single library call. (Apparently you can sort of fake this on Linux (and other Unix?) systems with D-Bus.)

The second category is "yeah, that was annoying, and in the intervening time it got fixed." That applies to the "the GUI sucks" category (I'm writing this on a Mac OS box, and you probably have either an Android or an IOS device in your pocket, don't you?). It applies to the "the shell is clunky" category--and already did by 1994. I remember vividly having to get the muscle memory for tab completion switched over from esc-completion when I started using bash on Linux systems rather than csh on SunOS (or whatever) systems. The Berkeley Fast File System is another target, and, yeah, it has limitations, so we got ext2-and-3-and-4 and reiserfs and ZFS and all the experimental file systems of the last 25 years. But that's also the third category.

There were a lot of things assumed to be essential features of Unix that, in retrospect, were only Unix-adjacent. Sendmail and Usenet are the big two in this particular book. Sendmail is instructive. Yes, sendmail.cf is utterly horrific, and the m4 macros designed to make it suck less were only kind of better. And then we had qmail, which, well, Dan Berenstein and speaking of toxic personalities, and then the world settled down on Postfix, written by someone who was a fairly nice guy, and configurable in a fairly straightforward manner. I myself stayed with Exim, because Phil Hazel was awesome and I understood Exim syntax. And now in the 201xs, it doesn't matter anymore because to a first approximation everyone outsources their mail to Google or Microsoft. (not me! I still run my own Exim system and do my own spam filtering and boy howdy is it wretched since I don't have Google's training corpus)

And finally there's the fourth category: things the book is right about. Yeah, NFS file locking is still terrible, even now. Like, literally the project I am working on right now has to do local locks, which of course means that two people on different machines better not edit the same file at the same time. But twenty-five years later I feel like we can definitively state that distributed filesystems are indeed pretty hard. Another completely reasonable observation of _The Unix Hater's Handbook_: Unix man pages are prickly, incomplete, inconsistently designed, and not very helpful if you don't already know what you're looking for. And while not every system did it better, well, Multics, TOPS-20, and VM/CMS all certainly did, so the dire state of Unix documentation is a fair criticism.

If you want a chapter-by-chapter critique, I will recommend that you read Eric Raymond's review of _The Unix Hater's Handbook_ from 2008: http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=538 . I'm not a big ESR fan in the general case, but he pretty much gets this right.

There's another thing about this book that is only clear from a modern perspective. When it was written (though perhaps not when it was published), it looked like Unix was likely to win but it wasn't a _fait accompli_. (In the mid-to-late 90s it looked like Windows might manage to strangle all the Unices.)

From the vantage point of 2018, well, Unix won. Unix (which I mean in a broad sense, specifically one that includes Linux) won everything but the corporate desktop. Anything running in the cloud or any service at a data center? Probably Unix. Your smartphone? Almost certainly either IOS or Android. The kernel might or might not be Unix, but the programming model and userland? Unix.

You're probably stuck using Windows at work. But hell, these days, Windows 10 comes with a Linux compatibility layer. Google just released gVisor, which is basically a Linux-syscall proxy layer written in Go. Plop that on top of Fuchsia and you can suddenly run a great many Linux applications, unmodified, on top of a much, much simpler underlying system. So even if you don't *want* to run a modern Unix from a resource perspective--it's what your developers are developing to.

But this is a very strange book, even for 1994. It makes no mention of Linux, which, OK, I guess that's on the edge of acceptability. It makes no mention of Windows, and that's a little weirder. Most of what it seems to be bemoaning is that Unix was winning in the early 90s, and not a descendant of something better. Now it reserves a bit of spleen for VMS, so "something better" seems to mostly mean "TOPS-20, ITS, WAITS, Multics, or a LISP Machine."

DMR, may he rest in peace, addressed this his Anti-Forward:

"The systems you remember so fondly (TOPS-20, ITS, Multics, Lisp Machine, Cedar/Mesa, the Dorado) are not just out to pasture, they are fertilizing it from below."

And at this juncture something is fairly easy that wasn't when ESR wrote his review, and wasn't even possible when the book was written.

I've installed TOPS-20, ITS, and Multics on emulators so that I can evaluate for myself how true this is. I have not emulated a LISP Machine, alas.

You'll note that the first two of those only ever ran on DEC-10s, which were never cheap machines. ITS was pretty much an MIT-specific environment running on a single machine, and WAITS was its Stanford counterpart. Nifty, but of limited reach (although greatly influential in later development of systems). Likewise, Multics was only ever available on extremely large, expensive, and, let's be frank, also-ran machines. I'd love to have a Symbolics LISP machine but they didn't react fast enough when Sun cut the floor out of the workstation market.

So, in a nutshell:

People aren't kidding about Multics. It's a very nice-feeling system, with useful online help. I can absolutely see how if you wanted to kind-of-replicate the Multics experience on the very, very much cheaper hardware of a PDP-11, you'd end up with something like early Unix. But that, of course, is one of the points that _The UNIX-HATER's Handbook_ resolutely fails to acknowledge. A whole lot more people had access to PDP-11s than to GE-645s.

TOPS-20 is also kind of nice. The command editing is well-done. The help system is, once again, definitely superior to Unix's. I can understand why someone would prefer it to early Unix.

A brief parenthetical aside: I found it slightly curious that the retrospectives on the personal computers of my youth (C-64, ZX Spectrum, Amiga, et al) always focussed on games. I mean, sure, those are generally the most visually appealing things on the system, and of course you wouldn't want to try to use those systems' productivity software now, while their games are still fun. And then I found myself installing all these ancient large-computer systems, and what do I run on them? Adventure. Zork. Moria.

And then we get to ITS.

Seriously, people? This is the embodiment of the dark side of the MIT attitude expressed as software. A system that gives you the hardware debugger as its shell, proudly calls its userbase "lusers", and is very forthrightly smug about "if you don't already know everything there is to know about the PDP-10 architecture as modified at MIT, die in a fire." This is a command environment that not even a mother could love. The user experience is dreadful. Sure, I know that Macsyma and Scheme and Zork all came out of here, but...sheesh. This is not merely unusable in the 21st century, it's the epitome of a user-hostile environment.

So, from my brief experiments: sure, there were a few systems around prior to Unix that were better in many ways. They also existed only on extremely high-end and expensive machines and so were inaccessible to the vast majority of people who _could_ afford a PDP-11. ITS is just horrific to use.

I've enjoyed writing this on Emacs on MacOS, which is to say, an editor that first appeared on ITS, but was rather quickly ported to Unix. MacOS is a Mach microkernel with a BSD Unix userland on top of it. I get a perfectly adequate GUI, and I also have a bunch of terminal windows open in which I can do all the traditional Unixy stream-of-bytes pipeline stuff. One of the things about the worse-is-better not-much-there-there model is that it's pretty easy to port things to a Unix/C world, and so it's easy to grab an editor from a different OS lineage and get it working in the Unix model.

This book was whiny and ludicrous when it first came out. It has only gotten more so since. It's still got a few valid criticisms of Unix, but the really interesting thing is how much of what its authors complained about turned out to not be intrinsic at all, and to get fixed rather quickly. I still believe, and the state of computing in 2018 seems to bear this out, that Unix was a good compromise, that gave usability and an easily-articulated-and-implemented philosophy, on top of (relatively) cheap hardware.

Note that this doesn't explain Linux's hegemony. For that we would need an analysis of Free Software and a discussion of the Unix Wars, and this review isn't the place for that. But it does explain why DMR was right, and the authors of _The UNIX-HATER's Handbook_ were wearing rosy-tinted goggles and exercising very selective memory when loudly and inaccurately proclaiming that the world was so much better when they were immersed in the cesspit of ITS.

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Thoughts on race and privilege in America

Fri, 29 Jul 2016 05:04:25 GMT

Some thoughts on race and privilege in the US.
I had a strange experience last night.
To set the stage: my spouse, Amy, was supposed to teach a dog class. I had received an urgent call to get my ass down the street to the bus stop, about half a mile away, in the Smart Car, so I could give that to Amy, because the left rear tire on the van (which Amy had been driving) had gone flat.
So I went down there, turned over the car, and called AAA while getting back to my house. I got the dogs inside, met the driver, and went down there while he chiselled the rusted-on spare from the underside of the van where it had been peacefully spending the last decade, determined that it would sort-of hold air, and put it on, whereupon I drove the little distance back home.
It was there that I determined that our newish Great Dane foster, Jamaica, had left a half-deflated-soccer-ball-sized dump on the living room floor. He's a sweet dog, but very very stubborn and, charitably, not bright. We'd spent nearly an hour outside with him immediately before Amy left, during which he peed but adamantly denied he had to poop. Then I left him unsupervised for less than half an hour, and Turdmageddon.
So anyway. I clean up this massive shit-pile, and take the bag of crap and paper towels out to the trash can at the side of my house. It's now like 9:15, and mostly dark: there's still some gray in the sky, and you can see silhouettes but not much else. That's the east side of the house, and there are stairs that go up along it to the back yard. I have several pots there containing hops and morning glories, and so I decided to water them, as although we have been getting a lot of rain, the rain comes in from the west, and so the east side of the house doesn't actually get rain in the usual case.
So I've gone up the stairs and back with a hose with a sprinkler head on the end, and I'm standing at the end of the stairs when I hear a whole bunch of barking from the front door. Now, I am aware I've been bad and not closed the front door, but just the screen door, because, well, I had my hands full of a bag of dog shit. So it's entirely normal that the dogs crowd the door and bay madly if they see, well, anything the least bit unusual. I think to myself, "I'd better hurry up and get back in before someone complains."
And that's when I see there's a guy walking quickly up the driveway towards me. I can only see the shape, but I think it's a black guy, maybe in his 30s? Not shaped like a kid, anyway. I'm pretty dazed from hiking back to the car and the excitement and unpleasantness of dealing with the dog shit, and I'm taking a while to form the thought, "I guess I should ask him what he wants or if I can help him."
While I'm standing there half dazed, he suddenly darts left and breaks into a dead run into the little gully between my house and the house on the street behind me, and disappears into the bushes. "What the hell?" I think, turn off the hose, and go inside.
It takes me a couple hours to realize what happened from his perspective. He's in the cul-de-sac, and suddenly there are a bunch of ferocious dogs barking at him from behind a flimsy screen door. He's trying to walk away quickly, and suddenly there's a silhouette of a white dude, holding what very easily could be a gun, in front of him, who evidently came out of the same house that the ferocious dogs are in.
So I probably caused someone to need to change his pants last night.
Now, I don't know who this guy was, or what he was doing in my cul-de-sac. If I were of a suspicious turn of mind, I might suspect he was casing houses to see if any looked worth robbing. If that is what he was doing then I think he probably won't be back any time soon. On the other hand, it very much could have been someone just cutting through, on foot, to get to wherever he was going more quickly. Or just someone out for a walk who got a little scared by several big dogs that did not appear well-restrained, and then a lot scared by what looked like a Missouri cracker with a gun.
But that's the thing: *I* never felt scared, or threatened. And that is all down to white privilege. Even if it had been a robber, what, he'd've gotten the forty bucks in my pocket, and could have taken a shitty minivan with a Thoroughly Corroded -3 Continental Spare Tire. (Seriously, the spare on this thing would have been perfect for pudding farming and not much else, and if you don't play _Nethack_ this sentence won't make any sense.)
But for a black man, trespassing on someone else's driveway, and suddenly seeing what appeared to be a white homeowner with a gun? No wonder it was terrifying.

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Three Prisons

Thu, 30 Jun 2016 04:02:51 GMT

Three Prisons: The Cursed Chateau by James Maliszewski (cover by Yannick Bouchard, graphic design and interior art by Jez Gordon), England Upturn'd by Barry Blatt (cover by Jason Rainville, graphic design and interior art by Sarah Richardson), and Maze of the Blue Medusa by Zak Sabbath and Patrick Stuart (cover and interior art by Zak Sabbath).

I've recently received three RPG books about imprisonment. Two of these are recent Lamentations of the Flame Princess releases, and one is the first thing from Satyr Press. These reviews will not be spoiler-free; if you're planning on playing the modules, rather than reading and running them, you may want to put off reading this piece until you've been through them.

The Cursed Chateau is an expansion and rerelease of James Maliszewski's earlier piece of the same name, which makes it sort of like Death Frost Doom or Carcosa. However, although I've read the earlier versions of each of those, I had never read The Cursed Chateau before.

The Cursed Chateau is a haunted house. It makes this quite explicit in the introduction, and structurally it stays very much within the expectations thus established. Rather delightfully, Maliszewski identifies the specific haunted houses he's evoking as not, in fact, being the haunted houses from crappy horror movies of the 1970s, as you might expect, but rather the (much scarier) haunted houses imagined by the kid whose parents did not let him see these movies but had to imagine them from his friends' breathless reports.

The translation of these movies into D&D modules points to the two modules Maliszewski specifically calls out: Tegel Manor and Castle Amber. I myself see a lot more Castle Amber than Tegel Manor in The Cursed Chateau. But then Tegel Manor makes me think of Scooby-Doo rather than anything, y'know, scary.

A lot of the Amberness is the French setting of The Cursed Chateau. However, I think Maliszewski is going for a more weary and decadent feeling than Castle Amber; more Baudelaire than Clark Ashton Smith. Indeed, the foreward to Les Fleurs du Mal could just straight-up be slapped onto The Cursed Chateau and it would fit just fine. As a matter of fact, the tl;dr summary of The Cursed Chateau could probably be "Roll Castle Amber around in Les Fleurs du Mal for a while." (One might also note that Room 22 of Castle Amber itself is named "Flowers of Evil.")

Funhouse dungeons get a lot of their fun from how gonzo and, generally, ridiculous, the juxtaposition of stuff-that-doesn't-make-sense is. Tegel Manor has very little in the way of organization or theme (beyond, "Rump Family! Kooky House! Go!"); it's a terrible read, but it's a delightful setting to actually play in. (If you're ever at Gary Con and Kevin Kelly is running Tegel Manor, do try to play.)

Castle Amber (and The Cursed Chateau) are far less goofy, although they certainly contain their share of WTFfery. Neither one is the sort of anything-goes kitchen-sink lunacy that Tegel Manor is. Their tone comes a lot closer to Gothic Horror than to Scooby-Doo.

The Cursed Chateau begins by trapping the party in the Chateau and its grounds; once they enter, there's an impenetrable force field that keeps the party imprisoned until they sufficiently amuse the undead Lord Joudain, master of this domain, which will break the curse that holds them inside the Chateau. (Note the similarity to the fetch-quest required in Castle Amber to break the curse and dispel the gray mist preventing the party from leaving; however, the exit criteria seem much more discoverable in Castle Amber.)

Joudain and his entire staff are undead, and trapped in eternal ennui (along with any unfortunate visitors) until someone can lift the curse by sufficiently amusing Joudain.

The goal of the module, therefore, is simply to perform enough amusing actions (with few enough tiresome ones) to fill Lord Joudain's Fun Meter. This is unlikely to be discovered quickly by the party. In turn, this implies that the party is going to spend much of its time aimlessly wandering the house and grounds, encountering the various undead NPCs.

The NPCs are quite good. They are certainly the best part of the module. Each one typically has one or a few strongly distinguishing traits, which would help an even minimally observant party tell them apart, and perhaps piece together the history of the Chateau and the nature of the curse. They have relationships with one another. Some are implacably hostile to the party, and some may be neutral or friendly. I am particularly fond of the young Guilhèm and Landri the long-suffering majordomo.

There's a hedge maze with a lilac bush I recognized (as Stetson's) from Eliot but which likely comes originally from a Symbolist. There's also a basement dungeon with a batrachian theme; some sort of Arnesonian nod, I guess. It all hangs together pretty well, in a world-weary decaying-finery kind of way.

The whole thing is--by design--pretty dour and joyless. This is certainly meant to reinforce the themes of the scenario, but it makes the module kind of tough going. And therein lies the problem.

I'm pretty sure I'm never going to run this module for any of my current groups. None of them pay enough attention, and thus they will never figure out how to break the curse. Everyone will get cranky and butthurt. If you have a group of players who like solving mysteries and don't mind a fairly slow pace, you might get better mileage out of The Cursed Chateau. For my use, well, I just can't see it producing much enjoyment for me or my players. That's no indictment of the work, just a realization that I want more freewheeling gonzo and less mannered melancholy, and that my players tend not to be detail-oriented.

The PDF is cleanly laid-out, in black, brown, and tan. What the PDF does not make obvious is that if you buy the physical book, all the "tan" is metallic ink, and it's a much more golden color than you'd expect from the PDF. Yes, this drives up the cost of the book a lot. Is it worth it? I'm on the fence here. The book is otherwise a typical LotFP hardcover: slick cover, slightly-larger-than-digest size, solidly bound. Still, 27.50 € is pretty steep, and this isn't a book that is stunningly beautiful the way Maze of the Blue Medusa is. If you want a melancholic haunted house, and you want a pretty physical book, it's worth getting. The PDF is $7.50 at DriveThruRPG, which seems reasonable for what you get.

In summary: not my cup of tea, but if you want a gloomier Castle Amber, it might be yours.

Next we have England Upturn'd by Barry Blatt. As you might guess from the title, it's set during the English Civil War, and it owes a great deal of its setting to Christopher Hill's magnificent book The World Turn'd Upside Down. That all by itself endears it to me.

The premise is insane and wonderful. Basically, Bad King John was a sorceror, who came into possession of a phylactery to hold his soul upon his death. That phylactery was lost somewhere in the Lincolnshire Fens in 1216 with the Crown's treasure, and John's soul entered it upon his death a couple weeks later; it has remained imprisoned there ever since.

Back in the present of the module--which, not coincidentally, happens to be the spring of 1642, just before the English Civil War boils over--the Crown has now given out private charters to drain the fens; if a wealthy man drains the fens, he gets to claim the drained land (which was previously common-use) as his own. I'm sure that any current political allegory is entirely coincidental, and anyway, those guys draining the fens were actually doing something kind of useful, unlike modern financial services. I seem to have gotten off in the weeds.

So you have England simmering in a state of economic unrest. You have Ranters, Diggers, and Levellers. You have Irish Catholics looking to foment religious trouble. You have the usual LotFP collection of Rich Guys Who Are Right Bastards And Also Secret Diabolists. Andrew Smeaton is ostensibly draining a swamp, but he knows that John was a sorcerer and is looking for his magical artifacts so he can gain great sorcerous power. Of course, this being LotFP, the phylactery is with the stuff he really wants, and when that phylactery is popped open and releases the soul of Bad King John from its long imprisonment, the results will be disastrous. They will almost certainly involve a PC being possessed by John. Hilarity will ensue.

But that's not even the crazy part. No, the crazy part is the Swedish Witchfinder Niklas Brahe. He thinks he's an avatar of Odin, and might actually be, and his plan is to enact the ritual that gives the module its name. That's right: turns out we're not talking about social upheaval, but a curse that will flip a big chunk of Lincolnshire into the Hollow Earth and the corresponding chunk, populated with Niflungr (scary sea-faerie types), into Lincolnshire. The bad-assest of them will be--of course they will--in a castle on the back of a giant turtle, and they're looking for King John to exact their revenge.

Since he died 400 years ago, that'd be a problem--except that now he's probably back, and likely inhabiting the body of a PC.

I don't know that I'm ever going to play straight-up LotFP, and I don't know that I particularly want to run a game set in an almost-historical Thirty Years' War, which is the LotFP setting. Still, I feel like I am a lot more likely to use this than The Cursed Chateau. Although most of this stuff is pretty grounded in the setting, it would be trivial to steal "old king's soul imprisoned in just-unearthed treasure" or indeed "big chunk of underworld flips into game world, or vice versa."

There is one rule-system change that warms the cockles of my heart: Alignment changes. The Law-Chaos axis is replaced with Cavalier-Roundhead, and Good-Evil with Royalist-Republican (the chart on p. 106 seems to be incorrect in the lower right and should be Republican Roundhead, I think).

I freely admit that I came to this module primed to enjoy it. As I said earlier, I love Christopher Hill, and in fact my grad school roommate's Ph.D. thesis was about the draining of the fens. Also, I've played in and enjoyed some of Barry's games. In short, though, it does not disappoint.

The historical research here is good; not just Ranters, Diggers, and Levellers, and their songs, but, most crucially, Muggletonians. Seriously, these guys actually existed, and are the finest Christian cult ever. Although their God is probably slightly shorter than the Jesus of Silver John, they...well, wow. Mad props to Barry Blatt for not only pulling them into LotFP, but making their cosmology ontologically correct within that world. I'm also a big fan of using the Sephiroth and Tarot to drive game-world occurrences, and it's a thing that pops up over and over in my games, so again, yay Baz Blatt Confirmation Bias!

On the other hand, it seems pretty cruel to ask the reader to peruse Liber 777 to do more Sephiroth/Tarot-associative magic. However, if you really do pick up Liber 777, tell me that it doesn't read like David Hargrave's Arduin tables. Seriously, I'm thinking of doing a web quiz that is "Crowley or Hargrave?"

In summary: England Upturn'd is highly recommended. As a physical artifact, it's an LotFP paperback. Well-constructed, looks nice. It's not terribly expensive at 16.50 €. If you want physical books, great, you won't be disappointed, and if you are happy with PDFs, then there you go; also $7.50 at Drive Thru RPG.

And that brings us to Maze of the Blue Medusa.

Holy shit, is this thing big.

It's going to take a lot of preparation to run this successfully. There are lots of factions and an immense number of NPCs with their own agendas and complicated interlocking plots. The titular character has spent ages in her Maze, largely acting as a prison guard. There are the three perfect Torn sisters, imprisoned. There's a lich who's in love with one of them. There are, in fact, several alliterative liches. There are cannibal art critics in a gallery where metabolism runs way too fast. There's a wedding frozen in time mid-cataclysm involving a machine that turns souls into gold. There's the Medusa's father the trapped-in-an-endlessly-rekeying-puzzle-box devil. There's a Garden Of Live Flowers from Through The Looking Glass only sexier and deadlier. There are the remnants of an ancient Saurid empire and its library, with mummies each stuffed with a particular genre of book. There's a creepy and genuinely helpful child-ghost. There are a pair of petrified werewolf lovers. There are ....

You get the idea.

There's more than 300 rooms of this, and almost none of them are low-cognitive-load rats and 2000 copper pieces.

I've read through it once, all the way, and didn't manage to retain enough of the structure to feel like I can run it. I'm on my second pass now.

The fundamental physical structure of the megadungeon is that it's one of Zak S's hyperdetailed pieces, with lots and lots of geometric spaces of differing sizes, each with an image in it. This then is used to generate a colored, unillustrated, numbered map, and the dungeon is the map of numbers to room contents (which are illustrated in the actual painting). The dungeon is divided roughly into regions: Gardens, Archives, Prisons, and so forth. This makes it slightly easier to keep track of what's going on, although there's still a lot of classic-fun-house things-next-to-each-other-with-little-rhyme-or-reason juxtaposition room-to-room. I don't mind this, but I imagine it's not to everyone's tastes. There's a lot of thematic consistency, but not so much tactical consistency, which makes it feel different than, say, Tegel Manor on the one hand, or the Caves of Chaos on the other.

There's also a Random Encounter table which generates stuff that the party will have to deal with, and provides for mixing of the dungeon regions as inhabitants wander around.

The Patrick/Zak collaboration is a delightful one. A lot of this feels like the same sort of actinic lunacy that powered Deep Carbon Observatory. In terms of bang-per-page I'd have to give the nod to DCO but there is, rest assured, plenty of bang here too. I'm pretty sure that the groanworthy puns are Patrick's ideas (such as the Lampen Proletariat). There's also a shout-out to Baudelaire, if you're keeping score.

Maze of the Blue Medusa seems like it'd be a hard thing to mine for parts. I suppose some of the NPCs could be stripped out of it and dropped into another game pretty easily, but a lot of what makes reading it fun is figuring out who is trying to put one over on whom, and trying to keep track of the web of social plots. It would diminish most of the characters to disentangle them from the others. In general, I think if you're going to run this, you don't have a lot of choice but to run it as a 300-room megadungeon, which may or may not let players leave once they enter. The obvious way out (which is to say, "the way we came in") comes with a fairly strict time limit, although if the players do the obvious thing, the prisoner they immediately free will be back in a couple weeks with her own small army, presenting another escape opportunity.

I'm not actually sure under what circumstances I'd run it. If I had a weekly game with a stable player roster, it'd probably work, assuming they were the sort of players who liked traversing deadly environments, thinking about what they were doing, and keeping track of the relationships of the people in the game. Murderhobos will probably not fare well in here. Since my current group meets more-or-less monthly, and we rotate between three campaigns, we're not going to attempt this: a quarterly run at it is not going to get very far, and no way will my players remember in July any details of what happened in April--and this module will punish them for not remembering. In fact, there's a living mosaic who makes a point of calling out a party that wasn't paying attention when she delivered her riddle.

The titular Medusa, Psathyrella, might or might not be the villain of the piece. She's very likely to be an adversary, but she's a pretty reluctant jailor. She makes a very good case, to the players and to the reader, that killing her is just going to make things a whole lot worse. One of my favorite items in the book is Levalliant Green, Supervillian. He's a perfectly ordinary guy whose superpowers are that he anticipated it all with DMly prescience, and that he didn't do any of the first d4 things the players thought of. This is genius.

And then there's the physical artifact. This book is every bit as beautiful as Red and Pleasant Land, in many of the same ways: robust fabric binding, clean layout, heavy paper. It is larger than Red and Pleasant Land and will not remind you of fairy-tale books you had as a child. But gosh golly is it ever gorgeous. If you're going to buy this, spring for the physical copy, not just the PDF. The PDF is fine; it's totally readable (although my aging eyes require that I zoom in on it). But...damn, the physical book is magnificent. It is right up there with Red and Pleasant Land as "one of the prettiest RPG books I have ever seen." The hardcover is $50. The PDF is a fucking steal at $5. And in this case, I'm recommending you spend the extra $45 for the physical book--but I'm kind of a fetishist when it comes to books, so cum grano salis and all.

Should you buy Maze of the Blue Medusa? Yes. If you like pretty books, this is a hell of a lot of pretty book for fifty bucks, and if you don't, five bucks is less than two cents a room.

So, to summarize: The Cursed Chateau left me lukewarm, but if you want to run a straight-up haunted house scenario, it's quite well-done. England Upturn'd is an insane, and delightful, picture of a 1642 that wasn't quite. Finally, The Maze Of The Blue Medusa is one of the prettiest RPG books you will ever see, and if an incredibly socially-complex madhouse megadungeon appeals to you, or if you collect beautiful books, you need a copy.

comments

Fit The Third

Sat, 09 May 2015 23:17:36 GMT

This session began with the characters at the bottom of the Rabbit
Hole. In the middle distance, a small glass table. They trudged over
there to find, as expected, a tiny gold key, a glass bottle with a DRINK
ME label, a small door behind a curtain, and a tiny glass box with an
even tinier EAT ME cake.

Jana smelled that Melanie had gone -- here we "arbitrarily" picked an
orientation, which means I just did my Wonderland-As-Manhattan thing --
north, and they followed the scent. They lost the scent somewhere in
the woods, but Jana was able to use regular old Tracking to find hiking
boot prints. They followed those up to a clearing where they saw a few
houses with anthropomorphic playing cards doing gardening stuff out
front, and a palace.

They approached one of the cards--the Ten of Spades--who immediately
prostrated himself before the party. A little questioning revealed that
Melanie was a guest of the King, in the castle. So they went there and
found the way blocked by a scorpion-man guard. Theodore fast-talked him
into announcing him and his retinue, and they were shown into the
castle.

The King and Queen were on their thrones. The King looked pretty much
like Rudy Ray Moore in _Dolemite_, and the queen looked like Beyonce at
the Met. Although suspicious, the King admitted that Silverman was his
guest and that if she wanted to meet the party (since Venkman knew her),
she was free to do so; he dispatched a Snake-footman to inquire. The
Queen was eyeing Theodore appreciatively.

Melanie showed up, confirmed that she knew Venkman, and asked the King
for a little privacy, which he graciously granted; so the party repaired
to a circular curtained booth in a little alcove and got the infodump
from Melanie. She seemed healthy and not at all worried that she was
going insane; she reported that things had gotten a lot better for her
when she reached Wonderland and realized that she knew her way around
pretty well and that if it was a hallucination, at least it was a
detailed and consistent one. And now that Professor Venkman and his
friends were here, then it seemed that she wasn't even alone. She did
want to go home, and when offered Snowdrop, seemed ready to run away to
find a mirror to duck into Looking-Glass Land and then shake the kitten,
to get herself home. Theodore persuaded her out of this and she agreed
to travel with the party, if she got to hold the kitten once they were
in Looking-Glass World, and maybe they'd all get home. Melanie had been
through a mirror once, when she sneaked into the Diamond Palace. She'd
emerged in a scary dark wood, hadn't explored much, and had come back
through the mirror.

Someone wondered where the Aces were, which Melanie realized she'd never
thought to ask.

The party experimented with the idea that the world was a consensual
dream, and everyone thought of _The Hobbit_ really hard, and the door to
Bag End (with a slightly weathered G-Rune) appeared. They peeked in,
and it did appear to be an empty Bag End. The Cheshire Cat, who had
been following them for some time, was spotted, and after some
conversation (in which he said, among other things, that the Footmen
were as native as he was) he went in to explore Bag End.

The Knave of Spades (picture a very young Billy Dee Williams) made sure
that he had invited Jana to the Ball that evening, and asked the King
and Queen to provide dress clothing for the party; however they would
have to procure their own hats, and so it was off to find the Mad
Hatter. Venkman closed the door to Bag End, but the Cat scampered out
just before it swung to.

They traipsed through the woods, skirted the clearing with the Heart
Palace--noticing as they did that it was right next to no-shit-Grand
Central Station--and down a path where they met the Caterpillar.
Venkman and Luz both got super-high, and they had an irritating
conversation with the Caterpillar that resulted in him telling them
where to find the Hatter, that Grand Central Station was the Court, and
that one side makes you larger (maybe then Theodore would fit his name),
and one side makes you smaller. They took some mushroom bits and
continued on their way.

The Mad Tea Party was as described, but on discovering that they were
there for business, the Hatter led them through the woods to his shop,
and outfitted them with appropriate headgear: Luz got a Scribe's Hat
(halfway between a chef's hat and a mortarboard), Venkman got a Huggy
Bear hat in red, Theodore got a spectacular top hat, and Jana received a
plague doctor's mask with steampunk goggles. Theodore noticed that,
oddly, there were no mirrors in the shop. That was, the Hatter
explained, because the inhabitants of Wonderland didn't want Those
People, from The Other Side Of The Mirror, coming to Wonderland.

The Hatter did not appear particularly Mad, and under questioning
revealed that Carroll had indeed visited several times ... some time ago
(his watch hasn't run right since it got butter in the works and no one
was able to fix it). He thought that if the party were supposed to be
in Wonderland they'd have a badge of authority, which Carroll had had,
but he didn't know if it really belonged to him. Also, the Footmen were
as native as he himself, and that Carroll used to stay at the White
Rabbit's house -- which happened to be more or less on the way back to
the Spade Palace. More outside intruders had been coming to Wonderland,
and he was worried that this meant that the Red King was going to wake
up, or something. At any rate, it was going to be bad. The Queen of
Hearts had been getting steadily more paranoid as the traffic increased,
and it seemed like things were falling apart and he didn't know if
they'd last as long as they needed to. The Cheshire Cat confirmed. The
New York from which the players came was clearly referred to as
Upstairs, and there was a Downstairs, access to which had something to
do with the Aces, which were, the Cat and Hatter said, both monstrous
and not. There was also a way to get Downstairs in the Court, but it
was pretty much controlled by the Hearts.

The party walked a little while and found the White Rabbit's house. The
Rabbit's footperson Mary Ann (a Lion-woman) opened the door and promptly
fainted. The Rabbit came downstairs, revived her with sal volatile
(after Luz's attempt to render first aid got him nothing more than an
"unhand my chambermaid, sir!" from the Rabbit), and interrogation
commenced. The Rabbit demanded to see the Party's Badge, and Theodore
bluffed and charmed his way into convincing the Rabbit that the badge
was rightfully the party's and they needed it back. After some
rummaging and hemming and hawing, the Rabbit surrendered it, and Jana
*finally* understood that the Rabbit and Woody Allen were one and the
same (she'd been blowing Smell rolls right and left).

The Badge had belonged to Reverend Dodgson. He hadn't come around in a
long time, and had left it in his nightstand. The Rabbit had been using
it to lead an exciting double life by going Upstairs and enjoying the
amenities of New York. The White Rabbit was quite sad that he couldn't
have his Upstairs persona anymore, but being a nervous and neurotic
sort, he was quite willing to agree that things had been getting worse,
that the Red King was in some kind of trouble, and that the Queen would
have him executed if anyone ever found out any of this, and maybe it was
better if the party had it and could fix things only Please Don't Kill
Us All.

The Badge looked like an MI-6 Warrant Card to Theodore, and like a DOD
badge with scary endorsements to everyone else. The Rabbit said it had
a big red Zero on it when he looked at it, and he said he could get up
to Weird New York, and then Real New York, by saying "Ed" and pointing
up or down. He had never tried to use it to go farther Downstairs,
though. He had been to Looking-Glass Land and found it terrifying, so
he returned. He also said there were multiple Weird New Yorks. There
was the one they'd been through, there was a futuristic rocket-shippy
one, and there was a hot sandy mostly empty one, and he let slip that
Weird New York was some kind of testing grounds. Everyone was pretty
weirded out by the idea that somehow Wonderland and Looking-Glass Land
were supporting our reality and a good deal of Sanity was lost.

The Rabbit also confirms that the various Sumerian-ish animal-men are
"as native as I am." When asked how long he's been in Wonderland, he
says "since the beginning."

Eventually The Rabbit also revealed that he possessed a Looking-Glass,
and the party worked out a way that he could turn it to the wall but
they could drop twigs through it to signify that he needed to rotate it
to step through into his closet. The party here abandoned their plan to
go to The Ball and decided to just hop through the mirror. So they went
through into Looking-Glass Land, and Luz used the knowledge of the Badge
to tell him that they were in KN3. The party reasoned that if the
pieces were in their original places the king should be at K1, and so
they set off through the woods. KB2 was a Wood Where Things Have No
Names, which was creepy and sanity-batterering.

Eventually they came to the Garden of Live Flowers in front of
Looking-Glass House, and through experimentation realized that walking
backwards would get you to the door. They went in, floated up to the
study, and found out that yes indeed the mirror was traversable.

On the other side, they had their cellphones and guns again, but not
their wonderful hats. It was November 22, 2014 (as it should have
been). Venkman tried some reality-bending experiments with inconclusive
results, although Theodore, who had the Badge, reported that it heated
up when he did so. They called The Bureau after ascertaining that they
were on the outskirts of Oxford, and were instructed to go to a local
pub and wait for a man with a pink carnation, who arrived and whisked
them back to London.

There they were politely but firmly detained, congratulated for finding
Melanie Silverman, and debriefed at length. They did not mention the
badge. The Director, one David Carruthers, quickly realized he needed
experts, and on the second day, Will Brooker came and asked some very
pointed questions about the Caterpillar; he did not seem as surprised as
one might think, given the story. Carruthers said that a team had been
sent round to the house with the mirror, and that as far as they were
able to ascertain -- which should have been quite far indeed -- it was a
perfectly ordinary mirror.

Melanie is offered the choice between recruitement or a lifetime of
tranquilizers and secure confinement, and the Bureau has another junior
agent; she will not, however, be accompanying our heroes any further.

On the third day, the ancient scholar -- known to and by both Luz and
Venkman -- Morton Cohen (Professor Emeritus, CUNY) arrived for a more
thorough debrief. This turned into a deputizing: congratulations, the
party is now full-time on the Bureau's payroll, and they are its eyes
and hands on the ground in Wonderland and Looking-Glass Land. Too bad,
Cohen says, that they hadn't done this a decade earlier, because Martin
was much better at this than Cohen ever has been, but hey, you work with
what you've got. Cohen agrees that the Red King waking, or something
else trying to Dream in his place, would be very bad. Bang!
out-like-a-light bad? New York gets all gross and 1970s bad? Ancient
Sumerian Blood Gods awaken bad? Who knows? Let's not find out!

From him they arrive at more or less the conclusion that the Alice books
are mostly nonfiction, and that the natives are probably right that
Downstairs is very important. If they were to find the Red King they'd
probably find what Alice found: an unimpressive sleeping guy. Something
is trying to mess with the Red King's Dream, but it's unclear to
everyone which way the Ontological Onion goes: are they going deeper in
or farther out when going Downstairs? Which way is "realer" ? When
Venkman and Luz start talking about Reality Generators somewhere Far
Downstairs that are responsible for keeping everything going, Cohen
rather archly reminds them that we used to call that "God."

If there is another Dreamer, Cohen thinks, it's probably not going to be
someone in Looking-Glass Land -- although Alice came back by shaking the
Red Queen, who was the black kitten, so maybe she was dreaming Alice's
story, but not *everything*...but really, he doesn't have much of an
idea. Cohen seems shaken by meeting Snowdrop, but reminds everyone,
"One thing was certain, that the _white_ kitten had nothing to do with
it -- it was the black kitten's fault entirely."

The party experiments (after getting the Bureau to ensure that the house
in Oxfordshire is and will remain empty) and discovers that the mirror
works for them and that the Badge heats up when they go through; they
pull a flower back from the other side, and the corresponding one on
this side crumbles to nothingness.

A week of rest, relaxation, and therapy ensues during which everyone can
get Sanity points back, go shopping for out-for-a-stroll
English-toffs-in-the-country clothes, and check for skill improvement.
A black-powder gun and a hand crossbow are purchased; a pocket Sumerian
guide and a miniature edition of _The Annotated Alice_ are also
acquired. Luz studies some Sumerian and memorizes some glyphs and verbs
that he thinks might help (since, as Luz finally realizes, "Ed" is
Sumerian for "Ascend" or "Descend").

On December 1, 2014 they again assemble in front of the mirror in the
house in Oxfordshire in order to continue their mission to determine
what's wrong with the Red King's Dream and try and set things right.

End of session.

================

So that's the session recap.

The players took a much more direct route through Wonderland than I
expected. No one messed with the size-changing goodies, and they
haven't yet had to infiltrate a castle to get to the Downstairs. (They
still may; getting Downstairs in Looking-Glass Land could prove much
more daunting than just getting through a Palace or the Court in
Wonderland.)

I had no idea why Woody Allen was the White Rabbit until the Badge came
along. I knew there was going to be some sort of access token at some
point that enabled manipulation of at least some of the layers of the
Onion, and I knew that Woody Allen was the Rabbit, but it wasn't until
the players arrived at his house looking for the Badge that it all
crystallized and I realized that the White Rabbit had kept
Rev. Dodgson's Badge and had been abusing it ever since. I should learn
to trust my subconscious more. At least when writing RPGs, it knows
what it is doing.

I need to feed it whisky, fairy tales, and recreational mathematics in
the couple months I have before I run another session, so *it* knows
what's going on Downstairs, even if I don't.

comments

Three Dreamlands

Fri, 13 Mar 2015 20:32:28 GMT

Three Dreamlands: The Sense of the Sleight-Of-Hand Man by Dennis
Detwiler, Dreamhounds of Paris and The Book of Ants by Robin D. Laws
with Ken Hite and Steve Dempsey, and A Red & Pleasant Land by Zak S.

I recently read these three-or-four books, which are all RPG books
about, in some sense, Dreamlands; two (or three; whether you choose to
consider The Book of Ants as separate from Dreamhounds of Paris is
to some degree a matter of personal choice; I choose to see the pair as
a single work) of them quite explicitly so, and the third one by
implication. In looking at them, I'm also going to drag in some of the
other RPG books riffing on Lewis Carroll's work.

The Sense of the Sleight-of-Hand Man is far and away the most
traditional of these three works. This was a Kickstarter-funded project
that was initially published in 2013; somehow it had evaded my notice
until recently. It is intended for use with Call of Cthulhu 6th
Edition, but it would be easy to make it work with any other CoC
version, or indeed any Lovecraftian RPG. It would be a little harder to
do outside of a straight-up Lovecraftian game, since it assumes a pretty
standard Call of Cthulhu cosmology and a Dreamlands not very different
from what you get in The Dream-Quest Of Unknown Kadath.

Its frame story, quickly dispensed with, is presented as 1920s Call of
Cthulhu but could trivially be moved to another environment. All the
characters are addicts who have fallen far behind on their payments to
their dealer; in the standard frame it is opium he deals, but one could
easily set it in 1970s Detroit with heroin, or really, almost any place
or time where someone sells addictive intoxicants to someone else, which
should leave plenty of latitude. The kingpin dealer has the PCs all
brought to his lair by his goons, and insists that they share a pipe.
Unbeknownst to them, they are not merely to be murdered as an example to
his other customers regarding the advisability of paying ones'
debts--they are given a drug which is supposed to gradually erase them
from everyday reality and shift them into the Dreamlands. Unbeknownst
to Mr. Lao, the drug dealer, the drug he is providing is tainted, and
disintegrates their bodies while propelling their souls into the nearest
empty vessels in the Dreamlands. The conceit behind this is that
there is an analog of Mr. Lao and the opium trade in the Dreamlands.
The Men of Leng supply dreamers to the moonbeasts, who in turn supply
them with the fabulously valuable Blood Gems.

All this is well and good, but if your players don't like railroads--and
who does?--they are likely to get their characters killed in the real
world before they ever get transported to the Dreamlands, and even if
they go along with the train, they're likely to already be sullen and
resentful even before the next part. And if they make it there, they're
in for a further shock: the bodies they wake up in are radically
different.

The adventure assumes you will be starting the game with brand-new
characters. To be sure, it'd be an extremely heavy-handed narrative
intervention if continuing characters within a larger CoC campaign were
all to become addicted to opium and then have their forms disintegrated
halfway through the first session of this new arc. However, since the
characters will spend their whole lives, effectively, in the Dreamlands,
you will likely get players who spent their time and character points
creating a backstory and set of skills for someone like Frank, the
down-on-his-luck auto mechanic with a lucky tattoo and tertiary syphilis
acquired in Montmartre, with piloting skills, familiarity with an M1
Carbine, and PTSD from the Great War, who now finds that he's a small
Asian woman, and there's nothing more technologically advanced than a
sword in the whole world.

I know that if I were on the outside of the screen that I'd be pretty
peeved at having just put in a bunch of effort for character creation
only to have all pretense of narrative agency wrested away, and then to
have my character given a new, probably race-and-or-gender-swapped body,
with a bunch of skills completely inapplicable to the new setting.

I don't know how you'd fix this without telling the players what you're
going to do to them, which would destroy a lot of the impact. It
strikes me that this is the sort of game you can only play within groups
that have evolved a lot of at-the-table trust--and if you don't do this
well, you may erode a lot of that earned trust. Caveat emptor.

But anyway, assuming that you eventually do get the characters to the
Dreamlands, then the game widens out a lot. It's pretty much assumed
that the characters' motive is to get back to the real world New York,
although it's not clear to me that going back to a grim, hardscrabble
existence of mounting debt and ever-deepening addiction is such a great
idea.

Once they awaken in the Dreamlands, they meet the wretched Collector,
who seems like a minor Peter Lorre role. He can provide some impetus by
telling them that if they do not find a way back home, their
dream-selves will sicken and die.

For a book that wants to be a sandbox, The Sense of the Sleight-Of-Hand
Man reads much more like a choose-your-own adventure book. For
instance, in the city of Sarkomand, where the characters awaken, they
have three choices:
* Try to find the exit to the waking world the Collector told them
about by taking the greased chute to the Underworld. Turn to
Chapter 7, p. 72.
* Try to steal a moon-beast ship from the harbor. Turn to Chapter 5,
p. 47.
* Try to march overland to Inquanok. Turn to Chapter 6, p. 58.
* If you just hang out in Sarkomand, you are eaten by a wamp or a
voomith or something. The End.

The book's title is the title of a Wallace Stevens poem. Each chapter
is introduced with a little quotation from Stevens. Stevens, of course,
is not part of the Weird Fiction tradition. It is very refreshing to
get little snippets of usually-quite-good poems rather than the same old
same old Clark Ashton Smith and Robert E. Howard and To Show That We're
Hip, Thomas Ligotti, or To Show That We're Ironically Hip, Clive
Barker.

Fortunately things get somewhat better from here. The trip through the
Underworld (should the party take it), under the supervision of their
ghoul guide Madaeker is extremely railroady, but the other two options
less so. Eventually, perhaps, the characters will find themselves in
Ilek-Vlad trying to determine what's wrong with Randolph Carter (itself
a rather-nicely-done parallel to the addiction that landed themselves in
this predicament in the first place) and to defeat his nemesis (or at
least, rouse him or some other major Dreamlands power to defeat same).

There are some delightful side-quests, such as the Oracle of the Western
Machine accessible from Inquanok, or indeed the whole Lhosk political
plot, as well as some fun smaller ones (including a nice Sarnath bit).
The midgame, with the characters wandering across the Dreamlands, is
where this book is at its best. It presents itself as, basically, a
bunch of location-centric adventure hooks with a few fleshed out
set-pieces, and they're generally well done, and quite varied. The
Oracle of the Western Machine comes across as almost Numeneraesque,
while The Nameless Rock comes across as ... well, it's not quite Robert
E. Howard, but imagine the better sort of Lin Carter and you've got the
idea.

Alas, after having saved Randolph Carter and Ilek-Vlad, the dreamers'
putative quest--to return home to the waking world--may seem a little
lackluster. Should they manage it and return to New York to defeat the
villanous Mr. Lao, their triumph offers little catharsis. The fruition
of the bargain Madaeker may have extracted from them in the Underworld
is much more interesting. This is, of course, the natural consequence
of the dream narrative being much more compelling than the frame story.

Still, as Dreamlands published adventures go, this is a damn good one.
It doesn't really break the mold of classic Call of Cthulhu, but if
you were looking for a solid large campaign, the size of Horror on the
Orient Express (I originally wrote this before the new Horror showed
up, borne to my doorstep on the backs of six sweating Venetians, pallid
of skin and wild of eye; let's amend that to the size of the first
edition of Horror on the Orient Express) or Beyond the Mountains of
Madness but with the Dreamlands as the focus, you really couldn't do
better.

It's published by Arc Dream press. It's clearly laid-out, and well
copy-edited. I found only a few typographical errors. There's not a
lot of reason to buy the print version: it's completely adequate, the
same quality you'd expect from a Lulu book, for instance, but nothing to
write home about. It's just a bit larger in every dimension than the
Call of Cthulhu 5th Edition paperback. An ungenerous reviewer might
point out that if the margins were less huge it would have fit into many
fewer pages and made a less weighty, and cheaper, tome. The art is also
by Detwiler and is unspectacular, but competent. My recommendation
would be to stick with the PDF.

The second of the Dreamlands adventures under the microscope is Robin
Laws', Ken Hite's, and Steve Dempsey's Dreamhounds of Paris and its
companion volume The Book Of Ants. They are nominally for Trail of
Cthulhu, but as with most ToC works, it wouldn't be too hard to
translate it into another gaming system.

This game is evidently the fruit of a whole lot of research Robin Laws
did into the Surrealists. The players are expected to take the roles of
Surrealists (historical or fictional) in 1920s Paris, and to care about
the machinations of Andre Breton and his ilk as they guide the movement
through the interwar period.

But of course that's not really what's going on. Maybe. The basic
conceit of the work goes something like this: Giorgio de Chirico, having
looked at a lot of Bocklin, finds his way to the Dreamlands in 1909.
Cocteau follows in 1913, and his children's book Le Potomak is a
Mythos tome. Dada does its thing, Max Ernst starts Dreaming, all the
Surrealists figure out how to get to the Dreamlands. They start shaping
it. The Dreamlands get weirder and nastier and then start to bleed back
into the waking world. Dali shows up and steals the Surrealist
movement. World War II destroys Europe. The End.

One of the things Dreamhounds tries to do is explain some of the
(historical) bizarre behavior of the Surrealists by reference to their
struggles within the Domains du Reve. Not to worry, an awful lot is
also still down to their politics and their just-plain-batshitness.

This thing is engaging (especially if, like me, you didn't know much
about the specifics of Surrealism beforehand) and quite fun if, like me,
you keep doing Google searches on the various artists mentioned as you
read it. But that's the thing. It's fun to read, and it's a good
introduction to Surrealism, but I have a really difficult time imagining
how you'd play it.

For starters, you'd need to have a group willing to devote months or
years to playing Surrealists in Paris. Maybe, maybe if I were in
college and all my friends were in the art department or at least taking
a bunch of art classes, I could see that happening. These days? Not
likely. Next, you and they will all need to be down with the idea that
the investigators are, most likely, going to be historical figures, and
that the game will therefore constrain their waking world actions at
certain points (there's also a pretty decent sidebar on how you can
arrange for the dream-Bataille, for instance, to escape to the real
world and take over should Georges Bataille the PC succumb to a terribly
addled egg). And you'd have to be willing to force not just the
real-world, but to some extent the whole Dreamlands narrative arc as
well, onto your players.

I haven't even started to talk about The Book Of Ants, which is a view
of the history of Surrealism and its expression in the Dreamlands, from
the point of view of a minor and forgotten Surrealist, one Henri Salem.
This gives a much more visceral picture of the mutation the Dreamlands
undergo than Dreamhounds itself did. As a general rule, I hate game
fiction. So it's high praise, coming from me, that it's great fun to
read. Really, the best part of the combined work is the sudden horror
when Salem realizes that the cod-medievalism of the Dreamlands has been
irrevocably eroded: he discovers that the ninth month of the dream-year
is no longer "Basalt" but "Machinegun."

That's where this piece shines. It's a weird allegorical
reinterpretation of RPGing itself, I think. Maybe capitalism in
general. Hear me out. My thesis goes something like this: Gygax and
Arneson gave us a world where, sure, the trade dress was Late Middle
Ages France Without The Cholera, but the stories? Westerns. Don't let
the longbows fool you: D&D is about How The West Was Won.

Only the Indians were now orcs and hobgoblins and shit, and so we didn't
have to feel the least bit bad about killing them, because it's not like
they were people, right?

Only then, later on--maybe much later on--we said, hey, what? Dude,
that's...a little creepy. And some people went on to do games where
Well Obviously It's The People Who Are The Real Monsters. The thing is,
it's not much fun to kill monsters and take their stuff if you have to
feel guilty about it. Self-aware murderhoboing is uncomfortably close
to straight-up psychopathy.

So: the Dreamlands. HPL's cod-medievalism. Feudalism where you're sure
you're one of the landed gentry, and not a feces-besmeared peasant, and
where the feces and the cholera are discreetly offstage. And, of
course, this follows in a loooooooong tradition of romanticization of,
well, feudalism. Of the Ancien Regime.

Then you've got the Surrealists. Who are, not to put too fine a point
on it, all like "Hey, this Established Social Order sucks. Seriously,
guys, can't you see that it blows goats? It's completely reinforcing
the status quo at the expense of, well, almost everyone except the
very richest motherfuckers."

(Oh, by the way, if you've read this far, you can probably give
Piketty's Capitalism In The Twenty-First Century a miss, because it's
pretty much what I'm saying right now, only with more data and fewer
swears.)

So, you know, it's hard not to sympathize with the Surrealists, or for
those who'd challenge the established social order, because they're
right, it does suck. But tearing down is the easy part. Trying to
build a New World Order? Turns out that not only does it usually suck
just as much, but it sucks in most of the same ways, only the New 1%
are a (maybe) different group of motherfuckers.

So, yeah. That critique applies to Surrealist falling-out-of-love with
Stalinism, but of course it also applies to our wanting to play Not D&D
but always, somehow, coming back to it. And to Capitalism In The
Twenty-First Century (the thing not the book), for that matter. Maybe
Human Endeavor In General.

Anyway, coming back from that tangent: Dreamhounds and The Book Of
Ants are fun to read. I don't know how the hell you'd ever use them at
your table. If you have some disposable cash and you feel like learning
more about the Surrealists while reading some social critique dressed up
as history dressed up as an RPG (and hey, I thought Qelong was one of
the best RPG books of the decade, so, you know, I'm not being dismissive
here), then you should totally buy this. Or buy it if you just like
Surrealism and want to inflict nightmare-scapes out of Dali or Bunuel or
Max Ernst or Magritte or ... on your players.

I do have physical copies of these. They're...nice, in modern
high-end-but-not-Paizo-or-WotC ways. If you own any other Pelgrane
Press books, you know what Dreamhounds looks like. The Book Of Ants
is smaller, and paperback, but both seem solidly bound. The quality of
the editing is good. The art is all right; the Hugenin cover on
Dreamhounds isn't his best work, but it's certainly serviceable.
Really, though, you're going to remember the art as the Surrealist
things you looked up while reading it, and that's mighty fine. Or at
least, if you don't like Surrealism, there's no real reason for you to
buy this book, so you probably will remember the art as having been
mighty fine, if slightly creepily obsessed with rapey Pianotaurs.
Again, though, there's not a compelling reason to buy a physical copy
rather than the PDF of either of these.

Finally, we get to Red and Pleasant Land. This is Zak S.'s take on
Alice. I absolutely cannot review this in any way objectively. One
of the very few records I had when growing up was the boxed set of Cyril
Pritchard reading the two Alice books, and so for many years I knew,
basically, the entire text of the two Alice books word-for-word by
heart--and I bet if you quote me a bit I can recite along for a while,
even now. I may be the only person in the world who can recite
"Jabberwocky" in less than thirty seconds, and if you buy me a beer I
will do so for you. So: despite the fact that, by modern standards,
Carroll was a creepy, creepy man, and possibly a pedophile, and despite
the fact that, sure, he embodied a lot of What Was Wrong With The
Victorians, I love my Alice.

And then there's the fact that Zak also did Pictures Showing What
Happens On Each Page Of Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, which,
well, if I were stuck on a desert island with one book, Gravity's
Rainbow would obviously be that book. You thought, based on the last
paragraph, I was a drooling Carroll fanboy? It's nothing to my
Pynchon-fanboy-ness. The only other person I'm close to that obsessive
about is Tom Waits. Who, yes, also did an interpretation of Alice.

Zak's book made me realize that, at least at one point, he (meaning Zak,
not Tom Waits) must have been almost as scarily into Gravity's Rainbow
as I am.

So: there was no way I was going to not like this book.

Of course I got a physical version as well. And, holy shit, Raggi
knocked it so far out of the fucking park you can't even see the stadium
anymore. Seriously. He nailed everything about this. You know those
late-Victorian-through-about-1920 fairy tale books your local library
had when you were a kid? This is those. It's the right size. It's the
right weight. The paper is not glossy, and it's medium-weight, and it's
cream-colored, not white. And the thing smells right. It smells like
a fairy-tale book. Seriously, if you don't want to take your pants off
and rub up against this book, you're probably a lot better adjusted than
I am.

Jez Gordon, whom you may know from Secret Santicore or any of the other
completely awesome stuff he's done in the OSR, did some of the layout
and maps, but this is mostly a Zak piece.

The closest I can come to a summary is:

This is The Two Alice Books If You'd Taken A Bunch Of Acid And Also
Watched A Bunch Of Shitty Italian Horror Vampire Films.

Nominally it's set somewhere in the Transylvania of Raggi's Thirty
Years' War Lamentations Of The Flame Princess setting, but...seriously,
it's pretty much the Dreamlands. It says it's for LotFP but, c'mon, you
can adapt it for anything D&Dish. Or CoCish. Or Risus. Or, y'know,
whatever.

This one is very up-front about how you can use it: drop it into your
campaign whole, steal specific mechanical bits of it, use it as general
inspiration, or the seldom-stated #4, which is very endearing: "Some
animals will swallow almost anything whole and some are very small. You
can use this book to kill them— by choking them with it or dropping it
on them, respectively."

The Alice character class (or, if you're going the whole Gravity's
Rainbow route, the Fool character class) is a charming touch; an
underpowered rogue backed by high-entropy serendipity. If your campaign
has one of these, you know it, and it's fun to be able to give that play
style (which usually meshes pretty well with player personality) some
mechanical support.

The landscape of Voivodja is principally a war zone between the houses
of the Red King and the Heart Queen, who might as well be Dracula and
Elizabeth Bathory, if you'd been eating a lot of psilocybin. But add to
those the (nice tip of the ten-shilling-and-sixpence hat to David Foster
Wallace there) Pale King and the Colorless Queen, who are trying to take
advantage of the realms' weakened states to stake their own claims.
This can play out, if you want it to, as a high-as-fuck version of the
Thirty Year's War, much like the rest of the LotFP setting but with more
whimsy amid the arterial gouts and spilled viscera. Only, like Qelong,
it's a horrible war where everyone's been summoning all manner of
hideous nightmare creatures from the multifarious hells for years and
years and years, and it's all like the bridge scene in Apocalypse Now.
Oh, and every mirror takes you from The War Side to The Quiet Side,
which is so quiet that it drives you mad in a matter of a very few
minutes.

There are a bunch of political alliances here, none of which are going
to make any sense to the players--I'm not sure they make sense
period--and then the two main castles are described. So, imagine Tegel
Manor. Now take some DMT, and add, obviously, Alice In Wonderland and
vampires. What comes out the other end is a pair of crazy, crazy,
super-lethal funhouse bizzaro dungeons. Then there are three
mini-locations, one of which, "Your Worst Halves," seems to have crawled
straight out of Crystal Castles, although I can't find Bentley Bear
anywhere.

After that there are a few non-R&PL-specific bits: there's a mass combat
system which looks like it's not a bad way to simulate the PCs' part in
a big battle, and a delightfully quick-and-dirty mounted combat system.
There are the usual selection of entertaining random-roll and die-drop
tables you'd expect from a Zak S. work.

I can't even guess about the utility of this book. I've already stolen
the Alice class for the Julian Jaynes-Cthulhu-Alice-JAGS Wonderland-The
Madness Dossiers mashup I'm doing, and I think I'm going to drop a
(perhaps somewhat nerfed) version of at least one of the castles into
the appropriate place in that mashup.

There have been at least two prior attempts to make the Alice stories
into tabletop RPGs. Likely there have been more, but these are the two
I know: Gygax did the pair as Castle Greyhawk sub-levels, published as
EX1 and 2. They're pretty leaden, frankly, in the mold of "let's make
all the animals and people in the stories angry things with a whole lot
of hit points!"

Much better than the EX series is Marco Chacon's JAGS: Wonderland, which
manages to go from author-slightly-creepily-working-through-some-of-his-
issues-with-mental-illness-and-its-treatment-in-21st-century-America to
something really cosmically weird in not many pages at all. It's
nowhere near as beautiful as R&PL, and it's clearly a lot more directed
(indeed, railroady), but it's well worth reading as a
compare-and-contrast. It's also horror, but of a very different stripe.
It's available free online, and it's definitely worth the price (its
companion, The Book of Knots, is less striking, but it's also free and
worth reading if you liked the first one).

In my opinion, you should buy at least one physical copy of Red and
Pleasant Land. This is, as far as I'm concerned, now the high-water
mark of RPG publishing. Not just small-press RPG publishing, but RPG
publishing, period. The production values on this little book are
ridiculously high. As with Vornheim, I'm pretty sure that if you don't
want to keep the book, there will be plenty of opportunities for later
resale.

Zak S.'s Alice art can stand beside Ralph Steadman and Mervyn Peake's
interpretations, and that's no small praise. Sure, it's not Tenniel,
but nothing is or ever will be. In fact, Steadman and Peake also tried
their hands at Treasure Island. Might I suggest ...?

As to whether you'll use this: if you like Zak's work, or LotFP
generally, then, yeah, you should get a copy; you will certainly find
something worth stealing. If you like playing on the edge between
whimsical and horrific, this is probably in your sweet spot too. If
you're into the splattery bits of LotFP, well, there's some pretty
gruesome description in here, but the art is not a Cannibal Corpse album
cover. I keep finding little bits in the book that make me go "oh,
that's neat"--for instance, the Colorless Rooks. I'm not going to
plug this Wonderland whole into any of my games, but bits and pieces of
it will certainly show up for years and years to come.

To summarize: get Sense of the Sleight-of-Hand Man if you want a big
straight-up Lovecraftian Dreamlands game. Get The Book Of
Ants/Dreamhounds of Paris if you like Surrealism and want to play with
some political and sociological themes in the Paris of the 1920s and
1930s. You won't be missing much if you get either of these in digital
form only. Get Red and Pleasant Land if you like either Lewis Carroll
or LotFP, and aren't completely dead inside. Get it in hardcopy as well
as digital.

comments

Fiasco Playset

Wed, 30 Jul 2014 01:23:18 GMT

"Elsinore" is now up, with original artwork by the inestimable S. John Ross!

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BzKIVhv2dkRYaDkyaDBzaThqaU0/edit?usp=sharing

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Murder on the Flugelschwein Zwei

Sun, 02 Feb 2014 01:00:48 GMT

Today was one of the most fun and most gonzo sessions I have had the
pleasure of running.

A new player joined the Vornheim group today. Ronak is playing Rig the
Fighter (Ronak has previously played in the Bookhounds of London and
Grace Under Pressure one-shots).

Nas (Image), Palalladin (usually Amy, played today by Alex because Amy
was ill), Balin (BC), and Ber (Alex) returned to Gaxen Kane from the
Lost City. They had dealt a significant setback to the Temple of Zargon
and freed many of its prisoners from the cathedral in the Lost
City--although they had not gone after Zargon itself, and they had not
entirely broken the cult's power. Nevertheless, they had unified the
factions of the Lost City and Ber had received a token showing her to be
a friend of the League of Tumultuous Erudition.

They returned to Gaxen Kane and Lord Chalk's (Harry to his friends)
townhouse. Nas immediately inquired after Hrezwina and was told that
she had become a successful entrepreneur and could be found at her
coffeehouse. Ah, yes, coffee. In the few short weeks since the party
had left, full-on coffee mania had struck Gaxen Kane. Harry described
it (and gave the party samples) as "almost exactly the opposite of
whiskey, but somehow equally delightful" The party immediately headed to
Hrezwina's Coffeehouse to discover the following:

As previously discussed, Goblin women become pregnant through reading
saucy literature. Hrezwina had been working--she was a little vague on
this point, but I think we can read between the lines--as a specialty
act in a fancy house, where many of the girls had (well-founded) fear of
pregnancy. And there she made a fascinating discovery. If, immediately
after exposure to spicy wordplay, a goblin woman reads something
excruciatingly boring, it is a sovereign prophylactic against
pregnancy.

Thus the girls began reading the shipping reports in between customers,
and plying their customers for details of their commercial lives; their
clientele were of course flattered by the attention paid to their
humdrum lives, and the girls...well, the girls suddenly had a
comprehensive, holistic view of trade in Gaxen Kane. This enabled them
to make some very smart investments which allowed them to rent a
building in the financial district. One of the rising stars was of
course coffee, and now Hrezwina is the proprietress of Gaxen Kane's very
first coffeehouse, where pretty girls (goblins, other than Hrezwina)
serve hot coffee to goblins of distinction, sit on their knees, and
offer an appealing social space (VIP booths with privacy curtains are
upstairs) for them to pursue their financial machinations.

Hrezwina was overjoyed to see Nas. She also had a job for the party,
should they wish to accept in. In exchange for a share (current value
1000gp) in her venture for each of them, she wants the party to secure a
reliable source of coffee for her. As far as she knows it comes from
one place, and one place only: the goblin colony at Tanaroa, on an
island far, far to the south. She currently pays about 50 gp per 50-lb
bag, delivered. She goes through about 50 bags a month. But prices are
going up steeply, because she now has competition and there are only
about 120 bags per month arriving at Gaxen Kane. So her aims are at
least threefold: 1) ensure a steady supply of coffee for her, 2) reduce
her cost by establishing a reliable supply chain, and 3) choke out her
competition, if possible.

Tanaroa is about a month's journey away by usual methods: a long
overland trip through bandit-infested wastes, to a seaport somewhere,
and then a medium-length ocean voyage to the island. But there's also
the every-other-day Hog Zepplin service. For a mere 100 gp each,
passengers can travel in style and luxury aboard an 80-hog zeppelin to
Tanaroa.

After some scraping together party funds, and Nas batting his eyelashes
until Hrezwina grudgingly gave him a pair of earrings to sell, the party
was able to afford the zeppelin. No one seemed to mind the sudden shift
from the reign of George IV to George V.

In the little while before the flight departed, Nas enjoyed Hrezwina's
charms, while Ber found that the League of Tumultuous Erudition had word
of cat-people, monkey-people, and spider-mages on the island, and were
willing to pay good money for anthropological surveys, and excellent
money for a spider-mage's spellbook if such a thing existed.

The zeppelin carries twelve paying guests, an indeterminate number of
crew, official mail and extremely expensive couriered private mail, and
a few hyper-luxury goods. It is called the _Flugelschwein Zwei_, and is
captained by the unbearably Teutonic monocled Captain Dolf Helmenspeik;
the chief engineer and head pig-slopper is Angus McTavish.

Our heroes met at the appointed time, were loaded by means of tethered
hog-balloons onto the zeppelin, and met the other passengers, all
goblins of wealth and taste. I will number them here for reasons that
will shortly become evident. Major Harrumphitol was actually a Captain
in play, and that was a mistake because distinguishing him from the
ship's captain, when planning, became difficult. We rolled d12s for
everyone to determine who got what cabin (if you got an occupied one,
you kept incrementing the cabin number until you hit an empty one), so
there was a map of people and rooms.

1) Lady Dolores Wrinklequim. Likes: rat-things (as extra-horrible
Pomeranians), champagne, pearls to clutch. Dislikes: rudeness, the
Wyvern Of The Well, loud noises.

2) Major Harlan Harrumphitol. Likes: parade dress, orderliness,
well-trimmed mutton chops. Dislikes: foreigners, change, spicy food.

3) Elijah Goldberg. Likes: fine-and-gaudy clothing, fancy women, pinky
rings. Dislikes: stuffy old-money aristocracy, seafood, responsibility.

4) Miss Veronica Adipose. Likes: cleavage, sultry singing, cocaine.
Dislikes: wet blankets, vicious dogs, bedtime.

5) Edward Moleblanket. Likes: pretty women, fast vehicles, deceit.
Dislikes: former acquaintances, policemen, his past.

6) The Widow Esmerelda Elderbush. Likes: pretty young men, gin, too
much makeup. Dislikes: her age, younger and prettier women, waking up
sober.

The first night was luxurious but uneventful: Nas provided a way for
Miss Adipose to avoid the attentions of Mr. Goldberg, and as so often
happens aboard a cruise, this somehow turned into cocaine and dancing
the night away (although she rebuffed his attempt to return to his
room); Edward Moleblanket found Ber and her fur unexpectedly
captivating, although then he sized up the Widow Elderbush's assets--no,
no, her jewelry--and shifted his focus; Rig attempted to strike up a
friendship with the Major based on their military experience and did
fairly well considering that he was a damned foreigner and a human to
boot.

Then I had the players roll a d6, another d6, and a d4. The first time,
they all came up 1, so I had a reroll. The next time it was 2, 6, and
2.

The d4 table is this one:

1) Sharp trauma
2) Blunt trauma
3) Strangulation
4) No obvious physical trauma

The next morning the servants woke everyone up early as the captain
announced they must meet in the dining gallery at once. Ber earned 50
additional XP by saying "oh! It's a murder mystery!" before the captain
spoke, because, indeed, it was.

The Widow Elderbush had been bludgeoned to death in her room the
previous night.

We now moved into a classical whodunit (inspired, yes, by the EA game
_Murder on the Zinderneuf_). Some clues quickly emerged. The Widow's
door had not been locked--a maid had been instructed to knock on her
door at 6 so that the Widow would have time to put on her (extensive)
face prior to breakfast, and when she did, the door swung open and she
saw the blood (I really should have had her screams wake the passengers,
but alas).

Her skull had been smashed with a few blows from a heavy, blunt object.
Her jewelery box was locked on her dresser--but the key was nowhere to
be found, and when Nas picked it open, it was discovered to be empty.
Her porthole was undogged, although it had been mostly closed. Some
towels and a pillowcase were missing. The single unoccupied cabin was
next door, and was empty. In that room, Nas found a few drops of blood
under the bed, and a missing towel, as well as a shoe-scuff on the
porthole. He also determined that the cabin door locks were trivially
easy to pick.

An examination of the body revealed some additional clues: bruising on
the wrists, consistent with them being held in a single strong, large
male hand--but on closer inspection, those bruises seemed to be a few
hours older than the fatal head wound. Her fingernails were long and
painted--but unbroken and there was no skin under them. And most
strikingly (it took a while to discover this, oddly, but the party did
finally remember they'd been carrying around a copy of _Anatomy of the
Goblin Races_ in an inexpensive student edition for several
sessions)...the Widow Esmerelda Elderbush was *no goblin at all*, but an
ugly human woman who wore a whole lot of makeup and had been pretending
to be a goblin society matron. She also had a tattoo of a cobra on her
left inner forearm, which was determined by Balin (a cleric of Vorn,
although a pretty halfhearted one) to be consistent with the Yig-worship
fad that had gone around the human world about 25 years previously.

Among the other guests: Goldberg had light bruising and some fingernail
marks on his face. The Major was limping and using a cane (the morning
was chilly and damp). Veronica Adipose seemed decidedly unwell. Lady
Wrinklequim looked pale, sat on the settee, and determinedly gulped down
brandy after brandy, and Mr. Moleblanket looked glumly out the window,
nursing gins and tonic.

Nas was able to determine that Elijah Goldberg's facial wounds were the
result of a slap delivered by Miss Adipose after he failed to take "no"
for an answer. This seemed to clear the two of them. General consensus
pointed away from Dolores Wrinklequim as far too frail to have
bludgeoned even another old lady to death. And that left Major
Harrumpitol and Edward Moleblanket as the primary suspects.

A plan was hatched: Ber proposed a sting. Balin announced that he was a
cleric of Vorn, and that he would stay up all night and commune with the
dead, and have an answer from her spirit by morning. He couldn't
actually do that, but of course the other guests didn't know that. Nas
hid under the bed in the empty room (having also climbed out his room's
porthole and in that one's), next to the former Widow's room. Pal and
Ber stayed in their cabins, and Rig went up to stand watch on the deck,
taking what cover he could behind the Big Metal Box, the Pointless
Smokestack, and the Even More Inexplicable Lifeboat. The observation
deck has a tarp about thirty feet above it, designed to sluice the
pigshit away from those enjoying the view. Rigging and rope ladders
lead up to the hogs, and there's evidently planking and stuff up there
so the sailors can slop the hogs during the voyage.

Rig burned his Big Purple d30 roll on being sneaky while on watch duty,
and got a 13. Which is pretty sneaky, but he's wearing chainmail and
he's human and thus doesn't have goblin night vision.

About 12:30, the Major came onto the deck, and toured the perimeter
checking the rigging and smoking a cigar. Then he went below. Somewhat
later, two more figures came upstairs. They made their way to the
lifeboat--it turned out to be Moleblanket and Adipose indulging in a
passionate makeout session. Rig noted that, at one point, he had her
wrists grabbed above her head in one of his hands as he was kissing her.

As the lovers were returning belowdecks, there was a startled "Harrumph!
I say!" as they encountered the Major again. And then he leaned his
cane up against the lifeboat and climbed the rigging. Rig immediately
ran to the door bridge, pounded on it, and explained to the copilot (one
Kurt Schlemiel) that the murderer was cutting a pig free from the mass
to make his escape. Kurt immediately rang the alarm bells, Rig
scampered up the rigging, and Ber and Pal started running for the stairs
to the observation deck.

The Major greeted Rig with a stream of racist invective (the phrases
"smoothskin" and "bright-light devil" were both deployed), and got both
hawsers securing a pig cut. Rig hit him with the flat of his axe, but
the Major manager to grab a line and began to escape, at which point Rig
tried to sever the hand holding the rope. He didn't quite cut through
it, but he did cripple that hand, causing the Major to fling his knife
(ineffectually) at Rig with his bad hand and causing the DM to burn his
d30 roll for the night: I said that the Major needed a 14 to grab the
line with his left hand and swing away. I rolled the d30, and it rolled
and wobbled a very long time before coming up 15.

The major was just lifting off, but by this time Ber and Pal had made it
to the observation deck, and Ber shouted the line that, by all rights,
should have inaugurated the most magnificent TPK in my personal gaming
history: "I Magic Missile the pig!"

So, a bolt of magical force streaked into the night, and impacted a
bloated, hydrogen-filled, giant hog, nestled amongst 79 other
hydrogen-filled hogs.

Unfortunately, Ber rolled a 1 for damage, (and did not roll a 1 on her
d20 roll for magical corruption) and so the pig did not explode in a
glorious fireball, but began to slowly sink, a jet of ghostly blue flame
shooting from its side.

Rig grabbed a line attached to a nearby pig in the canopy, and swung out
to grab the line from which the Major was hanging. He rolled a 1. This
sent us to my Random Fumble Table Table, which, unfortunately, was also
a 1, which was "Hackmaster," which merely meant "your enemy gets an
immediate free attack." And since all the Major was trying to do was to
climb the rope so he could get up to the pig and put out the flame and
patch the hole, that was basically just a "no effect."

But now as he descended, his legs were within Palalladin's reach, and
Pal grappled him and beat him on a contested Strength check, so he had a
firm grip on his legs and pulled him onto the observation deck. Ber
fired another Magic Missle and handily beat her corruption roll of 3,
severing the rope. The flaming pig rose back into the sky, and I ruled
that on a d12 roll of 1-3, it was coming back towards the canopy. 2.

But Rig would get a shot at it with his axe before it got up to the rest
of the balloons. He nailed it, and the pig exploded. This caused Rig
some damage, and covered him in pig guts, but saved the ship.
Palalladin managed to sit on the Major until help arrived. The copilot
corroborated our heroes' stories, and the Major eventually broke and
snarled that it wasn't like he'd killed a person anyway, and how dare
she pretend to be a goblin and it was disgusting and he'd only found out
when it was too late and he was sure that the jewels (which were
discovered in an improvised-from-a-pillowcase moneybelt around his
midriff) were stolen anyway.

SIDEBAR: WHAT WAS GOING ON HERE

The procedural mystery worked great, although I stand by my decision to
not stick with the 1,1,1, which could only have meant that Dolores
Wrinklequim was told what her name meant and stabbed herself in
despair. My plan was basically to use the likes-and-dislikes of the six
suspects and assume that both a reasonable motive and means would appear
and that there'd be room for red herrings--and whatever the party came
up with, I'd roll with.

So, the actual events of the evening went something like this:
Moleblanket was indeed after Esmerelda's jewels. And he did, fairly
early in the evening, engage in a spirited makeout session with her, and
his MO does include the wrist-grab thing. So that's where the bruises
came from. But he didn't kill her--indeed, he didn't even steal her
jewels, because it's only the first night of a 5-day trip, and he'd be
much more likely to perform the heist and get away clean if he did it at
the end of the trip.

But he did leave her hot, bothered, high, and dry. So, figuring any
port in a storm, she collared the Major, who was harrumphing his way
around the deck and corridors smoking cigars. Only once he turned on
the light to put his shoes back on, he realized she wasn't a goblin at
all, and in his anger and loathing (since he's a racist, jingoistic ass)
he held her face down with a pillow and cracked her on the side of the
skull a few times with the head of his cane. Had the characters
examined it at any point they would have noted that it had a heavy brass
handle, and that it was also a sword-cane. But they never did.

Then once he'd done the murder, he stole the jewels, climbed out the
window and in the window of the next-door cabin, cleaned himself up as
best he could, threw the jewelery box key and the bloodied towels out
the window, slipped into the corridor, and relocked the door with his
pen-knife (the Major, as it turns out, is no stranger to skulduggery).

END SIDEBAR

So, the murder was solved, the zeppelin was saved, and the rest of the
trip was uneventful, although Miss Adipose was ever so grateful to Nas
Foullurker, and the other characters' motivations for going to Tanaroa
were mostly-elucidated: Lady Dolores Wrinklequim was meeting her husband
and son, who ran most of the goods-imported-from-the-Imperial-heartland
trade and did some exporting of raw materials, though not, particularly,
coffee. Elijah Goldberg (who had been wearing extremely expensive
clothes trimmed in fine fur throughout this whole adventure) was a
magnate in the garment trade and was buying exotic furs and (especially)
skins from the island's renowned enormous lizards. It was never clear
what, exactly, Edward Moleblanket did, but it sure seemed to be
something like being a riverboat gambler separating rich ladies from
their jewelery, and the zeppelin routes were a magnificent venue for
him. Miss Adipose was a drug tourist, seeking new thrills near their
source.

At this point Rig had to leave, so BC played his character for the
little remaining adventuring we did.

In the colony in Tanaroa, the characters were quick to establish who the
local mercantile players were, and to get some information about the
interior and the natives (mostly human, especially in the seven villages
around Tanaroa, but also cat-men named rakasta, and some sort of
monkey-men, both farther inland). That night, they went to bed in the
inn down in the goblin colony (a few streets near a wharf built for
ocean-going ships, several hundred yards down the hill from the native
settlement). I asked the players to roll a d20, and not to roll a 1 if
they wanted a quiet night.

They rolled a 1. An enraged Tyrannosaurus Rex, wounded, with spears
sticking out of it, was lumbering down the hill from the village. Ber
used her d30 roll and hit it in the eye for 18 points of damage.
Blinded and very badly wounded, the lizard turned to flee, and the
colonists began buying the party lots of free booze--but all was not
well. Ber had to make a Corruption check of 5 this time--and rolled a
2. Fortunately the 78 on Scrap's Mutation Table yielded only an
enlarged chest--double lung capacity and a +2 to damage with blow guns.
This complemented her white fur, spines, baboon arms and different voice
every day, and as she said, tended to confirm her theory that she was
becoming an actual bear.

The next morning, our heroes spoke to Hugh Findlechot, the burgomeister,
who sold them a map of the (coast of the) island, and to Phoebe
Bardridge, Customs Director. She allows as how several enterprising
goblins have set out to create coffee plantations in recent month, and
names three who have actually sent multiple shipments of beans back
rather than vanishing into the wilderness, never to be heard from again.
Her guard, Aku, a native, offers the name "Skiwa" as a reliable guide
from the village, and says that they should talk to Allak, the village
chief. So they head up there, and as Ber is a hero today among the
natives (they pass a lot of destruction and, at the center of town, find
the T-Rex's severed head; the village is mostly engaged in rebuilding
the giant wooden doors that serve as the gate in their immense stone
wall, which Allak explains was built by the long-gone gods, as were the
stone and iron statues of people who look human, but neither with the
South Seas Islander looks of the villagers, nor the Germanic features of
Vornheim, but more like Native Americans). Allak is happy to lend Skiwa
to the party as a guide as far as the Big Tar Lake, and to give them
protective amulets, one from each clan (Elk, Hawk, Sea Turtle, Tiger).
They spend some time getting more tropically-appropriate gear and
getting ready to head out into the jungle next session. And that's
where we stopped. Next time: Coffee Plantations On The Isle of Dread.

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Fiasco Playset: Elsinore -- Hamlet Has Three Daddies

Fri, 08 Nov 2013 23:46:11 GMT

HAMLET HAS THREE DADDIES

An Actual Play Report of the "Elsinore" playset by Adam Thornton and
William Shakespeare.

The relationships we had to start with were:

a) Family: senile dad and hottie teen, paired with Location, Intimate:
In The Very Next Stall
b) Work: High-ranking politicians of opposing factions, paired with
Object, Documentary: Terms of Surrender
c) The Past: Former Spouses, paired with Location, Remote: Advancing
Army's Camp
d) Crime: Adulterer and Clueless Husband, paired with Need, To Get Free: of
suspicion, before they find out
e) Romance: Prince and MILFy Mom, Eww, paired with Need, To Get Respect:
from that hottie, by proving yourself.

This led to some...complications. You'll see. It eventually resolved
itself into.

Cast of Characters:
HAMLET, totally hot and vapid PRINCE OF DENMARK
FORTINBRAS (Sr.), still alive in this telling, KING OF NORWAY. And also
ACTUALLY HAMLET'S FATHER.
CLAUDIUS, KING OF DENMARK. Also, and here's where it gets weird, THINKS
HE'S HAMLET'S FATHER, and also SECRET HUSBAND OF OLD HAMLET, WHO,
YES, IS STILL ALSO TOTALLY HIS BROTHER. I guess this Denmark is
pretty much like West Virginia.
THE GHOST, FORMER KING OF DENMARK. Also THINKS HE'S HAMLET'S FATHER.
GERTRUDE, MILFy QUEEN OF DENMARK.

ACT I, Scene I:

The action opens with an external shot onto a privy. There are two
closed doors, and behind each one is a set of boots, one red, one blue.
There's a little tapping, and a wide stance, and a slurping noise, and
an "Oooh, it's big and fat and juicy, just like I like it!"

And then a record-scratch noise. A much older voice says, "Oh shit! We
can't do this!" "Why not?" "Because, uh, well, er, I guess I might as
well tell you. I'm Fortinbras, the King of Norway." "Yeah, I know, I
watched you go into the privy." "Aaaaand....I'm also your father."

Scene II:

Fortinbras is in Elsinore on a diplomatic mission,
attempting to negotiate the terms of Denmark's surrender. He's talking
to Claudius, and points out that his army is only two days' march away.
He offers to make Hamlet scarce and protect him should Denmark come to
harm. He even reveals to Claudius that he's actually Hamlet's father.
Claudius is unhappy and determined to retain power.

Scene III:

Claudius is talking to his dead brother, and says that Hamlet isn't
either of theirs (Old Hamlet had kinda suspected he was Claudius's). He
suggests the Ghost go terrorize the Norwegian Army, which he does.

Scene IV:

Flashback: the murder of the Ghost by Claudius was all Gertrude's idea.
She's tormented by the belief that she turns all the men in her life
gay.

Scene V:

Gertrude catches Hamlet with Laertes. She determines to turn him
straight by any means necessary. He rejects her advances, and Gertrude
then poisons him with a slow-acting poison that will, in fact, kill
people who consume his semen more quickly than him. She plans to ransom
the antidote to him.

ACT II

Scene I:

Fortinbras finds out that his army has fled in terror. He offers Hamlet
both thrones in exchange for taking care of Claudius.

Scene II:

The ghost attempts to frighten Fortinbras and fails miserably. He
settles for just annoyingly haunting him, standing behind him and making
snarky remarks, that sort of thing.

Scene III:

Claudius, feeling the tide shifting, solicits help from Gertrude, which
she promises. She lies.

Scene IV:

The Ghost tells Hamlet to get the hell out of Dodge while he still can.
Hamlet cockily waves him off.

Scene V:

Gertrude has finally managed to get some alone time with Fortinbras, but
he can't manage an erection, because the ghost is standing right behind
him, poking him, and asking what Fortinbras thinks of the ghost's wife.

TILT:

Paranoia: Two people cross paths, and everything changes / Innocence:
Love Rears Its Ugly Head

ACT III
Scene I:

Claudius, now that he knows Hamlet isn't actually his son, takes him as
a lover (two pairs of blue boots in the same privy stall, same shot as
the opening). Fortinbras, meanwhile, with the red boots in the next
stall, already slightly unhinged by the ghost's torment, begins to
spiral into madness.

Scene II:

Claudius has now been poisoned by the envenomed blade (as has Hamlet);
however, his long experience with Gertrude has enabled him to recognize
the danger. He and Hamlet will seek the antidote.

Scene III:

The Ghost, his differences with Claudius put aside for the moment, tells
him about a helpful apothecary.

Scene IV:

Gertrude is boning the apothecary when Claudius walks in the door. He
screams, "I've never stuck my sword in a woman, and I don't intend to
start now!" and stabs the apothecary to death, while Gertrude flees with
the antidote.

Scene V:

Gertrude reveals to Hamlet that she has the antidote, but that he's only
going to get it if he has sex with Ophelia. He grudgingly agrees.

Scene VI:

The now-thorougly-unhinged Fortinbras is in Gertrude's secret poison
cabinet. He's trashing the place, throwing bottles on the floor and
smashing them. POTION MISCIBILITY TABLE! Explosion! Clouds of caustic
smoke! Fortinbras is hideously disfigured by bubbling, sizzling
potions, and has become an unrecognizable monster.

Scene VII:

Hamlet has arranged Ophelia on the couch, facedown, and has asked her to
please put her hair up and try to talk in a deep voice. He is grimly
grinding away when Claudius enters; Claudius, in a rage, impales them
both with his sword.

Scene VIII:

The ghost appears in the wreckage and points out to Fortinbras that this
is all Gertrude's fault, every last bit, and he needs to kill her.

Scene IX:

Gertrude returns to her chambers; she opens the door, and the hideous
Fortinbras lurches from the smoke, drags her down, has his bestial way
with her, and snaps her neck.

AFTERMATH:

The ragtag remnants of the Norwegian army reach Elsinore; they are
greated by the shambling Fortinbras flinging the gates wide. From his
perspective, we see them screaming and fleeing in terror across a
blackened, smoldering hellscape, where the only living things are the
crows.

We see a pile of corpses. Gertrude's is on the top. Fortinbras shoos
away the crows, reaches for her body, picks it up tenderly...and then
flings it to the side. He leans down again, pulls Hamlet's corpse's
trousers down, and leers.

Cut to the throne room. The hideous Fortinbras is brooding on his
throne. Behind him, the ghosts of Claudius and Old Hamlet are bickering
with each other like an old married couple, which they are, and
occasionally poking Fortinbras. The Ghost of Gertrude keeps walking
through them, trying to get their attention, and they are utterly
ignoring her.

FINIS

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