GHOSTS OF DEPARTED QUANTITIES

“No knight under heaven,” his enemies confessed, “was William’s peer.” Boy as he was, horse and man went down before his lance at Val-ès-dunes. All the fierce gayety of his nature broke out in the chivalrous adventures of his youth, in his rout of fifteen Angevins with but five soldiers at his back, in his defiant ride over the ground which Geoffry Martel claimed from him—a ride with hawk on fist as though war and the chase were one . . . In his old age Philip of France mocked at the Conqueror’s unwieldy bulk and at the sickness which confined him to his bed at Rouen. “King William has as long a lying-in,” laughed his enemy, “as a woman behind her curtains!” “When I get up,” swore William, “I will go to mass in Philip’s land, and bring a rich offering for my churching. I will offer a thousand candles for my fee. Flaming brands shall they be, and steel shall glitter over the fire they make.” - G.T. Ferris

Headjam

I’d wager we are officially now arrived at the post-apocalyptic Grummet phase that is arguably the OSR’s natural milieu (see Manola’s “OSR aesthetics of Ruin” The vibes around Wizards are bad, bad [edit – it’s like basically a tpk up in there a week plus later]. They have perhaps become akin to an occupying army, engaging in resource extraction across a variety of qualia, these already demarcated according to the whims of a previous colonial power/game wizard(s). The hoi polloi are getting restive, even if they are colonizers themselves. "For God's sake, take care of your men. If they fire, you must die."

Syd Fieldian story beats, aristeias for everyone, and greater daemons of exhaustion sliding into the DMs until their hair is Fraggle Rocked to oblivion are OUT. Everyone wants some rando charts Charlie! Right now the big thing in the old-school space crossing over into l’âme de la foule is Shadowdark. Before that it was Cairn, or Mork Borg, or OSE, or LotFP, or what have you. There is a mighty sound of spiderwebbing glass, a fracture. There always a fracture. I am going to buy that Harnmaster box at the game store I swear.

Anyway, one feels possessed by a feeling of UNEASE at all of this. I mean, it’s partly as simple as the body falling apart from itself and that. Every aspect of the world begins to make one uneasy when it without much fight cedes to the onrushing Lethe. Who would have thought building a house so close to the under-river would be so hazardous? 

Francisco da Silva

A little bit it’s getting what you wanted. 

Governance by random chart. Gold for XP. Lo-prep. Which I like. Idle play with the D30 Sandbox Companion  spit up some items of interest. The charts don’t change, they just get appropriated by the next collection of tables. A waterfall, a temple, an artifact which grants wishes, a manticore—obviously leaning deep into its scorpion aspect. I know a water scorpion or needlebug or whatever is an insect anyway not an arthropod, but how do you account for this:

Here’s his stats, OSE style.

I wonder where the nearest water might be, and what might have squished itself flat against the floor there, half lion, half scorpion, half sea eagle.

Part of the disquiet is because everybody is running everything (not, alas, all at once). Only for a while before the next thing manifests. The AD&D ride or die cats insist that it’s because the other games lack DEPTH and a late-game.  But I’m not convinced about that. The best late-phase rpg I ever played was a game of WFRP that at a certain point became modified Fantasy Battle. The game reverted to its ancestral form. The illusion of depth is a phone call coming from inside the house.

Not wish-fulfillment-storygame-players-craft-the-world-together chanting KANAKADHARA STHOTHRAM on all Fridays and on all Full Moon days type of thing won’t give you that. Not Prestige TV&D everyone gets a magic moment and a flashback to their grandparents meeting in the under-alleys, the both of them beloved by mutually antagonistic fallen-out-of-favor gods I just made up like a half-remembered Dragons of Autumn Twilight.  Not 1-100 d100 tables cannibalizing other d100 tables cannibalizing Kevin Crawford like SALAMI overrunning the world with pickled and half-digested artifacts and hallucinations. It's the spaghetti code of it that makes a meal.

Imagine me 10 ago years disembarking the BART in San Leandro to get picked up by my uncle who was driving from Monterey with my great aunt’s worldly effects wrapped in a tarp and weighted down by landscaping tools. I had Lulu-printed copies of Anomalous Subsurface Environment (Labyrinth Lord - B/X), Deep Carbon Observatory (LotFP/ B/X again), and Yoon-Suin (Rules Cyclopedia, I can only assume). Holy s***! There’s some slicer dicers right there! 

Frank Miller

Basically a shared procedural universe. At least a lot of the same physics. Given, in one comic book, the Mighty Thor can twirl the Empire State building over his head while in the other he struggles to push a panzertherium at full bore backwards, but you can iterate a lot off a baseline. 

The takeaway: there sure are a lot of SYSTEMS these days! On the one hand, WtC's bad behavior push the action to the provinces. But surely folks are looking for SOMETHING amidst this march of one-shot chimeric heartbreakers, each purpose built to do something or other semi-specific, each set off of the other. Specificity makes for finitity. George Berkeley: "And what are these fluxions? The velocities of evanescent increments? And what are these same evanescent increments? They are neither finite quantities, nor quantities infinitely small, nor yet nothing . . ." 

Taking a page from the asinine US tariff calculations, I have produced some self-cancelling Greek numerals to arrive at a formulae : the topological space = the initial state divided by dimensional regularization times pure movement times final state, helpfully written on the blackboard as:

As always, when in doubt over the maths, it’s enlightening to pop on over to the drugstore and consult the spinner rack. Monster of the Day, ongoing character arc across issues at cutscenes, and tertiary slow burn foreshadowing all coexist – filtered through the lens of it being mechanically unlikely that any one kid or even one gang of children would ever assemble the spotty distribution into a full run. It’s refrigerator logic but you’re not allowed downstairs after bedtime.

Obviously, the self is no more unitary than an 8-year old’s comic collection – there are gaps everywhere, nor do we recognize that there are individual authors for our different episodes and anyway ascribing too much intentionality is corrosive. But at various point there are characteristics highlighting something fundamental as we move in and out of ontological structures which are:

1 – Ascendant

2 – Boss Mode

3 – (mid) Crisis

4 – Descendant

What are these astrophysical houses (or as I will now refer to them, CHAIRMEN – impersonal functionaries of the soul)? How do they interact with each other? Since I’m a dumb dumb decreeing the mass of tables for no purpose other than kludge, I made tables to explain the ill-thought out mechanic anyway. Better an abyssal bag lady than a celestial beggar.

By way of example (management apologizes for undue repetition . . . err . . . thematic convergence):

House of POW (POWER)

This is that min/max sh** right here. What’s bigger and badder than a hero? As we learned from David Megarry, a SUPERHERO. Kirby Crackle thunderstorm. As currently constituted, this is the mid-game. Stuff to do before you become a propriétaire and sink into lethargy.

1                    Anointed Champion

a     The high and wizardly counsel/ascended masters/kooky forgetful demigod has identified YOU as talent.

b     They arm you with a similarly anointed weapon for the big fight vs Mr. Scary Enemy.

c     Wait. Are we the bad guys?

d     Retire to the country. There’s plenty of supplicants trying to rope you back in and spooking the horses.      

2                    King Mob

a     It’s not charisma. It’s gravity from being the biggest mother***er around.

b     Ultimately the whole lot become an appendage  to the greater gestalt critter composed of pure will. All is one in Darkseid. None can stand against you/they/them.

c     Tommy Gunn thinks he should lead the gang instead. You’ll have to fight him.

d     Win or lose, your lil’ civil war spills over everywor.

3                    We Will Build Him, Stronger Than Before 

a     You get absolutely pounded by the quantum railroad, John Henry style. No saving throw, no nothing. But . . . 

b     Using some sweet cyber science or its spellpunk equivalent, YOU are now the colossus doing hammering. 

c     Things are starting to go on the fritz. Non-essential systems first. But the hiccups adds up to blackouts. 

d     The forcefully-separated symbiote has chosen a new host and is coming for revenge/ unification. 

4                    Obstructionist Pencil Neck 

a     The Man is holding you back. What’s worse it’s the Man in his most enraging aspect – a desk-jockey bureaucrat both inflexible and a total zero-burger. The situation at hand clearly requires extra-legal methods but they won’t let you. 

b     Make my day. Results at last! +1s all around. 

c     Turns out rules are for reasons. Working out of sequence injects anomalies which are like little eggs in your hair and begin to itch. 

d     Now you’re the chief – some punk who doesn’t know squat about how the world works is giving you a hard time. 

5                    One (or more) Against the Multitude 

a     The odds? Long. But as they get worse you get stronger and stronger. 

b     A Handful of Men  Forming the Invicible Flying Wedge Against a Killer Horde of Five Million. All these mediocrities you thought you were surrounded by? Lions. 

c     OK, getting tired here. Some help please Roharim? 

d     You are overrun and lying prone. Gradually soften the focus and pan out amid the string swells. Somehow amidst all the stomping, a flower. 

6                    Dead Letter Office 

a     The plot armor is strong in this one. Every time there’s fatal damage, it is negated. 

b     You basically can’t be hurt. Is it because you shambling around at 1 HP, all gaunt and ghostlike and even a hefty wind would kill you except it can’t? So what. It is impossible to convey just how dynamite a set of well-tailored clothes look on a person like that. 

c     Ahhh . . . that’s why. The scene in Being John Malkovich where everyone is John Malkovich and all they can say is John Malkovich – you find that pocket dimension. Each time you hit zero there is some kind of reality split, leaving on half of you here and one half there. 

d     After you secure their release, who has literally hundreds of 0-level retainers? You’d think they all would retain some semblance of your hard-won XP but the River Lethe is worse barrel full of wraithmonkeys . . . and I guess there’s that otherwise somebody would hook up an fission-based XP machine to deliver double the gold for XP by half crossing the threshold. Anyway, this lot are a bit forgetful, but your motivations align completely.

Head-Jam a.k.a. I-D-I-O-T

COMING SOON (or soonish) – Messieurs KNOW, TAO, FLOW, DOUGH, WOW, and GLOW (this house, however, is a latter addition and widely loathed, being described by one internet luminary as “a rambling thought exercise by Gygax as part of an update/letter to the ‘Loyal Readers’”.)