On the Shoulders of Giants

A once towering god king, an embodiment of strength, frail and brought to its knees, torn apart and consumed, salvaged for parts. A living idea in its moment of death, trapped in time, trapped in its own myth, upon which we reside.

Rorschach Not-Review

I finally read Tom King's Rorschach and it's really good. I especially like the way he juxtaposed Rorschach's Rorschach with the smiley-face of The Comedian; or Frank Miller's "Dark" with the Silver Age's simplicity, of meaning vs. nothingness but also clarity vs. obfuscation.

I've talked a lot before about the idea of pareidolia, and of how the way perception imposes anthropomorphism onto things could be like a kind of animism, or a control mechanism, a cybernetic interface to the noosphere.

It would be interesting to have something like a pulp hero, a Rorschach type, with a pareidolic mask. A living symbol like Batman claims to be, a force churning through the system of human minds via human bodies like Frankenstein's monster.

Willed into being, something connected to the human experience, a reflection on meaning lacking any of its own.

The Chattering Class: A Poltergeist Form for Maximum Recursion Depth

I ran a game jam for Maximum Recursion Depth (Exalted Funeral Print+PDF, Itch, Drivethrurpg) a while back, where I and a small panel selected one participant to have art and layout commissioned for their Poltergeist Form. Klintron of Sewer Mutant and Kid Minotaur won the jam with his entry The Chattering Class, which we have just released!

Also thank you Sarah Carapace and Roque Romero for the art and layout!

Designer Personalities

A world of designer drugs of viruses, bacteria, gut microflora, hormones and pheromones and neurotransmitters; leveraging the interaction of mind and body, the idea of a static personality becomes obsolete, identity itself re-constructable. Influencer personalities spread like memes. "The self" as a choice which most reject.

Worlds out of Phase: There is Only Forward Here

Worlds out of phase, passing through moments like walking between the raindrops. Each step a rotation through spacetime, winding forward and backwards like magnetic tape. A wrong step into another dimension, another universe, seamless and a-logical like a dream. Reality as we know it as thin and sharp as a razor's edge, or the needle of a drawing compass.

Imagine like Kokkoku except instead of being stuck in a single moment in time, they slide through moments in time or even other dimensions or universes, out of phase with the rest of reality as we know it.

Always right beside us, yet out of reach. Knock-on effects bottlenecked by three dimensions. A disturbed nexus, an interface, reverberations from unknowable origins.

Splicing frames of reality with each step, a wrong right turn intractably alters the source- there is only forward here.

The Earth's Core is a Mineral Intelligence

The Earth's core is a mineral intelligence, vibrations of sounds and lights and gravity curves rending warbles in time, oozing through geothermal vents in deep ocean, gluttonously exploiting their uncontested ecological niche, blissful, yet prepared, in the deep and dark places, waiting.

Encoded messages, names, written in quantums carved by the pressures of gravity. Glassy glittery splinters, undulations like a whining accordion, splines of spacetime, animations between frames of film, life subliminally.

Disproportioned, stretched grotesquery, funhouse mirror reflection, closer than it appears. It can't be helped.

Non-Euclidean curvatures fold the real and imaginary planes, the creatures kaleidoscope in patterns of impossible colors.

Anomalies abound, snaking wyrms and phosphenes. Anti-patterns, violent vectors, infection, a perverse microverse, magnified in gravity's shadow, a spotlight on the puppet performance.

Mineral bodies fighting holographic infection. Entropic draconic breath crackling, bacterial blue veins, cracked rainbows coated in droplets of regret. We sense the contrast like sharp edges, our shared language of panic and pain, and also pleasure.

RPG Scenarios and Puzzles based on Logic, Behavior, and Algorithms

As part of my interest in Non-Violent Encounter Design, these are RPG adventure seeds or encounters rooted in logic, behavioral phenomena or algorithmic thinking. They don't necessarily eschew violence altogether, but clever ideas will far outperform violent or linear ones.

I had intended to write more of these but it's been over a week since I've posted anything and I'm doubtful I'd have come back to this draft otherwise so here ya go, two good ones, one that I only picked the phenomena but never actually wrote, and one that's probably too complicated and also probably needs to be couched in more RPG terms so it doesn't look like a grade school math problem.

1. A seer proclaims that among three caves, one contains treasure and two contain aggressive dragons. There is no reason to prefer any one cave over any other, however, after the party decide to investigate one of them presumably at random, the seer provides another message just before they head out, that one of the two caves that they did not pick certainly contains a dragon. Each cave involves a laborious and dangerous Crawl, and if a dragon is provoked, it will cause havoc and likely destroy the opening to the treasure bearing cave, so they only get one chance to find the treasure. Which cave should they investigate?
   Monty Hall Problem: If the party sticks to their original decision, there is a 33% chance they found the cave with the treasure because they picked randomly among 3 caves. However, if they switch to the other cave after the seer eliminated one of them, there is now a 50% chance they found the cave with the treasure because they picked randomly among only 2 caves, so they are better off switching. This one may look familiar...
   
   
2. There has been an outbreak of monstrous wild boars eating crops, livestock, and causing destruction and mayhem. The wild boars are too numerous and too crafty to be wiped out by brute force alone, not even the entire army could do so without burning down the whole countryside. The king has established a high bounty on the wild boars, where hunters can return the tails of boars to collection centers for reward. However, in the time since the bounty began, many tails have been collected for reward, yet the boar problem is as bad as it's ever been. The party have been sent to investigate how the boars are reproducing so quickly.
   Perverse Incentives: Some unscrupulous "hunters" have begun to breed the boars in order to farm the tails for profit- not only obfuscating and failing to solve the underlying problem, but actively exacerbating it when inevitably some bred boars escape. Getting to the bottom of this will not solve the wild boar problem, but at least it will reveal that the bounty policy is broken.
   
   
3. Four Card Problem
   
   
4. The Dark Lord is building an army, where the devil summoners' invocation requires that they count the sum of all numbers between 1 and the total number of devils they intend to summon. The grand council of war wizards are trying to summon a counter-army of valkyries with the same invocation, but there are more devil summoners than war wizards and so as it stands, they will inevitably lose the war. However, there are ancient legends of war wizards capable of summoning far greater numbers of valkyries, suggesting there must be some non-linear invocation spell.
   Gauss Sum (an easier explanation): With the current invocation spell, to summon 100 valkyries, one would have to count the sum of all numbers between 1 and 100, or 5050. However, the sum of each symmetrical pair will be the same i.e. 1+100=101, 2+99=101, so actually, the invocation can be much simpler. Just take the number of pairs, or in other words, the total number divided by 2, multiplied by the sum of the first and last number, i.e. (n/2)*(first number + last number). With this new spell, a single war wizard can summon hundreds of valkyries in seconds, while it continues to take devil summoners hundreds of seconds to summon only 100 devils.