Semiurge: Weird & Wonderful Interviews

I spontaneously decided that I wanted to start doing interviews, so I interviewed Semiurge of the blog Archons March On. His random generators are some of the most creative and useful tools in all of the OSR, and I genuinely believe Semiurge to be one of the most talented and creative bloggers in the OSR blogosphere. I enjoyed this conversation quite a bit and would potentially like to do more interviews like this. If you enjoy reading this and would like to see more, please let me know!

Why don't you start by telling me a bit about yourself and the blog.

• Semiurge: Re: Introductions, I'm semiurge, my blog is Archons March On, it's mostly random tables.

Why did you start the blog?

• Semiurge: Honestly it's incredibly petty.
• Max: Ooh I'm intrigued...
• Semiurge: The r/d100 guy automated one of my tables and put it on his website (with my permission of course), and the link to the automated table got more attention than my original one. So I thought why not start doing the automating myself, found Spwack's thing, and the rest is history.

What are your inspirations?

• Semiurge: Recently (as in the last few months) it's been other people, bouncing ideas off them like the Ping Pong Challenge I did with Rememberdismove, doing prompts, riffing off their formats/ideas
• Max: I remember that ping pong thing you did, that was pretty cool. I don't know Rememberdismove outside of that event, but it was cool to see.
• Semiurge: Rememberdismove's a must-read I'd say, deserves to be up there with Goblin Punch/Monster Manual Sewn From Pants/etc. If my memory's right I think they're where I got the 5x20 table format from.
• Max: Wow, that's quite a compliment. I will have to take a closer look at their work. I can't remember when exactly that challenge happened now, but I think I may have been a bit disengaged from the RPG scene at the time.
• Max: What about prior to the last few months? More generally?
• Semiurge: As dissatisfying an answer as it might be: just about everything I've ever experienced. My memory's not great on specifics, so after a while it just lumps together into the same mash. Occasionally I get good stuff bubbling to the surface.
• Max: No worries, my memory is the same way.
• Semiurge: Kenneth Hite, particularly his Suppressed Transmission series, definitely informed my writing. Conspiracies, freewheeling free association, weird secret history. Weirdly enough I'm not sure if the stuff I've read and enjoyed reading makes it into the part of my brain that inspiration comes from. At least reading like books. Blogs do.
• Max: That's interesting, can you elaborate on that? What is it about blogs vs books? Is it a context thing you think? Or actually something about the medium?
• Semiurge: Part of it's probably that blog posts are more modular, you can take each on its own and really mine it for ideas, a full longform work is more entangled.
• Semiurge: Wait got one more thing for settings: Tattered Realms, for Song of Swords, it's got like five types of elves in a medieval Europe pastiche yet still blows most others out of the water. There's an anemic wiki but if you namesearch Jimmy Rome on 4plebs or another /tg/ archive you can get the direct stuff. How could I forget this one?! Long live the Invincible Republic of Dace!

Many of your posts are these very specific, multi-layered generators, which produce all sorts of weird and wonderful results. What about this format in particular appeals to you so much? What is your process?

• Semiurge: The biggest from the start is that because each individual line's so small you can drop the tables and pick them up again whenever. So I can't lose the thread like I do for the dozens of longer drafts I have lying around.
• Max: Oh ya, the struggle is real in that regard.
• Semiurge: It can be a fun puzzle too, coming up 3,200,000 possible combinations, none of which contradict themselves. I've done so many it's meditative at this point, like combing a rock garden.
• Max: But still, it is impressive how you can take some really specific idea, like... (searches through your index for a random post) headstrong helmets, and have five tables worth of stuff that can combine in all sorts of ways, and each one is interesting and coherent.
• Semiurge: Magic loot's usually one of the easier ones to do. Except for boots, which has languished unloved.
• Max: I can get the meditative aspect, when I'm in a good flow I feel that with my process as well. But there is really nobody I can think of that does what you do, and certainly not as well as you do it, so I'm just genuinely curious how you do it.
• Semiurge: Only so many interesting powers you can tie into boots
• Max: lol really?
• Semiurge: Yeah let me check it. Yeah just walk unharmed on oozes/lava/other mostly-fluids. Also I don't like reusing fantastical materials. Defeats the purpose of the creative exercise part of the form. So now that I've exhausted all the low- and medium-hanging fruit I'm on to like.... giant's toenails or whatever.

Do you worry that you'll run out of sufficiently original or interesting premises for these tables?

• Semiurge: Yes and no. It's harder now that I've used up most of the monsters and whatnot with broad enough thematic resonance to milk a hundred entries out of in an afternoon, but to reiterate it's a creative exercise in a pretty much literal sense. You start off doing 5 sets of 20 vampires, work your way up to oni, gnolls, time-travellers. The challenge is part of the point and the fun for me. Re: thematic resonance, I posted on your blog the other day how I find elves to be more of a feeling than a specific creature. Like everything from Keebler to Sindar. Do elves live in the woods? Where else could elves live that wouldn't be out of place for this feeling of "elf"? What's kind of like a forest? And so on. Same logic for everything else. What's a (D20x5) Place(s) of Pilgrimage (coming November 2022)? How much can I stretch and play with that idea? The web serial writer Wildbow came up with what he calls a pivot for this sort of thing that I find useful. It's like "nail down a concept as a set of points, then switch one of those up".
• Max: Ya I totally get what you mean. It's like, most people, if they're thinking about it at all, are thinking about an Elf in the mean average (the cognitive neuroscientist in me would call that the Prototype), or maybe as a single modal representation (the Exemplar). Your tables really deconstruct the concept of (in this case) Elf by saying, how many features can I create, where I can randomly combine them, and they're all still Elf, while also being unique. I'm not familiar with that web serial but that's an interesting idea.
• Semiurge: Wrt the pivot thing because that's a scrawny explanation. Take dwarves: Dwarves dig underground, dwarves are greedy for gold (for a shorter set). How do they dig? Typically like human miners, but maybe these dwarves are more like moles or worms. Where can they dig besides underground? Maybe into giant trees, like big hairy termites. What's kind of like digging? Maybe they dive into the ocean in bronze submersibles, hunting leviathans in abyssal trenches. Etc., et cetera.
• Max: Did you come up with those just now? Damn, those are good.
• Semiurge: Thanks.
• Max: I have very little restraint and when I try to do these kinds of deconstructions, I almost always tow way over the line lol. There's definitely a science to it.

What are some of your favorite systems and settings?

• Semiurge: I'm going to try to avoid the ones that a lot of people probably know and also like already (e.g. Centerra).
• Max: Fair enough.
• Semiurge: I've been playing with Sofinho (of Alone In The Labyrinth) in his Pariah game the last couple months, and that's been great. It's this neolithic, animistic, on the verge of agricultural revolution setting. The system's fast and simple, I think like a cut-down B/X with a bit of Spwack's Die Trying (at least the Xs system). I like anything simple and fast, and don't generally like learning new systems. When I was a kid I could blaze through and memorize all that 3e D&D, world of darkness stuff, now it's like just keep it to 100 words or less to start off.
• Max: I totally agree about not wanting to learn / play really complicated systems anymore.
• Semiurge: Another setting, which is a bit of a cop-out because it's stylized history, is Shigurui. One of the best stories put to paper. Set in early Tokugawa Japan. The way the social expectations and dynamics are so cloying, like a lead blanket on every character. Feels dominating in a way that fantasy settings usually don't, closer to real life in the weight and density of it. And yet very different from modern society.
• Max: I am not familiar with Shigurui, but you make such a bold claim now I feel compelled to check it out.
• Semiurge: To go back to Pariah's setting, it's hit home a bit of what is conventional wisdom for osr settings that didn't previously land for me. The post-apocalyptic, social order has broken down sort of stuff. But in kind of the opposite direction, pre-civilization rather than post-civilization. Smaller cast, smaller world, no big powerful states to exist in the shadow of. More room for weirdos and weird doings.
• Max: Ya, I've sat on some "stonepunk" ideas, but never quite felt like I had a strong enough grasp of the implications of pre-history to do it justice. And anyway, I don't think I thought of this parallel in quite the way you're suggesting, or at least you're making it now more salient. Dang, you are really good at making everything sound interesting! Although I guess I already knew that. I was passively aware of Alone in the Labyrinth but I will have to start making a more active effort to follow the blog now.
• Semiurge: Wildbow's stories too, to reference him again, are also neat. I maintain that if osr superheroes were to be a thing then Worm & Ward would be the base to build them off of setting-wise.
• Max: I'm sorry, I'm not familiar with Worm & Ward. Is it something from the campaign you were mentioning? I am, as you probably know, a fan of superheroes (although I've been struggling with my feelings on that recently, but that's a conversation for another time), and I know there are plenty of others in the OSR who are also into superheroes, but in a lot of ways supers are a bit antithetical to many of the common conventions of OSR. So any ideas about superheroes in the context of OSR or tabletop more generally are definitely interesting to me.
• Semiurge: They're a couple of that Wildbow guy's web serials, Worm alone is longer than the Bible so I can't really 'recommend it' recommend it but I'd say try it until the bank robbery and if you're not hooked by then it's probably not gonna work for you. I think the best frame would be as street-level villains jockeying for cash and reputation.
• Max: I can already kind of imagine how that ties into OSR.

Do you have any thoughts about the future of the OSR, blogosphere, RPG industry and community in general, etc.?

• Semiurge: The osr is a spook.
• Max: I have literally no idea what that means 0.o.
• Semiurge: (in the Stirner sense)
• Max: I am actually not super familiar with Stirner if you wouldn't mind elaborating on that further.
• Semiurge: To give a more serious answer, I've never really experienced a thing such as 'the osr'. Maybe it existed before I got into things.
• Max: Aah ok I think I see what you mean now.
• Semiurge: I'd say it's more of a network, but that sounds like networking, too businessy.
• Max: No I get what you mean by that though. And ya, I think the OSR that you and I came up in was very different than this thing that apparently existed for nearly a decade before either of us started blogging
• Semiurge: There's people whose stuff I like, there's people who like my stuff, sometimes those are the same people, many of them at least know of each other. So I guess my answer would be all that culture, industry, community stuff passes over my head like a cloud. I want the people I like to keep making good stuff and enjoy it. I want to make stuff I can enjoy. It's more individuals, personalities, relationships for me than all that.
• Max: That is probably for the best.
• Semiurge: Actually I think I can comment on platform.
• Max: Oh?
• Semiurge: Discord's ok for finding new people and playing games. But it can also be fun to meander through peoples' "recommended blogs" sidebars.
• Max: Oh ya for sure. Honestly, I'm not a huge fan of discord; I mean I like it for small group chats and running games and that sort of thing, but it doesn't really work for me as a big open platform in the way reddit (strictly as a platform, not speaking on the community) or especially G+ (RIP) did. But I 100% agree about the blog list sidebars. And also it feels really good when you see your blog on someone else's list, whether they're someone you really respect or someone you've never even met before.
• Semiurge: Yeah for sure.

Ok, I do have one more question that I'd like to end on, but before that, are there any questions I didn't ask that you'd like to talk about, or just in general anything you want to say?

• Semiurge: Yeah if you or anyone else would like me to write something I'm always open for ideas. So shoot those over on whatever platform. Won't say no to ideas.
• Max: Oh dang, ya I will definitely have to take you up on that some time. I wish I had a good idea for you off-hand but unfortunately I really don't.
• Semiurge: Oh yeah and thanks for the interview, fun way to spend an evening. 
• Max: Ya for sure, this has been a lot of fun. I wasn't sure how this was going to go but I feel like we got into some really cool stuff. I do have one more question for you though!

Can we talk about "Platinum Big Dick Baller"?

• Semiurge: lol
• Max: it's a (semi-)serious question!
• Semiurge: He [NOTE: The r/d100 guy) sneakily removed it for a week but then I noticed and had it reinstated. For a while, I was producing like 50%+ of that sub's content (it's bigger & faster moving now I think). So the head guy asked me if I wanted a special flair. That was the first thing to come to mind.
• Max: lol that's amazing. I remember you telling me when he removed it but I had no idea that's how you got it in the first place. I mean no disrespect to anyone else who has ever posted in that subreddit, but in my opinion your posts are are still the best thing there. I remember the first time reading one of your generators and my mind was blown. I am glad this story is now out there, the public has a right to know!
• Semiurge: Started from the bottom now we here (slightly above the bottom).
• Max: oof too real... ok well on that note, I think it's time we wrap up, but ya, thanks for doing this, this was really cool. We've talked about various things before, but I do feel like I've gotten to understand your creativity better through this and also learned about some cool stuff. You are full of just fascinating insights on top of your creativity.
• Semiurge: Appreciate it. Have a good one.