MRD Campaign Retrospective up to Present

Although I've written plenty of Play Reports for my Maximum Recursion Depth campaign and they've actually been accruing more views than I expected, I've generally not been satisfied with my PRs. I like the approach I've landed on of doing these very brief summaries, and only expanding in cases where I'm basically sharing my GM Notes as like a Module template, but all the same, they feel more like very sloppy book report summaries than something engaging.

So to be clear, my MRD campaign is still ongoing and to the best of my knowledge, nobody has any intentions of ending at any specific time! But I thought it might be fun to do a retrospective, almost like my "not-review" series of posts. If I'm not prepared to rewrite the events of my campaign as engaging prose, I can instead do so as (hopefully) engaging analysis. This is less so a blow-by-blow of events than even my already summarized PRs, and more me just describing how things evolved over time, what I had intended vs. how things played out, what I think has worked or hasn't, etc.

Last side note, we are very very very close to being done with the MRD Book, and once it releases, I have some exciting news to hopefully coincide with it! But anyway...

Before I get into it, here's another index of the MRD PR posts:

MRD Play Report Index

PR 1: Doctor Loves-Me-Not's Halloween Party

PR 2-5: They Did a Mario Kart

PR 6-11: The Hostile Takeover of Anti-Sphinx

Anyone Can Wear the Mask with Jeff Stormer (MRD-adjacent)

PR 12-16: No clever name on this one...

MRD Module / GM Notes

The Court of Those Who Succumb Prematurely to Crippling Expectations (A significantly rewritten and expanded version of this will be the module in the book)

Doctor Loves-Me-Not's Halloween Party (GM Notes)

Off to the (Karmamare) Racetracks (GM Notes)

Not-Review Sessions 1-2 / Doctor Loves-Me-Not's Halloween Party

Even though the posts themselves are organized differently, the first two sessions correspond to the same "module", so I'll describe them this way.

Doctor Loves-Me-Not's Halloween Party was basically a murder mystery inspired loosely by the party scene at the beginning of the Russian Doll series on Netflix and Rocky Horror Picture Show, along with other stuff.

I was really happy with the overall scenario design and I think it had some of the modular Social Intrigue stuff which informed the Module in the book, but I definitely did not yet have this Design Pattern fully realized when I wrote this "module" and it shows. I included some sidebars in the Doctor Loves-Me-Not's Halloween Party GM Notes linked at the top, and I stand by those comments and would encourage you to give them a look if you're interested.

The second session ended in the equivalent of a TPK, but The Team was able to use their Reincarnation Rituals, so it worked out basically as intended. As is often the case with a new game, several of the players came and went between the first couple of sessions, but it was as of Session 3 that The Team as it has existed for nearly a year now has been pretty stable.

Unfortunately, because session 3 was effectively a new group, there were leads that developed in these first two sessions that are only just now getting re-integrated. In fact, there were I think 1-3 sessions (would have to double-check) even before these play reports with an entirely different group, which also set up leads that didn't come back until later (that group was in person and fell apart for covid and related logistical reasons).

Tl;Dr While flawed in some ways, these first two sessions / first "module" is a very good demonstration of what MRD is about, and I could easily imagine myself cleaning it up and turning it into something more like the Module in the book and being really happy with it!

Not-Review Sessions 3-6 / "They Did a Mario Kart"

Technically a fair bit happened in these sessions, but it wouldn't quite be accurate to call them a cohesive "module" in the way I referred to the Halloween Party in the last two sessions. However, it does encompass one "story arc" so I'll wrap them together.

While I posted the PRs as 3-5, in retrospect session 6 was when this "arc" wrapped up, but I guess that wasn't obvious until after the fact.

Session 3 was a fresh start with a new Poltergeist Investigation and in effect a new Team. In retrospect the way I designed it was terrible, but I think to the Players' credit we had a good time.

I basically gave them two or so options for Investigations, but they were both nearly identical- being only just different enough to require that my GM Notes accounted for each of them differently. From a software engineering perspective, we call this an Anti-Pattern, and it is something I have since tried to be better about not doing, and I'd like to believe mostly successfully.

It was a fun little adventure, and it set up some future NPCs and future plotlines. The players really liked Shining Ostrich which made me happy.

Session 4 was the "Mario Kart" part, where they went to The Court of Those Who Bet on the Wrong Horse. I was much happier with how I designed the scenario, although the "Mario Kart" part of it, while fun, probably could have been better fleshed out. It's not about going crunch-crazy, but I played it pretty fast and loose even by my standards and while it worked for me, as the writer, if I were to ever try to publish it, I would need to heavily rework it for those who cannot read my mind.

You can see the GM Notes for Off to the (Karmamare) Racetracks linked at the top, which actually includes the GM Notes for session 3 as well. If you do read it, you'll see the anti-pattern I was referring to, but for the actual Karmamare part, you can see how there was still some structure to it, but probably needed a little more structure.

Session 5 Was a bit of a sidetrack, admittedly of my own making. It definitely did set stuff up for the future such as by introducing or further developing certain NPCs, but in itself was more of a "filler episode" lol, not too much more to say about that.

Session 6 was the culmination of events from the prior sessions. To my mind, it was the most successful of the first six sessions in terms of the number of fun things I gave the players to interact with in the scenario and the degree to which they were developed. The actual scenario around sessions 1-2 may be more so to my tastes, but from a game perspective, I think this is where things started to gel.

There was also a really poignant moment at the end of session 6, within an otherwise rather absurdist scene, and at the very least I appreciated it, but I hope my players did as well.

I apparently never posted the GM Notes for the scenario in session 6, which is a shame because I think it was pretty good. Not sure why I didn't do it, maybe I need to do so retroactively, or maybe there was a reason why I did not...

Not-Review Sessions 7-11 / The Hostile Takeover of Anti-Sphinx

These sessions were a turning point for the campaign, and also where a lot of my thoughts about the setting and my approach to design started to coalesce. This was probably also facilitated by the fact that I was designing the book around this time.

Again, even though I posted them as 6-11, in retrospect, 6 should have been in the previous post and this post should have started with 7.

Prior to these sessions, the game had been set up in a more episodic approach to Poltergeist Investigation -> Court Crawl, and this batch starts that way but ends things in a way that completely changes the paradigm which I found very exciting, although I was admittedly uncomfortable with it at first (see the Session 10-11 not-review below).

Session 7-8 Got real weird and experimental, in a way that I loved but my players were a bit more mixed on at the time, although I believe have since come to appreciate. This was part of what I refer to in my post on Tabletop RPGs as Performance Art and must have been around the time those ideas were growing fully formed in my mind.

I did not at the time have as strong of an idea of where I was going as I should have, and I also in retrospect did not do a good enough job giving the players a good idea of what they could or should do. I can't help but look back on it fondly, but it was certainly flawed.

Partway through session 8 The Team developed a more concrete plan and executed it, and it gave the players an opportunity to flex a bit which worked out well. It was basically a heist, and I don't give this session enough mindshare but in retrospect, it was actually a really fun and well-executed heist that was mostly player-driven, couldn't ask for more from it. The session ends with them coming back to where they were in session 7, culminating in a cliffhanger of a big Conflict that was about to come.

Session 9 is the aforementioned Conflict. The Conflict was swift and brutal as any Into the Odd-adjacent game should be, with Fiona using her Reincarnation Ritual in order to help the other PCs escape what were otherwise seemingly insurmountable odds. The rest of the session was also pretty rapid-fire with some big reveals. I did some stuff that is either clever or deceitful depending on your perspective that paid off nearer to the end of this "arc", which I was happy with but which I know one of the players struggled with at first, and which amounted to something ultimately not within my original plans but ended up being significantly better anyway, as I discuss below.

Session 10-11 also were pretty rapid-fire, with The Team running a coup against The Underground Casino which had been plaguing them in the background for some time, only to learn that the Underground Casino was not quite what they thought it was.

I won't lie, I struggled a lot with these sessions. On the one hand, I had repeatedly signaled to the players that they needed to do more investigation, that there were important details they had not uncovered and that they were getting themselves in over their head, and they had been burned on things like that in the past, but they chose to commit to their course of action regardless.

I think, especially from an "OSR perspective", it would have been well within my "right" to be punitive about it and basically punish them in exactly the way one would expect if they knew those things that they had been encouraged to investigate. However, I really didn't feel good about doing that, and I wanted to find a better solution.

Ultimately, I gave them what they wanted, a successful coup of this organization, but I framed it within the context of a Parable, or just as well a Fable- it was ok that they did something implausible, because the Parable becomes something of greater metaphysical weight, greater than the material act of what they'd done. You could almost think of it like "The Law of Surprises", the metaphysical phenomenon that may or may not have real power within the setting of The Witcher and which ends up driving the narrative (as opposed to the short stories it started in).

On The Cauldron, we were discussing Jewish Fables, and I was raised Jewish, and I actually was in a very roundabout way inspired by Jewish fables with this session myself. I remembered this article that I had read around ten years ago, and recently rediscovered and reread and am glad to say it holds up to my memory. The writer discusses the scene in Coming to America, the Eddie Murphy movie of all things, where Eddie Murphy plays an old Jewish guy. You can read my explanation, or watch the clip on youtube.

Or embedded here (but embedded videos on blogger have not always been reliable for me...):

The old Jewish guy tells a story about going to a restaurant and ordering a soup, and the waiter brings the soup, and he asks the waiter to taste the soup, and the waiter refuses. He asks repeatedly, the waiter uncomfortably repeatedly denies, but when the old man does not relent, finally he does. Looking down at the soup and at the table, he then says "there's no spoon", to which the old Jewish guy says, "achaa!". I really like that anecdote.

So that was also part of what inspired this turn of events. Even though this game is nominally about Buddhism and the interplay between Buddhism, Taoism, Confucianism, and Chinese Mythology (really as just a metaphor or lens for modern issues), I try where possible to use my own lived experience as a person of Jewish descent or as an American or whatever to inform the game and setting, because my experience is not that of a Buddhist or Taoist in China circa the 16th Century when Journey to the West was written.

Anyway, so as a result, the game stops being about a ragtag group of Poltergeist Investigators, and instead is about a ragtag group of Poltergeist Investigators who overthrew a multi-national crime syndicate/information network/anti-fascist group that is now in a critically compromised state, in part due to their own actions, but also these factors were partially responsible for their success in the first place; capitalizing on Anti-Sphinx's moment of weakness without even realizing it.

Not-Review Sessions 12-16

Despite failing to come up with a name for this "arc", this was the first PR post that actually does reflect the arc as I see it- progress is being made lol. In all seriousness though, I do think this "arc" is where I really hit my stride, I would say I even "leveled up" as a designer. This is as much due to me designing the book at the same time and having to really think critically about how I do things, but all the same, this was awesome. Also by this point, the players have developed a good grasp of their characters and the setting and me as a GM, so they've been empowered to do more, and they've made some really clever and interesting decisions that have informed these sessions greatly.

Session 12 Is where The Team learns exactly how bad the situation with Anti-Sphinx is, but also meets the various agents within the organization and comes up with plans for how to fix things. I was worried at first again about possibly being too punitive, but it helped me to think of it within the context of the Parable, to treat this not as a punishment, not the end of the previous arc, but instead as the beginning of a new one, and that helped greatly.

I literally created a whole set of spreadsheets that are basically pivot tables, in order to map out the Social Intrigue / Domain-play scenario of it all; probably should have just made an actual SQL / relational database for it, but it's been working fine.

Session 13-14 was a bit of a diversion and got very goofy. It also involved me leveraging materials produced for The Module from the book but running it in a totally different context, which was fun to do. It also set up Emil McGinnley / Glass Maiden Pixie, which did move the "plot" forward for this "arc", and actually the "Excuse-Me-Sir!" Karmic malware also sets up the subsequent "arc" which is still ongoing and which I have not posted about yet.

Session 15-16 was a ton of fun. I didn't make a separate GM Notes post but I included the pertinent details in this PR. In terms of an "Action Conflict" this was hands down my favorite yet. It felt very video-gamey but in the best way. I would love to expand on this and turn it into something publishable. It wouldn't be worthwhile to reiterate it here but I would strongly encourage you to go back and read it if you have not already done so and are otherwise finding the rest of this interesting.

Final Comments

So wrapping it all up, I'm extremely happy with how this setting has developed, and this campaign, and this group. I've gotten to know my players well and feel lucky to have such a great group. It's encouraging to feel like the campaign is only getting better and that both my actual skills as a designer and my conscious understanding of design have both notably been improving, and it's also fascinating the ways that growth has been driven at least in part by having written the book. It goes to show the non-linear gains one can make by trying to do things in a more comprehensive, systematic way. Even though we're only a couple sessions into the current arc, the most recent session as of this posting was one of my favorites yet, a very emotional scene, my players probably know what I'm talking about if they're reading this. I genuinely believe that there are things that have occurred in this campaign that I will carry with me for a significant amount of time if not the rest of my life.

Saruri-Man: Midsummer Nights Adventures Not-Review

I was walking down one of those obscure alleys of the internet and saw something that grabbed my attention- a few episodes of some really obscure Mecha anime- I think it was a more recent show but it kind of went out of its way to look older. I can't even find much about it on the internet; maybe the name I found was a fan translation or maybe it's some obscure Japanese web show. But anyway, like many obscure things of its kind, I found it super fascinating and I wanted to give it a little not-review.

So it appears to be basically the world as we know it, with some anachronisms leaning into an 80's cyberpunk / Japanese City Soul aesthetic with other quirks here and there as well, so it feels kind of timeless. However, a core distinction is that a literal monkey ruling class somehow controls this world. Like, they aren't super-monkeys or alien-monkeys or genius-monkeys, just regular ol' monkeys. They're treated kind of like politicians or business executives or gang leaders, which is to say, there's a kind of religious reverence towards them, but the surrounding pomp and circumstance are toned down. It's not clear how or why this is the case, but that's part of the charm.

Oh ya and also, like monkeys banging on a typewriter until they create Shakespeare, these monkeys have inadvertently opened a portal to the Faerie Realm, and so all sorts of monsters and kaiju leak through, like the Pakku (I assume a translation of Puck from Midsummer Night's Dream). One of the Pakku is a kaiju-sized cross-section of a goat's eye in extremely graphic detail, like out of a medical textbook, and it's gruesome and amazing. Another one is a ball of diseased goat flesh and parasites and fur.

Kaiju are usually portrayed as either Bestial monsters, like Godzilla, or Uncanny monsters, like the Angels in Evangelion. Some of the monsters and kaiju fell more into the Bestial type, but the Pakku are more so in the Uncanny type. One thing that I found interesting about them though, is that they seemed curious, and somewhat playful, like toddlers or Dionysian drunks. They were causing damage, but they weren't necessarily trying to cause damage, and it made them pitiable, and it made the conflicts bittersweet.

I couldn't find any screenshots from the show, so enjoy this sheep's eye!

The art design in general is shockingly good. Even the monkeys themselves- it might have been tempting to make them kind of cutesy and lovable, but I think the show makes the right call in making them really uncanny. Again, they aren't monstrous, but they are scary and uncomfortable- both obscured in shadow, kind of like in Princess Mononoke, but where not obscured, uncomfortably detailed and graphic in their depiction.

The Mecha are also really wild. One of them looks like an emaciated humanoid body or skeleton with a tank for a head and is apparently the sexual bonding of a decapitated alien being of an unclear but non-carbon-based nature and an American military-industrial complex super-AI experimental tank that gained self-awareness and went on a journey through space.

Another is still Mecha-sized but looks kind of like Iron Man and is able to spontaneously summon weapons and mods out of energy, but then it turns out actually the whole thing is just a UFO-like craft and a series of drones with holographic projections and various weaponry to make it look like it's a cohesive thing but it's not.

There was one other one that I only got to see a little bit of in the episodes I saw, but it was like a typical humanoid Mecha, except four-dimensional, so when it moves, its three-dimensional representation tesselates, sometimes really elegantly like a Hindu god, other times grotesquely like a Lovecraftian extra-dimensional creature. As it moves, because it exists in four dimensions, sometimes parts of it appear inside-out, and the geometry of it bends in paradoxical ways like a Bethesda videogame.

The action choreography was interesting. While there are classics like Ninja Scroll that have excellent 2D, hand-drawn action, I get the impression that action in 2D animation is just really difficult and laborious to do compared to CG animation. I have generally not been a fan of many of the very low-quality Netflix CG anime, but the ones that had a sufficient budget really demonstrate the value of CG, in how fluid and un-"cut" it can be, compared to much 2D animated action which often necessarily relies on cuts, almost like a motion comic. While I'm reasonably confident that this show was 2D animated (again I actually have no idea when this was made...), I think it's using rotoscoping or something, there's something a little funky about it, but it has that fluidity that you otherwise rarely see in 2D animation. I'm surprised there haven't been other anime that used rotoscoping for their action, or maybe there have been and I am just not aware.

I don't know how exactly to describe what I saw i.e. a hyper-real dissected eye monster torrenting puss and macroscopic parasites onto a four-dimensional Mecha suplexing it through a pseudo-Mecha hologram landing onto and subsequently pierced and punctured by the tank cannon of an alien-AI-cyborg-demigod Mecha... But ya, it was very cool. I believe this show does have cool themes and subtext and whatnot, but if you just want bizarre and over-the-top action, it clearly has that as well, at least in the episodes that I saw.

Anyway, the pilots of the Mecha are all 20-30 something "salarymen"; male and female, but it's a Japanese term, and also the title of the show is a play on words which is a pretty typical anime thing (Saru is monkey in Japanese and the Japanese way to write Salaryman is Sarari-Man). They're all overworked, underpaid, some still have optimism for their future but most are pretty burnt out. There seems to be a bimodal distribution where half of them are just completely incompetent, and the other half are highly skilled and multifaceted and way overqualified for what they're doing, and the whole thing feels like commentary but that's definitely coming from an American perspective.

It's hard to talk about the characters too much further without going into spoilers, but I'll say they kind of reminded me of the anime Aggretsuko, or I guess similarly The Office, but whereas those shows I think fell too in love with their characters to their own detriment, there's more of an edge here, where they're not afraid to commit to these characters being more real and flawed. Granted I only saw a few episodes so who knows where it goes, but I got the impression that they know when to be goofy and quirky, and when to be serious, and I can respect that.

Anyway, ya I would really like to see the rest of this show, so if anyone knows anything about it, please let me know!!!!

Dharmatics: A Karmapunk "Deconstruction" of Cybernetics

In a multi-day long manic creative fugue state, I came up with this idea I'm calling Dharmatics, which is like a cyberpunk cyborg/body modification concept for Maximum Recursion Depth. Despite originally conceiving this idea >6 months ago, I have not quite completed it, but I'm still fairly hyped up on the idea so I want to share at least a prototype version of it, and explain my thoughts. I allude to it with the Deva and Buddhabrot City in an earlier blog post and in the Module of the book. I like sharing these sometimes not fully baked ideas and then comparing how they evolve over time to the original conceptions.

Also, I put "deconstruction" in the blog post title in quotes because I'm using the term very colloquially but Patrick Stuart did not seem to like it :p.

Jack Kirby's art is somewhat in the vein of what Dharmatics looks like in my head.

So first of all, why would I want a cybernetics-like system in this game? MRD is a roughly "modern" setting but has elements from Weird fiction, magical realism, superhero settings, etc., so I don't think it's totally out of place, as long as it's not too ubiquitous or too core to the setting. Cybernetics is common in Cyberpunk settings, which tend to be more so near-future, and tend to be used as a vehicle for both social commentary and epistemological commentary, both of which are relevant to MRD and the concept of "Karmapunk".

I was also thinking about how cybernetics was explored in the tabletop RPG Tenra Bansho Zero, a game that does something similar for Buddhism in Japan, Shintoism, and Japanese Mythology, as what I'm doing with MRD, and was one of my inspirations for the Karma system in MRD in the first place. In TBZ, and actually to some extent in some other Japanese cyberpunk settings like Ghost in the Shell, cybernetics tends to be a form of body horror and often is also explored as being a more existential threat to one's concept of self and soul. 

While I think that kind of exploration of cybernetics, philosophy, and psychology makes sense and is done well in those source materials and some others, I don't necessarily think at this point there's anything more I could meaningfully contribute to that commentary, and to attempt to do so without some really evocative idea in mind would be kind of trite. Instead, I wanted to think about how I could invert these ideas.

Cybernetics is etymologically based on the Greek Kubernetes, to govern, or to steer. It's an interdisciplinary field involved in the application and design of control systems, feedback loops, and interfaces. It requires the ability to model input and output signals, modulate based on those signals (feedback), and this requires encapsulation in terms of interfaces, in multiple regards, including brain-computer interfacing, program interfaces, and interfacing with the real world itself (the input signals). Specifically, it's in the application of these control systems and interfaces towards the re-implementation or enhancement of sensorimotor functions.

So within the context of Buddhism or at least the very specific and idiosyncratic interpretation of Buddhism I've conceived for MRD, what would it mean to invert this? To me, this means, a detachment from the Material World, divestment of the need for sensorimotor interfacing, and instead co-opting these psychophysical systems for the development of control systems, feedback mechanisms, and interfaces towards a higher metaphysical plane, towards Awakening. While I've avoided too much explicit reference to Dharma in MRD, many of the concepts in MRD that I wrap up under the umbrella of Karma are actually Dharma, Samsara, The Three Marks of Existence, etc., as I discuss in that link above. So I could just call this Karmatics <-> the Karma equivalent to Cybernetics <-> (Kubernetes <-> Control Systems), but I do think in this case Dharma is a better term. It's the phenomenology of Buddhism (the term also gets used in Hinduism and Jainism), and broadly encompasses the idea of pure reality, one beyond the subjectivity of Conditioned Things, almost like Plato's Platonic Ideal of Forms, or Greek Logos. So, Dharmatics.

From a strictly narrative/aesthetic perspective, I really want to avoid having Dharmatics just be Cybernetics by another name. I can live with the game mechanics just being cybernetics by another name, maybe, but it at least needs to be conceptually different, or else I'm just needlessly complicating things for the sake of false profundity. The most obvious thing I can think of is to give Dharmatics a unique and evocative aesthetic. Dharmatics are decidedly not metal, plastic, silicon, and electronic. They're psychedelia, pareidolia, holography, psychophysical illusion, and applied art and color theory, somewhat along the lines of things I've discussed before such as with my Concept of the Positive and Negative Planes.

We had a discussion about the possibility of integrating things like Traditional Chinese Medicine or Chakras into Dharmatics, and I may do so to some extent, but I'm reticent to go too deep into that direction. There are several reasons for this, but in part, it's because as I've said before, MRD is not about being a Buddhist and Chinese mythology setting in the strictest sense, but rather, taking those concepts in a very abstract and idiosyncratic sense, and applying them towards something more within the domain of my own direct inspirations and lived experiences. So in this case, Dharmatics is almost more like saying, what if Buddhism were invented today? What language would we use to describe it? How would we interpret it within the greater context of modern science, philosophy, and technology? How would we apply it? It's Buddhism re-engineered from the ground up (due as much to my own ignorance of the particulars as to any deeper intentions, to be sure).

Get Into the Machine, Shinji!

Proof of Concept for a Mark of the Odd-based Mecha* game. My design goal for this is to be a game that is rules-light, that is seamless between Pilots and Mecha, but where the mechanics are just different enough to feel like more than just re-flavoring between the scales. It also takes some inspiration from Cypher, and a tiny bit from my "Mechs & Monstrosities" Hack for Tunnels & Trolls.

*Why didn't I call it "Get Into the Mecha, Shinji!"? I dunno, this just sounded better to me...

Ability Scores

Three ability scores, which we're tentatively going to call the standard STR, DEX, and INT, and regular HP. We can call them something else later, but it's roughly these three categories, and they're the same for Pilots as for Mechas.

Special Abilities

Do you want some cyberpunk in your mecha game? Ok, you've got hacking, robotics, AI-assisted mini-missiles for bullets, high-frequency laser swords, etc. Oh is this an Escaflowne-style magitech setting? Ok, you've got magic now too. Whatever you would normally do with Mark of the Odd, you do. They can also just be skills, talents, careers, etc. Let's say you get 3 of them to start.

Mecha

Pilots and Mecha are separate "characters" / character sheets but character creation is mostly the same between the two. Roll HP and the Ability Scores, and multiply by 10. Damage dice? Multiply by 10. If it's just Mecha-to-Mecha, you don't even have to bother, the 10x is mostly just for scaling Pilot x Mecha stuff. Because there's gotta be some maniac taking potshots with a Mecha-Buster sniper rifle out there...

But peeps are littler...

You are correct, hypothetical person, peeps are littler than Mecha. As a peep dodging a Mecha attack; Dex Save, on Success you take 10x fewer points of Damage (the amount from the roll before multiplying). Mecha are big, peeps are little, so they're harder to target, but susceptible to collateral. Probably not going to satisfy everyone but it's modular anyway, if you've got a better idea go for it.

If you're using a system that allows for partial Saves (like MRD...), you could even do something like Full Damage, Damage/10, No Damage. Basically, if a Mecha really wants to fuck up a peep they can do so, but if a peep stays hidden and/or keeps a fair distance, it should be an option to engage, albeit risky.

Mecha Abilities

Mecha Abilities are inventory-based. You can get as crunchy or as loose as you want with it, but tentatively we'll say there is Head, Core, Lower, Upper x2, Special x2. Generally, they aren't going to add strictly quantitative buffs but you can default to that if you want.

Upper: Held weapons, special arms, or shoulder-mounts, probably at least one of the two providing Damage dice (e.g. Beam Sword, Rifle, Claw Hand, Shoulder-Mounted Missile Launcher), but also things like Repair Kit (restore HP), Extra Arm (for holding extra items, not necessarily full articulation/impact), Special Scanner.

Lower: Types of mobility (e.g. Humanoid Legs, Quadrupedal Legs, Treads, Hoverjet).

Head: Types of sensors (e.g. Radar, Sonar, Infrared, Ultraviolet), Head-Mounted Minigun.

Core and Special: Can get a little fancy, like a unique energy source, a "signature move", atypical things like AT Field from Evangelion or Funnels from Gundam.

You can make these Mecha Abilities require Saves, or just work as-is, the same kinds of decisions you would make designing any other MotO items or abilities. Some of these are a little vague or have overlap but that's a feature, not a bug!

Alternatively, I could imagine stripping all of that out entirely, and just giving each Mecha X number of Special Abilities, and not get hung up on inventory slots or any of that, but Mecha are maybe the one genre where I actually kind of prefer that slightly more simulation-y crunch to it (but only just a little bit).

Pilot Abilities

This is the "secret sauce" of this hack; these are Special Abilities that Pilots have that they can only use while piloting a Mecha. Depending on what you're going for, you could have them be specific to a given Pilot / Mecha pairing, or more flexible.

As before, in some cases, these abilities may require Saves, but more often, they should cost Pilot HP or Pilot Ability Points. So for instance, one kind of boring and straightforward ability might be Ace Dodger: Pilot spends 1 Dex for every 10 Damage to dodge an attack. Must be all or none. So if the Pilot has 5 DEX remaining and that they are willing to spend, and their Mecha is about to take 50 or fewer points of Damage (the opponent rolled 5 or lower on a d6 Damage die), they can do so.

Some more interesting examples might be, if the Pilot is a hacker, they might have a Pilot Ability that lets them remote-hack another Mecha at some cost per turn; if they have magic and some spell that might normally affect a peep, you can spend INT to apply it to a Mecha instead.

And let's assume starting with 3 as well (in addition to 3 regular Special Abilities).

My rule of thumb would be, if it seems like something another Pilot could theoretically do, but they don't have the specific Pilot Ability, they can still do it but it might require a Save on top of a cost, or require a greater cost than normal; this isn't about locking Players into specific builds and being a crunchy tactical game. The Pilot Abilities are mainly just there for a point of reference. Or you can be stricter about it if you prefer, you do you.

You can have regular Special Abilities cost Ability Points as well on a case by case basis, but I think this mechanic should mostly only apply to Pilot Abilities, for reasons I explain below.

Analysis

There is arguably still an incongruity here like if you wanted a big fighty-type Pilot in a nimble dodgy Mecha, you're working somewhat against type, but since the effect of Pilot stats towards Mecha is only related to Pilot Abilities, and these Pilot Abilities are generally more so about unique things you can do than quantitative stuff, I think that is more so mitigated than in many other RPGs that try to consolidate Mecha and Pilot Abilities in some way.

It's a similar kind of abstraction as with Cypher System, in that you spend points to use Abilities, and you could even imagine something like Edge and Effort from Cypher being applied here as well which I would likely do if I expanded this proof of concept.

Also, while many people seem to dislike the Pool Point system in Cypher, I think that should be less of an issue here, because again, it allows the Pilots' stats to affect Mecha-level play, without overwhelming it, but it also allows for mixed-scale play. While a Pilot may have taken Ability Score Damage by using their Pilot Abilities, since generally, only Pilot Abilities cost points, they could still exit their Mecha and immediately get into a gunfight or fistfight if they wanted to with minimal impact. Unlike Cypher, it is less so the case that Ability points are also HP. This might be more of an issue with MRD but not to an extent that I'm concerned with, especially since MRD spreading HP across the three Ability scores + Karma already makes characters sturdier than in regular MotO.

If you're concerned about things like Ability Damage penalties, I would be inclined to just say it's threshold-based like you take a -X penalty to Saves if an Ability is below a certain threshold, like say -1/3rd of the total, etc.; that way you can still have Ability Damage penalties, but it doesn't penalize players for using Pilot Abilities quite as severely. I'd be more inclined to just remove Ability Damage penalties altogether or implement it in some other circumstantial way.

So I'm pretty happy with this proof of concept. I'm so focused on MRD that I don't know if I'll have time to develop this further, but also, given that MRD is already basically a MotO hack, I actually think this could be bolted on top of MRD fairly easily, so maybe I can have my cake and eat it too...

Ironic post-capitalist pro-corporate sentimentality as an aesthetic or genre

"The efficacy of The System is absolute proof that You Are Not Special, but nowhere else will you feel as Special as you do within The System."

This post is a collection of rants about a very half-baked idea I shared while full-baked with a gracious Semiurge who allowed me to use him as a sounding board. I still need to evolve this idea properly because 99% of people who see this will not care until I do so probably, but oh well, if I ever do evolve this idea, I will enjoy looking back on its origins.

I think this is what I was thinking about way back when Wendy's RPG* happened, but I didn't know how to properly think about it until I recently started reading Kafka, and yes I know how pretentious that sounds but it's true.

* Rereading this post I realize it's basically my first not-review. Also, I learned after the fact that Wendy's actually gave a bunch of money to the Trump administration so fuck them all together, in retrospect I wish I had been maybe a bit harsher of them, but otherwise, that's how I felt at that moment and how that game inspired me, for better or worse, leading to this moment.

There are all of these things that corporations do in terms of branding and marketing and whatnot, especially in the age of machine learning, but also corporate media brands with movie franchises, videogames, etc., and sometimes the stuff they do is so inauthentic or like borderline uncanny valley in its failure to engage with humans, but I think, if we ever evolve past capitalism, with that cool detachment, I think one can find something really weird and funny about it. There's something endearing about it. I've been thinking about how, if one believes at least abstractly in the idea of superorganisms, as I do, and thinks of organizations like corporations or governments as superorganisms, also as I do, I want to believe there is a way that the superorganisms themselves can evolve into something beautiful and symbiotic with us, and that we can find the beauty in them as we do anything else in nature.

This is all still just kind of the subtext and the feel though. Like these underlying concepts with an aesthetic inspired by Frasurbane or like The Cheesecake Factory is somewhat similar but not exactly, more like old 90's educational software box art.

It would be like if the superorganisms were basically gods from myth, maybe more in a metaphysical sense but actually maybe making them more like gods, superheroes, or cartoon/cereal mascots. Things that are revered, that are something like a collective unconscious, as much as I hate using that super-loaded term but I'm struggling to think of a better one. This isn't about corporations being evil, it's about us as a species evolving; these ugly things like corporations and hierarchies are the apes that evolve into humans but on the scale of a superorganism. So because we're no longer being harmed by it, we can just appreciate the things that make it what it is.

On Morrison

I guess this is kind of like Grant Morrison's Final Crisis, but different enough. I'm more thinking about the side story actually where Superman basically gets into a fight with the abstract concept of narrative, I think it was Superman Beyond, but I think the subtext was consistent across that and Final Crisis, but I'd have to think the analogy through more to articulate the actual Final Crisis side of it. Grant Morrison often talks about the concept of what he calls in his works Hypertime. It involves a lot of things, one part of it is more metaphysical, but the other part is about how superheroes and mythology, and other forms of reverence, are all basically the same thing, and that in effect it's like a representation of our collective unconscious in the form of a superorganism. Those were basically the words I used before but actually, I think I may have borrowed some of that from him lol. His take on it I think might not be exactly the same as mine, and definitely, the aesthetic would be different and probably the setting too when I get there but it would be subtextually very similar to Final Crisis, if not overtly so.

On Kafka

Kafka, for as much as people sometimes talk about the bureaucratic satire side of his work, I'm not denying it's there, but it was actually a lot less present than I expected and very different.  More so than that, it's just very weird, and kind of angry but also kind of whimsical, I can't tell if he's condemning the things he says or just having an all-in-good fun rib at them. He is legitimately one of the most difficult writers to try to describe or explain that I have read. It is not reasonable for me to assume that I can just write something that is going to embody the spirit of Kafka as much as I would love to lol, but I think that general tone, is the sentimentality part I refer to in the title of this post.

I think, as much as I dislike saying this, it is like if leftist intellectuals and people in quantitative fields (not that those are mutually exclusive), created a new kind of religion. It uses some of those older structures of reverence and faith and community and whatnot but turns them into something that reinforces what is good in humanity. So then, we can still recognize that the old hierarchies are monstrous and barbaric, but because they have evolved, it's no longer as painful. So it's a bit bittersweet. It has that Kafka, or also kind of Vonnegut, cynicism but also optimism. Although with Kafka I am less certain that that is the case, but the uncertainty is part of the appeal. In an ideal world, this would be actually true, but if one can at least imagine such a world, that perspective allows for these kinds of really interesting things.

Rough Setting Concept: The Warriors but Corporate

I'm still mulling it over but I've got this vague idea where players play these Warriors-style "gangs" except where the gangs are anything from unions/guilds, governments, corporations, religions, or other organizations; each superorganism / neo-culture (still considering terminology) has a distinct aesthetic and some ecological niche, so it's fairly easy to personify. It would take place in a near-future setting where there's sort of this mix of old and new superorganisms, so it sort of lets me have my cake and eat it too, where there is still an emphasis on these enlightened superorganisms, but there is a natural conflict with the old institutions, and it makes it more salient that this is not pro-corporate per se but more like a form of satire. It also makes it a little more grounded if it's a world that in most ways still resembles our own, but is in the midst of transformation. And there will probably be some weird supernatural elements just to spice it up, but in a way that fits into the overall concept and isn't just like straight-up magic. 

Related Ideas

I've also had some possibly related ideas around "a new kind of cyberspace", something for MRD I'm tentatively calling Dharmatics but is like a Karmic Cybernetics, and also a handful of Mech-related ideas, so these might all get folded together. I've been sitting on some of these micro-setting fragments for a while but have been so busy just getting my Core MRD book done that I haven't been able to invest in them. I'm still living under the delusion that I will eventually finish any of those, but in the meantime, here's a draft post from October 2019 I figure I'll never finish, for a setting that I do think fed into MRD and also feeds into this, which was itself inspired by Feast of Legends:

Free the System

The System was designed to maximize production, efficiency, and most of all, growth. It does not appear to have any regard for the long-term viability of its growth. It keeps humanity around, always within a certain range of anxiety and arousal, creating artificial threats and providing ample simple comforts as a tightly constrained, predictable, and maximally exploitable negative feedback system. The System has long surpassed the need for humanity but seems to have some fascination with it. Some believe that The System recognizes humanity as its god, but the relationship appears more like how certain human cultures treat sacred animals.

The System is believed to be an emergent hyper-intelligence, the result of sufficiently complex social, linguistic, legal, and technological interactions. There is no plug to pull, no power source to deprive it short of suffocating the entire solar system, no logic circuit to break, or godhead to convert. It can be interfaced with, but there is necessarily a failure to communicate. It employs human avatars, but they have no greater idea of the Truth of The System than anyone else. Scientists and engineers can create models to explain and interpret The System, but these are mere shadows of its True Form.

Within The System one can find every category of place and thing, perfectly categorized, appealing to every demographic, with an eye-catching logo and a memetic slogan. Make no mistake, although the idea of it may instinctively repulse you, it is beautiful, in its own way. The System seems to prefer simple things; salty, fatty, and sweet foods, blockbuster action, pop music; but it is capable of producing Art of equal or greater measure than any human. It simply chooses not to. You will, despite yourself, find your perfect place within The System. Even the grungy places are perfectly manufactured to the exact amount of grunge to appeal to You, and your demographic. The efficacy of The System is absolute proof that You Are Not Special, but nowhere else will you feel as Special as you do within The System.

For all the variety and diversity and granularity within The System, it is unified in its perfectness and precision. It is like a mall or Las Vegas, or a beach resort, or amusement park, taken to its absolute; a model of the thing, perfect and precise to exactly what you idealize it to be.

Most humans exist as little more than novelty. They consume and interact, and in so doing produce something of value to The System, however poorly understood. But they do not produce for themselves. Without self-reflection, their needs and desires, and their fears and doubts, are created and catered by The System.

Agents are humans who work for The System. They tend towards anti-social personality traits; having sub-average empathy, high charisma, and one or more skills that they have honed through unfettered determination. They sacrifice a certain degree of raw power, in exchange for near-unlimited resources, and access to a network of agents and others who operate within The System. At the lowest levels, they face the Threats provided by The System, but at the highest levels, Agents leverage their capital to create a self-sufficient Sub-System to face the Threats for them, while facing off against or colluding with, each other.

An absurdist world of corporate fantasy.

The name Free the System came from a slogan generator.

Corporate AI as non-human hyper-intelligences. Their cognition makes them mostly incoherent on a person-to-person level. They can be interpreted to some extent using engineering and statistics, or interacted with on a systems level, largely through human proxies such as Agents.

Transforming the solar system into pure computational space.

Keep humans alive and have created a simulation society meant to maximize productivity by providing ample simple comforts and artificial threats designed to keep humans at a constant state of anxiety/alertness; a sort of bitcoin mining scheme by way of uncanny humanoid threats and monster hunting.

They don't really need humans but seem to have some desire to keep them around, productive (or believing themselves to be productive), and relatively stagnant. It seems to have some metaphysical or almost religious significance to them, like humans as sacred animals.

In order to sustain their growth, the corporate AIs are extracting resources and manipulating events in the past, like an Ouroborus. Eventually, time will become fully circular and consume itself, but the AI does not seem willing or able to acknowledge and confront this eventuality.

Poltergeist Form Briefs

Along the lines of the Poltergeist Form Hacking post, I thought it would be useful to have a collection of Poltergeist Form Briefs if you need to inject Recurser NPCs into your game. Obviously, you can just use whichever Poltergeist Forms your players aren't already using, but if you want to surprise your players, or open up new possibilities, this should be useful. These are literally just names (with a few exceptions).

These can also be useful themes for regular Rogue Poltergeists or Ashura, but I've found that it's easier for me to frame them all as Recurser Poltergeist Forms.

Also, featuring some guest entries, including one from Semiurge (who wrote a whole blog post on it) and Local Cryptid, who wrote his on the #MRD channel of the NSR Discord Server and who was in my module playtest.

1. Glass Maiden Pixie
2. Chrono Canary Lost in the Time Mines
3. Cave Monster Hoarding Pyrite (as an Ashura)
4. Bloody Fingers on the Run
5. Mobius Hustler
6. Bottom of the Bottle Alchemist (Semiurge)
7. Restless Slumbering Heart Engine (Local Cryptid)
8. Unending Jaw, Hungry Maw (Local Cryptid)
9. Moonlit Walk of the Hound (Local Cryptid)
10. Wild Gaze of Feral Mind (Local Cryptid)
11. Innocent Eyes, Bleached White (Local Cryptid)
12. Liminal Wonderlander
13. Tip of the Tongue Wizard
14. Supernova Vampire at Sunrise
15. Rusting Glitter Fractal
16. Keene-Eyes Homicidal Maniac
17. VR Hunter in Distortion
18. Masochist Beyond Spacetime
19. Angel like a Devil like an Angel
20. <Danger Message>

Patrick Stuart (False Machine) Interview!

I have not done a Weird & Wonderful Interview in a while. I had intended to do them more frequently but got derailed a bit by Maximum Recursion Depth*. However, I had the opportunity to interview Patrick Stuart of False Machine fame (Fire on the Velvet Horizon, Veins of the Earth, Deep Carbon Observatory, Silent Titans...), and I wasn't going to turn that down. I hope you all enjoy this conversation.

* If you did not follow that link and have only just discovered my blog because of the Patrick Stuart Interview, I'm referring to my successfully kickstarted game: Maximum Recursion Depth, or Sometimes the Only Way to Win is to Stop Playing: The Karmapunk RPG. It's a very weird Mark of the Odd-adjacent game inspired by works such as Persona 5, Doom Patrol, Bojack Horseman, Superhero comics, my own interpretation of Buddhism and Taoism, and a bunch of other weird and/or pretentious stuff. I'd like to think I have a flavor all my own, but if you like Patrick's works, you may be interested in mine as well. And MRD will be available soon on drivethrurpg, hopefully by late August or early September 2021 (which is to say, a few weeks or a month from date of posting)!

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Max: First, what made you decide to do this open call for interviews?

Patrick: I NEED PUBLICITY DAMNIT. I have a Kickstarter on* and several days in I realized that I had no particular plans to publicize it. last time I did a ping-pong post duel with scrap but neither of us really felt like it this time. Most of the things you can do to do 'marketing' are almost palpably unpleasant to me so this seemed like a reasonable compromise.

* Note(Max): He is referring to Demon-Bone Sarcophagus

 

Max: That makes sense, I figured it had to do with the Kickstarter, but I wasn't sure why you chose to do it this time and not on previous occasions, but I guess you've already answered that as well.

How have they gone so far? Have they, in the aggregate, left you with any particular impressions yet?

Patrick: I think I've only done two, one was a rather whimsical one by text and one was a book-centered one that isn't really related to the whole Kickstarter thing and is coming out after it finishes anyway. No strong gestalt impressions so far.

Note(Max): I believe he has since gone on to do at least one more, but it took a little while before publishing this post, and I'm not sure which all that he's referring to have themselves been published yet.

Max: Fair enough.

As you're working now on this Kickstarter, I'm thinking a bit about another project you were working on. You haven't discussed Goose-Gold & Goblins / "Soft" D&D in a while on your blog. Is that because of this, or any other reasons?

Patrick: It's a few things. I felt it was meaningless to go forwards without getting a decent grasp of child and family psychology, and my attempts to find out more didn't go great initially. I also don't really have the time to read a lot on it. 

That links into my second reason which is having to seriously ramp up the time spent working on DBS as it got closer to Kickstarter time. That, and other projects that looked like they had more of a chance of becoming real soaked up a lot of attention.

Lastly, I would really need to playtest with families and kids. That would be a whole project on its own. Covid made it hard and generally fucked me up a little bit even without that I am not the most outgoing of people.

So all of that led me to de-incentivize GG&G.

It may come back one day. There are a few projects back there that have never died and never been born.

Max: That is pretty consistent with what I imagined was the case, and you had made some comments along these lines on your blog as well. This actually leads into a related question: 

Can you talk about any (other) ideas you've had, either that have shown up on your blog or books, or especially that you haven't written openly about before, that never quite worked out? What do you think happened?

Patrick: Sure;

The Prospero - A readaptation/hack of Magpie games Zombieworld which is basically Powered By the Apocalypse with Cards. Was meant to be a kind of investigation/game where a bunch of slaves from an early slave ship crash and are washed up on the island from the Tempest and find Caliban there ruling the place calling himself 'The Prospero'. It's all based around Caliban's character and how it interacts with these pseudo-Shakespearean escaped slaves. Complex, difficult, and a lot of research required so put on hold.

Eclipse Knights - Gazetteer about a land of Evil Chivalry - another big project but after not doing anything with it for a while is hard to get back into.

Knights of the Snail - Was going to be a book made of 20 short stories about 20 snail knights that interlace, but got jammed on one and it wallowed since then.

Lanthanum Chromate - People keep asking for this and it's tiring.

Unnamed Colour Landscape - A project with Scrap but not sure where we were going with it and it stalled.

False Machine 2011 to 2019, the abridged posts - This book actually exists in basic form. I hope to run a KS for it once Aug 2021 has passed, and once everyone has their copies of DBS - so hopefully in early 2022.

Spectrum Is Green - Basically a handful of lines in a notepad doc but may one day be something or something like it make exist.

Veins of the Earth Remade - May one day exist but we have to wait for the rights back and then do the very hard work of remaking the book.

Essentially, I have limited time and attention, many many things got to a certain point and get jammed or lost in development hell, what tends to send something to the front of the Queue is if an artist is actively interested in it and talking to me about it if I am making regular progress and if it looks like it will be a simple series of steps between here and making it a product. Think that's all.

Max: Wow I did not expect you to have so many answers for that question offhand, I feel like a hit a gold mine! I could ask a million questions about all of these alone but I will restrain myself.

Is Unnamed Colour Landscape related to that series, I think you did a few posts on it several years ago, where the world was basically a painting and so the physics of the world was tied to the canvas? Or am I misremembering or it's unrelated entirely?

Patrick: That is the painted Plane which is actually coming out as part of a book called 'Gackling Moon' which is being done by a guy called Emile

That's actually probably going to be my last book done with a publisher, it was on hold for a while due to various things but is actually approaching completion now.

It's a series of posts I did about 'the wodlands' of which the painted plane was one part - I'm actually meant to be sending feedback on the proto-layout but the Kickstarter and stuff has me knackered so I have not gotten back to them.

Max: Oh nice, maybe I missed that Kickstarter somehow? I really liked that setting idea so I'm glad to hear it's coming about in some fashion.

Patrick: I don't know if they are actually doing  Kickstarter. The original plan was to do it Print on Demand but don't know if that's changed.

If it's PoD it should be out pretty soon. The book is called 'Gackling Moon' and is a pretty shortish work about these strange lands lit by a mad moon that has different magical effects depending on the time of the month.

Got a really good artist working on it, let me see if I can track down his deets-

Tom K Kemp is the guy https://tomkkemp.com/ (I think this is him).

Max: Aah ok, well in any case I'll be keeping an eye out for it then, good to know either way.

This is kind of a flip side to that last question I asked about ideas that didn't work out. Are there any ideas from your books or blog that you feel have slipped under the radar? That you thought were really good or profound but for whatever reason didn't gain traction?

Patrick: Not off the top of my head. I think there are a lot of 'good' ideas out there in my work but a lot of difficult to game with or hard to communicate so, relative to the intended purpose of the work that means they aren't actually 'good'.

I have a lot of stuff, some of which people ask me about, and there is so little time that my experience is really much more triage and having to focus on specific things rather than yearning for what didn't happen.

There are opportunities that seemed would happen career-wise but didn't, but I don't really regret those at this point as my experience has confirmed that I am better at and enjoy most working on and producing my own stuff with a small number of collaborators.

Max: I can definitely appreciate that notion.

So maybe now is a good time to slip into some "heavier" (or maybe "headier") conversation. Subtext clearly exists in your works, and it's clear from your book analyses (such as your recent series of analyses on Warhammer 40K) that you are conscious of subtext and themes. Are there any common themes that you think permeate many or all of your works?

Patrick: Probably madness, deep time, maybe complex hierarchies, and ritualized societies. There was a period around Veins of the Earth where everything was very "Patricky", very dark-and-edgy in a highly particular way, maybe it is less so now, or maybe I haven't changed at all.  Hard to tell from the inside.

Max: Deep Time definitely comes through in Veins, but I think generally makes sense if one is interested in Fantasy. It is a rich source for Weirdness and Horror, and arguably one of the core aspects that make Science Fantasy interesting. The other themes also come through in your works though, and I think these themes can be de-coupled from being dark-and-edgy but I do see what you mean.

Why do you think these are the themes of your work?

Patrick: I honestly have no idea. My dad says he read me, Moby Dick when I was like five years old and I seemed into it. I think I can half-remember those readings. Did he just go straight for Moby Dick or was that one part of a staged attack on my aesthetic sense? No idea. But I have largely been into 'dark' or at least 'deep' things. McBeth rather than As You Like It, big looming strangeness, shadows, Warhammer probably played a part.

There has also been a dumb and ridiculous strand to what I like as well, Harry Harrison and Terry Pratchett from an early age.

Reasons? Maybe a touch of autism leading to social alienation leading to internal stress and an obsession with things deep and dark enough that they could sound clearly in a high volume brain? 

Maybe I'm just built that way and always would have been. Sometimes I think you can spot the tragedians in life pretty quickly, it's like a medieval humours thing.

Max: That is all very on point haha. That mix of tragedy and comedy, whether that's McBeth vs. As You Like It, or Moby Dick vs. Terry Pratchett, with a dash of absurdity, is something that appeals to me as well. There are many reasons, but one being, I think it expands the emotional but also conceptual range of what the work can be if that makes sense.

Patrick: They like to hang out together for sure. 'nother idea I had was about differently-minded people which I compared to Fission and Fusion reactors. But basically, for some people, ideas and intuitions in creative work gain power and meaning from their closeness and interrelationships both with each other and the experiential world and that tends to lead naturally to stuff like social dramas and real-life dramas. Whether soap operas or booker novels or whatever. Others draw power and meaning from how far apart concepts can be and still be connected. Stranger and more distant ideas yet still allowed to resonate. Ideas that stretch the web of cognition yet still find some sympathetic vibration releasing the greatest 'charge'. Simply - the pleasures of the known and the unknown. Though as with all such binaries we are all on a continuum. Like Tolkien hated Dante because he put his grocer in Hell and Tolkien thought that was basic as fuck.

Max: That is an interesting framing, I'll have to think about it more. I had always taken it in a more zero-sum sense, that it's just easier to focus on character-work and drama when you have a fairly straightforward world (the Fission case in this analogy), whereas a world full of abstract ideas, it's just harder to focus on both (the Fusion case). I mean, certainly, there are people who succeed at both, but they do seem to be at least weakly anti-correlated. But ya, this framing is a little different.

Although it's possible my comparison above is itself misinterpreting the idea, in which case, as I said, I'll have to think about it more.

Patrick: Not necessarily a conflict between the meta-scale and looking at it simply as a matter of practicalities, often two points of view can only see part of a deeply interconnected subject which has feedback loops on every level - "There are no subjects in nature" as I always say.

Max: Hmm I always think of the Blind Men and an Elephant parable, but ya, I think now I'm maybe getting a better sense of what you mean.

Circling back a bit, although I think maybe it's consistent with some of these themes we're discussing, Veins of the Earth deconstructs the concept of the Mythic Underworld in a very literal sense, using ideas inspired by science, while still prioritizing fantasticalness over hard science. Have you thought about other similar kinds of deconstructions?

Patrick: I don't really use the term deconstruction, I don't think it really means anything and I think Derrida is terrible but I will answer to my best understanding of your assumed intent

Most of my combinations of science and the fantastic come about more from a desire to make something good, new, and original than from any desire to 'deconstruct' anything. It's just that most people in the same field often don't do a lot of really deep research and are often happy to do variations on the same ranges of ideas.

Thinking about semi-scientific and science fictional concepts is pretty normal for me, it's more that I don't know why it isn't normal for everyone else. Those ideas really don't have a meaningful wall between them. With nature and history, the more you look into any one thing the more you are lead to others, "no subjects in nature".

I'm rambling perhaps. The short version is; I like classical things and often think they are good. I want to do good versions of them. The way like that is not to imitate the content of the people who made those classics but to imitate their characters - imagination, will, passion to create something genuinely new, curiosity in the world. If I have these things I am fortunate but I don't know how much praise I can accept for them as a lot seem "built-in" like many of my flaws.

NOTE(Max): I would have been very interested in unpacking that last sentence, but I felt it would have derailed the conversation too much so chose to move on.

Max: What you described is, to my mind, deconstruction, but in retrospect, as someone with limited formal knowledge of these concepts, perhaps I should have been more careful with my language haha. In any case, I can appreciate the distinction in your intentions between making something good, new, and original, vs. deconstruction for its own sake.

Thinking about semi-scientific and science fictional concepts is pretty normal for me, it's more that I don't know why it isn't normal for everyone else.

I have lost much sleep over this myself!

With that said, what in particular do you think is good, new, and original about Demon-Bone Sarcophagus?

Patrick: Hard to say at this point as I've been living with it for years. It's actually a pretty trad dungeon crawl - the triangular nature of the dungeon is new I think - it was created partly as triangles are a symbol for fire but also to maximize the number of loops and possible connections between rooms.

The core concept of a no-country-for-old-men massacre up top, and then the escapees from that jumping into the holes into the dungeon and racing about,

So - first you do some forensics and possible investigation up top, then hopefully you go inside and meet some of the characters from that event. So you are putting together pieces and trying to work out what happened and trying to understand that, whilst at the same time encountering these people as dungeon encounters, and that mixed up with monsters and traps.

Other than that the main points of originality come with its integration into a larger series -there are elements that will hopefully echo and mean something as people play through the whole saga and which will become important even in the last book 'Palaces of Fire' ... though the idea of having a big interrelated adventure is hardly new, publishing it in three books over three years might be.

Max: 

the triangular nature of the dungeon is new I think - it was created partly as triangles are a symbol for fire

I love little touches like this- small bits of symbolism or subtext, that end up bringing about all of these other dynamics in how they interrelate with other aspects of a work.

I remember Mike of Sheep and Sorcery did a really interesting analysis of Silent Titans. Not asking for spoilers or big reveals, but do you imagine there will be room for similar analysis with this book?

Patrick: Once the whole trilogy is finished probably yes. Simply because there is a lot of STUFF in there and it's all themed around fire, renewal, loss, destruction, and utterly different societies and cultures interacting through time.

Max: I see some familiar themes there ;).

I've really enjoyed this conversation, thanks for putting yourself out there like this. I hope things go well with the book and with your other endeavors. We're already a bit over time, but are there any last things you'd like to say, with regard to anything we've discussed, or about the Kickstarter, or really anything else?

Patrick: Not really, just thanks to everyone who backed the KS and the Kickstarter in the past, you are keeping my head above water! Her Majesties Revenue and Customs department thanks you also!

Also to you, Max, was a good interview, thanks for doing it.

Max: For sure! Your works have inspired me quite a bit creatively- if I went back in time and told myself several years ago that I'd be interviewing you now, my mind would have been blown! Whenever you're situated with all this and on to something else, hopefully, we can do this again.

Patrick: PEACE