Books are People Too

In the present day, for a great many who have embraced the profession as their own, writing has become a service industry, not unlike kitchen work or delivery. I have experienced this; it can pay well, it can be stable and secure, it can even be a half-decent way to spend one's day, so long as there are not too many days when it feels like a real job.

But writing ad copy or rephrasing quarterly reports is not "writing" in the Shakespearean, Thackarean or Hemingwayesque sense, but rather "communication" on the scale of runes scratched on tree bark to send a message that a man is stuck in the mud, as in the Kipling Just So story.  Communication is repeating something that we already know in a clarifying manner, in the most efficient way possible, to enable a process, such as sales, or decision-making for a company reading said reports, that has nothing actually to do with either the message or the method. This is what many writers who are caught up in the "service industry" logic fail to distinguish; that while thoughts are communicated through writing, the point isn't to communicate those thoughts to a specific person, or even a specific kind of person. The point is to communicate those thoughts because they need communicating, listener be damned.

I am commonly exhorted by various voices to write content that publishers will want to publish, because it will make them money. To get published, this content must not offend; it must not contain a possibility of being misunderstood; it must not be about subjects that are too "unfriendly" to the largest number of people; it must not depict persons in a way that would be considered demeaning, or punching either up or down, or across either. In short, I must write what already exists, but in sufficiently different words so that I am saying things that are safe and have already been said, but in a way they haven't been said before, or at least in a way that most people don't know hasn't been said before. Oh, and despite the resistance against "punching," it must be conflict-driven. That's very important.

It was not necessary for Shakespeare to write this way, as essentially there were no rules except for the ownership of the Globe, who did not care about anyone's hurt feelings — largely because the audience was free to express this by actively throwing things, with the approval of the management, that being the state of the theatre at the time. "Be an actor my son, but be ready to dodge."

More importantly, Shakespeare could not have written for me, personally, or anyone alive right now, no matter how many marketing experts he might have dug up like Yorick to tell him how to create conflict without punching down. Yet miraculously, he managed to write jokes that I have understood and laughed aloud at, in rooms of people not laughing, there to see Shakespeare the way they went to church, unaware entirely of the subtext. The funniest thing about my seeing Twelfth Night, my favourite Shakespearean play, is all the laughing I'm going to do in a near silent room. It says something, I think, about the failure of writing as "communication."  More often than not, because of the listener, the jokes don't land, however "there" they are.

Furthermore, this concept of target-audience engineering need not examples from so far in the past to show how clumsy is their design. To begin with, there is the great mass of authors post-1950 who simply fail to make inroads with the modern reader... but obviously, we don't suggest that Capote, Vonnegut, Plath, Ginsberg or Thompson shouldn't have bothered writing because, without their historical weight, they'd have faceplanted as authors if their first books had been published today. No, we're perfectly willing to make concessions that for them, in their time, without the engineering, it was okay to just go ahead and write whatever the hell they wanted, confident that today they'd still have readers, without the need of a 2026 publisher.  Of course, none of these writers were any good, right. I mean, none of them were worth reading, since they did punch down, and up, and sideways, and at themselves, with no regard whatsoever against an audience that had no rotten fruit to throw. We don't read them because they were good, no. Obviously not. We read them because... because... wait, why?

Well, I suppose because we can be BIG enough to grant a freedom to the dead, to write what they like, that can no longer be granted to the living. That seems plain enough.

To end with, I'll casually point out that no one in any era worth their sand, the term that used to apply to a person having value, waited for permission to write something. Nor did they pay any attention to approval, bans, refusals to publish or the prospect of being "disliked," which apparently is the worst thing that can happen to a person. If they could not make themselves heard one way, they found another. The only reason we know who Charles Bukowski was is because, well, he just did not give a fuck about who read or did not read his work. He did not write for other people. This is the point I started with. Writers do not write for readers. That's the role of the communicator.

Communication with words as a service industry is about being paid to write content that one is told to write. We are given a job, much like being asked to make a Monte Cristo sandwich; that job involves the arrangement of words to ensure, at their best, that they can only be understood one way. If I say that this company last year broke ground on a gas plant outside Sundre, and that the plant has reached a point where a definite date can now be named for when sour gas at that plant will begin processing, then the date matters, the clarity of what's going to happen on that date, how much of it is going to happen, where the supply will arrive from and where the finished product will go, how much it will cost according to the present figures, how much the predicted future will adjust those figures and so on, then all of this has to be crystal clear if the goal is to publish so an investor who might want to visit and tour the plant already has the correct information at their fingertips. The Monte Cristo's cheese has to be cooked just so, the bread dipped in the right amount of egg, and browned, just so, and cut just so, and plated just so, and on, so that it looks precisely like every other Monte Cristo this kitchen will make today, regardless of the cook making it. Communication, when done well, is not subject to the writer's footprint; it is best if the writer of the communication doesn't have one, since that will only muddy the message.

Human beings are not clear. They are muddy. Their motives are never straightforward and singular. Communicative writing is not natural because it requires us to think in a manner that diminishes the nuance that we are comfortable living with every day. The challenge, then, is that no matter how clear we make a thing, no matter how we flatten it into the most boring passages ever about the future of a sour gas plant, someone will misunderstand it because we are not built to all read things about gas plants or taste Monte Cristos in the same way. This makes communicative writing extremely frustrating, because no matter how one tries, the reader just won't have it. This is the point of Kipling's How the First Letter Was Written, because it invents a story about the invention of writing and the story is about how writing as a technology is a total disaster. Despite the effort to write a message for his daughter to carry, Tegumai only discovers that everyone misunderstands his efforts and his daughter Taffy is dearly tormented for his efforts. It is the most important story for a writer to read, I should think, because it carries a message a writer should never forget.

Do not write for other people, unless disappointment is your aim.

Mind you, I say this as I write for other people.

This right now, that I am doing, is communicative writing. I am writing a blog post explaining something I think deserves to be explained, but I fully expect it not to be understood, because it is not the nature of people to learn, appreciate or grasp things they do not already believe.

With my last post, I talked about my tendency to argue in association with a coffeeshop/bookstore that I ran for a brief time. I'll throw in that I began arguing in that other great crucible in which we're all forced to swim during our youth, school.  School for me was a situation where 29 trapped people, and me, would get into these arguments that I would impose ruthlessly, as was my nature then and is my nature now. I remember one of these was the argument that a hero "is a brave person." The class agreed. I did not. I did not believe then that it was so and 45 years has not changed my mind about this. A hero is a person who is there, who doesn't think, who does what's next, then afterwards generally thinks, "Oh my gawd, I could have died doing that. What as I thinking." That's my point. No thinking in the moment is involved. No thinking, no time to be "brave." One is too busy acting.

For years after school, here, there, I'd meet people who'd known me and disliked me who would come up to me at a mall or a restaurant or on the street and act like we'd always been old friends and isn't it great and how is your life going, that sort of thing. And quite often they'd say something to me like, "I remembered that thing you said (eight years ago, when we were 15) and you know what, you were right. I only realised it a long time later, when (tells story about how they came to the same conclusion). I just wanted you to know."

When this happens often enough, one begins to realise that a lot of people argue against a premise not because the premise is false, but because they just haven't had enough personal experience to know one way or the other, so they assume the safest course of action: that "Something I don't personally know is necessarily false." This actually makes a lot of sense to me. As a writer, it makes the point that the argument written down isn't an argument for the time it was written, but for all time. That anyone, at any point in their life, might come back to a thing written again, only to find that now it makes sense, when once it did not.  This is a very strong reason to write things that won't be (presently) understood by people. Because we live in four dimensions, not three.

Writing, understand, not being communicative, can be as muddy as the writer wants it to be. A given sentence can have two, three, even four meanings. Take my phrase about Charles Bukowski:

"The only reason we know who Charles Bukowski was is because, well..."

These 12 words are enough, because the above, unlike communicative writing, is not clear. It doesn't tell you who Bukowski is; it does not define him as a poet; it does not explain, for those who do not know the reference, how it is the right reference here. Nor does it say if I personally like Bukowski. None of this is communicated. Intentionally. Because those who know the poet already know the story; those who don't know him won't benefit from the story. My liking him or not is irrelevant to my knowledge of him, and my awareness of how he's the right modern person to be inserted here.

Omissions like this are not accidents. Writing intentionally plays mind games; it sets out to do far more than lead you down a garden path to a plot twist, it willingly makes you believe that you're in a day garden when actually you're blindfolded, it's night, there's a cliff a foot to your left and no, I'm not the author of this tale, I'm the devil. Writing is about deliberately laying a story out in such a way that it can be read today with this impression given, only to find oneself waking in the night and thinking, "Wait a minute... what happened to the dog?"

These things are not "plot holes." More often than not a "plot hole" is a reader that has failed to pay attention (though, granted, with a lot of films, that is not always so). These things are deliberate to make the reader see the world in a manner that isn't meant to communicate on a conscious level, but a subconscious one. It is dirty pool, it is mendacity and brainwashing and a hoodwink. It is also delicious, which is why it continues despite all the other things we might do instead. We like to read, because it offers a cunning puzzle that cannot be found elsewhere: a human puzzle, where the rules do not reflect what's nice or normal or approved. The best books are not the ones we liked best. The best books are those we cannot make ourselves stop thinking about.

If there is a book you might hate, such that you find yourself railing against it and it's author with a vehemence that is unlike you, that is because the work got under your skin. That's what makes it a good book. You fought that book and you lost. And you don't like that. Too bad.

Books, like people, do not exist that we may approve of them. They exist with the ability to act freely upon the reader, just as your neighbour is free to do with his damned garden hose, or the co-worker with their need to slap a sticky note on your computer screen, or whatever miserable, terrible, sometimes beloved things that human beings do to human beings. A work of literature needs no more justification for its presence than does any human not actively bothering you on this planet... because whatever you may think, the most awfulest book by Ayn Rand or Robert Heinlein does not have the power to grab you and make you read it. But, like people you don't like, you still have to live on a planet where these exist. Worse for you, we continue to generally believe as a culture that it's inappropriate to burn these things, just as it is people... and in fact, that is what Heinrich Heine wrote in 1821: "Where they burn books, they will, in the end, burn human beings too."

Thus, when we write, it is not another bit of non-offensive fluff that fails to punch that we strive to write, when we think of ourselves as writers. No, just as I taught my daughter to use her fists, so that she could defend herself if the time came, I give my books fists too, so they can punch as hard as they need. And if the reader doesn't like that...?

Well... fuck the reader.

Session 5: Fight!

Most of the session consisted of setting up for this fight, having the fight, then sharing out the treasure and experience after. The battle consisted of 9 goblins with 7 to 10 hit points each (goblin soldiers-at-arms, hardened, selected for unusual constitutions) and one "cavewight," which is the equivalent of the AD&D ogre... though augmented through the cult he'd organised around himself, and a total of 44 hit points. In addition, two ochre jellies, whose presence was inexplicable... even more so since they did not attack the goblins but rather ignored them, while freely attacking the party. So, in all, 12 opponents against six party members, levelled 5, 4, 2, 2, 2 and 1.

The battle was close. I am sorry that I did not take screen shots throughout, I simply didn't think of it, trying to manage combat rules that I've forgotten, which the players knew and had to keep calling me out on. It's a trifle embarrassing, but I felt it proved the wiki's value, since the players were using the wiki's rules to correct me. That's how a rule system is supposed to work.

Mikael the mage, 2nd level, suffered most, after likewise probably landing the most successful hit of the game. The black border around the shrine is a five-foot wide pit, which the cavewight was pressed against when Mikael hit him with an attack, knocking him back across the gap and taking him out of the fight at a critical moment. That gave a chance for Pandred to deal with the second jelly (the first had been killed early) while the others managed goblins for a time before the cavewight could get back into it. That breather, I believed, was much needed. Unfortunately, Mikael was knocked down to -3 by an attack by a goblin... then got in the way of the jelly, the average damage of which would have killed him. The jelly did five damage, leaving the mage with -8... whereupon a miraculous 2 in 20 roll was made that allowed the mage to retain consciousness. Left with only the ability to move one hex per round, without the ability to fight, and with his intelligence being essentially between 3 and 4, the character just tried to keep from being hit. Unfortunately, the cavewight had gotten back in the fight by then, had remembered Mikael, and came forward to crush him — only to miss the mage by 1 point. Mikael lived, while Pandred finished off the cavewight; two of the goblins broke ranks by failing morale and the players were able to mop up.

Ti, going into the battle weak, kept to the outskirts and struggled through the fight. Xoltan missed and missed and was missed and was missed. By round eight or nine, he had still not done a point of damage or suffered one. But both characters kept opponents busy and off the backs of Lexent and Pandred, the highest levelled characters. Pandred was wounded early and bled steadily for at least six or seven rounds; Lexent was also wounded, but neither could do anything about it, since they were needed to keep fighting. It's an awesome image... the combatants bleeding from open wounds, still fighting, keeping the rest of the party alive under difficult conditions.

And a call-out to Arduin, Pandred's hench; the faerie fire spell, plus Lexent's dust devil, were unquestionably both effective; Mikael's telling hit would not have landed without the former, and it would not have stunned if the latter had not bled the cavewight's hit points. Well played, all around.

Treasure offered an average of a thousand experience to everyone in the party; I had to be reminded of my proposed rule, that silver give 1 x.p. for every three coins, regardless of silver's value compared to gold, and 1 x.p. for every four coins of copper. I think that rule works well, as it means I don't have to pile up 55,000 copper to make it worthwhile. A few thousand were enough. The total weight of treasure was 170 lb. — though I'm not certain if that includes the gem or not:

This monster common opal, size shown by the 8 in. tall bullseye lantern (not counting handle), weighs 61 lb., 1 oz., and is worth a thousand gold pieces in Ozd/Miskolc, where the party is. If they can get it out of the Sanjak, the political province where they are, it will be worth more. Broken into pieces and polished, it's probably worth ten times as much. The party chose to split the experience for it. An opal of this size is extremely rare; an opal mine might find a head-sized opal once in a lifetime. The above is liable to be found once in a century. The party checked it for magic and it has none. They managed to heft it out, but the risk of moving it is that if found by a random guard, either an Ottoman in the empire they're in, or a customs' patrol should they try to smuggle it into Hungary, they'll either get dinged so hard for the tariff that it won't be profitable, or it'll be simply grabbed. I don't know how much the party understands about this yet, but I'm sure these smart guys have thought about it.

Anyway, that was the running on Friday, pretty much. Next game is the 17th.

P.S.,

Two things I forgot.

The above is the experience for combat only, experienced by the participants.

The other is that the whole combat, using my "complex" system, took about 2 hours and 45 minutes to play. And that's online; it would have been faster in person. I understand this is fast, compared to how normal D&D, and especially 5e, would do with a total of 18 combatants. I know there are some who have trouble with "tactical" combat, but one thing: it isn't boring.

Truth

In 1999, my life had fallen apart. My wife had been taken from me by multiple schlerosis and I'd had something of a breakdown. The year before I'd tried to wrest myself out of a tailspin by starting a zine, that had begun to get some attention from actual mainstream media in the city... but then my business partner had a collision just before Christmas and emptied the joint bank account to cover his loss, at the same time that I'd had an accident and broken my left ulna. All that spring I'd tried to put myself together again emotionally, fought to get enough coverage for my arm to cover at least a part of my rent; finally I'd had to abandon the apartment I was living in so I could sleep on the living room floor of a fellow I barely knew through a coffee-shop bookstore where I used to go to play chess and engage in discussions about politics, art, philosophy and the like. I was just 34.

I got work as a cook and got a new room to live-in with a roommate who seemed steady at first but eventually bailed on me. The apartment got switched to my name and I got another roommate who turned out to be easier to live with though a bit of a slob. Around the same time the bookstore, which was run by an ex-hippie who was not a businessman and did not care about business, or the law really, needed someone to run it five days a week and I jumped at it. I moved behind the counter and started making and serving the coffee as well as drinking it.

The bookstore was nominally open from 11 a.m. to 9, which made a ten-hour shift. The owner couldn't afford to pay minimum wage for that, so he made a deal to pay me a quarter of the day's take, which I'd take home each night, with the other three quarters put in an envelope and dropped through the slot of the place next door, which he also owned. Since it didn't matter to me how long I worked, I began opening at 7 a.m., then staying until midnight. I lived a 7 minute walk from the place, so I would get up about 6:40, scrub my body, do the basic things and then walk over and open the place. At night, I'd close, mop up for half an hour and then go home to crash. I got about 28-30 hours of sleep total between Sunday and Thursday; then I'd sleep on the weekends.

Meanwhile, I got neighbourhood regulars who made it practical for me to be up that early; I'd usually make a hundred and fifty by the bookstore's actual opening time, when the place would fill up with all familiar faces. There were about twenty diehards who came in every day, another twenty who might come in once every three days and hardly any strangers. The place was loaded with couches and tables with chessboard surfaces, while behind the bar were a dozen chess-sets. The chessplayers would roll in around six and stay 'til eleven; the university students appeared around four; the musicians around six. Most would hang for four or five hours. We treated the shop like a living room.

As I said, my workday ran about 16-17 hours. If I felt up to it, I closed later. I drank buckets of coffee. I began talking with professionals in the early hours and various forms of people, from those a foot from the street to those working through their PhDs, steadily and without a break for hour after hour, day after day. I brought in a crock pot and made soup that I sold to make a little extra money, since we were selling squares and bakery goods already. I brought my own music, an eclectic collection of mixed casette tapes with music that ranged from 1955 to the present of that time. Technically, playing the tapes in a public business was illegal. No one noticed. No cop ever set foot in the door, because no one drank, no one fought, no one was loud enough to be heard. The store was in a little strip mall with the nearest apartment building about a hundred yards away. I was never robbed. The customers were all "friends" of mine. Over the next ten years, I'd go to their birthday parties, their weddings (where sometimes I'd be the M.C.). I still know some of these people.

A lot of that talking involved what I called "list conversations." There was an internet, but it in November of 1999 it was in its infancy... which is to say that these talks were a sort of in-person social media. Somebody would mention a movie they liked, then someone would mention another movie, then that would remind someone of another, and another, and another, and for half an hour or more the whole conversation would just be making these group lists of movies that people had seen, and what ought to be seen, and what was all right, and what never should have been made and so on. Another day it would be music, say jazz Monday, then metal on Wednesday. Or politicians. Or places people visited. Or languages people had tried to learn, had learned, had learned and had now forgotten. Basically, anything could be a list conversation.

Another kind of group conversation was certainly what would later develop as the "flame war," but such terms didn't exist yet. Between five and nine just about every day, there'd be at least thirty people, counting the chessplayers; and like I say, we all knew each other. And we didn't think alike, so we'd argue. Mostly, people would argue with me. Not because I'm argumentative in and of itself, please understand, but because an argument would start in front of me about something, and two people would have opinions, and say this and that, and I'd be right there, playing chess with someone across the bar, or cleaning dishes in the sink, or working on D&D, which I could do while I worked, because I didn't have a boss to tell me to "get to work" or anything, so long as the place was clean at night and the till managed. And being right there, I'd have something to say when someone said something I didn't agree with. Moreover, in any room, especially one that I'm managing, I'm better at arguing than anyone else. It's not like I'm going to stand there and have someone say that Robert Borden built the railway across Canada, am I?  I'm certainly not going to listen quietly while someone fails to recall that Louis Riel was a Metis. And if someone says that the Federal government tried to "take away Alberta's oil" in 1980 because they were greedy, well no, I'm not going to listen and accept that garbage either. I'm going to weigh in. I'm going to correct. I'm going to walk over to the shelf in the bookshop I'm in and get out the book there and prove my bloody point. Right?

Because, see, there's a few very interesting things about having a bookstore at your disposal, depending on the person you are. One behind the counter might stand among all those books and be vaguely aware of what they are or what's in them. Another might resent having to dust them, since this really was more of a coffee shop than a bookstore; I think I actually sold about a book a month for the eight months I was there... though of course people would pick a book and read it while drinking their coffee.  But I am, or was, before the internet, a lover of books. I am a writer, after all. And I had many, many hours to just hang and wait for money to come in the door, with the time to take note of where all the books were. Too, I was 35 by then, and about 8 to 10 years older than the main body of the regulars who hung out there. I had a university degree in Classical History and Archeology, I'd been a professional student between 1986 and 1992 and I already knew a lot of books that were there. Plus I had a mind that kept track of book shelf geography, because I'd spent 20 years haunting libraries for fun at that point. So when I say, I walked "over to the shelf," I mean straight to it, knowing where the book was, like a magician producing a rabbit out of a hat, while flipping to page 85 to read the second paragraph from the top of that page. For a lot of people, that's fucking scary. It's not the way someone who is schlepping coffee is supposed to be.  After all, people who work pouring coffee for a living are losers.

All this is to give an impression of what confidence looks like to people who don't possess it. Confidence is not caring where one works; or caring what one looks like in a given moment, or the state of one's present circumstance. Confidence is not a suit and a tie or a job and money and a big house. It isn't an education or a fat list of books read or talents had or how well one can speak or even the stupidity not to care what others think. Confidence is holding a standard in one's mind that is bigger than the presence of every person in the room and then insisting that everyone it going to be held to that standard, come hell or hurt feelings or embarrassment or a friendship potentially lost. My world at that time, and now, was made of facts. Not in the sense that we have a perfect knowledge of truth or can accurately state that anything is a "fact," really, not if one has read Plato, Kant or Nietzsche, certainly.  But a fact in the sense that what just came out of your mouth is total bullshit, while what came out of this book is at least agreed upon by someone outside this room we're in. This is a very important measure to weigh in these things, and despite those who feel it doesn't have to be, especially now in this wild west of the internet, it remains as true today as it was then. Nothing is a fact. But an opinion that has been vouchsafed by someone with enough skin in the game to make it public has more validity that whatever half-baked thing that came out of your brain ten seconds ago.

That standard, to count for everything, must be external. It must be. It cannot be what I think in my gut, or what my group of friends think, or what my professors happened to think or what some large NGO banging doors in a goverment house think we should all think — no. The only standard that matters, that can matter, is one that is so widespread that it is impossible to point to one person or one gang or one institution as its source. We do not know that Da Vinci painted the Mona Lisa because he wrote a letter about it, or because the Louvre says so, or because someone made a movie about it or some group of experts took paint samples... but because everyone that counts has already, for the last five centuries, put this one to bed. It's not a question. And when it becomes a question, and people in authority allow it to become a question, that's not because it is one... it's because someone, somewhere, has lowered the standard so they can justify awarding themselves some importance as a fact-wrecker. It's not the pursuit of truth that's going on, it's the pursuit of bullshit.

We are being taught every day, and in a very narrow window of time when compared with human existence, a mere 25 years, since the arrival of a google sorting program, that every challenge to settled knowledge is a brave, truth-seeking phenomenon, in which the internet has "finally and at last allowed us to expose the lies that have led to our time," with the assumption that somehow everything we know, everything, is only known because some kind of cover-up has occurred. And because of the structure in which money whirls around between media and politics, there is more than enough impetus to throw sand in everyone's eyes and call it water, and shove it down their throats and call it water, and then expand this charade by crying out, "thank gawd we've found water at last! Click to pay for it."

We live in a system that can surface, rank and monetise contrarian claims at the speed of the electron, while actual verification still happens at a comparative snail's pace. On one level, it's scary terrifying, much moreso than the made-up panic about A.I. On another, we are mere days from technology from creating something so unimaginably immersive, like Larry Niven's wire, that I expect we're going to see a significant part of humanity just "tap out" to a place where nothing can be sold to them because whatever's coming is going to make the internet so boring no one's going to come round to the party any more. That's not truth. That's just how it looks to me. Eventually, someone's going to invent a product so enticing to stupid people that it will make it impossible to sell them sand any more. They'll have all they can gorge.

The people who came to my coffeeshop every day suffered from one simple disease: boredom. They were not looking for enlightenment, or company, or togetherness, or any of the crap that socio-scientists like to haul out and claim without offering a shred of proof beyond "we asked two hundred people and they said..."  No, they were bored. There was no internet, there was nothing on television, they didn't like to read, they did not do anything for themselves — except the chessplayers who were addicted to a game that could be played healthily with other addicts. The rest needed someone, or something, or some place to fill the void of endless pointless days without expectation of purpose or success with company as entertainment. Just as I was doing, since I didn't really think I was going to be a writer, I didn't have a group of D&D players, I wasn't in a relationship, I wasn't likely to meet anyone on my economic level that would serve in that capacity... and I had 85 hours a week to give to a place where I could drink coffee, sit, read, chat, argue and clean, to keep myself busy. And at that, because I had a purpose, I did better than most everyone there.

The exception were the small group of folks who dropped in between 7:00 and 7:30 to get coffee before work. The best of these was Tony.  Tony was a Major in the Canadian Armed Forces, who worked at Mewata base, starting at 9:00. His day mostly consisted of scaring the bloody blue bejeezus out of anyone who dared exist in the same space as he did, which they had to, because they answered to him, because he was a Major.

Tony invariably came in four days a week just after 7:30, once he learned I was always there. We'd play a game of chess, we were about evenly matched, talking while playing. He started off by talking about work; about the position he had; about the absurdity of it as he saw it. Not the absurdity of the military, or of the terror he left in his wake, because all that was necessary, which I understood despite not having ever been in the military because I read books. No, Tony found it all funny because he had ended up there; his success had all been utterly natural. He had simply been built as a human being in the womb, most likely, to eventually rise to his rank with his capability and his capacity to be an excellent Major. I talked to this man over many months, and we talked about everything he couldn't talk about with other people. That is why he came so consistently, and stayed until the last minute, because it took him ten minutes to drive to Mewata. Because, strangely, we were built to talk to each other.

Because Tony was used to being obeyed, deferred to, tiptoed around and distanced because of his rank, it mattered to him to have someone not subordinate to him, not dazzled by him, not trying to impress him and not frightened of him. My role was something like that of Ben from Next Generation's Lower Decks. It's an interesting place to be.

That relationship with Tony is memorable to me now because it wasn't a part of the "eddy" that the bookstore-coffeeshop made in my life. The drifters, the students, the regulars, they didn't come in that early. They never met Tony. He never met them. Which means my overall gestalt of learning as I pulled myself from circling the drain and chose instead to start living again hinges on a reward I got because I was willing to wake up very early in the morning and work as someone who, for the first three hours a day, ran a "coffeeshop" as well as a living room. The distinction may be lost on some. It isn't lost on me.

On the whole, I do better with people who aren't easily threatened by me. Who aren't impressed. Who don't need my approval. And yet, are perfectly free and easy with their own. Tony approved of me every time he came in, by coming in. Most customers who came to the shop would have no matter who worked there. Many would have preferred another barista... and, of course, those people got their wish. In not that much time, eight months I said, they got one.

A person who writes a post that is this long, that is this damning, this arrogant, this presumptive, is not looking for praise. He is not selling sand. I'll try to put this is plainly as I can. Water is everywhere, and it's free. But it can't be bought. It has to be earned. We earn it by ceasing to seek outside sources to soothe our boredom. We don't earn water by buying another video game, or looking for it on the internet, or watching a streaming service, or any of the things that rely on our going to someone else to get it. Water is earned by sitting down and finding a way to amuse oneself by arranging what we know into a shape that we made ourselves. It's very frustrating. It's largely unrewarding for a very long time. But this is the only way we get the sand out of our mouths and drink water instead.

There are two very funny things about this. The first is that it doesn't really cost anything. Oh, materials, maybe, or a single tool, plus a bit of upkeep. And a room to do it in, but heck, you already have to have a place to sleep. On the whole, it's not expensive to become self-entertaining. It's really just about making things with as little help as possible.

The other funny thing is that almost no one believes it works. Including an awful lot of people in the process of trying it.

That's the truth.

Sand-eating

So, you're a group of aliens and you're watching the earth... and you notice that while the earthlings are interested in throwing up these satellites in order to help themselves show pictures of cats and share lasagna recipes, while carping about urbanisation, they don't occasionally send out a ship and circle their own moon. This is puzzling for you, but its also convenient, because here's this terrific real estate opportunity for you to build on, so you can set up your lab station to study these earthlings and maybe grab a few now and then for testing.

Then, lo and behold, after fifty years, a group of earthlings decide, in not really a lot of time, to throw a ship around the moon for reasons that aren't clear, but mostly seem bounded up in the same sort of performative political points that encouraged them to do it back in the day. But the noise of culture rolling up from the earth is just that, noise, so you miss it until nearly the last moment. And now here you are, base about to be in plain sight, as the earthlings go by in this year's version of a flying tin can. What do you do?

The beginning of My Dinner with Andre includes this in the opening monologue, in which Wallace Shawn explains his view of the world at the time he made the film, following his inability to get enough work in New York.

"I've lived in this city all my life. I grew up on the Upper East Side; when I was ten years old, I was rich; I was an aristocrat, riding around in taxis, surrounded by comfort... and all I thought about was art and music. Now, I'm 36... and all I think about is money."

The film worked for him.  You can watch it here.  The IMDb trivia page for the film is interesting and should be read by anyone who wants to be a filmmaker, because not only was this intensely low-budget film a success, it did something that successful low budget films almost never do on their own merits: it changed the way intellectuals talk about film-making. The film was stupidly successful on an unimaginable scale for 1981, and is the only reason why Wallace Shawn was able to wrest his career from obscurity to the place where now we all recognise his immortal connection with the word "inconceivable."

I think the film is terrible. It came out in 1981, when I was 17 and surrounded by musicians and artists and other writers, who all gushed about the genius of the film in the same way they gushed about Jean-Luc Godard and Frederico Fellini, whose films I had seen and knew well enough to stay the fuck away from, since they were filled with a fascination about the tiniest most obvious parts of life as a way of avoiding talking about anything that actually fucking mattered. My Dinner with Andre addresses a familiar point-of-view that most anyone drifts into at some point between the age of 20 and 50: "I thought my life was about this, but now I realise that it's about that." But it's not "intellectual," it's pseudo-intellectual. All the clever, amazing things that Andre tells Wallace in the film amounts to tin-foil hat logic, not especially useful unless, coincidentally, you want to sell something to someone by telling them that life isn't about pain... a line, incidentally, I get from the writer of the book that contained the word "inconceivable" that Shawn would become famous for later.

It's not that Andre is stupid. He's not. He's passionate, he's rich with detail, he's anxious to explain and be understood and to delve deep into the thing that fascinates him, while Shawn provides a counterpoint that makes the film watchable because it's well-written. But it's a sham. It's all empty-headed nonsense. There isn't a single thought expressed so well in the film that can be applied to anything except to explain how the My-Pillow guy made millions. And for me personally it frustrates me to death that even now, 45 years later, comments under the film include, "I watched it for the first time years ago and it has truly made my life better."

Yes, exactly. That's what it's supposed to do. You're dying of thirst in the desert and this film gives you sand to drink... and you drink it because you don't know the difference between sand and water.  From a film directed by the guy who directed Wallace Shawn when he said the word that made him famous.

For such people who write such comments, an alien base on the far side of the moon sounds plausible.

It is for this reason why repeated exhortations about what "adventure" is fail. And why admonishing the fudging of dice fails. And why point-by-point demonstrations of the execreble writing of the white box set fails. Because no matter how passionate one is, or how precise with language, or how specific one's structured examples, or the demonstration of evidentiary success vs. staggering failure one provides, it never comes down to the listener listening and weighing the two points of view to come to a thoughtful conclusion about what to believe.

The only measure that ever counts is what the listener feels. Which the writer has no power to change. My Dinner with Andre does not succeed because it was well-written or exceptionally shot or because it came out at the right time or because the performers were artists. Those things are all true, for their time, but they aren't the reason why the film was successful. It was successful because it didn't ask anyone to change their mind. It offered them a bunch of patterns that people recognised, that pseudo-intellectual recognised, and then waved them about for 90 minutes in a way that made the audience feel smart to be watching a film like this. Which worked beautifully.

A DM who fudges does so because early in their development in that role, they attached themselves to the idea, most likely because they could not help themselves. It was just too hard to actually kill their friends, or even strangers, because their nature forbade it. So having attached first, like a limpet, all that was needed after was to rationalise it. That rationalisation varies but mostly its to "create a good game" or "to make sure the game stays fun," or whatever. The tendency of the intellectual is to argue with the rationalisation, but in fact the rationalisation is incidental. It could be anything, so long as it sounds plausible. Because the issue isn't whether or not it makes a better game, the issue is that, inside, they can't keep themselves from doing it. Fudging possesses them, not the reverse. They aren't strong enough, as human beings, to stop fudging. So argument is really just a waste of time.

This is the one lesson I've never been able to learn. And my recent understanding, lately, that I haven't learnt it yet, is embarrassing for me. This blog has been to construct an argument about this or that or the other thing, just as JB's post is, just as is any post about D&D or any subject that I respect, because I walk away from such posts and such videos with an awareness I did not have before. Because I am an intellectual, and not a sand-drinker, which is what makes me formidable and scary. Because I won't argue decently, respecting the listener's feelings about what this is or isn't or should be or feels better or what fits the pattern and hey, you can't actually prove there aren't aliens on the far side of the moon. I don't accept premises like those. But because I don't, I'm also unkind, and abusive, and cold, and rude, and any number of other things that sound like I'm in your house telling you that you've put your sofa on the wrong end of your living room. It's what makes me intolerable.

Because, seriously, if you were in a desert and you saw someone who was thirsty enough to drink the sand, you'd try to stop them, wouldn't you?

And if you couldn't succeed, and you had to just stand there watching them do it, that'd get pretty aggravating after, say, to pull a number out of my hat, 61 years.

But what makes it truly worse is the guy on my right who has realised the solution is to sell the drinker more sand. And he's making a killing at it.

All this is the reason why intellectuals tend to retreat from the system as they age rather than continue to fight it to the end. They get tired. They don't tire of the facts or the arguments or the wish to rigidly figure out the sense of a thing... but they do get tired of the quiet expectation that, "if you're not going to sell the sand, you could at least provide it for free."  Which is the role I should have adopted with this blog if I wanted it to be successful. I should have just called it "Free Sand" and then shovelled it into the mouths of my readers, making them all happy. I failed to do that. And therefore, demonstrably, I failed.

I am an excellent writer. Anyone here who thinks I couldn't have used that skill to proffer the sweetest-looking, brightest, most soft-grained sand imaginable is a fool. If I truly despised and disregarded my fellows, I could have built a sand-selling palace here, with vaulted ceilings and music playing and every kind of sand one's heart could desire. Because honestly, seriously... straight-talking it here... people aren't really that hard to lie to. They really aren't. And anyone who has read a few books, who has gotten through grade school and watched the way that bullies operate up close, comes to a point early on between knowing that you can either fuck these people over or serve them... and as it happens, all the money is in the former.

And mind, it's more than just the language. It's the intuitive understanding that underlies it, the comprehension about why the sand is being eaten and what for and why it's hard to stop and how deep the desperation goes, that encourages the fellow with sand in mouth to garble through the sand what an asshole I am in telling them to spit it out and drink water. Those are all little buttons, with little labels under them, arranged in a neat little row, and all it takes it to reach out and touch the one that works right now... and just like that, Johnny eats the sand he's told to eat.

If I am a rigid asshole, if I am inflexible, if I'm not ready to "see the argument" or "understand," it's bitcoins to donuts that I'm keeping my hand off the button that would pour out the sand you want me to pour out. I learned how to do that in High School, to subvert teachers, to placate principles, to get around bullies, to survive. It is so easy... you have no idea. Once you really understand how little is needed to manipulate a person's perception with lies — a small concession, stroking their ego, a little feigned uncertainty, some carefully timed sympathy, silence because the person needs to "stew," a little false seeing their point — they melt just so. But all that created in me when I tried it early in life was contempt... and I didn't like that feeling. I didn't lean into it. I didn't decide, "Hey, but it'll let me fuck people over and get paid for it."

And I shouldn't be telling you this now, but hey... I'm already an asshole. Not for doing this, obviously, but for not doing this.

So, lately, I haven't felt much like writing. Anything. Figuring this one out, I think. Getting pretty tired of yelling at the void. Lost a good friend over this kind of thing, whom I thought was a good friend and I haven't recovered. Lost a good friend over this last year, too. Seems I'm always doing this. I might just as well lie, all the time. Churn out some slopware. Or just walk. Because except for the prospect of running D&D tomorrow night, which is really why I love D&D, I just don't seem to be able to give a fuck whether people want to eat sand or not.

Game Store Culture

There was no session on Friday.

Nothing untoward, the campaign is sound, it just allows some flexibility. We agreed to push things off until this upcoming Friday, the 3rd, so there will be a session. Sometimes this is for the best, even though, naturally, there's always a feeling that something is missed.

That's because D&D is a good game, and of course a good time. Those who commit to it always do so wishing they could play every week, that they had the energy and the available time to do so, but of course there are other things in the world also. I only wish, for myself, that a suspension wasn't automatically seen as evidence that there's something wrong... which is why I had to start this post by assuring the reader that the campaign is fine.

Now, why do I have to do that?

Because, simply, in this day, "commitment" has come to mean something totally different from what it once did when I began playing in the 80s. Then, our participation seemed awfully loose, a comfortable sort of, "Well, you're not here today, but I know you miss this and you'll be here next week."  I could count on that as a DM, while my players had faith that if I began a campaign session with, "You know guys, I'm just beat from the week I've had... how 'bout we just play poker and pick up the game next week?"

Can't do that now. People are so ready to quit, they assume everyone is. Cancel a session and the worry immediately is, "You're not dropping the campaign, are you? We're still playing, right?"  And this is made worse in that a player won't actually call up and say, "Oh, hey, I'm not feeling well, I won't be there Friday." No, they just don't show. And they don't ever show again. And they don't say why.

Trust is in short supply. I don't expect someone's word to be their bond all the time; that's just silly. Past the age of 20, there are too many things that come up, too many accidents, too much chance that something of unexpected bad health will crop up and say, "I'm here!" So yeah, for the last forty years, I've made it clear that all I want is notice. It's not a job, no one has to pretend to be sick to get out of a "shift," but hell, we'll all supposed to be civilised. You don't want to play, call and say so. It's simply decent.

Now, the reader here is trying to figure out which player is dropping out and my answer is, NONE of them, not presently. I have no reason to doubt these folk; I've known them for years, they've known me; it's been an internet knowledge, a "knowing" of each other through character names and avatars and user-monikers and in a large part not faces — though Discord has fixed that, I'm glad to say. But it is knowing, in the sense that none of these fellows picked up the game yesterday and none are going to stop playing it tomorrow. This is not a game-store sample. These are true believers and therefore I know for a FACT that if one of them wanted to stop playing, they'd definitely say so. For one simple reason: they want to be well-thought of by me, just as I want to be well-thought of by them.

That is the core of where the lack of trust lies.

The 80s carried a sting that the present does not, which is rarely accounted for. I started playing with people I went to school with, as most do. I then moved onto people I was in university with. And then I played with people who I worked with, who knew my wife, my daughter, my home, my job and so on... which meant, if they didn't show up ever again, they gave up a lot more than a D&D game. They gave up playing with a smart little girl, they gave up my Wife's cooking... and they had to face me at work, or in class, or when I continued to invite their sisters and their cousins to my house for parties. Walk out of my game and that made a pretty big hole, because I didn't play in faceless gamestores. It makes a difference when you can't call me up and ask me to help you with your resume, or move your shit the next time you change apartments, or any of the things we used to do for each other because we weren't just D&D players together, we shared our lives together.

An unexplained absence carried weight. This made the "We'll play next week" culture stable, because we were, in fact, friends. The same way we played baseball together, and went to the beach together, and stood up at each other's weddings and so on. This is all gone because, for reasons that surpass understanding, game store culture obliterated it. Because, I suppose, it's so easy to just not give a fuck if you don't show up on Friday. You owe nothing to nobody.

This, I think, is one of the reasons I didn't jive very well with the 2010 perspective of how players approach the game: the assumption that I was out to screw them, or cheat them, or make stuff up designed to humiliate them, or whatever. And why, in some cases, the anger at my insistence that they "suck it up and just play" was so unexpected and absolute. Because they could, in fact, just flip off my game like a switch. I never played like that. With those kind of people. It wasn't the game culture I learned to run my game in.

It's a sort of pre-emptive way of protecting themselves... of sparing themselves an investment in something they know, from the outset, they can't actually control. Knowing they can't, or having that demonstrated for them — and heck, my last post was about the kind of prick I can be — creates this assumption that if they can't get around me today, that's it, there's no point. D&D, they think, is a give and take... and honestly, they couldn't be more wrong.

Something like a thousand years ago, I wrote that I wasn't a cruise director. I'm not here to make sure everything runs smoothly and that all the passengers have a good time, are entertained and are pleased with their stay. I'm not charged with my players welfare and comfort. I'm not here to provide social activities. I'm not an event planner, a master of ceremonies, I don't do customer service and I'm not a cheerleader.

Since, I've revisited the "cruise director" concept, here and there. I think it comes down to the idea that I'm willing to plan events, I'm willing to do customer service... I'm willing to be a cheerleader, even.

It's just not my JOB.

In fact, everyone exists to do all the parts listed here. If the campaign is sound, everyone has opportunities to help everyone have a good time, to think about others enjoying their game, to give ground regarding cheerleading and such.  D&D is absolutely about giving.

What it's not about is taking. And this is where the "give and take" model collapses, because those who go into this game with the expectation that the two things are going to even out in the end, that they'll get their opportunity to "take" as much as they give, in their minds of course, the program falls apart. Anyone, ever, who approaches a social activity with the headspace, "What am I going to get?" is a null signal. It's the player no one wants at their table.

But again, this is the game store culture fucking everything up. Because these aren't friends and they're not people you give to — because you don't know them. Hell, you don't even know if they're good people. You sure as hell don't know that you'll ever see them again. So it's natural to head off to the game store with the same ideals that you use when heading off to the theatre, the eatery, the hockey game or the bar:

"I am here to be served. Serve me."

What a terrible, terrible culture.

No wonder it invented concepts like D&D as a sport, where groups compete against each other to win fucking prizes and prove that they're better players than others. No wonder it invented player-vs.-player, then called it a virtue. No wonder. Because this isn't about four people helping each other survive, this is the "virtue" that screams, "He got his, where the fuck is mine?"... with the other side of that flag reading, "I got mine, so fuck you."

I'm too Canadian for this nonsense. Though, of course, we have game stores here and yes, it thrives there.

Funny, I don't have an inkling from any of my present players that this nonsense is present at the table. Perhaps it's playing by Discord. Perhaps its their familiarity with this blog. Or with my previous game, since three of them have played with me online before. But I also like to think its because they've got the right mindset about why we want to play. Not just that it's fun, it obviously is... but because its fun in a way that doesn't actually expect anything specific. We're just going to play, and see how it turns out. Investment as play and not as success.

Gives me hope.

A Rational Self-Sorting Model

I created my Patreon page, I think, in May of 2015. Patreon wasn't "new," but it wasn't widespread either and I was certainly ahead of the game there. In all honesty, I'd been released from my job in January of that year and I needed the money.

These last 18 years of running this blog (the anniversary is coming up in May) has not hidden from the world that I have a sharp tongue, a low tolerance for foolishness and a visible willingness to publicly swat stupidity. That would logically produce resentment, and it has. I've toned it down somewhat these last five years and I notice that the hate rhetoric on boards and reddit has subsided out of existence. I've been here long enough to have people simply tolerate me.

Still, I'm not especially nice. I'm a hard case, I won't easily change my opinion, I'll wade in swinging if I'm challenged... and in a space like a chat room I'm especially vicious. I write faster than most people, and I think at the pace that I write, so often I'm dredging out five hundred words of argument in the time it takes a lot of people to work out what they want to say in thirty. Its not unusual for me to find that I'm answering them with a breaknet three to five minutes with a deluge, while they're getting back to me fifteen to twenty years later.

Like the character Ramsey Michel (played by Oliver Platt) says in 2014's Chef, "You started a flame war with me... are you kidding me? I buy ink by the barrel, buddy."

Yeah. I write a lot. And in an online text fight, it shows.

I received word today that Patreon has created a new page for it's site. It's a "refund page," where patrons can go and manage all the refunds for their creator page in one place.  Here's a screenshot of mine:

I don't think this is evidence of my value.

I think this is evidence of a self-selection process my readers have, because logically the only kind of support I should be getting is from those who aren't easily offended, aren't easily influenced, aren't wilting flowers, aren't here to feel better about "supporting an artist" and definitely don't do it from pity.

This says boatloads more about my readers that it says about me.

For whatever reason — I prefer the theory that you're all damaged in some way — you all feel that you're getting value from what I'm doing. Your reasons are probably best left for your therapists to puzzle out. I'm contented that, despite my shortcomings over the years, despite my projects that don't pan out, despite the decimation of the game con culture that covid left, obliterating my plans there, the ledger of my work is in the black and not the red. That matters a lot to me.

I haven't posted much this last two months. February was a shit-show that poured into March and then, when everything cleared up, I found myself more or less thinking, "fuck it. I need a vacation." Which is what I've been taking. I have one commitment at present that I won't shirk, and that's the online campaign. I wish everyone could all come and play, but that would get a little complicated. I am kicking at the wiki a bit, which I haven't in quite a while, and building some content specifically for the campaign here and here. No doubt, there's going to be more of that. I'll keep you posted.

The game players have asked me to create a private discord channel for them and for me to keep off it, which I've done; so far as I know, however, this other channel is still open to anyone who wants to poke about and ask a question, until 6 p.m. EST this upcoming Friday... as then we'll be playing our game on it for four hours.

https://discord.gg/jtte95JY

Don't abuse it please.

Session 4: Campaign Goes to the Dogs

Friday the 13th's running picked up with the party atop the ridge where they'd witnessed the goblin settlement, where changes were made to the game's participants. Orsos the 1st level fighter stepped down and the search for new players turned up previous participants in the Juvenis game from pre-covid times: Pandred, 5th level fighter and his 1st level druid hench Arduin, and Mikael, 2nd level mage. This considerable increase in the party's strength played havoc with my original number of creatures (the party's strength increased from 7 total levels to 14), which in turn went down easier that expected, but the combats proved interesting. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

After some discussion, Mikael, whose father was an assassin and blessed the mage with a bonus stealth ability, made a run around the goblin settlement and found it to be peaceful, unwatched (despite the presence of an unused watchtower) and busy with the early summer planting, this being May 14th. The party decided to risk stepping forward and parleying with the goblins (with one of them tagging my intended narrative before it happened as one of the "possibilities" to explain the slaughtered freeholder and family). This turned up a story that nine of the hamlet's former goblin residents had joined a cult led by a cavewight, had left the hamlet and had, for nearly a year, been roaming around the landscape killing and looting. Being the toughest members of the settlement, who themselves were occasionally suffering impredations from this rogue group, the settlement was not up to undertaking their putting down... much less the possibility of overcoming the cavewight (a creature outside the party's ken).  Local hunters do know of this "cult," but so far as the goblins knew, nothing had come of that knowledge.

The elder of the hamlet, named "Falva," drew a map for the party as to the location of the cavewight lair, as shown, which the party duly began to follow. After moving through a rocky, dense part of the forest, they broke out into a flat and encountered a slaughtered deer carcass upon a great beech tree, marked with symbols and it's dried entrails hanging out from its crusted body. An application of comprehend languages from Mikael identified the message was essentially, "Go no further, or else," or for Dante fans, "Abandon All Hope Ye Who Enter Here."

Naturally, the party entered and were immediately attacked by three large wolves, though not dire wolves. This was our first "dog" encounter of the night. I wasn't taking notes during the combat, but essentially Pandred thumped, Lexent thumped, Ti thumped and most of all Zoltan thumped, doing 14 damage in a hit and killing one of the wolves by sentencing it to bleed to death.  Arduin dropped once, Pandred dropped once, no harm done. The party moved on.

They came to a large burnt out area, a mile wide, and tried to cross it directly. Zoltan was seized by a sinkhole and was saved before being sucked down by it by a good rolling Mikael, who then needed to be grabbed because the male is just a light-bodied elf and not as big as the 200+ lb. Zoltan and his equipment. But the party jumped to it, then backtracked along their own steps back the way they'd come. After some hemming and hawing, of which there always seems to be some, they went around and made camp.

With a small flame, as the night turned to the 15th of May, a strange sight took hold. By chance, looking to see what phase the moon was in on this night, the year 1650, I discovered that a lunar eclipse took place exactly here. What are the chances?  I made some changes and the werewolf that was due to attack the party in another part of this adventure was upgraded to alive and in wolf form in the here and now, as the moon turned red over the party's heads. The werewolf caught Arduin with initiative and caused 14 damage to the druid, the wound of which was immediately dealt with. The werewolf did not stand and fight but chose to attack individuals by hoping to catch them unawares, one by one. This didn't work, because Pandred got lucky with a crit, followed by Ti getting lucky with a crit, and then I believe it was Lexent getting lucky with a crit... and scratch one werewolf.  Still, there's a 14 in 23 chance that Arduin has caught the disease. The party just doesn't know yet.

The joke was made, "Will I be a super-werewolf because I was infected during a lunar eclipse," which brought the sort of D&D laughter that one wishes for, whereupon I answered that I could always argue he'd be the sort of werewolf that only changed during a lunar eclipse." That brought laughter too. Overall, the session was full of jokes, kidding, smart comebacks and all that a DM could ask for, the kind of thing that made the old school game terrific.

At last the lair was found, and entered. Two giant stone blocks were set to turn upon pins of carved stones, in a way that deliberately baffled. The party entered, found themselves in front of two passages and took the right one, with Ti at the head. Both Ti and Zoltan levelled after the werewolf fight, Ti from the x.p. and Zoltan from a silver necklace worth 500g.p. found around the werewolf's neck.

Here's the scene with Ti leading. Encountering an 18 ft. deep pit, without spikes, and seven ft. long, Ti expressed a desire to leap it. With no special skill for doing so, I nevertheless gave him a +4 advantage to his dexterity, so that he needed a 17 or less on a d20 to succeed. He rolled an 18, then got lucky and took only 7 damage.  But then, at that moment, an ochre jelly emerged from a crevice in the pit and attacked Ti, while the party were figuring out how to get him out, stunning him for 10 more damage.

Pandred leaped in and fought against the ochre jelly, to protect Ti, causing 3 damage but taking six. Whereupon Lexent, still above the pit, saved the day by asking, "Will salt of Ammon have any effect on an ochre jelly?"

Salt of Ammon is the medieval term for sodium chloride, is an item available in my equipment list and, Lexent having medicine as a sage study, decided to buy some. Without any idea, always a pervasive problem with this sort of thing, since there can never be enough rules in D&D, I asked chatGPT:

"Would salt of Ammon be effective against a D&D ochre jelly?"

I saved the answer and here it is:

Yes. Salt of ammon (ammonium chloride) would plausibly be effective against an ochre jelly, depending on how you want to model the interaction.

An ochre jelly in D&D is essentially an acidic, protoplasmic organism. Its offensive mechanism is corrosion: it secretes acid and dissolves organic matter. The creature is typically immune to lightning and slashing effects because those divide the mass rather than damage it, while cold and fire affect it normally because they change the physical condition of the substance.

Ammonium chloride is strongly hygroscopic and dissolves readily in water, forming an acidic solution. When applied to a gelatinous mass that is largely water and organic colloid, several things would happen. The salt would rapidly dissolve into the jelly’s fluid matrix, increasing ionic concentration and disturbing the internal balance of the organism. In biological systems, high salt concentrations draw water out of cells through osmotic pressure and destabilise proteins. For something like a jelly, whose structure depends on hydrated organic chains suspended in water, that effect would tend to collapse or stiffen the gel. In practice it would act as a chemical desiccant and disruptor rather than as a burning agent.

From a practical D&D perspective, if a character scattered powdered salt of ammon onto the jelly, the effect would likely be similar to throwing a corrosive chemical or strong desiccant into a slime creature. The powder would dissolve and locally break down the gel structure, causing the surface to shrivel, stiffen, or fragment. The result would be damage to the jelly without triggering its division mechanic, since the mechanism is chemical disruption rather than cutting or electrical stimulation.

If you want a simple ruling at the table, treating a handful of salt of ammon as equivalent to a small acid attack or alchemical reagent would be reasonable. It would damage the jelly but would not cause it to split the way slashing or lightning does.

In your face, anti-A.I.! I ruled the powder affected the creature as a "burn," equal to a flask of burning lamp oil, and had Lexent roll 2d6 damage. That produced 10 damage, which drove the jelly back into its hole and both Pandred and Ti were saved.

We called the game there.

Two New Players Located

I have two players who are legacy from the earlier Juvenis campaign, so the opening is closed. But message me anyway if you want to get on a list for further openings, if they should occur.

Seeking a New Player

Because one of the players of the present existing game has stepped down, there’s now an opening in the Discord campaign. We're starting our fourth session this upcoming Friday, the 13th. Play begins at 6pm central time and, if previous sessions hold, runs about four hours. The game is played on Discord, so your location is irrelevant if you can fit yourself into the schedule.

I would prefer a player who wants to run a character who is not a fighter or a cleric, though I will not hold you to this. A $3 fee to my patreon is required.  The game is in the traditional D&D style, though with my own set of Frankenstein-like house rules, as might be guessed. 

My previous campaign began on a blog and continued onto a wiki, if anyone wants to see an example of play.

There's no need to make a character ahead of time; I prefer to do so at the start of actual game play, so other players can see the rolls decisions you make.

Comment below upon this post, write to alexiss1@telus.net, find me in the patreon chat room, or upon discord at https://discord.gg/dqkhzsYQ.

Session 3: From Owlbears to Goblins

Friday's running last began with the party having returned to Ozd on the 3rd of May, whereupon I pointed out that, seeing people in the town using charcoal and coal, that they'd left about 50 to 200 lbs. of charcoal on the ground back at the kobald lair... for they had been making charcoal outside when the party had attacked. Charcoal in Ozd sells for 2 g.p. a bushel, or about 56 lbs. Thus, they decided to return to the dungeon, with Lexent this time, to see what was there.

It totalled 220 lbs, for which the party had brought baskets for (the cheapest form of container).  They checked in with Matyas, asked the sprites some questions and established themselves to be "allies" of the sprites, who would likely be there should the party need something of them.  Then, on their way back to Ozd with their charcoal, they encountered a dire wolf at a distance, deciding to keep their heads down and not attract the beast. Soon enough, the wolf was called for by its master, a tall bugbear; the party discussed the pros and cons of engaging, decided not to and let the pair go. Then they headed back to town with their additional booty, which they sold for 5 and a half gold.

Having heard that owlbear feathers served as a magical ingredient for something or other, they investigated this with the local apothecary and were told that if they would simply cut off the scalp of the owlbear, the apothecary would be happy to pay a hundred gold for it. Armoured with this knowledge, the party set out again to find the owlbear that had left signs over the countryside, and whose presence was confirmed by the sprites. They searched a day to no avail, however, set up their camp and, with a fire burning, set up their watch.

The owlbear appeared at 4 a.m., did not catch Ti by surprise and the party was aroused; the cleric Zoltan rushed forward with the others in his wake to face the beast, who managed to give a pretty mean swipe for six damage to Ti, then proceeded to roll a fumble against the cleric; the 1 on a d20 was followed by a second 1 on a d20, so that the beast lost it's beak attack (broken, sprained, whatever).  The party then utterly failed to miss, succeeding in killing the 30 hit point beast in two quick rounds. Easy as pie. I found it very disappointing.

Hurrying again back to town, the party collected their 100 g.p. and went on a buying spree. Because Ozd does not have an everyday market, but only a full market on Sunday.  All week, there is a craft-bazaar, where ordinary wares such as ceramics, woodcrafting, clothing and such can be purchased, as well as an everyday town market for meats, livestock and produce... but the party wanted armour and weapons, so they had to wait for Sunday, which was the 8th of May.

Having geared up, the party, especially Lexent, wanted to look into any gnome residents in the area, learning that they were most likely associated with the local coal and iron mines in the hills. Lexent is considered building a congregation; the owlbear pushed him to 4th level, which is "priest," and he has the ability to preach and proselytise in his religion, which is "gnomish" in form. The party travelled out to Uraj, a hamlet of 33 people, then to the coal mine a mile and a half south, where Lexent spoke to a dozen gnomes. He hasn't decided what to do yet.

Thereafter, the next day, the 10th, the party struck out west of Uraj into the hills, where the way was made easier by a found animal trail. Still, it took hours for them to reach an abandoned freehold, where evidence showed that it had likely been attacked at least a month before.  They went on, finding a sort of archery range, with evidence of goblinish arrows; no goblins, however, nor any evidence of when the range had last been used. The party returned to the freehold and spent the night.

Striking out the next day, they found evidence of a hunter's camp, where it was probably the freehold's family had been taken and slaughtered. Such camps feature stone areas for slaughtering game, ready-made windbreaks and usually a natural water supply like a freshwater creek. The scene of gnawed bones, bloodstains on rock and such disturbed the party, who nevertheless decided to continue. They began to climb the hill where the map shows a "3."  On the far side of the hill, they spied a large hamlet of some kind, and silently withdrew. This is where the game was left.

Now, I may be off on some details. It was six days ago since we played the game, I've been very distracted so I may have misremembered things. I leave it to the party to correct me, to bring us up to scale.

I'd say the party's engagement throughout was very strong. They were acting together, solving puzzles, standing up to me, acting perfectly like four gentlemen with plenty of experience in the game. The outdoor campaign is flowing well and not wasting a lot of time; much of this session was used up in purchasing, very understandable, rather than in discussing strategy from place to place. They haven't made up their mind about the hamlet; they don't know who it is occupied by, they didn't get close enough. Might really be anyone, but the hint is obviously biased for goblins.

I've always been comfortable with this sort of campaign. Players can move around from here to there, having short adventures which are good for low-level parties, leaving it open for a small dungeon to be stumbled across at any time. There's no real need to go marching across the map to find another place that's really just going to produce the same sort of area as this. Everything to the west and southwest of Ozd is unoccupied, with zero infrastructure, while adjacent to a large populated mining and farm land. Perfect for a low-level D&D campaign.

Status

Tamara came home safe and sound, she is doing well, rapidly improving and much better than she was before the procedure. I, on the other hand, have successfully produced an infection in my toe... all the running around at the hospital... and am laid up.  I'll have a proper post tomorrow.

Interesting Times

I do not think that I'll shall manage all the reportage that I have this week, because I am simply tired. I shall start with the troubles that have occurred, which I shall preface with the statement that I am, this Monday night at 9:32 as I write this sentence, well.

The reader may remember that while I working on The Lantern last, finished a Sunday ago before yesterday, that I'd been interrupted by a toothache, which led to a temporary filling, an extra days rest, antibiotics and a scheduled root canal, this Wednesday last.  Well, a week ago today, the large toe on my right foot began to pinch in an unpleasant way, that increased steadily until my Tuesday evening, I was in a fair bit of distress about it. Therefore, while my appointment with the dentist was at 2 p.m. Wednesday, I called my doctor and had an appointment with him on Wednesday morning at 10 a.m. This is a strange thing, I must tell you, to see a doctor about one thing, come home for lunch, then head out (in a blizzard) to see a dentist about another.

The toenail was identified as ingrown and the nail cut back from the side of my toe, bringing relief. The canal was filled, bringing relief. Thursday and Friday progressed well, I ran D&D on Discord Friday night and yesterday I should have given an account of that running, but... well, I'll explain.

My partner has been having bladder problems of one kind or another since May of 2025. Several measures were tried, until finally she was scheduled for a surgery that was to take place today at 11 a.m. Thus, the weekend was spent managing my partner's distress here and there, getting us both ready for the "big day" at last. In Canada, yes we wait, but we also don't pay.

Saturday, I unwrapped the bandage from my big toe, which had been bothering me off and on, such that I'd been applying polysporin. What I found was an enormous blood-and-lymph blister that had formed alongside the cut toe, in the space of about five hours. It grew bigger until midnight, when I spoke to a nurse on the 811 emergency we have in this country. At 12:30 a.m. I lanced it, pushed the blood out, and it felt much better. But, unfortunately, as Sunday, yesterday, progressed, it got increasingly worse so that...

Today, after getting my partner to her surgery, and getting her comfortable, and making sure everything was going to go according to plan, I was forced to leave her before her being taken away and go over to the emergency myself to have my toe looked at. This took a wait of about two hours, in which it was observed that yes, it was bad, but no, it probably wasn't severely infected, despite it leaking and some of that leakage having a suggestive yellow (pus) hue upon my sock I wore. The toe was bandaged, whereby I hurried back to the Day Surgery to find my partner's surgery had gone fine and she was now in recovery. I had ten minutes to eat lunch before fetching myself up to her and meeting her upon her coming out of recovery.

Is that all? No.

While the surgery went well, and will probably be fine, my partner's reaction to the small amount of botox used to manage the infection she had pretty much seized up her bladder. The rest of today has been spent comforting her, easing her experience while limping around on my experience, culminating in her being kept over night there. Now I am home, having had an "interesting" day, after an "interesting" week, and I could go with some "boring" for a bit.

This is a perfect place to immediately insert, ironically or facetiously, take your pick, the details of Friday's game. But I'm not going to. I'm tired, I have to hie my ass out to the hospital in the morning tomorrow and I trust everything there is going to be well.

Frankly, at my age, I felt I held up fairly well. Thanks be to my daughter, who helped make everything possible.