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.

Safety Last Blog

The film blog Safety Last managed to climb over 200 page views yesterday (it's at 233 now), having reached 11 posts with a visit to every decade from the 20s to the 90s. It is limited in that I'm only reviewing films that can be seen on youtube, for free, so that readers don't have to work hard to find the film or pay money for it. Naturally, I don't expect readers to actually do so... for some reason the film has lost it's verve. Most argue that it's because people can't concentrate on one product for so long, but I tend to think it's because general knowledge has flattened to the point that people can't get anything out of characters that aren't exactly like themselves. That opinion arises from film commentary I see on youtube.

I haven't discuss the blog here because I wanted it to find it's own voice first. The movies reflect my eclectic taste in film, not what a film critic would pick. For example, I've posted eleven films and none of them were made by Kurosawa, Kubrick, Tarantino or Nolan. Shock and horror. Jeez, one of them is about 15-year-old girls. And pretty soon, I'm going to add an actual musical to the list. I haven't decided if it's going to be something from Doris Day or Julie Andrews. You'll just have to see.

For a long time I've argued that a DM has to comprehend film if any possibility of campaign-nuance is to be understood. That doesn't just include "D&D films"... which are for the most part the worst possible examples, since they reflect what Hollywood utterly misunderstands about fantasy or the like. There are exceptions, of course... but the point isn't that films themselves reveal the plots and structures of D&D elements, but that narrative, structure, elaboration, conflict or resolution are in fact universal to all films, yes, including romantic stories, comedies and musicals. Blindness isn't to be found in not seeing the "right" films, but in failing to understand that every film provides it's unimagined bit of value... which is the reason to get "good" film out of one's structured approach but rather to take the stance of "I will see all films..." in whatever time is left on this planet.

The benefit of this is not immediate. In fact, probably, the reader won't notice a benefit until past the first hundred films... which will only be true if they're the films the reader wouldn't normally see. Watching another Star Wars sequel won't add to one's store. Virtually every show, every bit of "content" now produced is rehashed from some other content done in some previous decade, better. I don't say this to disparage modern film and television making. I don't have to. It disparages itself. But I do say it to point out that content today used to be "story" once... and that one does better to go find the example of it when that's what it was.

This is enough.  Preachy D&D guy will shut up now... brings hope for millions.

The March 1636 Lantern is Published

Okay, The March Lantern is available. Those fast on the draw may have noticed that I mistakenly published it as free access for 56 minutes.  I was just so worn by finishing it that I failed to adjust the publishing details. But it's behind a paywall now, I'm so sorry.

The reason this thing is such a bugbear for me is twofold. In the first place, publishing anything comes with hesitancy, because like any writer, I constantly doubt the value of my own work. I can't see it through the lens of other people, so I have no idea really if it's good or not. So, irrationally, I struggle in fear to put it out there.

The other side of that coin is that if it isn't good, then what the hell am I doing all the work for?  This is also a form of poison in an artist's head. Work is work. I was remarking to my partner yesterday that by dinner time, as I was incredibly stiff throughout my joints, that it comes from concentrating so hard that any movement of one's muscles becomes a distraction. Thus, when I'm working at anything that is extremely particular, as The Lantern is, not just in writing but in overall layout, the ads, the voice the "writers" use, physically I become more and more stone-like and more and more my whole effort is toward my thinking process. Eight hours of this and my joints get very ugly when I get up to eat something.

I don't experience these symptoms with a blog post. There's nothing riding on this. I'm not charging for this. It doesn't matter if I don't write this. What I write has no long-term consequences for me. Thus I can write calmly, fuck around even, and it doesn't matter. I can't see The Lantern in those terms. It matters too much to me.

Anyway, it's published. Yay.

The Lantern is Late

The March Lantern isn't going to be ready today. Losing Tuesday and Wednesday to a toothache, abcess and dentist's visit pretty much put me on my back heels, but I've caught up a full day on what's been lost. I would have managed this otherwise. As it's looking now, provided nothing goes wrong, this should be done sometime tomorrow evening, perhaps sooner, and no later than Monday a.m. Believe me, no one wants this done more than me.

Please be patient.

Panic at the Game Table

From the as yet unpublished March Lantern:

"Before any counsel might be taken—whether we should press onward through the opened door, or else withdraw and be content... Warth strode forward without hesitation and passed between the doors..."

I wrote the above specifically because of a behaviour than one of my Discord players actively called out as the reason for not directly taking action: because they did not want to volunteer the rest of the party by compelling others to act in accordance with their actions. On the one part, I like that its appropriately assumed that if, like Warth above, someone just bulls forward, the party will step up from a sense of commitment, but on the other part I find myself bristling that a player would resist trusting that. It's a characteristic I don't see in my offline games... and it is a characteristic that causes parties to default to a place where they have to check and be sure first, in essence getting permission, before acting. Which demands that every step the party takes forward be first resolved by committee meeting.

It's worth discussing how the player's "I act" is transformed into "I commit others to my action."  The structure of the game, divorced of the Gygaxian "leader" model, which is for shit, asks for players to step up and take the helm when they see what needs doing. The problem is that most everyone has played with incompetents and damn fools that just rush forward blindly at every opportunity. One naturally gets tired of kicking someone else's chestnuts out of the fire. Too, responsibly minded players, the better players, assume a default mode of looking after one's fellow man which is hard to shake off. It's all well and good for characters from a film to watch Shalar the Monk go off running and fifty enemy by himself with the line, "What does he think he's doing?", followed by a sigh and, "Getting himself killed." Around a D&D table, no one actually wants Shalar to die. So while there is a sigh, it's almost always followed by, "All right, we all go too."

No better player wants to be Shalar. They want to respect their fellow players and not impune their agency by forcing their hand. This is why the "committee" is not evidence of timidity, or poor play, or even self-doubt, but in fact an example of mutual respect.

Which makes it all the worse for being a bad strategy.

The problem with this character-action design is that requires the DM to reframe time to allow for a committee meeting to take place between the party members, even when that insertion of time is utterly irrational. A combat round in my game lasts 12 seconds, but even if it lasted a minute, it would not be long enough to account for some of the conversations I witnessed in our last session of combat. At present, with a new party, in a new game, with an uncertainty about the combat rules (though the party did extremely well with them), it's not reasonable for me to hold them accountable for unfamiliar decisions... yet. But soon enough they will know the combat system, and soon enough it won't be reasonable for them to have a discussion about who stands where or who does what this round or what the strategy is now that there are rats flooding up the stairs. Sooner or later, rationally, within the time frame imposed by the game, decisions by committee are not only going to be impractical, I'm going to have to take a stance that attempts to discuss will be complimented by forfeitures of attacks and other action. When called up to the plate, it's time to swing, not have another confab with the coach.

Now, is where I must insert the scene from the ancient film The Untouchables, where Al Capone says,

"A man stands alone at a plate. This is the time for what? For individual achievement. There he stands alone."

Thereafter, Capone goes into this whole thing about the team and being there for the team, culminating in a brutal murder but hey, spoilers, right?  And Capone's point is made. But the reverse also has to be true. The team can field themselves the livelong day, pitcher, first baseman, outfielder, but if someone doesn't score a damn point on their own, then the best the team can do together is TIE. None of that is discussed in the film, it wouldn't make the writer's point, but it's just as true as anything the Capone character says.

This is how D&D is structured, however. When it's time for the player to act, to fight, to throw a spell, to leap across this gorge, the team cannot, by virtue of their location in the setting, by virtue of the action taking place in the setting, speak their opinions about what a player does with the character. I have not hesitated as a DM to tell everyone else to keep quiet, to put the player on the spot. I have not hesitated to state that the character fails to do anything because they have taken too long to act. This aspect of my game has not come up where I've played in text, because it simply wasn't practical. But Discord is closer to the real thing now and I'm not going to let time stretch forever.

In face-to-face play, there is less hesitation in taking an action before discussing it. One can look around at the other players and see in a glance that they're intention is plainly to go ahead. Excited people after a success cry out and jump around with excitement once the stress has passed; but excited people on the cusp of stress tighten up. They visibly begin to sit still; it's a body language that most of us register without thinking about it, as we have a hundreds of thousands of years of biological selection related to freezing while watching one of our clan approach a tiger or a mastodon or some other beast with a flimsy spear. I have repeatedly argued that the fundamental genius of D&D is not the rules, the culture, the structure of the DM or the reward system, but the way these things work together to create moments of feeling extreme danger and threat without our having to risk breaking our bones on a playing field, or getting shot at in Venezuela.

Intuitively, in the physical company of the party, the need for pre-verbal consent diminishes. We trust our instincts. We're sure the party will approve if we just go through the doors without asking first. We're confident that they have our backs without needing to ask first. In fact, it's more than that, we feel that the zeitgeist of the group together is willing us to act without the wasting of game time a committee demands.

In a moment like this, where every D&D game wants to be, asking permission isn't just unnecessary, it's actively immersion-obverse. Asking first ruins the tempo, the tension, the thrill of the game as it spins forward. These things are what makes "flow" happen in-game... where the players cease questioning themselves, cease putting a wall between themselves and their character, even cease considering survival as functionally relevant to just moving forward in the compulsive need to do so.

Some players can't do that on their own. They can't "let go" of the grey of real life. But they can be pushed, and one way of doing that is by saying, "What do you do?" and then one time — it usually only takes once — saying to the player fighting to make up their mind, "That's it, your round is done," before moving onto the next player. It sobers them. It shakes them from their sense of "this is a game, nothing matters" into "fuck, if I don't pick it up, I'm going to get killed here."

I've seen this produce a "tunnelling" effect into players that is both upsetting and mind-blowing, depending on their character and the number of times they've experienced it. The term describes moments of extreme stress, threat, obsession or motivation where one's attention collapses to manage a narrow set of cues and actions. It is a state, which people report as one of clarity, urgency, even simplification. If the reader has ever experienced that moment where time seems to weirdly slow down at the moment of an accident, where every detail of an oncoming car, or the sense of flying through the air, is comprehended with unnatural perception, that is tunnelling. In real life, it can be dangerous; drivers can find themselves unable to pull their gaze from an obstacle they end up hitting, or pilots can find themselves so fixated on a single instrument that they fail to take action to save themselves... but around a D&D table, I assure the reader, it is quite safe.

The very idea that D&D can achieve this state of mind feels specious; some reading this will outright state that it cannot be so. Others, however, have experienced this and it is queerly the reason why they refuse to surrender this game despite the growing dearth of players. I have experienced it. Hell, I've experienced tunnelling while writing. I nearly always experience flow while writing.

For those experiencing either for the first time, it is like achieving an alternative cognitive state without doing drugs. In Nichiren Buddhism, the term is shakubuku (yes, where Grosse Pointe Blank finds it), meaning to "break and subdue." It forcefully refutes a person's interior beliefs in a manner that shatters delusion and compels acceptance for that which was formerly considered untrue. This is what's upsetting for many —it usually means that the lies they've told themselves for years just won't work any more. In D&D, it means that the other game that the other people play has in a flash ceased to be good enough.

As I'm a prick, I tend to carry out this approach in D&D. Not because I'm a Buddhist or a Taoist, but because I won't suspend my privilege as a DM in attempting to impose this spiritual kick to the head. I'm ready to be fair, to not use my privilege to gain power over my players, to not fake dice or cheat or assume I'm my player's keeper. But, as a performer, if I can make you, the person, feel something through your engagement and attachment to the character you're running I will.

Time, as a game rule, is on my side in this. While party commitment by committee is not. As a DM, I will not hesitate to use time, real time, to create tension, discomfort, fear and their compliment emotions control, resilience and bravery, to produce an experience that a movie can't produce, that a book can't produce, that a VR table can't produce... and that the whole WOTC, for all it's money and influence, hasn't even heard of.

This is what makes this fun for me.

The Hollowness of the Male Pitch

Putting the last of March's Lantern together and last night I was hit hard by a toothache. Nasty, vicious one it was, but I made it through the night before being able to see my dentist. During that time, the tooth well and truly died, so it's a root canal next week, and I'm not feeling tooth pain just now, rather just a bit of sick from the sewage dripping down my throat from the small abcess that was caught in time and is now diminishing. Good times.

As such, did not spend a lot of time working today, with the deadline close now, while I spent too much time watching youtube. That usually means some discussion on writing these days, as I've already said, this time with the main complaint being the poor white male writer who has been mercilessly cast aside by the publishing industry, the bastards, mostly in favour of women. Such diatribes that I see are usually put forth in content hosted by women, because this stuff is even worse when the subject is on a video hosted by men.

There are a few reasons I don't count myself as part of this pity party. First, I know I didn't "make it" as a mainstream writer largely because of my angry youth period, when all those who reached their hand out to help my career got it slapped away. Later, I didn't "make it" because I tended to rise up among groups of writers rather fearlessly to point out that their material wasn't going anywhere because it wasn't any good, just as I did not consider my work at the time of about the same caliber. That tended to make sure my work was not included in that sort of "grant sanctioned" collection that became so popular (and now so obscure) in Canada in the 1990s. Since then, I haven't "made it" because, well, fuck the publishing industry. As such, no pity party. There's a responsible person for this white male failing to become a bestselling author, that being me.

As such, as I write in my inimical, less than polite style, I want to make a point here that as I writer I've never self-identified as either white or male. Obviously, others have done so; I argued that on this blog less than a month ago. But I can't ever recall stopping mid-sentence and thinking, "Wait, is this how a man would write this sentence?" or "is that description of a farm house in Saskatchewan legitimate from a white perspective?" Predictably, I'm going to be accused of this by default anyway, since obviously there are fifty ways to describe the slats of an old house in a sparsely wooded country — the white way, the black way, the catholic way, the Guatemalan way and so on... with my knowing only the first of these. As such, I can only write about anything in the particular way associated with circumstances of my birth having nothing to do with my choices, and therefore I pay no attention to this. Not only do I pay it no attention while I'm writing, I pay it no attention if I hear someone else comment on this while they're reading... for, as well all know, there's only so many ways to read a text also: the white way, the black way, the catholic way and so on.

All of this is attitude is a ridiculous game that I am not interested in playing. Because of my name, and because I grew up in an age when a great deal was expressed through letters and mailings, I have been mistaken hundreds of times of being a woman. Far more, I think, than a Sandy or a Sidney or a Sam might be, because for the most part, people are aware that those names might be a man or a woman, and written responses are less hesitant to judge. But as an "Alexis" in erstwhile days, virtually unknown at that time as an Eastern European or Russian name in the very bland whiteness of Alberta where I still dwell to this day, I have nearly always been assumed to be a woman first, and a man only later at the "unveiling" that happened again and again. And, of course, being a writer, where the name is attached to the work that is in text, there has always been the moment where it comes out: "Oh, you're a man. I though you were a woman."

That is perhaps a reason why my rhetoric, what I write here, is in a different tone from my "writing," such as occurs with the Lantern and other official works. Not to prove that I'm a man writing this blog, but because I have little reason to cultivate my reader. The more I cultivate, the more gracious and kind I am, the more likely it will be that my reader will think I'm a woman... I am, after all, in such cases, "so polite." Because I can, if I wish, write just as sweet as cream. It's really not that hard.

I think this relevant because none of those who assumed I was a woman back in the day added the phrase, "But you don't write like a man."  Rather, the instant they understood what I was, once they'd seen the label on the wrapper if you will, then in their heads my writing automatically snapped to being that of a man. If this happens once or twice, it might be overlooked... but when it has happened many, many times every year, and especially so when I was writing for articles and newspapers, the whole "write like a man" or "write like a woman" frankly becomes an obvious hoax. It's all just horseshit to assume that because a writer includes constant references to a cultural frame or a supposed "identity" in text, that the identity is automatically "authentic," is just hokum. What makes the identity "authentic"is that the Guatemalan author's name is "Juan José López Pérez" and not "Carlos Martin," either of which are common names of that country.

Even after it was known that Cary Grant's given name was Archibald Leach (the name appears on a gravestone in the film Arsenic and Old Lace), they preferred Cary Grant because he didn't "look" like an Archibald.  I mean, really... Grace Kelly and Archibald Leach?  Ridiculous.

If it really is that tough for a man to succeed in the modern publishing stream, then for heaven's sake, why not just write like a woman? In the late 1940s through the 1950s, the Hollywood blacklist turned authorship into a kind of covert tradecraft. Writers accused of Communist sympathies found themselves unemployable under their own names. The result was an underground economy of authorship in which blacklisted writers continued to work by using "fronts," pretending to submit the author's scripts under their own names. It sounds awful, but it let writers go on making their living as writers, and not as ditchdiggers, cooks or door-to-door salesmen.

I don't bring it up to argue this should be the method employed, but rather to argue that it almost certainly IS being used by someone, and probably with the publisher's consent. Many people hate the junket end of publishing; they despise the road trips, the hotel stays, the audiences and the questions. At the same time, no doubt, there are many women and men who would be happy to enjoy this side of it while he remains home doing the actual writing. Of course, even suggesting this is sacrilege... despite the evidence that it's been going on for at least a century now.

I have ghostwritten two books. I'm under contract never to reveal anything more about this except that one fact, in case I want to sell my services to someone else someday. I don't mind that my name is not on the cover of those books, nor what benefits the payer received. I was paid.

Some people are "shocked" to discover this about me, far more so than learning that I'm not a woman. I find this funny. I rather like having my prose being mistaken for that of a woman, because it says very clearly to me that there is no such thing as "gender identity" writing. That's just a thing people made up. All the carping about male authorship and the lack of male readers and such only reveals that whatever the problem, it's almost certainly that the writing itself isn't really all that good. I say this as someone who, I argue, does not write well enough to win the Booker Prize. But then, that's not an atmosphere I ever want to breathe. What a bunch of stuffed mannequins.

When I find myself watching a video that features a white man bleating about the unfairness of the industry, and how his thoughtful, nuanced book about a man undergoing trauma about some thing or other reveals the depths of his themes or his value as a writer, I usually take this with a grain of sale. I have had too many discussions with both would-be and successful writers (far more successful than me, yet strangely no more secure for it) to be certain that this "deep theme" is more than dishwater with a few plates in it. And when I hear that this self same book has been struggling to get published for 15 years, I am not assured that this isn't another case of Chinese Democracy by Guns and Roses... a sort of competent work that in reality is almost instantly forgettable. And when I am actually told what the book is about, it invariably falls into the realm of some other book written by a white man between seventy and a hundred years ago — because it turns out that this is a man struggling in his marriage in a way not unlike Revolutionary Road, or this is a young man being crushed under his responsibilities and ennui not unlike Catcher in the Rye, or this is about a man from the rough sides of the tracks trying to get out, not unlike The Man with the Golden Arm, or this is about a man whose dreams didn't pan out like he thought they would, not unlike Death of a Salesman. In fact, I never hear anything about a white man's trauma that I can't locate in some book I read before I was twenty, when the actual age of the book was much older than that.

The emotional value of these books is important, and were valuable at the time, but my having read them convinced me that they were also ground I didn't need to cover. I recognised while the age of Biff in the play the pitfalls of Willie and thus did not allow myself to fall into them. I have zero desire to write such a novel because, first, if I wanted to make the point I'd tell the reader to see the play or read it through themselves; and second, because I lived my life entirely different from Willie, the thoughts rolling around in my head are not mixed up with feelings of inadequacy. My not "making it" as a writer is not a Willie problem for me; in the end, the writing in fact mattered more than the glitz. Willie's problem is that he hated being a salesman; he sold his comfort for a dream that never materialised, while I gained comfort and joy despite a dream that never materialised. My "trauma" isn't one. That's how good Arthur Miller's play really is: it taught me as a young man the pits and perils of not going down that road. So when I meet an author now who wants to write a book that sounds like Death of a Salesman, all I can think is "Why didn't you read the play young and learn something?"

Yet, I see these same books pitched over and over on the Internet by white men who bemoan the system that is aligned against them. Yet to paraphrase the line from Sorkin's American President, the failure isn't that the modern male writer doesn't get it, it's that they can't sell it. No one is interested in their 1950s based emotional problems not because they are white problems, but because they are problems that none of us have any more. No one anywhere believes that a man who cannot deal with his marriage has a right to complain about the "trauma" he's suffering, because there are now literally a hundred different approaches a person willing to be flexible and change their nature can do something about that. It's not the 1950s, it's not the land of fault divorce, it's not the male's responsibility to do all the earning, it's not the male's right to have a pity party because the marriage isn't going well. Those are problems that dinosaurs have. Present day males simply agree with their wives to call it quits, take up an activity that encourages growth and self-awareness, accepts that life is pain, that everyone feels it, and moves the fuck on. There's no room left for wallowing, which is what those old works of 70 years ago did. Not to their fault, but due to the time in which they were written.

This explains why so much literature and so many films take place three, four, even five decades ago, so that writers who want to write about the old problems all over again can do so without looking idiotic. But really, these stories only tell us to be grateful we're no longer those people. They don't enlighten, they don't really engage. They're largely judged on how faithful they are to the time period (within specific modern taboos), never upon the insight they offer into anything.

The pitch for why I should care about such writing — for there is always a pitch — suggests to me a fellow who arrives at my front door to sell me a new, great product he's invented. It's "sensational," every home needs one, it performs a service unlike no other appliance, the very presence of it will change the way I start my day every morning... and then, the reveal: it's a toaster. The man has invented a toaster. It may be a very nice toaster, it may do the job it's designed to do, but I already have one and it's the least modern gadget I own. In fact, I'm so tired of toast after a lifetime of eating it now that my toaster has one single purpose: to toast bagels. I don't eat sliced bread and the buns I eat don't fit in the toaster, so now this is all that's left. And if there are no bagels in the house, the toaster goes in a cupboard — where it sits, for months, until I want bagels again.

This is modern writing produced by the kind of complaining male I happen to find on youtube. Mind you, outside the "lit" community, I have no problem whatsoever finding books written by males... about history, science, geopolitics, mechanics, you name it. But I don't buy these.

I have the internet now.

Session 2: Kobalds and Rats

Friday we had another session, a week after the first... the next won't be for two weeks. The situation had been set up by the previous running, in which the players had seen three kobalds above ground engaged in making charcoal. One of these was killed at the end of the running on Feb. 6th, so we picked up Friday last's game with the party on one side of a swirl of smoke and, uncertainly, two kobalds on the other.

After the usual uncertainty about who should do what and how, which always seems to accompany these things (I have lately come to the conclusion that no one wants to force the other players into something not agreed upon, which is why the military assigns that responsibility to a leader), the party braved the smoke. Two kobalds were encountered, a bunch of missing happened and then both were dispatched easily.

Revealed also was a pathway down into a subterranean lair, pictured here:

Once entering the anti-chamber to 1., the party fought a running battle against 7 kobalds into room 2.  These generally had 1d4 for hit points, except the leader which was a "first-level" by my system, my having no trouble with the training that can be applied to humans being learnable by kobalds. This gave one kobald, armed with a dagger and shield instead of a club like the others, an AC of 6 and 12 h.p.; he proved to be quite durable and managed to land a triple-damage hit on Matyas for 12 damage. The hit demonstrated the no-helmet rule perfectly: I rolled a 20-crit, then a 19; Matyas didn't have a helmet. So it goes.

One kobald escaped, the party looted the body for a little copper and silver, found nothing else of worth and decided to press on. They met a second levelled kobald at the top of the stairs at 3.; as I remember, and I might be wrong (I'm old and doddering), it was the cleric Zoltan who managed to thump him twice and short order, leaving him dead at the bottom of the stairs. At that point the earlier escaped kobald released all the pet giant rats down below, 12 of them, so that these surged up and attacked the party.

Overall, they went down quickly... but in one particular round, I rolled two 20-crits against Ti out of three rats; then I rolled another 20 on one of these so that one of the rat hits would cause double, and the other triple damage. Rats do 1-3 damage on a hit; I use a six-sided counting 1-2 = 1, 3-4 = 2, 5-6 = 3 in the usual manner. I grabbed two d6 of different colours and rolled boxcars. Ti took 15 total that round, survived it but was knocked into negative hit points. As the damage was 6 and 9, there were no wounds (Matyas had suffered a wound earlier), so Ti was able to just stagger to the back of the group and let them finish off the rats.

At this point, the party were ready to quit. However, I taunted them into checking the bottom of the stairs (they hadn't gone down) as they counted their resources and hesitated, until I succeeded in getting Orsos to look. There he found the sprite princess in a cage, a sack beside her and scrawled across the door that would have led them nearer the mage purportedly at the bottom of the small dungeon, "Take her and GO!"

The party took the deal; the sack had a hundred gold, they returned the sprite princess to her people, got themselves healed... but unfortunately Matyas picked up a disease from the rats and was set to be laid up for perhaps as long as four weeks.

Joey, player managing Matyas, had participated in my Juvenis campaign once upon a time, when he ran a gnome cleric named Lexent. This being a character from my campaign, I offered an arrangement for Lexent to step into Matyas' place (just 4 x.p. shy of 4th level) and then, upon achieving 5th level, take Matyas as henchfolk. The party were given a veto on this and chose not to take it, so the next running will begin with the party again in Ozd, having met Lexent, while Matyas remains with the sprites to recover. He'll then remain in limbo until Lexent reaches 5th.

There you have it. Basically, a straight-up combat session. We'll see how the next one goes.

Session One, Sprites and All

The Discord D&D game took place on Friday and it's now Sunday evening as I write this. I agreed that it would be a good idea to discuss the game after, but of course that's easier said than done. Usually, during a game, I'm in a state of flow; I easily lose track of time, I don't remember the order of decisions made by myself and the party, I don't remember a lot of what I said. I know I tripped over a lot of words, speaking fast and struggling to describe the image in my head in words vocally, when I've gotten used to be able to write half a sentence, pause, then finish. I suppose, in some degree, I embarrassed myself. Not because I made any mistakes as a DM, or failed to drive attention, or get the players invested... though a first running with a group of players who are also DMs is a climb in that regard. No, "embarrassed" in the sense of maybe getting a little too excited about playing again.

I can report pleasantly that after the event I did not experience a "drop," but rather a continuation of being "wired." This continued uncomfortably for a couple of hours, despite my having a shower and trying to escape into other things. I could have really used a glass of wine, but there wasn't a drop in the house; I haven't bought any liquor since last September, because it's viciously expensive. I might buy a bottle for this Friday, when we've agreed to run again. Two Fridays put us in the territory of birthday parties and I think a wedding, so to be flexible it was either run again in a week or in three weeks. The party voted and it's this Friday.

I'd say the players struggled with investing; they didn't get the rolls they wanted, putting them firmly into the four basic classes of cleric, fighter, mage and thief; no one wanted to be a mage or a thief, so the party sorted itself out as three straight fighters and one cleric. The cleric elected Buddhism as a religion, a good one if the character wants to remain isolationist and self-directed. Personally, I'd prefer to be inside a strong, ordered structure that I can contribute to or feast from, but that takes a specific sort of headspace, which I know most don't have. I've had buddhist clerics in former parties; I don't mind in the least.

The rule-comprehension came very easily. As they're all DMs, no one disputed any rule in any manner whatsoever. The clarifications were certainly in line with the issues presented. I made only a couple of notes for things to be added to the malady table, as players pointed them out, and once I had to go to the original Players Handbook to estimate the weight of a godentag. That's the only reference I made to the Players. I made one reference also to the Monster Manual; I've never actually used sprites in a campaign before, and had to actually look up the original for them. Everything else was managed through my wiki and Discord. It's phenomenal that I can just drag and drop a file into discord, so that if I do have something in a file on my desktop, I don't need to take a screen shot, I can just give a copy. Great way for these fellows to get inside copies of the Streetvendor's Guide, as it happens.

Tried to get through the character background generator as fast as I could; there were a lot of bad rolls and I do wish I'd taken some time to upgrade that before playing with it again. A note for the future: that damn page needs work. If ever I have the time. I could, I suppose, just stop blogging.

We were hung up on buying equipment for time. I expected to be. It's a huge table, deliberately made confusing. Still, it's an excel file and saved to text, so people can just sort it. The players gamely tried to manage it by vendor, which makes a cruel headspace check. You don't find an axehead at the blacksmith's but at the "hacker's," that kind of thing. The players called out answers to each other and I feel the best approach is that if you're looking for anything for more than thirty seconds, call it out and someone else will answer. The issue conflates only when players try to stubbornly solve it themselves. The idea, and I wish I'd thought of this in-game, I only have now, is that you're on a street talking to your friend and saying, "I was just at the blacksmith's and I didn't see any axes."  Whereupon the friend answers, "Oh, I've just come from the hacker's; it's up two streets on your left." Only, of course, without the directions rendered in geography.

The starting game was pulling teeth, though it probably didn't seem like that from the players' perspective. In retrospect, I'm sure they were turning over a few dozen things in their minds, making the choosing of a character name seem superfluous and not at all necessary. It is always hard to progressively describe a party moving up through a forest, in this case along a stream, because the DM says, "You reach the point that represents the furthest you've ever been along this stream from town," and the player quite correctly has no answer for this. In painting the picture of where the players are, how they got here from there, it's often a series of descriptions that land flat in this manner, and it's easy for the DM to think, "Gawd, how boring must this be for them." But it's not really that, I don't believe. It's only that the player can't decide the actual terrain themselves; they can't react to trees or hills or streams except to move around or up them... and there is a feeling that the only reason I am mentioning the stream here, or that hill in the distance, is in some literary Chekhovian fashion: I would not point out this hill unless it mattered somehow. The problem, however, is that it "matters" because you're passing it now, and that actually passing the hill in reality would take time, and would be a little dull, and you would feel a little nonplussed to be marching on. So, though it feels uncomfortable, the actual trek would also be so. Subconsciously, the players need to be made aware of how far they are from civilisation, even as they march away from it.

A similar issue occurred when the lone sprite was encountered. If the party had been properly surprised by it, they'd have seen it run off and been left to wonder if they should follow. Instead, the sprite goofed, made it's presence known, lost initiative and the nearest fighter to the sprite missed. The sprite's fired arrow did all of 2 damage (details that really don't matter), whereupon the party agreed to parley. The sprite gave some salve to the hurt fighter, who got some x.p., and then I did a very obvious thing as a DM: I outlined a simple, straightforward, 2D adventure hook.

These guys needed it. I'd given them some teasing with some 8 ft. creature ripping into trees for honey, only to get back a sort of uncertainty about getting involved. Parties differ. One party will think, "Well, owlbears haven't much treasure, its just a fight, so is it worth it?"  Another party will think, "An owlbear, three or four hours from town? It's our duty to make the land safe for hunters." That kind of thing. In any case, the owlbear went over like a fart in church, so Asiff the sprite took the party to his treehouse settlement, where the party talked to the acting head of the lofty "hamlet," Hara, who explained that their princess had been kidnapped by a mage of some kind, aided by kobalds, and was likely being siphoned for blood for the purpose of potion-making. The party flinched at the idea that this is a sort of "few drops a day thing," and were willing to invest. The sprites explained that a "ward" had been created somehow that disabled sprites from moving past a certain part of the forest, which they suspected hid the princess. The players, not sprites, volunteered without being told (and I wouldn't have) and bravely marched off (hesitating every couple of steps like parties do) to rescue the princess.

It's almost embarrassing that I'm writing those words. But, heck, it's a story that's worked for a thousand years, who am I to argue?

Predictably they found the kobalds, not on guard but busy making charcoal in a valley; they descended, puzzled out the unfamiliar stealth rules from the wiki, made their approach on one kobald, got within 9 hexes, won initiative and killed the kobald. And that is as far as we got. But the party's blood was certainly up by then, so yeah, good all around. We'll pick it up from there on Friday.

Discord, I think, allows for a faster loosening up than text. The Juvenis Campaign and those on blogs were always hard to get off the ground; I expect every game everywhere is. Which is why we should be paying a little closer attention to a first game being like getting a crew together to say cook in a restaurant or work a job site. It doesn't go that great initially. It never does. The first practice of a baseball team is always a disaster, if the players don't already know each other. It's not until they lose that first game by 9 points that the second practice matters. We, and by this I mean every player and every DM in this pasttime, put too much emphasis on the first session. It's not that we need a "session zero," its that we need players who will guarantee three sessions before quitting.

Wouldn't it be nice if we could give each player $25 dollars for their first three sessions, with the understanding that they'd have to pay it back over five sessions if they wanted to keep going? Probably wouldn't work — D&D players are such nasty, ruthless people that a mere $75 would go such a long way toward changing their lives — but it would be nice if some measure of encouragement could be invented that would encourage players to believe that with real investment, it's certain to get better. Perspective, let's call it.

Trust me... anyone who quits after your first game? You don't want to even know that person.

Poor Unfortunate Souls

For those who may not know, a "sensitivity reader" is a person hired by an author or publisher to review a manuscript for portrayals of people, cultures, identities, or experiences that the reader believes may be inaccurate, harmful, or offensive. The role is advisory rather than editorial in the traditional sense. The sensitivity reader does not focus on prose quality, structure, or storytelling craft, but on how specific representations might be received by particular social or identity groups.

There is no agreed standard on what the role entails. If the individual happens to be a black person, Asian, or a woman, or transgendered, or native, or of any established cultural minority, they need only state that they are one and they are, if they can get themselves hired. There is no formal definition, no training, no credentialing, no shared methodology; in addition, there is no stated, clear, inherent consequence attached to the judgments they make. The reader bears no responsibility for the artistic, commercial or cultural outcome of the work; it the work still provokes criticism after their review, presumably, the penalty is that they might lose their job. This of course does not attach to the correctness of any specific judgment they might have made. Rather, the reading is evaluated on whether their feedback aligns with the expectations and risk posture of the institution employing them. If a publisher wants aggressive flagging, a reader who flags aggressively is doing the job "well," regardless of whether the flags are defensible, coherent or mutually compatible across projects.

I've tried to explain the above without sentiment or judgment and I'm not going to indulge in it. What would be the point? If this is the economic model that modern publishers want to embrace, they're welcome to it. I can't see how it affects my life as a writer, unless blogger.com wants to start employing one to look at my work.

What fascinates me is an exchange like this that took place on a podcast last August. The podcaster, Hughes, is talking about writing a Lebanese character into a book:

"When I'm writing the scene and they're around the kitchen table, what am I having them eat? Am I googling Lebanese American food? Because will that give me enough cultural knowledge to actually paint that picture authentically? What might a Lebanese mom say? What's a little saying that, you know, would create authenticity?"

This part is fascinating for me, because the two conversants go on to discuss creating characters in books, describing the importation of black people into books, stereotypes, the employment of American diversity to portray in stories and picture books various persons who have this background or that leaning or what not. Both are utterly blind to the racism going on in their own discussion, and how discussions like this reaching back into the 1950s inevitably led to issues of cultural appropriation in American literature.

As these two persons engage in the conversation (one of whom appears in the video I posted a few days ago about writing on campuses), the assumption is this: as a writer, I am making a character in a book, and my first tag for that character's personality is their race.  I'm not writing a scene where people sit around a kitchen table having dinner, where the food itself is irrelevant because I can describe any food I want, no. I'm writing a scene where Lebanese people are sitting around a kitchen table, and that makes it necessary for the food to be thought of in terms of its authenticity to the arbitrary naming of the character's ethnicity.

This defines the racism taking place in authorship.

The counterargument is that the characters must have names. If I do not say that the family is Lebanese, and still say, "Karim, Rami and Nadine sat at the table, where steaming bowls of falafel and rice awaited them," then I'm still saying Lebanese without using the term, correct?

No, not correct. Because if I never state the ethnicity, I'm first not beholden to having the characters self-define as Lebanese. These are names that people have, regardless of where they happen to have come from. What they talk about around the table defines their characters, their motivations, their interests and experiences... not that they have an ethnic background. If, as a writer, I ignore the ethnicity, if I never mention it per se, but only discuss the characters as people, and the story as a structure of events, then it does not matter if the people depicted happen not to be white. I'm not committing cultural appropriation because I'm not hinging the value or direction of my story upon a specific culture, but rather the one we all actually live in.

Post colonial writing, however, discovered in the 1950s that writing about a specific culture was a terrific way to sell books. If I am Guatemalan, and able to write well, then I have a ready market of Guatamalans if I write specifically about Guatemalan culture, because so little is actually written there. The appropriation complaint arises out of American people writing about Guatemalan culture and accessing that ready market without having "earned" the market by actually being Guatemalan. That in turn comes from the assumption that if I'm Guatemalan, I can't write a book that Americans will buy, because I don't know America and therefore don't know how to write work that will appeal to that culture which I do not know. What's "stolen" therefore is not the culture itself, but the willingness of Western publishing concerns to sweep in and market specific cultural books to specific cultural people, which it would like to do without outsiders to those cultures muddying a very lucrative and beneficial market (to publishers, that is, not to writers, who usually get exploited).

Thus, while the individual writer, say me, wants to write a book with "Lebanese" characters sitting at a table, the persons most concerned with this are not youtubers or cancel-culture enthusiasts, but publishers who want to be sure that my depiction of "Lebanese" is accurate to my actually BEING Lebanese... and thus the sensitivity reader. It's not, as most frame it, a desire to reduce backlash, but rather, to monopolise a specific kind of content.

For the would-be writer on the ground, however, not running a publishing house, it looks like avoiding backlash is the agenda. People in business, however, are not so naive as to think backlash won't happen regardless. The benefit of the sensitivity reader isn't that the backlash is reduced; it's that when it occurs, the publishers can argue, "Well, we did all we could. We used a sensitivity reader." This conveys their responsibility and thus sabotages the viability of any real backlash. The backlash that might have worked five years ago, when the "valid" perspective was on the internet, has now been countered by a greater validity. Publishers can now say to the press that comes to ask about the blowback to a book, with a shrug, "The internet is wrong; our research is professionally correct. That matters more than the opinions of a few amateurs." Poof. Internet problem gone.

The mindset of writers who sit around and discuss what culture to make their characters from arises from decades of literary critique that has systematically put all cultural writing, regardless of actual quality, upon a pedestal. As such, most college educated writers, the sort that take part in podcasts because their writing careers are frustrated, automatically think "good book" = "cultural framing." It is impossible for them to think of books in terms of self-identity except in terms of their group identity. It isn't possible for them to imagine novels that talk about the large subjects of a century ago (war, marriage, parenthood, morality, etc.) because they have been taught by university professors that nothing new can be written on those. Such books are still written, but they're eschewed by book prize committees or legitimacy, since academic institutions have decided that the only real life worth now writing about is the one set in the place where one grew up. This conveniently balkanises all writing into your social and ethnic status, while it is expected that as a white second-generation Canadian with distant roots in Russian culture, that I'm limited as a writer because my background was upper middle class suburban big city. I don't have anything worth writing about because I didn't suffer growing up. Besides, all novels about the suburbs were written fifty years ago by other white people who got there first.

We should not be surprised that there are now endless wars about the boundaries between cultures, and that "racism" or "genderism" or "sexism" are the battlegrounds upon which these wars are fought. The point about balkanisation is that there are so many little cultures, each jealousy struggling to defend their little hill, that this opens endless opportunities for accusation of theft, petty jealousies, arguments about validity and authenticity, and of course the perception that a sensitivity writer exists to impose even harsher boundaries against those writers who find their justifiable content narrowed still further. Already stuck in their heads with the assumptions that "books are written about peoples' culture" and that "all other subjects are dead," they find the news that publishers are now increasing their gatekeeping model as abusive and confrontational. Poor them. It chafes when writers without imagination or money find themselves without power also.

The solutions are obvious. What to write about? Well, this landscape to begin with. The novel about a writer who happens to be of one culture choosing to write about another, and then being vilified for doing so, sounds like a pretty good book that could be written at least ten thousand times, given all the boundaries to be crossed. The book about the writer who chooses to pretend to be a different culture, vis a vis the ancient book, Black Like Me, seems pretty obvious also, and is in fact already proliferating if one goes and looks for it. Common framings for this are all over youtube, in the guise of "I changed by sex and then I changed my mind" or "I used to be Maga"... any of these would make a new subject novel for anyone willing to have a spine that can withstand blowback. The problem with most cry-in-their-beer writers is what it has always been. They don't actually want to be writers. They want to be liked. That's almost impossible in the present world. Whereupon I have to repeat, poor them. Poor unfortunate souls. In pain. In need. This one longing not to be white, that one longing to be appreciated. Just like the mermaid who wants to live on land, but hates that it feels like walking on knives.