Moving the blog

I am moving this blog to a git-based version at todistantlands.github.io. 

For your convenience, here is a link to its RSS feed.

I have migrated many of my old posts there already. I am leaving this site up for the time being, partly because I haven't yet figured out if I can migrate the comment history. If I figure that out, I will shut down this site in short order. I may delete it eventually anyways.

UPDATE: It looks like I've successfully migrated the comments!

It looks like some of the comment metadata got lost in the import to Disqus, so the thread data has been lost. That's a shame as it makes conversations harder to follow. 

I will leave this blog online for now, but am shutting down any new comments.

Another Shot at Theorizing the OSR

Some interesting conversation recently around the "nature" of the OSR. This topic waxes and wanes, and will probably never really be settled, but for what it's worth (almost nothing) I'd like to share a thought that occured to me as I was reading Brendan's post on the topic.

Like Richard, I have my attachments to the term OSR. I'm not convinced by Marcia's positioning of that attachment along the axis of an originary myth, accurate or otherwise. As Brendan notes in the post linked above, such originary claims can be made after the fact. In other words, they might more accurately be interpreted as speech or textual acts that mediate an ongoing social formation, rather than telling its history.

But that's beside the point. If we want to talk about what the OSR is, without questionable historicizing^[1] or appeals to beliefs that others may not share, we could do worse than to look at its material culture. In other words, we can think of the OSR as a scene organized around a collection of quasi-canonical texts. We don't have to look very hard to identify these texts: the LBBs, the Basic D&D line, and to a lesser extent AD&D, as well as their retroclones -- in other words, the textual heritage of early D&D -- have been extensively analyzed, debated, and mined by people putatively affiliated with the OSR.^[2] We might frame the OSR as a kind of tradition, or network of traditions, of working with those foundational texts.

We engage with these texts in different ways. Some folks are interested in learning more about the culture that produced those texts, others in reenacting that culture, others in searching the texts for principles which may or may not be intended or reflective of that culture. Others don't care much either way and use them out of preference for certain aspects of the text itself (rules lite, fiction-forward, etc.).^[3] Some of us still engage with these texts directly, whereas others are happy to build on the interpretive work of intermediaries who have begun to spin these texts into their own trajectories. (Into the Odd and FKR strike me as good examples of OSR "offshoots" that have gone on to generate their own tradition.)

When I shared a draft of this post with Brendan, he raised a very good question:

What do you think of the risk that emphasizing material culture leads to the blind spots of the Forge? That is, people doing hardcore textual analysis and actual play analysis without acknowledging that a lot of the actual game resides in the culture and non-textual norms?

I don't know enough about the Forge to stand behind the part about "blind spots"^[4] but the question is valid regardless. I think for me the difference lies in those texts' function as a source of common ground -- a common font of products, play objects, rules, adventures, histories, etc., that we can look at together and talk about. That is, the OSR doesn't all have to have the same relationships to those texts nor the same ideas about them, for them to act the basis for a kind of shared experience. I emphasize the texts here in their status as objects in common, not as containers of authorized meanings.

As a closing conceptual note, I'm flirting with a couple ideas from the philosopher Jacques Rancière and I'd like to give credit to his work. Rancière is interested in questions of how things like art and knowledge give rise to forms of "being in common". I'm not working closely with him here, but half-digested recollections of his writing, particularly on art in Dissensus (2010) and on education in The Ignorant Schoolmaster (1991), have fed into my thinking in this post.

---

1. Although, I want to note, Marcia's historical analysis is excellent ↩︎
2. You could argue that some subsequent intepretive works, eg. influential blog posts or publications, have themselves become canon. I suspect arguing either way would require a more detailed sociological analysis than I have time for here. ↩︎
3. For what it's worth, I started off in the final category. ↩︎
4. Don't @ me. Also, don't @ Brendan, probably. ↩︎

F**k-You Design

I want to talk about a long-standing tendency that's been bothering me in OSR-inflected design spaces.

I'll start this off with a working definition of good game design for OSR play. Piggybacking on a recent post by Ram, I believe an essential function of good OSR design is to trace out the limits of a negative imaginative space that is filled out in play through GM stage-setting and player action.^[1] When I say the rules trace out the limits, I mean they identify the areas of that space that are ambiguous, complicated, and/or not interesting to imagine, and provide structures that shortcut some of the cognitive work they demand. XP, for all its flaws, is a good example of this: The gradual process of skill development through practice and training is both difficult to represent fictionally and not of interest to most old D&D-derived games except as a sort of background pacing mechanism for character growth; XP abstracts away that fictional murkiness and replaces it with a tidy if idiosyncratic point system.

Equally important for a fantasy game, rules help define areas of the imaginative space where a lack of grounding in familiar concepts makes it difficult to reach consensus through pure narration. In other words, it is easy to imagine a door and the various things it can do, because we are quite familiar with doors. A little more removed from our common experience is something like hand to hand combat, but combat rules help break down the chaos and complexity of a skirmish into a set of graspable concepts and procedures. And none of us have any real experience with the kind of magic common to your average fantasy game. We can't talk about manipulating magical forces the way we talk about manipulating a door, without some common frame of reference. This is why the old D&D magic system is, if not excellent game design, then at least good enough: it tells us in more or less concrete terms what effects a magician can produce, and under what circumstances.

In contrast to good or good-enough design, I want to talk about something I call fuck-you design.

Doing the Impossible

Lately I’ve been riding the bandwagon of interest in FKR-inspired design. I’m especially intrigued by diegetic advancement. This is a concept that holds a lot of promise in terms of replacing my least favourite legacy system: XP. However, I’m not convinced diegetic advancement has quite arrived in terms of implementation.

My only take on AC

I can't believe I'm even writing about ascending/descending AC. Blame Marcia, who's doing some fascinating work with the old Chainmail tables.

Look, here's my only take on ascending AC:

If you're using AC to reference a table, don't express AC as a number. You can use letters! Letter grade AC! It makes it so much less confusing when the number on the sheet is separate from the number you're rolling against.

So here we go: Unarmoured = D, Leather = C, Chain = B, Plate = A

If there's a shield, you get a +. So Plate + Shield = A+.

That's it. That's the take.

D&D Theology in The Raven Tower

Ann Leckie's The Raven Tower is a short fantasy novel told from the perspective of a demigod. Like all her other novels, it is a deft and thoughtful exploration of a way of being fundamentally different from our own. More relevant to this blog, it is also a compelling account of how deities (and their clerics) in your standard D&D setting might work.

In this article I'm going to try and summarize what gods in The Raven Tower are, and how their powers work. While ultimately I'd suggest you just go read the novel, I understand that not all readers have the time, money, or interest to do so. Still, I recommend it, especially if the breakdown in this post is interesting to you. The post will contain some minor spoilers, although I am confident it will not give away any critical plot details.

Also note that I listened to an audiobook of The Raven Tower, to which I no longer have access, about two years ago. Therefore, my recollections on some points are hazy, and I am unable to go back to the text to clarify.

The nature of gods

Gods in The Raven Tower are beings of pure mind and will. They occupy a particular point in space and can inhabit some physical body (examples include a rock, a dog, a swarm of mosquitos, a skull) but do not need to. Their exact origin, and relationship to the wider cosmology, is left ambiguous in the book. Gods are not omniscient and their awareness, while not strictly limited by senses as we know them, appears limited to their vicinity.

Everything a god says is true. This does not mean that gods cannot lie, but rather that if it speaks an untruth, the god wills that untruth into being. If a god says "that tree is on fire", the tree must either already be on fire, or it catches fire as soon as the sentence is uttered. Gods' speech is not verbal, so much as a pure expression of intent. In this regard, willpower and physical energy appear to be interchangeable, and speech alters the world largely through the application and manipulation of physical laws. Converting one substance into another means rearranging it at an atomic level; causing it to float means applying sufficient force to counter the pull of gravity. I do not remember whether the law of conservation of matter applies in The Raven Tower, but either way, it is certainly easier to manipulate existing matter than to create it fresh.

Speaking into being in this way expends a god's limited supply of consciousness, and so they have to be careful about what they say. Using up too much of its power robs the god of its essence and ability to think or act. I forget whether gods can truly die, but they can come very close by speaking something that exceeds their capacity. For instance, a god can speak a storm into being for a moment, allowing the storm to dissipate naturally afterward; but if a god says a storm will rage on forever, its power will permanently be funneled into keeping that storm going. Thus, the best way to "harm" a god is to trick it into saying something can't afford to make true.

The sociology of religion

Much as gods can expend energy through will, they accumulate energy as it is given to them. Acts that direct energy to a god nourish them; things like prayer are like a little snack, whereas a mass sacrifice, which gives matter and life over to them, is like a hearty meal. The exact mechanics of this exchange are not explored in depth, but the relationship between the direction of energy and the nourishment of gods make for some of the most interesting moments in the novel.

Something like religion, then, tends to emerge in historical relationships between communities of humans (there are no demi-humans in The Raven Tower) and gods. Humans can provide a steady diet of worship and sacrifice, in exchange for various boons, blessings, miracles, etc. At the same time, gods are cautious about what promises they make their worshippers, and often attach terms that allow them to balance their own resources and avoid overcommiting. For example, a god may promise that so long as certain observances are kept up according to its specifications, it will continue to protect a community from eg. drought, or some other narrowly defined threat.

Because gods' awareness is limited, they sometimes make their power "portable" by attaching a promise to a certain person, object, and/or action. This canonically leads to conditions where a blessed object -- a "god-spoken thing" -- will enact some miracle when a command word or gesture is performed, but only once a day.

(I'm extrapolating now, but you have here the basis for your traditional D&D cleric: A person who has adequately demonstrated their fealty is allowed to ask for a certain number of favours per day. Those favours are pre-defined, ranked according to how costly they are to grant -- levels -- and meted out in limited quantities per day. As they continue to prove their worth, clerics are given access to more and better favours.)

Gods have individual personalities and skills. Gods gradually develop techniques to more efficiently enact certain things. The difference could be between, say, a god that provides better crop yields by learning about and subtly accelerating plants' natural growth processes, and one that isn't as knowledgeable about plants and obtains the same effect by providing good weather all year (the latter presumably being a lot more costly). While their relationships with humans can be quite transactional, gods can also grow attached to humans -- or at least their communities, as individuals don't live very long.

Conclusion

The Raven Tower presents a world where gods live in evolving relationships with humans and one another, and where those relationships are embedded in a kind of pseudo-material economy of willpower. The nature and limitations of Leckie's take on fantasy deities corresponds closely to the way they're instantiated mechanically in D&D, making that novel's theology an excellent fit for your kitchen-sink D&D setting.

Ideating City Adventures, or 12 Ruinations of Pumpai

A Preamble

This post represents an intersection of a number of recent inspirations: For one, Patrick is blogging about Gormenghast, and Nate is sharing his incredible megadungeon lore, which have me thinking about the stories behind huge, beautiful, ruined, dreamy places. Second, I haven't run D&D in a while, and having started to miss it, I've been wanting to work on game material. So I've been thinking about Pumpai, a city I first started dreaming up in around 2014, and have fiddled with intermittently over the years. Some inspiration images:

Paul Delvaux, The Great Sirens (1947)

Max Ernst, Europe After the Rain II (1941)

lokorum (2020)

I'm not going to get into a bunch of detail about Pumpai now, because the point of this exercise is kind of not to do that. In the past I've struggled to flesh out Pumpai for play, so I went back to Joseph Manola's excellent posts about adapting his own city setting to something he can run at the table in his City of Spires game (parts 1, 2, and 3). I was particularly interested in his calls to condense and shrink the setting, as Pumpai has always existed in my mind as something vast and nebulous -- a vibe with infinite potential for specification and variation, rather than something actual and concrete you can put characters in. At the same time, it's important to me that Pumpai be a place that feels old, a place steeped in its history. So I wanted to do some work with it that would both develop it as a place for adventuring and help flesh out its past...

Social Procedures in Practice: A report

Not long ago I wrote up a codified version of my social procedures. In addition to posting them to this blog, I shared them with my players. I have run two sessions since then, during which I have taken care to call out these procedures as I use them and make clear how I am interpreting them in play. This is meant both to help my players better understand the game, and to enforce upon myself a kind of rigour in testing them out in this more defined form.

In the latest session, one PC managed to activate every single social mechanic. So here's how that went:

GM Anxiety and the West Marches

It should be no secret to anyone who's been following what I do lately that I think of GMing as craft. What I mean by that is enough for its own blog post (and also a podcast).

A lot of the talk about the social dynamics of GMing focus on power imbalances, and the outsized influence and control a GM can exert. I agree to an extent, but for reasons that also lie outside the scope of this post, I believe that this imbalance is not as necessarily or intrinsically problematic as some would contend. I also think it can make for a very rich game, and affords qualities of play that cannot be readily achieved through more balanced distributions of narrative control. Again, though, that's another post.

There is also a flipside to the social power arguments that I find absent, or at least underexplored, which is the vulnerability and social pressure attached to GMing. Admittedly, more balanced power dynamics offset this. However, proceeding from the assumption that assymmetry can be desirable, I find a more robust engagement with the subject lacking. These matter have become pronounced of late in my experiences running my home game, which has recently transitioned to a West Marches-style format. In this post I'm going to identify what I consider some significant blind spots in the ways we tend to talk about running this kind of game, especially when it comes to its experiential dimensions. Moving forward, I'll be devoting some thought to how I've been managing these issues in my campaign of late.

Social Procedures

I've been running OSE a bunch lately and decided it might be helpful for my players if there's a codified version of the way I run social encounters for them to consult.* Since I wrote them up anyway, I thought I'd share them here. Link immediately below, brief design notes after the jump.

Click here to see the document!

Text to Table episode 2: Nate Lumpkin -- Statting Gods and Dating Goblins

The second episode of my podcast is online! Go listen to it!

Click the picture to listen to it!

My guest for this episode is Nate Lumpkin, from Swamp of Monsters. His blog has been one of my favourites since the heyday of G+ and I'm super excited whenever a new post shows up in my feed. Nate is talented writer with a good mind for D&D, and it was really fun to get to speak to him about his campaign.

I faced a number of technical issues putting this one together, a couple of which were my fault but most of which really lie with the platform, Anchor. These are reflected in the nearly month-long gap between episodes, and in the audio quality of the interview itself. It's alright if you want to get something out quick and don't care to edit, but neither of those things describe me and I found it to be really hostile to work with. I haven't made any firm decisions yet but am exploring alternative hosting services, cause damn. 

Anyway, enjoy the conversation. I liked having it and I think there's some really interesting material in there.

Background Music in Online Games: The Sequel

A lot us are doing a lot more online gaming these days. For the last year, I've been living an hour's drive my from my nearest friend, and two or more hours from the vast majority of people I've traditionally gamed with in person. So I've been online for a while now. This isn't my first time moving my gaming online - it also happened the year I was living in France for the 2014-15 school year - and of course there's been the occasional online game on G+ (R.I.P.) and Discord. All this to say I have quite a bit of experience with these things.

Through all that experience, one problem that remains fucking intractable is that of piping in background music. This has never been especially hard to do in person; I open up my laptop and pull up a song or video. But for some reason, while simulating every other aspect of a TTRPG session is getting increasingly easy and convenient, music remains a singular challenge. I more or less solved the issue in 2015. The advice in that post still works, more or less. I checked yesterday, and while it's a bit dated and some links might need updating, if you squint a little the instructions will do now what they did then.

So why am I writing this post? Well, the computational landscape has changed significantly since 2015. I no longer use Skype, because I find it intolerable, and Hangouts has been slowly torn to pieces and will finally be laid to rest in June. There are other options for online gaming, and they are very good options, but music remains a problem. In this post I'm going to break down what it takes to get music right in an online gaming session, and I'm going to provide an overview of every conferencing tool of which I am aware. As you'll see, while many of these are okay, or at least workable, most solutions available now are unnecessarily kludgy, awkward to coordinate with players, and/or rely on bad or dying software. The other point of this post is to lay out the problem clearly, in the hopes that someone equiped with that information might have a better solution.

New podcast: Text to Table

I've started a podcast!

You can listen to the first episode here!

What's it about?

Text to Table is a series of interviews about RPGs, focusing on GMing as craft. It understands the act of taking RPG texts and bringing them to life in games as a task that is complex, skillful, expressive, and challenging. I speak with GMs about their experiences with various RPG products and topics, in order to get a better sense of how they bridge that seemingly endless gap between the thing on the page (or in your head) and the fantastical chaos of play.

This first episode features David Wilkie / Anxiety Wizard as we talk about Troika, its colourful archetypes, and the wide-open campaign affordances of its rules and setting.

I hope you enjoy. Feel free to shoot me any questions/comments/feedback here or by email at alexichalk@gmail.com. If you enjoy, please share, as I'm not on RPG twitter and therefore somewhat limited in my ability to reach listeners. Also please let me know if there's a topic you'd like to see addressed, or if you have insights you might be interested in sharing on the show yourself!

Graded success for roll-under d20

This is a sort of half-baked add-on inspired by Call of Cthulhu 7e's graded difficulty system for roll-under d100 resolution. It assumes 3d6-based ability generation a la BX, and uses the same modifier scale, albeit towards a different end.

I'm opening a Discord server

Alright folks, I've been hanging around Discord a while and thinking about what kind of server I'd like to be in, and I think it's time I made it happen. Link after the jump.

Boosting the signal: "Transgender representation in OSR cyberpunk games," by Evlyn M

First, if you're somehow reading my blog and aren't already following Evlyn M at Le Chaudron Chromatique, you should be. Her artwork is some of the most beautiful and original on the RPG scene right now, her writing is bursting with fresh ideas, and her work ethic is enviable and inspiring.

Yesterday she published this excellent overview of trans representation in OSR cyberpunk games. I am first deeply appreciative of Evlyn's efforts to contribute an OSR* perspective to the discussion on queer issues on the RPG scene, and secondly really impressed by the rigour with which she carries out her research.

Back in the Days Of G+ there was a discussion of sorts as to whether the scene needed more critical voices. The prevailing position was that no we don't because those might make someone feel Bad** but I maintain that hell yes we do and this is exactly the sort of work I had in mind. I think Evlyn does such a great job at focalizing an important question, surveying the area, analyzing and drawing intelligent conclusions leading to helpful advice - that is, of being critical though not polemical. Hell yes, more of this please, and thank you.

*or whatever we're calling it these days
**This is an oversimplification and possibly a strawman but I'm blogging from my phone so

The Recursive Encounter Calculator: for checking encounters over many turns

Peter's recent post on the enduring difficulty of running travel in RPGs has motivated me to make a little tool I'd been thinking about for a while. It is not a complete solution to his problem, but I hope it can at be helpful to a few GMs out there. I'll explain further, but first, the tool:

Latest Frankenrules

It's come to my attention that in the Year of Our Lord 2019 someone is linking to this - which is flattering and also fine, however not exactly representative of how I'm running my D&D games nowadays. So I figure it's time for an update on that front.

These are the rules I've been using over the past year+ in my ongoing Red & Pleasant Land campaign. Two major sources pillaged are the LotFP playtest rules in Eldritch Cock, and Evey Lockhart's Broken Wilds setting.

There's maybe room for reflection here on how my approach to running D&D has evolved since I wrote up those older houserules in 2014. However it is already past my bedtime, so those thoughts will have to wait.

A-here we go:

Do I Miss Google Plus? The Answer May Surprise You

Patrick has asked about how people are taking the demise of G+. I'm writing this post partially because it seems too long to dump in his comment section, but also because an accidental button
click led me to lose an in-progress response multiple paragraphs long. Twice.

I'm mostly on Discord now, lurking on about a dozen servers and active on 3 or 4. The ones I'm active on are small, the largest with members numbering around 100. I do not even lurk the big OSR server because I simply can't keep up. I mention this because those servers are my main point of comparison.

I miss G+ but not as much as I'd expected. Frankly, I'd grown tired with a number of aspects of the platform by the end. The crowdedness of G+ made a constant chore of just keeping the platform bearable, and the conversations I was interested in having seemed mostly to have played out. The conversations that were happening felt increasingly dominated by chatter, or like rehashes of last year's topics. I also felt that the culture on G+ (reinforced by the site's UX design) created an emphasis on "making", whether the thing made was a blog post or a game product or what have you. As my life got busier that pressure felt more limiting as I sought more casual avenues for my hobby. Furthermore, as my interests branched out into other RPGs that weren't D&D, I found my community there increasingly unresponsive and occasionally outright hostile.

The gaming experience on Discord has been refreshing. I was initially drawn to G+ by ConstantCon and the promise of easy access to games on a whim. As far as I can tell, those days were already over by the time I signed up. On Discord I have found games in abundance and varied in kind. Tellingly, after years of intermittent, utterly failed attempts to get a Monsterhearts game going on G+, I managed to wind up running one in Discord almost by accident, and have had to take some creative measures just to keep player numbers under control.

The social experience has been superior, straight up. I spend much less time thinking about who to avoid and how to avoid them. My communities feel more intimate and trusting. What I lose in granularity of control over my social circle I make up for in a sense of conviviality. I've also had some really enjoyable exchanges with people I doubt I'd have ever much engaged with on G+. While the language for relationships on the Internet remains fraught as ever, I do believe I have quickly made friends on Discord.

As a queer person I also want to shout out to a couple servers in particular that have provided what feels like a distinctly queer space for RPGs - something I never would have asked for but am so, so happy to have. This is not to say that G+ was hostile, exactly, but I did always have a sense of speaking to a more mixed group, even in cases where I may not have wanted to. Discord, I suppose, offers a sense of movement between intimacies, rather than shouting from a fixed position.

Discord is not perfect. For all my talk about the shallowness of "the conversation" on G+, on Discord it's downright impossible to have a comparable, extended discussion of a given topic. G+ was good at creating space for an exchange of ideas, decentralized, spread out over time, but connected. Part of the reason a lot of blogs went dormant (including this one) is because it was just easier on G+, and it rendered blogs redundant except as dumping grounds for overlong posts (like this one). Without G+ as a hub, many seem to be returning to their blogs. My RSS feed (I use Inoreader) has done a good enough job of keeping me abreast. "Good enough" feels key here. It's not the same, it's perhaps not as excellent, but I am satisfied.

I'll close this with a quick thought on "the conversation" after G+. If we're returning to blogs, we'll probably find ourselves looking for ways to recreate the sense of continuity and connectivity that generated so much energy in our old home. I think it will be increasingly important to regard blogs as key nodes in a network that extends into a variety of platforms and communities. That means we'll need to be mindful of linking back to other posts, and helping our readers follow the conversations we're taking part in.

To answer Patrick's question: Do I miss G+? Sure, of course I do. Rest in peace. Thank god it's gone.

The Conch Tower (30-Minute Dungeon)

Tristan Tanner has created a really compelling 30-minute Dungeon Challenge. This is both an attempt to make one of those, and to flesh out part of a sort-of-secret project I'm trying not to promise too much about.

This took me well over 30 minutes. In fact, it took me several hours, but Tristan's template (in the link above) was really helpful keeping me on track. The dungeon is rough around the edges, but I'm going to post it now or I'll second guess myself and it will never see the light of day. Hopefully I will get around to cleaning it up and throwing together in the coming days. I would also like to write some brief reflections on making this thing, but that's another post.

Without further ado, here is the dungeon:

THE CONCH TOWER

Max Ernst, Europe After the Rain II, c. 1940 - 1942