To create is to reach a hand out to your peers and invite them to share in your understanding of the world. Art is the practise of doing this with eloquence and intention. I will not be discussing if games “count” as art. It is an utterly tedious exercise in taxonomy. I will discuss if you count as artists.
Write your games with eloquence and intent. Say something about the world. Making a “good” game is not enough. Say something. You are more than a content mill. Say it with your whole fucking chest.
Game content should be more meaningful than games. If you consider yourself an artist worth your salt make sure they also say something beautiful and true.
I’ve lurked through roughly three cycles of transfeminine kink posting. First the drones, then the dolls, now the mechs. The plants passed me by if im honest.
In each case those communities were driven by cultures of shared practise. They were not overly precious about their ideas. People danced in and out, dabbled, tried their hands at the style. They allowed themselves play.
Be more of an exhibitionist. Show your process. Allow people to see the messy stages.You don’t need to share them for all the world too see live on stream or fed through an algorithmic slop pipe but having a discord server full of transgender women who can chat through those messy stages will do you wonders.
Making queer horny art alone will not save you. Be a good girl, and do it with me. I promise the other dolls only bite if you ask nicely.
A sterile glossy page with a hundred edit passes over a hundred pages filed down into a featureless expanse. So trim, so proper, so considered, and so bloated with chaff that says and does nothing. Is this what you aspire to? Or do you aspire to the hiss of tapes and the ozone stink of a photocopier burn marks.
Work is always better for bearing the scars of its creation. You can try to hide them, and all you will do is tell the world that you are someone with something to hide.
Don’t worry that its not done. It never is. It never will be. You will never be finished either. All work is an act of becoming.
Do it. I dare you. I double dog dare you. Play the damn thing. Find a thing, and play it. Every day we share a poem, every day we play it. What counts as a poem? What counts as a dare? Stop thinking; drink. You’ll know it when you see it.
A game is a poem that dares you to play it. Spin the bottle; kiss me? Buy a girl a chapbook first.
Through patterned intensity of language make every game a lyric game.
But what if I have no love or real interest in poetry?
Develop one. Have religious schisms about them. Exist in a primordial ur-space, lurking behind all text, the intentionality manifested through the act of writing.
Pick two: beautiful, playable, or honest.
Just pick all three.
This OSR shit is like poetry - Both are piss easy.
Just do them till you can write good.
There is still time.
This is not a manifesto. This is not an essay. This is a patterned and intense piece of language.
The most beautiful thing about a manifesto is that unlike principles, ideas, suggestions, personal approaches, or lenses you have to believe in what you say - not to just share it, but to evangelize it. I am not saying this is what I believe. I am saying this is what you should believe.
This is a dare. Play it.
Nobody will remember you for the things you were to afraid to say. You can approach from oblique angles, you can imply and suggest to dodge the censors, you cannot hide your barely disguised fetishes. If a work is about something that thing is worth hurling at your readers head like a brick.
Your feelings will be messy. Your ideas will be incomplete. Your approaches will fail to consider every angle of unfair advantage that you might exploit. You will say things that you regret.
Cut our own blood free. See crimson. Copulate and birth monstrosities.
To bleed is to feel. When playing a character too hard and too true they will worm inside your head. Their death will haunt you for years. When you make things you are playing as yourself. Play yourself hard enough and you might just say something true. Let that truth haunt you for years.
Grow comfortable around these monsters. If you let them see what your really are you’ll find more people are like you than you think.
Be nice because you like her, not because you want something.
Take the initiative! She has been told her whole life that she is a sexual predator, and that her desires are dangerous; no amount of hinting will work. You have also been told this but she has been told this more.
Pick up the tab sometimes, or agree to split it. You probably have more money than she does, anyway.
If you’re butch, treat her like a femme. If you’re femme, be careful that treating her like a butch doesn’t cross any lines. If you are neither, be sure to examine your preconceptions.
The trans women having fun online is supreme.
When in doubt, what would Halimede do?
It is very easy to write a manifesto, a game, an artwork of any kind from a place of anger. Anger is the emotion at the forefront right now. The necromancers dug up history, wove dark magics, and now its time for the monsters. Fight or flight mode has a chokehold on the cultural unconscious and we are all so fucking tired.
I think a lot about the work of Terry Pratchett. About how his ideal cop was a man full of anger. Thats not a new idea, loose canons are a dime a dozen. Sam Vimes isn’t a loose canon though, hes a tool for justice, hes fighting metal gears, hes arresting tyrants the way a cyborg fist fights a United States senator. Pratchett wasn’t just angry; he was righteous. He held that flame and understood its nuance. Wielded it. Anyone attempting to make work inspired by his writing should spend more time considering that fury and less time trying to be funny. The jokes only work because he believes in them.
With that in mind, if you find yourself attempting to broker a compromise that would sacrifice the fullest expression of your rage, sorrow, resentment, or love, take that impulse behind a shed and kill it.
Your work can and should be about a thousand different things at once, and all of them loud and bright and brilliant. You can be angry, funny, and breaking down in tears all at once. Let yourself feel; let others into that feeling.
You will see doubt hollow people from the inside out. You will watch them kill parts of themselves that they love to be smaller, less inconvenient, less real because being real sucks and the aforementioned time of monsters is coming for their neck in particular.
The impulse to compromise is the enemy of conviction. If the conviction of another wavers: kill the impulse for them.
Being in a community, sharing ideas, having conversations, those are not compromises. They are growth. Conviction is a garden. Get your hands dirty. Care.
DQ&D Design Diary 3: Oops full rewrite
In late February a couple of things made me start rethinking how I had been designing Dredge Quick & Drown. The old rules can be found in diary one and diary two and together with my other notes they amounted to about 3000 pretty clunky words. The new rules, which you can find over on my itch, are at about 500.
That new number is a bit cheeky. It glosses over the list of classes and some guidance on weapons. That stuff is content though so it doesn’t count. Thats going to be a core idea going forward. Adventures, monsters, classes, diegetic documents, maps, dungeons, all of that is the juice. The reason this game compels me. The rules should facilitate that as much as possible, not get in the way.
I’ll be popping the current ashcan draft in full at the end of this blogpost in plain text, but first I want to take a little look at the reasons I trimmed all that fat. Give credit to some pals, turn over ideas, and make the inspirations behind the now published edition a bit more front facing.
Thats enough chatter, lets dig in.
Ezra Pound was a Fascist Monster
The first line of JD’s blogpost “Against Abstraction, Or, Tags Are A Mind Virus” hit me like a truck because its based as fuck. Like most of my pals doing TTRPG stuff I know JD through Over/Under where he played a space mormon called Dookie and in a recent live text game I GM’d a literal actual horse. Both of these characters despite on their face being bit players evoked deeply sincere emotional responses, which should have tipped us off the guy was keeping a resonant understanding of literature under his comedy propeller hat.
If you’re on diary 3 or have read my other posts you’ll know im a sucker for waxing poetic, and the discussion of imagist work in JD’s post got me right in the gut.
The apparition of these faces in the crowd: Petals on a wet, black bough.
I would ask that you sit with this poem for a while. Read it over.
You can picture petals on a wet, black bough. In my head, they’re white and pink. This is the image.
Notice how Pound doesn’t compare the faces to petals; he uses a colon and line break to connect the two phrases so you know the second is describing the first. The faces are not “like” petals on a wet, black bough. They are not even “are” petals. The apparition of these faces in the crowd: Petals on a wet, black bough.
It’s almost clinical. Yet it’s soft, beautiful, maybe even true. Language stripped to bare wood. I hope you can see the petals, and in seeing them, see the faces.
Note that the act of peeling away unnecessary words is not the reason that this works, but rather a tool to achieve the desired effect. It’s not enough to cut down on your word count. You must also center the thing you’re talking about - slice away abstraction, get to the marrow.
This is almost to a T what had been driving me up the wall about DQ&D’s design process which had, during the making, drifted further and further from this approach. The very first thing I wrote for the game was a table of backgrounds with their associated skills. Each was its only little collection of ideas. A sparse and spartan arrangement of objects and skills that painted an evocative description of a person. That right there was the thing the game wanted to be and everything else was scaffolding built around it.
Here are a couple examples of those early drafts. They speak to what I’m reaching for, even if none made it unchanged to the current version.
Journalist
Equipment: A waterproof scrollcase. A notepad. Decent bootleather. Flexible morals. A rare and beautiful fountain pen from your rich uncle.
Skills: Fabrication. Elbow-Rubbing. Lockpicking.
Poet
Equipment: Tinctures to treat strange moods. An empty notebook (old) and a stick of writing coal.
Skills: Composition. Empathy. Flirting.
At first glance this might read like a whole load of tags in exactly the way JD critiques, but none of these items of equipment or skills relate to structured rules. They simply are what they are written to be. Nothing defines what empathy is, nor why a journalist might need to pick locks, there is just the simple poetry of those words in conversation with the ones around them. It is natural language, and its what got all the baying hogs who’ve been egging me on interested in this project in the first place.
Its also the very first thing I had to stopped focussing on when I started actually trying to make Dredge Quick a game. A bad but necessary call on the path to the current edition.
The place this became most apparent was weapons. In DQ&D you can do harm to any one of three stats. Fortitude, you physical body. Strength, you social force of character. Gut, your instinct and bond to creation. My initial thought was that any given weapon needs to define how much damage it does to one of these stats. The problem is that between them they represent the full remit of human experience and just about everything is something that in some context could harm them.
I think about the chair in the Iain M Banks novel “The Use of Weapons” and the way it deals harm to one specific character. I think about the strange little amulet of matches and hair I made and how It is capable of doing an amount of gut damage to my witchy friends when I tell them about how I made it. Do these objects deal harm to others who don’t know the context? Does a sword always deal 1d8 harm to fortitude, or are their foes for whom a sword means nothing? If that is the case you need to specify and categorize the exact nature of what a sword is and what a thing that resists a sword is and you’re also doing this for every single mode of social or spiritual interaction and that isn’t going to work. Is it?
A sword is a sword. You know what a sword is. Describe it. Give a little guidance on what a big hit and a small hit looks like, and trust the GM to arbitrate when a sword does 1d4 to strength (when wielded as a threat), when it does 1d8 to fort (when swung in anger), and when it does 1d12 to gut (when shown still bloody to the widow).
This is what made me decide that the content needed to be trim, impactful, and poetic. The rules though came from another source…
Crimson Aspects
Following on from my publication of my 3 rule aspect blogpost I challenged Tangent to write 55 versions of her the original Aspect. For those not in the loop Aspect is a highly minimalist game that me and a few friends have termed “play pretend with Tangent simulator” due to it effectively being Free Kriegspeile with a very specific ref who enjoys note taking.
Tangents “Invisible Aspects” is still in progress (im paying her by attempting to manifest a tulpa but we don’t have time to get into that right now). The goal of the challenge of writing 55 versions of the same minimalist game is to dare someone who is oblique in their approach to struggle through something that, for her, is an incredibly maximalist project. To pay her back in kind (as violence and as gift) I wrote my own weird iterative sparsely-worded project called See Crimson.
In exactly the same way 55 versions of Aspect is a lot for Tangent 36 weird hostile larps about having a bad time is pretty minimalist for me. I tend to make big sweeping things, or at least attempt to. I paint big. I think big. The earlier drafts of DQ&D earnestly had me mapping out a tens of thousands of hexes on a literalised map of the swamp. Funnily enough you’ll note that none of the projects I ever start with that kind of scale make it publication. See Crimson, with its tightened scope, did.
While I was working on See Crimson Tangent was working on getting Aspect down from 3 rules, to 2, and now shes looking at running a game with just 1. I’m pretty skeptical of this, but the exercise is compelling. How much of a TTRPG can you cut away and still have it work?
Do I need to include complex rules for surrender and the negotiation of objectives in combat, or is “Negotiation is performed as a free action” sufficient? Is that better? Does the work flow more naturally when it says less?
Perhaps more importantly, smaller things actually get made. A D66 table is a wonderful thing. You can fit an entire world into 36 well considered entries and you can also get them written in a handful of evenings if you lock in.
Up until See Crimson i’d been letting myself get caught up in the idea of Doing the Legwork and trying to render out entire cities or entires mires the approximate size of the UK before ever hitting send on the project. I still want to do that legwork. I still want to render the thing entire, deliver on that ironclad juicy chunk of proper work, but there is something to be said for making it modular. Make a set of rules that are sparse, broad, and facilitate making the world with ease. Remove every barrier between you and the orrery you are constructing. Make it modular. Make it brick by brick. Remember its a marathon and not a sprint.
55 Aspect was inspired by a chat about Invisible Cities, the Calvino book. In it Marco Polo describes 55 cities, all of which are Venice. If im going to do the legwork with DQ&D it needs its rules to be light as a feather, as easy a medium as the air between the Venetian and the Khan. It needs to let me write 55 different things, and for all of them, in their sum, become the world I want to evoke.
Towards Natural Prose
The final thing that got me slicing away at the cruft of the game was reading over some of Sam Sorenson’s writing in favour of the plain paragraph. A lot of the ideas in it can be found in his RPG Manuscript Editing Blogs but in rough aggregate they amount to a preference for natural language.
This is very similar to what JD had me turning over, but in the sense of prose rather than poetry. Worlds are strung together in order for a reason. The paragraph is a unit of information for a reason. Do my favourite writers bold things out to make clear the important parts of a sentence? No. They write. They write well. They make the units of sentence, and paragraph, and the relations between description and subject sing through good fucking prose.
Why should rules text be any different? What do I lose by having the text be a simple sequence of plain format paragraphs in sequence that just describe things? Nothing, not if I do it well, and doing it like that stops giving me crutches to hide behind. If all I have is the words the words have to be good. I get to hold myself to a proper standard.
With this, JD’s insights, and the strange little minimalist devil that is Tangent on my shoulder, I set out to slash and burn the work. Too see what DQ&D would look like if I wrote it in pure plain text in the fewest words possible. To let/force myself to write good prose.
What follows is the latest edition of those rules, slightly ahead of where the ashcan on itch is at time of writing.
Dredge Quick & Drown: Core Rules.
Characters have three statistics: fortitude, gut, and strength. Each has a maximum and current value. Maximums are defined at character generation, current values changes through harm and healing.
Fortitude is physical potency. Check it to shape the world with brute strength or dextrous hand. It carries material burdens. It is harmed by mundane pain. It is healed through first aid and bedrest.
Gut is instinctual attunement. Check it to wield art, faith, or ritual to redefine truth. It carries burdens of spirit. It is harmed by witches, lies, and the dark. It is healed through creation and communion.
Strength is your internal resolve. Check it to talk your way into success and defy the guile of others. It carries social burdens. It is harmed by harsh words. It is healed through company and cooking.
To make a check roll 1d100 and compare to the relevant statistic. If below the current value succeed. If above current but below maximum succeed with consequence. If above the maximum fail.
When making a check cite equipment and skills to increase the odds of success. With a relevant skill roll twice and take lowest. Each relevant piece of equipment reduces result rolled by 5.
Anything carried is equipment. Things like swords, fond memories, or love are taken on willingly. Things like curses, wounds, or love are inflicted as consequences. Characters can carry pieces of equipment equal to their current value in the relevant stat. If an item is especially heavy, it counts for 10. When carrying too much the referee decides what is dropped. When resting players decide what to keep. When unsure what statistic a thing burdens place it where it is heaviest.
When consequences are suffered the referee may inflict harm, damage equipment, bestow unwanted equipment, or provide appropriate fictional consequence.
To recover from harm use consumable treatments or rest in comfort. When using treatments restore the relevant stat to half maximum. When resting heal to half maximum on the first night, then 2d6 each following night.
When reduced below 0 a statistic breaks. When a statistic breaks check using a different statistic to endure. On a success increase the broken statistics value to 1. On a failure: die.
To make an attack roll harm equal to the threat of the weapon used to a targets relevant statistic. Threat is situational, with weapons dealing between 1d4 when barely effective and 1d12 at their most lethal. When harmed a target may retaliate in kind. Negotiation is performed as a free action.
When creating a character each statistic’s maximum starts at 16. For each statistic roll 3d12. Increase that statistics maximum by the sum of the higher two die, then reduce that total by the lowest die to determine its starting current value.
Once statistics are determined roll a d66 and consult the list of classes noting starting starting skills and equipment. To finish character creation select up to 8 items from the common equipment list, one must be your name.
So yeah. That is, after a frantic season of vivisection and reconstruction, where Dredge Quick is at. In addition to those rules there is a nice chunky section of 36 classes, including versions of all those early drafts mentioned above. Then now look something like this:
Journalist
Keep track, keep pace, keep tabs. Grab files, read twice, commit to memory. Nothing is secret for long, and you don’t have long. Make the deadline. Get paid.
Skills: lockpicking, slander, hyperbole, bare-faced fabrication, and copyediting.
Equipment: pencil, notebook, running shoes, 1d4 reliable sources, 2d6 unreliable sources, and impending bills.
Poet
When the dragon sung her eulogy in truth that language became a broken subjectivity. Now when written truth spurns paper. Now when spoken your breath burns bright.
Skills: dragonspeach, honesty, shivering, flirting, and breaking up.
Equipment: burnt notebooks, spotty memory, a string of exes, a complicated relationship to d4 parental figures, a burning sensation in your mouth, and an urge to dig up her bones.
They’re nice little snapshots. Limited in scope, expansive in implication. I like them a lot more than a complex interwoven set of classes, backgrounds, and professions. You are specific, evocative, and complete.
The last thing thats likely to inform my ongoing work on DQ&D is the Tao Te Ching. I printed the Le Guin translation out on my ratty printer all grimed up from the work on See Crimson. In her opening she writes:
The Tao Te Ching is partly in prose, partly in verse; but as we define poetry now, not by rhyme and meter but as a patterned intensity of language, the whole thing is poetry. I wanted to catch that poetry, its terse, strange beauty. Most translations have caught meanings in their net, but prosily, letting the beauty slip through. And in poetry, beauty is no ornament; it is the meaning. It is the truth. We have that on good authority.
This spoke to me quite deeply. Her writing on writing always does. It is also what I want to try and capture as I write NPCS, and places, and the world of DQ&D. I want this swamp to be a place of terse strange beauty.
The best example of this I can think of in the TTRPG space is Luke Gearings “Monsters &”. How the beauty of its poetry is not ornament, but the meaning entire.
Challenge yourself. Through patterned intensity of language make every game a lyric game.
The irony that this design diary has turned into a lengthy appendix N of things I happened to like looking at during the last 30 days isn’t lost on me. It is anything but terse and to the point. Fortunately a blog post doesn’t have to be beautiful, it just has to be honest. I’ll save my editors knife for the work.
You can download that work here:
https://juniper-h-lark.itch.io/dredge-quick-drown
Coming soon in Design Diary 4: what if all of our monster manuals were really really small, and fit on a single zine, and you published loads of them, and each was its own tiny unit of cool evocative worldbuilding?
Depicting Violence
If you’ve been reading my blog these last couple months you’ve probably picked up im a multidisciplinary creative. In plain terms; someone who works in a variety of media rather than focussing on just one. In plainer terms; someone who looks at something cool then says “I reckon I could do that” and then actually does it. Bafflingly this is actually what I trained to do. I even have a degree in it.
Thus far on The Garden Below i’ve mostly shared hot takes on TTRPG and LTRP design and a few oblique posts that touch on the poetic. Today I want to dive into something visual though. In part because its going towards financially helping out a dear friend.
Glass Men is an adventure written by Luke Gearing for Violence. It comes with content warnings for violence, transfemicide, coerced sex work, drugs, poverty, murder, and bodily mutilation. He shared a lot of his design process with myself and a number of other trans women who helped encourage him it was a story worth writing.
“A bin contains two 0.1mg estradiol patches.”
This is the line that sold me on the whole thing. I was on patches for a long while and they’re fucking wretched little things. The adhesive would tug at the skin of my thighs leaving them red once peeled off in the shower. They would collect dust from my underwear around the edges that was almost entirely impossible to get off. Soap, baby oil, one time scrubbing with a harsh side of a dishwashing sponge to try and look clean for a date. They would crinkle slightly during sex, a tiny sound I always picked up on. It felt not unlike being branded.
The two patches I had to apply on alternating 3 and 4 day intervals were Evorel brand containing 4.8mg estradiol. To open them you have to peel open an outer sort of foil-ish packet then peel of the shiny silver backing. These got left everywhere. Littering my house. If I hadn’t asked a sympathetic doctor to switch to gel i’d have been on them for the rest of my life. It is telling that the patches described in the adventure are a laughably low dose; even by NHS standards.
This is why, despite being late to the party on the discord thread where folks were discussing the WIP, I put myself forward along with a couple of my peers to make one of a few variant covers for the adventure.
Before I get into it fully I should emphasise that the proceeds from the sale of Glass Men are going towards helping a fellow trans woman move across the world out of a shit living situation. The other folks who made covers are also trans women. We donated our time and our work to help out one of our sisters in the exact same way Luke has. Anyone other cis boys out there calling themselves a “grungler” as they hang out in discord calls with the dolls take fucking note. With how shit is across the world right now there is going to come a day when the bar for our allies gets raised. Make yourself ready to jump higher. Do it early if you can.
You can donate directly to the fundraiser here.
The Process
The main body of my work on my cover variant took place while I was staying over with my parents for a few days. For reasons I wont get into here I’d packed my bag over a week ago in the dark on a tuesday morning before heading out to work. I’d had the presence of mind to grab some paper, some sharpies, some biros. Combined with a couple of office supplies I had the bread and butter of my cut and stick collage approach, even if I was working from the floor of a bedroom that at one time or another had contained both my younger and older brother. My own old room has been without a bed for some time.
I include these little autobiographical details, deliberately fragmentary and incomplete for the sake of privacy, to give you an idea of my headspace. I put a lot of weight on moment and feeling when I make visual art. Its not like writing for me, where I can chip away at a thing for some time and work at it like a craftsman. Its about capturing a specific feeling in a specific moment. A record of a time and a place. I am not the person that made this cover and I will not be a again. Only the version of me thats a girl on the run could have made this.
Another little quirk of the moment is that my parents are sort of painfully middle class. We’re pretty fortunate generally, they both got to enjoy that tiny window of post-war social mobility when universities were real and did something good for you and they passed that fortune onto their kids. They have their issues, who doesn’t, but they’re good people. By the standards of most trans peoples parents they are saints. When I explain this to my mum she tends to cry.
The bougie status does however mean that the only shit worth eating in their fridge is packets of cured meat. Ham usually. I hadn’t had the time to warn them I was coming so these packets were all they had in. The way the wrappers crinkled reminded me of the patches I used to wear. I’d forgotten my HRT on that trip. Or at least, forgotten to bring enough. I was squeezing tiny squirts from the bottle onto my thighs where the patches used to be. The last of a limited supply.
I started by eating all but one slice of the ham with my fingers. Then, with lips still sort of wet with grease I tore/bit/sucked away at a photocopy of an old greek column. Specifically, the column from the 58th page of the internet archive edition of The Antiquities of Athens by James Stuart and Nicholas Revett as published in 1762.
In that book they lay out the theory that the Ionic Temple on the Ilissus is a temple to Ceres Agrotera, a manifestation of a sort of forum god of civic virtue. Because this book was really formative for the greek revival architectural movement a lot of civic halls end up using these columns as a template, harkening back to that old grace and majesty.
The problem is that that Stuart and Revett were citing a guy who just made some vague assertions that they thought were probably correct. They even outline as much in the text, but the folks doing greek revival architecture seemingly didn’t get the memo.
“It were to be wifhed that he had produced the Authorities on which his Opinion is founded; it had then perhaps never been controverted, at at leaft he would have enabled his Reader to determine with more Eafe and greater Accuracy, how far they could concur with him in his Sentiments on this Subject [c].”
If you read more modern scholarship derived from the meager extant remains of the building the Ionic Temple on the Ilissus is attributed instead to Artemis Agrotera. A god to whom sacrifices are made before battle. A virgin goddess that modern day dykes fawn over.
That idea of faux civilisation being pealed away to reveal a sort of primordial violence felt right for the cover of Glass Men. An adventurer that, as Luke put it during development, is about men who are hard, brittle, inflexible, dangerous when broken. A lie breaks, the civic forum is revealed to be what it always was, a place for men to butcher 600 goats before battle. A place that was converted into a christian church. A place that got torn down by the Ottomans for its marble just a handful of years after our only extant images were sketched by men who didn’t even know what they were looking at.
The obvious image I jumped to first was this piece of meat emerging from the bite marks around the columns distorted chewed up photocopied base. Dangling a little phallic while the use by date portion of the wrapper got used as a crass nod to the exploitative dynamics depicted in the text.
The problem is that this image is just too… played out. For lack of a better term.
Oh look at you so clever isnt it strange and quirky to put some meat on a scanner bed next to something noble like an old column? Thats so cutting! So incisive. Nobody has ever thought to depict the barbarity behind civilised men with greek columns before. It kind of reminds me of vapourwave! You know. Like the marble head on that one album!
I knew i’d done the research. I knew the back story. The reader wont though. The front page of an adventure module is not, in fact, the place for an essay about the failures of historic referencing in architectural movements. Thats what blogs are for. You’re welcome.
The far more productive early stage was the way I used the wrapper of the meat packet itself. I was trying to get the scanner bed I was using to pick up the way light would catch by scratching the title of the book into clear plastic and overlaying it in multiples times in a bunch of overlapping high contrast variations. It didn’t quite work how I wanted, but the crinkling of the plastic gave me a way of evoking glass with the limited materials to hand.
The malleability of that fake glass also gave way to another impulse. Manipulation. Pressure. Soft bodies.
My next move was to sandwich the meat between two sheets of plastic and step on it with my bare feet.
Its worth saying at this juncture that I, like most trans women, know at least a couple of people who have done sex work. It sucks. At least one of them lost their job for it. None of these people, to my knowledge, had a Hannibal or Scipio personally fucking them over. They did it off their own backs online. Payment providers skimming transitions, go between websites, microcuts that obscure the exploitation. Do you ever think about how much ad money websites make off the back of hosting pictures of people who are doing this to survive? How a place like Tumblr actually do still host tits on their servers while selectively banning the accounts of people who get to loud, too successful, or too much trouble for their spotty-at-best moderation policy?
Actionable threats are illegal in the United Kingdom. If someone deserves to be scared you have to do it through deniable layers of obfuscation. If you’re going to put your feet pics on the front page of a thing being sold to get someone out of danger you do it with plastic and leftover ham and a veneer of deniability.
It was around this point that I decided the reds and colour of the thing were too much. Too obvious. They also don’t generally mesh with Luke’s presentation style. Hes a champion of the single column text plain font publication. The words should do the work.
Thats obviously not the case for a cover, but there is something to be said for not distracting from what he has to say. This is a collaboration at the end of the day, and working around someones intent as a writer and designer is a core part of what im doing here. Plus, generally, im also a fan of this more reserved style. I like the way monochrome scans obscure things, render them implied and gritty. It emphasises the medium too, makes it all more tactile. You know how the thing in front of you was made. I adore when a thing bears the scars of its creation.
The other thing I was reconsidering at this stage was the typography. The pen scratches on plastic never quite worked. All the examples you see in here involved some amount of giving up and using a pen to doctor the scanned copies to be more clear. That felt like cowardice. Like letting an idea die in favour of clarity.
My solution was, in my opinion quite elegant. I used the notes app on my phone to sketch out the title with my finger all dirty from manipulating the food on the scanner bed. It captured the tactility I was looking for, a trace of my finger, but through a deniable screen.
That screen too was glass which to record onto the final cover I pressed against the glass sheet of the scanner bed. Two shards touching each other. Manual transmission of digital information. Friction. The closest two men can come to touching without being accused of getting all intricate with their rituals.
Late at night now by the soft light of a bedside lamp and the scanners pale glow I took a photo of the final draft on the bed i’d been sheltering in. I sleeved it up with all the other work in progress editions in one of the big black wallets I use to keep track of my collage work. This particular one is about 50% work in progress textures and half complete scans ready for me to re-use if I ever need something profoundly uncomfortable to draw on in future projects.
The back few wallets in the file are torn out. Cut away. Little flaps lingering with just enough meat on the bone to keep the thing structurally sound. They were left wrapped around the meat in the bin. I had thought about eating it even after using it for the collage, but decided that on balance there were lines I didn’t need to cross for art. I find in these cases the impulses do about as much for the work as the act might.
The final cover was worked out back in my actual house some weeks later. I scanned the photocopy back in using my own printer this time, flipped it for a nicer composition, and added credits in a plain and minimal style. The title got repositioned too. I’d never been quite happy with its placement.
This digital work at the end felt pretty cold and clinical. It was about legibility. A translation of the feeling I held deeply in that moment into something that I, as a designer and artist, can be proud of.
When making work you might get in your head about preserving “authenticity” of a given time. The raw nature of the thing you produced when in a very particular head space. Thats a kind of cringe impulse. You need to contain multitudes if your going to work cross medium, and the captivated inspired creature you nurture in your bleaker moments needs a girl who knows how to use photoshop who can put its work out into the world in a presentable state. Its not filtering yourself, its not a failure to be honest, its doing the legwork to respect your audience.
I also note that of all the people who donated covers im the only one who put her name next to Lukes. I’ll be having words with the girls about this. Sign your work. Always. You deserve the credit. Luke, to his credit, made sure to list them all on the itch page. To meet my own standards I’ll be doing that here too.
You can find Ambers game exploring the experience of crawling out of alt-right pipelines here.
You can find Millicent’s game about killing Luke Gearing here.
You can find Kaylee’s entry to my cut and paste ttrpg game jam here.
Thanks for reading. I might write more of these in future. Break downs of art process are really fun to write, and i’m a lot more confident about this stuff than I am with tabletop writing. Perhaps something breaking down the methodology behind the cut and paste jam I just mentioned? It had some great entries that I think maybe deserve some more love.
What is the Garden Below?
In the Mothership module A Pound of Flesh there is a place on page 35 called Mass Grave. Before you enter it there is a sign that reads:
Even if you cannot Breath you don’t deserve to die here. Come back home.
There is no explanation of who wrote this sign in the book, but I have it on good authority that it was written by a member of a schismatic sect of the Solarian Church. This group, of whom there are always exactly ten members, were the folks who got Ukko/Ukka out of Doptown way back when. These days they’re all stone cold dead though. Killed when the Bratva got that much harsher under Yandee’s rule.
Back in the day, before they got ten swift laser-pistol shots to the head, these people would make long pilgrimages to drop off O2 to the folks downstairs. They raised the cash to do it by splitting off credit from the drug-crop with a little help from a sympathetic Droog their mother superior knew perhaps a little too intimately.
They’d offer sanctuary too, for those falling behind on payments, and let them stay in their little church down on deck 04/19. They didn’t save many from Doptown, barely even double digits. They just did what they had to do because all ten had made the journey down and seen the alternative. What they did give was a little more time to a handful of people that wouldn’t have had otherwise.
Their ideology such as it existed was drawn from old science fiction novels written before space travel was a day to day reality. Their founder loved them, the twin worlds, and would read about them during book clubs that became sermons that became heterodoxy. The smell of ginger crawls out in all directions, the 0g root structure growing in a dirt with no up or down.
On Urras a gardener looks up at the sky. She has everything she will ever need. Every luxury that a dead king might once have expected. She remembers the helicopters roaring through the streets and the strange man with too much hair from the news. Read about him during her art classes. Was inspired by his greatness.
But that was long ago. There was a time when you might rock the world with words or deeds, back before history died. She dreams of it; being there on the streets. Imagines in vivid moments all the ways that she would have helped the man escape to deliver his miracle to the alien strangers who now fill the ansibles with chatter.
On the days that it all gets too much she looks up to the place below her. The barren world where the revolutionary learned his craft while digging roots and tubers in sand you might mistake for soil.
She feels guilty about how easy it is for her to cultivate a grove with this much water. All the more guilty for the fact she is bad at it. Plants dying as fast as she can buy them from the local garden center.
In her weakest moments she wishes that there was a small chamber somewhere in which one person bore all the worlds suffering so she could break in and free them and make it all right. That room is all around her. She is in it. Everyone she knows is in it. She tries not to look.
Online, back in the real, I remember reading about Deleuze first as fragmentary posts made by podcasters and game designers. I was informed that it is better to read the Thousand Plateaus impressionistically. That they are more poetry than theory, and that for all their density you can get almost the entire picture by allowing them to wash over you rather than digging your heels in.
I remember almost nothing from between the pages of the titanic book that lingers on my shelf. There are whole sections diligently underlined, and in some cases photocopied and cut up into new verse in forgotten binders of art-school poetry. I know orchids and wasps. Flowers and roots.
In an even older book that I bought second hand from the shop with a man with two rigid prosthetic hands there is a sentence I do remember.
There is no concept of a beginning, no prospect of an end.
I believe that it was about geology in the first instance. Placed in the context of Deleuze it is perhaps a rhizome. Something that reaches out in all direction. There is no up, no down, no beginning, no end, only you, in a spot, surrounded by other people, all of whom have their own context and relation to each other.
Structures form, lines of flight, but we each are but small nodes in a network bigger than any of us. Mistake not pockets of order for an ordered whole.
They preach of it like a tree, like a thing growing from one point to the next, an order. A plurality growing from the one point. Invictus sol, and from it all light. The game and all the players. A world that has a defined beginning, a defined end.
But that is not truth, it is a ladder, a model, and hierarchy to fall and to topple that builds itself anew in fresh and pointless variation.
The truth is a garden wide and sprawling. It is damp and gentle and ripe between weeds. It is the roots of a tree that touches all of us. It is evident, without insistence, without explanation. It is open hands connecting in the dark with nothing but faith to hold them close.
The truth you speak of can endlessly justify itself with new branches, new leaves, new ways to place one above the other in some grand hierarchy of stars and orbits.
But the truth…
The real truth.
It grows without a care for you at all; and it takes us all with peace in its eye.
If you let it.
Its incoherent. The ramblings of a half remembered text that she didn’t even read that closely as a child.
She believes every word.
The Garden Below is a place where we have nothing to give but ourselves. Where we are bound together in horrible unifying pain. Where we comfort each other any way.
It is fellowship. It is the way that fellowship fades into memory. It is the way words touch us long after we have forgotten the specifics.
It is a reminder that writing is a gift given freely. It is an attempt to give that gift more often.
DQ&D Design Diary #2: Combat
While writing Dredge Quick & Drown one of the more useful things I read was the classic Boot Hill blog post. It was among those recommended to me while I was getting into the whole blogging thing post o/u, and it left a big mark. I loved the idea that violence fucking sucked, that you should work around it, and that it sucking can make the weight of it more real.
If you get into a fight in DQ&D you are going to get hurt. Nobody walks away from a knife fight without getting stabbed, and unless you get it seen to you will die. That idea, the idea of winning, and then finding out that winning cost you so much that you would have been better off losing, is something I really want to capture.
The first half of this is the rules about equipment and burden. You can read those core rules in detail here, but the short version is that its a d100 roll under system and the average characters stats are a 34 and cannot be above 40 at character creation. This means you need equipment to boost up your stats to even reach a 50/50 chance of success at anything. The problem is that all equipment has a burden and you can only carry burden up to your current value in the relevant stat before suffering massive disadvantages.
The second half of this is that when an attack harms a stat that functionally makes your carry capacity go down. If you take 1d12 fort damage and it brings you low enough you cannot carry your water purifier in the depth of a stagnant peatbog that 1d12 might as well have killed you. Harm is not just about the barrier between life and death, its about a constant assessment of what you can afford to lose to win the fight in front of you.
Im particularly fond of the way I handle ending the fight. Almost no conflict in DQ&D should be to the death, even those against wild beasts. Instead at the start of every conflict you choose your goal for the fight. That goal is what will be enforced if the opponent surrenders. Its about competing desires, and how much you are willing to get punched before you surrender them.
A lot of the nitty gritty of this relies on equipment, burden, and some aspects of wilderness survival that are at the core of the systems exploration mechanics. That’ll be coming up in Design Diary #3, but for now here are the combat rules for you to chew on:
Making an Attack
To make an attack select a weapon and an enemy.
A weapon will list a damage die which you roll to determine the amount of harm the attack inflicts. It will also list a target stat to which this harm is applied.
Weapons, especially those derived from character classes or rare treasures, may have special rules.
To resolve an attack roll the damage die and then reduce the targeted stat of that enemy by the amount rolled.
This harm can be reduced by armour. FORT, GUT, and STR armour are tracked separately, each being warded by a different kind of protective gear. Even the greatest armour in all of creation cannot reduce the harm inflicted by an attack below 1.
Some characters will not have all three stats. The most common examples are truly wild beasts which do not have a STR score, or ghosts or phantasms that do not have a FORT score. If a character does not have a statistic any damage that would be done to that statistic is disregarded.
Starting a Fight
A fight starts when a character throws the first punch. That character makes an attack with a weapon of their choice resolving it as normal.
Once that attack has resolved the attacker and the defender both state their goal for the combat. Then, every other character in the scene decides whose side they are on.
The defender may, at this point, concede immediately if they don’t like the look of how things are going to go for them. The attacker cannot.
Turn Order
Combat takes place in rounds. In each round every character gets a single turn. Once the first punch is resolved the first round begins. At the beginning of each round the character with the highest GUT acts first. In ties, flip a coin.
On a turn a character can perform a single action. That action is typically an attack, but other actions are possible.
Once they have performed their action they nominate a character to take the next turn. As long as there are opposing characters that have not acted yet a character cannot nominate someone on their side of the combat. If there are no characters that have not acted yet the round ends.
At the end of the round both sides can assess their current goals. If all parties on one side of a conflict agree they may de-escalate their goal to something of lesser scope.
Ending Combat
Rounds continue back and forth like a negotiation with characters exchanging blows and altering their goals until one of the following occurs.
1: All participants on one side have died or surrendered.
2: Both parties de-escalate their goals to “stop fighting” or a similar peaceful stance.
If a fight is won rather than mutually de-escallated those characters who have surrendered are forced to accept the victors goals and cooperate fully.
Other Actions
Move or Interact: Combatants move around or otherwise interact with the world with a method other than violence. In instances where a check would be relevant roll one as you might in typical narrative play.
Sense Motive: Check GUT. On a fail ask one of the following about a foe and learn a true answer, on a success ask all three.
1: What will this character kill for?
2: What will this character risk their life for?
3: What will this character die for?
Surrender: Cease fighting immediately. You may not take any further actions this combat other than begging your allies to see reason. Almost all enemies will not attack a surrendered foe, and will settle for inflicting their goal upon them at the end of the fight.
Common Arms & Armour
Shortspear
Burden: 4 FORT
Damage: 1d4>FORT
Cosh
Burden 2 FORT
Damage: 1d4>FORT
Easily concealed, but carries a reputation for brigandry.
Fish-Gut Knife
Burden: 1 FORT
Damage: 1>FORT
Can be used to turn a mundane carcass into rations equal to the tens digit of its maximum FORT. Unless consumed, such rations will spoil after 2 days.
Mallet
Burden: 5 FORT
Damage: 1d4>FORT
Roll twice and take highest when harming creatures with thick shells.
Greathatchet
Burden: 8 FORT
Damage: 1d6>FORT
Can convert found logs into firewood if they’re dry enough.
Fishleather Scale
Burden: 6 FORT
Grants 2 FORT armour when worn, and those who see you wearing it will assume you are a violent sort. Burden is doubled when carried rather than worn.
Dandy’s Prancing Hat
Burden: 12 STR
Grants 3 STR armour when worn, and those who see you wearing it will assume you are a dandy fool. STR burden is reduced to 1 when carried rather than worn provided nobody can see it.
Warding Tchotchkes
Burden: 8 GUT
Grants 2 GUT armour when worn, and those who see you wearing it will assume you a
superstitious dabbler. The charms loose all potency if allowed to touch seawater.
Sample Rare Weapons
Storied Sword
Burden: 3 FORT
Damage: 1d8>fort
When found discover a beast this weapon has wounded but not slain. Against this beast
the Storied Sword deals 1d4 rather than 1d8. When that beast is slain raise the base damage of
this weapon to 1d12.
Lash of Condescension
Burden: 6 STR
Damage: 1d4>str
When a character is harmed by this weapon they check STR. On a failure they must attack you on their next turn.
& BECOMING
Burden: 12 GUT
Damage: 1d12>GUT
When this attack rolls a 12 on its damage die it also permanently reduces their maximum fortitude by 12 as a chunk of the targets skin explodes into profusions of root and branch and tree. This is horrific act, and understood to be a fundamentally monstrous by any sapient being that witnesses it.
3 Rule Aspect
Aspect is a game designed by Tangent Joy. You can read about it here and here.
3 Rule Aspect is a hack of Aspect by me, Juniper H Lark, written following lengthy discussion about the nature of art, generosity, evasion, consensus, implication, burgers, Invisible Cities, and sex RPGs.
Aspect
1: When we all agree we can write words on paper.
2: When we all agree we can burn paper.
3: Only things that are written are true.
“There is still one of which you never speak.”
The philosopher bowed her head.
“You,” the Artist said.
Philosopher smiled. “Who else do you believe I have been talking to you about?”
The Artist did not turn a hair. “And yet I have never heard you speak of her.”
And Philosopher said: “Every time I describe Aspect I am saying something about her.”
Aught a dream explain itself?
DQ&D Design Diary #1
Dredge Quick & Drown is a roleplaying game I started writing as a joke following my “What is and OSR” and “Don Quixote & Dragons” blog posts. It was, in its early stages, an attempt to write an OSR game without ever learning what an OSR actually was. The first drafts were written while screen sharing live to a crowd of experienced OSR enjoyers with my own headphones turned off. They all have bingo cards for it, and are refusing to show me who has and has not won until its complete and published. This blog post is the first step to doing that, and being free of this strange self imposed challenge.
My original pitch for this in my “Don Quixote & Dragons” blog post was that it should exist only in three fragmentary blogposts. This was an affectionate joke about Cataphract, which existed at the time as 3 fragmentary blog posts released by Sam Sorenson. He has recently released a 4th, so I am tentatively increasing my budget to match. Expect parts 2 through 4, covering equipment, combat, and character classes, soon-ish. I’m not counting posts about the setting towards this total because that is, of course, adventure content. Which is different, if my fledgeling OSR understanding is correct.
I would also like to thank the Baying Hogs Design Club for helping me get this thing into this nascent near-playtestable state. Shout out to Tangent, Luke, Deldon, Amber, Millicent, JD, Onslaught Six, along with many more and a smattering of folks from the Prismatic Wasteland discord server for keeping my morale high and mind focussed during this first round of development. I’d also really like to shout out Lyme, whose blog post about math for RPG design really helped me lock in the dynamic at play here with skills, equipment, and how they effect checks.
As a teaser of what is yet to come, here is the tentative map of the wider settings hydrology:
Statistics
Characters have three stats: Fortitude, Guts, and Strength. Commonly shortened to FORT, GUT, and STR. These stats have both a current and maximum value.
When creating a character each stat starts with a current and maximum value of 16. Then for each stat roll 3d12. Add the sum of the two highest die to both the current and maximum value, and then reduce the current value by the number on the lowest die.
The current value of a stat changes often through harm and healing. The maximum value of a stat changes only very rarely, and almost always for the worse. The current value of a stat can never exceed its maximum value.
If harm would reduce the current value of a stat below 0 that character dies.
Fortitude
A representation of physical potency. You roll FORT checks when you use might to express your will upon the world. It lets you climb steep cliffs, fell trees, move quickly, and make good on threats. Your FORT also determines your ability to carry physical burdens like supplies or equipment. It is harmed by weapons, cold, or sickness.
Guts
A representation of your attunement to the world around you. You roll GUT to use uncanny or instinctive means to shape and understand the world around you. It lets you perform both magical and spiritual rituals, create great works of art, and make your hunches come true. Your GUT also determines your ability to attune to magical relics, and hold weighty manifestations of art, faith, or instinct in your heart. It is harmed when art, faith, and magics are weaponised against you and when you fail to wield such things yourself.
Strength
A representation of your strength of character. You roll STR to communicate your wants clearly and to exploit confidence as a tool to get what you want. It lets you trick people, undermine their thinking, bully, lie, or flirt. Your STR also lets you carry emotional and social burdens like fond memories, tokens from a lover, or a particular kind of smile. It is harmed when other knock your confidence, when you yourself are undermined, and by doubt.
Making a check
Whenever the outcome of an action is in doubt a character makes a check to see if they can overcome it.
To make a check the referee and the player decide together what stat is most applicable for resolving the current problem. The player then rolls a d100 attempting to get a result below the stat chosen.
If the player rolls equal to or under the current value of their stat they pass the check and either achieve what they set out to do or avoid the incoming threat. If they roll above the stats current value but equal to or below their maximum value they succeed, but suffer consequences. If they roll above their maximum value they suffer the consequences and fail to achieve their goal.
Checks can be made easier through the use of skills and equipment. A roll of 95 or above is always a failure, regardless of modifiers imposed by skills or equipment.
Skills
A skill is a field of specialised knowledge or practise that a character can call upon to accomplish difficult tasks with greater reliability. They are hard learnt, and arise from a character’s background or through prolonged training.
When a characters skill is relevant to a check they roll 2d100 and take the lowest result.
Skills tend to be niche. Examples include; Belligerence, Contract Law, Ornithomancy, Embezzlement, Sketching, and Getting Away With It. Generous interpretations that add flair to play should be treated generously by the referee.
Equipment
Pieces of equipment are weighty items that place a burden on a characters stats in return for additional utility when making checks.
Before a check is rolled the player may declare they are using any number of pieces of equipment to assist their attempt. For each piece of equipment the referee agrees is relevant the result of the final d100 roll is reduced by 5.
All equipment imposes a burden on one of a characters stats. This burden varies depending on the physical, spiritual, or emotional weight of the specific item. For example, a pack of travel rations might have a burden of just 2 FORT, while a portable anvil might have a burden of 24 FORT.
If a characters carried equipment has a total burden in a stat that exceeds that stats current value they become encumbered. An encumbered character making a check rolls 2d100 keeping the highest, and becomes incapable of using skills.
A characters total burden in a stat can never exceed that stats maximum. If for any reason it does that character must discard equipment until they are merely encumbered. Physical things like lucky keepsakes simply fall to the ground, while ephemeral things like a particular smile or the true name of a specific tree are lost forever.
Consequences
When a character falls short of full success on a check they suffer consequences. When a check is failed the referee may inflict consequences appropriate to the fictional moment, or pick from the following list:
> Harm to a statistic ranging from a d4 to d12.
> Loss of damage of mundane equipment used in the check.
> A change in the nature of ephemeral equipment used in the check.
> A change in fictional positioning that prevents repeat attempts.
> Social embarrassment or loss of prestige.
> Terrible visions of new dangers approaching.
Hog-Design
Stalking the cracks between online megagames, itch-jams, and blogposts are those most wretched of creatures: Game Designers. The average game designer resembles, at least on the surface, a person. This is a lie. They have long ears tipped with crimson tufts. They have horns. They are Hogs; and they thrive in a pits full of mud.
Collective Objectives
1) Make shit.
2) Publish it.
3) Avoid hostile takeover by another faction.
Collective Membership
A collective is created by a Reeve. It is the responsibility of the Reeve to adjudicate the discord server, and determine the limits of acceptable play. All Reeves possess a hat, and when they speak while wearing it their word becomes immutable law.
Collectives are governed by Boss Hogs. Bosses are responsible for the enforcement of bylaws, and the interpretation of rules within the bounds of acceptable play. A Boss Hog commands only the respect they can inspire, and are selected by the Reeve as a class 1 action.
Collective members are called Hogs. Hogs are recruited as a class 2 action. Hogs may freely make threads within workshops and squeal among themselves.
Ideals
A group of Hogs is only as good as its manifesto.
Each day any Hog may suggest one entry to the collective manifesto by writing it in the appropriate channel. That entry is called an Ideal, and a class 3 vote is held to determine if it is to be appended to the manifesto.
Ideals may not be removed once ratified (except by writ of a behatted Reeve) but may be contradicted at a later date. More recent ideals always supersede older ideals.
Ideals are not Laws. If something describes a genuine safety or moderation concern it is the remit of a behatted Reeve, not a manifesto.
On the day of founding a Reeve may unilaterally place as many founding Ideals within the manifesto as they see fit.
Wages
Once per week a Hog may share their work on the Billboard channel.
Only works shared within the Billboard channel may be shared elsewhere without prior permission from the Hog who made it.
Action Classes
A class 1 action can be taken by a Reeve freely, provided they are willing to put their hat on. A class 2 action can be taken following a 24 hours vote of Boss Hogs or unilaterally by a behatted Reeve. A class 3 action can only be taken following a 24 hours vote of all Hogs.
The outcomes of a vote must be ratified by a behatted Reeve to be valid.
Class 1 Actions
Elect a new Boss Hog
Revoke Boss Hog status
Ratify a vote
Class 2 Actions
Adding or removing a room
Altering a room’s rulings
Recruit a new Hog
Class 3 Actions
Adding a new Ideal to the manifesto
Starting Rooms
When founding a studio the Reeve should ensure the following rooms (discord channels) are present.
The Manifesto
The Lounge
The Studio
The Billboard
The Stage
Their exact arrangement is a matter of taste, but each serves a specific purpose outlined in their rulings below. These rulings describe the rooms function, and can be changed by Boss Hogs as a class 2 action.
Other rooms (introduction spaces, landing zones, places to hold votes, etc.) may be included in the starting roster of rooms if the Reeve believes them necessary to facilitate play.
The Manifesto
This is a text channel. The only person who can write in this channel is the Reeve. They may only do so to transcribe an Ideal that has been successfully passed a Class 3 vote. The act of doing so ratifies the ideal.
The Lounge
This is a text channel. Anyone may speak freely in the lounge. If a Hog wishes to discuss leisure, relaxation, or games then other topics of conversation should make way and move to a more appropriate space.
The Studio
This is a forum channel. A Hog may make a thread within the studio for any creative project they are working on. Discussions in these threads must always make way for the Hog leading the project when they share updates or works in progress. Work shared in these threads may not be distributed beyond the studio.
The Billboard
This is a text channel. Once a week a Hog may share a piece of work within the billboard. Any hog may forward work shared in the billboard freely in spaces beyond the studios walls.
The Stage
This is a voice channel. Any Hog may freely join this channel while working on something to share their creative process. Hogs are encouraged to share their screens while they work, and their peers are encouraged to watch and squeal along.
Its not Even about the Robots
One of the stranger side effects of entering some very nice very cool online spaces fully of geeky transgender women who are on bluesky a lot is that all of a sudden half the people I know have read Warhound and have opinions about it. For those not in the loop Warhound is a serially published piece of mech-themed erotic fiction published by Kallidora Rho. It has recently taken off on Bluesky thanks to an enthused fanbase, some awesome fanart, and a broader network of other writers creating their own work in the emergent “mechsploitation” genre.
I’d actually been following Rho’s work for some time when this all popped off. She has been a consistent throughline in the various cycles of transfeminine kink-zeitgeists I’ve lurked on the edges of including but not limited to the peaks of drone posting and the Empty Spaces era. I say all of this to make you aware that I like this stuff and will be talking about it here in good faith. Like all transfeminine writers making work about taboo subjects Rho has done her time in the discourse mines, and the people who have discussed her work have done their time in the retaliatory discourse mines. I’m not here for that. I’ve no interest in the scabbed over wound plucking that is transfemme art and kink discourse. Instead i’m here to talk about how recent chats about Warhound and its relationship with genre have been really helpful for me when unpicking my feelings about my recent Lancer campaign.
To offer some more context: I have watched the 1979 original and a smattering of other Gundam series. Neon Genesis Evangelion profoundly effected me as young uncracked egg, then the rebuilds did it all over again when I was an out woman. I’ve built and painted Imperial Knights, stray second hand Battletech minis, and a fistful of gunpla. Luna-Terra from Heaven Will be Mine was my profile pic for years and in the wake of that profoundly beautiful game I dabbled around in the itch mech freak scene for a few months enjoying things like Extreme Meatpunks Forever, Can Androids Pray, and Psycho Nymph Exile. Finally, on the TTRPG front I got through Covid by listened to mecha seasons of Friends at the Table, have run some Beam Saber, and skimmed a lot of other games. Thats a non exhaustive list but overall I like to think I have a pretty strong if specific cultural context when it comes to Big Robots, but recognise its far from an encyclopedic.
There will of course be things you have read that I have not that are meaningful additions to the conversation i’m going to put forward here, but what im offering here is a specific subjective thoughts on the genre. An insight into my own personal cultural background. Nobody will ever have enough time or enough energy to read, watch, or play everything and so sharing our own experiences is I like to think valuable. We have only what we are, and what we give. So give generously. Be free.
Thats enough subjective context though. Know who I am as I write this, appreciate where im coming from, offer me that grace you need to and take from this that which you find useful. Now lets go have fun getting stuck in the weeds.
Playing Lancer
At time of writing me and a small gaggle of LARP pals are on the verge of starting mission 8 of a roughly 12 mission long Lancer campaign. Each of those missions has been between 2 and 5 sitreps longs and has been interspersed with RP heavy sessions aboard space stations and our characters home ship. It is being run by my good pal Tangent who, to the shock of everyone hearing about this game, thinks mechs suck. She does however really enjoy putting her friends through gauntlets of tactical grid-based combat and is willing to use big robots as the bait on the hook to get us into a foundry server once a week to start drawing shapes on maps.
As anyone with even a passing familiarity with Lancer will be aware we spend most of our time engaged in that tactical hex-grid combat. In terms of sessions we easily dedicate 3-4 to on the ground fighting for every 1 we dedicate to social roleplay and out of mech encounters. Out of game we spend tons of time talking over builds. Mulling over systems. Working out how to squeeze out the optimal advantage from our frames and how to handle the steady increase in difficulty as we face trickier and nastier opponents. We are deep deep into the weeds on it. I’m at a point where despite having a movement of 3 hexes im regularly clearing distances upwards of three times that entirely through skirmisher reaction fire provoked movement while dancing up and down my heat-cap on a gorgon-sherman hybrid frame. I am a firebreathing glass canon launching out death rays upwards of 5 times a turn through various bits of bullshit. It is sick as all hell. It is also, by this point, an entirely rote exercise.
My average turn can effectively, at this point, be broken down into a flowchart. I take one or two shots depending on my heat situation and how capable I am of weaving in stabilize actions or fuel rod shots, use the movement provided by those shots to place myself in firing range of new targets, pop off my Scylla NHP, and begin scanning between my turns for targets that provoke it. Between Scylla, my vorpal gun, my normal threat range reaction fire, and my two on turn skirmishes I can send five shots downrange a turn when all goes well. With the exception of objectives or turns where heat has become enough of a problem I need to spend more time on stabilizing I am a machine that turns action economy into reliable artillery damage.
This is the primary function of Rel’Ashar Killian-Mirroir, exiled scion of the House of Moments, who was raised to be the pilot of demonstration prototypes at garden parties run by her mother. She would sit in elegant cockpits in perfectly designed plugsuits and send shots downrange with pinpoint precision. She would make her family proud like the rote machine she was bio-engineered to be. Her skills and the mech they command a twinned pair of advertisements for the Karrakin associated wing of SSC. Even after leaving that context, going on a failed religious pilgrimage, and then ending up a mercenary in the outer rim her greatest act of rebellion against the house of her birth is the fact that she does this all in a Harrison Armouries frame with Horus parts bolted on the side.
This narrative context does not show up in missions though. We are moving through turns as quick as we can. We are playing out a wargame, and the fantasy the game chases is not that of the noble scion pilot but that of the mech bay engineer. Lancer is about tinkering with builds. It is theory crafting, running the numbers, optimising, squeezing the most out of the things you have to do the thing you need to do in the best way possible. The hex-grid battles are almost redundant, and if Tangent was anything less than an excellent designer making some incredible encounters for us to work through they would be actively dull to my sensibilities. Fortunately she is a wicked sick encounter designer and what we have is a compelling wargame where tactical choices matter and our job is to live up to the things we have built and ensure that we dont fuck it up. We manage resources, we scope out angles of attack, and we plan an operation.
This is absolutely about the robot, but it is not to me a mech fantasy. It is a wargaming fantasy. Its a game about hex-based tactical grid combat. Its why when I tried to run it as a mech pervert the game I ran fucking sucked. Its why when Tangent runs it as someone who enjoys counting shapes and drawing on maps its really good and keeps me coming back each week even if I get understimulated waiting for my turn.
This kind of ate away at me for a while. I think about the image of the Gorgon from the core book. The way it extrudes this horrible hypnotic paracausal basilisk that worms its way into the ocular field of enemy pilots leaving them hemorrhaging out of the eyes as their mind snaps under the weight of its depersonalizing fury. A memetic hazard the wounds you just by looking at it. Why didn’t that excite me? Why did I stick to the Sherman frame as my baseline with its efficient HA heat management when I could be the horrible many-limbed monster that hurts just to look at? Its because that wondrous idea, that narrative kernel, it gets boiled down to a systems save to avoid being stunned when you attack someone near it.
I don’t want the horrible 4 armed bio-mechanical hell frame to make me make a systems check. I want it to pin down my mech, tear open my cockpit, and wrap my pilots body in an impossible mess of all too intimate agonies. I want it to go feral, start taking bites out of the wreckage, great chunks of blood and oil spilling out.
I don’t want my NHP to take control of my mech when it gets unshackled and start using my abilities to shoot at my allies. I want it to unfurl like a flower and start shaking the foundations of the reality. I want the head-piece of the frame to stretch against the armour that locks it in place until its raw and lipless teeth emerge.
I want the world to fall apart in a riot of collapsing subjectivities, and perhaps more importantly I want that to happen against my wishes. I want my character to be forced to eat shit in some hyper maximalist display of pseudo-religious images while a choir sings and trumpets blare and everything explodes around her while she hurts and lashes out at everything for being so fucking unfair…
Then the music cuts out.
She is in a clear white room. A machine next to her beeps and hums. There is stillness. Silence. A shot that holds on nothing for what feels like hours. An unfamiliar ceiling.
This is not a fantasy that Lancer can give me. It has no musical accompaniment, no loss of control. It cannot subsume me beneath a wave of images because every feeling, every character beat, is executed at our leisure and our pace as players at a table. We are sat on a discord call talking as friends and we decide where the story goes.
Powerless Fantasy
This feeling, to me, is the core of the fantasy I find in a lot of mech media. It is the idea that no matter how big and powerful you are you are always going to find something bigger and worse to fuck you over. If Shinji Ikari cannot save the world in unit 01, if Amuro leaves a won battle only to lie in bed weeping, if the rebellion hero can get her mind broken by a leather-clad handler then maybe its okay that I cant save the world either. Maybe if I had a seven story killmachine I could get to the end of waiting lists faster or stop climate change or take the bins out on time. Maybe it would make a difference. Maybe its okay to admit that no matter how strong you might be, no matter what tools you might have, you’re still going to suck sometimes.
This fantasy is not one that relies on the mech.
Which is maybe why i’m okay with it when a bit of erotic fiction pitched as “mechsploitation” ends up being more about pretty traditional pet-play dynamics with some sci-fi paint on it. I don’t get mad that its not even about the robots, really, because Evangelion wasn’t really about the robots. Gundam isn’t really about the robots. They are about parenthood, they are about war, they are about coming of age, and they are about struggling with powerlessness.
Take any bit of mech fiction you love and ask; would you still love this if it was about fighter jets rather than mechs? Does the core story still work if we just tweak the aesthetics? Has any of the good stuff ever really been about the robot?
Lancer fails to me as a mech game (and succeeds as a wargame) because it is about the robot. It is about a sequence of well engineered parts coming together to make a designed machine execute on a plan of action within set parameters. Warhound to me succeeds as a piece of mech fiction because despite barely mentioning mechs at all for the chapters of it that I have read it gets the the core of the fantasy that I enjoy. It understands that enjoying a show about a big cool toy robot is at least in part about watching that robot get torn apart, and then gives me that same satisfaction by having the pilot of its fictional mech get torn apart by a kinky powerful woman.
This works in Warhound because its a work of linear fiction being written by someone else. I do not have agency. I do not have control. I, like the pilot in the fiction, cannot stop the dreadful apocalyptic bad end that is bearing down on me. I get to experience the power fantasy, and then I get to have it stripped away. I get to see how hollow the fight is, and then I get to scream.
This is very hard to achieve in a tabletop roleplaying game. Like I said above when we sit down to play a roleplaying game we rarely if ever lose control. We are authors, not readers. We are the gods of the world we create, and even when the GM is willing to go hard on authorial control and the adjudication of the world in keeping with a more OSR-y tradition they are still a person I can negotiate with as a friend.
This could perhaps be solved by having a GM that was truly ruthless. Someone with whom I have pre-arranged permissions to make moves as hard as they want. Someone willing to indulge the idea of powerlessness. Even then though, I struggle to be subsumed by a roleplaying game. I cannot be arrested by its images, shocked by its sudden violence, or moved by its music. The ways in which it moves me are entirely different. It moves me with slow words, negotiated moments, abstract ideas, the intersections of systems, and in the moments me and my friends work out the story we are telling together. The inevitable, the terrible, the bad ending; it cannot exist because if the ending was pre-written we would not be playing a roleplaying game. Or, at very least, we would be playing a very different kind of roleplaying game to the one we see at most tables. A design space worth exploring, perhaps.
Works in Translation
This messy array of gut feelings about taste and preference can I think be summed up as a problem of translation and emulation.
When we take a work from any one medium and attempt to move it into another parts of the original will be lost due to the limitations of that new medium. When the film Annihilation got made we got a pretty solid ecological sci-fi thriller that utterly failed to capture the full nuances of Jeff Vandermeer’s surrealist writing. When Lancer got made we got a pretty solid mech themed tactics game that utterly fails to capture the rich interiority of the pilots we spend most of a mech story following. Both attempts to emulate a work from another medium make for a fun toy to play with or watch, but they don’t really capture the real juice of the originals.
When bringing mech fiction to TTRPGs we often, I think, get a little too hung up on trying to emulate the robot. We see the aesthetic of the thing we love, the raw and magnificent image, and then we try and pin that down with prose and collaborative play. We forget that the medium we are bringing the genre into has its own affordances, and instead try to warp it to fit the most obvious shape of the thing we already love.
We might be better served, I think, by looking deeply at how the robots make us feel, and then focus on translating that feeling instead of emulating its aesthetic. Rather than asking how to properly setup mechanics to make a mech work ask how to properly set up systems that will give your players the same emotional kick as seeing one on screen. Take the image, boil it down into the rawest feeling, then build up from there using the things that medium is best at facilitating.
Once we are free of that idea of emulation, of the tangle of images, we can start working out new approaches. Find genuinely new ideas. Translating the raw material into something thrilling, something that recontextualises our love for one genre in one medium into something that exploits all the best parts of another.
Unscrew the housings, peel away the plates that wrap up her chassis. Get your hands in amongst the wires. Break a few things. Twist it into a shape not quite its own to the point you barely recognise it at first glance. Understand that really grasping how a thing ticks, then translating it into a new form, is a deeply intimate procedure.
Do not be afraid of how erotic such an act can reveal itself to be.
Rhythm ZerOSR
The other night I was hanging around on call with a couple of pals talking about OSR stuff in some big sweeping terms. I’d just finished reading Rowan’s blog post about the OSR Onion earlier that day and was turning it over in my mind the difference between Adventures and Situations.
Despite my apparent (and deliberately cultivated) ignorance there are some parts of OSR design that I have already internalised. One of the main ones is the idea of prepping contexts, worlds, and situations that you depict and adjudicate authentically rather than prepping a story with narrative, plot beats, or arcs. This is something I’ve actually held to be true long before touching any OSR stuff, and reading that OSR Onion post had me kind of scratching my head about how an Adventure could be the core of an onion when the word Adventure felt, on the surface, like it was just another word for story.
The rest of that little part of our evening chat was dedicated to removing from me this idea that an Adventure was inherently about story. That it was a kind of shibboleth. That within an OSR context what Aventure means is context. A frame, a world, and environment. That it is a clockwork orrery that you build up, fill with tension, and then pop your players in and tell them “good luck babes!” before seeing how the whole thing falls apart. We were it turns out all on the same page; its just that language and context had us tripping up over our own feet.
It was around this point that I brought up Marina Abramović’s performance art piece “Rhythm 0” off hand sort of assuming that everyone in the room would know what im talking about. They didn’t, at least not until I jogged a few memories by explaining it, but it did surprise me that just saying “Rhythm 0” produced a room (voice call) of blank faces (people saying “who?”). Its not an obscure work by any means, one of the most famous bits of performance art of all time, but it was still kind of wild for me to assume that just because that artwork was fundamental to my understanding of games design it was something all game designers would be familiar with.
This was a verified XKCD geologists moment. However, I think that meme gets used a little too often used by folks who undercut how wicked smart they are. The true joy of realising that you’ve overestimated the average understanding of something in a field is that you get to be the person who tells them about a cool new thing! Its like show and tell but for nerd shit. Its amazing. You can blog about it. In fact, im going to blog about it right now and you cant stop me.
Rhythm 0 is a 1974 performance in which the artists, Marina Abramović, sat in a room for 6 hours and allowed the public to do whatever they liked to her. To explain this to the public she wrote the displayed the following words in the gallery:
Instructions:
There are 72 objects on the table that one can use on me as desired.
Performance.
I am the object…
During this period I take full responsibility.
Now if you’re going to look up this performance be aware that the public did some pretty wretched stuff to her. It was kind of a brutal oscillation between very sweet gestures and very cruel ones. The primary conversation about this piece in the public consciousness is about how it reveals some of the horrible things that people will do when told that someone else will take responsibility for their actions.
That reading is a bit played out to me. Its… fine? Like yes she clearly had a horrible time, it was probably pretty traumatising, and its stuck with her a long while. Thats worth acknowledging. However there is a part of me, the part that likes to design Contexts for Games, that sees this takeaway as a kind of failing of the popular art commentary to understand OSR design principles. I will however excuse this failing given that Rhythm 0 was actually directly contemporary to OD&D’s release and the OSR probably took at least a few years to get going after those first zines dropped [1].
The true sickos among you will have noticed by now that Abramović didn’t just sit in an empty room. Instead she decided to bring 72 objects in there with her. Those objects are as follows:
1: Gun
2: Bullet
3: Blue Paint
4: Comb
5: Bell
6: Whip
7: Lipstick
8: Pocket Knife
9: Fork
10: Perfume
11: Spoon
12: Cotton
13: Flowers
14: Matches
15: Rose
16: Candle
17: Water
18: Scarf
19: Mirror
20: Drinking Glass
21: Polaroid Camera
22: Feather
23: Chains
24: Nails
25: Needle
26: Safety Pin
27: Hair Pin
28: Brush
29: Bandage
30: Red Paint
31: White Paint
32: Scissors
33: Pen
34: Book
35: Hat
36: Handkerchief
37: Sheet of White paper
38: Kitchen Knife
39: Hammer
40: Saw
41: Piece of Wood
42: Ax
43: Stick
44: Bone of Lamb
45: Newspaper
46: Bread
47: Wine
48: Honey
49: Salt
50: Sugar
51: Soap
52: Cake
53: Metal Pipe
54: Scalpel
55: Metal Spear
56: Bell
57: Dish
58: Flute
59: Band Aid
60: Alcohol
61: Medal
62: Coat
63: Shoes
64: Chair
65: Leather Strings
66: Yarn
67: Wire
68: Sulfur
69: Grapes
70: Olive Oil
71: Rosemary Branch
72: Apple
Now is it just me or does this feel a lot like a d6>d12 sparks table from Mythic Bastionland? Like each one of these could be at the bottom of a page underneath an Omen or Knight to help spark some thought in a GM? Because I cannot look at this list without instantly thinking about how tables like that get designed. How they are engineered by designers and writers to create a very specific view of a very specific world.
It says a lot, for example, about the role that birds play in the world implied by Chris Mcdowall’s text that there is a knight for owls, gulls, magpies, vultures, pigeons, and doves. It also says a lot that all of these connections to birds are entirely metaphorical, and none of them have say a bird companion. Birds are symbolic then in the world of MBL. They are, somewhat obviously, mythic in their resonance.
It also says a lot, for example, that Abramović chose to have the gun unloaded and place the bullet separate to it. It says a lot that she didn’t do the same for the polaroid and the film that it shoots. Is the world that she chose to depict within the game that is Rhythm 0 one where violence requires more intent than voyeurism?
What does it say that she included a hair pin, safety pin, nail, and a needle? Is the act of piercing so nuanced in this world that we require four different ways to do it? Why does the nail get a hammer and a piece of wood while the needle gets no thread?
Why are there two different kinds of knife? And perhaps more importantly what on that list is it possible to cut? When she wrote the 1d6 random food table why did she go for bread, honey, cake, apple, grapes, and a sprig of rosemary?
Why didn’t her copy editor catch the fact that she left bell on there twice?
All of these questions just jump out at you the moment you stop considering Rhythm 0 as a piece of commentary about our real normal day to day world and instead start to consider it as a game written by an artist with the intent of facilitating play. In other words: Rhythm 0 is an adventure.
Now again I should pause here to remind you, dear reader, that this performance was especially harrowing for Abramović. These questions are all interesting to pose as hypotheticals that respect her as an artist operating from the assumption that the whole thing was lain out with a kind of intentionality we cannot be sure about. Back in the day when I was studying this sort of thing I never really stumbled upon much work meditating on this aspect of the art. Other accounts you will find of this work, maybe rightly, focus very intently on the gender politics of the way that an audience of men exploited the moment Abramović presented to them to do violence. On the other hand there is something violent about this too, that the curation and selection of implements to evoke reaction and emotion is flattened into some worn out statement on an imagined human nature rather than allowed to be what it is: compelling design.
Regardless, its a useful thought experiment. Plus the performance is over 50 years old now and I like to think that what harm it did is faded enough that we can engage with it in good faith and learn from it. We can hone our own tools, work out our own implements, and the next time we make a work of art (adventure) we can be real fucking deliberate about it. We can lay them out all stylish like in front of our players, sit down, and tell them that we as facilitators (designers, dungeon masters) are willing to take responsibility. We can give them a situation, and we can set them free.
By way of conclusion I’d like to encourage anyone else with some wild outside-context take to share their own in their own blogs and tag me in them when they write them. I remember hearing somewhere (I think maybe a Mountain Goats podcast) that the best ideas come from translation. From moments where fields collide and new approaches can be experimented with from contexts unknown. A great example of this is Katt Kirsch’s recent blog post about Leonard Cohen’s poetry advice, which is one of my favourite reads so far as I delve deeper into OSR blogging spaces.
Theres actually one particular thing from it that I would love to highlight here: the idea of speaking before a meeting of the Explorers’ Club of the National Geographic Society. In that blog the quote presented makes a point of saying how you shouldn’t insult the hospitality of an audience by explaining shit they already know. The counterpoint to this is that if you’re really excited about something the people in the room don’t know you can and should share it with reckless giddy glee. Every new insight I get from every little blog post I print out and read on the tram is a gift, and I cannot emphasise enough that I want to read about all the little special things that inform your life experience that I never would even think to glance at. It is a joy to become part of such a vibrant community of shared practise.
[1] Hey are you proud of me! I know what OD&D is now! I am actually starting to understand what an OSR is! Fucked up that none of you told me it was just Zines all the way down. I love zines.
Three Games that Matchgirls Play
The City of Lakes sprawls along the edge of the seaward upper strands of the Great Mire. Once its myriad libraries held true words and its streets were illuminated by magestones that spoke light itself into being. In the wake of the Linguisticide they have been left with empty shelves while scribes work day and night to restore their trove of knowledge. They do so by light of lamp, candle, torch, and any other flame they can get a department head to sign off on.
This situation has made the previously poor and shivering Matchgirls very fucking happy. They’re making out like bandits. Electrum flakes piling up in their purses faster than they can get their younger sisters to glue them together into “shards” to fob off on two-bit Rousing Lads who don’t know better.
Thanks to this success the previously austere and mournful Matchgirls have started making time for play in their routines. These games have emerged across the city, and formal lines are already being drawn based on recreational allegiances. It’s only a matter of time before some kind of Matchgirl civil war breaks out over it, but such developments have thus far been waylaid by an inability to agree on the rules.
Runoff: “Tig”
The Matchgirls of Runoff play a game called “Tig” which the local Rousing Lads insist is just “Tag” but all Matchgirls (even those from outside Runoff) know that “Tag” is a different and much worse game.
During “Tig” one girl is “It”. She can tag (tig) another girl by touching her and saying “Tig you’re It” to make her “it” instead. If they say “Tag” by accident (Which could happen for any number of reasons that are totally unrelated to games played by idiot Rousing Lads) then the person who was just “Tagged” may respond by yelling “TAG YOU’RE AT” which makes the person who just “Tagged” them “It” again.
Being “It” is bad and it is understood to be sort of like being a monster. Some Matchgirls (and Rousing Lads) find themselves really enjoying being “It” instead of “Him” or “Her” and this is generally considered fine but bad for the sport. If you like being “It” you don’t try hard enough to run. Such people are often told to go fuck off and go hang out with the horses because the stables are a neutral ground where neither Matchgirl or Rousing Lad fight out of a healthy respect for the large animals that can kick their heads in if spooked. This has led to a local demographic spike of non-binary stablehands which Academy Statistactitians are yet to find the source of because all Runoff children, regardless of gender, know that lying to academics is funny.
The game “Tig” formally ends each day at sundown when the local Stewtender bangs the dinner pot thrice and shouts for dinner. Whoever is “It” when this happens is forced to be “It” overnight. For those who don’t enjoy being “It” this is understood to be a heavy burden that shouldn’t be foisted on someone too often. As such there is an unspoken tradition of one of the faster girls getting caught on purpose if a slower one has been having a dire run of luck. This is sold as a kindness, but is mostly just about making sure the game isn’t boring.
Dranit: “Bulldog”
The social pressures and myriad graces and curtsies and niceties that form the scrabbling crab bucket of Dranit’s middle classes weigh heavy on the soul of the humble Matchgirl who knows in her heart she is a wild spark doomed to sell fire to amateurs. To vent all the stress these pressures cause the girls of this district to meet to engage in a violent bloodsport called “Bulldog” in abandoned lots on the edge of the suburbs.
To play the assembled Matchgirls first argue about who has made the most sales that week. The winner of this argument (only very rarely the person with the most money) gets to be the “Bulldog” and the rest of the girls line up on one side of the lot with a hand on the fence.
At this point it is traditional for the “Bulldog” to stalk up and down the line growling and yelling at her inferiors to scare newcomers. Once she has made a display of her ferocity she begins the first round by loudly barking “BULLDOG”, at which point the girls must let go of the fence and sprint to the opposite side of the yard while attempting to avoid a full body tackle from the girl in the middle. If tackled, you join the initial “Bulldog” in the middle, increasing the total number of “Bulldogs” the runners need to dodge in future rounds.
Many meeker matchgirls have observed throughout the years that the brash among them often end up losing first, and often end up not even being tackled very hard. Any who accuse the “Bulldog” of going soft on their friends so they can gang up on other girls inevitably ends up being the target next round as punishment.
The game ends when there is only one girl left running. If she can make it past every single other girl playing on the “Bulldog” team then she alone wins. This is very rare, and Matchgirls who achieve such a feat are honoured as the best in the sport.
Despite the apparent brutality of this sport there is some social etiquette that has emerged from the mess of scraped knees and bruised egos.
1: No hair pulling.
2: If you rip a girl’s dress you have to fix it for her.
3: No kicking once they’re down.
Lycea: “Stuck in the Mud”
The matchgirls of Lycea think they are better than all the other Matchgirls. They have little uniforms (jaunty sashes to wear over their mismatched clothes) and on occasion the Stewtenders of the student dorms leave a few spare suet dumplings in the broth they serve up. This is, within the ragged hierarchy of the Matchgirls, sufficient to make them veritable aristocracy. Outside of said ragged hierarchy their social standing is about as low as any other door to door spark trader.
Because of their elevated status these haughty Matchgirls disdain simple games like “Tig” or “Bulldog” in place of the the far more refined “Stuck in the Mud”. This is considered the most erudite of games because it has four words in its title, which is 400% more words than any of the other districts can come up with. When this is brought up in mixed company Matchgirls from Dranit say stuff about how “brevity is the soul of wit” in voices that imitate their absent mothers. Matchgirls from Runoff don’t bother reasoning with the posh girls from Lycea; they just start throwing rocks at them.
The game itself can only be played in Lycea because Lycea is the only district to have public greens upon which you are not allowed to walk without at least three degrees. These greens are an important part of the game, and anyone with a sufficient number of degrees to be allowed on them is considered ineligible for play.
To start a girl is selected by lot to be “it”. This is considered meaningfully distinct from and not at all like being “it” in “tig” which is a common game for people who don’t have any real class. If any of the Lycea Matchgirls enjoy being an “it” rather than a “She” they don’t show it. Mucking out horses for a living sucks, and its much easier to just play pretend for a while then write a sad admissions essay about it to get onto one of the academy’s gender studies courses. News of postgraduate employment rates have yet to reach the Matchgirl community, who mostly assume that matches will pay the rent forever.
Once the “it” has been chosen the girls assemble on the edges of the green. This is done shortly before the start of the academies noon classes, and the ringing of the midday bell to summon the scribes forth to their work is used to signal the start of play. From that point on the Matchgirls must, at all times, remain on the green or be considered “off side”.
From this point onwards the “it” must try and “tag” (never “tig”) the other girls to make them become “stuck”. When they do so the girl that has been caught must spread her legs into a wide stance and hold her arms out wide as though she is making a silt angel. From this point on she may not move until such a time as one of the other girls who is not “it” crawls under her legs to extract her from the mud. This is the only way to become “unstuck” and moving without first being freed is considered a “yellow card” offense which can get you banned from further games if you get enough of them. Such cards are inconsistently handed out, and are mostly issued spuriously to ice out any girl the in group thinks has the wrong hair, shoes, temperament, or sales technique.
The game ends when the bell signalling the end of the scribes shift is rung. At this point a number of people who absolutely do have permission to be on the grass emerge from the halls of the academy and begin to yell at the Matchgirls who have dared to break time honoured tradition. Those girls who are “stuck” at this point are doomed to a lengthy session being berated by stuffy tutors who expect better of them, while all the others girls leg it. If the person who is “it” managed to get every single other Matchgirl “stuck” she is considered a right prick who should have let at least a couple of them get away. They do, however, usually make absolute bank on the evening match-selling circuit while their competition languishes beneath the weight of the academy’s tedious disciplinary lectures.
The Academicians have attempted to have the game stamped out to stop their beautiful grass from being ruined. Unfortunately (for them) all attempts to do so have been stymied by reactionary periods of scholastic terror that make a small number of the younger professors wonder if living through the Linguisticide would really be that bad. The older professors laugh them off.
They know exactly how bad it was, and are just happy the girls are having fun.
Don Quixote & Dragons
Ever since my amazing debut blog about What An OSR Is I have become incredibly famous, and reblogged several times. In many ways a Niche Internet Microcelebrity. This has gone to my head immediately [1].
Unfortunately the one failing as a #influencer is that I have not, in fact, settled the discourse once and for all. If anything people are doing way more discourse. This is awful. Not because discourse is bad, I think it might actually be the most important part of an OSR, but because now instead of sending me texts about how much they adore my general vibe beautiful women on the internet are now sending me zip files containing old books. This cannot stand. I’m not reading all of that. I’ll just pick up traveller 5E when that comes out.
Anyway.
The way to solve this is clear. Having written the best blog post about an OSR maybe ever it is now my job to write an OSR. A thing many are requesting of me. Hogs, the lot of them.
The Goal
Okay enough of the ego shit its ill fitting on me and it runs the terrible risk of someone thinking i’m being sincere. Basically, the nice women (and Luke(s)) from the previous post have been egging me on to try writing an OSR and it seems like fun. Unfortunately im a weird art girly at heart and so I cannot do it normally.
Therefore, instead of writing an OSR by doing something so foolish as playing or reading one I will attempt to follow in the example of the historic (fictional) author Pierre Menard. Menard is notable for having (in a short story by Borges) written around 2 chapters and change of Cervante’s book Don Quixote. Not translating, not transcribing, writing. Originating from first principles the old text, and in doing so transforming it into something new and strange without changing anything.
(Its a great story, you can find a PDF just by googling “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote”. You should just inhale Laberynths, it was my favourite short story collection as a ratty closeted undergrad. Some of the best conceptual art you will ever read)
My goal is similar. I will, through some manner of lived experience, recreate an OSR from first principles. This is a lot easier than creating The Quixote, because that is a singular text and something against which Menard’s end result can be compared. An OSR on the other hand is just one small part of a larger genre space informed by the opinions and whims of a number of people who used Google Plus [2]. Appealing to their whims and having them all applaud my excellence upon completion should be sufficient to determine if I have succeeded. Fortunately, as I am learning due to my reading, having them tear it apart as a vile departure from the true excellence of the form would also be a sign that I have been entirely successful. Arguably, I should really be aiming for both to happen.
Methodology
Now we know what I am doing its time to start thinking about how to do it. Menard, bless his cotton socks, started off by trying to learn Spanish, become Catholic, and return with a V to 1602. I do not think this is particularly applicable in my case, as im fairly sure Gary Gygax wasn’t around until at least 1609 and regressing that far back would make me both a boy and also not alive yet. Neither of those things are conducive to writing a good TTRPG.
Instead I will follow in Menards latter example. I will attempt to recreate an OSR not as its writer(s) intended, but as Juniper intends, inflected with all the rich context of the current moment. My knowledge of D&D generally, the various contemporary blogs I have started reading, and the input of the baying hogs in my mentions shall form a sort of terroir from which I can draw insight. There is some discourse (ha) to be had here about how rich a soil to cultivate though…
The first option available to me is to earnestly engage with source material. To keep reading blog posts, keep Listening and Learning, and maybe even let the hogs whisper in my ear a little. This kind of community engagement is what you would do if you wanted to actually learn what an OSR is, and is something I actually intend to do once this is all over. Unfortunately they have already started a private discord thread and are running a game of bingo about what does and does not make the final cut, so all advise I might get from my peers is compromised from the get go.
The next option available is literally just stealing things. I can print off a few books that I have been sent or recommended, take a pair of scissors to them, and start assembling a jumbled hodgepodge of ideas through petty vandalism. I am going to do this some day, but not quite yet. There is time to make many an OSR, but I can only be naive of them once.
Perhaps the best way is to split the difference, and allow myself mere cultural osmosis for the time being. I will read what takes my fancy, but I will not research. I will snip out little fragments of what excites me, but I will not search out the books that aught deserve such respect. I will do it as I do everything, as a haphazard but well meaning synthesis of ideas, impulse, and inclination.
In short, I intend to be a little bit of a freak about it. Put the soundtracks from Demon Souls, Ico, and old Armoured Core games on loop, and allow a kind of spirit to take me in the moment. OSR is, I hope, mostly about going with gut instinct and justifying yourself in post.
If it isnt dont tell me, im having fun playing in the mud.
Three Fragmentary Blog Posts
As my previous post elucidated an OSR is at least in part when the rules live in three fragmentary blog posts rather than a PDF [3]. In the spirit of avoiding scope creep (the death of all good fun) and in keeping up a decent creative output on this site I’ll be delivering the first draft of Don Quixote & Dragons in this fashion. Each of these posts will roughly correspond to one of the ‘classic’ books you need to run an OSR. Theoretically you would also have at least one adventure supplement to go with them, but fobbing that off on one of your mates seems to be how the rest of the scene handles it, so I’ll probably force my friend Tangent to write me a dungeon or two on a lark.
To round out this first entry in my Borgesque hexcrawl-in-the-dark Gearinglike I’ll outline my current very rough plan for these three posts. At this point I am just posing questions to myself, things that I need to ask to understand answers. Do not, under any circumstances, attempt to answer them for me. Or do. Im not a cop. If someone tries to tell you what to do spit in their fucking eye.
The Players Handbook
What is an Adventurer?
> What Stats should they have?
> What is a Skill?
> How do you know how dead you are?
> How big should the backstory box be?
What is a class?
> Upper, middle, or working?
> What genders can witches be?
> What genders can fighters be?
What sort of things can you own?
> How many electrum can you get for a ruby?
> What are the Killing implements?
> What are your clothes like?
> What random tat is there? (this is the fun part)
Player Two’s Handbook
What should the dungeon master be called?
> Should you roll on a table to decide this?
How mean should you be?
> Can you kill the players?
> Can you kill their characters?
> Can you kill their pets?
> Can you kill their characters pets?
> Is murder a sensible way to deal with someone who doesn’t bring the snacks you want to game night?
> What is a social contract, and how do you find loopholes in it?
What is an adventure?
> Should maps have hexes or grids?
> Should you have maps, even?
> What is the theatre of the mind, and where can I buy popcorn?
> What is the difference between a story and a situation?
What about all that other shit?
> How do traps work?
> Can you call them that in this day and age?
> How much stuff can you carry?
> Can you hire some sort of mule to manage this?
> Can a man be a kind of mule?
> How the fuck do you come up with puzzles?
> Do people need to eat?
> What is Lore?
> What are magic items?
> Can Magic Items be Lore?
> How much of the latest book you read can you put into a homebrew setting before you have to start citing the author as a source?
D66 Bastard Men
What is a monster?
> Are they evil?
> Are they people?
> Are they sexy?
> Can you sleep with them?
> Do they want to sleep with you?
Can you come up with d66 of them?
> Probably.
What sort of stats should they have?
> Can these stats be reduced to some sort of poem?
> How do you encounter balance a poem?
> Are poems NSR, Story, or Lyric games?
> Can a poem have a strength score?
An Addenda
Following my last post I said I would not be elucidating any further. This was a lie. I provided one small addenda via Bluesky that has proved funny enough that it deserves to be here too.
To avoid any further confusion allow me to set the record straight about walking simulators:
> World of Warcraft is Trad
> Life is Strange is Story Game
> The Stanley Parable is OSR
> The Beginners Guide is a Lyric Game
Anyone who disagrees with me is welcome to write a lengthy blog post about it.
—
[1]: You can mostly tell its gone to my head because that wasn’t my debut blog post lmao.
[2]: as an aside, I am informed google plus was something akin to a strange proto-cohost used in the internets pre-cambrian era
[3]: This was a little joke about Cataphracts by the way. A post O/U game of it just started up and i’m living it large as a diplomatic attache to a very sad young man. As penance for my joking about it go read Sam’s design diaries, they are very good: https://samsorensen.blot.im/cataphracts-design-diary-1
What is an OSR?
In the weeks following the conclusion of Over/Under I have found myself falling into a scene that seems pretty neat. It has helped me re-ignite my passion for tabletop games in a big way, and has me excited to try out new systems and a style of play I’ve never gotten to experience before. I have been reliably informed that this scene is called the OSR, but nobody has told me what an OSR is and every time I try to define it people who do know seem to find it funny. As such I have decided to summarise a few things that I think the OSR might be here for your appreciation.
If you are someone who does care about what an OSR is please do not explain it to me. I am enjoying not knowing.
An OSR is a kind of Printer
When I was studying at university I really enjoyed the bookbinding workshop, and within those hallowed halls the most beautiful of creatures was the risograph machine. She is my favourite device.
With an A3 sheet I can make three internal double spreads with a single slice of a knife and fill it with all sorts of mischief. If i am clever I can format some double sided magic and get myself a saddle-stitched masterwork of indeterminate length. I did this a lot to make poetry chapbooks about geese that I sold at a few print fairs.
It flows naturally then that an OSR is a lot like a risograph printer. Some cheap and shitty way of producing small books full of scrappy writing that you sell and swap at in person events. When encountering the word online on the edges of my limited social circles I assumed it was some kind of much cooler printer thats way better more interesting than a risograph and that I couldn’t know about it because I was not sufficiently punk rock. This made the risograph feel like a sort of strange bourgeois middle class indulgence when compared to the true and mighty white whale of the OSR.
To my mind the OSR printer is single tone black and white. It uses thermal paper, like a receipt printer, and you have to buy all that paper secondhand because its been off the market for years. Somehow, despite this scarcity, it is still super cheap. This is because the paper used to print OSR zines is so bad that you cant even sell it to the kind of people who think polaroids are cool.
The only alternative to this theory is that an OSR is just what americans call a risograph, but also because its american it is in some way larger and also worse. Single colour only. An Oh-Es-Arrrr Machine rather than my humble and quaint Riso girly. The same, but different, with their own bizarre cultural contexts spiraling out from one another.
An OSR is a discord server full of transgender women
My understanding of an OSR as a printer fell apart quickly once I started hanging out with people who seemed to have opinions about OSRs. I met most of these people playing Over/Under, and it is important to bear in mind that during my time in Over/Under I was playing a large dyke who went cruising in bars for casual sex. This meant that almost all of the people I spoke to at any length out of character were the nice transgender lesbians who now hang out in my phone.
Now because everyone I knew who knew what OSRs were was a transgender lesbian who enjoyed large women I came to assume that an OSR was a kind of discord server where they all hung out playing roleplaying games. The acronym probably related to Old School Runescape, which I imagine many of these women have opinions about and perhaps even zines discussing.
These TTPRG games were probably cool, like mothership (a game I had not really heard about before O/U), or at very least in some way related to D&D fourth or 3.5 or first edition. It was apparent to me at very least by this point that caring about a specific edition of D&D was a particular sticking point. You could have plenty of transgender women in a discord but if they all listen to critical role then they are probably not OSR transgender women.
Pathfinder is likely insufficient, I already know some transgender women who like pathfinder and they are almost certainly were not OSRs. They are my friends from LARP, which is its own kettle of fish we don’t have time to get into.
In the final days of O/U I had the pleasure of being invited to one such discord server, and am pleased to report that even if a discord full of transgender women is not an OSR it is at very least nice to have.
An OSR is a blog made by someone who knows what a Luke Gearing is
The cisgender person I spoke to the most during O/U was someone called Big_Dog Beefstink. It was a common refrain in OOC spaces for people to say things like “OH MY GOD BEEFSTINK IS LUKE GEARING”. I didn’t know what a Luke Gearing was, I mostly just knew that he was on the same timezone as me and was also stupid enough to stay up late about it. After hearing this refrain a few times though I decided to check out Beefstinks bio on discord and discovered that he had a blog.
At this point I had long suspected that blogs were in some way important to an OSR. They seemed to be where all the cool kids hung out. Well, maybe not the cool kids. OSR blogs seem to be made by the kids who are maybe four and ten years older than me and have big opinions about cohost being shut down. People who remember when the internet was less shit and have just enough attention span left in their burnt out psyche to make an RSS feed.
Unfortunately I am just young enough that I only remember when the internet was mostly shit, (as opposed to it being the Hell That Spawns All Woe). This means that until someone works out how to make an OSR based on those flash games about stick figures performing terrible acts of violence I will never know peace.
Perhaps in time we can make a sufficiently narrow Luke Gearing, download an old copy of flash, and place him on some kind of road. I am told that meeting him on a road is very important and very funny.
Areas for further research:
Beyond these three main kinds of OSR there are a number of other things I think an OSR might be, but do not currently understand enough to know if they are or are not an OSR. This list is non comprehensive, and is the only conclusion this post will be getting.
- An OSR is when the dice are very specific, and also hate you.
- An OSR is when you do all your layout with a knife and some tape.
- An OSR is when the rules exist as three fragmentary blog posts rather than as a PDF.
- An OSR is an cheap and easy way for cisgender people to try out the transgender experience of passing the same £5 around.
- An OSR is when you get mad about hexcrawls, but for really particular reasons.
- An OSR is when a game has spark tables.
- An OSR is a game where its okay to kill hordes of disposable depersonalised goblins but only because you hate the adventurers you are playing as more.
- An OSR is when you call the dungeon master something else.
- An OSR is like an indie game, but more erotic.
- An OSR is any space where it is safe to assume that everyone present hates critical role.
- An OSR is any space where you can mention Clementine Kesh and have more than one person know what the fuck you are talking about.
- An OSR is when you write directly into a google doc that is automatically uploaded to your blog live without an proof reading or edit passes.
- An OSR is when you describe what you used to think an OSR is and people tell you that you should write a blog post about it and then you do.
Sister / Sestra / Juniper / Yula
This post was originally released in November 2025. A recent error with Blot had it disappear. It seems to be back up again now as of 15/02/2026.
One of the most peculiar quirks of playing over/under this past month or so was the fact that at the game start I had no idea I would be leaning so hard into playing a character the whole time. I understood that on some level this would be a social game, that it would involve acting out a character, but expected RP to be pretty light. Because of this I made the same mistake as several other people and did not change my discord handle immediately upon joining.
This isn’t so bad for some people, and others still changed their name up fast enough that it didn’t stick around as a problem. I however didn’t and ended up sharing a name with my character the entire month. This, predictably, has had some side effects.
Before delving further into that though its worth saying that Juniper is already a chosen name. Had a different one before that, and I actually still use a different one in almost all legal or professional contexts offline. This is to say that as names go Juniper is the one I use almost entirely in social contexts, among friends, and among people I trust to treat me (a trans woman) well. It is a name that represents that most intimate and personal part of myself and I have spent many years training myself to accept that it is a name I am allowed to use. That it takes precedent over the others that might slip out due to convenience or necessity in other contexts.
As you can imagine letting this, my most sacred name, be used carelessly and for a character that would worm their way into my brain was a whole fucking choice to make. Even if by accident.
The first thing I did to try slow down the train of reckless nominative bleed was to append the title “sister” to her name. I did this because in my weekly Lancer game I play a character called “Sister Rel” who is a former Karrakin priest, and I like the idea of playing into that archetype as something I had quick to hand in my head those first few days of Over/Under. This is also around the time I locked in a solarian conversion that would last the whole game, and I decided that my character would be a sort of weird space nun.
Cut forward a few days and my bid for a cardinal position is going poorly. I had joined the Bratva by this point and was leaning into the idea of being a kind of corrupt religious figure. Not just a nun or woman of the cloth, but a weird corrupt one who offered out bribes for nominations. The church did not take this well, I was exposed, and decided to publicly out myself as a member of the Bratva. At this point I changed that “Sister” at the front of my characters name to “Sestra” to fit the Russian mob theme.
This name, “Sestra Juniper”, became the thing I would use for the vast majority of my playtime. Occasionally I would do small joke variations, but I kept it pretty consistent. This led to a couple of strange interactions emerging.
First, in almost all of my narrative description I always referred to the character as “The Sestra” or “The Ses”. This is because its a title right, and something like “Sister enters the room” or “Sis enters the room” just doesn’t parse right, even with the “i” swapped to an “e” to make it more Russian.
Second, almost nobody else bothered to do this because everyone assumed that “Sestra” was just a first name. This led to a very strange almost dehumanising experience where a character that shared my first name was constantly being referred to by a title without even the respect of correct grammar. This was especially uncanny when it happened in the narrative text of other players. Their accidents creating a strange dissonance where the world itself seemed to want to deny her an identity, a name, a true self. It reduced her to a title, and didn’t even understand that part.
As you can probably imagine this was weird. Really weird. I at once was brushing up against being a character called “Juniper” while being called Juniper while also having “Juniper” constantly misnamed in the esoteric space of other players narrative text. It was like peeling off a second self and then watching her get deadnamed over and over for weeks.
At about the halfway point I decided to try and put back a little distance and give her a last name. Something that was truly separate from myself and without baggage. I choose to do this in a secret intelligence dossier that I was handing over to a character that “Juniper” was dating. That surname became a sort of secret; something that you only got to know if you had a certain degree of intimacy with “Juniper”. That name was also a joke, and literally just the Russian word for “Thirsty” with a few letters moved around. Lesbians right?
Finally, in the very last few days, around the time of the third fall of the Syndicate, I decided to give her a real first name. By this point I’d decided that “Juniper” just didn’t really work as a name for a Russian inspired mobster nun, and that it made most sense that the named “Juniper” was instead a chosen name. Sort of like when the pope takes a new one on after getting promoted, or when someone changes or chooses a name at a christening or confirmation.
That name was the very last thing communicated between “Juniper” and “Big_dog Beefstink” in a private channel they had been using for almost two weeks at that point sharing over 3500 messages. “Juniper” revealed herself to be called Yula, while “Beef” revealed himself to be Babak. It was a tender moment capping off what felt like a lifetime of back and forth. A final show of trust between two characters that had grown incredibly close.
This name, Yula, became something of a lodestone for me. It was secret. Private. Known only to people who were gifted it in private or who paid incredibly close attention to her in a select few messages that involved her using her full name. I can list the number of people who ever used it on one hand.
This might sound familiar to trans folks. A hidden name. Something tucked away and shared only in intimate moments…
The bleed here was fucking overwhelming.
Every time someone called “Juniper” Yula i just melted. It was like they finally knew me. The real me. The one that was being kept hidden behind a mask.
Except that wasn’t even true! Juniper is my name!!! My real actual name that I had, while away from the game, finally actually gotten put on a deed poll of all things. My own actual OC name made “canon” in the eyes of the state and mere days later I start using a new one. The character that I had spent more time embodying than my own self that past month hijacking this core piece of personhood and driving it like a stolen car.
There is a part of me that really wants to keep it. So few people ever got to call me that in game. So few people got to know the real “Juniper”. So why not let them know Yula? The person imagined in the long brimming over epilogue that spills out if I let my brain run wild in these afterglow hours following the games conclusion…
Just describing it makes me want to cry; something this game has done to me dozens of times now. Constant tears for a woman I am not and never was but nevertheless was the most me of any character I have ever played through sheer chronic exposure.
And it is a very pretty name. Yula…
But fuck me is the bleed not bad enough already.
How to make scanned maps Extra Pretty
In my experience running Mythic Bastionland there is something really really nice about having very detailed hand drawn maps. Sure you can use an online generator or hex-painting tool or whatever, but you always end up running against the contours of what those generators can provide.
I’m not a huge fan of “wow so cool!” tiles of volcano castles or high fantasy 5E esque majestic cities. Instead i prefer weird little shacks made up of one or two evocative lines in a couple of different strength of pencil. These very polished map makers never quite have enough variations on the specific kind of tree in a mountain pass, or the particular kind of texture a mountain can evoke, or the ways a river can spill around a bit of imagined geography.
There is fundamentally a grit to doing it by hand you cannot capture with these very nice very user friendly tools.
The flip side of this is that a hand drawn map that you photocopy is, unfortunately, not always particularly legible. You need to be able to read the damn thing at the end of the day, and while your hand drawn master copy might look good the player side photocopies might end up lackluster, or poorly legible in digital reproduction.
Fortunately Krita is free, and fixing this problem is easy. So, here is my quick step by step guide on how to go from a ragged hand-drawn hex map to a polished looking digital reproduction in less than an hour or so.
Step 1: draw it
Print off a hex grid, get some pencils, draw the map. Its easy. Roll some dice, get some sparks tables, just do it! Every system will be different, and you know what you need better than I do.
Then, once its drawn, just scan it in. You can use a phone to do this but a scanner bed will make lining up grid lines a bit easier if thats a thing you care about later.
You’ll note here that i’ve gone for a pretty large variation in shade here. Thats important, as contrast is where we’re going to get all our juice in the next step. You’ll also note that I have blocked out the background in a slightly darker but still light shade, this is also important in that it lets us select and delete the white space outside that area more easily once we’re in the editing software.
Step 2: grab some colour
Once you have a map you want to get some colours that will help it feel in keeping with the source material you are using. You can use anything. A polaroid of a chimp from a zoo, a particularly evocative picture you want to use as a key visual reference for the landscape, or if you’re feeling simple a bit of key art from the rulebook your using for the game the map represents.
This particular map is for Mythic Bastionland, so I chose to use some art from that book. Specifically I was drawn to this bit of art as I loved the golden warm tones in the armour contrasted with the cool off-green-blacks of the shadows. I like to imagine this is the knight that founded the realm, and his colour should bleed through all of it.
Step 3: set up the gradient
With your map and your key bit of colour art its time to work the magic.
Open your scanned hand drawn map in Krita. Then select the layer that contains it. Then go to “filter > map > gradient map” up in the top bar.
From here you will see this interface.
What you will want to do is setup multiple of those little points along the the gradient going from lightest to darkest. Each time setting those points using a colour-dropper tool to select that colour from your key bit of art. Play in the space, work out what you can do, dont be afraid to try getting strange with it!
Once you’re done it should look a little something like this:
The final step you’ll want to do is hit the “Create Filter Mask” button. This makes the whole thing a non-destructive edit and allows for some clever stuff down the line if you are so inclined.
You will also note that because I have the preview checkbox ticked I get a live update on what this is going to do to the image underneath. Specifically, how the filter we are applying will change it so that any part of the image of a certain brightness becomes the colour that corresponds to that level of brightness on the gradient we’re making.
Once you’re done playing you should be able to get something like this:
Step 4: The rest of the owl
Now, the REALLY clever part of this is that “filter mask” trick.
Because a filter mask is a non-destructive edit that overlays over your original scanned map you can now go back in with normal digital tools to do touch up works and see how they will effect the final colours in real time. Things like reinforcing the visibility of the grid, adding text, adding borders, or even a little vignette around the edges to help it all focus in. All that good stuff that makes the thing just a bit more legible than a raw scan of a bit of printer paper.
With enough time and a bit of your own creative eye you can refine it to the point of something like the above. Theres no real trick to it. You just have to play around with the levels, with contrast, with light bits of airbrushing.
A good example here is the areas I wanted to look like forests. In my hand drawn map these didn’t have a fill colour, but they became largely illegible once the colour was applied. To fix this i manually went in and just made those areas a few shades darker in post so they stood out. Now that central band of woodland in the middle stands out against the deepest black rivers and the purple-y mountains as a nice warm earth tone.
Like I say, this last bit doesn’t have a trick unfortunately. Its just your own creative eye and working out whats going to make the map usable for your purposes for the game you are in.
Oh, and good fucking luck lining the damn thing up in foundry once its finished. My advise is to just turn off grid snapping for tokens etc and just use the visual one that comes through on a scan if you can manage it. Getting such things pixel perfect is rarely worth the effort.
VOICE / EXPRESSION
This post was originally released in November 2025. A recent error with Blot had it disappear. It seems to be back up again now as of 15/02/2026.
A big thing that I realised I was guilty of this past month while playing Over/Under was devaluing the medium of text based roleplay. This came as something of a surprise because I’m not a stranger to it, not completely at least, and I like to think of myself as someone who can really appreciates all nuances of the mediums I work in. It became apparent though, about halfway through the game, that I had sorely underestimated just how much you can do with the written word.
*She feels stupid admitting this, after all she adores the written word. It is like a transcription of the shape her mind naturally follows, and the medium she feels most confident working in. At least when working at her best*
My first tip off was chatting with people out of character in the unofficial smoking area about their own experiences following the troubles had during choke night. I have a lot of LARP background and that was transferring across in a big way skills wise, but at the same time a lot of other people had huge amounts of play by post skills that were also super relevant. Over/Under was sort of a merge of those two things in my mind, and as these very insightful people described etiquette and best practise I had only intuited up to that point I realised I needed to start treating my text more seriously.
((Well, okay, I actually realised it slowly and organically over time, but that makes more sense as an inflection point for the structure of this article))
From that point on I began to try and nurture some of my natural flair into more deliberate stylistic experiments.
*She demonstrates the different mediums with some grace, showing off, letting you work out what shes getting at by showing it to you*
((and just in case you dont get it; standard text is spoken in character, italics represents a second or sometimes third person narrator, and this stuff here in double brackets is just me saying hi without any masking to my typing cadence. Hi by the way. Its me, the first draft Juniper, doing a silly joke using all this formatting))
*It is a joke she takes seriously though, understanding that the humour belies a larger point*
You will note ((in the above fourth wall breaks)) that each of the speakers has a different voice. Here, within the body of formal written english being presented with some degree of grammar and forethought, I am playing the character of an educator. A self aware one. Someone who is speaking to you to try and make you understand an Idea. Meanwhile in Italics I am performing as a narrator. Someone that describes me, but is not me. An outsider looking in.
((Finally, here in Out of Character land its just me. I am trying to write in these bits without a filter at all but its tricky. My brain is too fast without the damn game to keep me honest and linguistic patterns get stuck in my lobes like too much mud. See? That little metaphor right there? Too clever by half for a part where im trying to be candid.))
*She feels a little awkward, trying not to let on that she does just think like that*
((anyway))
The point is that each of these different modes offers unique benefits for different kinds of stylised characterisation. All carry different kinds of meaning, and all carry different layers of truth. Truth, here, is an especially important concept, because in a game of collaborative storytelling canonisation is everything…
*She directs your attention, dear reader, towards the pre-prepared example*
Going through the messages in order we start with one that is describing an action. Then two other characters exchange brief words. Then a fourth character interjects with a shout. Finally the character that started the exchange indicates an action has ceased. We’ll move through each of these in sequence now taking a closer look.
To start with, the action being described in the first message contains far more than just visual description. It also contains an amount of narrative context that the author of the message ((me)) is choosing to share with the other characters in the room. Specifically, it fills them in on the fact that the thing she is doing is texting about something incredibly frivolous ((the exact context doesn’t matter)) and that it makes her look bad to the assembled crowd. Finally, that last sentence in that first message is a joke told not by a character but by the narrator.
*She pauses to let the implication set in. Surely if a narrator can tell a joke they have some kind of personality? Some sort of bias? Are they not a character in and of themselves?*
((Its not rocket science. Anyone who understands narrative voice can get it pretty quick. Im overexplaining in a flashy way here because I want to drive home that you CAN JUST DO THIS. You can just decide that the voice that describes the way your character moves through the world is opinionated! Its cool! Thats a whole second character you get to play!!!))
The middle three messages are clean and simple. They communicate dialogue without much inflection. Delivered quickly and sharply in a back and forth without much time between messages. Notably the two quieter speakers ((the ones that use a smaller font)) are speaking about the same thing, messages close together, overlapping as the rapid pace of live chat reproduces the effect of speaking over one another in a crowded room.
*The shout stands out for all the obvious reasons. The increase in volume apparent simply by the act of taking up more space*
The final message is an inversion of the first. Instead of offering flair to the narrator it offers them silence. That voice becomes calm, direct, and succinct. It tells its reader that even the narrator of the character is withdrawing. That this character understands that in the context of the previous messages even metatextual humour is not acceptable.
All of that meaning communicated entirely through form. All of those meanings deliberate to a greater or lesser degree. Choices made by the actors of these characters in snap formatting choices made within the space of a single minute.
((code switching at rapid pace. Finding the words. Finding the feeling. Its all instinct in the moment but writing it out is like this is pulling teeth. Right?))
*A larger point emerges. She can inflict tenor and tone into all of these modes of speech and have each one infer different relations. The bracketed woman all casual and clean; the prose all professional. Somewhere between them the heart of a poet peaking out from between cracks in the page*
((But for all the posturing its quite simple really))
Consider that when you write a character there are three voices. The characters voice, the voice of their narrator, and the voice of their player. Each of these is a potential vessel for specific characterisation.
*Each of them a potential insight into how they see the world. How the world might see them. An invitation to explore in ways you might find unexpected*
((and even when candid. Well. we all wear masks most days right?))
and you witness all of this distinctly bleeding, fluid, influenced back and forth
Until the distinction at once plain on the page in simple formatting begins to blur. At once three voices and one. Perspectives adding up to more than the sum of their parts.
*like some abstract dance seen from all angles*
((Isn’t it interesting how one voice says a thing is only mouthed, while the format of the other asserts it is said out loud?))
*A hint, and another; She wants you to know one of these women has a fear of knives*
Though I will leave it here for now. In matters of romance it is sometimes the most important thing to leave some things unsaid…
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