Dungeon Poem Challenge

 Dungeon Poem Challenge

I had this idea of, not a Gygaxian Democracy dungeon, but a kind of blog-ring alter-dungeon challenge thing

Take one of the more interesting (and SMALL) Dyson Logos maps.

This one (I like it because it has a river on it).

Original here.

And anyone who wants to; make a dungeon of this map.

Thats; everyone use this specific map 

I am going to try to do mine and will attempt to post it by Saturday or Sunday, and if anyone else wants to do one and tell me about it I will link it here. And we will see what everyone comes up with.

The general concept is; Artpunk plus functional. So original ideas preferred, as pretentious as you like, but minimal text, shaved right down, and functional as a dungeon for players without any extra context. But as much as possible, honed for beauty, interest and strangeness.

The link to 'poetry' being not the euphony structure or rhythm of the text, (though you can try that if you like), but the condensation of utility, beauty, meaning and originality into a functional and interesting micro-adventure. 

All those things traditionally being opposed or at least difficult to have at the same time.

To do as much as possible with as little text and information as possible

OSR Witchfinder

DO NOT TALK THEORY TO ME, I AM THE WITCHFINDER

WHOEVER FIRST SPEAKETH IN THE FORKED WORDS OF GAME THEORY - THEY SHALL BE BURNT

Seriously, please comment and please comment with actual comprehensible situations describes in natural language and without use of game theory jargon. Brendan, you can say 'orthogonal' once, because I know you need that.

And me calling myself a Witchfinder is me being ironic and edgy, the fact that I have to explicitly say this is slowly killing me inside. Please do not actually witch-hunt anyone.


................................


Scrap ran this thread about assumed OSR game elements and that, along with Ben Miltons discussion of the new 40k game a bunch of other things, made me start, or continue, to think about Storygames and what they are.

Everyone has a good idea about what storygames are and none of those ideas are the same ideas.

So here are my thoughts. If you add your thoughts then we can start to agree about what we disagree about.

(Clearly, as I read back through this, I am describing a pattern of thought and a culture that goes way beyond just 'story games' and also clearly I can't defend most of this on rational grounds. This is not me making an argument that all of these things are story gaming but describing the idea cluster in my head that comes up in relation to that phrase.)



NARRATIVE CONTROL

If it has has narrative control elements where, to paraphrase Zedeck, 'you play as a screenwriter writing your character, instead of as your character', then that's a story game.

In D&D my OSR witch-finder brain will allow this only through occasional magical effects, only in an alienating and slightly upsetting fashion and only in an irregular and unpredictable way.

Anything where this kind of thing is regularised is storygamey to me.

Apocalypse World, in my mind, must absolutely be a storygame, and if it is, then is seems impossible that anything drawn from its engine might not be.



IT TELLS YOU

If a game outright says that a *primary* purpose is to produce a story then that increases the storygameness.

However, a lot of modern D&D language, especially post critical-roll (role?), is about adventures as a 'story' and that the purpose is 'storytelling'. But under the hood it is very much the same old structure with a complex arrangement of character, challenge based, narrative and other elements all jammed together and which you can play in a variety of ways.

So perhaps the gaming 'culture' is storygamy but the actual system, and much of the play, is not.

I would say self-declared statements in the game text about being a story-generation machine are not themselves enough.



CHARACTER BASED

You begin the game caring a lot about your character in a very particular way. Identification is immediate, or quick. They are special now. They have a role and a meaning in the 'story'.

Their emotions matter directly now and very often their emotions are directly mirrored or described or measured in the ruleset.



PERSON TO PERSON

They tend to be good at, and focused on, modelling complex person-to-person interactions. More so than modelling peson-to-space or person-to-world reactions.

If a game has a large cast of PC's largely interacting with each other more than with the world around them and if it has rules governing those interactions, then I am likely to think 'storygame'.



LAW OVER CHAOS

The players have to be protected from power abuses and that protection must come though explicit rules that make it almost impossible for the GM to be 'abusive' (however the designer defines that) if they are running by the written rules.

The benefits from strong protective rules are considered much more imporant than the possible benefits of unpredictable, and potentially unproductive chaos.

This can be extended into the political/social realm as well. That Baker-influenced lego robots game has, I think, a bit that explicitly tells you not to play if you are Fascist. Since everything is political, and since Fascists might like the game, then failing to explicitly tell them not to play is the same as writing a potentially Fascist game.



PLAY & DESIGN CULTURE IS CENTRE-LEFT TO FAR-LEFT

So far as I know there is absolutely no-one associated with storygames in any way who could be described as 'conservative' or right wing in their political leanings.

Conversely the OSR has a wide range from lefty nutters to right-wing whackjobs to whatever the fuck Pundit is.

So this entirely left/liberal and usually metropolitan play culture is something else I associate with something being 'storygamy'.



CHALLENGE

'Because I want you to feel successful'

You might not be able to absolutely win, but you can lose. You can die. You be unable to solve a problem. Not every problem exists 'to be solved. If you fail to solve something then the world doesn't necessarily push back, morph to provide another option or to provoke a response.

All of these are strong suggestions to me of 'not a storygame'.

Storygames to me are anxious that nothing too bad can happen to your character or you. [EDIT - see comments below & on G+ for view on how storygames actually really like some 'bad' things.] Challenges will almost always be solvable or something you can go around. You will be given many chances.



BENDY WORLDS

I imagine OSR-iy games to minimise the extent to which things are moved around 'behind the scenes' and, though they both use complex and somewhat flowing world-generation techniques, I think of storygames and being bent *towards* a flowing or shifting world behind the scenes more than OSR-ish games.



SOMEHOW ASSOCIATED WITH THE FORGE

I barely ever got through a thread on there because it was written in Crazy but something being from the Forge, or a designer being from there or someone referencing the Forge, always makes me think of storygameishness.



AGREEABLENESS

So, from Wikipedia; "Agreeableness is a personality trait manifesting itself in individual behavioural characteristics that are perceived as kind, sympathetic, cooperative, warm and considerate."

......

"The lower level traits, or facets, grouped under agreeableness are: trust, strightforwardness, altruism, compliance, modesty, and tender-mindedness."

To me this fits almost exactly the personality type I personally most associate with the cluster of ideas around 'Storygames'. Except for trust, because they seem to prefer strong rules to interpersonal power arrangements, and for strightforwardness, because they tend to back away from and skirt around arguments.

So when I meet people like this, I think 'storygames', and when I think 'storygames', I imagine people like this.

And this personality cluster is very different from the people I tend to be drawn towards, get along with and who's work I am interested in, who very often are difficult, spiky, awkward, disagreeable, antisocial, strange and very straightforward with it.

Silly Fashion Post

40k has, or had, an interesting save system, depending on the power of the weapon shooting at you, you either do, or do not roll a save for your armour.

So heavy guns just shoot right through poor armour.

So if a normal dude wearing a flack jacket gets shot by another normal dude with his normal gun, he gets a 5+ save.

If a normal dude gets shot by a Space Marine with a bolter, he gets fuck all.

If a Space Marine is shot at by a normal dude, or another Space Marine, he gets his excellent 3+ save.

If a Space Marine is shot at by a Las cannon, behold, he recieveth not one fuck.

 

In the same way, when the strength of the weapon pointed at you is double your toughness or more, you don’t lose wounds, you just die. I’m pretty sure a few races have mega-weapons that don’t even roll to wound. The last time I looked, template weapons don’t roll to hit.

The problem with clothing systems so far is that they are too mild and they almost make sense*. Instead, they should be really intense and barely make sense.

Fashion in D&D should be like shooting in 40k, it should just blast right through poor defences. Like a crazy plasma weapon that might blow up at any time. It should encourage people to spend loot on ridiculous clothes instead of sensible things, and to obsess over how they look, just like real people.

What did you spend?	CHA bonus	With
1000	+1	Peasants
10,000	+2	and middle class
100,000	+3	and Nobility
1000,000	+4	and Kings

Plus; you get to use your insanely valuable and beautiful clothes to cause an effect that is the equivalent of a temporary Charm spell on one of the groups you can effect.

Every time you use the Charm effect there is a 50% chance that thieves with levels equal to your entire party have taken note of your insane wealth. The DM rolls secretly.

The ‘logic’ is that if someone walks in so insanely blinged out that you just can’t believe it, then they must be someone important. I mean if someone can spend enough to build a castle on their clothes then they have to be worth taking notice of, right?

People of different classes are logarithmically more difficult to impress. It's 10 times harder to impress a burgher than a peasant and 10 times harder to impress an emperor than an aristocrat.

The CHA bonus doesn’t go up or down or get modified. You either wow the hell out of someone like a gunshot or you don't. If you don't it doesn’t hurt you, you are just thrown back on your own personality.

It works on humanoids and people part of a hierarchal culture, it might not work on others.

The level of detail you need to describe goes up with effect as well. At least as many adjectives as the bonus in effect. Preferably more. Try this for a set of requirements;

+1	+2	+3	+4
Named merchant	Named Tailor	Named designer	Personal designer
Named cloth type	Fit described	Named style	Style named after you
Knows the rules of style.	Bit of flair	Does things their own way	SHOCKS EVERYONE, YOU CAN’T DO THAT (or can you?)
Named colours & body type.	But you added something. What was it.	Describe how you put your own twist on it	Name all the rules you are breaking, and, for each one, how you are remaking it.
Visible gem	Weapons gilded at least	Jewels everywhere	No jewels as now too important for that, but one legendary named gem with its own story, and you wear it all the time.

*Arnolds was OK

Would you Buy This

If I took a buch of stuff from this blog (which you alredy got for free), cleaned it up, re-arranged it and put it into a book, would you buy it?

The index would look like this;

Table of Contents

The Point of No Return 5

1 – Thinking about Games 7

Ill Deeds 7

Complex Theory, meet Mundane Reality 9

Monsters of Incompetence and Atomic Bread 13

Monsters and Military Incompetence 14

Atomic Bread 16

Ghost Protocols 18

Acting Dumb 21

Contrarian Knobend Dungeons and Dragons 23

Art in Games 27

godz without limitz 34

BUT WHY KENKU? 37

2 – A River of Shadows 39

Before Dawn 39

A Commentary on Appendix P 40

Empire of the Summer Moon by C.S.Gwynne. 40

Blind Descent by James M.Tabor 41

Unquenchable Fire by Rachel Pollack 41

Personal Memoirs of U.S.Grant. 42

The Air Loom Gang – Mike Jay 42

In The Mail 43

“I should have lived before Kennedy died” 46

Millers Crossing – The Cohen Brothers 46

Afghanistan, a Cultural and Political History by Thomas Barfield 48

A Paradise Built in Hell – Rebecca Solnit. 49

The Insurgent Archipelago by John Mackinley 50

3 - Game Objects 52

A city without a name 52

The Demon Behind Glass 56

Bunny World 57

I fucking love writing badly 59

The Prince of Carcasses 64

Pluvial 66

Five.. Four... Three.. Two... ONE! 72

There are so many signs of trouble 75

My Means of Destroying You All 78

Frost Squid 81

d7 Doppelgängers 82

The Hours in Balach 84

A Knight of Mars 86

ORCNEAS 86

FROST-FETTER 87

STORM-WIFE 88

WEEP-YET-I-DIE 89

Oath of Mars 90

Oath of Repentance 90

Marriage Song 91

Curse of Mars 92

My Island is the centre of the world. 93

A City On The Edge Of Deception 98

But. 101

The Sorrows of The Thane of Coates 105

4 – Culture 111

The Joey School 111

Old Snow 115

this post is less good 119

Animal Crackers 124

5 - Teens 128

Opening Comment 128

The Dog Was Called Priestly 128

Teens 129

'They called me the Riddlemaster' 133

The Riddles I Made 135

Emotions 137

Telepathic Snails 138

Fake Being Gay to Kill Thieves 139

"You know it's always more fun when we split up." 141

The Rules Don't Cover Imploding Friendships 142

Trigger Warning for Stupidity 144

Teens don't know what Evil means 146

Like A Beckett Play 147

"You can't feminize me, I'll demote you." 148

6 – Sculpture 151

Completely enclosed in the hollow of his hand 151

Jesus Likes Your Backpack 157

“But is it aaaaaarrrrrtt?” 161

"Still, that is not the point.” 162

Ten Ideas For The Backs Of Toy Soldiers 168

Ten Masks of the Creatures from Before Time 171

In case you didn't notice how fucking clever I was being 173

Exo-Suits of the Hot Girls 175

    Six Science Fiction Fortifications 181

Plan For The Film Of An Alien Siege 185

Always Betray Everybody

In case you didn't notice how fucking clever I was being

I will make it explicit for you.

I'll admit I only came up with the idea of mixed rhyming schemes (on top of all ten being almost perfect iabmic pentameter) about half way thorugh. And I only really got into it deeply on the last few. But come on. It deserves more than plus two in total.

Maybe you don't want to reward 'pailing' on line four. But 'pale' 'weal' and 'sail' on one four and five? The interlocking alliterations of 's' and 'w' from two to five? Pulling it all together with the skull/skin metaphor on line five that unifies the 'blazes pale' 'umbral bone' and 'winters smiling face'. Nothing?

Umbral fucking bone people. Umbral bone. You are lucky to be getting this shit for free I tell you.

End-stopped lines on 1-5 and 2-4 with the central end rhyme repeated twice on the bottom line without fucking up the end rhyme with 1? Expressions and weapons? The fucking alliteration all over tyhe first three lines? What do I need to do here? Write you a poem? I FUCKING DID.

Alright I used 'this' twice. But look at the rhyme scheme for fucks sake!

I reveresed the end rhymes on BOTH lines in the thiRd and forth lines and repeated all four in sequence on the last line.

Gnathite for fucks sake. Do you have any idea what it took to dig up Gnathite?

Its the part of a jaw or mouthpart that manipluates or chews.

Ten Masks of the Creatures from Before Time

1.

The gaps in broken glass and falling leaves

delineate the angles and the face

whose shiftings cannot blur, as wheel-spokes merge

or fighters hands trace vectors in the air,

but freeze each sectored movement in the eye.

2.

Once gleam, twice reflected telescoped gold,

like sun motes hum in the predators gaze,

the cagelike iris of the wolf that counts,

arranging constellations of sweet time.

Seconds celestial, quickly eclipsed.

3.

The cold, enfolded shadow blazes pale,

weeps molten moonlight tears that slowly pool,

a face of silver cast on umbral bone.

The winters smiling face on paling weal

and skulls slow-sung farewell to tidal sail.

4.

This masks packs fractured spiderwebs on glass

which holds the slow-constructed droplets eye,

gaze staring blankly from their inverse world

of harried girl-craft faces and a sky

shining like the ghost of a carapace.

5.

The skin here is finer than a fly’s wing

and folds around the features like that shield.

Expressions flick and twitch, a fly-leg prance,

deceptive weapons locked in silent wield,

a trance remembered dance it cannot sing.

6.

The eyes of approximate millions glare

from venom-spelling reptilian skin,

the snake of Nox (onomastically; Night)

a daemons tapestry of keratin

the legions chained up in her nails and hair.

7.

The smoke from burnt iron cores of blasted worlds

writhes, denser than the floors it seeps on, gawps

and talks, with words unfurled pennants of iron,

these tongues coronal to a boiling face,

sourceless, centreless, timeless as the race.

8.

Pinclutch of unclassifiable eyes,

Facial geography crystal splintered.

This mask is latticing the tongue in light,

igniting solar lips and bright gnathite,

bones; setting suns like shadows dis-interred.

9.

A hive of thoughts is twisting in the glass:

knots rays inside this anti-prism mask.

Omniphagic Gorgonite mouth, alas

Unstopped by its fettered portal casque

making lemniscate noms of space, and mass.

10.

This mask is the skull of the dragon, death,

who came before all days and noticed hours,

breath spilling out an absent numbing mist

bower, an architectured void that no-one drew.

This first masks fist is weft and screwed with power.

Monsters of Incompetence and Atomic Bread

Mind-Soup

There are three apparently unrelated ideas swirling around my mind.

This post in Monsters and Manuals about the changes in game design shaped by vocal minorities.

This article on the development of ultra-white 'Atomic' bread in the 1950's.

And the book, the Psychology of Military Incompetence by Norman Dixon

I feel a strong relation between the ideas in these sources, yet I am having trouble clearly delineating the nature of the connection to myself. What follows is a kind of internal dialogue to see if I am, in fact, correct. Or if the soup of my mind has failed me again. How can these things be related?

The simplest connection is between Dixon and Manuals.

Monsters and Military Incompetence

The main theme of Dixon's book on military incompetence goes roughly like this:-

Warfare is very difficult and produces enormous stress in the people who undertake it. As a consequence, the organisations that are directed to warfare develop rituals, manners and structures that are designed to control, displace, channel, and otherwise deal with stress. Because these organisations develop such qualities they then attract individuals who find themselves in personal need of these qualities in normal life. (Italics mine.)

In Dixon's own words “..those very characteristics which are demanded by war – the ability to tolerate uncertainty, spontaneity of thought and action, having a mind open to the receipt of novel, and perhaps threatening, information – are the antitheses of those possessed by people attracted to the controls, and orderliness of militarism. Here is the germ of a terrible paradox.”

How does this connect to the post in 'Monsters and Manuals'?

The post suggests that changes in game design for Dungeons and Dragons have been driven by a minority of people who base their beliefs about the nature of RPG's on the most negative assumptions possible, and then ask the creators to change the game to eliminate the possible en-action of those dark assumptions.

Another quote, this one is by K.J.W Craik, I took it from Dixon's book. He used it as a heading for a chapter titled – 'Socialization and the Anal Character.'

“... a form of adaptation is thus achieved by narrowing and distorting the environment until one's conduct appears adequate to it, rather than by altering ones conduct and enlarging one's knowledge till one can cope with the real environment.”

So, R.P.G's give us rules to simulate life. They take complex, living situations and break them down to a series of abstract rules that, unlike real life, can be fully and directly comprehended in their totality.

It is possible that because of this R.P.G's attract exactly the kind of people who really need rules for complex living situations. (I can state that this is probably a small, but real, factor in my own attraction to R.P.G's)

It is also possible that the members of the group that are least socially-capable actually produce a greater impact on the engine driving the hobby than the majority of the group. They are 'louder', they are willing to argue for longer, they devote more energy to arguments (especially online). They have poorer social radar which means they will ignore the tacit signals other people use to know when to shut up in a complex situation. They have nowhere else to go, someone whose life is based around D&D will be much, much more directed and focused on changing or influencing the game than someone who has other social options.

If R.P.G's attract this kind of person, and if we also assume that the least socially-capable members of the group also produce the loudest 'signal' in the games audience, then we can see how a game that provides life simulation as a kind of necessity for most of its players in order for them to achieve other aims can be consumed by those for whom those rules are a need in themselves.

I propose that the situation between Military forces and those who are attracted to them is analogous to the connection between R.P.G's and those who are attracted to them. Both will initially attract a wide spectrum of personality types. But ultimately, both can become dominated by those who need the organisation most. These people are not necessarily the ones the organisation most needs.

But how does this connect to Atomic Bread?

Atomic Bread

Aaron Bobrow-Strain is a bread enthusiast. The kind of person who will obsessive search out the methods to create interesting breads from history and then try to recreate them in the kitchen.

In this article he attempts to re-create 50's Wonda-Bread, and while doing so, gives a fascinating analysis of the history of industrial food, our relation with the things we eat and a host of other things. It's an excellent piece and I recommend you take a look if you have the time.

I will briefly summarise the things I understood (or thought I understood) and that seemed to leap forward with a hidden relevance.

During the 1950's, the US government apparently becomes concerned that people are not eating enough bread.

They embark on a massive project to find out why.

They aim to discover what people want from their bread, the results are surprising:- “a clear portrait of America's favourite loaf emerged. It was 42.9 percent fluffier than the existing industry standard and 250 percent sweeter. "

People want really white, really fluffy and really really really sweet, bread. The government tries to give them what they want. They challenge nature itself and produce 'USDA White Pan Loaf No.1'

People hate the bread. They complain about it to a huge degree. They distrust its fakeness, its softness and its whiteness.

They buy it in huge numbers.

They regard it as modern, powerful, they believe in it's artificial enrichments.

There are lots of strange and fucked up elements that go into societies relationship with its bread. But there are two things to remember.

One. It was brought about by large numbers of people trying to do the right thing. The cryptic government bread programs are to strengthen the nation and protect the health of the people. The people want to eat the right thing. The corporations want to make bread faster, better, and sell it large volumes. None of these are essentially evil or immoral.

Two. There is an essential dualness to the peoples relationship to the product. They hate it and they want it. They complain about it and they buy it. They trust it and distrust it.

So how does the bread paradox relate to the Monsters/Incompetence axis?

We can have a human system, generated only by people trying to do the right thing, in which the wrong people are doing the wrong thing, actively disliking it and yet unable to pull away. All driven by human need, and a desire to fulfil it.