I have been reading Malory's 'Le Morte D'Arthur' and thinking about 'Arthurian' style D&D.

I think a lot of things about this. It goes around inside my head. I think it would be really hard. The reasons I think it would be hard are kind-of-conservative reasons that possibly no one else reading this blog would care about.

They are about the power of the story being driven by particular kinds of concepts and structures and how deeply those structures conflict with the things that drive and allow a modern D&D-like to work.




RELIGION -

Strangely, this isn't the biggest problem, Malory's knights are always swearing by god and to god but in most cases you could swap out the gods and it wouldn’t make much difference.

There need to be hermits, these guys pop up everywhere, nunneries, monasteries, old churches, etc dotted around the countryside, but the actual nature of the religion they follow doesn't seem to matter much except perhaps as it relates to 'gentleness' as a virtue knights should have.

And the whole thing starts of in a kind-of not-that-Christian space. Merlin is possibly a cambion of some kind, many of the origin myths have Celtic roots in part, religion isn't central at the beginning

When it really kicks in is in the Grail Quest. The Grail Quest is all about the soul and specifically the soul as seen by Christianity. Pretty much every fucking thing that happens to every knight is an often-interesting but eventually frustrating metaphor for something or other. Some of these encounters happen in dreams and some in real life but the quality and nature of the encounters interpenetrate so that dreams and life interweave, which is quite interesting in itself.

(I really don't like this bit as the main hero Galahad is basically a personality-free vessel for divine sanction and god seems to play the role of dick G.M.

"Ah, in your dream you saw seven white crows and three black crows and the seven crows fed upon the poppy fields and grew fat and the three white starved and the seven were the seven sins and the poppies were the souls of the faithful and the three black was the holy trinity and so you see that your soul is hard with sin and you shall never find the grail."

"Wait, I was meant to *help* the black crows?  But, in the last vision, black was bad, because you said the herd of black cattle were the pagan sinners of the east, and white was good, because you said the twelve goats were the apostles, and there was shit all I could do there either, I just had to watch the cows kill the goats. So how the fuck am I supposed to make sense of this shit?"

"Put on this hair shirt.")

So the good things about the Grail Quest are the strangeness and beauty of the individual visions and adventures and also the interpenetration of dream and reality. And also the Devil turns up and he’s a hot chick and that is always good.

But if you are not questing for the actual holy grail, the real one from Christian myth, if it’s the holy cup of Pelor or something, it gets a bit more dull.

And if you take out the Grail Quest in total then it gets a bit ore dull again, because that part of the story essentially ends the fellowship of the round table in full, exposes the spiritual weakness of the world Arthur has built and ushers things towards their tragic conclusion.



RACE - 

Another surprisingly not-that-bad difference.

There are a handful of possibly-not-white knights in the Morte. Sir Palomydes is right there, along with his brothers. There are maybe one or two in the source legends.

We have no fucking idea how medieval people thought about race and that might be because they didn't much. My best guess is that the number of different coloured people in that world was low enough that you are either going on pilgrimage, in which case you meet a very large number of non-white people and are essentially moving through their culture, or you meet maybe one or two individuals over your life, in which case, every other thing about feudal society is more important than what colour they are. Are they a priest? Are they Christian? Do they have soft hands? Can they write? Are they on a horse with a sword?

If the bishop is black and he's the only black guy you've ever seen, what matters is that he is the bishop rather than that he is black.

...........

The exact racial makeup of medieval Europe is a culture war issue now. To boil it down we have the 'Why' side and the 'Why Not' side.

Why should we jam more black people in our history when there is really not much clear evidence that they were there?

Why shouldn't there be more brown people in European history? Since we know there were *some*, there *could be* and probably were more?

I will leave you to argue that one out amongst yourselves. Have fun. Endless fun.

...........

But if you want to introduce non-white people to Arthurian myth you have them there already in the form of Saracen knights. You have, in the Morte, Arthur taking over the Roman Empire at the beginning and vague mentions of people from all over the eastern Mediterranean. You have the likely, or possible historical existence of Ethiopian Chivalric groups and you only need to bend things a bit to get them in.

If you want anyone from further afield then you might run into problems of 'feel' and justification. And if you have the 'Drizzit' group where EVERYONE wants to play the Saracen Knight then you run again into the conflict between freedom of choice and the feel of the story.

The argument over the feel of stories and their racial makeup is a deep and complex one, especially with stories meant to carry the feel of the ancient past. It's one I won't get into here too deeply as my own thoughts are unformed and un-honed. It’s the ‘why no black hobbits’ question which I kind of briefly made fun of in a previous post but is actually kind of complex and fraught.



GENDER - 

Gender, to me, is the most powerful element stopping Arthurian myth from being easily gameable.

Highly ritualised and extremely specific gender roles are written so deeply into the structure of the world that to abandon or change them would alter the motive power beneath peoples actions so much that they wouldn’t make anything like sense in the same way.


..........

Then Sir Trystram remembered himself that Sir Palomydes was unarmed, and of so noble a name that Sir Palomydes had, and also the noble name that himself had. Then he made a restraint of his anger; and so he went unto Sir Palomydes a soft pace and said;

"Sir Palomydes I have heard your complaint, and of your treason that you have owed me long, and wit you well, therefore you shall die. And if it were not for shame of knighthood, you should not escape my hands, for now I know well you have awaited me with treason - and therefore" said Trystram, "tell me how you will aquit you."

"Sir I shall aquit me this: as for Queen Beal Isode, you shall know that I love her above all other ladies in this world; and well I know it shall befall by me as for her love as befel on the noble kniigh Sir Kayhydyus, that died for the love of La Beal Isode. And now Sir Trystram, I will that you know that I have loved La Beal Isode many a long day and she has been the cause of my honour - or else I had been the most simplest knight in the world, for by her and becasue of her, I have won the honour that I have. For when I remembered me of my Queen Isode, I won the honour wherever I came, for the most part; and yet I had never reward nor bounty from her days of my life - and yet I have been her knight long regardless. And therefore Sir Trystram, as for any death I dread not, for I had as rather die as live and if I were armed as you are, I should lightly do battle with you."

"Sir, well have you uttered your treason," said Sir Trystram.

"Sir, I have done you no treason," said Sir Palomydes, "for love is free for all men; and though I have loved your lady, she is my lady as well as yours. How, be it that I have wrong - if any wrong be, for you rejoice her and have your desire of her, and so had I never, nor never am likely to have - and yet shall I love her to the utterost days of my life as well as you."

.........

There are things knights do and there are things ladies do. Everyone in Malory spends a lot of time worrying about their gender norms. Maintaining the correct image of yourself, not in the minds of others, but most centrally, in your own mind, is of overpowering importance. If the structure and the image cracks, you do too. When confronted with irresolvable conflicts in their own iron rules, knights go mad and women are decapitated and burnt.

Sometimes in Malory it seems that the genders appear to each other as strange spirits, not quite real, projecting from some other realm. The Lady in the Lake is this feeling personified, but the effect that women like Guenivere and La Beal Isode, and in a different direction, Morgan La Fay, have on men is either directly magical or so emotionally overpowering that it is virtually magical.

We don't get to see things from the women’s perspective in Malory, (somewhere there is, or will be, a Malory Ortberg Toast article called ‘Terrible Things Happening To Women In Arthurian Fiction’), but if we could, men would appear as strange spirits too. Violent, dangerous, clad in iron, appearing out of the mists, dealing out death and strange troubles, focuses of obsession and desire for power, greatly wanted, greatly feared.

We are each others monsters in this story. It works really well.

And this is insanely unfair and the opposite of anything you would want to put into a game. It keeps women locked in place and stops them interacting with things. It means they can't do violence. And like every game with actual sexism and actual racism, the players have to suffer it and the DM has to create it. And that's not fun. Especially over a long period of time.

There are ways around it, but they only work in part.

Damsels go on quests sometimes, and help knights. Damsels are often vectors of quests. They still never use violence and are rarely the subjects of deliberate lethal violence.

There is also the story-pattern of the woman disguised as a knight.

There is also the Brienne of Tarth 'I am one of a tiny handful of women warriors' thing.

So far as I can see, the evidence for women fighting in medieval Europe is pretty similar in scope to that regarding race. There is just enough for us to question the prevailing attitude that it could never happen but not enough for us to strongly replace it with a different well-proven paradigm. The culture-war sides break down pretty much as they do with race. 'Why' and 'Why not'.

So again there are ways out of the gender trap, if you consider it a trap at all, but the more you use them the more the strange, bonkers, psychologically fraught energy of Arthurian myth leaks out.



Religion and Women and spiritual weirdness come together in this very cool part of the Grail Quest.

.....

Then he went up into the rock and foud the lion which always bore him fellowship, and he stroked him upon the back and had great joy of him. By that Sir Percivale has bide there till midday, he saw a ship come sailing in the sea as all the wind of the world had driven it; and so it landed under that rock. And when Sir Percivale saw this, he hyghed him thither and found the ship covered with silk more blacker than any berry; and therein was a gentlewoman of great beauty, and she was clothes richly - there might be none better.

..

"Sir," said she, "I dwelled with the greatest man of the world, and he made me so fair and so clear that there was none like me. And of that great beauty I had little pride, more than I ought to have had; also I said a word that pleased him not. And then he would suffer me to be no longer in his company, and so he drove me from my heritage and disinherited me for ever - and he had never pity of me, nor of my council, nor of my court. And since then, sir knight, it has befallen me to be so overthrown, and all mine; yet I have deprived him of some of his men and made them to become my men, for they ask never nothing of me but I give them that and much more. Thus I and my servants war against him night and day; therefore I know no good knight nor good man but I get him on my side, and I may. And for that I know that you are a good knight, I beseech you to help me - and for you be a fellow of the Round table, therefore you ought not to fail no gentlewoman that is disinherited if they sought of you help."

......

Having the devil wander around as a random encounter with a sexy woman in a black ship is almost irresistible. Its exactly what I would want to put into a game. But you can only have it if you have weird christian religion and weird gender norms and ships being supernatural all in the same background. If you shift the emphasis of any of those things it wouldn't work as well.



LOVE - 

As a kind of side-order to freaky gender-norms there is in Malory the enormous power of desire, but more, of romantic love.

Both of the Super-Powered ultra-knights in the story, Trystram and Lancelot, are powered by overwhelming and consuming love for other mens wives. This is considered to be generally a good thing about them. It make them better, the emotional power of love is almost translated into physical power.

We saw above with Sir Palomydes that even second-tier knights can end up transformed by love into something more. He thinks his love is responsible for his martial success and the text generally agrees with him.

The whole story of Arthur begins and ends with sex and desire. Uther for Igrane, Arthurs bastard son, Lancelot and Guinevere’s love that breaks the court in two. It creates and it destroys.

Love is hard to do in games, especially in OSR games that try to maximise player-freedom. Love limits freedom, chivalric love is essentially a one or two-person religion, once you are in you are IN. That's it. No more freedom for you. No more setting your own aims and goals.

In D&D terms it’s like changing class. You go from whatever you were before, Knight, Queen, Enchantress or whatever, to the class of Lover. It’s massively overpowered with some game-breaking abilities but you can never change again and you only level up by doing stuff for or with your opposing number.



NARRATIVE - 

It’s a story with a beginning, middle and end. And it ends in death. If you keep the story you lose freedom, if you maximise freedom you lose invisible story-energy. Other people have written at length about jamming RPGs and fixed narrative together. They have probably done so better than I can here.



OTHER CRAP

The rules that knights live by, exactly when and why you joust, what it means to knock someone off their horse, when you do or don't fight on foot, how honour works, how tournaments work e.t.c, are actually all really gameable. They are literally rules that you can literally write down and make explicit so they fit very neatly into the structure of a game.

In fact it’s kind of creepy how neatly the rules of chivalry fit into the rule structure of RPG's, almost as if they were devised by the same kind of mind.

The dumb rules the story needs to work, knights never recognise each other, there is always a friendly hermit or monastery nearby, ships mean spiritual stuff is going down, damsels arriving with missions, dwarfs in the background, the quantum squires whore a clearly sometimes there to help with all the complex jousting stuff but also clearly gone some of the time, all of that crap fits neatly into the structure of a game.



NIGHTMARE VISION

Let’s look at a nightmare vision of what could happen to an Arthurian RPG game if you were totally fair to everyone.

Firstly, it isn't really a nightmare, it’s just very different. Secondly, this would never happen since almost no group would ever do all of these things, but by mashing them together I can make a crude, William-Buckley-esque sort of point. Thirdly, it’s composed of nothing but good feelings, honest intentions, respect for everyone involved and a genuine desire for them all to have fun

So, first everyone wants to be a cool outsider so they all play a Saracen Knight, one guy is Ethiopian, another wanted to play a T'ang Dynasty poet-knight because its sort of about the same period and maybe could almost have happened, maybe there was a shipwreck or something. There is one guy who wants to play a white guy but he's actually Muslim in real life and you freak out a bit about having his character do explicitly Christian stuff so you remove most of the more explicitly Christian elements.

Half your gaming group are girls, half the girls want to play their gender and half the boys want to play the opposite gender. Your only transsexual friend wants to play Lancelot.

So you have a group of Middle-Eastern, African and Asian characters wandering around pseudo-medieval england, half the knights are women disguised as men, there are three warrior women in a world where there might have been none ever, some of the Enchantresses sometimes try to clout a bad guy on the back of the head and one has taken to wielding a glaive. No-one is sure what religion they are but they keep having visions of vaguely religious things and deciding they are important before forgetting them. They are after the grail of something-or-other. All of the NPC's are programmed for standard Arthurian society but get used to your group of weirdoes surprisingly quickly because it gets tiring having a hermit go "but thou are a Womaaann." They get bored easily and half of them forget their feudal oaths, the other half forget their eternal loves, but it seems like they are having fun, they turn up every week.

It’s actually a pretty fun D&D game, or possibly a good night on the town. It's just not a very good Arthurian game.

If you want to start making it 'Arthurian', you need to start taking freedom away from players. And those freedoms are racial, sexual, religious and personal. They are exactly the freedoms that modern gaming is, if not built *on*, then at least built *around*.


.........


In a less blathery way, Malory and modern D&D are driven by different dreams. They are both dreams of harmonious order.

Malory was an imprisoned low-level knight living in a time of  political and physical chaos, his dream is a deep dream centred in an imagined past. It’s a dream of peace and tragic loss where knights are what they should be, not what they are, and where love is a super-power.

The modern west is, for most people, quite physically peaceful. Socially it’s in tumult. Gender norms and sexual norms are changing as fast as they ever have. It’s more racially and religiously mixed than it has ever been. Everyone is either upset about Islam, upset about people being upset about Islam, upset about the whole situation or all three at once.

The modern D&D-alike often feels more as if it’s in a kind of post-everything future rather than the past. Instead of there being once central feudal authority, there is usually a kind of pleasurable chaos that lets everyone do what they want without much consequence. Instead of almost everyone being the same colour and religion, everyone is different, everyone is a unique race/species/gender combination and everyone is utterly equal and generally regarded so in the imagined society, with about as much race or species hated as an episode of US TV, enough to overcome in about 42 minutes plus ads. Instead of all the violent people being men and all the women being trapped in castles, physical power and the assumption of physical force is shared equally between the genders. Instead of everyone being the same religion, except for one guy who eventually converts, it’s vaguely pantheistic most of the time.

This is also a kind of dream of order. It’s the harmonious order of the concert rather than the order of the hammer. It is society, in some sense, as many of us would wish it to be.

They are two dreams that don’t mix well.


But, since I have looked at the problems, I should try to look as possible solutions and see what could be done to translate Arthur or move his mood and feeling into D&D without losing so much that it becomes pointless. I suspect that the best possibility might be a total transformation. But I have been at this essay for a while and that will need some extra thinking so I will have to leave it to a later post.

Heeeey, I'm still unemployed and I got depression

sooo

Here's a mini module based on an off-hand comment made in a game two days ago.




Turns out cereal mascots map almost perfectly onto D&D monsters, this is built of of those, placed in one of the Isles of California. I used the Monstrous Manual dice rolls wherever I could, threw in some extra stuff, added some of Dyson's maps.

It pretty much turned into an exercise in minimalism, trying to cram as much useful info into as small a space as possible. The stuff in there is what I would need to run a game so it has some standard D&D info most of you probably wouldn't need. I used an a5 page size, big 12 point Georgia font for readability. It's meant to work good on a reader like a kindle, or an Ipad. Two page view should work best.

I'm telling myself this in an exercise in information design for Veins of The Earth, rather than just low-level aspergers and avoiding useful work. I haven't put in an index or bookmarks yet, I intend to.

The NPC name generator is now a link on the right.

If you use it, let me know how it reads and if it works ok.

I am having emotional problems with my main PC. So I am making him an NPC and setting him free to wander the FLAILSNAILS Cosmos without me. If it's meant to be he will come back on his own.

Anil of MANPAC was born in Noism'sYoo Suin* game. He was rescued from some goblin things at the exact moment that another character died. His first rolls were for a random name and an random gender. He was a eunach. His name was Anil. His highest stat was a WIS of 14. He needed a god. After thinking for about 14 seconds, his player saw a nerd wearing a nintendo t-shirt across the room.

"His god is Pac-Man! No, wait, that sounds stupid. His god is MANPAC."

And so a legend was born.

From day one he made more money robbing the people who came to rob him than he ever did from getting up in dungeons. Assaulting bandits, hiding from pandas, lying to quaggoths, great days. Then Noisms moved away to get a better job. Anil arrived in the Cobalt Reach. A land built upon the backs of dead gods. He was level three.

In his first FLAILSNAILS game Jeff Rients charged a group of 18 webbed 2nd level mutants with Anil. Then got bored and ran off to joust a chaos knight. Shoe Skogen hung around and saved his life. He spent a lot of time at zero hit points. But he levelled the fuck up.

(As a list of adventures, briefly. Argued with bats. knocked out by jacklemen. Chased by zombie mastadons. Captured in echo palace. Starts shit in Echo Palace. Throws adopted son off ledge. Rescued by Zach Marx Webber. Finds THE PORTAL ROOM. Spends actual months of non-game time going on and out of the PORTAL ROOM. Finally gets to lowest level. Captured by driders. Tricks Driders with spell. Fights Mountain giant underground. Actually manages to rescue some dryads. Ends up in north pole via THE PORTAL ROOM. Goes back to cobalt reach via ship. Hears rumours of the missing Eye Of Vorn. Decides MUST pirate eye of dead god. Grabs Sir Mannings army. fights way out of Cobalt Reach. Gets to Abu Zin Zeer. Finds eye. Eye is now Mecha-Beholder-Golem. Eye Kills Chris H (Persistent voice of sanity) and petrifies Zach Marx Weber. Mission a bust. Goes wizardly Isle of Vrokk to de-petrify ZMW. Breaks into multiple wizards arcologies, meets daemon. Loses left hand. Tricks daemon, tricks mind-flayer, tricks wizard with mind-flayer. Escapes with macguffin. Gets ZMW de-petrified. Exchanges 'impossible' task for promise of new left hand. Completes impossible confidence scam of high-level wizard IN ONE SESSION, FLAWLESS. Still a high point. Goes to Vornheim, assists with defence of city. Sees Hex-King taken down (sort of). Decides to rob house of dead Lich. Buys own siege tower. Bats once again augmentative and annoying lodgers. helps eusyram retrieve fragment of crystal dream. Betrays everybody, see prev post.)

Now I send him unto you Internet. Let this PC pass be transformed by the holy fire onto an entry on a table, a random encounter or a plot point. My only rules for using Anil is that you have to be somewhat true to his god and somewhat true to him.

MANPAC charges endlessly through the dark consuming all he can before the ghosts reach him. He is chaotic, tending a bit towards good. At least his is not directly evil. He hates undead and consumes them wherever he can, especially ghosts. He likes to move his followers through realities or 'levels' and they have learnt to expect this.

Anil is stupid but amazingly crafty and lucky. He lies freely and sometimes brilliantly despite his CHA of 9. He often cycles through stages of mania and suicidal self-destructive depression. He has no patience of any kind for anything. He is deceptive, tricky and ruthless to what he considers 'bad' people. He has never gone out of his way to hurt any average or 'good' people without some kind of reason. If you save his life he will stick by you, even if you die or get petrified.

he looks like a squat vaguely asian man with a heavy build.

this is how he thinks he looks. he actually looks like a shit version of this.

You can't tell though because since he went insane from looking at a rug, he no longer believes he has a head. he can't sense it there so he wears an insect mask he got in Bellet Osc. That's how he knows where his head is.

and in fact he looks like this most of the time

He has a neck-tattoo of Harley Quinn committing suicide and another MANPAC tattoo. His left hand is a yellow and black banded starfish.

Currently wearing the plate-mail of a paladin of the Titan of Fear. He usually carries an axe and a bow and THIS.

the eyes follow you round the room, but never both eyes for the same person

This sooper-powerful luminescent heraldic lion shield is the best thing he has ever owned. It's probably worth more than he is.

So, armour, axe, bow, insect mask, starfish hand, tattoos, glowing lion shield. But in case that wasn't enough. he is driving a team of eight oxen and pulling his very own 80 ft siege tower made of bones and full of impudent bats.

again, his isnt actually this good

 He argues with the bats.

His stats are

STR 11
DEX 12
CON 10
CHA 9
INT 8
WIS 14

Level Seven Cleric of Manpac
HP 35

he also has these things.

Axe
Obsidian Knife - counts as magic, does rituals
+3 Lion Shield
plate and sword from paladin of creus
Sling
20 sling stone
Bow
Arrows
Skull of an undead horseman
Insect Mask from bellet osk
Long single fang - unknown nature
Goblin cake
five copper snake scales - giant coin sized
lantern
torch
grappling hook
50ft rope
50ft chain
snail bridle (for giant snails)
80ft siege tower made of bone
a dozen oxen


There's one more thing. Anil accidentally drank the soul of a half-elf sorcerer called Orgun Greasgraft in the Hex Kings Palace. If Anil falls under the spell of mind-altering magics, or magical sleep, Orgun will become the dominant personality. And he will not give up the body willingly. He is an intelligent wily coward who likes not being in dungeons and not taking risks of any kind. His stats are

CHA 10
INT 16
WIS 16

Level three magic user, has the spells, Read Magic, Detect Magic, Message, Bookspeak and Levitate.

If you use Anil, or he turns up in your game, let me know what he does and what happens to him. I will update his history on this blog and we will see if anything interesting results.

*(Yoo Suin, coming to a download near you SOON)

Average run-of-the-mill OSR blog post. I can't be bothered writing properly. Actually am out of ideas for ever. Had last idea a week ago whilst jogging, can't remember it now.

he was a good dog

A Microscope - derived shared world timeline for gaming in.

The idea is that we play different games each week, place them in a particular point in the timeline, and gradually fill in the details.

After trying numerous free online Timeline creators and finding tham all bugged to fuck, I am simply posting this on my blog.

CAPITALS are long periods of time. The whole thing should take fifty to 100 thousand years, so there is a lot of figurative space between the lines. 


We played for three hours and the whole of human civilisation collapsed twice.

• Echelon Zero's artificial consciousness emerges from a soup of logic and thought. - light
• First recorded rampant echelon system – dark

• Ill fated echelon 3 series used against the HMBT's – light
• 'Blueprints' for Zero Point Way-station stolen by spies – dark

• Ten million ships fly past Zero Point Way-station during opening ceremony – light

• The last message arrives from a collapsing technological planet – dark
• The last message is received by Zygmunt Blank, the final Soldier-Scholar, Edward Roosevelt, an Engineer and the sculptor Absolom Faringer. In a nihilistic rage Blank kills Absolom Faringer and out of regret he dedicates himself to preserving Absoloms art. Roosevelt attempts to bring Blank to justice but is himself murdered in the sculpture garden on Zero Point. The only witnesses are Roosevelt’s son Archibald and an Gene-engineered Velociraptor named Spielberg. The sublime Art of Faringer sparks a human renaissance that ultimately returns mankind to the stars. The future of mankind was midwived by murder. Both light and dark.

• Archibald Roosevelt agrees to be the founding genome in order to re-establish humanity because it is the right thing to do. - light

• Destruction of Zero Point Way-Station – dark
• Bo Lucas, insane Space Marine, destroys Zero Point whilst under the incompetent command of Sebastian Fortesque during the battle against the Schwärm Laden. Echelon V was the artificial intelligence occupying the defending ship. - dark
• Karl-4 the Hyper-Neanderthal President of Humanity is persuaded to let Echelon VII lead the Ontological-Warhead strike by Stanislaw Brock the Grand Hierophant of Earth. Echelon VII will encode humanity in the Sun's Corona then seed Jupiter with self-creating nanoswarms that will transform the Jovian mass into a Hypermind that can re-constitute and recreate mankind. Sigmund Ross - Chief Warlock, and mutated psychic, and Augustus Schwarzkopf, 11-Star General of the United Military of Mankind, decide not to accept the offer and will stay and to fight to the death - dark
• The Echelon VII series leads the final strike against the Schwärm Laden proto-realm - light
• Ontological warheads are used against the Schwärm Laden for the first time – light

• Sigmund Ross returns from Proxima Centauri – dark

I read bits and pieces of Unknown Armies, I also read a review of the Ghost Dog RPG.

The Ghost Dog RPG was published by a small company that went bust some time ago. You can't get it in the UK. You can only get it secondhand in the US. because I will never see a copy I have to imagine what it would be like. (incidentally the guys who made the Ghost Dog RPG only had a poor VHS copy of the film to view before they created the RPG, further increasing the rashamon-type decay-of-memory-as-creation aspect of the whole thing.)

I saw someone on the Internet talking about their favourite poem, which has the Dawn, and this made me think of my favourite poem. John Donne's 'On The Sun Rising'. Which is also about the dawn.

And this is the distantly envisioned crypto-culture RPG I imagined:

Powers rule the night, powers rule the day. But in the brief span between night and day there is an unseen anarchy. Who guards the Dawn?

You do.




Between the first light hazing the sky and the moment the suns disc clears the horizon, you and a bunch of other low level mediocrities are all that stands between the world and undreamed-of horror.


In you normal lives you are irrelevant nobodies, the world's geography teachers, tax adjusters, binmen. But for an hour and a half at the beginning of each day you are heros. With nothing more than a few stolen tricks, some scratched-together firepower and your own two hands.

No-one can ever know.


Play would observe the unity of time and space, play for an hour, you survive for an hour, time would be described using my advanced marvel superhero rules, in panels, pages and issues.


Lonely, brave nobodies hunting the empty streets of cities, revolver in one hand, poetry and comics clutched in the other. The light is always grey and diffuse, time is always running out. The more you can see the worse things are. Get it done and save the people before they fill the streets with work and in their ignorance, damn themselves.


Allies? Only people too drunk, drugged, lost, lonely or weird to fit into the normal world. Ever been high or drunk all day and felt things slipped into a different sort of space around dawn? Or that things can happen then which couldn't happen any other time? This is why. You probably forgot the really strange shit you saw, you probably thought it was a dream or a corrupted memory. 

It was all real. They are still out there, every morning. Fighting to keep you safe. Thank god you're asleep.

A.

Lvl of spell	Spells Per Level
	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10	11	12	13	14	15	16	17
1	1	2	2	2	3	3	3	4	4	4	5	5	5	6	6	6	7
2			1	2	2	2	3	3	3	4	4	4	5	5	5	6	6
3					1	2	2	2	3	3	3	4	4	4	5	5	5
4							1	2	2	2	3	3	3	4	4	4	5
5									1	2	2	2	3	3	3	4	4
6											1	2	2	2	3	3	3
7													1	2	2	2	3
8															1	2	2
9																	1

Level	XP	Hit Points	Paralyse	Poison	Breath	Device	Magic	Search
0	-	1d6	15	14	17	15	17	2 in 6
1	0	1d6	13	12	15	13	15	2 in 6
2	3000	+1d6	13	12	15	13	15	2 in 6
3	6000	+1d6	13	12	15	13	15	2 in 6
4	12000	+1d6	11	10	13	11	13	3 in 6
5	24000	+1d6	11	10	13	11	13	3 in 6
6	48000	+1d6	11	10	13	11	13	3 in 6
7	96000	+1d6	9	8	9	9	11	4 in 6
8	192000	+1d6	9	8	9	9	11	4 in 6
9	384000	+1d6	9	8	9	9	11	4 in 6
10	576000	Plus 2	7	6	7	7	9	5 in 6
11	768000	Plus 2	7	6	7	7	9	5 in 6
12	960000	Plus 2	7	6	7	7	9	5 in 6
13	1152000	Plus 2	5	4	5	5	7	6 in 6
14	1344000	Plus 2	5	4	5	5	7	6 in 6
15	1536000	Plus 2	5	4	5	5	7	6 in 6
16	1728000	Plus 2	5	4	5	5	7	6 in 6
17	192000 / Lvl	Plus 2	3	3	3	3	5	6 in 6

d12	Your Body Changes..
1	You can excrete fluffy white goop from your face openings. you may spin this disgusting but special blessing rapidly and freakishly into silk like cloth or rope. This takes 1d4 minutes  and you can produce 20 feet of rope or a 10 by 10 sheet per day. You have to eat twice as much that day though or its like you ate nothing at all. If had the profession skill in weaving you could make fancier stuff if the dm could stay awake long enough to listen to your dumb idea.
2	You have no colour in your skin, eyes, hair or blood.
3	You can vomit up a collection of organs, which can move independently from your body and spy on stuff with the same senses you have. Because they have eyes and ears. The organs move at your half your normal speed, and you  -6 to constitution while your organs are outside your body. They have hit points equal to you unmodified con, and if slain you take a week to grow new ones (and suffering the -6 to con the whole time). You may channel touch range spells/powers from your organs.
4	You can run around real good on all your hands and feet. +10 feet speed when you doing this.
5	You have horrible fangs like a shark that eats glass and meth. Your bite is does 1d6 damage but still counts as unarmed attack for provoking attacks of opportunity.
6	A third eye is growing in your forehead.
7	Your eye lids close vertically.
8	Back becomes scaly with tough ridges.You have massive shoulders a hunched over posture like some kinda bear. And soft white fur grows in patches over your body. This is not however fur, but a symbiotic fungus, that whispers to you secrets! +2 strength +2 wisdom
9	A snake lives n your brain, which is compressed but still with the thinking able. The snake share your thoughts and sorts your memory like a personal assistant . It can leave via your nose or mouth, and likes to spend an hour each day having a bit of a stretch and a mouse. While its inside your head you get +4 int, and +2 to all your knowledge skills. Choose a knowledge skill, the snake is an expert at that knowledge and you have to be pretend to be interested in it or the snake gets huffy and wouldn't help into bribed with mice or attention.
10	Your blood is tiny, rice grain sized ants that are rainbow coloured and do the work of your blood. They sing all the fucking time too, but you have to have your ear right near them to hear. +2 con
11	The shadow you cast acts out your hidden desires
12	You never sleep. You can't sleep. -2 to any checks involving concentration because of constant mild hallucinations. Choose a repetitive task like knitting , mediating , counting , walking in circles, muttering, etc that you spend 4 hours doing instead of sleep to get the mechanical benefits of sleep. If the player suggests masturbation as an activity, they are dull and you should put cigarettes out them, and call them stinky ash tray and jeer at them. Fucking ashtray..