The Captive Cervantes and the problem of history
The recent Spanish film The Captive (trailer) is difficult to review because it tells a very streamlined story that is very deeply situated in a complex historical context. It also takes a bunch of risks with complicated, emotive topics and hopes the audience is willing to come along for the ride. Critical responses have ranged from “how can you say Cervantes was gay?” to “this film is nowhere near gay enough,” with just a dash of “is this actually Islamophobic?”
I personally think all of these miss the film’s point, which is actually an exploration of Spain’s cultural blindnesses and hypocrisies in the 16th century and maybe a little about how such blindnesses continue today, and also about how some individuals (like Cervantes) could see past them. But that thing about being deeply situated in a cultural complex – that requires some historical background to reach. So I think it might be useful to add a few footnotes and talk a bit about why its context is hard (but worthwhile) to explore.
Content warnings: slavery, torture, violence, Christianity, homophobia. Bias warning: the movie really only shows us one half of a conversation. But that one half plus a few muffled interjections is enough to look past the Spanish view and see some of how it’s constructed. More on that later.
Synopsis (spoilers)
As a matter of historical record, Cervantes (author of Don Quixote, often cited as the greatest work of Spanish literature and/or the first truly “modern” novel) briefly served as a soldier at the Battle of Lepanto. Then he was taken captive by corsairs and held prisoner by the Ottoman Algerian government for 5 years. He was finally ransomed and returned to Spain, where he began his career as a novelist. This movie tells a story (that goes way beyond any historical evidence into pure speculation) about his life during captivity. It’s in the genre of historical fiction of things that could have happened: the historical context is pretty rigorously researched (that’s not the same as true), but the events that make up the plot are invented and interspersed with dramatizations of Cervantes’s own made-up stories, creating a charming but these days pretty familiar artful blurring of lines about evidence, meanings, truth claims and storytelling.
Context
Ok so the first thing you really need to know about this situation is that, in its broad outlines, it really happened. For centuries, the corsairs of north Africa and the eastern Mediterranean captured and enslaved European Christians or imprisoned them for ransom.* Here’s an episode of the Empire podcast about it. It’s hard to estimate total numbers but it happened often enough that European Christian mariners invented mutual insurance societies to pay ransoms for their members. And yes, it’s true that some Christian captives were able to gain their freedom by converting to Islam and then lived free in the Ottoman empire, and others converted but remained enslaved and even so they could rise to important, powerful positions in Islamic society as slaves or eventually buy their freedom, because Islamic slaves could own property and make money. And some people never got any of these options – they were enslaved without questions regarding their religion or options for ways to bargain for their freedom, or they were arbitrarily killed, or otherwise maltreated. History tends to be like that: very varied, with many exceptions even to its seemingly firm rules. The film shows a possible condition, that might have happened to Cervantes.
Also (less discussed in the film) Christians captured and enslaved Muslims and other Christians. The most prolific enslavers of Muslims (or people they could claim were Muslims) per capita were the Knights of Malta. But they didn’t encourage conversion, nor were Muslim slaves able to rise much in Christian society, and it was very rare for them to be freed. There are recorded cases of eg. Greek fishermen being serially enslaved by African corsairs and Maltese privateers, and having to prove their religion or justify their conversion or otherwise plead for their freedom against the word of their gentleman owners on multiple sides.
Now, discussion of this whole European vs. non-European slavery business tends to get cut off by some conversational failure modes before it can be considered deeply, so I’ll just quickly address them:
- Does this mean that slavery or arbitrary imprisonment isn’t so bad, really?
No. Slavery is a terrible thing and it’s usually accompanied by institutionalized terror, which the movie does not shy away from. Slaves have limited or no rights and are generally subjected to almost unimaginable cruelties. Don’t do it and don’t condone it. - But if Africans enslaved white people, doesn’t that kinda excuse whites enslaving Africans?
No. See response 1. - OK but actually European/American plantation slavery was worse than this sideshow of corsair slavery because there was no way to freedom for blacks on the plantations, their children would also be automatically enslaved, it involved more people, and it was exploited as a colonial system, without which the whole European economy would not have worked.
That’s all true but I would say that we don’t have to make this a competition, like an Olympics of evils – any time you can be arbitrarily beaten to death, that’s already unconscionably, unquestionably unacceptable. Nothing about any kind of slavery is excusable in any case. - Racism is still a strong force in society and by drawing false equivalence between historical enslavement of black and white people, you inevitably cover up the present harm being done by the continuing racist disadvantaging of black people. Talking about the miseries of white slaves is whataboutism, and that’s really why white racists like to talk about this corsair slavery period.
I dunno. I think racists will latch onto any way to make their racism look OK and we should not abandon our efforts to understand history just because racists look to it for excuses. In fact we have to understand them in order to understand the whole phenomenon of slavery and ongoing cultural battlegrounds. Only by looking squarely at the past can we assess the power it still exerts.
Still with me? Still interested in knowing about this movie?
OK so what happens to Cervantes is he’s put up for sale as a basic worker slave but because of his crippled arm he’s considered worthless, and therefore the slave-seller decides to kill him but he produces a letter that he claims means he’s important, and that means he gets put in the prison for gentlemen prisoners, whose families will pay ransoms in silver for their release. Only he has no rich family, so he’s stuck there.
And here we see how social class changes the captive’s situation, because the prospect of a ransom makes it worthwhile for the corsairs to keep these idle gentlemen alive… but for the gentlemen it totally changes the calculus of captivity. You could convert to Islam to win your freedom, and if you were as poor as a rat (as one convert puts it) it might be attractive – the Ottoman economy presented more opportunities for commoners than the Spanish – but for a noble, your family in Spain will only welcome you back if you don’t convert – if you protect your reputation as a gentleman, if you still have family prospects and employability in the deeply racist, xenophobic, and honour-obsessed Spanish court. You have to still be you – maintain your identity, even act as an exemplar of the indomitable noble Spanish character – to be worth your ransom.
(N.B. the film doesn’t point out the narrowness of the gentlemen’s choice. It says “if you convert you can never leave,” but that’s not true, you can go anywhere in the Ottoman empire, which is essentially a whole other half to Europe, about which the northerners prefer to be ignorant:
…the king of Spain’s reach was impressively long but hardly ubiquitous, even in Christendom. You could certainly go to those parts of Christian Europe that opposed Spain in 1575, like England or the Netherlands, which welcomed mariners trained in Barbary. A former Muslim of Spanish origin could take up life almost anywhere in the pale yellow area of this map, especially Portugal, where they would find whole sympathetic societies, until 1580 when the Spanish take over and try to ethnically cleanse Portugal, at which point they could join the large numbers of moriscos who moved to Amsterdam and became successful in the East Indies trades).
So… at root, your gentlemanly Spanish identity had to not be polluted by your interaction with the Barbary Other. How to neatly and intelligibly wrap up this discourse of cultural pollution, that will act as the hinge for all the film’s debates? What’s one distinction between Spanish and Ottoman society that the movie audience will immediately grasp as important, as something likely to cause trouble in cultural translation?
Homosexuality. The Ottoman empire was much more tolerant of homosexual activity than the Spanish one (although there are debates about which activities in particular), so that becomes the test: the film’s Spaniards couch their fear of Ottoman cultural pollution in a fear of sodomy and the Ottoman world outside the Spaniards’ prison is presented as one filled with homosexual relations. The closeted, jittery Father Blanco exclaims “it’s Babylon out there” and the camera indulges his judgment, maybe selecting its subjects to show a Spanish Orientalist gaze as it pans across bath-houses and lush gardens of shirtless men and boys in veils and the feline, kohl-eyed Pasha who rules over free Algiers and keeps the Spaniards penned up in their monkish courtyard.
The whole rest of the film is really about that Spanish identity, its pollution, and the various characters’ efforts to maintain theirs. It explores how the trials of captivity and intercultural experience might carve away at your identity or add to it.
Cervantes, being a “nobody” wrongly categorized as a gentleman, decides to surf the edge of pollution, engaging with the Other and, having started a dialogue, he experiments with a series of different identities as the plot progresses – heroic escape artist, leader of men, ingenue, seducer, lover, traitor, martyr. The other Spaniards around him show their own struggles with identity – patient father Sosa, who cannot tolerate his nephew’s adaptation, the convert barber who confesses that what he misses most about Spain is his name, ie the identity he had to give up in order to adapt.
And the film has a lot of fun subverting Cervantes the Spaniard’s identity expectations: Hasan Pasha, the high Ottoman official who holds him prisoner, is actually a Venetian – a former captive who converted and became successful, who confesses he doesn’t believe in any religion and is therefore free to make practical decisions… mostly about whom he must torture and terrorize in order to keep his job, to prevent his own return to the dungeons. Hasan, attracted by Cervantes’s stories, invites the Spaniard to fall into the role of Scheherezade to his own persona as an Oriental despot, trading stories for liberties, except that Hasan doesn’t want Arabian Nights tales of fantasy and grand romance – he demands real stories about real people motivated by plausible emotions and choices made in a milieu he can recognize. In terms of identity management, he’s the less-obvious foil to Cervantes’s journey of discovery: he surrendered his background in order to move forward and, until Cervantes fills his mind with curiosity again, he lived in a shuttered office of state cruelty, little luxuries, and little personal engagement. He spends his life playing the Pasha, playing at tyranny, and sometimes playing at tenderness with Cervantes (a sinister duality that we see plainly when he plays tender with another prisoner just before having him executed). So Hasan wants his entertainment to reflect the authenticity of experience he’s lost, and so the viewer is also rebuked: Hasan might be surrounded by theatrically Oriental props – plates of ripe fruit, scatter cushions – but that doesn’t mean we should take him at Orientalism’s face value; they are theatrical because Hasan is in theater, there are layers of masquing going on.
In the end, Cervantes’ engagement helps him discover who he is and what he values, while Hasan’s abandonment of any center makes him capricious and unreliable. There comes a moment when Hasan asks Cervantes to choose between a life of cloistered luxury with himself and one of uncertainty in Spain… and the scene most clearly recalls the recent crop of Narco gangster dramas – Hasan, like Palma, is too deeply embroiled in networks of violence to be able to promise any safety. No matter how much the gangster may love his wife, he will surely kill her one day. Scheherezade’s happily-ever-after ending was an invention of European publishers, when they assembled the Arabian Nights between covers. Cervantes has to get out.
What’s missing from the film, to turn it into a history essay, is an equal discussion of the violence and slavery of Spain, Europe, Christendom. Toledo and Paris have their own oubliettes, their own arbitrary torture and terror, their impossible demands: the Ottoman Empire is no worse a place than the Spaniards’ home, but back home the Spaniards would be the ones with their boots on others’ necks. But none of the Spanish gentlemen present is going to say that, and when one does he’s dismissed as “a Moor” by the other gentlemen.
But (a) such an essay is not the film’s goal and (b) against the charge of one-sidedness it pulls a sneakily subversive trick, that undermines the us-and-them dichotomy that the Spaniards’ calculus stands on. You see, it’s entirely filmed in Spain. All of its opulent, Oriental palaces and slave courts and picturesque Islamic-style medieval streets are part of Spanish culture, and were at the time of Cervantes.
They only look foreign because of Spanish policies of ethnic cleansing, under the Habsburgs and General Franco, which Father Blanco refers to when he follows up his line of “it’s Babylon out there” with “we were right to throw them out!” The Other was within them all the time. Are the Spaniards gay? That’s because they’re gay Spaniards, not because some foreign germ has got into them and altered them. More importantly, if the Spaniards are homophobic… well, we could fall back into some carefully-avoided discourse of inherent sin but I think it’s more likely that we’re supposed to see the characters as being at war first with themselves – their wars against everyone else are symptoms of this internal conflict. In order to be properly Spanish at the time of Cervantes, you must forget or reject some aspects of being Spanish.
So. Don Quixote imagines himself the last guardian of chivalry, protecting his countrymen from the ravages of giants and monsters, but in fact he’s just a deluded crackpot hurting himself and those around him. The Spanish court in Cervantes’s time imagines itself locked in a struggle to the death for the salvation of the world against Muslim and Protestant monsters, who represent barbarity and sin, but in fact it’s just torturing its own people with the Inquisition and its neighbors with wars and enslavement. And Hasan imagines Cervantes as his happy lover, safe in his harem, who wants nothing more than to accompany him to the big city of Constantinople and share in its little luxuries and tell Hasan stories, when in fact Cervantes is a terrified slave doing his best to survive under circumstances he would never have chosen and working on a novel through which he might try to make sense of all these illusions and contradictions.
* I bet you thought I’d forgotten about this footnote, like the movie forgets about Jews, Druze, and everyone else not covered by the Muslim/Christian dichotomy. I’m afraid to say that in general, these other religious or ethnic groups had an even harder time getting freed than Muslim and Christian captives, because it was generally harder for them to connect with people who might pay their ransoms or bring pressure to bear on their owners to release them. But yep, slavers on all sides just hoovered up whoever they could find and negotiated for the highest profit possible. For a case of Spanish slavers capturing Dutch mariners for profit, see Piet Heyn, whose subsequent career should serve as a warning to anyone considering a policy of capture-and-release piracy.
Southern Reach 3: Area X as Cthulhu adventure or Trophy incursion
Astute readers of the previous post will have already noticed that of course everything there about how languages construct subjects applies to RPG rule systems and how they structure games and their players (hey look at that, Trick’s Tales is on a similar kick for D&D).
Game systems are, in fact, the most total of institutions. And VanderMeer’s already ahead of us there, too:
institutions, even individual departments in governments, were the concrete embodiments of not just ideas or opinions but also of attitudes and emotions. Like hate or empathy, statements such as “immigrants need to learn English or they’re not really citizens” or “all mental patients deserve our respect.”
Authority
It doesn’t take much imagination to see how the institution of the prison, for instance, conveys and embodies the emotions of revenge – hate, spite, the desire for company in misery, the need to share pain by inflicting it on the painful and call that righteousness. Why are prisons fearful if society’s safety is supposed to depend on them? Why are they famously lawless inside? Does anyone actually believe they’re supposed to be for rehabilitation? (Yes, in the Netherlands, at least until recently, and that’s why Dutch prisons are different from American ones.)
Also while I’m here, who knows how much longer the NIH will exist? Probably best to grab what you can of their essays before it all disappears down the memory hole.
But I promised you something directly relevant to RPGs, so: different rule systems bring different expectations, different genre conventions and, even more, different emotional content to the table. To restate it in the Southern Reach’s own language, a game system is a terroir for generating particular play cultures. Which brings me, at long last, to Call of Cthulhu and its spawn.
Very thorough spoilers for book 1, also enough to ruin 2 and 3, follow from here on.
Area X has all the standard elements of a classic Cthulhu adventure:
– a tentpole monster, which in a CoC adventure is best considered as a puzzle (if you attack it directly you go mad and/or die, so there’s usually some non-attack solution you can find elsewhere),
– an information trove that tells you about the monster and other mysteries of the place, and
– a sense of urgency (that used to be hostages or a leak in the boiler room or something but these days is often) modeled as a Doom Clock.
It’s probably closest to something like John Tynes’s Convergence, the first Delta Green adventure, with which it shares (spoilers) a final Act of almost guaranteed total destruction.
But for efficiency’s sake, here it is formatted for Trophy (Gold, for reasons given below). Except that the Trophy rules say “the most important step for converting an existing module into a Trophy Gold incursion is to find the module’s theme. Look for one word that can serve as a hook to hang everything else on.” So far I’ve written 2 long blog posts saying how complex and multi-themed VanderMeer’s work is, so maybe we’ll just put annihilation in this box.
– – –
Briefing: After 2 months of training at a simulated Area X facility, hard physical and mental conditioning, and a tough selection process, you are the elite Areanauts, the few who passed the tests and can enter Area X. No names – you will be identified by your function: The Psychologist is the team leader, the rest of you are The Biologist, The Linguist, The Surveyor, The Anthropologist.
11 prior expeditions have explored Area X before you. This is the 12th. Some expeditions came back heroes of science, some didn’t come back at all. Area X is mysterious, dangerous, and growing. Your job is to help the Psychologist, who is the Expedition Leader, in finding out what happened to the last expedition. Also survey and map the area around the base camp – the Village and Lighthouse. Record your observations in your journals. Don’t go as far as the Island. The Psychologist will put you in a trance to get across the Border, which is for your safety. Do what she says. You will be extracted, by the Psychologist, in 2 weeks.
You each have a rifle and 10 rounds of ammo, a flashlight, basic supplies, food, water, fuel, and a small black box with a glass panel in one side, function unstated. the Psychologist will tell you if she decides you need to know what it does.
The Psychologist is terse, sarcastic, businesslike, and domineering. She needs the others to do basic stuff – map, get supplies, organize labor, collect your observations.
Secretly, she has a set of hypnotic commands she can issue everyone else, including sleep, obey, enter a trance, follow her, even [content warning] self-harm.
She is the only one who gets to see the map. She is the only one who knows about the Anomaly.
Also secretly, she’s really here to explore Set 3 – the Anomaly. At night she commands the group to sleep, then wakes up and places one expedition member in a trance to enter the Anomaly and take samples from the Crawler.
Super secretly, she has guarded the Biologist from most of the pre-expedition hypnotic conditioning. She expects the expedition to fail and die, and wants the Biologist to escape because she thinks the Biologist is the only member who has a good chance of going native and understanding something deeper about Area X.
As soon as the game begins, so does the Doom Clock, which will render all the PCs unplayable in fairly short order, possibly before they’ve even explored the known locations. Trophy makes this clock and its effects extremely easy: for each PC, every day, and also whenever something happens to deeply unsettle them, roll a d6. On a 1 they gain 1 ruin. Per Trophy, “when your Ruin reaches 6, you lose yourself to the wilds that have been growing inside you… [either becoming] a monstrosity [controlled by the DM] or you simply die.” Note in Area X even if you die you’ll have a Double. Becoming a monstrosity means mutating drastically and losing your sense of self. If you’re playing another game system (CoC, probably), you lose 1d4 str, int, or edu (whichever seems appropriate to the stress), or 1d6 san. Any of these losses causes paranoia and erodes teamwork. Entering the Anomaly speeds this up to 1-3 on the d6. If they read the Biologist’s journal or acquire her wisdom some other way (insane insight, somehow getting it out of the Psychologist, at the Island), a PC can use physical pain to reroll, reversing the effect.
Set 1. Base Camp this is where you wake up from the hypnotic trance that the expedition leader placed you in “for your safety” while you were crossing Set 2 – the Border. Expedition members and Doubles tend to gravitate here if they don’t have a specific mission for the day. Connects to Set 2 – the Border, Set 3 – the Anomaly, and Set 4 – the Scrub/Marsh. You can also see Set 5 – the lighthouse, in the distance.
set goal: rest, organize, marshal resources for forays deeper into Area X
props: some tents, some supplies (mostly spoiled, apart from what you brought with you), some inconclusive doodles from previous expeditions.
traps: none, unless you count the expedition leader. Ha ha.
treasure: basic equipment, on a search you can find one concealed handgun and 2d6 bullets.
Set 2. The Border: you are strongly discouraged from coming here by the leader. You have a job to do and it does not involve going back home. A few miles from Base Camp the trees are interrupted by a wall of shimmering, bright, swirling vagueness.
set goal: if you’re determined to leave, then find a way through
props/traps: Anything that approaches the shimmery wall winks out of existence at a certain invisible point before reaching it and is removed from play. Nonetheless, the static landscape continues right up to the shimmer. Weird. Somewhere in the information trove there’s a map showing how to find and traverse the sole narrow tunnel through the wall. The method involves following the map and throwing something (pebbles, usually) in front of you, to see if they disappear before hitting the ground, Roadside Picnic style.
Being inside the narrow intermundane tunnel causes confusion and you feel a strong sense of pressure, like the pains of childbirth as experienced by the infant. Gain 1 ruin/lose 1d10 san when you enter, then again before you can leave.
On the far side of the tunnel, of course, the US army operates a guard station on behalf of the Southern Reach, so you’d have to sneak past that or get captured and subjected to interrogation – it’s Terry Gilliam’s Brazil from there on out.
Set 3. The Topographical Anomaly: a big concrete spiral staircase leading down into the ground, with periodic circular landings between flights of stairs. Connects to Set 1 – Base Camp, Set 4 – Scrub/Marsh
set goal: encounter The Crawler
props: wall poetry – a line of text, made out of biological material (fungal fruiting bodies, maybe brain, definitely mysterious) on the left wall.
Some areas of the floor and walls are weirdly wet and sticky, fronds are reaching toward you from you don’t know where. Something in here is alive and you’re in its gullet and its immune defenses are starting to notice you.
Photographs taken in the Anomaly are blurry and badly lit, sounds are distorted and muted: shouts cannot be heard more than 1 flight away, gunshots no more than 2.
Traps: on any day when you’re looking for the Anomaly, roll a d6: on a 6 it cannot be found, even if some PCs are inside it.
When found, roll 1d6 for each PC: on a 1 they see it as a Tower and cannot understand any other interpretation, 2-6 it’s a Tunnel, obviously. Anyone who disagrees is delusional. Fighting them is encouraged.
Below the first flight, the air in the Anomaly is full of spores that speed up the Doom Clock.
If you have 3+ ruin/have lost more than half of any attribute to the Doom Clock, you perceive it not as concrete but as some sort of breathing flesh.
The Crawler, the adventure’s tentpole monster, is on the stairs (roll 6d6 for how many flights down from the surface), writing wall poetry.
Treasure: at the bottom of the Anomaly, past the Crawler, (somewhere below flight 36) there’s a gate to a different campaign. If you step through it, you are removed from play but might pop up in subsequent games as a PC, NPC, or PC pursued by several NPC Doubles.
The Crawler
Description: Encountering it (usually seeing it) for the first time causes 1d2 ruin, or 1d20 san loss or whatever your system supports. It also causes blinding pain of full-body dentistry, hallucinations and distortions, and reminds you of someone who used to be important to you but has since dissolved. You are a bug in a fire, incapable of any action but writhing and burning. No you can’t quite say what it looks like but it has an arm that is writing poetry. The Anomaly is now a hellscape for you and it costs 1 ruin to do anything but flee.
Endurance: 12, probably. Did you read “description?” What are you hoping to do under these circumstances?
Habits: writing poetry, turning its eviscerating gaze upon anyone who sees it, making Doubles of those it encounters.
Defenses: continuous projection of an aura that causes mental explosive dysentary.
Also whirling golden balls that can wink you out of existence or turn you into fungus/jelly/humanoid ferns/bits of loose sky.
Weakness: pauses to reassess if you address it as Saul. If you remain in its presence long enough for it to copy you, then it mostly ignores you, so you can sneak past it and continue downstairs. But doing so requires an extremely difficult will/san save. Also now there’s a Double of you roaming around outside the Anomaly, talking vaguely to your companions, messing with your stuff. Obviously if you attack it or try to take samples then the golden balls come out. Note: if the Crawler is somehow destroyed, Area X will make a new one.
Set 4. The Scrub/Marsh: this is a wide, deep area of country with gullies, thick vegetation, long flats that stretch out to sea, and lots of bits of invaginated landscape where someone with a rifle might think they can snipe any approaching enemy but in fact it’s full of culverts where they can sneak up undetected. Some of it’s thicketed scrub, some is tussocky marsh. Originally it was St. Mark’s Wildlife Refuge but now the life is wilder and doesn’t need refuge.
set goal: get to Set 1 – base camp, Set 3 – Anomaly, Set 5 – the lighthouse, or Set 6 – the ruined Village, before nightfall. If you’re determined and energetic you can get to any Set within one day.
props: sinister thistles, white rabbits (some mutated), abundant bird life, thrumming that’s probably just your blood beating in your brain, traces of previous expeditions up to and including heavily decayed/overgrown weapons, vehicles, corpses, and plants that look like corpses.
traps: alligators, lynxes, Doubles, feral expedition members, sucking bog, snakes, biting flies, impassable places that force double-backs, getting lost, the Moaning Thing.
treasure: searching may reveal small scraps of journal, a rowing boat or oar, a clip of ammo.
Random encounter: the Moaning Thing.
Description: each day, roll 1d6. On a 1-3 the Moaning Thing starts tracking you. First you hear it moaning and rustling in the undergrowth. At dusk, if the party is 1-2 people, it will attack. If 3+ people, it tries to lure them or separate them into groups of 1-2 by moaning, herding them toward obstacles, placing artifacts or carrion in their path, moving any markers or equipment they’ve placed, etc. 1d6 san loss if you see it. It has a giant humanoid head and was clearly once an expedition member, but its body has grown huge and sinuous and its skeleton has sprouted like a pine tree, erupting out of its body in some places.
Endurance: 9. CoC: use stats for Dimensional Shambler, except the only dimension it can shamble to is the Marsh.
Habits: moaning, skulking, attacking by charging like a freight train, mournfully singing to its dead daughter on the outside.
Defenses: claw, bite, drag into the marsh to roll you in the water like an alligator.
Weakness: faster that you in the marsh/water, slower in the scrub. In constant, debilitating pain, so if you press on its exposed bones it’ll thrash and scream instead of attacking.
Random encounter: Double
Doubles look exactly like expedition members and have the same stats, but are immune to Ruin. They have a few memories, similar to those of their originals, but it’s like they just skimmed through the script. Also they’re kind of distracted and not strongly motivated, even to attack. But they’re convinced they are the original and will act to try to convince others, too. If they meet their original, they mimic them, learning from them how to behave, which is y’know sorta Jung/Freud/Hegelian. They will defend themselves if attacked – human fight/flight urges are what they’re best at.
Meeting a Double of someone else causes 1 ruin if you roll 1 on 1d6. Meeting your own Double always causes 1 ruin/1d6 san loss.
Set 5. The Lighthouse: the ground is cleared all around the lighthouse for a few hundred yards, making the walkway around the top of the lighthouse a perfect sniper’s roost. On the landward side, it’s yard-tall grasses. On the seaward side there’s a little beach right under the lighthouse tower and some rocky cliffs and coves farther away. At the base of the tower on the landward side there’s a low building of 4 rooms. The tower contains a steep spiral staircase, leading to an upper room with the lantern and a circular exterior walkway with a yard-high railing. Many battles have been fought all over this thing. There’s dried blood and bits of investigator everywhere. Connects to Set 4 – scrub/marsh and Set 7 – the sea.
set goal: find the Information Trove
props: gore, discarded weapons (mostly broken), a framed photo of Saul the lighthouse keeper, broken glass, strange moving shadows on the stairs, corpses, and plants that look like corpses. In the lantern room, the fresnel Lens (somewhat broken) is a marvel of 19th century engineering, with adjustable mirrors and baffles inside, and also 4 tons of molded glass. Heavily decayed information placards tell the story of how it used to be on the other lighthouse, on Failure Island.
traps: Doubles, feral expedition members, broken infrastructure.
treasure: searching may reveal small scraps of journal, a rowing boat or oar, a clip of ammo. Searching the top of the lighthouse reveals the Information Trove.
The Information Trove that you need to understand the nature of Area X is in the room at the top of the lighthouse – concealed beneath a trapdoor, beneath a carpet, no less (attentive investigators can notice that the spiral staircase deviates around a space just before the lantern room and deduce the existence of the room beneath the trapdoor).
It’s a mound of hundreds or thousands of mouldering journals from previous expeditions. Many of them are blood-soaked, some are gnawed by humans and animals. There are far, far too many for the 11 expeditions you’ve been told about: hundreds of people have been thrown into this brain-grinder before you and have failed and their collected records are decaying here, unused by the Southern Reach. The revelation stored here (which is remorselessly HPL-purist in its bleakness) is that you can’t do anything to defeat The Crawler or Area X, all you can hope to do is maybe warn other people not to come here. If you know members of prior expeditions you can look for their journals.
All the journals show signs of their writers going mad, losing their mental skills, and eventually losing their ability to write or understand what the journal is for. If you spend more that 6 hours reading journals you can get an idea of the characteristic way in which madness descends: those who enter the Anomaly go mad quickly, often with paranoia and hallucinations. Those who don’t enter have more time but slowly they lose their ability to recognize differences between friend, foe, threat, food, landscape etc. Consciousness of the mission goals rarely lasts a full week. Many, many journals detail fights in and over the lighthouse, between expedition members, against monsters, or against giant leviathans that come out of the sea or sky. Many journals start out obsessed with the border, then forget about it and concentrate on bodily function problems. The final entry in many journals is a decision to go to the Island.
Set 6. The Ruined Village is a few heavily decayed and mostly collapsed houses, surrounded by plant and fungal life that looks strangely like people.
set goal: learn about the people who lived here before it became Area X
props: people-plants, broken house and home stuff (pots, pans, photos, toys), post-apocalyptic relics of Florida family life.
traps: Doubles, broken infrastructure, traumatic memories of people you used to know, if you happen to have once lived here.
treasure: shelter for the night can easily be scavenged, in case the PCs can’t get back to Base Camp or the Lighthouse before nightfall. Searching may reveal guns or other military hardware, journals left by the inhabitants or S&SB (early investigators of the nascent Area X before the border came down). This could be a good place to seed that the lighthouse keeper was one of the first people to be transformed and that his name was Saul.
Set 7. The Sea contains Leviathans (including, on repeat visits with new PCs, The Biologist), dangerous currents and, a 30-minute row or 60 minute swim away, leads to Set 8 – Failure Island
set goal: get to the island or try to flee along the coast or out to sea. Fleeing is doomed because eventually you run into the Border
props: there’s always a handy rowing boat, hidden near the lighthouse, just by chance. The sea has ominous shadows and weird stuff stitching through the sky and horizon but if you don’t dawdle you can get to the island safely enough.
traps: currents and sudden waves could tip you out of the boat so you lose all your equipment. If you do dawdle, there’s the leviathans.
treasure: a moment’s respite from the suffocating swamp-life ashore.
Random encounter: Leviathan.
Description: each hour at sea, roll 1d6. On a 2-4 a Leviathan surfaces in the middle distance, on a 1 it tips over your boat as it’s passing. Leviathans have no single body plan or size but it’s a fair bet they’re covered in eyes and roughly the size of a university library. Obviously, gain 1 ruin/lose 1d20 san if you get to see more than the briefly-surfaced dorsal 1% of it.
Endurance: 1078.5 I mean come on.
Habits: carefree whale-like meandering at sea, occasional devastating excursions ashore, where they can gouge up the ground or flatten houses but are often surprisingly delicate toward vegetation and wildlife.
Defenses: the old shoggoth slide. Like being hit by a pyroclastic flow but clammy and distressingly intimate.
Weakness: not actively malicious unless attacked
Set 8. Failure Island. Only the most determined investigators get here so it has a sort of survivalists’ cachet – you can see signs of campfires and successful rabbit-hunts and a few discarded oars. There are no doubles but leviathans do sometimes come ashore for a snoop. The Ruined Lighthouse is the only significant building – it’s heavily decayed, the concrete has crumbled away in places to reveal the rusted steel frame of the tower and stairs.
set goal: find journals, learn about leviathans, learn that the border also surrounds the sea.
props: more white rabbits, calmer bird life, decayed bits of concrete dock and buildings, signs of fires/long habitation.
traps: occasional leviathan rampages. Just possibly, a survivor from a previous expedition. They’ve been here for a decade or more. Yes, that doesn’t add up with the known time between expeditions.
treasure: searching may reveal a few journals, a rowing boat or oar, a clip of ammo. People who made it out here are the longer-lived investigators and some S&SB members. Deeper lore of the history of Area X can be found in hidden journals, including advice on how to survive long-term (by inflicting pain on yourself daily). Books full of theories about what Area X is, how it started, what it means. Extensive and creative notes on how to start and maintain cults, revenges to exact against the Southern Reach, etc.
So. How do different systems bring different emotional content, play experiences, and meanings to this?
Well, OG Call of Cthulhu is, according to its ruleset, the most tactically-inclined Cthulhu-themed game around, with the greatest freedom for the players to “get it wrong” – to generate a play experience in a different genre (Petersen promotes Authentic Lovecraftian Madness and Doom in the rulebook but it can easily veer off into Derlethian Two-fisted Adventure or even Coen Brothers Fiascos. And honestly the miscommunicating misfits of the Southern Reach fit that last category pretty well). In theory, CoC’s thematic freedom could play the best with VanderMeer’s agnostic stance to the horror content of his own fiction. The San rules, though, tell you directly that coexistence with the Uncanny isn’t going to work long term, and the common play culture is unlikely ever to understand Area X the way Ghost Bird understands it by the end of Book 3, as a genuine alternative to the humanocentric Holocene with a tragic origin but a viable future as a sort of new ecological age, with or without her in it.
Because CoC, being based on HPL, treats its horror as essentially exterior to the PCs, a kind of (possibly insidious) alien invasion, and so it tends to promote a mode of war. In the books, Lowry expresses this perspective: he treats Area X as The Enemy and feels that any means used to fight it are justified, even if he knows they’re doomed to fail, because the boundary between oneself and the enemy is the ultimate stake, the one thing you have to maintain, and therefore loss of self (or self-recognition) is the ultimate, unacceptable failure. With his CIA instincts and shady government backing, Lowry is really an archetypal Delta Green operative.
The other problem of CoC is genre awareness and the tendency to binary hope conditions: dividing adventures into those you might survive and those you’re not supposed to. So the minute CoC players see a leviathan (or any of the monsters, honestly) they’ll recognize it as a shoggoth and breathe a sort of ironic sigh of relief, because this is obviously what they came for – the disastrous destruction that heralds progress. After that, they’ll be looking for clues with the hope that those will lead to a narrow path to victory and if they decide that it’s not a winnable scenario they’ll settle into a sort of grimly humorous death spiral as a satisfying conclusion. Sandy Petersen didn’t exactly tell them to play this way, but this is where we are.
Cthulhu Dark, the HPL Madness and Doom Fundamentalist Cthulhu game, expects the horror, the horror to be metaphorical as well as physical, something internal to the PCs, something alien that calls to something within them, to offer a temptation, to unite what is dark inside with a darkness outside. In other words, Cthulhu Dark already knows that Ghost Bird is wrong, a trap, a misfire, and probably a DM’s ringer. Of the characters in the books, Grace seems like she’s playing Cthulhu Dark and she’s kind of surprised when she doesn’t get cathartically annihilated in Book 3. The emotional appeal of Dark is to confront the monster within yourself and dance down the deathslide with it: “the Investigators descend into chaos, darkness, madness and horror,” often in a programmatic sequence of 5 debasements, which strip away the Pillars of Stability on which they’ve built their world-view. Cthulhu Dark also assumes PCs will be relatively powerless – disturbed natives, not adventure-seeking colonists – so it might make sense to set the Dark version right as the border is coming down. You play villagers, regulars at Old Jim’s dive bar, and everything starts going wrong and everyone starts going mad and you can’t get out and you’re convinced it has something to do with those S&SB outsiders with the ouija boards and oscilloscopes. Funnily enough, the theme is probably acceptance and its difficulties.
Trophy Dark really builds on and further formalizes the stages of annihilation of Cthulhu Dark. It gets prescriptive at the level of the individual scene: here is the purpose of this place, here’s what you should make sure you understand by interacting with it. And you know going in that there’s no “winning” a Trophy Dark incursion – the point is to chart the depths.
And I think that would be a radical misreading of VanderMeer who, I’d say, isn’t even sure he’s writing horror. For HPL, going native in the alien wilderness is the most horrific idea – a fate worse than death. But when the Biologist returns in Book 3 (the return of the repressed) as something that’s very recognizably shoggothy, VanderMeer presents, through his characters, a varied menu of reactions (from annihilation to acceptance).
And so even though nobody’s getting out of this adventure alive, I think the baked-in consciousness of that wouldn’t yield a play experience that’s faithful to VanderMeer’s intentions. So despite Trophy Gold’s stated focus, of getting back out with treasure to feed your family, I think Ghost Bird’s journey (the farthest journey) fits it better than the other options here. Ghost Bird gets somewhere close to the heart of the mystery but not on a doom funnel – she’s choosing her own adventure, right up to the end.
Coda
There’s more in the books I could analyze but I’d rather end with a sharp left turn into a thicket.
Imagine the first irruption of Hogwarts into the world as a localised condition that forever changes the people caught up in it. Suddenly they can do inexplicable things that they can barely control. In roughly one third of test subjects, these new powers bring with them feelings of superiority and grandiose ambition. They think perhaps they should rule, but they can’t bring themselves to empathize enough with the mundane world outside to really care about who rules that. Their ambition is more transcendent.
The British government tries to cut the new danger off, to treat it as a no-go zone, an Anthrax island. They consider starving the dangerous inhabitants out, not realizing that they can generate food out of nothing, or hunt unicorns. Seeing an emergent order based around some weird distortion of an Eton-like boarding school, they wonder – what is this invasion? Has it always been here? Does it understand us, while we don’t understand it?
Meanwhile, inside the castle Wards, the new order shows a tendency to heighten certain trauma responses from the outside. Inhabitants skew either sinister or cozy.
remove unknowns, add only comforts
As he was asking questions he knew he was hemorrhaging data
there’s no reward in the risk
why did it allow itself to be found? That sounds like the right question
he was playing dead to keep his head
Never skip a step. Skip a step, you’ll find five more new ones waiting ahead of you
a clarity that comes from knowing you will soon be gone
Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach series, 2: on language
Like Part 1, this will contain spoilers for the first 3 Southern Reach books. This one’s a long dive into obscure philosophical problems, though. Not much use to game designers, perhaps.
It is popularly imagined that artists become artists because they’re talented: because they’re good at making art. I disagree. I think artists are generally bothered by something that they want to explore. If you’ve encountered something and you can see the edges of it, you know broadly what sort of thing it is, and you know what questions to ask in order to find out more, you’re a scientist. But if you’re bothered about something and you don’t know its extent and you don’t know what questions to ask but you’re trying anyway, you’re an artist.
Much has been written about VanderMeer as an anti-humanist or post-humanist. I’m not sure, I think he’s an old-fashioned misanthrope (or maybe that’s me projecting). I’m much more certain that he’s bothered by linguistic constructivism. Which is funny because at the same time he writes about how language makes subjects, he repeatedly and explicitly rails against the reduction of lived experience into language. This, in fact, might be his last essentialist bone.
The Linguistic Turn
Where 19th century Romantics imagined the individual as a sparky divine will that had to be chiseled out of its encasing marble of childish conventions, 20th century Analytics saw new individuals (children) as formless raw dough, whose thoughts had to be given structure with language. Or something like that. Anyway, Russell, Wittgenstein, de Saussure, and then a whole slew of anthropologists and historians started studying how language and representation might have the power to form individuals’ minds and consciousness: the terms in which they think, their basic reactions to stimuli. Both the self and society (they said) were formed by categorizing the things of the world, to identify what was clean, dirty, safe, treacherous, desirable, us vs them, pleasure vs pain, good vs bad etc.
Both the sui generis soul and the constructed linguistic subject bother VanderMeer. Annihilation has lengthy meditations on how the psyche is formed by outside influences and at root those seem to be linguistic – some of them, indeed, are deliberately implanted by mind control at the Southern Reach.
(There’s a strong Freudian thread running through the trilogy’s obsession with mind control and co-dependence. Freud thought that the shock of self-awareness split the psyche into three pieces, or petals: the id, formed of our animalistic urges – our fight or flight, mating and killing impulses; the ego, being our consciousness, the eyes from which we see the world, our thinking and calculating and critical selves; and the superego, our consciousness of the wills and judgments of others, our ability to see ourselves from outside. The monster that represents ego’s fear of the id is the unrestrained beast (vampire or werewolf). The monster that represents fear of the superego is the unwilled automaton or zombie, a puppet subject to hidden control by others. The people in the Southern Reach are worried about losing their free will or autonomy or control to Area X, which represents a sort of id – untrammeled wilderness, God’s country before the Fall – but at the Southern Reach they all toil like automata, controlled by others (Lowry, the Director, the Severances) and when we first meet them in Authority they have a strong sense that the motions they’re mechanistically repeating are futile. Maybe even that their hidden masters at Central know they’re futile. What they face in Area X might be radical freedom or an alien hive mind or subsumption in something like God, they don’t know. But they can see their own systems of control, in the corner of their eye, because Area X loosens them enough from their humanistic straitjacket to make them visible.)
Into all this, Annihilation‘s protagonist, the Biologist, is chosen (by the Director, we later learn) because she’s relatively uncontaminated by the canalization of implanted thoughts. She’s a loner, an outsider, a crafter of her own language and categories, working within the common system of signs but very often at odds with its priorities. She seems like a sort of Judith Butler figure, who reveals problems other people can’t see or won’t see – lightly socialized, not very positively gendered, ill at ease with social and environmental categories, common ways of seeing and dividing.
So she’s exciting to the Psychologist, who hopes her lack of firm humanistic mooring might make her receptive to (as in give her biochemical type receptors for) Area X. And I suspect for VanderMeer, who uses her as an observant, minimally-filtered translator between the strangeness of Area X and the reader. Her formative experience was watching a complex ecosystem develop in an abandoned swimming pool. Previously social, sterile, and empty, it filled up with (anti-social) life as its poisons subsided – the pool’s journey from culture to nature becomes the Biologist’s. And VanderMeer keeps reminding us of how her perspective differs from conventional social categories: her double, Ghost Bird, is found in what Control never fails to call an “empty lot.” Empty in his view – empty of commercial value, social signs of function and ownership. But full of wild ecology in her view, that his language/cultural training has taught him to unsee.
(An aside on canalization and images: after the 2008 debt default crisis, there were thousands of abandoned swimming pools undergoing this sort of transformation in the south of the US and photos of them were all over the news. Now if I search for those images in 2025, instead I get AI-made fake stock photos of banknotes floating in blue swimming pool water – a linguistic sign of pools and financial turmoil, instead of evidence/memory of how they actually interact)
“the tv was on but nothing made sense”
Control, after her sees the video of the first expedition. Also me, today.
VanderMeer opens up a lot of vistas from this perspective disjuncture and while I was listening, a bunch of discussant texts suggested themselves. In le Carre’s stories, George Smiley’s great strength (described by an enemy) “is that he imagines what is real, not what he would like.” Public Domain Review offered up a dictum from Ben Hecht: “we can be masters of our imaginary realms but we are reality’s playthings.”
But when people come back from Area X, they seem mostly unable or unwilling to communicate their new reality with those who have not had the direct experience, and are locked into a new perspective that those others cannot share. Interrogated about what she was doing at the “empty lot,” Ghost Bird muses “purpose hides so many other things.” At the Southern Reach she finds people “trapped in finding solutions.”
Area X covers its own traces and is selective about what it shares – it cannot really be photographed; videos have strange shadows on them, they show the investigators but not what’s terrorizing them. Debriefings with those investigators are frustratingly oblique. The first expedition – the most thoroughly documented – shows traces of what Area X does to purposeful questions. The expedition members lose the coherence of their language first, babbling at each other, not seeming to notice that they’re not connecting, not passing information. Then they lose their culture and restraint. Irrational violence follows.
VanderMeer’s writing follows the same dissolution whenever Area X irrupts violently into the narrative: the first thing to be jettisoned is grammar cues, separation of subject and object. We know dramatic stuff is afoot but not what happens to whom or through what agency. So the reader can get a hint of the expedition members’ dislocation: having lost their subject/object hierachies, they lose their humanity in a decidedly Lovecraftian way.
manifestation, infestation, oppression, possession
Saul shows how hard it is to communicate even the sort of effect you could find in a Pixar movie, if you want it to be taken seriously in real life. His first encounter with Area X is in the form of a rainbow “splinter” – a little shard of wrongness that he tries to pick up, that passes right through his glove. He has no words for it and nobody would believe him except the Light Brigade (S&SB) and he doesn’t want them to pay him any more attention than they already do, so he falls into the habit of silent secrecy that will infect nearly everyone in the trilogy and thinks he is the sole observer of his own growing brightness. Being able to classify (birds, waves, the duties of the lighthouse) reassures him of his competence, his continued presence, his selfhood. But his diary of classifications is slowly lost to him as Area X’s brightness takes him over and interjects its own messages and inputs. The final diary entry in Acceptance is the same as his first and it’s ambiguous, whether it’s supposed to show a closing of the mask or if VanderMeer slips it in unnaturalistically as a poetic coda. It obfuscates Saul, the missing observer. Or, as Yu Suzuki says of mastering Zen, “trees are again trees, mountains are again mountains.”
But VanderMeer seems to be speaking to us directly when he has his characters suffer experiences for which they feel “the futility of language against the rightness of the lived-in moment, … for which words were such a sorrowful disappointment.” He seems to feel he himself is diminished by the way language has colonized his mind, prevented him experiencing things fully, unfiltered, the common terms through which he must communicate a violation of the things trying to be communicated. This, maybe, is why he wants to show us Area X (and is why I found it such a disappointment when he actually revealed the puzzle of Area X’s creation rather than leaving us with the mystery, like life as we all find it – already in full swing, defying our attempts to understand).
So Area X is a big, inexpressible experience (as everyone expects it to be, if it’s going to be a voyage into the unknown) but right by the base camp there’s that scrawl – Saul’s bad translation, his contribution to the terroir – that tells the Southern Reach it’s not a pristine wilderness they can claim as their own: they’re already being colonized, through the uncanny, Biblical-sounding language in the words in the Tower. Only at the end of the third book can we glimpse the truth (?), that Area X is indeed trying to communicate something through the writing on the wall, but it is doing so through the inadequate ligatures it finds in Saul’s brain.
The verses are never really decoded but they’re the rhizome formed by Area X’s desire to communicate in an urgent, imperative mode, and the structures Saul knows that most closely approximate that – the utterances of prophets. In Saul’s experience, the language of prophecy is how you encapsulate a truth that does not invite debate or appeal to the listener’s reason. Instead it is intended to be taken as incontrovertible, and that’s what Area X wants to impart, even if “strangling fruit” probably doesn’t convey the exact semiotic figure it’s aiming for.
And from a literary perspective, that’s pretty clever. Because I have to admit, in the first pages of Annihilation I was not pleased to be confronted with some portentous-sounding semi-poetry by someone I initially took to be a Lovecraft fanboy. “Where lies the strangling fruit that came from the hand of the sinner I shall bring forth the seeds of the dead to share with the worms that gather in the darkness” yes yes OK, I thought, do I skip this hoping it will get less embarrassing? The expedition members are similarly resistant: they look for meaning in the biochemical composition of the medium in which it’s written, they regard the words themselves as a coincidence, a mental trap, they’re sure the message is not the message, that there’s no literary decoding that will make it spring into focus.
It’s the inadequacy of language, of course. The narrow channel of communication that leaves each of us fundamentally alone, mutating in our own more or less canalized observations, wondering if others can possibly see as much as we do, or even more, but cannot tell us. Closeted Saul, who couldn’t tell his congregation that he’d grown suspicious of his own sermons, who can’t tell his lover that he’s metastasizing out of his human envelope, who can’t tell anyone about the explosions and vastations going on behind his eyes.
Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach series, 1: the review
I have finally got around to reading (or listening to) Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach trilogy.* For years I resisted, thinking it was some kind of Lovecraftian genre fiction, like David Eddings to Tolkien, and I didn’t really need any more of that because I live in Trump’s America and can see “laws and morals thrown aside and all men shouting and killing and revelling” on the TV. Then I saw the movie called Annihilation and, while I admired its art and its evident curiosity about cancer cells, I thought it fumbled the ending and went off into soapy generalities about the unknowable.
(* yes I know there are 4 books now. But I had enough to write after the trilogy, so… more on that later)
So I was delighted to find out that actually VanderMeer’s trilogy is none of those things. It is an awful lot of things – it reaches in too many directions for me to count right now, so most of all it’s hard to summarize. It’s very, very good (and by god it’s a relief to be in the hands of an author who really knows what they’re doing after reading a lot of mediocre fiction).
So to approach it, I thought I might call in some discussant texts – and it has so many more interesting discussion partners than HPL. The Strugatskys’ Roadside Picnic, of course, and Stanislaw Lem’s Futurological Congress, but also John le Carre’s spy novels, Terry Gilliam’s Brazil, Rumphius’s Herbarium Amboinense and Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. And definitely Frankenstein and Dracula, but their literary originals, not their Hammer Horror Halloween children. Gothic chills are not VanderMeer’s target, even though Gothic ambiguity and paranoia are all over the Southern Reach.
You see, something has happened to a stretch of (unnamed, canonically “forgotten”) coast and now things are different there. Rather like HPL’s Colour Out of Space, the life there seems healthy (several expeditions call it “pristine wilderness”), but it’s now up to something new and incompatible with the world outside. Called “Area X,” it’s sealed off from the outside by a disjuncture, a “border,” which disappears anything that tries to cross it. There is one narrow doorway across this border and it is this that the secret intelligence services guard, conceal, and send expeditions through.
That’s where VanderMeer and Lovecraft part company: HPL knows the Colour is profoundly, cosmically Wrong and humans who come into contact with it must go mad and/or die. VanderMeer’s not so sure, neither about Right and Wrong, nor humans. He’s interested in the possibilities and imperatives of ecosphere survival. “The world goes on even as it falls apart, changes irrevocably, becomes something strange and different” (Book 3, Acceptance).
So is it horror? Yes and no. And yes. People “go mad” and die or kill each other, and some of the descriptions are neck-hair-raising, so it plays with horror tropes. But unlike HPL, VanderMeer doesn’t tell you how to feel or foreclose acceptance of the new, he doesn’t start from a place of concrete certainty that is oh so vulnerable to being chiselled away. More, there’s a persistent undercurrent saying this isn’t so unfamiliar, actually. You might have encountered something like this in your own life, if you take it metaphorically. How sure are you of your own earliest memories? What kinds of manipulative environments have you had to adapt to? is the world outside the forgotten coast actually any more attractive that the one inside?
OK but what’s it about, actually? This is where the spoilers start and there’s no having a proper discussion without them, so. If you want to read the books first, here’s where to stop. Spoilers for the whole trilogy follow.
Still here. OK.
The first discussant I keep coming back to, that I think must ring in VanderMeer’s own head, is Lawrence Weschler’s “inhaling the spore,” which makes its case better than I can:
Deep in the Cameroonian rain forests of West Africa there lives a floor-dwelling ant known as Megaloponera foetens, or, more commonly, the stink ant. This large ant — indeed, it’s one of the very few capable of emitting a cry audible to the human ear — survives by foraging for food among the fallen leaves and undergrowth of the extraordinarily rich rain-forest floor.
On occasion, while thus foraging, one of these ants will become infected by inhaling the microscopic spore of a fungus from the genus Tomentella, one of millions of such spores raining down upon the forest floor from somewhere in the canopy above. Upon being inhaled, the spore lodges itself inside the ant’s tiny brain and immediately begins to grow, quickly fomenting bizarre behavioral changes in its host. The creature appears troubled and confused, and now, for the first time in its life, it leaves the forest floor and begins an arduous climb up the stalk of a vine or fern.
Driven on by the still-growing fungus, the ant finally achieves a seemingly prescribed height, whereupon, utterly spent, it attaches its mandibles to the plant it has been climbing and, thus affixed, waits to die. Ants that have met their doom in this fashion are quite a common sight in certain sections of the rain forest.
The fungus, for its part, lives on: it continues to consume the ant’s brain, moving through the rest of the nervous system and presently through all the soft tissue that remains of the ant. After approximately two weeks, a spikelike protrusion erupts from what was once the ant’s head. Growing to a length of about an inch and a half, the Spike features a bright-orange tip heavily laden with spores, which now begin to rain down onto the forest floor for other unsuspecting ants to inhale.
It’s worth reading the whole thing, which turns out to be about the Museum of Jurassic Technology, D. H. Wilson’s gift to museumology and speculative wunderkammerurgy and spores. Go visit it, as soon as possible. Really. It’s in Culver City, a suburb of LA. Parking is, of course, difficult, and these days you have to book ahead. Don’t care about that. Go. Go now.
So.
I think VanderMeer’s trilogy is principally about how we are constructed – our minds, our thoughts, our reactions, our fundamental being – by agents that are mostly outside our control and our point of view. It’s about how changing a person’s (or plant’s or text’s) environment changes the person/plant/text. The activating word is terroir – the aggregate of all the environmental influences on a wine grape, that gives the wine its character. New situation, new grape. New grape, new wine. Terroir is a sort of constructive dialectic that gives the lie to any essentialist understanding of the individual, of nature, of the difference between humanity and its Others. And VanderMeer’s trilogy is very much about the things people, plants, and texts have in common.
(The movie (which shares little with the book beside a title) gets lightly into this, and only visually – there are trees shaped like people, which are actually neither – recombinations of bits of DNA that start up certain arborescent or rhizomatic scripts that we think we recognize. It’s like a Magritte painting made from familiar pieces but with unfamiliar meanings. But it presents the sort of understanding you’d get from only reading the first sentence of each page – which is itself a very VanderMeer sort of conceit.)
And because it’s about the mutual construction of person and environment, it makes sense that it’s about the repeated encounters of different groups of people with one small set of environments – a marsh, a stretch of coast, an island, a lighthouse, and an inverted tower, consisting of a spiral staircase with landings tunneling deep into the ground. These environments are never quite the same for repeat visitors, maybe partly because they are inhabited by something strange (“Area X” is sometimes addressed as a malign, thinking entity), definitely partly because people change them: setting fire to them, writing on them, leaving their bodies to feed them.
One of the cleverest things about the series (and most intimidating, for any aspiring author) is the way the whole thing is structured like a detective mystery, in which the reader slowly learns things that reconfigure what they’ve already read. The first book follows an expedition into Area X, with viewpoint characters who know as little as the reader – and what they think they know is immediately undercut. Hypnosis and mind control colour their perceptions and reactions. Their briefing is shown to be incomplete – deliberately so – and over the course of the book it starts to look like it was all a trap. But for what purpose? The team leader knows more than the rest but we learn she doesn’t know anything like enough. Its conclusion – the decision of the lone survivor to leave treacherous humanity behind – is bleak and satisfying.
Subsequent books trickle out information, incrementally revealing people’s disguises and hidden agendas, telling us tidbits (nowhere near everything) about the nature of Area X and its inhabitants, revealing the history of many, many tragic expeditions. Again and again they show us how the characters we’ve already met are working with false assumptions. So the second book, Authority, seems to be about the dysfunctions of the Southern Reach (the government agency devoted to studying and interacting with Area X), but actually it reveals the agency to be another Area X, full of traps and monsters, like the Ministry in Brazil,
and its protagonist turns out to be more thoroughly entrapped than that of Book 1. (It is remarkable that most of what we learn about what Control (the protagonist of Book 2) is supposed to be doing at the Southern Reach is revealed in Book 3, through elisions. Why doesn’t his mother take over the troubled Reach after the Director leaves? Why does she send her disgraced son instead? Because she wants to stay at arm’s length, treating the Reach as a ticking time bomb. Her son, put nominally in control, is really only Control in the sense of a control group, or maybe a control switch – an emergency cut-off, a fuse to prevent the Reach from blowing back all the way to her.)
Authority and Annihilation both end with their protagonists rejecting the Reach’s program and (probably ironically) asserting their individual will, expressed as a leap into the unknown from a home that has become a prison. It’s a symbolic death but their vales of tears are not done with them yet – they will keep moving forward, one of the little phrases VanderMeer keeps repeating, with cumulatively eerie effect. In the third book, Acceptance, we get some glimmer of what’s really going on with Area X but less clarity about why the investigating humans do what they do, perhaps because we expect to understand them more thoroughly, to have an account that makes sense on more levels. I’ll cover that more in a later post, this one’s already long and full of branches.
(The names, too! If you had any doubts about the intertextuality at work, check out the names: the paranoid schemer Lowry, subverting the bureaucracy to feed his fantasies. Whitby as the means by which Area X invades the Empire. Cheney, the ever-angry engineer of doom. Saul the lighthouse-keeper, whose prophecy on the walls of the Tower is the first hint that we’re not dealing with an ordinary alien invasion story. I can’t figure out where the name Severance comes from but it’s highly suggestive for a family of MKULTRA spies. It’s tempting to bring up the paranoid mind-control TV show Severance here, but I guess the influence goes the other way around. One thing about reading VanderMeer: you start to see his influence everywhere.)
So we have a story simultaneously of research, encounter, deception and paranoia – making John le Carre at least as interesting a discussant as HPL. But deep down le Carre, like HPL, assumes the essential existence of a Basic Right Order, which his characters have been trained or bribed or blackmailed into sinning against. Le Carre (like Raymond Chandler) mostly wrote stories of individuals discovering their moral hard lines when society wouldn’t provide the right scripts for them. They’re typically killed or forced into exile by their moral discoveries, but at least they find something more valuable to them than the world of professional lies. VanderMeer doesn’t supply this reassuring hard bottom and he doesn’t offer the redemptive power of the heroic individual will (or if he does, he immediately complicates it). Individuals don’t really have fundamental essences, in VanderMeer’s books: there’s no stripping away their accretion of training and manipulations because these things have left indelible marks, forming a new entity. People are always already palimpsests, waiting to have one story or another prioritized in them.
Area X presents an alternative to this dirty humanosphere, possibly in evolutionary competition with it, possibly transformative cooperation, while the humanosphere itself presents a roiling, constant battleground between philosophies, manipulations, market imperatives, and conspiracies, in which nature is the perpetual fuel, hostage, and collateral damage victim (BTW the Radiolab episode “life in a barrel” offers an amazingly bleak and interesting discussant for this viewpoint). As the forlorn message of a dead alien race (that could very possibly be ourselves), it seems like Area X could be completely benign, well-intentioned: a healing and cleaning force that our biosphere so desperately needs at this late moment in our corrosive history. But unfortunately it runs into the terroir of humanity, which immediately perceives it as – and makes it – destructive. Area X and its investigators are locked into a dialectic of co-creation/destruction, to which VanderMeer doesn’t offer a resolution: it’s an unstable symbiosis or mutual orbit, not a problem with any promise of resolution. And that unsatisfying non-ending is worth sticking around for, more real and trustworthy than any tidy moral lesson or dead observers, killed by their one extraordinary encounter in order to meet the word count or maintain the mystery.
Todd Alcott’s “What does the protagonist want?”
I have been mulling over writing Large and Serious blog posts about the works of John le Carre and Jeff VanderMeer and James Clavell but they will have to wait even longer.
Instead this is a quick post to recommend TrickTheGiant‘s musings (linked in the updated blogroll, to the right>) and Todd Alcott’s ever-enlightening movie blog, “what does the protagonist want?“
I’ve been chatting with Trick about game design on discord for a while and I’m expecting all sort of good things from the blog.
Todd Alcott writes the kinds of essays I love and US high schools hate. Ones that take you on journeys and pull movies apart scene-by-scene and assume you understand the basics. And having forgotten his name a while ago, I had the devil’s own time finding his blog through the scattered bones and detritus of the internet SEO landscape, so I’m linking it here hoping to help people who want actual content.
Todd on The Apprentice: “For these men, there are no rules or standards, there’s just “what they want” and “what they can do to get it.” A philanderer preaching family values? A gay man disparaging gay men, while supporting Reagan, while also dying of AIDS? These men see no contradiction, because no rules apply to them, they just absolutely don’t see it. Who cares about contradictions, who cares about truth? They make their own truth.”
On Pirates of the Caribbean 1: “…you could say that the entire narrative is about Elizabeth trying to awaken the pirate within Will, which makes Will a rather passive character in my view. Will wants to have Elizabeth fairly and justly, but Elizabeth wants to be taken by force. (Which makes it all the more symbolically appropriate that Will is here today to deliver a sword to Governor Swann, who has ordered it to give to Norrington — he’s forged a hard-on for Elizabeth for years, but propriety insists that he hand his steeled desire over to the higher-ranking man.)”
Anatomy of a Wonder: Napoleon’s Tomb
I wasn’t going to visit Napoleon’s tomb, but I was in the middle of writing posts about Civ and I thought “is there a more Civ artifact anywhere? The mausoleum of an actual Civ character,
…who liked to imagine himself as another Civ character…
…built and maintained in his capital city. What kind of immortal memorial can you buy, if you make yourself the autocrat of a major European power?”
Of course, as I was walking around it, I realized that truth is always stranger than game logic. Sure, Napoleon conquered most of Europe, built monuments etc. but… he also lost. Twice. And died in British custody on St. Helena in the south Atlantic. So… who actually built his mausoleum? Who decided to honor him after his death? After the spectacular collapse of his empire? And why?
So this post is about the weird zigzag path that leads to the creation of a monumental Wonder, the ambiguous and politically negotiated meanings of buildings, and the ways these things get revised year after year – the sort of things Civ leaves out. Maybe it’ll be inspiring for other games set in the ashes of empires.
OK so first, Napoleon’s tomb occupies a building that predates the man by over 100 years. In 1670, Louis XIV commissioned a hospital for wounded soldiers with an attached church, where they could be honored. Then in the 1680s, halfway through construction, Louis decided he didn’t want to pray together with common servicemen so he added a Royal Chapel to the hospital (the tall gold domed bit) just for himself.
It was finished in 1706 and boasted the tallest dome in Paris, covered in gold leaf outside and painted in the latest illusionistic style inside – a monument to the king’s taste, piety, and respect for the men who defended his realm. Louis visited it once, then ignored it until his death 10 years later. History would remember his reign as the high point of the ancien regime – in 1789 the revolution turned the monuments of France’s kings into museums, stranded in a proletarian republic. But only for 8 years because then Napoleon took over as France’s first emperor.
Napoleon was not that keen on republics or the revolution’s idea of popular sovereignty but he also didn’t regard himself as the new king of France and probably wouldn’t have wanted to be buried in a French king’s church. According to the completely unbiased Austrian Prince Metternich, he had a pragmatic view of religion – he rolled back the militant atheism of the revolution and restored links to the Papacy but avoided any sort of official State church: he thought religion was useful and probably essential for civilization but he didn’t think it was worth arguing about when power and organization were the real purposes of life. Napoleon himself is supposed to have said “I won the Vendée war by making myself a Catholic, Egypt by making myself a Moslem, and won over the Italians by making myself an ultramontane. If I ruled the Jews I would rebuild the Temple of Solomon.”
Instead he modeled his image on Julius Caesar, who had also overturned a republic in the name of a military empire, and who was retrospectively turned into a god. When Napoleon beat the Austrians at Austerlitz he commissioned a giant Roman-style arch, so he could parade into Paris in the style of Caesar’s Triumphs. Monumentality might have been his true religion.
Based on that, we can guess what sort of tomb he would have wanted: Classical, squarely columnated, Caesar-appropriate – maybe with a pyramid on top, since he also conquered Egypt and sponsored Egyptologists to uncover the secrets of the Pharaohs.
Unfortunately for Paris’s costumiers his military successes were cut short in 1814 and the triumphal procession never happened. He died in prison, accusing the British of poisoning him (the jury is still out between arsenic and stomach cancer), and was buried on an East India Company farm. The Allies (principally Britain) restored the monarchies that Napoleon had deposed all across Europe, digging out Louis XVI’s brother to rule France. Due to France’s chronic shortage of names, Louis XVI’s brother was also called Louis and ruled as Louis XVIII, because Louis XVI’s son, Louis, had been executed before he could get to the throne (but the kingons, or Louisons, had nonetheless briefly visited him).
Louis XVIII had no interest in celebrating his deposed, commoner, Corsican adventurer predecessor, so work stopped on Napoleon’s monuments….until the 1830s, when a further revolution in France had changed the monarchy again – this time to Louis-Philippe, Duke of Chartres, a second cousin from a junior branch of the family.
OK so. After Napoleon, 19th century France played out like the game Reigns: remaining in power was a balancing act based on preventing any one faction from getting powerful enough to replace the king, so all political decisions were first and foremost devoted to maintaining that balance (and nobody managed to balance for 20 years at a stretch, so revolutions were semi-regular). Louis-Philippe (L-P) knew the game but wasn’t a masterly player – he had fought for the Revolutionary Government until it got around to beheading the king, then fled to Switzerland, accused of plotting to bring back the monarchy. He is said to have spoken French with a German accent and German with a French one, and is accused by historians of not being able to make up his mind between being a revanchist monarchist or an industrialist corporate shill. What he absolutely wasn’t was a member of the Bonaparte family, so the Bonapartist faction (mostly Napoleon’s old soldiers) hated him passionately. Disgruntled remnants of Napoleon’s Grande Armée repeatedly tried to assassinate L-P – a business he made easier by leaping back up as the smoke was clearing to reassure people he was still alive. In 1835 an “infernal machine” was set off next to his carriage, killing 18 people and lightly grazing the king. L-P decided to have the victims buried with full military honors at Les Invalides. The following year, Napoleon’s nephew, Louis-Napoleon, attempted a coup, seeking to rally the old grognards in an attack on Strasbourg. The attempt failed quickly and Louis-Napoleon fled back to Switzerland, but it scared L-P into trying to appease the Bonapartist faction by returning OG Napoleon’s body to France, to be buried with honor together with his own assassination-victims, to show that Napoleon was a (safely dead) National Hero and part of the same long ethnonational continuity as L-P himself. In 1840 he finalized arrangements with Britain to pick up Napoleon’s body from St. Helena and bury him by the Seine, as he had always wished.
(This is where things get interesting for fans of Ken Hite’s occult/conspiratorial musings: Napoleon’s body (or, as the faithful insisted, his “ashes” (cendres)) seems to have been treated an awful lot like that of an Egyptian pharaoh. Immediately after death, his internal organs had been removed and were stored in two sealed silver jars, buried with the rest of his body in four nested coffins – of tin, mahogany, lead, and mahogany again (working outward). The French delegation opened them to inspect the body, then resealed them and nested them inside 3 more coffins – lead, ebony, and oak – for transportation to France. In case that’s not occult enough for you, there was a rumour that his penis was removed, linking him to the God Osiris, who was brought back from the dead by his wife, minus his organ of generation, after having been hacked to pieces by his brother (perfidious Albion, perhaps). The whole assemblage, weighing over a ton, was carted to the ship Belle Poule (beautiful chicken – not sure of the occult significance there) and, minus the oak outer box, lowered aboard into a candlelit chapel for a voyage made more exciting by the rumour that they were going to be attacked by British warships. That didn’t happen and they arrived in France peacefully.)
The public, who turned out in droves to honor the last man who had given France a Destiny, were disappointed that they didn’t get to see his coffin – only a black-shrouded paddlewheel steamer, that rapidly transported the body to Paris, and a similarly shrouded carriage, that carried it to the Les Invalides.
The ceremony of placing the coffin in Les Invalides was restricted to VIPs for fear of inflaming the public’s Bonapartist passions and the politicians present were seen to yawn and shuffle disrespectfully, so the propaganda effect was completely spoiled. Wikipedia offers an aside on the sickly governor, who alone was credited with acting with proper solemnity:
For a fortnight he had been in agony, pressing his doctor to keep him alive at least to complete his role in the ceremony. At the end of the religious ceremony he managed to walk to the catafalque, sprinkled holy water on it and pronounced as the closing words: “And now, let us go home to die” (footnote: although he actually lived until 20 April 1842).
A few months later Louis-Napoleon attempted a second coup, which failed even more miserably than the first. Imprisoned, Napoleon’s nephew grew more popular than ever. Evidently the public didn’t buy the idea that Napoleonism was dead.
Since the ritual had failed, another gesture was deemed necessary to show that L-P really honored the dead man-god, who accused his regime from beyond the grave for its littleness. In 1842 there was a competition to design a proper tomb, that would venerate the Emperor without gathering unruly crowds. And that’s where the current monument comes from: it’s the mid-19th-century product of a much-reduced and politically unstable France, aimed at deflecting and taming disruptive imperial fervor – praising but only faintly the man who flared out France’s glory, and placing him in a narrative sequence where he could pass into history and out of living hearts. Not quite the straightforward memorial to a successful Civ player that it initially appears.
The winning design involved digging out the floor of Louis XIV’s chapel and adding a free-standing red sarcophagus (imitating the red porphyry used by Roman emperors but actually a Russian/Finnish quartzite from the Arctic circle), on top of a plinth of green Vosges granite, on top of a plinth of black Alpine marble in the middle of an enameled floor depicting laurels. I’m not sure what that particular lapidary scheme was supposed to achieve but it’s intriguing that it follows the alchemical colour sequence from the blackness of base things, progressing through green, then red. The gold, of course, is concealed from the uninitiated (but hinted at in the sunburst on the floor, surrounding the whole composition). The quartzite sarcophagus looks like it’s carved to represent the form of the coffin that people used to visit, with some sort of rolled blanket or cushion on top, looking a bit like the cushion on top of an Ionic column – perhaps a witty callback to familiar Classical iconography – Napoleon becomes the column that holds up an invisible empire.
Also, while I’m considering cult iconography, the whole composition makes Napoleon into the head of a lingam in yoni – the round enclosure with entrance passage below the church’s floor level. 12 muses face the sarcophagus, holding up a circular gallery that contains low-relief marble friezes declaring Napoleon’s (mostly domestic) achievements – organizing laws, taxation etc.
The victims of the infernal machine are walled up in a second gallery hidden behind that, tucked out of view in classic crypt style – there’s a hint that a little labyrinth continues but it’s fenced off from the public. The path down into the tomb-basement has friezes showing the ritual of returning the “ashes” without any hint of the embarrassment caused at the time, so the whole thing looks like it makes its own kind of sense – a building that celebrates the great imperial fathers of France equally: Louis XIV and Napoleon, with Napoleon’s return restoring the dignity of the realm. Since then it’s become the national cenotaph, so coffins containing great generals of world wars 1 and 2 are added as corner-supports, looking at each other through diagonal archways, while the mighty spirit of Napoleon anchors the lantern of the dome.
It’s a grand, weird, and expensive homage to an emperor that L-P was trying to selectively forget. And it took so long to build and decorate that L-P’s regime fell to another revolution before it was finished. In 1848 France again became a republic and L-P, like all the other deposed rulers of 19th century France, fled to England. That republic only lasted 3 years until, once again, it was overturned by a Bonaparte (this time Louis-Napoleon, who had escaped from prison and got elected to the republic’s Assembly) in a sequence of events that led Karl Marx to comment: “all great world-historic facts and personages appear twice… the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.” The self-proclaimed Emperor Napoleon III got 18 controversial years of “pasteboard empire” before himself being toppled by Bismarck and a third revolution. But he benefited from being able to finish his uncle’s tomb in 1861 and open it to the public, 40 years after the man’s death, and was able to bury two of Napoleon’s brothers with him in the next 3 years – those that Napoleon had made the kings of Spain and Westphalia, who had retired from kingship into meddling from 1815 to the 1860s.
Did you think that was as weird as it was going to get? We’re not done yet. The thing about monumental buildings is they just keep standing there, ready for anyone to use for any purpose.
In the gallery of Napoleon’s achievements there’s a tomb for Napoleon II, “King of Rome, 1811-32”. Confusingly, that plaque stands under a statue of Napoleon I in Roman drag.
Even more confusingly, Rome was under the Pope, not any king, from 1814 to 1849, so… who was this Napoleon II and what’s going on?
Napoleon II was Napoleon’s son, born 1811 and appointed King of Rome and Prince Imperial of France at birth, but he lost all his titles after his dad got locked up in 1814. He bore the title Napoleon II for a weekend – and only among committed Bonapartists – while the Allies were figuring out who to put in charge of France. From 1814 to 1832 he lived in Vienna as Franz, Duke of Reichstadt and Prince of Parma, Piacenza, and Guastalla (but not Rome) – titles he got from his mum, the daughter of the Emperor of Austria. He enjoyed soldiering but was kept assiduously away from any sort of political career and then he died of tuberculosis at 21 and was buried in Vienna. Most historians have forgotten him.
But then in 1940, a century after the return of Napoleon’s “ashes,” a new Napoleon-style ruler united Austria and France: Adolf Hitler. I don’t know why he decided to transfer Duke Franz to Napoleon’s tomb (apart from “because he could”) – it caused a crisis in his puppet Vichy government – but I’m guessing that, having seen what happens when you leave your memorials to others, his ultimate plan was to include himself somewhere in the narrative sequence of divine emperors. He was returning a Bonaparte, like L-P had done, to emphasize his own (French) national piety.
Hitler had Franz’s coffin installed at Les Invalides with the byline “King of Rome” but no dates. After the war his installation was accepted by de Gaulle’s National Government and reinforced in 1969 by President Pompidou, who transferred the coffin to the basement, to be closer to his dad, and added the current name-plate with wildly and demonstrably inaccurate dates. I simply cannot explain it, except to say that nationalist epics always seem to drift this way: ever greater claims, ever farther removed from reality. Hitler’s version of French history has been accepted and embellished. Maybe the only real explanation is that once you’ve built a monument, it continues to pump out 1 culture every turn no matter who holds it… as long as you keep repairing it.
And perhaps one day Napoleon III’s remains will also be returned and rehabilitated, from their current, shunned mausoleum south of London. Players in this game of monuments can always come back, they just require a new crop of followers.
The new(er) problems of Civilization 6
It took me about 8 years to get around to writing my review of Civ 5. In contrast I’ve only played Civ 6 for 2 weeks. But that’s good for what I have to say, because there are things that are clear when you’re learning a game, that get covered over when it’s become second nature.
And the main thing I have to say is, OH MY GOD LEARNING THIS GAME IS A NIGHTMARE. Partly because it’s very complicated, partly because its information design is just not up to its complexity. Which, to be fair, is merely saying the information design is not absolutely world-class.
The other thing I have to say is that the lack of clarity that makes Civ 6 so hard to learn comes from the fact that it’s much less in command of its discourses than Civ 5.
1. UI is hard
I am playing the latest full game package with all the DLCs (Rise and Fall, Gathering Storm, Leader packs etc) AND the 30+ mods recommended on Steam for making the UI clearer (Better Trade, What Did I Promise?, Better Builder Charges Tracker etc etc). So what I’m experiencing comes at the end of a long process of player frustration and community hacking.
Regarding complexity, Civ 5 is pretty much at the top end of how much cognitive load I can find fun. So I kept wondering if, in learning Civ 6, I was just experiencing what new Civ 5 players go through – had I forgotten the pain and confusion, the sense of futility? Everything has been made unfamiliar enough to make my prior knowledge unreliable, so maybe it was just that my brain is old now? Maybe, but 6 is also objectively more complicated. First it has more moving parts – the old tech tree has been cut into more, smaller chunks and is joined by Civics (Cultural techs), now another whole damn tree that is shrub-hybridized to the tech tree and to a governments-tree system that determines the size of your hand of game-altering cards that you can deploy at one time. Second, the logic of sprawl is everywhere – not just in the controversial division of cities into specialized districts that compete with the old farms and mines for real estate on the map. Sprawl has made things that used to be single line items into semi-independent sub-games – spies now do 10 different jobs but none of them well unless you devote time and energy to spy-optimizing play. Great Persons have become unique Magic: the Gathering type monsters with a long paragraph of individual special powers. City state influence is controlled through a mini-game of envoys and governors. Etc, etc, etc.
It’s a lot. And it leads to a million popup tips about details that you can’t understand or use right away. Tips that often direct you to read the encyclopedia, the entries of which in turn direct you to hunt through the whole encyclopedia looking for hints.
(…which potentially is a really interesting re-emergence of the old book-puzzle-based texts of the 1960s, like Hopscotch, but that might not be the game you wanted. It’s not what I wanted, which was why I’d already given up playing the game twice last year. But my son got me to try it again, so maybe Civ 6 is a successful design after all?)
Here’s the thing about complexity: there is a distinctive kind of pleasure that video games can give you – a moment in a well-designed game where you understand the rules, you understand how to play, you know what consequences to expect from your interactions, and then just sometimes you get something extra – you are surprised by more success (or more tension) than you anticipated and the excess is experienced as pure joy. Some games have figured out how to deliver those moments with remarkable efficiency and reliability – the simple phone game Ballz, for instance, is like 1/2 tension, 1/4 inevitable disappointment, 1/4 joyful excess:
Here’s how you expect it to go: you bounce balls (or ballz) off squares to get rid of them. Every time they hit a square they erode it by 1, when a square gets to 0 it disappears and is no longer a threat. That’s a nice, simple feedback mechanism: hit the squares and continue, or miss them and die.
But sometimes you can get the ballz in behind a line of squares and then they keep bouncing around in there, eroding lots of squares at once. It turns out, in fact, that Ballz is perfectly balanced so that you can predict (and hope) that you’ll get maybe 3, 4 bounces, but just occasionally they’ll keep going for like 40 bounces and you joyfully get to watch them clearing the whole screen and you feel very clever because by chance everything lined up and you made it happen.
So. The more complex the rules, the harder it is to get to this mastery/joy state. The more time you spend either bumping along the bottom of the play experience or flailing around wondering what you should be doing. Civ has always had a problem with long periods of bumping and flailing, but Civ 6 promises to throw you back into it with every new sub-game it unveils, because each one threatens to reveal your previous decisions to be misguided.
TL:DR – there’s an unmanageable number of things competing for your attention in the first 20 hours of playing Civ 6. Information is badly prioritized, the implications of your decisions are unclear, and it’s easy to miss little things like the fact that you’re at war with another civ. Over 80 hours into a game, I was surprised to find that I’d (permanently?) lost all handles on the diplomatic influence sub-game and I still don’t know why. Perhaps there was a notification that I missed in the flood.
But that’s just a load of complaining. Why is it interesting?
2. discourses are harder than they seem
One of the big things that makes 6 harder to understand than 5 is that its discourses are less clear – the links between game objects and their significance feel less natural. There’s no effort to joke with the discourses, like Civ 5 did when it said penicillin was required for Marines. I suspect this loss of clarity comes from it being redesigned by a committee to make more sense as a game engine, at the expense of making sense as a comment on historiography.
…which sounds like smart design – a game must first be fun, right? If it’s not fun nobody will play it and then it doesn’t matter how historical it is, right? I think Lewis Pulsipher might’ve said that. Except that part of the proposition of Civilization is that you’re playing a game of world history and it kinda promises to educate you as you play, so… why not go play Doom instead if it doesn’t deliver that? Anthony Burgess coined the term Clockwork Orange to describe a thing that is beautifully engineered but useless for its actual, original purpose and if you re-engineer Civ to be a great game but jettison its historical pretensions then I guess that’s what you risk. Obviously I’m not saying they’ve really done that. Obviously I’m not offering some false dichotomy between a history exercise and a game – the job of the designer is to somehow satisfy both requirements. But I do think 6 is less graceful in threading the needle than 5.
Take the Temple of Artemis Wonder – in Civ 5 you unlock it by learning Archery. It makes archers cheaper and speeds up your city growth. Which makes sense – the Ephesian Temple of Artemis (one of the original Seven Wonders) was dedicated to a fertility goddess and associated (by the Romans) with the bow-toting huntress goddess, Diana. So, fertility = growth, Diana = archery. OK.
In Civ 6 you still unlock it with archery but once you have done so, the archers are no longer relevant. It provides +4 Food, +3 Housing, and maybe some Amenities. The practical upshot is fairly similar – Food is needed for city growth and, in 6, “Housing” acts as a limit on city population. But… the metaphors are weaker and less tied to the Temple. “Housing” is a 20th century city planning term – and, in general, archery is discouraged around it. It feels arbitrary in an ancient world setting and it feels weirdly glued onto the ideas of the Artemision. Consequently, it demands more mental overhead to remember the links or track them through the game as it unfolds. It doesn’t take advantage of the symbols it forces you to interpret.
Honestly I kind of get how sewers would help grow population and even how they could allow greater density – that’s a good metaphor! But then you find out that the Eiffel Tower also increases housing by increasing the “appeal” of landscapes (because the population density of Neighborhoods depends on how beautiful they are) and at that point I just don’t know what we’re saying any more.
Oh it’s DISGUSTING!
“then at least you must have lots of room”
When my son is assessing games and movies and theme parks he talks about the distance between the initial idea and the final product – I think he means the visibility of the author’s intent, which is to say the clarity of vision that the user can participate in: can you perceive that the product is what it was supposed to be? I think that distance is shorter in 5 than in 6. Or to put it in academic historian’s terms, I think that the researcher’s job is to peel back layers of discourses to see what they’re made of and what lies beneath them – to excavate ideas from the cruft of discourses that have piled up on top of them. Civ 5 is often quite good at that but I feel like Civ 6 tends to covers things up again with its layers of “only a game” practical rule streamlining and its confusing, overlapping bonuses and buffs and stackable microcrocks.
Take, for instance, some big nugget of discourse, like Teddy Roosevelt’s romantic ideas about the Closing of the American Frontier. Civ 6’s designers were allegedly partly inspired by Ted’s speeches when they were writing the diplomacy rules – they agreed with Ted that talking should come to replace fighting in international affairs as the overall level of civilization rises and that America should naturally have a civilizing influence on the world as the 20th century dawned, but they didn’t go so far as to add either Big Stick or Bull Moose Civic techs to the game, to make that link explicit. On the other hand they did put in Ted’s beloved National Parks (unlocked by Environmentalism) as wonders you can build to detox your country. But then they made it very difficult to actually do so:
You see, much earlier in the game, they actively encourage you to build next to mountains and natural wonders, to reap the bonuses they offer basic districts:
…so you’re unlikely to have any suitable 4-hex areas to turn into Parks – where would you find such valuable land still empty?
So there’s a teachable moment here – an opportunity to uncover a discourse, rather than just repeating it. Ted, you see, was very keen on declaring Park lands to be empty – he revealed their ennobling wilderness nature, where Men Can Be Real Men, mostly by chasing native populations off them and obscuring the fact they had ever been inhabited. So the stage was perfectly set for Civ 6 to add the Civic Tech Frontier Fetishism, which would allow you to declare the emptiness of land, to erase the features humans had placed on hexes, to celebrate them as virgin territory, and maybe harvest Faith or Heroic Grit from their new pristine naturalness. That would be memorable, and might even get players to consider the game’s other messages. But instead Civ 6 just leaves it as a puzzle – it agrees that wilderness should confer advantages, that it’s good for the soul and the environment – but it does so from inside Ted’s empty-land propaganda. It scolds the new player for not leaving a few white spaces on the map for later and congratulates Ted for finding them, out there in the Manly Destiny West.
The Problem of Civilization, the problems of Civ V
Since Civ VII has just been announced, it’s a fair bet that Civ VI should have finally barrel aged into a playable state. And that means it’s time to record my notes about Civ V before they get overwritten by playing the “new” game.
Do I like Civ V? Is it a good game? After some hundreds of hours it’s still hard to say. I can say it’s a really interesting critique of wargames, US curriculae on world history, and the idea of “serious play.” It’s also a major influence on Counter-colonial Heistcrawl, in that much of CCH is written in anger against things Civ takes for granted.
All games express theories of the world, Civ wears them on its sleeve. It leans on all kinds of familiar, lazy thinking and shows how cleverly persuasive that thinking can be. Sometimes I think middle school kids should play Civ V to prepare them for the nightmare of AP World History because it reflects that curriculum all too closely. They explain each other, and I think they might reveal each other’s traps. Other times I think only postgrad historians should play it for exactly the same reasons.
First, though, let’s define some terms. For this post:
- A theory is a reliable statement that tells you things about the world that you can use (to make a game, for instance). For example, Newton’s Second Law, force = mass x acceleration, is a nice, fully developed theory – you apply a force to a mass to accelerate it or, conversely, if you accelerate a mass (by crashing into it, e.g.) it imparts a force on you. Newton’s theory works well enough that we can use it (plus some refinements) to land men on the moon, just by carefully accelerating masses. And you could totally make a game out of it, maybe something about throwing things of different masses through a hoop or crashing cars into each other and seeing which one forces the other off the road.
- A discourse is a set of ideas that are associated together, to lead the reader/listener/player to some conclusion. An argument (ideas put together in an order to lead explicitly to a conclusion) is a very specialized sort of discourse – most discourses are like “arguments you don’t need to have,” because the associations they make are already familiar. Darkness connotes danger, the winner of a fight is probably stronger, the simplest solution is most likely to be right, there’s no such thing as a free lunch. When we recognize that a discourse is unreliable and/or it has effects we don’t like, we tend to call it “prejudice” or “bias:” we pay attention to how it doesn’t actually argue its case. But forming discourses seems to be pretty fundamental to how we learn and think. As a baby, you learn your first language by inferring connections between things and sounds – you make up your own discourses about what words mean and how to use them, and refine from there (is this linguistic assertion a theory or just a discourse? Well in this essay we’re calling it the latter, since it’s not directly useable). So discourses are generally persuasive, they tend to appeal to our assumptions or they rhyme with things we already take for granted. If some snakes are venomous we’re inclined to treat all snakes as if they might be dangerous, relying on the discourse that snake -> venom -> death.
Discourses are far easier to make than theories and always come first: theories don’t pop up in barren fields. If we’ve thought about a thing, we have discourses about it. And if we haven’t, we can easily borrow discourses from adjacent things. One of the big challenges for making theories is clearing discourses out of the way: Newton’s work piggybacked on Galileo both in matters of theory and discourse. Aside from providing “Newton’s” first law and a lot of data supporting the others, Galileo helped by having a famous fight with Europe’s master discourse-maker, the Catholic Church, over basic ideas of physics. One of the results of that fight was a discourse (in England) that the Catholic Church shouldn’t get an unchallenged license to set discourses about natural phenomena, giving Newton a space to expound his theories.
Discourses also beget discourses: the first humans on the moon were all men because there was a discourse that women were not suited to space travel (or risky adventures, or travel in general, frankly). Just as the job of astronaut was developing, a new discourse popped up in support of this prior sexist discourse, that women’s bodies would be especially damaged by the accelerations that test pilots and astronauts experienced – a spurious idea that gained traction because it played well with discourses that women shouldn’t do that sort of thing.
I’ve bored you with this because:
a) the whole idea of Civilization as the noble opposite of filthy Barbarism is a discourse. A giant hairy ball of discourses, inseparable from colonialism and inter-ethnic domination, that Civ V has to use/contend with. It may be the master discourse of our times, unless that’s “your worth = your intelligence x your income.”
b) the main task that faces the designers of Civ V is to turn discourses into theories – to take ideas and associations, that the players expect and accept as familiar, and turn them into manipulable systems out of which a game can be built. Quick – do you really know if a musket is more deadly than a crossbow? Everyone and their dog, from Oda Nobunaga to Sanjay Subrahmanyam to Jonathan Ferguson to Lindybeige has an opinion (discourse), but… deadly to whom, under what circumstances, with what training? Is there actually any reliable research? Civ V has an answer (theory): a crossbowman has combat strength 13, a musketman has 24. So the latter is worth nearly two of the former. And the game has to arrange everything on those sorts of axes – to line up the elements of world history that it chooses to be important and ask “what’s the exchange rate between coal and oil? Pike formations and soldier hygiene? Hills and fish? Ancient Egypt and 19th century Germany?” These are questions no sane historian would attempt. But the designers of Civ are making a game and games need rules systems, winners and losers, good and bad play. And those rules have to “make enough sense” (fit into existing discourses) that the player accepts them and learns to use them.
(BTW, Civ V achieves this “reasonable-sounding solution” by never being explicit with any of its units. How many crossbowmen vs. how many musketmen? Enough to generate this result. The level of abstraction can be seen in how the map scale shifts with the evolution of firearms. Bowmen can shoot swordsmen from 2 hexes away, but musketmen can’t. They’re melee, just like swords, while Gatling guns only have a range of 1 hex, which means they’re basically melee but don’t advance to take the hex they’ve cleansed of enemy life. Why? Because the world gets bigger. In a world where rifles are melee, only artillery and aircraft are “ranged weapons.” How can these different scales possibly coexist on the same mapboard? Only because the more advanced units have much higher numbers than the less advanced ones, so that the less advanced become simply irrelevant on the battlefield. It is frankly astonishing that Civ manages to make any of this look reasonable, and yet the player accepts it (after a hundred hours of play) as long as they can win with it. The magic of self-interested interaction.)
Civ V as a tool for teaching history
So I’ve been running a little unscientific lab for the past 10 years with my 2 kids, and on that minimal sample size I can say that Civ V helps to teach history but only if you’re very careful with how you present it. My eldest played and enjoyed Civ and it helped him understand AP World History. He could, moreover, see how Civ is the APWH curriculum, gamified. My youngest was unenthusiastic about Civ and struggled with questions about APWH that Civ would have answered.
But Civ needs extensive glossing because, on its own, it’s a historian’s nightmare. First because theory formation in history has a terrible reputation (only partly due to Hitler’s contributions), second because many of its discourses are, let’s say, unfashionable with historians these days. It cheerfully repeats nationalistic myths – like the idea that the English are especially great mariners with super-fast ships (nope):
and the Japanese are inclined to fight on fiercely when nearly dead:
These ideas are better described as propaganda than as any sort of evidence-based history.
But Civ has value exactly because it says the quiet parts out loud, laying its theories out for us to look at and discuss. For instance, everyone can make knights – they’re a universal technology – but only Japan can make Samurai. That’s an example of what feminist theory calls an “unmarked category.” If you’re prepped to talk about it, it’s a really nice, clear example. More fundamentally, Civ leans on assumptions that we enlightened post-post-modern critics still depend on even though we know we shouldn’t, which makes it a great primer for discussing how those assumptions might be problematized – that is, rendered into a form where we can discuss and examine them, rather than embarrassedly brushing them aside as part of a regrettable disciplinary past.
What do I mean? I mean that if you read, say, Strayer’s semi-official AP textbook you will encounter frequent asides about how there was nothing fundamentally wrong with Africans or Native Americans, that allowed Europeans to colonize them. Strayer tries to be better than other historians by including capsule biographies of neglected categories of historical actors – dedicating a page to an important woman of colour that other history books ignored… but you do not encounter a nice, clear explanation of why these correctives are necessary or why they’re in his book. You do not get a chapter on racist, sexist historiography and the difficulties of trying to correct for it in spite of working with archives that were themselves pruned to support racism and sexism, nor is there any explanation for why exactly racism and sexism in the construction of the historical record might be a problem. So there’s a load of scaffolding but no explanation of what it’s no longer holding up.
Civ, on the other hand, is unembarrassed about setting out the whole of human history as a continuous war – of weapons, ideas, and resources – with winners and losers. Arguably all wargames naturalize war, but Civ explicitly says “this is all there is. This game encapsulates the effort of humans to organize, and they do so against other humans.”
It posits eternal ethno-nationalistic competitors
(this idea is not original to Sid Meier, btw)
who can only advance at each other’s expense (even the peaceful Space Exploration path to victory is a path to victory – it ends the game). It naturalizes conquest, domination, exploitation, and a casual realpolitik. And in doing so, it makes the motivations – of, say, European colonizers of the Americas – crystal clear: both their urge to expand and their violent competition with each other in doing so. Because conceiving of the world as an arena of continuous, necessary war actually does describe Early Modern European attitudes pretty well.
Civ’s explanation for who wins history and how they do it is solidly 19th century (and, honestly, has not been superceded): superior weapons technology, which stems from superior production, which stems from superior organization. You might recognise this model from Adam Smith or Karl Marx or Kenneth Pomeranz. Or the intro chapter of Jared Diamond’s wildly popular Guns, Germs and Steel – Diamond tells a charming (presumably fictional) story about some non-European asking him why Europeans have more stuff than his own people. What he really means is, why did Europeans win world history? The rest of the book is best understood as a long meditation on the importance of where you settle your first Civ city.
And Civ has graduated answers, depending on how deeply you accept its basic premises (ie how long you play). On lower difficulty levels everyone’s peaceful and you can win merely by optimizing GDP better than your neighbors. But as you go up the ranks of expertise the kid gloves come off and violence (symbolic and literal) becomes imperative – on the highest difficulty, everyone else starts out way ahead of you and you have to pull them down to your level through careful use of murder. All cultural expression, religion, morality and meaning are but grist to the mill of producing more than your competitors.
Few respectable historians these days would be willing to offer such a reductive, depressing account of what it means to be civilized, or human. What it means to “succeed.” Even Hobbes, with his “nasty, brutish and short” assessment of the nature of human life, only offered that grim assessment as the bad cop, against which he placed the better Leviathan of good government by and for the people. But here’s the thing: that grim vision is exactly the shadow that lies behind a thousand more hopeful accounts of history. It’s the unspoken baseline that reformers – including Smith, Marx, and Pomeranz – want to improve upon.
AFAICT Civ has two other core lessons for the player:
- concentration of force: it matters less who has the bigger overall army than who can bring the greater force to bear on a limited space right now, this turn. Maximizing damage on a single enemy unit lets you kill it before it can retaliate. This is the essence of blitzkrieg and explains the whole “20th century wars” unit of APWH.
- self-sufficient synergy: although there are several different styles of victory on offer (cultural, diplomatic, scientific, military) the best way to win is by winning all of them at once. Better government boosts your science, religious fervor can expand your army, more propaganda keeps your empire together. You should never let anyone else win any one aspect of the game-of-civilization on offer, because even if you could potentially dominate them all, the Koreans will still beat you to space unless you cripple them first. Unless you are the Koreans, in which case it’s the Babylonians you have to pull down.
Both of these basic principles are implicit in the AP curriculum – it is assumed that students understand them, so they aren’t taught. I can tell you (from my daughter’s experience) that such an assumption is not safe. And the doctrine of self-sufficient synergy is essentially the (nowadays unspoken) doctrine of US history – the goal is to expand fast, eliminating or crippling all competitors on your continent, while unifying your people behind a single ideology (of capitalism) and downplaying (say) stubborn religious differences because those don’t support expansion. Once you’ve got the natural resources and industrial production under your thumb you can start dominating science and sports. Why did the US Empire replace that of Spain in this whole business? Probably a combo of social policies and tech speed – Spain’s persistent Unhappiness stunted its growth. Because, of course, Spain wasn’t the legitimate hegemon. Its rulers weren’t as good at manifesting its destiny. They weren’t as sophisticated about winning all the games simultaneously.
You can also have some fun deriving the discourses that inform the tech tree.
(although I confess I don’t quite follow some of its logic – arrows to wheels to math? is this an elaborate joke about Achilles and the Tortoise?)
If a particular tech lets you build Terracotta Army or Hanging Gardens of Babylon, that’s a clue about which bit of world history the designer was thinking about at the time. In particular, I suspect the association between Penicillin and Marines probably comes from a dirty joke, told at the expense of US Marines by other service branches, about the prevalence of VD in the supposedly least intelligent branch.
The pinnacle of human development that the game deals with is more-or-less explicitly the US at the turn of the millenium, as winner of the Cold War. When other Civs complain about how you’re beating them at the culture game, they mention your “blue jeans and rock music.” Clues that the “Atomic Age” really is the 20th century include the fact that the three available ideologies are Freedom (duh), Order (characterized by ahem five year plans) and Autocracy (which now I think about it probably stands for the “Third World”). In short, no you can’t develop your civilization whichever way you want, world history always winds up exactly here. But you can put the Inca in the place normally occupied by the US, if that’s your thing.
Civ as a game
So Civ pretty much spawned the 4X genre (Explore, Expand, Exploit, Exterminate), which means that as master of its own category it doesn’t have to justify that category to anyone. Also it’s sold like 35 million copies, so any critique I have of it won’t be worth that much profit. If you like Civ, go ahead and make a Civ-like.
OK but I also think if we’re planning to make our own games (like CCH) then we should be selective about what we emulate. And if it were me, and if I were making an RPG with some Civ-type inspiration, I would not follow its weird admixture of being both a sim and a wargame. Partly because I think sims are generally built on false advertizing.
Wikipedia’s definition of simulations is too broad to be useful here – Imma define sims within the field of video games as fundamentally deriving from SimCity. That is, a sim is a game where you try to derive the designer’s theory of a system from observing how its elements behave, then rebuild the designer’s optimal system to make it flower. It’s essentially a solo puzzle game where the challenge is to learn to think like the designer. I’ll also say, sims as a genre are never actually what they seem to be. The implicit promise to the player of “you can build your own city” or “you can control your own empire” is you get to build it the way you want. Chances are the player is ready for some creative constraints that might lead to fun surprises – they don’t necessarily want a city painting program – but I for one have always found sims disappointing when they lead to a single true pre-built solution and/or boring when they’re happy with whatever damn fool input you feel like throwing at them. Civ’s levels of difficulty are a partial fix for this, and maybe the only possible fix: at one end you have an idle clicker where everything will work out somehow, at the other you have a hardcore learn how to hack this because you’re doomed if you don’t cheat experience.
(the tech tree really shows the gulf between a sim’s promise and its delivery. Imagine all of human ingenuity, laid out with logically path-dependent pre-requisites! Why shouldn’t you invent the record player, as soon as you have some theory of sound, wax, and needles? Assemble the ingredients and the player can provide the spark of genius. But no. The tech tree is really just a yellow brick road to follow – you can forge ahead to frigates or trebuchets while neglecting metalworking if you want, but ultimately you have to develop everything, in more or less the set order, and the game engine itself can declare where in human history you have reached, based on which key techs you’ve unlocked. Notably, even if your map has no sea, you still have to develop all the ships. Because the game’s theory says you can’t make plastics or nukes or schools without them.)
Sims require complexity, because working out the relationships between their interlocking systems is the core of the play activity, and Civ V delivers a lot of complexity. There are separate but interlinked systems and stats for tech, religion, money, city production, population growth, happiness, influence over NPCs, diplomacy, and a sort of governmental tech tree called “culture,” which leads eventually to a cultural wargame called “tourism.” On the other hand, a lot of that complexity collapses once you get familiar with the bewildering profusion of elements. It turns out the tech tree must come first because it’s the key that unlocks everything else, and that tree has only a few really key branches; those that speed up the acquisition of tech by adding to your science-per-turn (writing, education, scientific theory), those that revolutionize production (metal casting, chemistry, fertilizer), and one tech, “industrialization,” which is revolutionary for the eminently Marxist reason that it lets you build factories, and those open up Ideology, the mid-game win-state for “culture”, which finally takes the brakes off the wargame.
Here’s the thing about the sim part of the game: it’s almost all solo unlocking of parts. It doesn’t involve or promote interaction between players. And it unlocks slowly (especially at first). Often 20+ clicks of the next turn button to develop a new technology. As you grow your imperial garden, your rate of science acquisition goes up, but it’s kinda like PC performance – every time Intel releases a faster chip, Microsoft releases a slower operating system, so Word runs at the same speed no matter what’s under the hood. Higher techs require more science and somehow it always winds up being about 10-20 turns, if you accelerate for all you’re worth. So that has a sort of slow, meditative constancy to it.
Civ is also a wargame and that does involve inter-player interaction. It’s also apt to take over, because of the simple Sun Tzu principle that war destabilizes: every asset you take away from your enemy counts twice – you have it, and they don’t. The spoils of war may not make you rich overnight but they definitely impoverish your enemies. So to slow the wargame down to the same speed as the sim, Civ V deliberately cripples it with a couple of extra subsystems:
– “happiness” (or more importantly “unhappiness”), which worsens as your empire expands and plummets if it expands by conquest,
– “resistance,” which makes newly-conquered cities a drain on your resources for a number of turns equal to their population,
and the much more historically-based
– “money,” which military units eat through, whether they’re fighting or not.
And once you realize that Civ V is at war with its own war affordances, all the “non-war” methods of winning pop into a different sort of focus. The culture victory is essentially a war that you fight at home, by taking all the museum loot from the other players and tempting their populations to love your civilization more that their own, through tourism. The religious subsystems are really about boosting tourism through conversion, which is also how great musicians work (blue jeans and rock music). Diplomacy is about monopolizing city states (obligate crippled NPCs), out-bidding the other players for their support. Only the science victory does not play like a war – it’s a race to exhaust the tech tree and build a space rocket. But it’s still aided more by outright war than by any other activity: the only way to slow down the other racers’ acquisition of techs is to take away their cities with your military.
All those non-wargames (really wargames with bloodless metaphors) have inferior gameplay to the actual hex-and-chit wargame the Civ contains, because:
a) they’re slow and ponderous, taking many turns to accomplish anything;
b) their feedback mechanisms suck – whether you’re winning or losing, you only find out well after the actions that decide your fate – often much, much later, when the consequences of actions long forgotten finally manifest in ways you can see them
c) their rhythm precludes any cut-and-thrust with other players – if you see a bunch of religious inquisitors headed your way to boost your enemy’s religion at the expense of your own, you don’t have time to respond in kind – the only quick remedy you have is actual hex-and-chit war.
In contrast, the hex-and-chit wargame has immediate, clear visual feedback (you can see when you or the other guy loses a unit); breathless turn-by-turn action, as you visibly advance and risk your units; and a shifting tactical landscape, as your units develop new capabilities through experience (often greater than those that tech alone can give them).
(I call this a “Supermurderer Class” battleship: it has longer range than the factory standard, so you can shoot without the enemy shooting back, it can do it twice a round so it’s basically two battleships, it has boosted movement, vision, and damage, and it can move both before and after shooting, so it can nip in, murder, and retire to a safe distance all in the same turn. This is maybe my favourite thing in all of Civ and you acquire it principally through play, by using it without losing it.)
So. tl:dr, Civ is not the game I want it to be. Not the game I hope for, even years after I first loaded it up. It’s a remarkable bit of game design, an extraordinary achievement. And it can support thousands of hours of play, if you buy into the game that it is, rather than the game you imagine, and if you decide to find out exactly what’s involved in winning a bloodless culture victory, for instance. It’s good enough that I don’t consider it a cautionary tale. It points in enough interesting, novel directions that I find it inspiring rather than depressing. But there’s definitely room for a more exciting game that fulfills its promises better. Maybe something with fewer ingredients and more room for strategic mastery. Simpler and more elegant. Closer to chess and farther from an encyclopedia. Not, in a word, Civ VI.
Singing in the Wilderness: reconstructing Dune pt.3
I thought I was done, but one more thing…
The biggest of all Dune’s sinews is probably scarcity: the whole book is a paean to the power of lack. Water is scarce on Arrakis, friends and manpower are scarce for the Atreides, Spice and transport are scarce in the universe. The importance of maintaining that scarcity is why Dune doesn’t mash up all that well with many other fantasies – there are ways to do it, but they’re not easy or satisfying.
There really should be a stage play. Although I’m not sure a rock opera is the right way to go.
In contrast, Star Wars is built on abundance and therefore threatened only by willful, perverse malice. The galaxy abounds in habitable worlds, a smuggler or a fugitive Jedi can always run to one that lies forgotten, off the main trade routes.
A guerrilla rebellion can keep regrouping and recruiting endlessly, beyond the gaze of power. It also has abundant time – old religions lie buried for centuries while the worlds move on around them, fructifying in the fertile loam of resentment and once-and-future lost causes, while Dune, despite its 10,000 years of stasis, is right on the edge of collapse when we arrive.
You could force Star Wars and Dune together – if Star Wars’s galaxy, reachable by jump drive, is all shallow then the Guild’s deep reach is intergalactic or interdimensional. The connections the Guild makes are completely arbitrary and strictly limited – they could be across time or genre as well as space (and it might be fun to add a little time travel to Star Wars’s relentlessly expanding universe and to hack Dune’s prophecies and portents – a Heighliner could shuttle between the Coruscant of Darth Vader and Alderaan of a thousand years before without collapsing the Star Wars universe, as long as the Guild kept a choke-hold on who and what could take that path). But it wouldn’t add anything very dramatically interesting to the Dune side, I think, because the drama of Dune depends on restrictions on action. Work with the Emperor or become a pauper, fugitive, renegade. Work with the Guild or be exiled. Like Sartre’s No Exit and Greenaway’s The Cook, The Thief, it’s important that Dune’s players are locked together and that there is no useful outside to Dune’s political chambers.
Dune’s scarcity also breeds secrecy – the Schools jealously guard their special powers; the competitions and vendettas over resources have a desperate edge because they’re all zero-sum: there is this much and no more. So I think if you want a bit of Dune flavour but not the whole Duniverse, it might work best in a wainscoting fantasy setting – something like Harry Potter or Narnia, where the Guild and Bene Gesserit can be secret societies hiding in the plain sight of Postwar Britain, or whatever other claustrophobic setting you prefer.
for Tim Powers fans, Mark Molnar has already provided the perfect poster for mashing Dune up with Declare. Disquietingly mobile rocks might be the Sandworms of the esoteric djinn Cold War.
Am I just saying “try adding the Bene Gesserit to your Unknown Armies game”? Honestly that’s not a bad idea, but instead it occurs to me that Dune might be a great third ingredient for the Traveller-Narcos game I proposed a while ago.
In this setting, the Spice is illegal and desired nearly everywhere in the galaxy – partly for the reasons cocaine is illegal (addictive, socially disruptive, too much fun), but even more so because it’s actively dangerous to the rules that States operate by: it can offer prophetic visions of the future that collapse the stock market, it extends lifespans to the point where life insurance no longer makes sense, and it just might let you migrate invisibly to someplace the State cannot catch and tax you. Spice smuggling is in the slippery hands of giant, vicious cartels and is such a big business that it inevitably destabilizes any individual planetary government it touches. Most ordinary criminals won’t touch it for fear of the cartels’ weirdo assassins and trackers – which include some cult of mind-reading women and a shadowy “guild,” that isn’t in any one cartel, but everyone seems to be afraid of. None of the Trade is carried on computer media – too traceable – but instead rests encoded in the heads of the cartels’ Mentats – and the various cadres of undercover cop Mentats, the product of training programs by governments that have invested a Spice-price in trying to stuff the genie back in the snuffbox. You play a smuggler cell that might unwittingly be a deep-cover government operation, trying to pay off your crippling ship mortgage by doing covert missions for a mysterious handler, which keep pulling you closer and closer into the secret heart of spice production – some backwater desert planet infested by murderous vermin.
When you finally make contact with some actual Spice producers, it turns out they’re nothing like the zero-sum desperadoes in transport and distribution. In fact, they seem completely uninterested in making any money off the stuff – long-term, high-intensity contact with Spice has opened their minds to the point where they no longer experience scarcity at all. They can offer you direct transport, ship-free, to the multiverse – a world of perfect freedom in which all the power structures of your own world would collapse, for lack of handles on the populace.
On a throne of an apartment
With a wide open
Mouth full of teeth
Waiting for the arrival of death
Because far from the
Flagged fences
Which separate yards
On the calm peak
Of my eyes I see
The soft sound shade
Of a flying saucer
So the question is, do you go with them on an adventure where you don’t need money, or do you take the trappings of scarcity’s upper crust?
these guys insist all you need for this adventure is a book of verse, a jug of wine, a loaf of bread… and enough hyperdrugs to swim in. Also they have a busted old Airstream caravan and some ugly macrame blankets covered in cat hair.
Art by Mikhail Borulko.
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(Because the funny thing about Herbert’s magic mushroom universe is, it’s so damn Capitalist. Right in the middle of the postwar freak-out, surrounded by the hippie promise that all this Square materialist fear was just a crisis of the birth of the New Age, there’s Herbert the anti-hippie in goddamn Oregon tripping on dreams of endless and inevitable slavery and doomed Mohammeds and tragic millenia, cranking that old Wheel of deceit and violence around One More Time.)
“And do you think that unto such as you
A maggot-minded, starved, fanatic crew
God gave a secret, and denied it me?
Well, well—what matters it? Believe that, too!”
― Omar The Tent-seller, Quatrains
Machines As The Measure Of Men: reconstructing Dune pt. 2
(part 1 discussed Dune’s factions and drew a distinction between those parts of a setting that make it work (the sinews) and those parts that are pure flavour, that could be reskinned without risking the setting falling apart or becoming incoherent (the fat, maybe). I recommend reading it before this part.)
2: Technologies
Villeneuve’s best work in Dune is in getting machines to tell the story. Every machine has the personality of the people who made it. Each one reinforces its maker’s power position in the narrative.
First, all the stuff that comes from off-world is a study in scale contrasts. The brutalist carryall from Lynch’s Dune is now the basic spaceship form – they still hang in the sky like bricks don’t but under Villeneuve’s carefully-angled cinematography they’re beefed up the point where you wonder why the Atreides ever disembark from them – they could just flatten Arrakeen and replace it.
As for making the factions as distinctive as possible, Villeneuve’s approach is (sometimes) radical. The Harkonnens are rather unimpressive on Arrakis – black-clad, pallid, fat goths – until you realise their home world is literally black and white or, rather, infra red, like their thinking.
And while the Atreides and Harkonnens fly brick dumpsters, the Emperor flits in on Anish Kapoor’s Cloud Gate – an effete, feckless look for an ineffective figurehead.
But the masterpiece of the whole film is the Harkonnens’ spice harvester. Villeneuve sets us up for meh with the basic harvester in part 1. It’s big but… flat, like NASA’s Crawler Transporter. It’s what you’d expect a harvester to be – a supporting player, not poised to steal the show from the charismatic lead.
But that, you see, is a jank old busted harvester, what the Harkonnens leave behind for the Atreides to complain about. The real Harkonnen spice harvesters, when they’re finally properly unveiled in part 2, are a symphony of signs: colossal, overweening, top-heavy, parasitic – like the spider-head in John Carpenter’s The Thing.
And of course it’s all ironic: the bigger they are, the harder they fall to a bunch of Fremen who pop up out of the sand exactly like the anti-tank miners in Stalingrad.
Because one of Herbert’s big sinewy ideas is: comfort makes you weak. Getting a machine to do your work is inviting disaster, because someone who is tougher (because he doesn’t have a machine) will take everything from you. Or, as Mad Magazine put it in 1960:
BTW for a really good discussion of technology, power, and their attendant colonialist superiority complexes, check out Michael Adas’s book, which supplies this post’s title. I think Herbert was suspicious of technosaviour arguments, as Adas notes the British and French were, just in time for Vietnam. Whether his Fremen were secretly based off the Viet Cong, Iranian Revolutionaries or any other IRL group is beyond the scope of this blogpost.
Anyway. Herbert’s second sinew is less often remarked: being tougher doesn’t make you politically smarter. The Fremen and Sardaukar warriors are technologies, too – conditioned by neglect to be “tough, strong, ferocious men,” they are also therefore vulnerable to the old mind tricks: “play on the certain knowledge of their superiority, the mystique of secret covenant, the esprit of shared suffering.” Get that right and they’ll be strongly, ferociously, fanatically loyal and obedient. Although once you’ve set them in motion, they’re also liable to be as hard to stop or redirect as a Harkonnen spice harvester. Once they’ve got an idea in their heads, it’s almost impossible to dislodge it with a new one.
Cue another Dune sinew: the Superior Man is flexible. He makes use of tools but is aware of how those tools will try to shape him. He refuses to be shaped except by his own will.
(Does this sound like Mein Kampf? Noooo, it’s probably just Nietzsche.)
The most thoroughly iterated representation of this idea is the Holtzman shield generator.
Shields are wonderful at keeping you safe except for when –
– the enemy has clever slow-bullet guns that pause politely at the shield’s edge to tunnel inexorably in, like something out of an Edgar Allen Poe story;
– the enemy has lasers, because when a laser hits a shield you get an atomic-style explosion;
– you’re out in Arrakis’s Wild Manhood Testing Country, where they attract frenzied worm attacks;
– you can’t use your shield and you have to knife-fight anyway, in which case your “slow on attack” training gets in your way.
…still, everyone uses them all the time. You can see who is the master of their technology and who is mastered by it by how they behave when the technology doesn’t.
See also the Imperial doctors’ Pyretic Conscience (which doesn’t work), the Guild’s precognition (spoofable by Tleilaxu, but then so is everything), Hawat’s security searches for assassins (didn’t look in the cupboard) etc etc.
Aside from generating dramatic tension and highlighting the fallibility of the best-laid plans (a fallibility that is necessary to the whole Fremen uprising plot) this is a classic game design principle: if you add something super strong, give it an Achilles heel.
What can we do with this? Well most of all, think of weaknesses for all the major Classes (BG, Mentat, Swordmaster, Doctor) that brings them back in line with the Sardaukar and Harkonnnens. The classic Dune move is to make people too confident in their strengths. But a Bene Gesserit can’t mind-read a typed note or an ignorant emissary (Doctor Yueh deliberately clouds the Bene Gesserit Jessica’s observations by manufacturing an embarrassing situation), a Mentat can quickly get lost in paranoid mirror-mazes, Swordmasters rely on faster-than-thought training that can be exploited
and Doctors… well, they care too much. Similarly the fastest ornithopter shouldn’t be the most maneuverable, the biggest worm shouldn’t be the most tractable etc.
Maybe the biggest sinew, though, is to replace machines with people. The Mentat as human computer has already been mentioned, but the motif is everywhere. Why have a scripture when you can have oral traditions? Why a recording device when it could be a person with eidetic memory? Conceivably, you could replace weapons, horses, cars and telephones with talented humans. I would say furniture, but that’s a bit too Book 5 for this post. Or mix the functions up: a Bene Gesserit is in many ways a social Mentat – their skills at manipulation, cold reading, and masking their own signals make them a technology of persuasion. Someone who was able to open doors into gatherings could be social harvester, someone who can keep things secret might be an information swordmaster. I dunno, maybe this is all too JoJo but Dune has so many little superpowers, lightly explained that I think you could really go wild with inventing new ones.
3: Space Splice
While we’re on the topic of replacing machines with people, have you ever noticed that the spaceship computers in Classic Traveller are generally the size of a stateroom? You could easily replace them with the living quarters for a Mentat (Wizard of Oz curtain optional), with bigger ships requiring higher-status mentats who demand more palatial accommodations, according to strict sumptuary laws.
Herbert does not explain how the Guild achieves interstellar travel…. until Book 5, which came out a year after Lynch’s movie, and which gives the same explanation Lynch gives: the Guild Navigators “fold space,” using their esoteric mind visions. So that’s neat: the Jump Drive is also a person, with bulky quarters full of spice gas. Dune’s Guild has a monopoly on interstellar travel, though, so there would be no jump drives except for the gigantic Guild Heighliners.
It is curious, though, that Herbert doesn’t explain how interstellar travel works until Book 5, 20 years into writing the novels, because:
1. everyone else who writes an interstellar empire epic in the 20th century offers an explanation for how it’s supposed to work – Jump drives or Hyperspace or Warp or interdimensional gates or corridors. Everyone has their own way of kowtowing to Einstein’s assertion that you can’t go faster than light, and then saying “here’s how we’re ignoring it.”
2. the rest of Dune is so damn didactic. It’s the perfect book for high school analysis essays because you can say “Herbert thinks struggle makes you stronger because he says so, first on page 26 through the mouth of Leto, then on page 27 directly via the omniscient narrator.”
But when it comes to how the empire is tied together, what the Guild’s all-important monopoly rests on… nothing. Except that Guild Navigators needed Spice to “see a safe path” – because if you’re going really fast, you don’t want to run into any pebbles. Or hydrogen.
So… maybe this is overreaching (although if anyone ever invited a Talmudic/Koranic exegesis of their novels, it’s Frank Herbert) but… what if Herbert kept quiet about this not because he himself was ignorant or uninterested in the Einsteinian problem but because he wanted to maintain the mystique of the Guild? No-one outside the Guild knows how the Guild does it. More than that, what if the point was, nobody in the Duniverse knows FTL travel might be a problem because they don’t have the scientific background? In Dune’s lore, the 5 great schools of knowledge (Swords, Doctors, Mentats, Bene Gesserit, Guild) are set up after the Butlerian Jihad, which was fought against computer AIs. Developing computers requires Einstein, quantum mechanics, and higher math. So… the schools restrict access to science and (to be safe) calculus. The rest of Dune is socially… what? 16th century? In our own history it takes about 300 years to get from there to Einstein. How would you prevent that development for 10,000 years? By funneling everyone into very deliberately constructed educational pathways and teaching them curricula that neatly sidestep the required questions, then giving the guardians of various fields of knowledge social positions they want to defend, that come with neatly circumscribed professional formations. Herbert is obsessed with mental and social conditioning and he specifically mentions that doctors and mentats have trained restrictions. The other hint here is that the Great Houses’ “family atomics” are all supposed to be 10,000 years old – irreplaceable relics of the Jihad (and Dune was written at a time when the discourse of nukes was that they lasted forever). So: only the Guild school is entrusted with relativity. …and, probably, with Maxwell’s equations for electricity and light, which were what set Einstein off in the first place. And only the Ixians and Tleilaxu disobey the restriction and they keep very quiet about it for their own mnopolistic reasons.
All that said, fundamentally, the situation offered is actually quite familiar for gamers:
Travel within a star system is “shallow water” – anyone with a simple spaceworthy craft can do it (Houses, smugglers, assassins etc). Going from one star system to another is “deep water” and requires a Guild Heighliner.
I say that, but I can’t actually remember Dune ever taking advantage of multiple points of interest in a single system (in the book it seems that the Guild actually restricts Houses’ rights to fly their own ships around, which makes me wonder how much of a capital drain a space warship is on a House that can hardly ever use it). Which is too bad, because star systems could get really diverse: “shallow” could be a busy star system with twelve warring planets, or several moons around a single gas giant, or a lively asteroid field for mining. It could also be an enormous nebula, a couple of light years wide, populated with enough gas and little rocks and radiation and brown dwarfs to keep tramp ships powered and occupied for decades. (Nebulae could even be no-go zones for the Guild’s big hazard-averse ships).
(BTW the shallow/deep divide in Civ has no physical justification except that “shallow” might mean “easily accessible to an unidentified harbour of retreat,” so in theory unstable ships like galleys could run to shelter from storms from the “shallows” but would be forced to ride those storms out in the “deeps.” but don’t let that worry you, it’s a wonderful bit of game design anyway to be able to see the excitement over there but then have to devise an ingenious method for getting to it.)
There are many ways to set a shallow/deep division up – maybe you need a special ship or map, or only a native guide can get you across the deep desert, or only a government cyberdeck can get you into the government’s servers… the point is you have to work with the Church to get into its Treasury. Imagine Han Solo in this situation: he can smuggle all around the solar system but if he wants to get from Tatooine to Alderaan, he needs to forge papers or bribe an official, get on a Heighliner and “fly casual” right under the nose of the Grand Moffs who are coming back from obliterating Alderaan a moment before. Because also people can see who else is on a Heighliner but they can’t do anything about it without endangering their travel privileges. Imagine the Guild letting people off at a system that no longer has a trading planet, or being evasive and dropping them at the wrong destination. A Death Star could only exist if the Guild were complicit in the Emperor’s planet-busting reign of terror or if a rogue splinter-Guild drove it around, causing a crisis in everyone’s confidence in Guild neutrality/ethics/reliability/violence.
4. Dune, Ripple, Wave
Finally, I guess I’ve already tipped my hand to this one but of course, Dune’s shallow/deep structure, like everything else about Dune, could work at any scale.
The stated scale – galactic spread, billions of unmentioned subjects – presents all sorts of problems (that Herbert doesn’t address), but an ocean or a big sky full of Flash Gordon flying islands or whatever could give you the same fun. Shallow could be estuaries, archipelagos, reefs, tower blocks, subway stations, university departments – any space that’s somehow bounded, where connecting to another such space offers a different challenge from getting around the current one. The point is that if you get the sinews right, you could reskin and rescale Dune in all sorts of ways to fit your home gaming group and still get a recognizably Duney campaign.
What if you reskinned Dune just lightly, to play up the early modern exploration vibe and play down the (clearly uncomfortable) sciencey part of the fiction?
It is the long 16th century – somewhere between 1480 and 1648 – and everything and everyone you find in that span is fair game. The Emperor, Charles-Philip of Spain, is bent on spreading his rule across all the unknown realms of the universe – both those across the seas and those of Angels and Devils. He has become so powerful that he threatens the unity of the Holy Mother Guild and it is rumoured some Cardinal Navigators have promised to open up their routes for him, to the Outer Spheres, where the Angelic Guild Superiors keep their fruitful kingdoms and permanent warehouses.
Only a coalition of the Great Houses (Tudor, Valois-Angoulême, Ottoman, Syah, the Bohemian and Austrian Habsburgs, etc) can stop him, and then only if they can keep him from discovering the sources of Radiant Spice, for which the Guild thirsts. Rumours abound of Spice sources across the seas:
– fountains of youth,
– cities of Brass and Djinn,
– Ambergris floating on the foam,
– islands made from a single nutmeg, from which all other nutmegs grow,
…and of Other Worlds offering trade and conquest:
– El Dorado,
– Far Cathay,
– Agartha,
– Hy-Brazil,
– St. Brendan’s Isle
– the paradisical Isle of Pines.
Any of them could seduce the Guild to the Emperor’s path, all of them are said to offer a way to the fabled Prime Mover and a Great Synthesis – if Charles-Philip could reach that, he would become sole and eternal Emperor of all.
The Mentats John Dee and Ignatius of Loyola translate the secret languages of the Angel Guild for their respective rulers. Giordano Bruno, kept captive in the Guild Embassy in Rome, charts the empire-to-be in his Memory Palace.
The Bene Gesserit are a secret sisterhood of basically every woman you’ve heard of from the period – it is rumoured that all women are members, whether they know it or not, especially all the wives, mistresses and wetnurses of royalty. Known Reverend Mothers include Isabella of Castille (the Emperor’s long-lived grandmother), Elizabeth and Mary Tudor, Artemisia Gentilleschi, Aphra Behn… and the Missionaria Protectiva are said to have been active among the Amazons of Benin and the Wonhwa of Joseon.
This proto-Dune hovers on the brink of the long-term stability that Herbert’s book tears down: the Spice monopoly is still out in the rumoured wilderness and up for grabs. The most vicious fights are over speculation – about where the Spice might be, about what it might unlock. The Guild still controls access to eternal life, though, and nobody (yet) dares to openly defy it, even as they try to tease its members away into supportive splinter sects.
next: Post 3: Dune Mashups
Trick’s Tales
- Weather Worm Adventure I: A review of Deluge at Drizzle Distillery
- Some More Small Gods of the Old Forest (Glogmas 2025)
- Sunshine Blogger Award
- Kazar, City of Dreams
- Seven Part Pact: An Extremely Complicated Game about Extremely Complicated Men
- Marketing Retrospective from my Charity Bundle
- Fear and Fascism in America; or, Baby Steps for Resistance
- I published a game (and have cool friends)
- Some lessons from an indie TTRPG zine fundraiser
- Violence at the Seams: Womanhood, Feminism, and the Neopolitan Novels
To Distant Lands
- How to Not Do Zines Wrong
- The Great Platypus Hunt
- DM-less Castle Xyntillan
- Cuccagna Session 7: Or Maybe They’re Yandere and You’re F*cked
- Cuccagna Session 6: I accidentally called it ‘Protection from Email’
- Cuccagnat Session 5: Put ‘Er There
- Cuccagnat Session 4: The One Where We Cash Out
- Cuccagnat Session 3: They’re Rather Phallic, But Mushrooms Often Are
- Cuccagnat Session 2: This Did Not Have to End in Death
- Dungeons as Tutorial Zones
Monster Manual Sewn From Pants
- MALUSTRIOUS BROOD art book available
- Abpolis 4: NU_WOLVES
- Abpolis 3: Scrungers also TRAVEL FUNDRAISER
- Abpolis 2: Immurement Cults and Elemunters
- Abpolis :What? -> Exhibition , Frogs, Bita-men ->Oh Cool, Sounds Grand
- BEAST PEOPLE NAMES FOR BEAST PEOPLE
- Six Secret Books
- NooFutura available for purchase
- Leucrotta
- Weapon Breakage In Darksun
Reading Appendix N
- How I’m running my zero-prep Traveller sandbox
- Quietly reading and playing
- Some thoughts on reading Appendix N
- Ticking along on Appendix N
- Play with gray
- My 1,000th logged RPG session
- Turning CATS into CATSOS (“catsauce”) for RPGs
- Cataloging my Appendix N reading
- Returning to Appendix N (vewy vewy quietly)
- Godsbarrow: the Basement Game, Myzes, and Tuage orcs
Lich house
- B5 Horror on the Hill - Finished!
- Curse of Strahd Campaign (ShadowDark) - Mid-Campaign Update
- Resource Files - Running Curse of Strahd for ShadowDark
- ShadowDark of Strahd - Game 2
- Something New
- Curse of Strahd for Shadowdark - The Gauntlet - Let's Go!
- Shadowdark: The Good, The Bad, the Ugly
- Shadowdark at Philly Area Gaming Expo
- Progress Report - Horror on the Hill
- Enabling Curse of Strahd as a Sandbox
Richard's Dystopian Pokeverse