Apocalypse Now, Or Never: Apocalypse Always
September 15, 2024, 07:33:12 PM
Apocalypse Now - Or Never?
By Jubal
Part 2: Apocalypse Always
Is the promise of modern fantasy "you can prevent this"?
Modern fantasy apocalypses, meanwhile, are very much possible to avert. They have more in common, as we saw last time, with older European fears of steppe conquerors than fears of religious apocalypses, and they often represent and reflect very modern anxieties about human-scale actors being able to achieve global destruction. This very feature is core to how we set up disasters that heroes can overcome – and therefore to modern fantasy as a whole.
Of course, not all fantasy operates on this sort of world-ending scale, but it's undeniable that quite a lot does, and in a lot of cases it's operating on this scale from the audience's perspective. For example, it's not made wholly clear in Baldur's Gate 3 to what extent there are still forces on Faerun who might be capable of resisting the villain (or a villainous player character) if they win and achieve god-like levels of psionic power. But from the perspective of the game-world, this is an irrelevant question: you and everything you might have cared about are definitely lost. The world that is ending, in short, doesn't need to be the multiverse to make something apocalyptic, it needs to be the world as an audience perceives it. A totality of destruction that leaves either nothing at all behind, or a world so changed that it's twisted out of recognition.
Modern fantasy also tends to rest on the premise that the world is under threat and that the role of heroes is to stop that threat. This is rooted in a sort of inherent small-c conservatism in the genre, derived in part from Tolkien's scepticism of machines and industrialisation: the status quo or past and its protection are the essential objective, and enemies are often seeking some form of darkly transformational 'progress'. Even where the world is rotten and is fundamentally changed by the heroes, this is often presented as a return to an older, more balanced or more free form of existence: Aragorn's fourth age Reunited Kingdom will not at least to begin with have the corrupt lethargy of Denethor's retreating Gondor, but this is a return to or echo of the Numenorean past rather than a move forward into a new and reimagined future.
That's not to say that fantasy needs to operate like that, or always does: something like NK Jemisin's Broken Earth books would be a prime example of questioning through fantasy whether worlds and their status quo situations do, in fact, need to be broken. Nor is it to say that there's anything wrong with an external threat as the core of a story. Tolkien wasn't wrong that the protection of the natural world, and of what we retain from the past, are things with real value, nor was he wrong that there's something that sits badly with the practice of breaking things for the sake of knowledge-seeking or avarice. The tendency to make the external threat the core of the genre, though, is one of the things that makes apocalypse so embedded in fantastical literature. It's also how moving such a world-ending event forwards becomes a necessary part of plot writing, and therefore is key to the birth of another feature of the apocalypses we know today - the modern villain.
The devil acts through the evil hearts of men. Thanos just acts.
This represents another shift in apocalypses: they are often now produced by much clearer, sharper villains than are the case in much premodern literature. Whilst yes, Loki is ultimately responsible for Ragnarok, he is far from consistently the scheming villain of Norse myth, and in a biblical apocalypse, Satan really has rather little agency in bringing it about. These figures might precipitate and symbolise apocalypse, but they don't have a fundamental motivation for it, in part because they don't have a motivation for very much. The devil is presumed to want to tempt mortals on account of being evil, but it's incredible just how rare it is that one actually sees him planning anything whatsoever: his role is to show and bring out the evil that was already within people through temptation, not to be a figure with true narratively described agency to create and cause evil. Few writers since perhaps CS Lewis have described apocalypses that have this sort of moralising character to them, and Lewis very explicitly was drawing on Christian models.
Consider that against Thanos, whose active quest to gain the infinity stones is a major driver of the plot, or Corypheus in Dragon Age, who actively seeks to use the breach in the veil to enter the Fade and claim the empty thrones of the gods. These characters, as apocalyptic villains, are oriented around particular plans and goals that the heroes must compete against. They are active characters in a way that really can be said of very few literary villains of past ages, and in many cases they, not the hero, are the driving force behind the plot. As we saw above, an active threat to the status quo gives something for the hero to come up against.
But why from the audience perspective are they used quite so much? What makes this particular formula work?
Good guy or not? Iif the world needs saving, everyone has to chip in.
This is especially interesting for developers of role-playing games, because an apocalyptic system maximises possibility while minimising necessary buy-in for players. If the player's very survival relies on them facing down a threat, then there is no need to ensure that the player is otherwise bought into the values or necessity of protecting any other thing in particular. In a game context, where one wants to get the player involved in the game fast with minimal backstory dumping, this has very great utility. Unlike for a book character, who can immediately act according to an in-world perspective, players of a computer game don't immediately have mental access to all of the surrounding lore and how the world works. Short-cutting that with an immediate large threat is, therefore, extremely useful.
An opening threat can also be a good driver of secondary action, for example by creating scenes where the audience and point of view heroes are aware of how bad things are right at the start but where the rest of the in-setting world takes time to catch up. This helps set up a lot of potential interactions and persuasion to come together against a common threat (Dragon Age: Origins and Mass Effect both pull this one as examples, but indeed we get it in Tolkien as well in the tragedy of Boromir). This necessity of pulling together against a common threat also allows for a wider character cast.
In particular, that's especially important for players with evil outlooks or motivations. The apocalypse is the threat that allows someone who is essentially self-serving and venal, or even pledged to some other horrible goal that is at odds with the one being pursued by an apocalyptic villain, then they can still be part of the action. In a situation that's this bad, you might need all the help you can get, even if that help is pretty grim itself – or even if you're pretty grim yourself. You know things are bad when the world is calling on you of all people, and it's certainly true that a villain – where else are you going to steal, murder and pillage if you don't have a world left to do it in?
The adventuring party of unlikely or varied heroes as a stock trope therefore is significantly ease in its setup by having a common threat to unite against. That in turn allows for the kinds of writing that people often want in SFF and in stories in general, where we get contrasting characters from different walks of life. This is especially useful in stories with varied secondary-world settings, because it means we can have characters who understand different elements of the world taking part, and it's useful for creating a lively, diverse points of view core character group to begin with.
Having built up our heroes, we come to a third key point about apocalypses: apocalypse implies climax. Especially if there is a villain behind the apocalypse to confront, but even if confronting the apocalypse is a matter of turning back some non-human force, there must be a turning point or final confrontation where the apocalypse is defeated. That is, basically, the moment when a writer gets to let rip with their special effects budget: destroying bad things is fast and punchy and can be truly spectacular. An apocalyptic climax helps give the audience an immediate, visual sense of achievement: think the fall of Barad-dur, or Alduin the dragon crashing to earth, or all the big explosions at the end of Fallout 1.
One can have a big explosion without a strictly apocalyptic threat, of course, but if the threat is apocalyptic, it gives a much bigger scope for "problem solved" as an endgame situation. A merely human scale threat begs the question of why another, similarly human sized threat won't rise again in the near future: there will always be scheming viziers and cruel kings and ruthless generals. The very apocalyptic nature of a threat tends to make it something that genuinely is irreplaceable, such that at the very least the next apocalypse will need to look rather different. This amplifies the sense of achievement for a game player, or relief for a book reader, in imagining the world after the heroes' adventures.
So there are some thoughts on why apocalypses are useful – and why we have quite so many of them knocking around SFF books, media, and games. We've seen how apocalypses are good for helping audiences rapidly enter a story-world, for explaining a story pulling together diverse character casts, and building strong narrative climaxes with a sense of achievement. We've also seen how that's often underpinned by driving, plot-defining villains that threaten a status quo that needs protecting.
There are, however, still some questions left to be answered, and in part 3 of this series I'm going to look at the problems with the apocalypse as a driving narrative force – when it shouldn't be used, whether it's over-used, and what creators could do to vary or change the format in what they write. Until then!
This is the second part of a series. You can read part one, A Brief History of the End of the World, here.
The Edge of the Edge of the World
July 14, 2024, 02:58:22 PM
The Edge of the Edge of the World
By indiekid
The Pacific beckoning over the beach.
Perspectives
As a child I was taught that Christopher Columbus "discovered" the Americas in 1492, ignoring the 50 to 100 million people who already called them home. I'm pleased to say that this narrative has changed over the past couple of decades, but as an Englishman I can't escape the fact that my country is, typically, printed centrally on world maps. To help recreate the eye-opening nature of my journey I'd like you to humour me by opening Google Maps. Go on, it's not that difficult, even if you're reading this on a phone. Type "Chiloe" into the search bar but don't panic if you misspell it – you'll probably still end up in Chile.
You should now be looking at Gran Chiloé, the second largest island in South America and the largest of the Chiloé archipelago (I'm going to be lazy in this article and refer to it as Chiloé, since I never made it onto the smaller islands). Zoom out a little and you will notice that Chile itself is an odd shape: 4300 km long but never more than 350 km wide. Its border with Argentina is defined by the Andes mountains, which I'd like you to follow south for a little while. You will find that "mainland Chile" almost ceases to exist, breaking up into a multitude of lakes, fjords and islands. You'll see very few settlements but a host of national parks. In fact, the region is so dominated by the sea and a few pesky glaciers that these last 1000 km lack a continuous road. Residents of Punta Arenas typically fly to visit other cities. This makes the island of Chiloé the end of what I'm going to call "easily-navigable Chile", and we'll return to that idea later.
The calming presence of the Iglesia de Nuestra Señora de los Dolores.
For the next part of the tour, zoom out until you see a patch of white at the bottom of your screen. That's right: it's Antarctica, about 1000 km from South America. I'm told that a change in wind direction on Tierra del Fuego can bring about a dramatic change in temperature. Not far from Argentina you'll see another large archipelago: Las Malvinas, known to the British as the Falklands. For our last stop on this tour, scroll or drag yourself to the very top of South America, to the border between Colombia and Panama. What do you notice? That's right: there's no road linking the two. The wild "Darién Gap" has never been developed; this has been a boon for wildlife but a disaster for migrants attempting to cross it. It's physically impossible to drive from North America to South America, but this does not stop people travelling the Pan-American Highway.
Before I talk about the highway I'd like to mention the wider idea of Pan-Americanism. In hindsight, the abrupt end of colonial rule in the Americas in the last few centuries provided an unusual opportunity: a chance to re-define the term "country". Are countries, and their associated borders, even necessary? My understanding of Pan-Americanism is that it was a somewhat romantic (and very socialist) effort to unite all the former Spanish colonies of South America into a single entity as part of the re-organising process. I believe the former Portuguese colony of Brazil was excluded, perhaps because of the language barrier and perhaps because its population was already greater than that of all the other countries combined. Proponents of Pan-Americanism held talks (on a variety of subjects) with leaders of countries in the North and they agreed, in principle, to build a single road running the length of the two continents. The road never saw the light of day but the idea of it remains. Adventurers make a point of following it south from Alaska, though there are now many branches and possible end points. One of them is in the south of easily-navigable Chile: on Chiloé. So although the island is not the Edge of the World, it has a pretty strong claim to being the End of the Road.
An Island and its People
Palafitos - traditional wooden fishing houses - on Chiloe.
According to Wikipedia Chiloé has been inhabited for over 7000 years. By the time the Spanish arrived (there's my European lens again) there were broadly two cultures living there: the Huilliche, the southernmost people of the Mapuche macroethnic group, and the Chonos, a tribe of nomadic seafarers. Many indigenous traditions survive on Chiloé, including stone and wood representations of folkloric characters. These are a colourful bunch: in addition to the aforementioned elemental serpents there's La Pincoya, the mermaid; El Caleuche, the ghost ship and Voladora, the crow-shaped messenger of the witches. Perhaps spookiest of all is the Rumpelstiltskin-like troll El Trauco who lays ambushes for unsuspecting travellers in the forest. In so doing he performs a useful social function: he acts as a scapegoat for any unexplained pregnancies on the island.
You may have noticed some similarities between the above characters and those of European folklore. This is not a coincidence: "Chilote" culture is considered one of the most egalitarian fusions of indigenous and colonial cultures anywhere in the Americas. In addition to Spaniards, Chiloé was colonised by Germans and Czechs. The colonisers were very impressed by the natives' skill in crafting boats of larch and cypress. In combining these skills with European architectural ambitions, the people of Chiloé (under the influence of the Jesuits) built some extraordinary wooden churches. These churches vary across the island but have some features are common: arched porticos; towers which seem to change shape from base to top; and objects typically made of stone, such as pillars, reproduced faithfully in wood. Sixteen of them have been designated World Heritage Sites by UNESCO (the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation). This, for the benefit of British readers, puts them on a par with the likes of Stonehenge. One of them – I forget which – has a painting of Christ surrounded by the aforementioned folkloric characters.
My Ancud Adventures
A view through the windows of the Convento.
With the help of the staff at my hostel I booked a place on a penguin-watching tour. We drove directly onto the beach at Puñihuil and boarded a small boat. The sand, sea, rocks and drizzle were all grey; the penguins' coats, I suppose, averaged to grey. The most striking animals, therefore, were the bright orange starfish, revealed on the rocks as each wave receded. Given that Chiloé is an important colony for both Humboldt and Magellanic (named after the explorer) penguins I was a little disappointed with how few we saw, but they were very cute. A second tour from Ancud took me into the forest to watch tough pangue leaves being collected for curanto. Our guide then took us back to the garden of his restaurant where this traditional dish was ready to be cooked. A number of white stones had been heating in a fire for some time, and these were placed in a pit. They were then covered first with shellfish, then chicken, pork, sausages, purple potatoes, dumplings, the pangue leaves and, finally, earth. The resulting mound steamed cheerfully for two hours, at which point it was gutted and the curanto served. The fresh shellfish, positioned at the bottom, seasoned the meal to perfection. Our host and his daughter then showed us some traditional salsa-like dancing.
The Penguins of Puñihuil.
I went on to Castro, the capital and largest town of Chiloé. Facing its main plaza was the Iglesia de San Francisco, the largest wooden church on the island and the only one (as far as I'm aware) painted in vomit-inducing yellow and pink. It was closed for renovation during my visit so I took a walk to see Castro's famous palafitos. These wooden fisherman's houses were built on stilts to better withstand the island's extreme tidal ranges. Afterwards I caught one more bus to the nearby town of Chonchi, where I visited the Iglesia de Nuestra Señora del Rosario. This one was pretty but I was a little alarmed by the hefty pieces of wood leaning against one wall and apparently holding it up: the churches, it seems, need a lot of maintenance.
In the National Park
Curanto: from festival meal to tourist feast?
I was not as alone as I had first assumed: in the morning I met Diego, a keen birdwatcher, and "Snorty", a sea lion who liked to chill in the river around breakfast time. My first stop of the day was a nature trail showcasing some of the endemic plants unique to Chiloé (the island is home to unusual "temperate rainforest" habitats). I found it quite disconcerting to approach a clump of vegetation which, from a distance, looked familiar, only to find every plant completely alien to me. After the nature trail I followed the beach north and, with a bit of unplanned paddling, located the start of a hike I had read about online. The sun was shining brightly on this occasion and I set off in high spirits along the bank of yet another lake. I passed a number of small wooden houses, all of which seemed to have some cute puppies, piglets or similar outside. When the path turned inland, and into the rainforest, the going became significantly harder. I was beginning to see why the website had recommended hiring a guide. I decided against trying to reach the viewpoint at the end of the hike; as I prepared to descend I was rewarded with the sight of a small brown object hanging in the air. Despite its darting into the trees I recognised it as a hummingbird – I had never seen one in the wild before.
Some of the fluffier residents of Cucao gathering to bid farewell to our correspondent.
As we approached the village – I could only make out a few wooden houses – I prepared to say something to the driver in Spanish. One of the biggest parts of learning a language, especially when you're short on vocabulary, is working out how to twist the words you know into an understandable sentence. Telling the driver that I had changed my mind and, having fought so hard to reach Cole Cole, I wouldn't be getting off the bus was a new challenge for me. I managed to make myself understood but I think what I actually said translated as "I want to stay with you forever". Shortly after this resounding success we finally stopped and picked up a hoard of children. This shouldn't have come as a surprise: of course the bus serving a remote village twice a day would double as the school bus! The children had a lot more energy than I and, though they were speaking Spanish, from their appearance I guessed that they had very little Spanish ancestry (one shouldn't make judgements like this, of course, but it's hard to avoid). The children took no notice of me throughout our journey back to Cucao and I learnt an important lesson that day: no matter where you are in the world, kids on a school bus behave like kids on a school bus.
A few bus rides later I was back on the ferry to the mainland. I was sorry to be leaving Chiloé but I had a date with my brother at the "third most photogenic" volcano in the world. This, at least, was how it had been sold to us, but I still haven't worked out how "photogenicity" is actually measured (Japan's Mount Fuji apparently tops the list). On the ferry I was, ostensibly, looking out for whales, but my eye kept being drawn back to Chiloé. The island's hills rolled into the sea in a blur of grey and green; it was easy to imagine the two great serpents locked in battle for eternity. I thought of Diego, Snorty and my friends from the hostel in Ancud. I thought of curanto: once reserved for weddings and special occasions, now mostly cooked for tourists. I thought of the wooden churches and how easily they could succumb to rot, fire or earthquake. In this, at least, we can be grateful to UNESCO for supporting conservation efforts and raising awareness of "intangible cultural heritages" worldwide. It's thanks to organisations like them that we live in such an open and well-educated world; a world which goes on for ever and ever and has absolutely no "edge".
Thank you for reading this article; most names have been changed. I couldn't rely on my memory for this one so I'll include some of the websites (besides Wikipedia) I found useful below. There are likely to be a few factual inaccuracies in the text so please point them out if you see them!
Links
For Chilote folklore: https://www.chile.travel/en/blog-en-2/discover-the-fantastic-myths-and-legends-of-chiloe-a-place-full-of-mysteries/ and https://www.ancientpages.com/2022/07/10/trentren-and-caicai-the-battling-serpents-of-chilote-mythology/
For identifying penguins: https://www.americanoceans.org/facts/types-of-penguins/ (highly recommended!)
For the wooden churches: https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/971 and https://chiloepatrimoniomundial.gob.cl/las-iglesias/
Editor's notes: Pan-Americanism is a topic complex enough for many historical dissertations, but some short notes for the interested reader follow. The early South American pan-Americanists to whom indiekid refers arguably pre-date socialism in its modern sense: Bolivar's Congress of Panama which aimed to unify all the former Spanish colonies in a supranational union happened when Karl Marx was still just eight years of age and a good twenty years short of writing his most notable works. Since then, pan-Americanism has shifted somewhat chimerically between a Bolivarian revolutionary ideal transcending statehood and, notably in the form of the Monroe Doctrine and its developments by men like James G. Blaine, a very grounded foreign policy tool often driven by the United States as the hemisphere's richest country. The concept of a Pan-American highway perhaps owes more to the latter than the former, being an idea pushed first in the form of a railroad in the 1880s and then, from the 1920s, as a road highway: construction eventually began in earnest from the late 1930s onwards, though large sections, as noted in the article, were never completed.
More of indiekid's travels in the Americas can be found in a two-part article with part one here and part two here.
The Problem of Focus II: Focus and Magic
June 24, 2024, 09:26:57 PM
The Problem of Focus II: Focus and Magic
By Jubal
A while ago (longer now than I'd like to think) I wrote a piece called The Problem of Focus, in which I outlined the concept of high and low focus as separate from high and low fantasy as a way of categorising fantasy settings. To give a very short definition, in a high focus setting, cause and effect are consistent and recognisable, whereas in a low focus setting they are nebulous and mysterious. This especially applies to magic: a high focus magic user casts a spell with a defined cost and outcome, and it happens. A low focus magic user meanwhile performs something closer to miracle: a situation where the rules of the world are not utilised to do something, but set aside or broken in a moment of revelation or awe. Where high focus magic users are often experts with particular skills, low-focus magic users are often paragons whose virtue or connections to items or external powers enable them to produce magical outcomes.
Games tend to be high focus in how they deal with magic and the fantastical. But are there ways we could de-focus fantasy in games – and would there be advantages, or at least a different player experience, in doing so? That's what I want to try and answer in this article.
Casting spells - practical toolbox or mystical revelation?
To consider why and how we could use more low focus magic, we first need to re-examine why high focus is the norm. There are two connected but distinct key reasons for this. Firstly and perhaps most importantly, it assists gameplay from the player's perspective. If you want a game with any sort of strategic element to it, then knowing what you can or cannot do is very important. Low focus mystical moments are more often the stuff of cutscenes: it's harder for a player to use a singular, strange effect repeatedly and have it maintain its sense of mystery.
The second reason for having high focus fantasy in games is a matter of bounded creativity. Because low focus magic is in part defined by its being outside the usual cosmic rules, stopping it feeling like a cheap and unearned way to solve problems requires very careful handling. It's hard to write low focus as well when you have a strong protagonist, and games usually do: this is because people want to make a meaningful impact on the world around them. Low focus stories - often fairytales and folklore – often have very ordinary protagonists or point of view characters, for whom their interactions with magic feel numinous and special rather than being part of their every day lives. (Low focus in this sense can share more elements with some kinds of horror, though I want to focus here more on the folktales and mythic side of things).
So low focus, in contrast, can give us a different feel for the players of a game. One of the keys a lot of game try to aim for is senses of wonder and emotion, and those can end up disconnected from the fantastical when magic is turned into a specialist's toolbox rather than a wondrous discovery or revelation about the world.
Low focus in magic
Magic has been our starting point here – so how do we reduce its focus whilst still keeping it playable? It's a tricky problem: take for example wishing for things. This is a key sort of low focus magic: it's not bounded, the effects are often unpredictable, and it can be a singular grant of mystical power rather than something you wake up with every morning. But this creates problems: for a game we have to in some way bound the effects of a wish to avoid it being either an instant problem-fixer or accidental world destroyer. This can then box the player in, and make it feel like GM fiat (at the tabletop) or an annoying menu exercise if a computer game gives you a list of what you're allowed to wish for or not. D&D makes Wish quite a high level spell for this reason.
Making magical abilities more singular is probably a good way to start resolving this. High focus magic tends to have big toolkits of specific function spells: in a low focus world being The Guy Who Can Turn Into An Otter may well be enough in and of itself. If played right this sort of thing can also produce some interesting problem solving in games, where a smaller toolkit forces some innovation in the player's approach. Low focus magic needs to click into character and narrative much more closely than high focus magic, because its expression needs to feel earned by those things: it's not bounded by hard rules, so it needs to be effectively bounded by the plot or it will start feeling like a cheap and gimmicky deus ex machina rather than an earned numinous or emotional moment.
How do you defeat the bad guys when your gift is talking to rabbits?
Predictability may be another element to play with. In D&D terms, wild magic with its panoply of random side effects is less high focus than regular magic, because it leans much more heavily into the idea that magic is not something that plays by predictable rules. The downside of this approach is that unpredictability is frustrating for players, but sometimes the sense that you are genuinely channeling a power beyond your ken and that you're not fully in control is something worth giving to the player to support the sort of story that you want to tell.
What you tell the player also matters a lot. Whilst concealing aspects of the game can be frustrating, it can also be important in creating certain effects. For example, magical effects in a game could be tied to player decisions: if this is a world where piety and miracles are connected, pious acts might make it easier or more likely that they can. In this case, a lot of the difference in focus might be made by the exposure of that logic: you could give the player a visible piety score and they'll have a high focus system to work with. Alternatively, hide the score and make it a more narratively framed effect where the player gets an extra option at a key game moment, and the system will be much lower focus. (This does lead to a question about whether focus can be externally increased: in a computer game, someone is likely to ultimately produce a game guide for example, but that's a whole other area slightly beyond our scope here.)
A final thought is that low focus magic is often well placed with some external or physical element involved. Having a mysterious artefact or gift from nature or the gods helps remove the element of "but how does this work" from the picture as far as possible: we may be able to tell how this specific artefact works, allowing the player to work through the game, but we can avoid a wider detailing of exactly how magic as a whole works. Low focus means avoiding and rejecting systematisation and clear logic in favour of unique elements, mystery, and emotion as ways of building payoff.
Low Focus in stories
Odysseus getting some help - deus ex machina, or recognition of virtue?
Emotion is something that I think is very key to low focus magic. Effects need to feel earned in games, and in a low focus game we're ditching the idea of earning them through pure skill. It's therefore very important that the payoff feels like it has been earned emotionally, precisely because the character will not have earned it through sheer power and ability. The fundamental difference between well written low focus magic and hand-wavy problem solving is that sense of pay-off: a sense that the character has earned the effect, even if they didn't consciously plan the effect.
Linked to the idea of emotion is the idea of virtue. What virtue means varies a lot between cultures historically, and types of virtue can differ. Virtue can be both affirmed by, and make viable, mysterious and magical interventions. The Greek concept of kleos for example could absolutely include help from deities: the original deus ex machina showed not that a hero was getting a free pass on solving a problem, but that the hero was worthy of being chosen by the gods. In some cultures virtue requires giving up thoughts of revenge, in others seeking righteous vengeance is treated as an obligation. Whatever the character's virtue system is, low focus magic should work in relation to it: this may be magic showing the character's worth, or alternatively magic as a darker representation of their willingness to depart from the virtue system. High focus, by systematising magic, tends to externalise it: low focus needs us to take magic back into a more social and natural context.
A further key idea we visited in the introduction to this piece is that we may want to make lower focus games also lower in the status of their protagonists. This doesn't necessarily need to be the case: mystery and magic can happen to high status characters too. However, given lower focus reducing conscious, direct control over magical effects, it can be a better tool for permitting a character who we might less expect to understand and manipulate the inner workings of the world to still have influence or impact. The greater sense of odds and struggle that a weaker or lower status character faces can make high focus magic feel stranger in their hands, but can make lower focus magic feel better earned.
Conclusions
In this article we've covered a range of features that might help you implement a low focus magic system in a game or story, and help you decide what sort of story best suits this kind of magic. We've seen how the aim of low focus is to imbue magic with a stronger sense of mystery and awe, and how we need to focus on making that feel earned through emotion, virtue and story beats rather than through skill, power, and functional utility. Some sorts of characters and stories may be better suited to that kind of system, allowing us to re-evaluate who our ideal protagonists might be.
In terms of implementation, we've covered a number of key points. Using magical effects that are somewhat externalised through objects, or represent a singular grant of power not necessarily directly connected to a single functional task, can help emphasise the idea that magic is here as a strange form of power rather than a toolkit amenable to study. Not always making the cause-effect relationship of a game decision entirely clear, or making the outcomes of a magical action more random, can reduce the extent to which the player feels like magic is a simple, controllable effect. Tying such effects more closely into the plot can help make such impacts feel earned rather than frustratingly random.
That's all for this article: hopefully that was interesting, and I'm keen to hear about any instances of trying to implement this sort of magic in your stories and games! I'm not sure when or if a Problem of Focus part III is coming, but I may look more at how particular settings and games currently deal with the problem of focus, or perhaps give some ideas on how the gods and creatures of a setting could be aligned with high and low focus systems – let me know what you think. And, of course, thanks for reading!
Beyond the Wall – Part Two
April 12, 2024, 07:51:55 PM
Beyond the Wall – Part Two
By rbuxton
Editor's Note: This is the second part of a two part article. You can read part one here.
Arturo's Quest
Timmo on his horse.
My bus ride from Morelia to Patzcuaro was not altogether smooth. I followed the journey on Google Maps until we got to the northern outskirts of the town. I asked the driver if the stop was close and he nodded and said "Estación". The next stop appeared to be the middle of nowhere so I didn't get off, only to find us whizzing out of Patzcuaro the next instant (the town is very narrow in the north). I had assumed the driver's answer meant we were heading towards a "bus station", but they don't use that phrase in Mexico and he was actually referring to the small, freight-only train station hidden beyond the trees at the stop. I decided to stay on the bus as far as the next town, where I might be able to get off and make some enquiries about tours to Parícutin. The journey through pine-covered hills was long, and in the end I just hopped on a bus back, this time to the centre of Patzcuaro.
Patzcuaro is a lakeside Pueblo Mágico (magic town) full of low, whitewashed colonial buildings with red signs and eccentric tiled rooves. It's also the capital of Day of the Dead celebrations, but I was there at the wrong time for those. I stayed in a hostel in a traditional building just off one of the main squares, which had an inner courtyard and colourful streamers hanging everywhere. I climbed several hills (actually extinct volcanoes) to get views of the town and lake. There were cobbled streets and old buildings aplenty to explore. I went to a craft fair organised by a Canadian artist where I tried my hand at weaving on a huge, pedal-operated loom. One morning I stumbled upon a parade in honour of one of the saints. A lot of people were in traditional costume, which included long ribbons tied into women's pigtails. I couldn't stay for the whole thing because I was due to watch the Eurovision song contest remotely with some friends back in the UK.
I took a number of trips out of Patzcuaro by collectivo (shared minibus). I went further into the mountains to Santa Clara del Cobre, a centre for copper working. I also visited Tzintzuntzan, a name which means "Place of the Hummingbirds" and is often abbreviated, conveniently, to TZN. It is a unique ancient site overlooking Lake Patzcuaro, dominated by a series of connected semi-circular platforms. Historically it was one of the few cities strong enough to resist domination by the Aztec Triple Alliance during their heyday. I actually saw more hummingbirds at Ihuatzio where a pair of temples look over the islands of the lake, their bases encroached upon by farmland.
My biggest trip out of Patzcuaro, however, was to Janitzio Island. I got up at 5 am and made my way through the cold and mist (the town is more than 2000 meters above sea level) to watch the white herons and other birds of the lake in the dawn light. The first boats from Janitzio began to arrive, disgorging secondary school students and loading up on crates of beer. I took one of these boats with the rest of the morning's tourists and we were treated to a display of the traditional fishing technique, which involved what I'd call a giant butterfly net. The steep-sided island was crammed with buildings: there is an entire town there, where the indigenous Purépecha culture is still very much alive. It seems odd, therefore, that the island is dominated by a giant hollow statue of Hidalgo, a champion of Mexico as a whole. I did some more birdwatching and spotted a number of butterflies and a snake. Then I followed the main (only) road as it spiralled up towards the statue. On the way I met an old woman, Carolina, sweeping her doorstep. She was wearing traditional clothing and was missing a lot of teeth. I told her I was from England and I wanted to visit Guatemala and El Salvador; she described all of these places as "far". Otherwise the conversation was mostly about whether I was married, though after a few repetitions of "Dinero para mis tortillas" I realised she was asking for money. I felt I had to oblige her but I couldn't bring myself to ask her for a photo – this is not really appropriate any more.
I was sorry to leave Patzcuaro and its lake but I had to get on to Uruapan. The city is not particularly interesting but I was lucky to bump into yet another parade when I arrived. A short walk from the centre is the Parque Nacional Barranca del Cupatitzio, which follows several waterfalls of the Cupatitzio river to the beautifully calm pool at its source. The valley is densely wooded and the water has been diverted into all manner of channels and "fountains". I spent a happy morning birdwatching and trying to remember what my dad had taught me about the relationship between shutter speed and running water when aiming for specific effects on my compact camera. I still had not found out much about Parícutin: there was frustratingly little information online and Uruapan's wooden "tourist information" box remained so firmly shut during my visit that I began to suspect it was really someone's TARDIS. I decided to go there a day early for some reconnaissance and took a collectivo to Angahuán. I walked past the small town's church to the viewpoint and there it was at last: Parícutin.
The story goes that in 1943 a farmer named Dionisio Pulido noticed a hole appearing in his cornfield and attempted to plug it with stones. He was soon repelled by the ash, smoke and sulfurous smell emerging from the widening fissure. By the end of the day the nascent volcano was two meters high; after one year it was closer to four hundred. Three people were killed and two towns buried by lava over ten years of intense eruption; the volcano is still active but much calmer today. It stands as a squat, unfinished cone, dark against the surrounding mountains; black lava fields stretch from its base into the avocado plantations below. I had been determined to get to the top since Arturo first told me the story, and I appreciated that, at 80 years old, the volcano proves my grandmother is "as old as the hills".
My guide for the day was a local man named Timmo, who recommended I ride one of his horses to Parícutin's base. Horses are a popular means of transport through the pine-clad hills of the area because the roads are so soft with sand and ash. I had read, however, that the journey is extremely uncomfortable for those unaccustomed to the saddle, so we set out on foot. I sorely missed the walking boots I had left in the UK. Timmo set a brisk pace and we quickly cleared the forest and started grappling with the crumbling, otherworldly sculptures of the lava field. A few plants had taken root on the volcano but for the most part it was a steep, dark heap of loose stones, sending occasional plumes of steam into the grey sky. The crater itself was spectacular if a little smelly. There was nothing interesting at the bottom, just the end of several scree slopes, but the views out were spectacular. I appreciated Timmo's pace then, because the day's first peels of thunder came very close just as we were preparing to descend.
We slid down a softer slope (skis would have been useful) and took shelter in a small building used by the guides. Rain was pelting down and it had mixed with the ash to form a sticky paste in my shoes – it would be many months before they regained their normal colour. Timmo dug around for plastic bags and bin liners to fashion some waterproofs for himself and we set off again. The weather gradually improved as we passed from lava into avocado fields and we stopped for my packed lunch of, appropriately, avocados and wheat tortillas. We passed a couple of small villages and Timmo taught me the Purépecha words for the fruit growing by the road (including, to my surprise, blackberries and cherries). Eventually we reached what is possibly the area's most photographed site: the church of San Juan Parangaricutiro, which is buried up to its neck in lava. It was interesting to climb around inside and wonder what the parishioners thought of the biblical-scale destruction being wrought upon their village. Finally Timmo and I made it up the last hill and sat down outside the stables at the visitor centre.
"Este es para ti," I said, handing over our agreed sum, "And this is for a new raincoat."
"Or some new shoes!" he laughed, lifting his foot so that I could see the extent to which the rubber was peeling from his plimsoles.
With that Timmo mounted his horse and rode off into the (almost) sunset. I went to Domino's for a pizza.
The next day I took a BlaBlaCar north to Guadalajara, the second city of Mexico. Famously the home of Mariachi music, the city now has a modern, studenty feel. I could not, however, enjoy exploring the old town: I was there on a Saturday afternoon and it is genuinely the most crowded place I have ever been. I suppose this is inevitable when a city with an attractive centre expands too quickly for the infrastructure to keep up. On Sunday I made my way to another church of expats; this was made difficult by the closure of many roads for a cycling event (Sunday closures like this are common in Latin America). I met some nice people and enjoyed the service: it was truly bilingual, with English and Spanish sometimes alternating on a sentence-by-sentence basis. After church I went to the expansive Bosque los Colomos, where the Japanese Garden was a particular highlight (as an aside, apparently Japan once tried to buy the Baja California peninsula from Mexico to give itself some leverage over the USA ahead of the Second World War. I'm not sure if this is true but there's certainly evidence of cultural exchanges around Mexico.)
I was in Guadalajara for one reason: to take a flight to the South. I had not taken an internal flight like this before and I was hoping to treat both of my bags as hand luggage. This presented me with the problem of smuggling my penknife through security. In an effort to disguise the blade I wrapped all of my metal possessions around the knife and secured them with electrical tape – to my amazement, and alarm, this worked. I was not so successful, however, with actually getting to the airport. My usual bus station strategy of seeking help from as many people as possible let me down: I asked one too many conductors and found myself bundled onto an inappropriate bus. The conductor obviously hadn't realised that when a tourist asks for the "airport", they mean the terminal, not the god-forsaken stretch of motorway on the far side of the perimeter fence. By the time I realised my mistake I had given myself a walk of several kilometres. I had a similar problem when I touched down at Tuxtla Gutiérrez airport: emerging into a beautiful, and noticeably more humid, evening I looked around for transport to the city. There was none, because the airport is very small and in the middle of nowhere. A single stretch of barbed wire was all that separated the airport access road from a field of cows. I trudged towards a junction in the hope of picking up a collectivo before nightfall. "It's nice to be met at the airport," I said to myself, "Just not by cows."
The Sweaty South
Marimba night in Tuxtla Gutiérrez.
The southern state of Chiapas has had a turbulent history. As independence movements surged across Latin America it briefly considered becoming part of Guatemala. When Mexico achieved independence its first act was to subdue Chiapas by force. I've often wondered what it must have been like for the soldiers in the new Mexican army: having thrown off the shackles of their colonial masters they immediately marched south to defeat a very similar independence movement on their own turf. Chiapas did not go quietly and most of its contemporary history has been violent. At one point the government relocated large numbers of indigenous groups to Chiapas, ignoring those who had lived there for millennia. In the late 20th Century the Zapatista Army of National Liberation was born, a complex fusion of Marxists and indigenous groups. Chiapas was a no-go area for tourists as recently as the noughties but, for better or worse, it's now extremely popular with them.
I arrived in the capital, Tuxtla Gutiérrez, at night and was given a warm welcome at the rooftop bar of my hostel. The next morning the mountains which separated the city from the Sumidero Canyon were clearly visible. I visited a coffee museum and the botanical gardens, where I was struck by the sheer variety of endemic plant species. I also caught several marimba performances in the city's plazas. The marimba is a large percussion instrument, comparable to a xylophone but with an individual soundbox for each note. It is usually played by three people and combined with brass and other instruments; local people salsa the night away, especially at weekends. The origin of the instrument is unclear: it's either indigenous, brought over by the Spanish, or a hybrid of the two.
The highlight of my visit to Tuxtla, however, was my tour of the Sumidero Canyon. It started with a boat ride upriver to where the canyon juts onto flat ground like a wall. It's thirteen kilometres long and, in places, one kilometre high; it's home to birds, monkeys and American Crocodiles, some of which I managed to photograph. There were many interesting formations on the sheer rock walls and someone had put a shrine to a saint in one of the caves. The canyon opened out onto a beautiful lake where pelicans skimmed the water's surface. After boating through the canyon we had lunch in the Pueblo Mágico of Chiapa de Corzo, which is known for its handicrafts. After that we piled into minibuses to ride to the viewpoints above the canyon. Since it was May the views were obscured by haze, but we could still enjoy the sight of sight of mighty eagles, much diminished by distance, wheeling below us.
The collectivo journey from Tuxtla to San Cristóbal de las Casas took just over an hour but the two cities could not be more different. While the former is very modern the latter was, to me, a more touristy version of Patzcuaro: all colonial buildings and funny streets. In Tuxtla I couldn't sleep without air conditioning; in San Cristóbal, more than 2000 meters above sea level, I had to ask for an extra blanket. The city has been an important junction for backpackers for some time. Every night, from about ten o'clock, groups of them walk the streets with big bags on their backs and determined expressions on their faces. They are inevitably on their way to catch a night bus to the Yucatan Peninsula, Oaxaca State or even Guatemala (I did not join them – night buses are my least favourite means of transport).
The hardest thing about travel is, for me, the social pressure, or "fear of missing out", which I feel on arrival at a new hostel. Everyone seems to have loads of friends already; they've all got more energy than you and they all speak better Spanish (the Germans also speak better English). This anxiety is misplaced, of course, because by your second evening you've made a lot of friends yourself and you're in a position to extend a welcome to the next road-weary traveller to hover uncertainly outside the communal area. I went through this process on arrival at my hostel in San Cristóbal, a beautiful old school building on one storey and with a large central courtyard (a lucky find – I had not booked ahead). In the centre of the courtyard was garden of sorts with a feeder to attract the resident hummingbirds (known in Spanish as Colibrís). One morning two travellers, one Irish and one Austrian, pulled chairs into the sunny part of the courtyard and started seeing to each others' dreadlocks. Watching from the shade, pen hovering above diary, I felt that this, too, was a little slice of history. A few days later I celebrated my 31st birthday with a traditional barbecue cooked by one of the Argentinian volunteers at the hostel. Between the nine of us we represented nine different nations; our ages ranged from 18 to 83.
I lingered for a long time in San Cristóbal, enjoying its churches, markets and murals. I went to the Museum of Amber, which contained both natural preserved flora and fauna and handmade jewellery. The translations on the labels of the former described them as "shapes from nature's whimsy". I took a collectivo a little way out of town to Parque el Arcotete, a mountain park which is home to a cave with a river running right through it. A thunderstorm started while I was exploring the cave systems above the river, and the sound of it echoing off the rock walls was awe-inspiring. Upstream I sat in a meadow and must have seen at least twenty different species of butterfly and dragonfly. Later I played a game of chess at the Centro Cultural del Carmen and met José, a guitarist who was playing duets with a double bassist (they had a great arrangement of Libertango by the Argentinian composer Villa-Lobos). José invited me to listen to his solo set at a bar that evening, where he was delayed by a passing parade. This parade was "not very cultural: more about the drinking", as Arturo would say: it consisted mostly of backpackers and had some silly connection to the full moon. They made a lot of noise and it was a relief when José was able to resume playing.
José (left) at the Centro Cultural El Carmen.
My biggest excursion from San Cristóbal was to the mountain town of Chamula. I had been told it was a place where the indigenous culture was very much alive and tourists had to adhere to a strict code of conduct – taking photos in the church, for example, could lead to permanent confiscation of the offending camera. I took a collectivo to the turnoff for the town and was faced with a huge concrete archway reading "Bienvenidos al Pueblo Mágico de Chamula". There was no one else around; the only movement was the literal dust cloud being thrown up by my rapidly retreating bus. I felt a sudden sense of foreboding, as if I was about to enter the Fey World or something. Taking a deep breath I passed under the archway and followed the hairpin bends towards town, camera safely stowed at the bottom of my bag. I was soon reassured by the familiar sight of whole chickens roasting over charcoal. Less familiar were the outfits of the men: despite the heat each wore a long woollen tunic and carried a hat and staff. The colour of tunic (white or black) and style of hat and staff seemed to denote which village the man came from. It was market day and the men had assembled on a platform while the women saw to the buying and selling. The unassuming white and green church, the Templo de San Juan, stood at the far end of the market.
I bought my ticket and stepped into the darkness of the church. There were no pews, and the floorspace was divided in two by cabinets containing effigies of just about every saint in Mexican Catholicism. There must have been over a thousand candles burning, but they were releasing so much smoke it was still gloomy inside. The biggest, meltiest, droopiest candles were reserved for spaces on the floor, which was otherwise completely covered in a carpet of pine needles. Family groups stood or knelt at these candles, their heads bowed in prayer. They brought offerings with them: in recent years water has been replaced with a cheaper alternative, Coca-Cola. For music they had a small tinny speaker playing such Christian classics as Silent Night and Rudolph, the Red Nosed Reindeer. I didn't witness the most interesting of the San Juan practices: the in-situ sacrificing of chickens. San Juan, if you hadn't guessed, is one of the more striking examples of Catholicism adapting and mixing with indigenous religions in the Americas. Although it sounds weird to write it down, actually being there felt perfectly normal. It was, as I reflected while sitting on a bench in the market, just ordinary people going about their ordinary lives. As if to reinforce this point, a toddler at whom I had been quietly giggling suddenly stopped whatever adorable activity he was engaged in. He looked at his family and pointed at me in a "Look at that man, isn't he funny" kind of way. I couldn't deny that in Chamula I was, indeed, strange.
I left San Cristóbal expecting to take the road north to Palenque, so I was surprised when the bus set off south-west, towards Tuxtla. We were on a "three sides of a square" type journey, and I managed to gather that the direct road had been deemed unsafe. I wondered if this was related to a recent drug-related shooting I had heard about. A film was showing on the bus's entertainment system: something about police busting up crime gangs. It did not lighten my mood: suddenly, after so much success, it seemed the naysayers had been right about Mexico after all. Should I have stayed safely behind the Wall? I later found out that this diversion was routine because the Mexican government was not "fully in control" of the road in question. Gangs connected to the cartels sometimes set up blockades and rob tourist buses – I think this technically makes them brigands. We stopped at a military checkpoint – the first of four – where my passport would have been taken out of my sight had I not kicked up a fuss. The diverted bus route did turn out to be a brilliant tour of the mountains of Chiapas, or at least it would have, had the next film on the entertainment system not been Disney's Raya and the Last Dragon. Talk about divided loyalties.
(Talk about a divided paragraph. Don't worry, we're nearly at the end.)
After a loop through green and banana-ey Tabasco State we arrived in Palenque and I booked a tour for the following day. My bus picked me up at 5 am and we set off into the Lacandon Jungle. It was proper jungle, with Tarzan-style vines hanging everywhere. Every so often the silence would be broken by a sort of wave of insect song or the roars of sparring Howler Monkeys (the loudest land animals in the world). We transferred onto boats for a journey down the Río Usumacinta (meaning "howler monkey") which forms the border between Mexico and Guatemala. I felt a long way from civilisation and it was nice to imagine the ethnographers from Na Bolom making journeys like this themselves – the river is still the only way to access the ruined Maya city of Yaxchilán. The main buildings of the city occupy a hill which would once have had a commanding view over a great curve of the river; now, having been reclaimed by jungle, everything is obscured. After disembarking at a beach our first sight of the city was a very green stone wall emerging from the vegetation. The site is not huge but is incredibly atmospheric; its inaccessibility means that it is not crowded with tourists. There were a number of small houses, temples and stelae (stone blocks carved with mythological figures and records of royal successions). A beautiful, wonky and overgrown staircase led to an extraordinary building at the top of a hill. Its roof was adorned with a huge stone lattice, which would once have been visible for miles around.
Our pilot with Guatemala (left) and Mexico (right).
Back on the main road our driver turned to us and asked who wanted to watch a film on the big TV screen. Everyone else – I'm not exaggerating – lifted their hands and cheered, so I pressed my face against the window and, in the gathering jungle gloom, thought about the Maya. In their heyday they were a collection of city states with such complex interrelationships they make A Game of Thrones look like a picnic. Several hundred years before the Spanish arrived the Mayan cities, but not their culture, collapsed. We're still not sure why this happened, but one possible explanation has a certain appeal to me: in clearing ever-increasing swathes of jungle to support their ever-increasing population, the Maya may have realised they risked causing irreversible damage to their environment. Perhaps its wishful thinking to suggest that they chose to go back to a simpler, more village-orientated lifestyle, but even so there's possibly a lesson for us here. As a bit of a tangent, I'd like to point out that American civilisations were not as technologically backwards (that really feels like the wrong word) as they're sometimes portrayed. Although the Maya didn't have them, metallurgy and wheels both existed on the continent. The latter are not much use without roads, and roads are hard to build in mountains and jungles, so perhaps it's unsurprising that the only wheels I've seen were on an artefact which was actually a child's toy. One thing the Maya did have is writing, and this posed a bit of a problem for the Spanish colonists. In order to justify their atrocities towards indigenous peoples they had to portray them as savages. So they set about "re-educating" the Maya scribes and destroying every Maya book they could get their hands on. Three survived. Three. Three books. If there's one thing this trip brought home to me it's the sheer scale of the histories and voices lost to the European land grab. If the Spanish come across badly in this story we can be sure that things would have been at least as bad under the British or another colonial power. I'm not sure if that's much of a defence, but what do I know? I'm just a backpacker.
I had one more set of ruins to visit: those of Palenque itself. These are much tamer and more touristy than Yaxchilán and Bonampak, but still breathtaking. On arrival at the site I was confronted with a steep hill covered in vegetation: an unexcavated temple. To date less than a quarter of Palenque has been excavated and it was interesting to be see part of the city as it would have appeared before work began in the 20th Century. Palenque had a ball court, a royal palace complete with tower, and some truly immense temples – no cheating by running up the side of a hill here! One of the most spectacular temples is the tomb of K'inich Jabaal Pakal, better remembered as Pakal the Great. Maya kings liked to equate themselves with gods, so Pakal's sarcophagus shows him curled in the foetal position and emerging from a seed in the style of the god of maize. It also has a jade likeness of his face which is one of the finest examples of Mayan art in existence. Visitors can't access the original but the site's museum has an excellent replica, as does the Museo Nacional de Antropología back in CDMX. After my visit to Palenque I walked down its nature trail and thought longingly of my upcoming dip in the pools of the Roberto Barrios waterfalls.
Throughout my time in Palenque the heat was excruciating. On the second night I abandoned my bed in favour of a yoga mat on the floor with two fans over me. I remember waking up in the middle of the night and attempting to have a cold shower, only to find the "cold" water getting warm after a few seconds. I also fought a losing battle over my breakfast cereal with an army of Small Ants (the Medium Ants and Big Ants were significantly more peaceable). I was not the only one struggling: passing one of the few other groups of backpackers I heard one say to another "That's his third ice cream this morning." I jumped on the earliest air-conditioned bus I could. I went back to Tuxtla the long way around then changed for a bus to Tapachula, Mexico's southernmost city – a journey of fifteen hours in total. At about 11pm I checked into a hotel.
I woke up late. I watched some Mexican TV. I turned my air conditioning on, then off, then on again. I ordered a pizza. I had planned to do nothing other than relax on my final day, but Mexico had one more surprise in store for me. In venturing onto the balcony to watch the approach of the evening's thunderstorm I met my neighbour, Rodrigo. He told me his story: as a young man he had spent ten years working in the USA. It was hard work and he never had the opportunity to learn English: even the American taskmasters spoke to him in Spanish. Nor was the work steady: a job for someone "from El Salvador" was, he told me, easy for someone from that smaller country to obtain, whereas those "for Mexicans" are hotly contested. At some point, his passport and papers were taken from him. He met and fell in love with a woman from Guatemala; they married and had a son. His family was all he had left but they were now in Guatemala and refusing to tell him exactly where. He was trying to find them, and he asked me if I thought it would be easy to cross the border. I told him, sheepishly, that for a tourist like me it probably was. I didn't know what to say to Rodrigo. He seemed harmless enough but it was possible his wife had good reason to hide from him (the position of women in Mexico is – how can I put this – complicated). I had set out to find out what life was like Beyond the Wall and it seemed, in Rodrigo, I had succeeded. The evening with the students in Chile suddenly seemed a long time ago.
The next morning I crossed a bridge over the Río Suchiate on foot and entered Guatemala. I had been in Mexico for nearly three months and had left much undone. It was a shame, for example, to have flown straight over the mountains and beaches of Oaxaca. I was already devising two more three-month tours: one around the Yucatan and Caribbean coast; the other across the desert and up the Baja California peninsula for a spot of whale-watching (both tours would, of course, have to include a visit to Arturo in León). The latter presents the possibility of arriving in the USA in some style: by crossing the physical Wall into California.
Thank you for reading this article to the end, especially if English is not your first language. Thanks also go to my proofreaders and to Jubal. There are probably some factual inaccuracies here so, as ever, please do point them out if you see them. I have changed all the names of individuals. Mexico has stayed with me, and I do expect to go back. No wall lasts forever.
How to think about history in your games
March 17, 2024, 11:30:50 PM
How to think about history in your games
By Jubal
Even very "historical" games can produce wild ahistorical outcomes. Does that matter?
The thing that people always expect of me as a historian is that I will talk about accuracy, and will mostly be here to complain about games getting things wrong. "Oh, you must be so annoyed at all the things Total War gets wrong" is something I've heard rather more times than I care to remember, or the sometimes even more awkward "oh, I bet you love Kingdom Come Deliverance!"
This hits a pretty rapid problem though: making a totally accurate simulation of the past is impossible. I think most people and certainly most game developers understand this on some level: the demand for medieval RPGs where the player character has to take a dump regularly is pretty low, despite the fact we can be pretty sure that's a period-accurate thing for them to do.
Even if you did make a terrible game where you were doing everything 'accurately', there's a further problem: your player is not, themselves, a medieval person. Growing up in medieval cultures, people had different thought processes and mental structures – different assumptions about how the world worked, what was important, and what was valued. They had a whole lifetime to grow up into that world, and learn huge amounts of expected knowledge about things the average player today can't be expected to know. A medieval person's knowledge of how one gathers moorhen eggs or the right conditions for digging peat turves or of stories and folk tales many of which are now lost aren't to be judged better or worse to a modern person's knowledge of how to use a spreadsheet or which stores one buys cheap clothing at or what the order of Marvel movies to watch is, but fundamentally you cannot, in a ten or even hundred hour game, replace one lifetime of knowledge and assumptions with the other.
You may be wondering, then, what the point of my research into history and games even is, if we can't produce accurate computer games. They're often seen as just an entertainment medium in the end, after all, and most gamers don't actually understand games as a good way to learn about history. Should we not just decide that computer games are so much fantasy, and not bother thinking about how they relate to history?
My answer to that is "absolutely not". The relationship between games and history is far more complex than a question of accuracy, but the relationship between games and history is there and it matters immensely. Games are just there as entertainment in the same way that paintings are just there to be pretty: which is to say, they're not. They are art, and do project ideas and influences, whether we choose to acknowledge that fact or not. Games are a space where imagination, selections of ideas from history, and a selection of modern ideas and concepts all frequently collide. That makes them an amazingly fertile space for imagining and reimagining the past, and taking past concepts and imaginations seriously in that matters a great deal.
Hades' "Ancient Greek" underworld has medieval stained glass windows: history inspires in places we don't expect.
In other words, rather than thinking of your games in terms of whether they're accurate, as a historian I'd encourage you to think about them as a selection process. Even if you're not setting a game historically there's a good chance you're including a number of historical elements and ideas, and that collection helps signal various things to your players about the sort of world your characters inhabit and your contribution to their wider imagined past.
There's a dark side to all this which I want to discuss head-on: extreme ideologues, especially on the nationalist and racist far right, love using games and their iconography to sell their ideas. People at far-right rallies hold up Deus Vult flags as much because of its popularisation into internet culture via games like Crusader Kings as because they're actually reading any serious literature on the crusades. People may not think of the games they play as accurate, but they're still taking parts of that curated collection away and re-using them, and we're still building expectations about what the past can and can't look like. In a world where people often hold pre-modern history up as a grim age of human misery, or as a golden age of "pure" nations that we should hark back to, or indeed as a grim age of human misery that we should hark back to, the sorts of imagined pasts we tell stories about do matter.
Understanding games as a selection process helps us understand this and helps us ask the right questions about how it works. Accuracy here can be a double-edged sword: some games that sell themselves hard on "historical accuracy" very much use accuracy in specific areas to cover for the things that they left out of their curation of the past in other areas. A really nicely 3D modelled historical sword is a lovely and very exciting thing, but it doesn't 'counterbalance' having a world which takes over-simplistic and ahistorical pictures of faith, rulership, gender, and identity. For that we particularly need our curation approach, to ask what's missing from the historical picture. Note that I'm not saying that games should be moralising in this regard, or always contain modern assumptions about what's good or bad regarding those things, or always contain as many medieval elements in the curation process as possible on the other hand. I'm a firm believer in the idea that there are many routes to a good game. I am saying, however, that devs could do more to recognise which ahistorical tropes are likely to be beloved of those who would use history for bad purposes, and consider that when it comes to design, community engagement, and talking to writers and historians alike about our work.
I don't want to give the impression, though, that thinking about games as curation of the past is solely about the modern political impacts and tropes. I want to give the positive case as well: thinking better about what we include and exclude can be a way of unlocking new ideas for our games, new parts of the past to explore and new ways to see them. There are immense amounts of untapped potential in building imagined pasts and historical or historical-fantastical settings that aren't worked into modern games effectively, and I'd be very excited to see more of that rich diversity of human experience tapped more effectively by game developers.
A medieval 'grotesque', British Library Arundel 83 f55v. The medieval imagination is a wonderful place to explore!
For me, that's all a more positive approach to history in games, thinking about what we've got – and whether we really want it in our collection – and thinking about what we haven't got and what's still there to be discovered and used. Using history in games better should be a win for everyone, unlocking new stories and spaces: more different things for players to relate to, history-interested folks to discover, and developers like us to build great narratives and gameplay around.
It's also something that's not as hard to do as you might think: if you're sitting there thinking "that sounds great but there's no way I can find anyone to talk to about history" or "I'm too small to pay a historical consultant" – well, here I switch to my historian's hat and say talk to us anyway. Whilst I'd love to see more devs hiring historians as part of their narrative and design teams, if that's out of reach there are plenty of historians out there who'd love to share ideas with small and independent developers, and spaces like Exilian's Coding Medieval Worlds workshops or the online Middle Ages in Modern Games conferences where there are resources and networks available.
To sum up, if there are three things I'd like you to take away from reading this, they are these:
> History in games matters. It helps us unlock new stories and material, and affects how our game takes part in wider discussions and imaginations of the past and present, whether we want it to or not.
> Rather than thinking about overall "accuracy", think about the history in your games as a curation process. Considering what's there, what isn't, and why you're using it are key to working out how to use history better.
> Remember that you can talk to historians! Academics are often keen to engage with the public and there are many more fruitful connections that can be made.
I'm an optimist about what we can do with games and history – and I think there's a huge amount still to be done and a great many fascinating stories to be told, fresh historical and fantastical worlds to discover, and more besides. I hope this piece has helped give you some new tools to look afresh at your games and game settings, and that it'll help you to explore building games in a wider array of medieval worlds.
Beyond the Wall – Part One
March 12, 2024, 10:38:56 PM
Beyond the Wall – Part One
By rbuxton
Which wall? Trump's wall.
In 2017 I visited my brother in Chile. After travelling together for a bit I set off alone and soon made friends with some European university students. They were involved in the university's International Society, which put on cultural events. I was invited to "France Night", a pleasant evening in which two French students talked for half an hour about their country's history and culture. "Mexico Night", on the following evening, was completely different. There must have been at least thirty Mexican students pulling out all the stops with food, music, games and a Zapateado dance show. I was struck by how good-natured, proud and interesting the people were. In that moment I realised how insulting the then-US president's rhetoric was – insulting to both Mexicans and those crossing it from other Central and South American countries.
A young organillero plies his trade.
I'd like to make one thing clear: Mexico is not a "developing" country. It has great infrastructure, huge cities and a booming tech scene. The streets of CDMX follow a grid layout – perfectly intuitive for most of the world's population but strangely confusing to the British. Music is all around, often coming from the Organilleros – an army of smartly-dressed musicians pumping away at organs and doffing their caps for change. They sometimes rub shoulders with busking saxophonists, while efficient recycling trucks whizz by and traffic wardens whistle to keep everything under control.
During one outing in CDMX I jumped on a double decker bus with another (male) backpacker. After a few minutes people started nudging us and pointing at the floor, but our Spanish was too basic to grasp what was going on. It turned out we were standing in the "women and children only" part of the bus, an area taking up most of the ground floor and demarcated by pink handrails (which were yellow elsewhere). In weighing up the pros and cons of this system, I felt, one could cover many of the gender and equality issues which have been thrown up in the UK in the past decade or so.
My favourite public transport story, however, comes from CDMX's metro. I was standing by the doors of the carriage with a young man to my right. He was seated and had very stylish hair, moulded into some complicated shape and looking wet as a result. Suddenly a few bubbles whizzed past us accompanied by a cry of "Cinco pesos!". What on Earth was going on? Looking up, I saw one of the many one-item salespeople who ply their trade on the metro; his product was children's bubbles. He had a neat trick: by holding the bubble wand towards the stream of air from a fan he could literally bombard his potential customers with his wares. Unfortunately for my neighbour the wax holding his hair in place was quite attractive to bubbles, so several stuck without him noticing. I didn't have the confidence – social or linguistic – to point this out to him, so I'm pretty sure he was still wearing them when we emerged onto street level a few minutes later.
In venturing beyond the Wall I got a little more than I bargained for. In reading this, you will too. You have been warned...
Around the Capital
I had decided to ease the culture shock by making my first stop in Mexico the small town of Tepoztlán. Getting there was not too much trouble but in order to find my hostel I booted up Google Maps. I was charged £72 for the privilege, having missed the text message from my network which said something like "Welcome to Mexico, we've turned off the data roaming cap you sensibly set yourself, wasn't that helpful of us?". On top of this I was struggling with the heat, the jet lag, a sore throat (probably my fault) and a bad back (definitely my fault). When I arrived in Tepoztlán a light dust was swirling through the cobbled streets and saloon-style doorways; some sort of festival was going on and a man in a skeleton costume waved at the local tourists. Mexico, it seemed, was not holding back.
Tepoztlán, it turned out, is turned out to be a "Pueblo Mágico" (magic town), one of several hundred in Mexico which have done much to preserve their heritage. Its old buildings, murals and mountaintop Aztec temple no doubt contributed to this accolade. I spent a day acclimatising and shopping around for a big sombrero to replace the weedy cap I had brought from the UK, eventually choosing one made of straw (the material of the peasantry; posher sombreros are of felt). The next morning I rose early to climb the mountain before the heat set in. The path was beautiful and led to some brilliant views; the temple wasn't overly interesting but the wheeling clouds of Mexican Eagles certainly were.
From Tepoztlán I backtracked to Cuernavaca, capital of Morelos state and an important cultural centre. It had some interesting churches and a nice cathedral but otherwise didn't hold much for a backpacker. The city's most interesting site is a squat castle built by the conquistador Hernán Cortés in 1528 (making it perhaps the oldest Spanish building in Central America) but it was closed during my visit. Like Cortés (well, kind of) I now turned my attention to the Aztecs' Tenochtitlan; Frida Kahlo's Ciudad de Mexico; Instagram's CDMX.
The Aztecs (technically the Mexica) chose the location for their city based on the omen of an eagle killing a snake while standing on a cactus; this image still adorns the national flag. The location was a lake, so they developed a land-reclamation system involving plants grown at the water's edge. This gave them a handy system of canals which helped the city become very efficient. When the Spanish conquered it, they built their city directly on top. I'm not really sure what this means, but the result is that the centre sinks by about a foot every year. This, combined with the tectonic activity of the area, has led to some buildings sitting at a jaunty angle. Over the next few centuries the city expanded into the surrounding mountains at a frightening rate; by 2005 it was (by one measure) the second most populous in the world. Recently there have been many efforts to address the social issues associated with such growth, including an extensive cable-car network.
I stayed in a hostel a few blocks from Zócalo, the city's main square and venue for both political demonstrations and free concerts. It's surrounded by beautiful examples of Spanish colonial architecture, including universities and a cathedral. Latin America in general is home to some amazing architecture which might look vaguely familiar to those of us who've visited Europe. These buildings tend to be on a significantly smaller scale, and this could be due to practicalities like sourcing materials, the aforementioned tectonic activity, and the desire to erect colonial status-symbols speedily. They helped form a national identity as independence movements swept the region, and I imagine the conversations going something like this: "You can't be your own country when you don't even have fine, neo-classical buildings", "Oh yes we do!"
Easter celebrations in the Zócalo.
I spent three Sundays at an Anglican church near Chapultepec, which served some of CDMX's expats and digital nomads (the city almost irresistible to the latter due to its climate and amenities). On arrival I was confronted by a pie chart showing the ethnicities of its members, and was surprised to see Nigerian in third place (after American and Mexican). It was nice to be able to relax there and chat to people who had called the city home for most of their lives. Semana Santa (Holy Week) was approaching and on Palm Sunday we paraded around the church equipped with crosses and, for some, bagpipes. Easter Saturday found me back in the Zócalo watching a huge display of music and dancing, accompanied by a sermon from a very charismatic woman, who spoke so fast I could only really pick out repetitions of the phrase "pueblo de Dios". I had been advised to stay in CDMX over Semana Santa because, as in many countries, holiday destinations get very booked up. The city, Zócalo concert notwithstanding, was comparatively empty and I had some nice relaxed walks around the centre.
My first excursion was to the mountain Pueblo Mágico of Mineral del Chico. It was very nice up there among the pine trees but it was so hard to reach by public transport that I only had an hour there and had to spend much of that time on the toilet. My trip to the ruins of Teotihuacan was rather more successful. This vast site of stone temples, walkways and marketplaces was one of the largest, and most cosmopolitan, cities in the world in the 1st Century AD (so cosmopolitan, in fact, that it's not clear if it was the Olmecs or Toltecs who built it). What is known is that the Mexica, arriving in the region about a millennium after Teotihuacan's decline, believed it had been built by gods and modelled Tenochtitlan on it. The so-called pyramids of the Sun and Moon dominate Teotihuacan's skyline and are connected by the wide, temple-flanked Avenue of the Dead (we're not sure about any of these names, by the way). The pyramids would have had structures at the top, perhaps of wood, but were not used for human sacrifice, a practice which was mostly confined to the Mexica in the 14th and 15th centuries. More subtle are the stone animals, pillars painted with deities, and houses which show a cross-section of the building techniques used throughout the city's history. It was very hot and I was fortunate to have a sombrero to protect me from the sun, though it was dwarfed by those of the souvenir-sellers.
I had a blast in CDMX, but it didn't feel that way the whole time. I was preoccupied with my money, which was supposed to last nearly a year, and Mexico was significantly more expensive than I had expected (I had unwisely used my India trip of 2011 as a budgeting reference). I was also overwhelmed by the sheer size of Mexico and the fact that I was right in the middle. It turns out that having the world as your oyster is more than a little daunting. One day, sitting around in the hostel nursing an upset stomach, I was on the verge of booking a flight to Colombia when I received a WhatsApp message on a group which had been defunct for more than two years. It was an old travel friend asking where everyone had got to and the answers came back as follows: Mexico, Belgium, Tenerife, Canada and Mexico. It turned out that my American friend Henk was just a few hours away by bus! I mention this extraordinary coincidence because I had first met Henk under very similar circumstances; sometimes lightning really does strike twice.
The American and the Mexican
So it was decided: I would set off Northwest for my rendezvous with Henk, stopping off in the cities of Querétaro and San Miguel de Allende. The former is Mexico's fastest-growing city and its tech capital. On my first day I stumbled upon a crowd of people in traditional costumes, including rattling anklets, dancing to the beat of drums. I visited a number of churches and the Santa Cruz convent. The convent forms the terminus of the city's impressive colonial-era aqueduct, indicating how important these institutions were in the operation of early Spanish settlements. The bus journey to San Miguel de Allende was dramatic and afforded great views of the city and the famous pink church tower of La Parroquia de San Migeul Arcángel. Another famous site in the city is the house of Ignacio Allende, one of the leaders in Mexico's war of independence (1810 to 1821). The city is no stranger to war: it was a front line during the 16th century Chichimeca War and had to be abandoned several times before the Chichimeca leaders were bought off by the Spaniards.
Finally I reached Guanajuato, surely one of Mexico's strangest cities. This arid mountain town experienced a "silver rush" in the 16th century and was soon producing 30% of the world's silver. There was no planning so buildings popped up wherever they could; thanks to the region's wealth many of them were very grand. The result is a maze of staircases and alleyways giving out to cramped squares and neo-classical façades. With space at a premium the roads are all in tunnels below street level; I felt like Indiana Jones as I approached by bus. The city is popular with backpackers and international students, who are drawn here from Guadalajara by the promise of techno music and cocaine.
I met Henk on the steps of the market building and we caught up over pork sandwiches with plenty of offal. We donned hard hats to explore one of the mines and visited the church where some of its silver ended up. We joined a walking tour organised by one of the volunteers at the hostel and wound up at the museum of the artist Diego Rivera (husband to Frida Kahlo). We hiked up to a viewpoint where my sombrero was nearly lost to a gust of wind; Henk helped me to attach a chin strap. We spent several evenings at the statue of local independence-era hero El Pípila, from which we could watch the sunset picking out the many colours of the city. In the hostel we ate sopes, a kind of thick tortilla, and drank mezcal, a smoky cousin of tequila which is also derived from the agave plant. I did not visit the city's most famous attraction: a museum of naturally preserved corpses, exhumed and displayed in glass cases. My reluctance to visit surprised many Mexicans; their relationship with Death is certainly different to my own.
The finest busker in León, if not Mexico.
Henk took me to a leather market where skins of cows, snakes, crocodiles and more could be bought. I was interested to find out that Iran is the world's biggest exporter of snakeskin. I asked one man where he had bought his elephant hide and he did not answer – I suspect this was not due to my poor Spanish skills. We also visited the city's triumphal arch and the church of El Templo Expiatorio, which was built in the 1920s. I'm no architecture buff but I could see this church was very different to others I had visited: built in a neo-gothic style it had the colouration of a Battenberg cake and eschewed fancy decorations in favour of simple stained-glass windows. Every evening, sunset would bring out brides-to-be and their entourages to have photos taken in advance of their weddings. I ventured into the extensive catacombs, which had a number of rooms dedicated to different saints. I was surprised to find them very brightly lit – how could anyone sleep? I also took a couple of buses to a big lake for some birdwatching.
It is impossible to overstate the generosity of my hosts. Despite often using his house as an Airbnb Arturo invited Henk and myself to stay for free for two weeks. Henk is a brilliant cook and would sometimes wake me up with pancakes before taking me to the local market to buy fruit and vegetables. Arturo invited me to Sunday lunch with his extended family, most of whom lived locally. There I met his sister Mariana, who had worked as a nanny in the USA. Her host family had given her a Scrabble set as a parting gift but she had not found enough English speakers to play it – until now (unfortunately we never got around to playing in Spanish). Henk and some of his friends, also one-time landlords of his, took me to a karaoke bar, where we – what's the word – surprised the local people with our renditions of Johnny Cash and the Red Hot Chili Peppers. The bar "ran out of beer" that night, so we drank a lot of mezcal. At one point Henk asked me if I thought we were in a richer or poorer area than that of the cumbia bar. I guessed it was richer and more middle-class. How could I tell? Let's just say there's a correlation between physical appearance and affluence in Mexico which is depressingly familiar to those of us from the UK.
Henk left to attend to business in the USA and Germany, and I lingered. Over the next few days I encountered a number of people with very inspiring ambitions, some of which I'll reproduce here:
"I work in the leather market but I'm hoping to train as a teacher."
"I've been invited to Spain to do an interview on TV about my beauty products."
"I'd like to turn this place into a seafood restaurant, like the one outside of town. They have shrimp tacos there. Come on, let me show you!"
I have not covered half of my adventures in León here. They culminated with my desperate attempts to clean the bathroom on my final morning before my host returned from a friend's house. I had rocked up at 2 am the previous evening and blocked the sink with my vomit. Too much information? Let's get back to the backpacking.
From León I did two day trips, the first to Aguascalientes. I looked around some nice churches and the Museum of Death, which contained historical and artistic pieces relating to Mexico's fascination with all things morbid. I considered spending the evening at the city's famous festival, but since it was, in Arturo's words, "not very cultural: more about the drinking" I decided to give it a miss. A longer trip – and a night in a hostel – took me to Zacatecas, the northernmost city on my trip and situated where the Central Plateau gives out to semi-desert. It's another old mining town but, unlike Guanajuato, it has enough space for the grand buildings to really stand out. The most interesting site was the "Mina el Edén", or Eden Mine, which has some beautiful caverns running for several kilometres, and a train. The name is both deceptive and cruel: hundreds of thousands of indigenous people were killed while working as slaves in the mines, and in the associated wars with the Spanish (many African slaves would later share the same fate). While walking the streets of Zacatecas I stumbled upon an open-air display of traditional music and dancing. As far as I could tell it was actually a cultural exchange of sorts: the dancers were from a university in the distant state of Oaxaca (woh-ha-kah). With the exception of a terrifying dance on stilts most dances were calm affairs of ten or so couples in traditional costume. One seemed to tell the story of the Spaniards' arrival in Mexico: the dancers acted out some domestic scenes, gradually giving way to joyful twirling. Towards the end the "lead" woman took up position in the centre of the stage, squatted down and flapped her skirts around. Eventually she laid an egg, which her partner promptly ate, to much applause.
This is part one of a two-article coverage of rbuxton's adventures. You can read part two by clicking here.
You can also read about rbuxton's previous Accidents in Andalucía, or discover more travel writing from other Exilian members via our travel writing index.
Exilian Interviews: Phoenixguard!
January 18, 2024, 10:32:45 AM
A Conversation With: Phoenixguard!
Your Interviewer: Jubal
The RPG design team at Norbayne have been key parts of the Exilian community for many years, especially their captain and lead designer James Gatehouse (Phoenixguard09). We caught up with him for a chat in our latest Exilian interview, now going up as Exilians 150,000th post! Read on to find out more about the project, the influences and issues on indie fantasy RPG design, and a fair bit of nerdery besides...
Jubal: So, we're here mostly to talk about your tabletop RPG project Norbayne, but first, let's talk about you: what got you into tabletop RPGs to begin with?
Phoenixguard: Hey Jubs, thanks for having us here. For anyone not aware, my name is James Gatehouse. I am the initial creator and lead developer of the Norbayne tabletop role-playing game.
The story as far as my initial tabletop experience is, I think, at least a little atypical. I went to a pretty fundamentalist school in my early years. Dungeons and Dragons for instance was a complete no-go, I was somewhat ostracised because I had read Harry Potter, the whole Satanic Panic made somewhat manifest in suburban Queensland, Australia. Narnia and Lord of the Rings were fine though, so there was some form of acceptable fantasy - though I must admit, I did not get into Lord of the Rings until just before The Two Towers came out in cinemas. I think my first dabbling with a tabletop game was perhaps around early 2003, with a kind of bizarre, dice-less, largely solo-player narrative adventure game with a real kitchen-sink fantasy setting. Somehow, I managed to rope my poor mother into playtesting it for me, which still to this day means a great deal to me, though she has never let me forget what a sacrifice it was for her to sit through!
Around that same time, I got absolutely hooked on Lord of the Rings and devoured absolutely everything Middle-Earth related I could get my hands on. At the end of 2003, after the theatrical release of The Return of the King, I received a copy of the Games Workshop Lord of the Rings Strategy Battle Game starter box. I was quite young at the time and it took me a fair while to properly parse the rules, but I found it absolutely fascinating. I spent truly unreasonable hours learning the game, painting the miniatures, crafting terrain, playing against myself, memorising the rulebook by rote and soon, I was creating my own rules content as well, coming up with new units and an unreleased 'campaign' type system for you to create your own little warband. I would have been insufferable as a child (still am by most accounts).
I progressed into Warhammer pretty smoothly from that point, crafting another homebrew RP system to use with the Warhammer Fantasy setting, this one relying on D6 dice pools. Not long after running a few games of this at school, I was introduced to the concept of Dungeons and Dragons and played a few games, but I was never really enamoured with the D20 system.
Since that time, I've dabbled a bit in a few different tabletop systems, particularly enjoying the 2nd edition of Fantasy Flight Games Warhammer Fantasy Role Playing Game, which gave me a great appreciation of the versatility of a percentile-based system. It is an appreciation which has informed many of the design decisions which have, in turn, given rise to Norbayne.
A draft title page from an earlier Norbayne version.
Phoenixguard: I think it was late 2011. I had been struggling for months to write a story. I had all the ideas for an interesting setting and world, but could not come up with a compelling story to write. The depression was setting in alarmingly quickly, until a friend of mine at the time (now wife), Stephanie, told me one evening, "Don't write a story then, use the world you've created for something else."
In hindsight, that advice seems very simple, but at the time, my mind was blown. It hadn't occurred to me to even consider such a thing. So I think maybe ten months passed, where I worked on this thing basically in secret. I put together what I felt was quite a robust system to go with the setting and then began to invite a few people I thought may be interested. At the time, we didn't actually have an explicit table as such, it was the playtesting of this game which brought our gaming group together. Thus was the Three Coins campaign born, which would last approximately nine years in the end, albeit with a couple of hiatuses in there due to various real-life scheduling issues.
Jubal: Can you give us a quick pitch – what makes Norbayne stand out for you and what makes it differ from other TTRPG settings out there?
Phoenixguard: From a setting perspective, there's a bit of everything. We've got some allusions to an almost space operatic in the deep past of the setting, a classical fantasy kind of feel with some unique twists to the formula and then a legitimately in-depth evolutionary origin for the various species at large in the world. I think we've hit a really good balance between providing a detailed framework and providing enough freedom to come up with your own parts of the setting.
On the mechanical front, it's elaborate. We're a hard class-based percentile system with a fully independent ruleset and multiple ways to play baked into the core rules. While we may have a hard class-based design, the customisation available to you within your Class selection is prodigious, and to be fair, is probably the biggest part of why we're still in development.
Jubal: If you could pick one place and one character that really sum up the setting for you, who and where would those be – and why?
Phoenixguard: I'm afraid I really can't pick a single place or character right off the bat, but I think the initial Three Coins group is pretty representative of the setting. For that matter, there are worse locations to consider than the independent township of Summer Hill, in which we spend a great deal of time throughout the course of the Three Coins campaign. A Midland town sitting on the border between two powerful kingdoms, Summer Hill society is a conglomeration of various peoples, as are most towns throughout the Midlands of Norbayne come the modern era. One big design concept I wanted to emphasise right from the beginning was to stay away from the idea of great monolithic cultures being demarcated by species. In some places, this is still the case, but these cases are largely the exception, usually due to remoteness of location and the deliberately insular nature of the culture itself. By the modern age of Norbayne, most of the more populous settlements will have a mixed species population, and the society reflects this.
As for our initial playtest group, in large parts they defined the quintessential member of their people. For instance, George's character, Harold Oakenshield provided us with a great example of just what an Invarrian was. He threw himself into the physiology of the species, for example always asking specifically if he could smell anything when I asked for Perception Checks, but he also really embraced the mentality of the Invarrians, their dualistic nature and dichotomy between their generally fun-loving personality and their inherent thrill in causing destruction.
He wasn't alone in this. For instance, Steph's Danann, Maebh Preachain-Eite really delved into the psyche of a Fell Clan Danann who had imposed a form of self-exile upon herself.
This is not to say we have not had similarly well-fleshed out and compelling characters since this time. Steph again has really hit the brief perfectly with another Danann, Bedelia Ceanndorcha in our Forgotten Glories campaign for example, nailing the concept of the Fell Clan Danann trying to exist in a society she really doesn't quite understand, all the while dealing with her own, personal historical trauma.
Jubal: The aesthetics of much of Norbayne have a European feel – with for example the highlanders having very Scots aesthetics, some celtic myth terms like Danaan used. But, of course, you and your team are all Australian. What do you think is the attraction of building that Europeanism into your worlds – and how do you think your experiences and surroundings growing up in Australia might have influenced Norbayne?
Phoenixguard: In large part, this particular influence has come from me. The Lord of the Rings in particular was a huge influence upon me and most of the work I have done, even outside of the Norbayne project. I'd consider the Warhammer setting to also be a significant influence too, which definitely has a fairly strong European feel to it as well. I think personally, it's a matter of comfort. I understand European folklore and languages quite well and can therefore incorporate it more easily as inspiration for my own works.
That is one thing to note, I guess. A lot of the structure of the setting is built around my personal love for and interest in languages. We use real-world languages to help us represent the in-game dialects (similarly to what Tolkien did, what with using Old English to represent Rohirric for instance, though I am not talented nor mad enough to construct my own languages), and as such, relationships between languages in the real world can help reveal various relationships between the languages, peoples and cultures of the world of Norbayne. It's a fun little game you can play while you make your way through our years of collated lore.
Some highlanders from Norbayne's, well, highlands.
Jubal: To return to the other part of the question about whether there's any 'Australian-ness' in how Norbayne has come together, do you think your relationship to that European folklore differs from authors who live in Europe, in aspects of landscape, wildlife or culture that might resonate differently for you?
Phoenixguard: Oh definitely, no doubt at all. I think being so far removed from that European 'base' has given our development a sense of other-ness. There's a sense of it still being mysterious and foreign, without it being wholly unrecognisable and unfamiliar. Particularly from a landscape perspective, Australia doesn't exactly have mountains, or at least not really in the sense other continents do, so there is a sense of the mountain ranges of Norbayne feeling perhaps a little more fantastical as a result.
There'd be quite a few things in that vein too, for instance, wolves. Wolves in many places in Europe are a very real and somewhat mundane creature (for all they are endangered in many regions today) however from an Australian perspective, there is so much mythology built up around those animals which cannot be experienced in day-to-day life. The Norbayne setting treats various species and variety of wolf perhaps more seriously and with more reverence (not sure if it's the correct term) than other comparable settings may.
Jubal: You mentioned Warhammer and Tolkien as core inspirations. Warhammer in particular is a sort of "bucket of oddments" approach to a setting, whereas Tolkien's work has something of a more internally consistent and less anarchic feel (Tom Bombadil notwithstanding). Which of those approaches do you think better characterises how you build fantasy?
Phoenixguard: I think I aim for somewhere in between, as close to the centre as possible, while pushing to one extreme or the other as the whim takes me. While that sounds anarchic and unfocussed, I think it adds to the depth of the setting as, ideally, we'd like to think there should be something for everyone.
It's probably fair to say I aim for internal consistency everywhere I can and have spent countless hours mulling over the evolutionary paths of any given ancestry in an attempt to tie their birth into the setting's prehistory, but sometimes, just as in the real world, occurrences can be wild and unexpected and there may just be no explanation every now and then, which just adds to the mystery and excitement.
I hope so, anyway.
Jubal: Norbayne is a setting first and foremost but it's also a completely independent game with its own rules. What made you decide to develop Norbayne as a totally independent system, rather than a setting supplement for a major published TTRPG rule set?
Phoenixguard: In light of the recent Wizards of the Coast Open Gaming Licence drama, I'm very glad I chose to do something different. Largely, I struggled to find a system which properly modelled the specifics of how I wanted the setting to be represented. The WFRPG, while excellent and a favourite of mine, doesn't lend itself particularly well to being translated to other settings. I've never really liked most D20-based systems and I definitely did not want to work with Vancian-style casting for Norbayne's various magic systems.
In the end, it almost felt like less work to build a system from scratch, as compared to chopping and changing something which already existed to make it fit reasonably well.
I remember the very early days of the project, trying to show people and explain it to them and I'd regularly be met with a barrage of, "Why don't you just use the D&D rules?" Considering that fact, you would think I'd have a better answer for this question by now.
GMing Norbayne: Phoenixguard in action
Phoenixguard: Of course. I'll try to keep this as brief as possible, as while on the tabletop this is usually pretty quick and efficient, in prose it might come across a bit rough.
On any given combat round, each participant would act in Initiative order, which is determined by rolling a single d10 and adding it to your character's Initiative Statistic. For example, let's say two of our longest running characters, the sisters, Mathlynn and Aracaeda Cild-Ailith are going to have a little sparring match to pass the time.
They'd each determine their Initiative, with the higher result acting first. In this case, it is likely Aracaeda would act first as she has the higher base Initiative, but there is a chance she'd be slow on the uptake. For the example's sake, let's say she rolled higher. Each character generally has a Movement Action and a Full Action to utilise on their turn. Aracaeda may move up to her Speed Statistic in feet as a Movement Action every turn. In addition to this, she may elect to perform a Full Attack with her Full Action or a Quick Attack with a Half Action. By electing to do the latter, Aracaeda may hold a Half Action in reserve to use as a Dodge or Parry should the occasion call for it.
She does so, moving into close combat with Mathlynn and making a Quick Attack with her longsword. She must then determine her target number to hit Mathlynn. By adding her Dexterity Statistic to any bonus she may have to her Close Combat Skill and her longsword Weapon Proficiency and then subtracting any situation negatives she may suffer to the target number, Aracaeda can determine her target number. She may then roll a d100 to determine her success, wanting to get as far under the target number as she can. She will then advise the Games Master of how many 'degrees of success' she achieved, by determining the difference between the '10's' die of the d100 and the '10's' place value of the target number. For example, if her target number was '87' and she rolled a '24', she would have achieved 6 degrees of success.
Mathlynn, should she have a half action available to her, may attempt to Parry or Dodge this oncoming attack. She would do this by either rolling a d100 and attempting to achieve higher than Aracaeda's target number to hit, or alternatively rolling under her own Agility Statistic plus any bonus she may have to her own Dodge Skill. In this case, Mathlynn knows Aracaeda's target number is very high and so would likely attempt to dodge the strike. Should she succeed, no Damage would be done, though on her turn, Mathlynn would only have a Half Action with which to perform any activities, as she would have used a Half Action to perform the Dodge Check. Should she fail to perform the Dodge, she would of course take damage, equal to Aracaeda's degrees of success to hit, the damage value of her sword and her Strength Modifier, plus any other bonuses Aracaeda may have. This would then be mitigated by any damage reduction and resistances Mathlynn may have, with the final total subtracted from Mathlynn's current Health total.
This is our basic close combat mechanic, though different weapons, armour, Talents and other abilities can cause this initial mechanic to take on further varied forms. On her own turn, Mathlynn, a Necromancer, may well seek to raise some nearby corpses and use them to apprehend and detain her sister.
Jubal: What have been some of the biggest problems and changes you've had to make on a mechanics and rules level to the game over time, and how do you approach those challenges?
Phoenixguard: We've seen quite a few major paradigm changes to the system over the years. I think the first big one (and likely the most contentious in practice) was implementing Soulfire as a generated Statistic for your character. Previously, we balanced magic by making it very dangerous, but it quickly became apparent this was not particularly working. As such, I reduced the inherent danger of Arcane Magic by a little and incorporated Soulfire as a way of tracking your character's ability to sling spells around. There was a varied reaction to that change, let me tell you.
On the one hand, about half the party were very happy with the change, while particularly Steph, who was playing a Mage, could not have felt more differently.
I think the most important thing we've had to embrace with regards to this is the fact our stories to date, while the game as a whole is now largely realised, remain playtests. As such, when a balancing issue does become apparent, we normally try and implement fixes in between sessions. In recent years, this has become significantly less prevalent, but I can't deny, it has taken some cooperation and understanding from the playing group.
Jubal: Can you talk a bit more about how you deal with that playtesting element? Are there particular guidelines you have to set yourself with how to approach rebalancing and other issues, like not changing too many elements at once, or do you just reshuffle the game as needed and eyeball the outcome you're after?
Phoenixguard: Again, probably a bit of both. I try my best to factor in the feedback from each of the players at the table and any reports I may get from outside it. I personally try to make changes to a certain mechanic or area of the game in one hit and hope not to change too many other major elements at the same time in an attempt to help the players keep track of changes when they occur. By dint of the various campaigns we play though, this can be somewhat difficult at times, which again, as mentioned previously, requires some understanding and cooperation from the players.
As the ruleset is, to be frank, pretty sprawling at this stage, there's certainly an element of simply eyeballing changes and trying to monitor it in play. We are lucky to have a few members of the team with a bit of an analytical bent. Previously, one of our inaugural players, Geoffrey, provided us with some significant statistical breakdowns for a fair few concepts to help give us an idea of places we should look to redress, which was very useful.
We are bringing quite a few new players into the game in the next few months too, which I'll mention again a little bit later. We're definitely hoping to continue to build up our resources in this area as we are constantly looking for different perspectives and experiences to help us enrich the game experience.
The Norbayne team busy with a long Hallowe'en playtest session
Phoenixguard: It's been huge, right from the outset. I mentioned before how we've had so many elements of the setting informed by the creativity of our players. So much of the Invarrian society for instance was laid out by George initially when he played Harold Oakenshield in Three Coins, but then a lot more of it was codified by Bri when she put together an elaborate backstory for Assar Eiliert upon the resumption of The God King campaign.
Skye has been huge in this area too. There's a lot of depth in many different places which is owed to Skye, firstly as a player, then as part of our development team and, more recently, as a games master too. We have a private chat where Skye just asks me random setting-related questions, which I may or may not end up finishing the answers to.
The balancing act has been interesting. I think it's fair to say, from a setting and lore perspective, the entire team is more than happy to cede overall decisions to me, but I guess I'm lucky in that the whole team has a good grasp of the feel of the setting. Most discussion surrounding, "Can I do this in the setting?" is normally very positive and built around discussing exactly how such a thing could work. It is very rare I've had to say to one of our players, "No, it doesn't work like that, you couldn't do such a thing."
The rules and system differences can be a little more contentious. Again, normally the final decision pretty well comes down to me, but there's been a few times where I've been outvoted. I try to remain as balanced and even-handed as possible and I've had to learn to take a step back and let others provide their input even in those situations where I disagree.
The key principle we've really tried to push recently has been the idea of, 'Responsibility, not ownership.' There was a tendency in the past where individual developers would feel a sense of ownership over concepts and elements of the game they had worked on, which led to a feeling of discontent upon other members of the team running an eye over those elements and offering feedback, or, in my opinion, even more distressingly, a sense one could not work upon a certain concept or class because it was one individual's personal project. We've consciously tried to move away from this, seeking a holistic design process which encompasses the core team as a base and referring to our consultant team as required.
Jubal: And to give people an insight into your next steps, what can we expect from Norbayne in the near future?
Phoenixguard: At this stage, we're getting mighty close to launching our Kickstarter campaign. We've been dedicated to making sure the actual content of the game is completed before launching the Kickstarter, so all we will need to do is fund the artwork and overall design of our product and then printing and distribution costs.
We're currently in the process of really opening our playtesting group too. We've had a significant influx of interested newcomers looking to play some one-shot games with our development team after we put out a call to arms of sorts.
Steph and I got married last April, so we're taking a little bit of time to enjoy that before launching into what is shaping up to be our biggest year yet. Between our newcomer one-shots, the launch of Arc 3 of Seven Stones and a Pale Shadow and hopefully the release of our Great Maw table-read, there'll be plenty of content to experience in the lead up to the Kickstarter campaign.
There's also been a little bit of talk around a streamed game, though I probably shouldn't say too much more about that.
Jubal: And finally, where can people find out more about the game?
Phoenixguard: At this stage, a lot of our material is based here on Exilian. We will be moving to our own website in time, but we'll be maintaining a strong presence on Exilian to discuss elements of the game moving forward.
If you'd like to join our community and keep abreast of any and all updates, please join our Discord. You'll note we're still taking expressions of interest for prospective newcomers. At this time, we're only able to cater for players local to the South-East Queensland area in Australia, however we are working to incorporate a remote option for our friends further afield.
Lastly, we have an Instagram page at the moment, where we've historically posted all kinds of concept art, fan art and sometimes photos and snippets of video from our sessions. Feel free to give us a cheeky follow on there.
Unusual selections from a magical library
September 17, 2023, 12:04:48 AM
Unusual selections from a magical library
By Jubal
Whilst digging through the lost libraries of the depths of Exilian, I decided to note down a selection of the most intriguing magical texts, to give you all some more ideas about what might lurk at the heart of any magical libraries, wizards' towers, or other such spaces that you may be creating for your TTRPGs, computer games, fantasy fiction, or similar. As such, here are twelve magical texts that you might come across. Read on... though, as ever, remember that knowledge can be a dangerous thing!
The Aumanac
If read normally, is just a series of folk tales: but it can be read in a different way (back to front, in columns, every other line: it's a hidden text puzzle) and if this is done the Aumanac bonds with the reader, its covers forming a breastplate, the pages a robe and cloak, and the metal corner caps transforming into a helm. The Aumanac armour does not have a terribly high armour value but works more by providing beneficial effects (forcing opponents to fail or re-try attacks, permitting the hero to try again when they fail at something) and also meaning deus ex machina events happen to the hero a lot: it is, in fact, literal plot armour.
The Holy Laws Of Meryten
A set of laws devised to govern magic by some gods at the dawn of time: these were long since forgotten but are mostly technically still in force, meaning that a user who has properly read the book has the opportunity to resist almost preternaturally well or even produce a full counterspell any time they are targeted by a magical attack, as long as they can come up with a plausible sounding novel loophole or legal technicality that makes the action illegal. The book can only be properly memorised by one person at a time, because the lawyer who wrote it all down didn't want anyone stealing his business.
The Good Little Bullywug
A children's tale about a sad little bullywug (that is, a frog person, for those who do not know D&D monster lore). She wants to be a princess but turns out to actually just be a bullywug after all. The tale appears unimportant, but if a hero expresses sympathy for the bullywug and hugs or gives a kiss to the book, the bullywug will be summoned. She is neutral good, really really wants to help the heroes, and mostly has the stats of a bullywug, but is *completely indestructible by any means* - she could be lost by e.g. being portaled away, but no attacks or environmental hazards will ever affect her. She will also leave the party if they do too many evil deeds, because, well, she's literally a children's book character and doesn't want to be disappointed by you.
The Volumomanteion
A tabletop-game only option. Pick another book from nearby the gaming table (not a rulebook, ideally a novel). The user of the Oracle should roll d100, and count pages and pick a sentence depending on the phases of the moon:
- Crescent moon: Count from the back, first sentence on the page
- Waxing moon: Count from the front, last sentence on the page
- Full moon: Count from the front, first sentence on the page
- Waning moon: Count from the back, last sentence on the page
The reader then becomes the agent of this prophecy: they get a small penalty, at the GM's discretion, until they can reasonably argue that they have fulfilled the spirit of their selected sentence, at which point they get a small permanent bonus.
The Periplus, Commesian the Navigator
Often wrongly assumed to be the periplus (travel account) "of" Commesian, but actually Commesian transformed himself into a book to better record his voyages, which encompassed everywhere on the prime material plane. Commesian did so hundreds of years ago, but this means he can basically be used as a historial hitch-hiker's guide who can reveal the locations of lost treasure, cities, etc, often in the form of slightly annoying reminiscences about how everything was better when he was young. The book is sentient, but only talks if provided with incentives either by threatening its fabric or by coaxing it with offers of travel and stories of what the world is like now.
A History of Swords
This is a book that rewrites itself to be the history of whatever sword the reader is actually carrying and/or any swords in the room. Could reveal who was killed with them, those people's life stories, any magic item secrets, etc. It may reveal things about non-sword weapons but will be incredibly rude about their inferiority due to them not being swords.
The Prophecies of Ceraphai
The Prophecies is not, in fact, a book that may tell heroes prophecies about themselves: rather, it's a magical book that seeks to make the reader an agent of prophecy, and will open itself to pages relating to areas, families, or that it senses the heroes may be near. The prophecies will not always be happy ones, but the heroes can loophole them and the writing is often such to allow for this.
A prophecy being fulfilled will cause the book to replace that page with some information of use to the fulfiller – be that a small bit of local wisdom, the location of nearby treasure, or similar. Pointedly failing to fulfil a prophecy or refusing to, conversely, will cause the page to be filled with a minor curse, explosive runes, or similar.
Six example prophecies
1 - The last heir of (family) must admit their true love before the month ends
Note: This isn't necessarily a matchmaking task! Finding what they already love, in any sense of that term, and getting them to admit it should count. Though matchmaking might also work.
2 - The ruler of (place) is fated to die before the month ends
Note: actually easily loopholed by finding someone already on their deathbed and temporarily making them the ruler until the end of the month.
3 - There shall be no king/mayor/duke upon the throne of x hereafter
Note: just persuade them to change the titulature! Though having a revolution also works.
4 - Their bones shall be broken, their flesh burned, their home shall lie empty in the dark.
Note: bones and flesh can be purchased by the prophesy-holder at all good local butchers, thus becoming theirs. Their home doesn't have to be emptied for more than a night.
5 – Only when a sapling planted this year touches the roof of the tallest tower will the city be safe from the plague.
Note: the prophecy never states that the sapling's roots still need to be in the ground. Behold, a way to include plot-critical flowerpots and roof climbing into your fantasy worlds.
6 – The lovers shall never be allowed to marry without bringing bad luck to all the fishermen of the area, unless they dance their marriage dance upon the sea-floor.
Note: I don't have a good way to rule this one, but it is a really good way for someone who took control water or waterbreathing spells to have a moment to shine. Also, a scene where the heroes have to let the lovers keep dancing while fighting off an evil overlord's angry fish-men/drowned dead/giant doom nautilus might have something to it.
The Three Walled Castle
A children's book. When opened to a certain page and sung the right nursery rhymes the book opens out into a tiny castle full of little fey spirits who are excessively and bizarrely chivalric. The castle only has three walls, and takes up approximately a 4ft (1.2 metre) square. The inhabitants are tiny (7-10cm), equipped variously as knights, archers, and royals, and number around twenty: they are very persuadable to take on anything that can be made to sound like a chivalric enough task, but conversely will refuse to help with anything that sounds unchivalrous.
The Heresiarch
This book contains details of hundreds of lost heresies and minor gods whose cults were wiped out by various inquisitions and similar. Not all the gods in it are evil, but all of them are chaotic or otherwise opposed to the usual ordering of society. At least, that's a first impression. Heroes reading this book will actually tend to find more and more heresies or ideas that speak to their particular frustrations with the social order they find themselves in, as the book tries to give them the information and ideas to break out of those bonds or strictures - for better or for worse, as the book is an agent of heresy for its own sake.
The Doomscroll
When unrolled, the Doomscroll is always full of tiny annal entries containing the worst things happening in the world. This is useful for discerning what the heroes need to be doing in an up to the minute way, but there is a catch. It may cause temporary penalties to intellect and wisdom to use, and those who know of its existence, especially its mysterious original author, can manipulate it to show what they want the heroes to see.
Tapputi's Laboratory
Mostly an alchemy guide, but opening a hidden part of the book's cover correctly lets you into the extradimensional laboratory, which is a small dungeon-style adventure themed around potions and alchemy that needs clearing. If this is done, Tapputi's ghost will be found at the centre of the laboratory and will provide useful advice on potions beyond those which can normally be created by mortal kindreds.
The Nestognomeicon
The pages of this book are quite loose. All of them contain terribly done pictures of gnomes. If one falls out, a gnome is spawned. Note that the book is around 350 pages long so if all of them fall out at once there may be some issues.
The gnomes from the Nestognomeicon have entirely beetle-black eyes, a preternatural sense for where paintings, metal items, and mechanisms are, and a tendency to hoarding behaviour: they speak their own clicking and guttural language unknown to those around them. In general they will attempt to find a suitably safe, small space and busily start hoarding items that are precious to them there. They are otherwise, well, gnomes.
The lost librarians of Exilian hope you found these texts interesting and enlightening, and remind you that under no circumstances are readers allowed into the Forbidden Shelves of the site archives. Have you seen anything similar to these books in stories or campaigns, or do you have any entries to add? Do say, and let us know what you might do with these texts and ideas, in the thread below!
Exilian Chain Writing - 2023: complete story!
August 23, 2023, 05:16:52 PM
Chain Writing 2023: The Complete Story
By Seven Wonderful Chain Writers (edited by Spritelady)
Our chain writing tale is now complete, and I would like to say a huge thank you to everyone who took part (who are more than welcome to lay claim to their writing below, or leave it a mystery!). I really appreciate everyone's time and effort, and especially that everyone managed to return their writing well before the deadlines!
I think we have a really interesting story, and I'd love to hear everyone's thoughts. So without further ado, our fantasy tale...
There was time to spare, for once, but that night's journey was still uneasy.
Following her companion, the stocky little woman crept through unlit passageways with a level of quiet, slow purpose more usually reserved for snails than people. Light was not an option. Talking was not an option. Breathing was just about acceptable, as long as she held the imagined death-stare of a librarian in her mind to ensure, with withering glances, that she kept the noise down.
She adjusted her pince-nez and re-pinned a stray grey braid as she walked: there was no need for haste, and keeping her hands quietly busy helped with the nerves. The route was cool, even airy, but a nervous sweat still moistened her hands.
It took another hour of twists, turns, circles – some passages only opened if one went round a loop twice, or shut certain routes once every 20 minutes – but with her guide ahead of her, these were merely rituals rather than problems. She just had to be quiet enough not to attract undue attention: and as she'd never been good at attracting attention when it was frankly more than due, this was just fine.
At last, she gingerly stretched her legs down a ladder – this place felt built for someone at least half a foot taller, if built was even the correct term. There was light, finally: the woman and her guide saw each other, curiosity and fear mingled between them, for the first time. They had arrived.
"We can speak now. The guardians will not detect us here." Her companion said.
The woman's eyes widened as it threw back its hood. They had not known each other long, but she still found the appearance strange. Her guide was a birdlike creature, covered in crimson feathers. It had a curved, blue beak and tiny black eyes. Eyes that were fixated on what lay before them.
Dim green light was emanating from an immense golden cube in the middle of the cavernous room they found themselves in. Its sides were alive with glittering ornate glyphs which held unknown meaning. On each side of the cube were set four huge doors, each inlaid with a fist sized, glowing emerald.
Finally, she had found it. It was the device! She shuddered, thinking of the amazing and terrible things that could be done with it.
"Was it you that sent me the message about this?" The woman asked apprehensively, finally tearing her gaze away from the device.
"Yes, Briyya'' It said. Its beaked mouth was clumsy with her name. "You are the one who can operate it."
It was a statement, not a question. She had spent many years in the unseen corners of bookshops and libraries reading endless texts in the hopes of finding any mention of this mythical item. Her persistence had not been in vain. Nobody knew it better than her.
She gave a reluctant nod.
She pressed her left hand firmly against one of the emeralds. It was cold to the touch, yet glowing with heat. A wave of relaxation and a surge of energy hit her at the same time.
She said the words that she had practised a thousand times, her hand on a pomelo pressed against the kitchen wall. Hesitant at first, then louder, then chanting.
With her other hand on the door, she pushed. It gave way, not hinging but straight inward, as if carving a tunnel through solid gold. With her first step into the cube the pain started. Not nearly as bad as the scriptures had led her to believe. Her second step made her falter a little, but she knew she had to press on.
By now the pain was intense. Looking back she saw how far she had gone, the entrance a speck of light. It was excruciating, like being ripped apart, skin burning, blood boiling, bones twisting. She pushed on, her hand still on the emerald. No, in it. Past it. She entered the emerald, became it, its infinite reflections were her own, until finally she was reborn, stepping out all four sides of the cube.
Looking over one shoulder, then the other, she saw herselves. She was her body, cold but strong. She was her spirit, burning and free. She was her blood, flowing beautifully. She was her bones, crackling with power.
"Time to get to work," she said in unison.
*
Arrakam watched the human disappear into darkness and allowed himself a sigh of relief. He had worked for centuries to reach this point: hiding in the shadows of the human cities above; learning their language; stealing the materials he needed for his forgeries. "Scriptures" they called them, gullible creatures! He needed them no more: the Host - his Host - would soon emerge. He hoped there would be time for a little conversation with someone he respected.
At that moment, he heard footsteps in the corridor above him; he recognised them even after a millennium of separation. His sister Arrasai flung herself down the ladder and landed crouching, feathers erect and talons outstretched. Her eyes found his.
"Arrakam," she breathed, "What have you done?"
"It's good to see you too, sister," he replied, "I have released us from our imprisonment."
"You have broken our oath!"
"Not so. Our purpose is to protect the Dako from misuse by our own kind."
Arrasai hesitated for a moment, then approached the door. The light from the Dako was growing brighter by the minute, but the doorway remained shrouded in darkness.
"You put a human inside," she said, turning to face him again. "You know its brain can't cope."
"They were once little more than animals," he replied, "But they have grown to embrace power, even as we fear it. This will suffice."
"What happened to you, Arrakam?" she asked with a quivering voice. "You're barely anything like the Xellian I remember. You think I haven't heard of everything you've been doing?"
A sneer crossed Arrakam's face.
"What does it even matter? You come to lecture me, and call me oathbreaker? You think I enjoy this? Do you think that lowly of me? I am simply willing to do what must be done, even if it means not playing by their stupid rules anymore."
"So, it's all about trickery to you?"
"No, no... I detest trickery. But if we ourselves are to suffer deception, our hands are no longer tied. I'm sick of these false moral shackles. "
"If you'd prefer shackles of the iron variety, that can be arranged," Arrasai hissed. "Imprisonment would be a merciful sentence for your crimes."
Arrakam ruffled his feathers in impatience.
"The threat of punishment hasn't deterred me during my centuries of planning. Why should it stay my talons now, on the brink of victory? If you want to report me to the guardians, go fetch them and leave me to my work."
Arrasai sprang forward, her beak clicking in an aggressive battle cry. Arrakam widened his stance and prepared to ward off his sister's attack. They both noticed the changing light from the Dako at the same moment and stopped to stare.
The Host was emerging.
*
Briyya's many hands were a blur as they tapped the glyphs in a complex, rapid pattern. The interior of the cube flashed with thousands of faces, hummed with thousands of voices speaking a cacophony of dead languages she did not know. Yet Briyya could understand the meaning of the words in a corner of her consciousness which no longer belonged, entirely, to her.
Briyya was an elder by human standards, but she sensed the presence of much older minds swirling inside the Dako. The wisdom, prowess, and charisma of untold generations were preserved here, waiting to be channelled into a living vessel.
"Who shall I try on first?" she mused. But this was merely a rhetorical question, for one voice called to her louder than all the others. She knew who she must become.
Briyya now knew what the Dako was: knowledge. An archive with infinite revolutionary minds. She recognized some of them: Secundus the Silent, Beyonce. And the one who called to her: Seraphina, the librarian who'd protected the library of Xenaxos with her fiery blade. Briyya was a fan.
She spread her arms in the thick nothingness that surrounded her and whispered, "Seraphina, come to me," until she felt a slow dislodging of her mind. They were ready.
*
The two Xellians were peering at the figure emerging from the blinding light. "You are going to be in so much trouble," Arrasai hissed, whacking her brother's arm with a feathery slap.
"Be silent," Arrakam said, "and observe- we shall be free." She narrowed her beady eyes at him.
"You're allowed to act out at this age, but this is too much. You swore to mum a millennium ago that you would stop this!" Arrakam now turned to her, irritably. Just because he was going through puberty, people thought they could boss him around.
"You do not know what I have to endure-"
"High school isn't fun for anyone, Arrakam! We're not imprisoned, you-"
Before they could continue the family argument that had started 2000 years ago, they were interrupted by someone clearing their throat.
"The Host," Arrakam breathed. He spun around to meet his saviour- and froze.
There was an old lady. With Briyya's pince-nez. And a flaming letter opener.
"Hello. I am Seraphina. Is there a bathroom around? I haven't had a bladder in some time," she said calmly. Arrakam blinked.
"You are the Host?"
"The host? This is certainly not my home. Who's that behind you?"
"Are you here to incinerate my enemies? And... get me out of school?" the birdling tried. Arrasai was suppressing laughter. Seraphina straightened her back.
"No, I thought I might continue my research with Briyya. Or perhaps... bake a cake." Arrakam buried his talons in his legs, pulling out feathers in the rage rising inside him.
"Are you alright, son? Perhaps some tea?" Seraphina asked.
"You have got to be f*cking kidding me!" Arrakam screeched.
Three Accidents in Andalucía
March 26, 2023, 01:44:52 PM
Three Accidents in Andalucía
By rbuxton
My brother arrived in Spain in January 2020 and, with one thing and another, it was three years before I managed to visit him. By then he was living in Madrid and I used that as a start point for a three week tour of Andalucía, the southernmost of mainland Spain's "autonomous communities" (they are very autonomous, by the way). I was partly drawn to this region by its mild winter weather, but mainly by its promise of history, culture and mountains. The title of this article is not entirely honest: my first two stops, and my first "accident", were actually in the central province of Castilla-La Mancha.
Humans were living permanently in caves in Andalucía from at least 25 000 years ago. The area was then colonised by Phoenicians, Romans, Visigoths, Moors (Arabs and Berbers) and the Christian Kingdoms which would become modern Spain. In the 1st century AD a Jewish community – the Sephardim – settled in the area and experienced varying degrees of persecution until they were violently expelled in about the 14th century. Although they contain art and architecture from many of these different eras, the cities of the region do not feel like monuments to racial and religious harmony. The dominance of one group would come abruptly to an end and the conquerors would make their own mark on top of the old – quite literally, in places like Granada. Geographically Andalucía is fairly mountainous with several national parks and its dramatic coastline includes the Costa del Sol. There are some fertile river valleys to the west but to the east it borders a desert – the only one in Europe.
Many of Andalucía's cities have an "old city" area which is clearly defined: on a hill in Toledo, an island in Cádiz. In Cordoba, however, it goes on forever, and the buildings there were noticeably lower and the narrow streets less gloomy as a result. Getting lost in these areas is part of the sightseeing experience, and the main buildings of interest sometimes spring out at you without warning. I saw a number of open-topped tour buses and wondered about their efficacy: a big bus in these places is about as useful as in, say, Venice. "There's the roof of the cathedral... about a mile away, and the palace next to it... you'll have to walk that bit."
Madrid
On my first day in Spain's capital I saw the cathedral and palace then took the metro to the Buen Retiro Park. I walked through it, past the lake and monument to King Alfonso XII, to the Reina Sofia art gallery. This is home to Pablo Picasso's Guernica, a vast black and white painting depicting the 1937 Nazi bombing of the eponymous town. Next I went to the Temple of Debod, an ancient Egyptian temple gifted to Spain in 1968. It was moved piece by piece to a hilltop in the city centre, where it has a commanding view over parks and the distant mountains. My brother took me into those mountains the following day, to Navacerrada, where a ski resort looks down over a reservoir. We followed a river valley up to the remnants of the snowline, where the path got slippery underfoot. Huge vultures wheeled around us, riding the air currents with hardly a beat of their wings.
In between the days out, tapas and live music I tried to plan my next stop. I was dismayed to see that a train journey to Seville would be expensive and take up most of a day. Much better to take a bus for €5 to a city just south of Madrid.
Toledo
Perched on a rock and surrounded on three sides by the Tagus river gorge, Toledo is spectacular. The city is famous – as anyone who's seen the film Highlander will know – for its steel making, and the souvenir shops are packed with swords. I dragged myself up the slope alongside its 16th century walls towards a hostel with a sunny roof terrace. I visited the complex of the Santa Fe convent, a series of buildings which was variously used as a Moorish palace, Castillian castle, base for a knightly order, nunnery, girls' school and now eclectic modern art gallery. The following day I took a bus to a viewpoint on the far side of the gorge, walked back across a Roman bridge and took in the synagogue, alcázar (castle) and cathedral. The latter was one of the most incredible buildings I've ever been in; a highlight was its three metre high gold and silver monstrance.
Now to my first "accident": sitting down to a meal of pasta and tomato soup (I'd misread the tin) at the hostel I heard drumming. I was aware that February was carnival month in much of Andalucía and thought my arrival might have coincided with a rehearsal. I was wrong: the main parade was that evening and it wound through the city streets and down, down, down to the river. I felt like the happiest tourist alive as I followed the dancers, musicians, fishermen and weeping clowns/kings/queens. The noise was sometimes deafening and the sense of community contagious. Only the pigeons, startled off distant balconies, seemed perturbed.
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Accident the First- being swept up in Toledo's carnival. Great for your correspondent, less so for the local columbidae.
Granada
A dramatic bus ride through the foothills of the Sierra Nevada took me to Granada, medieval seat of the Nasrid dynasty. I had come to see the Alhambra: essentially a city on a hill of its own consisting of palaces, castles and gardens with some of the best preserved buildings of their kind in the world. I spent a lot of time gazing at views of and from it, and had booked a four hour guided tour well in advance. Wandering the labyrinth of beautifully plastered rooms and courtyards was very special. My guide pointed to some interesting features of Islamic architecture: fountains, for example, are always small to provide a peaceful murmur of water, unlike the thundering status symbols of European aristocracy. Islamic buildings are usually plain and unadorned on the exterior so, when the Christians conquered the Alhambra, they slapped their own richly decorated palace in the middle of it. When Sultan Boabdil, weakened by infighting in his own court, surrendered Granada the centuries of Moorish rule in the Iberian Peninsula were over. This was in 1492, the same year Columbus set sail on his fateful voyage across the Atlantic.
Málaga
The warm weather of coastal Málaga was a relief after the time spent in the mountains, and helped me get over a cold. The city's reputation as a mere party destination for British sunseekers is undeserved – though there's certainly a large amount of Sangria available. I explored its waterfront and Roman and medieval buildings, many of which are clustered around a steep, pine-covered hill which affords brilliant panoramas of the city. The cathedral (affectionately known as the "One-armed Lady" since the second of its two towers was never finished) was lit up beautifully every evening by the setting sun. From Málaga I did a day trip to the Nerja caves, a huge network of chambers with artwork dating back 42 000 years. Tourists cannot visit these light-sensitive paintings but it's still worth seeing the extraordinary speleothems (the general term for cave mineral formations) which include a 32-metre high column. There was plenty of information about the area on a "nature walk" above the caves, which I extended towards a beach for a freezing cold 30-second swim.
Andalucía Day was fast approaching and I asked Pedro, the receptionist, if this would affect long distance public transport. "I don't know," he said, like everybody else, "But you know you should go to my home town. You will see something very folk, it's not for the tourists. Do the pilgrimage to Santa Fe, it's maybe one hour. There will be music. I have to work". Unsure of what I was letting myself in for I took a train into the Sierra del Gibralmora. Santa Fe turned out to be a sharp rocky outcrop above the town of Pizarra and the four-hour round trip had great views back to the coast. I returned to find the streets of the town had been closed to vehicles and there were horses everywhere. People drinking beer on horseback, chatting on horseback, watching the musicians and Flamenco dancers on horseback. I, meanwhile, was making an ass of myself trying to order street food in my faltering Spanish – it was clear there weren't many tourists around. I returned to the hostel, grinning at my accidental good fortune, and showed Pedro my videos. "Hey," he cried, "That's my house!"
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Accident the Second - an unexpected trip to Santa Fe where your correspondent found himself lacking the apparently obligatory horse.
Sevilla
I only had a day in the fourth largest city in Spain so I spent most of it exploring on foot. It was nice to stand by the river and imagine Columbus setting sail all those years ago. The city is home to the third-largest cathedral in Christendom which, unfortunately, seemed to have the third-largest queue as well, and it was the same with the alcázar. I don't feel I did Sevilla justice, but I did have some very nice empanadas. It was time to chill for a few days in a laid-back coastal town.
Cádiz
Cádiz is situated on an island connected to the mainland by a narrow isthmus just on the Atlantic side of the Strait of Gibraltar. The Phoenicians were the first people to spot its potential as a trade post in the 7th Century BC and they walled off the isthmus to create a fortress. The 16th Century Puertas de Tierra still divide the old city from the new; another notable feature is the large number of sea-facing merchant watchtowers dotted around. I climbed a tower, went to the cathedral and had a great time in the extensive fish market, where I bought a big bag of prawns for €4 (they were no longer wriggling, unlike the crabs). Cádiz's place in history was further cemented when it became the de facto capital of Spain during the Peninsula War. It was here that the liberal constitution of 1812 was proclaimed, and this left-wing attitude has been proudly maintained ever since. It is most evident today, I'm told, in its riotous annual carnival, which I had just missed.
Or so I thought.
I began to suspect something was up when I saw a group of middle-aged men in silly costumes waving inflatable guitars at each other on the Saturday night. By Sunday afternoon, crowds had started to gather at the steps of various buildings around town, which served as stages. These were filled up apparently at random by groups of performers in even sillier costumes – the group of large rubber ducks was a personal favourite. The acts divided roughly into two types. The first I would describe as "street pantomime": two people – friends or a husband-and-wife team – would regale passers by with stories, jokes and songs with the help of kazoos and wooden sticks. Afterwards they would give out badges in exchange for coins and spend the coins on beer and sherry ("Please fund our alcoholism," read one sign, in English). The second type would be a group of ten or more singers with guitars, drums, cymbals and seriously good four-part harmonies. The words were entirely lost on me which was a shame as the crowd were laughing and joining in with everything, especially the drinking. I'm pretty sure, however, that the nun was inviting the fireman in through her window for some distinctly un-nunnish activities.
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Accident the Third - because why have one accidental carnival stop when you could have three?
Córdoba
My last stop was another former Moorish stronghold with remains of walls dotted around. My first view of the cathedral and alcázar was from the far side of the Guadalquivir river, where there are historical bridges and watermills. The alcázar here was actually built by Christian kings after they conquered the city in 1236. More recently some exquisite Roman mosaics were moved here, but the gardens with their rows of fountains were the highlight for me. I went to the Museum of the Sephardic Jews in an old town house, which was very moving. Many converts to Christianity continued to practise Judaism in secret – an activity the 15th century Inquisition sought to stamp out. Just across the road was a synagogue, forgotten after its conversion to a church but now restored. The city's famous Mezquita is another example of a religious building changing over time: it's a cathedral built to completely cover and encapsulate an earlier mosque. The first thing you see on entering is some of the 800 or so columns supporting arches stretching away into the gloom. I finished up with a tour of the churches to the east of the old city, then it was time for a bus back to Madrid and a flight home.
I'm not sure how to wrap this up. It was a brilliant three weeks and I'd recommend it to anyone. The bigger cities could easily be done as a weekend getaway or, for a longer tour, Andalucía could be combined with Portugal, Valencia and Barcelona or even Morocco (an hour away by boat). There may be a few errors in the dates and facts in my account so please let me know if you spot any. Regarding my three accidents, I suppose I was simply in the right place at the right time. If that doesn't encourage you to put a bag on your back and go somewhere new I don't know what will. Thanks for reading.
Editor's Note: If you enjoyed this article and want to read more travel writing by Exilian members, please check out the forum's Travel Writing Index, which includes a range of members' travels and thoughts on places from Tunis to Tbilisi and more besides!
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