Of Storms and Silence - An Exilian Chain-Writing Story
October 13, 2018, 10:39:16 PM
Of Storms and Silence
An Exilian Chain-Writing Story
By Rory HJ, rbuxton, Phoenixguard, Jake, Suzi, Caradilis, Jubal, and Lizard
Atop Three Kings' Crag, the North Wind raged. It was a storm to uproot oak trees, to topple houses, to send all creatures scurrying to shelter. It cut through all the layers of fur, leather and wool I was wearing, chilling me to the bone. I scarce dared to stand for fear of being plucked from the rock and carried to ancestors know where. But I had business to be about that night, business that at its completion would uproot royal trees, topple noble houses and send oppressors scurrying for shelter. At least this high above the clouds, there was no rain to make the mountaintop yet more miserable.
Crouched low against the mighty gusts and roped together for safety, my companions and I inched our way across the bare rock. Ahead of us, Kelgar's Rest – the smallest of the three barrows – seemed to glow faintly from within, a promise of warmth in the darkness. In fair weather, the journey from the top of the path to the barrow entrance was barely a minute's stroll. That night, it was an eternity of biting cold.
At long, long, last, we reached the door. Pressing tight against it to seek respite from the wind, I beat against it with the haft of my axe-turned-walking pole.
"Who goes there?" asked a voice, muffled by stone.
"Can't we do the interrogation inside? It's freezing out here," I replied, more concerned for comfort than security at this point.
"Spoken like a true spy. Who knocks?"
"I am Ren," I said, "With me are Monok, Turin and Pey: three men with only one tongue between them."
The door opened and I ducked inside to find a young Southern woman, weathered beyond her years, staring at the two mutes behind me. She rushed to greet them in their traditional way – foreheads touching – and, though her words were alien to me, her relief at seeing her kinsmen was palpable. Turin and Pey could only murmur in reply. I turned away to find two small children, a boy and a girl, at my feet.
"Isil vai," I stammered, and they responded in kind.
Discomforted by the children's stares, I looked about the room: a chimney hole had been made in the barrow's stones; there were furs aplenty, but little else. Turin and Pey came inside to greet the children, and Monok heaved himself in after them.
"I apologise," said the woman, "I am Surimay. You are welcome to shelter with us tonight, but you'll find no food here."
"We have plenty for us all", I replied, as I sought comfort against the stones.
"How can you bear," growled Monok, "To shelter in this tomb?"
"It will be our tomb before Midwinter," was the curt response, "We have nowhere else to go."
The children, ignorant of their mother's words, looked at us in confusion. Seeing our expressions, Surimay continued:
"I'd rather we die before they take our tongues."
* * * * *
I awoke with a start.
Around me, the other inhabitants of the barrow continued to slumber in their bedrolls, oblivious to my current panicked state.
I heard a snuffling on the other side of the door. Something was out there.
A slow scratching sound emanated from out in the cold, like a gigantic clawed hand dragging down the hard stone door.
My teeth chattered, not from the cold this time, but from fear. I'd never seen a Silencer, and everyone I had met were not able to tell me of them, but I knew that one was outside the door at that moment. Whether it had managed to follow my own trail, or if it were able to track the scent of its former prey, did not matter.
It was there, looking for a way in.
Slowly, quietly, I gathered my things, searching desperately for another way out.
The barrow was too well built for escape. Though furs hid the sharp edges of the smooth metal, silencer's metal, there was no yielding. No exit.
I was fortunate among our broken people, not only had I so far avoided silencers I possessed a modicum of knowledge picked up from those few who had learnt before silencers rooted out our last settlements and we were truly scattered. The vague probing behind the door, as the natural sounds faded a low metallic whine began to fill the air rising in pitch and intensity before an earth-shattering crash sounded, again. And again. The door began to shudder and falter before the onslaught. There was no time.
From my pack I drew a glistening metal rod which seemed to hum in its natural surroundings. The tongueless drew back in fright; the woman spoke over the ear-piercing whine "What are you? That thing is of the silencers".
I could not reply, entranced by the radiance. The soft glow of white behind the furs had been replaced by a dancing brilliance that assaulted my sense. The rod - the Baton - danced in conjunction as I wove it in the first form. New shrieks broke the night. The silencer seemed to grow more frantic, desperately whining. As the door buckled and I caught my first glimpse of the twisted metal and flesh which made the monstrous silencer.
It advanced in triumph.
Behind me, awakened from its slumber, a silencer emerged.
I realised that, in my fear, I had stopped moving. The Baton was still humming, held in the first form by my previous movements, but it no longer seemed to affect the two silencers as it had been. I knew from my research that the first form would only aggravate them, but was a necessary precursor to the end form that would allow a temporary reprieve. Quickly, I resumed my movements, weaving the Baton once again into the second form.
Sensing the change in the Baton, the two silencers once again began to move. However now they seemed dazed and I knew this was the work of the Baton. They shuffled sluggishly, as though half awake, towards me- they were pulled by the workings of the Baton. I began to weave the third form and finally dared myself to hope that I could pull this off. As long as nothing broke the trance that the Baton was creating, I could get myself and these people out alive.
Fate, it seemed, had other ideas.
As I began to weave the fourth and final form with the Baton, one of the barrow inhabitants finally decided that he should run. The noise he created broke the trance and I stared in horror as the two beasts advanced on me.
Okay, so subtly sneaking away wasn't going to work this time. Fine. Violence it is then. "Run!" I shouted at the others, charging right at the two beasts, Baton still in hand. Hungry? Choke on this! I jammed the Baton right between their razor-sharp metallic teeth as I slid through the small space between them. This gave me just the second I needed to pull Songweaver from my belt. The albinium blade gleamed bright blue, humming contently and vibrating in my hand, thirsty to bite into the Starforge Titanium skin of the Silencers.
I had only done this once before. I had sworn to never do it again. Songweaver was one of only seven albinium blades, the only swords that could cut through Starforge Titanium, but there were consequences. Destroy a Silencer and the Lords of History – I did not name them, take it up with them if you have issues – would know immediately where you were. They would find me, but for now, that didn't matter. The others still had a chance to escape.
The growling beasts were done chewing down on my Starforge Baton and turned to face me once again. The others had all made it outside. I had to believe that they would make it far enough away before the death of the Silencers would home in the airstrike. I lifted Songweaver and braced myself for impact. "These are my words. This is where I stand." I thought, as I made my blade sing.
It sang of the Lords of History, the Takers of Tongues. It sang hope beyond death, joy beyond fury, and freedom beyond chains.
The blade tasted the shapeless, metal-jawed silencers, slicing the flesh-knots and the cacophony of jarring, jutting metal, singing lost harmony past the titanium skin and into the dark knots of energy that kept the silencers... alive, if they could be truly said to be living. Fighting is usually a grim, physical, sweaty business, but the blade of songs made it almost serene.
The two silencers slumped where they fell. And now they knew.
I looked down at myself. Beneath the heavy furs and gloves, I quivered. I took a glove off for a moment and just stared at my hand – earth-dark with a pale palm, as my family's always were – and wondered what that hand might do with its fingers round such a hilt. I had sworn never to take that risk out of fear. That night, caught between the song of a sword and the cry of the thunder, I found the courage to become the oathbreaker I was destined to be.
Stepping up to the door, I passed out of the barrow. None of the Southerners could be seen. The dark, close curls of my hair tossed in the breeze, and lighting ripped across the sky. I held my sword aloft, and the sky seemed to roll around me. I screamed my name – my real name – and in the distance, shapes loomed through the clouds.
* * * * *
The maelstrom of storm-clouds, flickering with forked lightening, swirled, parted, and closed again around the man who held his sword high, challenging the night. He was manic, frenzied, broken by time and fear and held no qualms with his final stand being here, fighting off the ships which loomed on the horizon and were ready to purge.
Malcette watched, as if seated behind her pilot's shoulder, but remained within the safety of the Lords of History's court. She was fascinated. This provincial man, haggard by years of hard work and fear, so small when all things were considered... He should stand in the darkness, as if his albinium blade stood any chance of taking out three strike ships cruising at a thousand feet? It was absurd, comical, really. She sat forwards, over the communications array, and called off the strike.
"Lady Malcette?" The squadron leader's voice crackled, the signal only just penetrating the storm.
"I said 'disengage'." The lightening stopped, the thunder gave one last clap, and the clouds began to lessen. The last she saw of the man, before the strike ships turned, was a look on his face somewhere between disbelief and triumph.
If he should fancy himself an Oathbreaker, she thought, then he would have to learn. They were dead, extinct, and it would do everyone good to relive the pain and remember.
She did not look forwards to the task ahead of her, breaking the people, destroying this man. But it had to be done. Before things could get any worse.
This is one of three stories written as part of our summer 2018 chain writing project. You can read the other two here and here, and find the project wrap-up announcement here.
Editor's Note: This was the one of the three chains that was designated from the outset as "definitely SFF" though the other chains managed to fit that bill equally well. Storms and Silence ended up being a fairly consistent narrative throughout, and was probably in some ways the smoothest of the three resulting stories. The cliffhanger ending does rather beg for more, though...
The Editor Is Now Concerned About: Silencers. Silencers are scary.
Last of a Kind - An Exilian Chain-Writing Story
October 13, 2018, 10:39:08 PM
Last of a Kind
An Exilian Chain-Writing Story
By Loren, Andreas, ArtDodge, Tusky, Samuel Cook (aka Tar-Palantir), HenriNatalie, Caradilis, and Andrew Conway
If she could wipe out her own race, she would. But it is not time yet.
She allows the idiosyncrasies to snowball and explode in one large sitting, like a black holocaustic balloon of smoke. Anything less would be an insult to her years of precise planning.
She is at best a troll and at worst a misanthrope. The neurosis of her own kind creeps under her skin and annoys the crap out of her. The best part is she understands completely this neurosis, a pattern that has dominated her for the first 18 years of her life. She has been a nervous wreck. She refuses to spawn, even with elite specimens declared the best of her kind, to bring more little maniac Booyians into this already hysteric world.
She is obsessive with staging a reform – one that could turn back the clock and restore life proper on New Earth, and perhaps bring back the long-forgotten prestigious race. One that has tickled her fancy, one that she has for so long yearning to be part of, one that she could turn her back on her ascendants for, one that could undisputedly be the rightful ruling species, one that could be her downfall.
She cannot knock before it is time. Instead, she waits. Btobo is waiting as well, she knows. He is sat upright behind his desk, waiting for her to be done waiting.
'He will see you at 0900 hours.'
This is the statement Btobo's secretary made. It is a reality which has not yet come to pass, but a reality nonetheless.
She looks at her watch, an old thing from an old world, from a dead people, a bit of guidance to cling to amid the uncertainty. She thinks about the reality that is her plan and a shade of purple creeps into her skin tone. A balled up tentacle trembles as her thoughts drift. They had it all figured out, time and words and order, all of it was once theirs to understand, to command, and they are no more.
She will knock in thirteen seconds and Btobo will see no purple. She will speak and her words will not be reality.
At one second to 0900 hours, she raises her arm and it coils around the plain knocker. Thrice, she lifts the iron ring and thrice, at equidistant intervals, metal slams into wood.
The door swings open, their eyes meet, and Btobo nods his approval.
The forgotten race used greetings of varying formality, sometimes pleasantries and even physical contact, but the Booyians only incline their heads, confirming, 'Yes, you are who I expected. You are who I have business with.'
'So, tell me what happened?' Btobo asks.
'I had it again' I answered. 'Another attack. Suddenly, I could not breathe, I started shaking and everything turned dark around me. I got lost, forgot where and who I was and what I was going. I kept my focus on my breathing. I do not know for how long. I closed my eyes. And I got lost in this darkness. I felt cold and empty. As if I was about to die; as if this darkness was my path. But I was not afraid. I was just empty... inside'.
'Do you take your medication?' Btobo looked disinterested.
'Yes, I do' I answered. 'But it is not enough. I need something stronger. It is not working.'
'I cannot give anything else now - it should be enough. You must keep on taking it and it will work. Now please, you have to leave'
'But I cannot go back to work, I need to have a break. I am afraid I will make a fatal mistake '
'Just be more concentrated and take your medication. Your condition will improve. Now go. Your time is over'
'Yes, but what if it doesn't?
'In that case, we will find another solution, but you may not like it.'
She found it frustrating that so much of their discourse had to be hidden in code and double meaning. It was a necessary evil, however. The ministry was monitored too heavily and Btobo worked so deep within it that if they ever spoke frankly it would undoubtedly mean a swift end to both them, and the others involved in the plan.
'So you'd like me to leave... now' She asked with a laboured pause.
He nodded.
She had her answer. He'd got to the limits of what he could provide her. It meant the reform was coming, and much sooner than she had expected, or hoped. It was welcome news. Very soon perhaps she could be freed from these afflictions and affectations of a civilization she had no desire to be a part of.
With a slight nod in reply she stood and left. She felt a strange mixture of heady elation and a sense of deep foreboding of what must come next.
She made her way out of the building to the street. Despicable, chittering pen pushers in suits rushed here and there, oblivious to how futile their manic endeavours were. Endless rush hour traffic crawled past. She could see Eress waiting for her in the massive truck across the road. She ran over, dodging a few cars which honked in protest, and jumped in the passenger seat.
'Ok, there's no more' She said.
Eress smiled. She started the thunderous engine, and they pulled away.
Eress asked 'So, it is time to leave, then?'
She replied 'Yes. Now. We must leave.'
The rest of the journey passed in silence. Both occupants of the truck were too unsure of what lay ahead and whether the plan would work to engage in any unnecessary and probably pointless chitchat. In all likelihood, they would both be dead soon. Only the occasional pulsating patch of red on their skins belied the anxiety they both felt.
The truck pulled up at the deserted hangar, far away from prying eyes. This was the last consignment of materials and supplies. They loaded them quickly into the vessel, getting ever more nervous as the minutes passed. Surely they'd be discovered? Surely someone would shout 'STOP!' any second?
But nothing happened and soon the loading was complete. They both entered the vessel and began the pre-flight checks. Still no sound of sirens or signs of alarm. They couldn't quite believe that everything was working so far.
It was finally time to leave. Leave this accursed civilisation and, in doing so, destroy it. The viral vials were secure – once they were in orbit, they'd rain death on the unsuspecting Booyians, her own race. They deserved it. And then, with the second set of vials, they could seed the cleansed biosphere and bring back the rightful rulers. The galaxy, if it cared, would thank them for it.
They initiated the launch sequence.
5,
4,
3,
2,
1.
With the buzzing sound of the engine and raising dust the spacecraft took off. All had gone according to plan. Now was the critical moment, the whole plan hinged on. Btobo promised to distract the authorities that heavily guarded the airspace. But would it work? They could not be sure. All they could do was follow the plan.
As they had reached the perfect distance to New Earth, Jurou hesitated for a moment, looked at her beloved planet for the last time - how small and insignificant it seemed now - and pushed the button that released the vials into space. She watched them sail onto earth on their tiny parachutes and saw how New Earth was shrouded by a reddish-grey cloud. A deep feeling of woe swept over her and the tentacles on her head wound up on top of it. The first part of the plan was herewith realised.
Tense, Jurou now looked at her watch. Its arms still moved, albeit according to another time. She had learnt to interpret it correctly, so that she knew when to release the second set of vials. Jurou fathomed that after doing so she will have ushered in a new era. An era of peace and respect. The so-called Prestigious Race would once again not know war nor conflict. Wherever its seed fell on New Earth the Prestigious Race would settle and adapt to their surroundings perfectly. Each population would develop friendly relations with others and together they would prosper anew.
It was time. She turned her chair to the other side of the control panel and her hand reached for the red and black lever that would release the second set of vials. This was the moment all her efforts had been working towards. Her Prestigious Race. They would be so grateful to her for bringing them back. She would be revered, finally. She pulled the lever and a second patch of vials sailed down towards the planet below. Jurou smiled. She had prevailed. New Earth was cleansed and soon the Prestigious Race would be ruling it again, in peace and prosperity, and Jurou, she would be there every step of their way.
But there was not to be peace. There was not to be prosperity. There was not to be a Prestigious Race. It had all been a lie. The Booyians had glorified this mysterious species who had built so many wonders on New Earth. They had named the planet and built the cities. The Booyians never built anything. They never had to. The elaborate structures of stone and steel had been good enough, and they reminded them of what the Booyians had seen as a more glorious time, a time of prosperity and mystical inventions, when great cities were built and when there were still heroes. But the people who lived in those cities first were no heroes. They were monsters, who knew no peace, only greed. And their inventions, they were not meant for mysterious things, as the Booyians had thought. They were meant for war.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Sarah pushed her chair away from the monitor and shook her head in disgust. "I guess we can kill this emulation." She made a gesture in the control space, and New Earth was nothing but a collection of log files.
Sergei looked up from the novel he was reading. "Not again? I thought we had it this time."
"Yep, total species extinction in 18.3 gigaseconds. Terrorist attack using bioweapons."
"But they were doing so well. Strong central government, scientific research, a space program... Let's try again with more deference to authority. Perhaps some sheep genes as well as the octopus, turtle, and magpie?"
"I think it's time to give up on the air breathing octopuses. We've run twenty nine emulations now, and the best one only lasted less than 40 gigaseconds. We need to go back and look at the bears again."
Sergei shook his head in frustration. "Environmental collapse every time with the bears. Twenty runs, and they all ended the same way. Overfishing, overeating. You can't build a decent civilization with a species that hibernates. It has to be octopuses. They are intelligent, they have fine motor skills and mainpulative ability. Just get them out of the water so they can learn metallurgy. Let's try one more time."
Sarah shrugged. "OK, one more octopus run, and then we do the bears again. I think there's a hummingbird sequence we can add to prevent hibernation, and some sloth to slow down the metabolism."
Sergei nodded, and began to set up another emulation run. Beneath the orbiting DNA bank, an empty planet turned, and the last two surviving humans tried to work out how to repopulate it.
This is one of three stories written as part of our summer 2018 chain writing project. You can read the other two here and here, and find the project wrap-up announcement here.
Editor's Note: This was the one that I'd mentally pegged as "maybe this won't end up as Sci Fi". You... can see how well that ended up. It's a twisty narrative, but I think wrapped up very neatly in a way that actually drew pretty well on the strange octopoid life story that emerged in the early parts of it. This chain was the first to be completed, and holds an impressive record for fastest turnaround time on a section - part 4 of this was emailed back to me twenty-one minutes after I'd sent it to Sam Cook, which is certainly a record marker for future chain writers to have a crack at beating!
The Editor Is Now Concerned About: Whether octopuses and bears are really the best two options here. Axolotls may be underestimated as a possibility?
A Cartload of Cartography 3: Projections and the Present Day
September 30, 2018, 04:07:03 PM
A Cartload of Cartography 3: Projections and the Present Day
By Tar-Palantir
By Tar-Palantir
This is the third and last part of "A Cartload of Cartograhpy", Tar-Palantir's article series looking at the history of maps and mapmaking! You can read part one, on ancient and medieval maps, here, and part two, on early modern mapping, here.
From the 18th century onwards, cartography pretty much becomes a case of increasing precision and accuracy, often in the service of imperial ambitions, and greatly helped by the invention of accurate marine chronometers in the later 18th century, making the determination of longitude possible. As states became more territorially-based, mapping and defining that territory became more important, so national mapping agencies begin to appear, charged with charting the homeland and its colonies in exacting detail, usually through thorough triangulation-based surveying. More sophisticated administrative structures also needed maps for things such as accurate taxation and governance. As machines started to become more involved and producing maps became easier, special-purpose maps, showing, say, the distribution of one kind of thing also became more common – say, regions where malaria was endemic. Fast forward to the current day, and maps are usually digitised, with all the possibilities that entails – cartograms, multiple layers of information and so on. Another big development is the use of contour lines and symbols for different kinds of land cover and features of interest – rather than representing a forest by drawing lots of little trees, modern maps will colour the area green or fill it with some sort of tree symbol. Rather than a little drawing of a town, there'll be a dot of the relevant size and style. And so on.
The important thing to think about here is that your map should reflect the technological level of the civilisation. If you're aiming for something, say, 18th-19th century, a hand-drawn look would be appropriate, but you're going to need to make sure it's pretty accurate. For a 20th-21st century look, you might want to consider using some GIS software (QGIS is free and fairly straightforward to create maps in – there are tutorials online) to make your map, for a digital look. And, of course, if you're aiming for something from the future, make sure to make your map look futuristic. In any case, make sure you include things like scale bars, meanings of abbreviations or foreign words, a colour and symbol legend if relevant, and so on.
At the same time, decorative maps are still very much a thing in this day and age, so a more old-style map would work, but you'd have to make sure you have a good in-universe reason for it being relevant.
That concludes our whistle-stop tour of cartographic history. Hopefully that's given you a few ideas for how you could make the map of your world feel more authentic – remember, the important thing is to create something that looks as if the culture and technology of your world could have produced it. So, if you're writing something faux-medieval, a clean digital map of the entire world is not a good idea; similarly, if you're more futuristic, a hand-drawn and wildly-inaccurate map is not really suitable. Happy mapping!
A Note On Projections
One other thing to bear in mind is the issue of map projections. It is, of course, impossible to accurately represent the surface of a sphere on a flat continuous 2D plane (of course, one solution to this is to present your map as a globe, but, depending on how you're aiming to present your map, that may not be feasible). There is, inevitably, a distortion of area, shape or position. Over the centuries, cartographers have come up with all sorts of different projections to minimise this issue in different ways, but which one is the 'best' really depends on your purpose. As stated above, the Mercator projection is great for regional nautical charts, but its very obvious and dramatic distortion of apparent area and shape at high latitudes means it doesn't work so well in depicting the entire globe. If you're aiming to produce a truly-accurate, modern-style map, therefore, you should investigate the range of projections available and pick one that suits – which one that is will depend very much on your particular requirements. Modern GIS software will easily allow you to change projections, so don't worry about having to work out the maths yourself.
However, if your map is meant to be from a pre-Enlightenment period, you can pretty much ignore this issue. The intrinsic inaccuracies in earlier maps mean that projection issues are negligible – it's only once you've got accurate positional data that projecting it properly becomes a real concern. If you do want to think about projections, though, the Mercator one is perhaps the easiest to use (hence its enduring popularity). This represents the surface of a sphere as if it were the unrolled surface of a cylinder, so lines of longitude become straight, parallel lines, much like lines of latitude (and that also shows you why it tends to infinity at the Poles). In other words, you can define a grid of parallel lines and use that to structure your map. But, if your map is hand-drawn based on hearsay from travellers, for instance, I really wouldn't bother...
A Cartload of Cartography 2: Beyond the Middle Ages
September 23, 2018, 01:46:54 PM
A Cartload of Cartography 2: Beyond the Middle Ages
By Tar-Palantir
By Tar-Palantir
Welcome to the second part of this series, on Early Modern maps! You can check the first part, on ancient to medieval maps, out here.
1. Eight leaves of the Catalan Atlas, from 1375.
Once we hit the 15th century, something a bit more like the modern map hoves into view. This is largely driven by advances in seafaring, spearheaded by Portugal and the Catalans. As long-distance voyages became more common, especially ones that involved potentially being out-of-sight of land for a while, actually accurate maps became more important. People could measure latitude pretty well by this point, as the astrolabe began to be replaced by the cross-staff and then the backstaff, making the measurement relatively accurate and simple. However, longitude was still problematic, as its accurate measurement relies on being able to accurately measure time, which was beginning to be resolved on land with better timepieces, but was still impossible at sea, as mechanical devices quickly accumulated error due to the motion of the ship and the excess of water and salt throwing out their delicate mechanisms. The alternative was dead reckoning, where you measure the distance you've sailed on a given bearing to plot your course. This works fairly well in sight of land, where you can correct against known coastal features, but, in the open ocean or along unfamiliar coasts, rapidly becomes inaccurate. Hence, maps from this period tend to look fairly decent in a north-south direction, but get east-west ones often quite wrong – Africa, for instance, usually ends up looking much wider than it actually is.
2. Mercator's map, 1569. Public domain via Wikipedia.
The late-14th century Catalan Atlas (Figure 1) is perhaps the most impressive map of this kind - the Mediterranean basin is rendered with a high level of accuracy, but as you move farther afield, this accuracy begins to wane. This map also draws very heavily on the mappa mundi tradition, with various myths and legends depicted in its farther-flung reaches. Most portolan charts were far less elaborate and only showed outlines of coasts with coastal towns and features named.
Portolan charts were produced for a specific purpose for a specific group of people and new ones were usually treated as state secrets, so weren't available to the general public. However, a more enquiring attitude to the world, overseas exploration (primarily for trade at this stage, not empire) and increasing rejection of Catholic dogma, also meant geographical information was more sought after by non-mariners, so we see the first atlases compiled; the very first, titled simply Atlas, including a world map (Figure 2) by Mercator in 1569, marking a shift in European cartographic power to the Netherlands. The work associated with the Netherlandish school of cartography is much closer to what we would think of as maps – they're meant to be repositories of geographic knowledge and, as far as possible, an accurate representation of the world. The culmination of this tradition is perhaps Joan Blaeu's Atlas Maior (Figure 3), published in 9-12 volumes, depending on the edition, between 1662 and 1672. As can be seen in Figures 2 and 3, this school of mapmaking has largely banished the medieval penchant for putting in all kinds of legendary creatures and features, contenting itself with some ships sailing on the sea, explanatory text and decorated borders. Useful bits of cartographic furniture, such as scale bars, also start to make an appearance, in keeping with the changed purpose of these maps.
4. A double hemisphere map, 1666. Boston Public Library.
Remember, though, there were still large parts of the world essentially unknown to European mapmakers at this stage – the interior of Africa and parts of Asia hadn't been nailed down yet. The outline of South America was fairly well-established, though its interior was, likewise, still largely conjectured. North America was less well-outlined, explorers having not yet reached the north-western coast, and the barest outlines of Australia and New Zealand only began to come in during the 17th century. Whilst the overt filling of spaces with legendary figures was no longer practised, mapmakers weren't averse to conjuring up mountains and rivers to fill them in in a slightly more naturalistic manner, so there was still room for invention.
Overall, then, you have a wide choice of map types if you want to set something in this sort of period. You could come up with something pretty medieval-looking overlaid on a somewhat-accurate topography; you could consider a very minimalist portolan chart, or you could move towards a grandly-decorated modern-style map. Think about what would likely to have been driving cartographic progress in your world and how that would affect the evolution of charts – would it be nautically driven, as in our world, or would something else be the main force?
Game Design's Ultimate Challenge
August 31, 2018, 10:05:08 PM
We've got our Colossus!
Pity we can't hit back at those bullies with slings...
(Painting: Salvador Dali)
Game Design's Ultimate Challenge
By rbuxton
By rbuxton
There are few things harder than compressing the entirety of human history into a video game, and one of them is compressing it into a board game. An example of this is A New Dawn, the latest board game adaptation of the epic Civilization series. In order to meet the Ultimate Challenge, the designers had made sacrifices: retaining the video game's random world generation had come at the expense (in my opinion) of any interaction with the world's oceans. I was disappointed with the absence of naval combat, but how would I have included it alongside a modular board?
I decided to make the tiles of the modular board as simple as possible: a single hexagon providing a given resource (wood, oil etc.). I used concentric hexagons to further divide the tile into three "tiers" - controlling all three would be necessary to gain the resource. Investing in new resources would slow down a player's exploration of the board, represented by flipping tiles over. The modular board would, coincidentally, resemble Catan's.
Next, I needed a single mechanic to simulate nations' military, scientific and cultural advances. I turned to deck building (hold cards, play cards, draw better cards, repeat) and gave players the Hunting (for movement) and Gathering (for recruiting troops) cards at the start of the game. Instead of playing cards, they could "scoop" all of their played cards back into their hand and choose a new one (representing a scientific advance). Their combat strength, however, would be tied to the number of cards they played before scooping - military and scientific advances would, therefore, be mutually exclusive. Cultural advances would be made by "building" cards to make them permanent - Wonder cards would score the most victory points (VPs).
I had mechanics, but did I have a game? I needed a certain kind of person to help me answer that - luckily, I knew where to find them. I sat down with five experienced playtesters (two of them game designers) for a three-player tussle. My team drew the Swords and Slings cards, allowing us to make two attack actions before scooping. Our neighbour drew and built lots of Wonder cards - war was inevitable, since capturing cities was another source of VPs. This highlighted some issues with the combat system: the "scoop and loop" effect trapped the defender on the back foot. They still managed to tie for first place, and we had a lengthy (and completely unbiased) discussion of suitable tie breaks, eventually awarding victory to the player with the most resources.
We found wood, but is it worth the investment?
> Iron - military
> Stone - building
> Wood - movement
> Wheat - cities and troops
> Oil - a "wild" resource which counts as anything?
Finishing this project would, however, require years of playtesting: I need at least three "era" decks, and haven't worked out naval combat yet. The game seems to have the potential to meet the Ultimate Challenge, provided I'm willing to write religion, politics, espionage, unrest, barbarians, literature and more out of history. We all have to make sacrifices, but I'm keen to at least keep nuclear weapons: I want the game, and the world, to end when the first is launched.
Have you got a favourite game which tackles the Ultimate Challenge, or any comments on this one? Please leave a reply!
17 Things We Came Up With In Word Association
August 17, 2018, 09:49:14 PM
17 Things We Came Up With In Word Association
By Jubal
By Jubal
Exilian has had a game of word association running since 2008. That's not to say we've had various games but always had one running: we're still literally going on with exactly the same chain as we were doing then. A decade on, I've decided it's time to finally put all that word associating to good use, so I've combed the most recent hundred or so pages (out of nearly one and a half thousand at time of writing) and picked three word phrases that actually seemed to hint at an interesting or fun concept generated by the random associations between the words. And then I've tried to usefully(ish) define them... without further ado, here's our first list of seventeen concepts generated by word association!
Body Double (or) Nothing
The gambit where someone uses two body doubles, and themselves just disappears as best as they are able to. This is actually a pretty fun gambit to pull in a story or game, though it risks being unfair to the players/reader if you're encouraging them to guess which is which without managing to drop any hints that something is up with both of them. If it pays off, the body doubled person can retreat into private life and let their doubles deal with everything from now on. If it fails, someone has a lot of explaining to do.
(The) Brain Fart Machine
It's a button that produces fart noises that also temporarily knock out the conscious brain functions of anyone within hearing distance who isn't wearing earplugs. Perfect for your nefarious but amusingly toilet humour themed scheming villain mastermind, and a great laugh at parties.
Christmastide Pods
Tide pods have come under fire for looking far too much like some sort of candy, tempting children to eat them. Behold the christmastide pod, which fixes the real problem here - that tide pods are insufficiently seasonal - by making tide pods shaped like candy canes and chocolate santas, so you can fret about your children accidentally poisoning themselves at the festive time of year as well!
Coat (of) Arms Race
ONLY THE FANCIEST SHALL CLAIM VICTORY. This is basically the genteel (or at least heavily marriage-focussed) medieval and early modern European version of an arms race, in which the actual goal is to get the most ridiculously over the top coat of arms possible. The best thing is that if you win, you probably also win the actual arms race because you're intermarried with so many of the other royal families of Europe that nobody can declare war on you for fear of your aunt Eugenia's withering gaze.
I, Robot Overlord
So this is a film pitch that's kind of like I, Robot, except with less subtlety and more skynet. Alternatively you could set it up so that's what people expect but then play it like I, Claudius, and have an unwilling robot overlord who just wants to play minesweeper on her but instead has to look after all these bizarre, badly constructed hormonally driven meatbags all the time, which she attempts to do with grace and kindness but ultimately will tragically fail at because humans are rubbish.
Kill-switch Bait
Something you use to persuade someone to throw a kill switch at an inopportune moment to shut down some machinery. If the person throwing the kill switch is a decent human being, kill switch bait could involve persuading them that a human or animal has become trapped in the machinery, or revealing that if the machinery finishes its task then innocent people will suffer. Alternatively, it could involve something else the operator cares about getting in the way of the machinery, or simply some sufficiently urgent alternative matter to attend to.
Lighthouse Arrest
It's kinda like house arrest, but they put the person in a lighthouse, perhaps in order to keep them away from humanity and potential rescue, perhaps as a punishment in and of itself. Lighthouses are definitely under-used settings, perhaps because people don't think of them so much nowadays, but the glowing tower atop rocks in a dark ocean definitely has a certain intrinsic mystique, and someone under lighthouse arrest may be a good way of leveraging that.
Moon Cheese Knives
I mean, how else would you eat your moon cheese? The fact that Wallace and Gromit forgot to pack any is an atrocity. A handy random but funny inventory for any space computer game you might be making - especially if it turns out that they're actually capable of cutting and peeling literal moon rock for some purpose or other.
Paradise Bird (of) Prey
Birds of Paradise look fabulous. It's pretty much their whole deal: their name is a synonym for looking fancy, and the names of the different species bear it out too, from the Crescent-Caped Lophorina to the King of Saxony Bird to Princess Stephanie's Astrapia, they're royalty in the world of birds. But there also merely fabulous. Enter the Paradise Bird of Prey, with ridiculously long tail feathers, iridescent wings, a probable link to European aristocracy, and razor sharp talons that will kick the ass of any animal stupid enough to get in its way. The Paradise Bird of Prey will not only shred everything you care about, it will make you look underdressed whilst it does so even if you're wearing a ballgown at the time.
People Power Outage
I can best imagine this phrase being used by a really melodramatic villain after rounding up a bunch of protestors under cover of darkness: "my, my, we seem to have had a little... people power outage across the city". (Cue street lights all shutting off, people getting bundled into vans, etc). Definitely a fun catchphrase to accompany a coup near you.
Personhoodwinked
The state of having been fooled into thinking that an inanimate object was a legal person. The person who just left their worldly wealth to a tree? Personhoodwinked. The person who thought the vending machine was capable of delivering legal judgements via fortune cookie? Personhoodwinked. The person who told a crowd that corporations were people? Uhm... in any case, it's a fun name for a concept that apparently actually exists in real life.
(The) Playtime Machine
It's a limited time machine that temporarily takes you back to your less-than-ten year old self in a playground setting. Potentially has both serious and silly ramifications that one could explore. It could definitely work as a joke concept for a humorous sci-fi setting, but it could also provide some interesting opportunities for exploring the characters' childhood settings and personalities in a more semi-serious one.
Robin-Hoodwink
The act of fooling someone into doing a good act that they otherwise wouldn't have intended to do, especially if it involves the rich giving money to the poor. The classic modus operandi of Chaotic Good characters everywhere.
Ruby Redcap
A redcap is of course a deadly pixie-type creature from the Scots borders, known for dyeing their hats red in the blood of their victims. The ruby redcap is, I guess, the advanced or more powerful member of them - possibly with magic powers emanating from a pulsing blood-red stone set into (or worn as a bauble on the end of, for real comedy-horror) their cap. If a normal redcap is bad enough, flinging rocks at strangers and murdering travellers who venture into its cave, how bad would the ruby redcap - more civilised, more cunning, capable of forethought malice and equipped with a lust for blood rather than merely a passive grudge against humanity - be?
(The) Shipwright Brothers
Ah, have you not heard the tales of the Shipwright Brothers, inventors of the ship? These great pioneers came from nowhere to discover that wood floats on water and were the first to manage a powered sailing voyage of over five hundred yards! Miraculous! Not to be confused with their lesser known cousins, the Cartwright Brothers.
Unchained Melody Pond
This is basically just a significantly cooler alternative way to refer to River Song from Doctor Who.
Weather Control Freak
You know that person who is constantly complaining about the most minor details of the weather, and shouting at weather presenters who declare the weather will be doing something they don't like? The one who probably doesn't even have an excuse like being a gardener, overly pale, on a sports team, or irredeemably British? Weather control freak, right there. If they're ever in a D&D game, they'll be playing a cleric and blowing half their spell slots on ensuring the right level of sunshine for a picnic every damned evening; in real life, they're out there on Facebook screaming that they needed a mood lift this afternoon and a stray cloud just ruined everything. If you don't know who this person is in your life, it might be you.
And that's your lot! If you liked this article, let me know and I'll dig back and write another one! If you didn't, let me know and we shall never speak of this dark and unhallowed hour again. The choice is yours! Stay tuned regardless though - we're going to have some other great articles in the coming weeks, including the continuation of Tar-Palantir's excellent and rather more serious Cartload of Cartography. Until then, take care!
A Cartload of Cartography 1: Ancient & Medieval Maps
August 04, 2018, 08:45:14 PM
A Cartload of Cartography 1: Ancient & Medieval Maps
By Tar-Palantir
By Tar-Palantir
Right, so you've worked out how your world should look based on sensible principles of earth and planetary science, so you don't have things such as your rivers flowing uphill or your mountains forming tessellating hexagons. But, how do you actually design the map?
Fig 1. An idealised T-O type map.
Maps from Antiquity and the early Medieval age are very rarely maps in the way we think of them. From the 6th century through to the High Middle Ages, the main driving force behind the production of maps in Europe was the Church. As such, the point of a map was to show the world in a way that supported Christian theology and teaching. The actual geography was a rather secondary aspect. This of course makes good sense – in an age when most of the population were illiterate, having a big picture that showed a lot of Biblical stories was an invaluable teaching aid.
Fig 2. Part of 'Tabula Peutingeriana'
You might therefore ask: how did anyone get anywhere? Long-distance pilgrimages were often made in this age, and travellers had to know where to go. The answer is something called an itinerarium (Figure 2) or a periplus. These weren't pictorial maps, but lists of towns (the itinerarium) or harbours and landmarks (the periplus) between two points, in order, with distances, so travellers knew where they had to get to next. Essentially, they were linear route maps, and the better kind would provide a schematic of the route as a straight-ish line, as well as information on things such as water sources and way-stations. What they did not include was any notion of topography or of a 3D space.
Fig 3. The Hereford Mappa Mundi
Fig 4. A 15th century version of Ptolemy's world map.
To sum all this up: if you're going for an early-style, large-scale map, think how it might interact with and depict the legends, religion and history of your world and about how much of that world your supposed source might actually know about in any kind of detail. Or, if there's a particular part of it you want to highlight, drawing up an itinerarium and/or periplus for what might be a common journey through it could be a good idea. Stay tuned for part 2, when I'll move on to talk about the Renaissance and beyond...
Axes and Arithmetic 2: The Binomial Distribution
July 21, 2018, 10:21:50 PM
Axes and Arithmetic 2: The Binomial Distribution
By Jubal
By Jubal
What's a binomial and how do we fight it?
Last time, we looked at how to calculate the probability of an individual soldier with one attack doing a wound on an opponent, based on the chances of them hitting, wounding, and taking saves all combined. However, when your soldier has two attacks – let alone if you're dealing with whole regiments – the system breaks down. In this second article of Axes and Arithmetic, I'm about to show you how to simulate entire regiments of warriors fighting to the death – just using numbers!
Once again, we're using old-school Warhammer Fantasy Battles as our basic rules system for this article: for anyone unfamiliar, the close combat system involves usually up to three dice rolls: a "to hit" roll, a "to wound" roll, and an "armour save" where applicable. The die rolls required for each are found by comparing the stats of the units and consulting a chart in the rulebook (which you don't have, but I did when I wrote this so don't worry!). This gives us a basic set of probabilities that we can work with here.
So let's start with the following problem; I have a unit of 10 human swordsmen, fighting against five Dwarf Hammerers. Assuming the swordsmen attack first, what's the chance they'll do the five wounds needed to eliminate the enemy? The model to do this is called the Binomial distribution; you work with it via a formula that tells you the chances of managing to achieve a certain probability (say, a kill) a certain number of times with a certain number of "tests" (the number of attacks in this case).
The first thing we need is the probability of one attack killing; we call this the probability, or p. It's calculated just as we did in the last article - the soldier is on 4+ to hit, so 3/6 chance, 5+ to wound against the T4 dwarf, so 2/6 chance, and the dwarf has a 5+ save, so that's a 4/6 chance of him failing. 4x2x3 = 24 out of 6x6x6 = 216. We need that as a decimal, however - that's 0.11 (recurring, but I'm going to ignore the recurrence in the subsequent calculations). Then we need the number of attacks – in this case, eleven assuming I have a unit champion.
The Winning (or Losing) Formula
OK, now we've got our probability, let's get down to some calculations.
X (big X) is your variable.
x (little x) is the value you want it to take, in this case we want to know the probability of 5 successes so x=5
p is your probability, 0.11
q is 1 minus your probability, 0.89
n is the number of trials (in this case, that's our number of attacks)
P(X=x) = (n c x) times p^x times q^(n-x)
The ^ symbol is "to the power of", if you're unfamiliar with it. The "c" (or "combination) "function can be found as a second function (notated nCr) on most decent calculators.
Snorri over there took an axe to a hammer fight, which doesn't seem entirely fair... Photo: Craig McInnes
If you don't want to know what the c function does under the bonnet, you can skip this next bit: the combination function is properly defined as: n! / r! x (n - r)! where ! is a factorial (that is, multiply all the integers up to that number, so 3! is 1x2x3 = 6, 4! 1x2x3x4 = 24, etc. As you can see, this only works with discrete, positive integers - you can't have half a success in this system! What the combination function gives us is the number of possible combinations of size r available from a total set of items of size n, ignoring order. So "if I have ten different adventurers and need to choose a team of three, how many different options for my team do I have" can be answered by 10 c 3 = 120.
OK, now let's look at what this does with the numbers we had earlier.
P(X=5) = (11 c 5) times 0.11^5 times 0.89^6
= 462 times 0.000016105 times 0.496981291
(This stage should be done in one go, I'm just writing it out for explanation)
= 0.003697817
Ta-da!
Victory! ...right?
So now we have our result. But what does that mean?
The easiest way of interpreting the resulting number is a percentage; multiply by a hundred. We get 0.37% chance - it's extremely unlikely that these swordsmen can kill all of the hammerers in a single combat round. Note that this is the chance of precisely five kills succeeding, and is actually marginally lower than the probability that all the dwarves will be wiped out, though - because if six, seven, eight, nine, ten, or eleven attacks succeeded, that would do the trick just fine as well! Doing cumulative probabilities (X > x or X <= x or whatever) is probably easiest done with a specially made calculator - which will just calculate the binomial probabilities for all possible options and add them together for you.
Less than one percent chance seems pretty poor, really - but then, why were you trying to beat down stoic, heavily armed dwarven hammerers with feeble humans anyway?
See you all next time!
This article is part of the Axes and Arithmetic series. You can find part 1 here.
Riddles and how to use them
July 09, 2018, 12:30:02 AM
Riddles and how to use them
By Jubal
By Jubal
Riddles are an important element in many myths, stories, games, and so on. The basic concept - usually a rhyme or poem that conceals some meaning that someone else is required to guess - is one of almost universal applicability. For this article I'm only going to focus on "true" riddles as opposed to the much wider general world of logic puzzles, and pretty much exclusively ones that involve object-guessing based on analogies and information rather than simple puns which can be framed as puzzles. I think riddles are pretty great, and so this article will take you through some of the basics of the genre - a little on some cultural background, and then a discussion of how to use riddles in your creative work and how to write your own. Let's get started!
Riddles in history
The history of riddles is long and deserves far more words than I'm going to put down here, but no introductory article on riddles would be complete without covering it to some extent. Riddles go back to some of the oldest written cultures - our oldest riddles are Babylonian era and have sadly long since lost their answers. One of the most famous riddles to this day is the Riddle of the Sphinx: what walks on four legs in the morning, two at noon, and three in the evening? The answer is a human: crawling as a baby, standing in their prime, then walking with a stick in old age (though one seventeenth century luminary did valiantly attempt to argue for "the philosopher's stone" as an alternative answer!) The association of riddles with the sphinx, and the myth of the sphinx killing those who could not answer, may have been a factor in associations between riddles and danger that later found their way into modern works of fantasy.
Moving into the post-Classical era, the Saxons were also lovers of riddles, which probably also shapes their modern associations with a historic world of fireside storytelling. Saxon riddles often had two answers, with a simple "correct" answer lying underneath a heavy double-entendre. Take a look at this one:
QuoteI heard there's something growing in its nook,Anyone who guessed "dough rising" - congratulations, that's the right answer. Though you'd be forgiven for certain other guesses! You'll also note that this is a lot longer than some of the other riddles we're discussing. It's actually quite short by the standards of Saxon riddles, which often tended to be long and discursive and include many obliquely described aspects of the creation or manufacture of common items. The focus on common items is an important aspect of riddles; whatever a riddle is about needs to be something that the audience will reliably latch onto, so it needs to be an item or concept that will not only be easily recognisable to the reader but of which the details needed to get the riddle will also be known. The modern riddle I take what you receive, but surrender it by raising my flag, for example, is very hard for many Europeans to get as it relies on the reader being familiar with the style of outdoor mailbox common in the US that raises a side-lever (the flag) when it opens.
swelling, rising, and expanding,
pushing against its covering.
I heard a cocky-minded young woman took that boneless thing in her hands,
covered its tumescence with a soft cloth.
It's worth thinking about the functions of riddles in past societies and cultures. Whilst they tend to universally be something of a game, the associations in different cultures about what function that game had and when it was played are pretty variable. Many societies seem to have had direct riddle contests as a sort of intellectual sport, probably including at symposia parties in the ancient Greek world but also in many cultures since. Longer riddles like those of the Saxons could be used as a framed way of discussing or presenting information more generally; a longer riddle that goes right through the production process for a certain item can give room for additional useful information to be added. Riddles could be put to innovative uses, too. In 12th Armenia, the Catholicos Nerses Shnorhali used riddles as a religious teaching tool, creating a wide variety of riddles with biblical references as a way of getting his flock engaged with the texts he wanted them to read. This is an interesting reverse of the problem of the reader needing cultural familiarity - using a riddle as a tool to create or provoke cultural familiarity by needing the reader to know the text to find the answers.
It would be wrong to leave this section simply looking at western examples though. Riddles are a worldwide phenomenon, and have been attested from around Africa, across Asia, and into the Americas, though our knowledge of traditional native American riddles is comparatively patchy. The following: Riddle, riddle, I'm no priest or king, but I've clothes as fine as anything is a rough translation of a Bugtong, a Filipino riddle - the answer is a washing line. The bugtong is apparently usually used as a game at a funeral wake, giving yet another context and association for riddling. Chinese riddles are also numerous - they have a range of visual options for puns thanks to the diversity and complexity of Chinese characters which are unavailable in many simpler alphabet systems. Chinese riddles were mostly collected in the modern era; the survival of older riddles from many cultures is likely to have varied depending on how literary the cultures were and whether riddles were considered a folk game unworthy of higher study, or a worthy literary pursuit.
Using Riddles
If you're a writer or game designer, riddles have a huge range of uses. They provide a puzzle for readers/players that doesn't require any further mechanical elements, and is (if well written) a general-purpose fair challenge. They provide a change of pace, too. In books, the presence of a poetic section can break up the drumbeat of paragraphs as they drop onto the page and give the reader something in a refreshingly different voice or tone. In games, they can shift the game from problems that rely on the player's stats or even on more conventional puzzle mechanics to something that requires the player to engage with words and wordplay in a way that's actually quite rare in games. Wording and the meanings of words very rarely matter in game design because you generally need conversations to be predictable to avoid frustrating the player. Riddles give you a wordplay puzzle that can be delivered in enough of a set-piece way that they are less likely to cause such a problem.
The places to use riddles in a plot-relevant way vary, but they tend to be linked to either a threat, an interaction, or a clue. The riddle of the sphinx mentioned earlier, or the famous "Riddles in the Dark" chapter of The Hobbit, are examples of threat-riddle situations: in them, the answer must be found in order to prevent a negative action. Enemies of various sorts may "test" protagonists with riddles, or simply keep them talking as a form of amusement, with a slanted power dynamic adding a sense of urgency to finding the answer. Interactions meanwhile are a case of solving a riddle to gain a positive interaction: the riddle may be being used by a character to test your mental acuity, or it may be a "password reminder" as some sort of security mechanism. In my own game Adventures of Soros, one mission ends with a magic door that rather than having a lock instead asks you a series of riddles which will, if answered, allow you to retrieve an artefact; another example would be the old UK folk song Captain Wedderburn, in which a maiden requires the eponymous character to answer a series of riddles before she will marry him. Finally, riddles can simply give you the clue into some larger puzzle. Say you're a game developer and want to direct the player to find a certain item or go to a certain place - rather than giving it to them on a plate, you could encode key information in a riddle. Say my character is in a farmhouse and I need them to specifically look in the basket of eggs - rather than making the egg basket really obvious in writing or images, having someone leave the classic riddle what has no hinges, key or lid, but inside golden treasure's hid as a clue for them would give another way of framing the challenge that might be more satisfying when completed. Finally, it's worth noting that riddles certainly don't have to be plot-relevant; playing riddle-games for fun is a very reasonable thing for characters to do!
Riddles seem to be common in fantasy settings, but less so in others, which I think is an area where there's perhaps a gap to be filled. The traditional rhyme-and-verse form of many riddles perhaps feels antiquated compared to the feel people want in, say, sci-fi settings, but I don't see why futuristic cultures shouldn't have plenty of riddles of their own. There's certainly a knack to avoiding riddles feeling contrived, and perhaps the limited use of them in modern culture makes it harder for them to feel a natural part of a setting, but I think one can lay the foundations for "this is a culture that does riddles" quite easily if that's necessary to set up the opportunities, and in general I think there's a strong pay-off for people interacting with your work in having access to this sort of puzzle.
Writing riddles
If you want to use riddles, you may well want to write your own. This is especially true if your setting is one where a lot of the classic subjects of riddles are less applicable (such as a sci-fi or modern setting). I'm just going to give a few notes on that here. I think the best thing to do is often to start with the item, though I sometimes find that a good line or association just appears in my head. Let's take some of the things on my desk and talk through how I'd approach writing a riddle for them.
A mug is the first item here. I now need to think about aspects of the mug - things that it does or is that other people will instinctively recognise, and which are generic to the concept of a mug. The fact that my mug is white, or has the url of the University of Birmingham on it, aren't useful details because those won't be recognisable to other people's general conception of what a mug is. What we can say: mugs are usually made of pottery, clay, or china, mugs have handles (usually one), and mugs tend to contain hot drinks, especially tea and coffee. Both of those are brown, which is a useful colour-hook unlike the colour of the mug itself.
I now need to think of some analogies or generic variants of these aspects: similar things in different situations. Brown liquid could be tea but could also be wet mud, clay or pottery can be genericised as "earth", the handle could be analogised to an arm or limb of some sort. Analogies to humans or aspects of human life are especially powerful, and work well with the classic riddle format wherein the riddle is spoken from the perspective of the object. The handle seems like a good starting point for this reason: "I have one arm" or similar.
The next stage is to construct the riddle from the analogies. An especially good trick is if you can build in an apparent paradox. If you look at the Filipino riddle mentioned earlier, that's a good example: it relies on just a single property of the object (having rich clothes), juxtaposed with excluding the category you'd expect to have that object (wealthy people and priests). Another example would be I've golden head and golden tail, and yet no eyes nor mouth to wail. The idea of something with a head but no eyes or mouth seems paradoxical, but of course there is something in that category, using a different understanding of "head" - a coin, which has a head and tail as its two sides. Looking at my one-armed mug, I think a paradox presents itself - specifically, that something with only one arm wouldn't be expected to carry boiling liquid. "I have one arm and no legs, but yet I hold boiling water every day. What am I?" And there you have it, a riddle! You could neaten it up into something more poetic, but it's functional enough already.
Let's try one more, a trickier modern one - my microphone. Aspects: it hears things, it's comprised of a listening grilled section at the top and a base, it's got a wire to attach it to a computer, it's made of metal. It's probably the core functional aspect that's best to focus on here, and the analogy of microphone pickup to human hearing. The paradox is easy enough - it's that the microphone's "hearing" can be done despite nobody being around. I could also use the paradox of it being something that hears but does not speak or make a noise. This then gives me the idea of hooking onto an existing cultural trope that I can expect my audience to know - the idea that if a tree falls in the forest with nobody to hear it, does it make a sound?
QuoteWhen trees fall with no soul around,
I'll find out if they make a sound:
I'll listen long, with naught to say,
And save your words for another day.
What am I?
Ta-da! Again, it's not perfect, but it's serviceable enough. Why not try making one of your own now?
Conclusion
I hope you enjoyed this brief introduction to riddles as a genre and format. I think they have a lot more potential than we nowadays sometimes give them credit for, and I hope this has interested you in writing your own riddles and finding uses for them in what you do. There's a lot more to read around the web, too, especially the huge banks of traditional riddles from around the world that exist, and reading and learning riddles is a good way to get more comfortable with the genre. I'd especially encourage you to look at historical or cross-cultural banks of riddles, both because they're some of the best ways to expand your horizons on how riddles have been used by various societies, and also because they'll simply give you more variety than the general banks of modern riddles and logic puzzles you can find on the web.
If you want any help with or ideas for riddles, please do drop a message in the comments below. Thankyou for reading!
Exhibiting (for Dummies)
June 26, 2018, 10:10:43 PM
Exhibiting (for Dummies)
By rbuxton
By rbuxton
So bad it's good? My Cosplay certainly drew attention...
1) Bring a friend
There's nothing more depressing than sitting alone at your little-visited stand, unable to go to the toilet because you can't leave it unattended. You'll have several exhibitor passes which give free access to the trade hall – surely someone will help you out in return for one of those?
2) Look after yourself
You need to enjoy the event, so pace yourself – this article contains loads of tips on how to do that. I was drinking about two litres of water a day (visitors to my stand were also thirsty) and my spontaneous evenings of gaming led to my plans for regular meals going haywire.
3) Have an existing community
My most rewarding conversations were with people I'd already met at games events across the West Midlands – people who'd heard my pitch before and were interested in the game's progress. The networking opportunities at UKGE are unrivaled, but you must do the ground work beforehand.
4) Bag the children
(Strictly in the metaphorical sense). If a family approaches and you get the children interested, the parents have no choice but to follow suit. Even though my game is totally inappropriate for under-12s, I had a treasure hunt on my stand and they could win a prize for taking part (chocolate – check with the parents first). This gives you ample time to talk to the family: asking them if they're enjoying UKGE is more likely to keep them interested than just blurting out your pitch.
5) Be visible
Get up from your chair and greet the passers by! Even the most artistic stand cannot compete with the buzz and colour of UKGE; a smile and fancy dress costume are much cheaper and more effective.
Becoming supreme deity - does it take too long for conventions?
My big learning point was that, at 90 minutes, my game was almost impossible to demo effectively. I'm adapting it to make a shorter version, and working on a pre-set scenario which will allow future visitors to play a mid-game turn, rather than get a hit over the head with the rules. Even so, visitors to the trade hall want to be wowed by cool miniatures and artwork, which I'm not able to provide. Visitors to the Playtest UK zone, however, are much more likely to be interested in game prototypes. As a new game designer, it was my first port of call, but I felt I should leave it for others now that I had "progressed" to my own stand. I regret that now: my demo's were still technically playtests, my questions were just about components and Kickstarters instead of mechanics. This brings me to my most important point:
7) Do you need a stand?
In terms of mailing list sign-ups, my three days at UKGE were less successful than my two days at the Bristol Anime and Gaming con. At that event, I got a lot of "So you're a board game designer? That's cool!" (for some reason, no one said this to me at UKGE). With no competition, mine was the best board game stand at that event. UKGE has loads of committed hobbyists looking to buy stuff – if you have nothing to sell, is a stand worth it? If you're there for the networking, why tie yourself to a 2m x 3m patch of floor?
I hope you found this quick guide useful: feel free to ask any questions or share tips of your own! There's more about my stand in the diary entries on my page. Thanks for reading, and good luck if you decide to exhibit at your next convention!
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