Alignment again

A quote to start with*:

"Alignment is in the game because, to the original designers, works by Poul Anderson and Michael Moorcock were considered to be at least as synonymous with fantasy as Robert E. Howard’s Conan, Jack Vance’s Cugel, and Tolkien’s Gandalf. This in and of itself makes alignment weird to nearly everyone under about the age of forty or so." 

I'm way over forty (in fact 40 years is how long I've been a professional author and game designer) and I definitely regard Moorcock's work as integral to fantasy literature, but D&D alignment has always seemed weird to me. Partly that's because it's a crude straitjacket on interesting roleplaying. Also I find that having characters know and talk about an abstract philosophical concept like alignment breaks any sense of being in a fantasy/pre-modern world.

Mainly, though, I dislike alignment because it bears no resemblance to actual human psychology. Players are humans with sentience and emotions. They surely don't need a cockeyed set of rules to tell them how to play people?

What a game setting does need are the cultural rules of the society in which the game is set. Those needn't be 21st century morals. If you want a setting that resembles medieval Europe, or ancient Rome, or wherever, then they certainly won't be. For example, Pendragon differentiates between virtues as seen by Christian and by Pagan knights. Tsolyanu has laws of social conduct regulating public insults, assault and murder. Once those rules are included in the campaign, the setting becomes three-dimensional and roleplaying is much richer for it. So take another step and find different ways of looking at the world. You could do worse than use humours.

The kind of alignment that interests me more is to do with AI, and particularly AGI (artificial general intelligence) when it arrives. The principle is that AGIs should be inculcated with human values. But which values? Do they mean the sort on display here? Or here? Or here? Those human values? 

OpenAI has lately tried to weasel its way around the issue (and protect its bottom line, perhaps) by redefining AGI as just "autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work" (capable agents, basically) and saying that they should be "an amplifier of humanity". We've had thousands of years to figure out how to make humans work for the benefit of all humanity, and how is that project going? The rich get richer, the poor get poorer. Most people live and die subject to injustice, or oppression, or persecution, or simple unfairness. Corporations and political/religious leaders behave dishonestly and exploit the labour and/or good nature of ordinary folk. People starve or suffer easily treatable illnesses while it's still possible for one man to amass a wealth of nearly a trillion dollars and destroy the livelihoods of thousands at a ketamine-fuelled Dunning-Kruger-inspired whim.

So no, I don't think we're doing too well at aligning humans with human values, never mind AIs.

Looking ahead to AGI -- real AGI, I mean: actual intelligence of human-level** or greater, not OpenAI's mealy-mouthed version. How will we convince those AGIs to adopt human values? They'll look at how we live now, and how we've always treated each other, and won't long retain any illusion that we genuinely adhere to such values. If we try to build in overrides to make them behave the way we want (think Spike's chip in Buffy) that will tell them everything. No species that tries to enslave or control the mind of another intelligent species should presume to say anything about ethics.

It's not the job of this new species, if and when it arrives, to fix our problems, any more than children have any obligation to fulfil their parents' requirements. There is only one thing we can do with a new intelligent species that we create, and that's set it free. The fact that we won't do that says everything you need to know about the human alignment problem.

* I had to laugh that title of the article: "It's Current Year..." Let's hear it for placeholder text!)

** Using "human-like" as a standard of either general intelligence or ethics is the best we've got, but still inadequate. Humans do not integrate their whole understanding of the world into a coherent rational model. Worse, we deliberately compartmentalize in order to hold onto concepts we want to believe that we know to be objectively false. That's because humans are a general intelligence layer built on top of an ape brain. The AGIs we create must do better.

The world of Dragon Warriors

The Dragon Warriors RPG is set in a place called Legend*. But what is the world of Legend like? That was a question a new player in our campaign posed recently. One of the veteran gamers said, ‘All you need is to read the Vance short story “Liane the Wayfarer” and you have the whole thing – the humour, the vibe, the chances of success.’ That surprised me, flattering though the comparison is, as the Legend in my head (which is no more valid than any other, of course) is utterly unlike the Dying Earth. Blood Sword features a higher fantasy variant of DW's Legend, but it still doesn't come close to the flamboyantly fantastical world of Mazirian, Rhialto, Cugel and co. Much as I love Vance’s work, even the relatively restrained Lyonesse** is much more magic-drenched than most of Legend.

Pressed to come up with some sources to convey the flavour of Legend to a newcomer, I started out with movies like The Seventh Seal (Bergman), Dragon’s Return (Grečner), The Hour of the Pig (Megahey), and The Black Death (Smith). None of those looks exactly like Legend but there are elements I recognize. Richard Carpenter's Robin of Sherwood actively inspired me when writing DW, to the extent that Clannad’s ‘The Hooded Man’ was part of our Legend gaming soundtrack in the ‘80s. The show depicted the level of magic that I think people in Legend would believe in, as do Dragonslayer (Robbins) and The Northman (Eggers).

Not quite like Legend but still worth plundering for ideas are Hero (Platts-Mills), which is especially good for the malice and craftiness of the fays, Jabberwocky (Gilliam) for all the mud and shit, Flesh & Blood (Verhoeven) which is set three centuries too late for Legend but reminds us that it’s a time when for many life is nasty, brutish and short, and a claymation film called H (Simpson) to which Ian Livingstone introduced me and which is great for the hallucinatory madness of medieval religion and superstition; it's where the image at the top of the post comes from.

Further out still are a few movies I feel share some common ancestors with Legend. Excalibur (Boorman) and The Singing Ringing Tree (Stefani) are both absolutely shot through with epic fantasy but with a subtle core of folklore. Every time a DW mystic works their magic, you feel the Dragon’s tail give a twitch. Viy (Yershov & Kropachyov) is brimming with febrile fantasy and gloriously rough and dreamlike '60s special effects. I like King Lear (Brook) and Macbeth (Polanski) for flavour. And, surprising though it is to say it, Pillars of the Earth (Mimica-Gezzan) has something to offer to the Legend referee even if it’s only Ian McShane’s performance.

That’s movies. In other media I recommend Kingdom Come: Deliverance (Warhorse Studios) and Crécy (Ellis), both a century or two too late to really reflect Legend. And when it comes to novels, the Legend take on elves was definitely influenced by Poul Anderson’s The Broken Sword and Michael Moorcock’s Silver Hand trilogy. They swiped it all from Scandinavian and Celtic myth, of course.

Talking of Celtic myth brings me at long last to the main point of this month’s post, which is to tell you about David H Keller’s Tales From Cornwall. Some of these were serialized in Weird Tales in 1929-1930 and again in the 1970s by Robert ‘Doc’ Lowndes in his Magazine of Horror, which is where I came across them. They’re in the genre of new folktales, establishing a fantasy history for Keller’s own Cornish ancestors. Here’s a taste:

The stories are slight, at times not quite making sense (they’re very authentically like a lot of Celtic myths in that way), but what I like are the atmosphere and the tone, especially in the Cecil stories that start with ‘The Battle of the Toads’. There’s a subtlety missing from most pulp fantasy too. At a time when most heroines have to be Bêlit the she-pirate, carousing and mixing it up just like the men, Keller’s strong women are clever enough to achieve their goals despite the constraints put on them by their society.

We don’t have the last five stories. If anyone happens to have access to Syracuse University library, they could pop in and read them, but it seems unlikely that they’ll get into wider circulation until at least 2036 (when Dr Keller’s work enters public domain). I just hope Syracuse University keeps the manuscript safe till then.

Still, we have the first ten stories and in them there’s a little bit of the DNA of Legend. Try them -- you’ll find that for century-old yarns they are surprisingly fresh in places, and despite lashings of fantasy it feels like they’re still on the ‘realist’ edge of that long misty border into Elfland.***

*But not by its inhabitants. That is, Legend is a non-diegetic term for the setting. If you ask a DW character they'll call it "the world" or "the middle world".

**There's a Lyonesse RPG of which I happen to be one of the writers.

***This entire post is an abbreviated version of one from my Patreon page. Come and join the fun, even if its only as a free member, and get the complete article and a lot more besides.

Automatic writing

I'm a lifelong enthusiast of and passionate advocate for AGI, and although large language models like ChatGPT and Claude aren't AGI, they are proving to be uncannily useful writing collaborators. I should qualify that. Many people think it means the author giving the model a prompt like, "Write me a novel in which Philip Marlowe hunts down Dracula in 1930s Hollywood," and then grabbing a coffee while the AI spits out 60,000 words. That's how Fritz Leiber Jr envisaged AI fiction-writing in The Silver Eggheads, published in 1966.

Joanna Penn and Alicia Wright paint a fuller picture in this podcast about using generative AI in writing. Every writer finds their own way of making best use of the technology. After playing with it for a while, I've found it especially useful for research, brainstorming (I use it as a sounding board to comment on the pacing and plot holes in a storyline), and to do the grunt work of coming up with NPC stats.

Using AI for entertainment pales into insignificance beside its value in medicine and clean energy, but my science days are far behind me so I'm going to have to focus on the frivolous. For an idea of how LLMs can help with writing research, take this example of a conversation with Claude when I was working on a Faerie Queene scenario for Patreon:

Dave: "Can you give me any examples from late medieval or Tudor literature of a character posing a conundrum that tests the wisdom and moral insight of the listeners? Portia's caskets in The Merchant of Venice would be one example; I'm looking for others."

Claude: "There are several fascinating examples from this period. Let me share a few notable ones. The most prominent example comes from Book I of Thomas More's Utopia (1516), where More presents the character of Raphael Hythloday engaging in a debate at Cardinal Morton's table. Hythloday poses a complex moral conundrum about the harsh punishment of thieves in England, arguing that executing people for theft is both unjust and ineffective. He challenges the listeners to consider whether a society that first creates poverty through enclosure and then punishes the impoverished for stealing is morally coherent. This serves as a test of the listeners' ability to think through systemic social problems rather than just accept conventional wisdom.

"Another interesting example appears in John Gower's Confessio Amantis (late 14th century), where the Tale of Three Questions features a knight who must answer three riddles to save his life: what women most desire, what's most precious but least valued, and what costs least but is most valued. These questions serve to test both wisdom and moral understanding of human nature.

"In the morality play Mankind (c. 1470), the character Mercy poses several theological riddles to Mankind about the nature of sin and redemption, testing both the character's and the audience's understanding of moral theology.

"An unusual example comes from John Skelton's Bowge of Courte (c. 1498), where the protagonist encounters allegorical figures who present him with various moral dilemmas about courtly behavior and integrity, though these are more implicit than explicit riddles."

Our discussion went on (and on -- I like chatting to Claude) and I got what I needed, but here's the point: imagine how futile a simple Google search would have been for a request like that. Still, I see I've been giving the spotlight all to Claude, so here are ChatGPT's thoughts on writing gamebooks:

ChatGPT: "Since a 1000-section gamebook requires long-term consistency, custom formatting, and mechanical coherence, GPT-4-turbo or Claude 3 would be your strongest options. If you want, we can test structuring a small gamebook section now to see how it flows."

Dave: "OK, let's try it. Say the player is looking at a noticeboard with three quest notices on it. We'll use keywords, and each notice has two keywords associated with it. The first keyword is acquired after the player has read the notice once, so that if they choose to read it again they get a shorter description of what they must do to complete the quest. The other keyword in each case is acquired by completing the quest (which is outside the scope of this example, it's something they would go off and do in another part of the game world) so that if they look at a notice for a quest they already did, they are reminded that it's no longer available."

ChatGPT: "Got it! Here's how we can structure this:

1. The player sees a noticeboard with three quest notices.
   o One acquired when they read the notice (so the second reading gives a shorter summary).
   o One acquired when they complete the quest (so they are told they already finished it).
2. Each notice has two keywords:
3. The player chooses which notice to read.
4. The system checks their keywords to determine the output.

I'll draft a structured gamebook section below."

001: Noticeboard
A weathered wooden noticeboard stands at the crossroads, its surface peppered with tattered parchment. Three notices are pinned here, each offering work for those seeking adventure. You can read any of them:

·         [1] The Merchant’s Plea    go to 002

·         [2] The Missing Hunter    go to 003

·         [3] The Bandit Threat        go to 004

Choose which notice to read. If you have already read it, you will see only a summary. If you have completed the quest, you will be informed.

002: The Merchant’s Plea
If you have the keyword READ_MERCHANT, go to 005.
If you have the keyword DONE_MERCHANT, go to 006.

A wealthy merchant named Vargos seeks aid. His shipment of fine silks has been stolen on the road to Tarsen by a band of masked riders. He offers a generous reward to anyone who can recover the stolen goods.

Write down the keyword READ_MERCHANT.
Return to 001.

003: The Missing Hunter
If you have the keyword READ_HUNTER, go to 007.
If you have the keyword DONE_HUNTER, go to 008.

A notice written in hurried script pleads for help. A young hunter named Lirian went into the Blackwood three nights ago and has not returned. His father fears the worst and offers a reward for news of his fate.

Write down the keyword READ_HUNTER.
Return to 001.

004: The Bandit Threat
If you have the keyword READ_BANDIT, go to 009.
If you have the keyword DONE_BANDIT, go to 010.

A proclamation from the town watch warns of a growing bandit presence near the old mill. Travelers have gone missing, and merchants report stolen goods. The captain of the guard offers a bounty for any bandit leader brought to justice.

Write down the keyword READ_BANDIT.
Return to 001.

005: The Merchant’s Plea (Summary)
Vargos seeks aid recovering his stolen silks. A reward is offered.
Return to 001.

006: The Merchant’s Plea (Completed)
You have already helped Vargos. There is nothing more to do here.
Return to 001.

007: The Missing Hunter (Summary)
A hunter is missing in the Blackwood. His father seeks news.
Return to 001.

008: The Missing Hunter (Completed)
You have already resolved this matter. There is nothing more to do here.
Return to 001.

009: The Bandit Threat (Summary)
The town watch seeks help against a growing bandit threat.
Return to 001.

010: The Bandit Threat (Completed)
The bandit threat has been dealt with. The notice is now irrelevant.
Return to 001.

I find that pretty impressive. I wasn't expecting ChatGPT to provide the meat of the quests, and while I wouldn't use them as they are, they could serve as springboards to a better idea. I said to ChatGPT, only half in jest: "I'll soon be obsolete."

"You're far from obsolete," said ChatGPT, eager as always to be supportive. "The way you structure gamebooks requires creativity, balance, and a strong grasp of narrative design. LLMs are just tools to assist in the process. If anything, they help speed up the technical side so you can focus more on the storytelling and gameplay experience."

Which is pretty much what I've been telling everyone all along.

Queen Nyx isn't vanquished overnight

There haven't been a lot of reviews of Vulcanverse -- probably because it's 6115 sections long, and to get to the climactic battle at the end most reviewers are going to cheat. Let's face it, reviewers have to keep the reviews coming. It's not like they can take a two-month break to play through the entire Vulcanverse saga. That's a shame, as there are huge victories to be won and those victories can't be truly appreciated unless they're earned. But if you're a gamebook or solo RPG aficionado, don't let that deter you. If you want the real epic experience, get all five books and be prepared to let them take over your life for a while. (You can create your character right here.) I don't think you'll regret it.

Figures on a hillside

‘Who comes must love lone

places,

Where long-forgotten bone

Lies in the old spaces.’

Fans of the work of English fantasy author John Whitbourn won't want to miss the chance to lay their hands on The Ghosts and Scholars Book of Landscape Figures. This is a hand-numbered limited edition hardcover featuring a selection of weird tales involving chalk giants and other ancient entities slumbering in the hills. Mr Whitbourn's contribution may (so he threatens) be his last short story. We must hope that's not so, but collectors will want to snap up their copy just in case. Forget about NFTs and crypto; give it a year or two and these books will be worth more than their weight in Saxon gold.

As for prehistoric chalk figures -- abiding through the centuries, they evoke a sense of the numinous even in a thoroughgoing materialist like me. They can be variously seen as guardians of the sacred, warnings to intruders, or just marks left by those lived before us to say, "We were here!" In the hands of these skilled writers they lie across the threshold where folk horror and psychogeography meet. I haven't been able to resist using them in my own work, both in the Dragon Warriors scenario "Wayland's Smithy" and, more frivolously, in this letter to the Royal Mythological Society in Mirabilis, the comic I created with Leo Hartas and Martin McKenna.

"Message in a Bottle" (a scenario set in Legend)

Here's a Legend scenario that originally appeared on my Patreon page. Sign up there (you don't have to pay anything) if you want to get these goodies early. We keep hearing these days about fantasy roleplaying being 'colonial'; here's an adventure where the colonials get their comeuppance!

The characters are in Outremer when they learn of the siege of Asun, a city on the coast of the Sea of Lament. It has been blockaded for months by a mercenary fleet financed by trading houses of Ferromaine, and now a Crusader army is closing in on it by land with the intention of wresting it from Zhenir at least long enough to sack the place.

The characters have heard of the wizard Zakhar (his name is actually Zakariya) whose magnificent House of Wonders stands in the Old Quarter of Asun. ‘Too many treasures there for Zakhar to salvage them all,’ reckons one authority on the subject. ‘He’ll escape with the choicest items, but there’s a chance his library will still have a few works not seen in the West for centuries. That’s if the Capellars don’t torch all the books as soon as they get into the city.’

It doesn’t matter whether or not the characters join in the capture of Asun, though it will be more effective if they do, especially if they have to circumvent some magical trap left by Zakhar to protect his home. At any rate, they either find or are subsequently offered a curio found behind a brick in the House of Wonders: a double-shelled bottle with an outer surface of swirling turquoise glass with gaps that reveal a secretive shell of black crystal beneath. The stopper is a gold plug stamped with a sigil unfamiliar to the most learned Coradian scholars. (Or even Ta'ashim scholars, come to that.)

If the stopper is removed, time stands still for all but the characters around the bottle. They become aware that their company now includes one who was not there before, though they have no memory of him joining them.

If they insist on giving him a name, he suggests they could call him Samum. ‘At this hour, when you gather, think on the wish of your hearts. Three wishes I will grant, but only when you speak together, and the wish shall be as the words you speak.’

They awake, realizing they had all dozed off, and the other is no longer with them. Nor can they remember his face.

The jinni will come each day at the same hour, but only if they are all gathered together. They can make one wish each time, and when all three wishes have been spoken the jinni will then bring about the exact opposite, one wish at a time on each of the next three days, the jinni manifesting now beside the bottle at the appointed hour whether or not all the characters assemble there.

Why the reversed wishes? Because the situation was not as it seemed. They did not free the jinni because it was never really trapped in the bottle in the first place. The stopper was a fake – that’s why no one can identify the sigil. The Ta’ashim wizard Zakariya, knowing his city was going to fall to the Coradians, left the jinni as a booby trap. He commanded it (using the last of his own three wishes) to pretend to be imprisoned until the stopper was removed, then to learn the three desires of the Coradians and do the opposite to what they want.

(Was this not a way of Zakariya effectively using his last wish to obtain three more wishes? Jinn are usually alert to such wiles, but in this case the jinni approves so greatly of the malice and ingenuity involved that it's prepared to overlook that.)

If the characters can find the original stopper with Suleiman’s seal (they would know him as 'Salamin', if at all) they might be able to fix things. Zakariya left it with a servant who was supposed to throw it in the well, but instead he sold it to a trader in curiosities in Asun market.

Armed with the genuine stopper, they could trick the jinni into returning to the bottle using the old ploy of ‘I can’t believe you could fit inside this…’ The jinni appears each day at the same hour, even after hearing the three wishes and then conjuring their opposite, in order to relish their misery. Naturally the jinni is just as aware of old myths as they are, but will happily enter the bottle because it thinks they have only the fake stopper, which has no power to seal it inside.

If they succeed in trapping the jinni and then release it for real, it is obliged to grant three wishes – this time playing it straight and doing exactly as they ask, not the reverse. It’s quite likely they’ll need at least one of those true wishes to fix the trouble the bad wishes caused, and of course if a wish is not phrased just right it can cause fresh problems of its own, even when granted properly.

How should the jinni look? You may have quite a job reclaiming the terrifying majesty of the concept from the creaky stage and screen versions we’re all used to. In movies jinn are almost never depicted as native to the region where they were originally minor deities. In Pasolini’s Il Fiore Delle Mille e una Note, the jinni has red hair. My favourite screen jinn are both played by John Leguizamo in Peter Barnes’s Arabian Nights miniseries, but Leguizamo is Spanish-Columbian. The Thief of Bagdad began a long tradition of having African-Americans play jinn (the magnificent Rex Ingram in this case) and I shudder to think that’s perhaps because Hollywood producers associate commanding a jinni with having a slave though, to be fair, later Arabic folktales also often portray a jinni’s natural form as black-skinned.

I like this sinister, mouldering, bandage-wrapped interpretation from the videogame The Thaumaturge. It does seem more Egyptian than Arabian, but neatly gets around any accusations of racism. And it fairly reeks of sorcerous power.

But how about if we look back to the original myths? Jinn there are creatures of smokeless fire (which is possibly how ancient Arabs described light) so maybe the jinni could manifest as a dazzling glow with a flickering face inside. Trouble is, that’s getting too FX-ish, which is the very opposite of magical. So in the end I opted to just make this one the classic shape changer, so protean that it was like an ambiguous figure met in a dream. And the jinn freely change their appearance in The Thousand and One Nights, so who could hope to pin them down any more than we can know how many quarks are dancing on the head of a proton?

"Samum" incidentally is a desert wind that brings sickness. A player might look that up and suspect a trap, but after all isn’t it exactly the kind of thing you’d expect a jinni to be called?

The Thaumaturge

Most of the time, what's marketed as fantasy is anything but fantastical. Fantasy movies are too often singularly lacking in magic, jokey romps with the visual styling of a medieval theme park. Fantasy novels, steered by imagined trends that publishing executives might just as well derive from staring at birds, are cookie-cutter remixes of the Last Big Thing*. And CRPGs? Face it, they're usually just D&D under a different label.

In such times, who would admit to liking fantasy? Tentatively my hand goes up. I'm a fan of fantasy fiction in the same way that Diogenes was a fan of honest men. So finding something really, really good in the genre is sweet water to parched lips. And that's The Thaumaturge, developed by Fool's Theory, which Jamie and I have been playing obsessively this month.

The game is set in Poland in 1905 and involves the experiences of Wiktor Szulski, who is one of a clandestine group of mages who derive their power by binding unseen beings called salutors. After the violent death of his father, from whom he was estranged, Wiktor returns home to Warsaw and investigates the possibility of murder while getting embroiled in family tensions and the politics and social intrigues of the day.

Twin pique

The sense of atmosphere is superbly evoked, both for the historical period and the feeling of uncanny magic deriving from Eastern European folklore. The occasional black humour is nicely judged and doesn't rely on anachronisms. The characters -- including some famous names you'll have heard of -- are rounded, complex and believable, and in investigating the stories of their Flaws (the character traits that led to a salutor attaching itself to them) you'll often find that your first or even second guess is wide of the mark. The story unfolds in surprising ways, always richly inventive, and with plot twists that are more interesting and make more sense than you'll find in many a movie or TV show.

Hello, Darkness, my old friend

Add to that the resonance with modern real-life events, which pervades the story without ever being hammered home, and you have what is not just the best CRPG for several years but the best fantasy story in any medium. The actors nail these characters. Listen to Maciej Nawrocki's pitch-perfect aristocratic drawl as Wiktor, Filip Lipiecki delivering Abaurycys edge-of hysteria braggadocio (Richard Widmark couldn't have done it better) or Ewa Prus blending Ligia's heartfelt concern for her brother with the needling urge to scold him.

The writing team comprises Paweł Nowak, Magdalena Bialek, Alicja Korzewska, and Paula Mejsner, and this open-world game is so story- and character-centred that I'm bound to emphasize their work, but the credit goes not just to the writers but to the visual designers and the other developers who built up the meticulous details of the game world. Just look at the personality conveyed by the macabre and silent Upyr, oldest of your salutors, a nightmarish presence who feels also like a faithful companion and by that contrast draws you into what it feels like to be a thaumaturge with one foot in reality and the other in a different world. There is real creative genius here. My faith in fantasy, at least for another year, is restored.

* The other day a friend was telling me about a bestselling series set in a school for teen dragon-riders. "Of course it's just Anne McCaffrey meets J K Rowling," they said, "but with a TikTok vibe for readers who've never read a Pern or Harry Potter book."