M A R Barker used to draw a distinction between “real” Tekumel, the world as it would function if it actually existed, and “game” Tekumel, the version that allows for player-characters changing the course of history in sometimes rather slapstick ways.
It has widely been asserted that real Tekumel (I’m dropping those quotes) is unplayable. Some of Barker’s own gaming group take that view. I’m not so sure. Consider these remarks by the director Satyajit Ray:
“Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay’s Pather Panchali was serialised in a popular Bengali magazine in the early 1930s. The author had been brought up in a village and the book contained much that was autobiographical. The manuscript had been turned down by the publishers on the ground that it lacked a story. […] I chose Pather Panchali for the qualities that made it a great book: humanism, lyricism, and its ring of truth. I knew I would have to do a lot of pruning and reshaping – I certainly could not go beyond the first half, which ended with the family’s departure for Banaras – but at the same time I felt that to cast the thing into a mould of cut-and-dried narrative would be wrong. The script had to retain some of the rambling quality of the novel because that in itself contained a clue to the feel of authenticity: life in a poor Bengali village does ramble.”
Would it be possible to run a game like that? Ray went on to describe how the filming of Pather Panchali affected him:
“These explorations into the village opened up a new and fascinating world. To one born and bred in the city it had a new flavour, a new texture; and its values were different. It made you want to observe and probe, to catch the revealing details, the telling gestures, the particular turns of speech.”
If modern Bollywood movies typically present us with game India, what Ray was looking for was the real India. And I think that stretch away from genre tropes towards authenticity can be achieved in roleplaying. When I ran Sagas of the Icelanders (Gregor Vuga's RPG, praised so often on this blog that I don’t need to do so again) there was no magic in the game. It became mostly a tale of farmers having boundary disputes, romantic affairs, family arguments. Some raiding and killing, but not a lot, just like in the Icelandic sagas themselves. Grettir’s Saga does have spells and undead, sure, but that’s an outlier.
I like The Northman but it’s set in game Scandinavia, if it’s even truly Norse at all. Grímur Hákonarson's Rams feels more like one of the genuine sagas. I like the pettiness – which isn’t at all petty once your focus adjusts; then it could be the wrath of Achilles. The loose ends and the ambiguity too.
A lot of Depression-era games resemble The Shadow – another movie I love, incidentally – but you could just as well forgo game-1930s for the real-1930s of, say, Patrick Hamilton’s 20,000 Streets Under The Sky, which has way more meat to it than one of Walter Gibson’s Shadow novellas.
Responses to escapism, realism and non-genre gaming suggest that the quest for a real Tekumel, or Legend, or Iceland, or wherever is not something most roleplayers are on board for. But how do you know till you try it? And anyway...
Assuming your roleplaying campaign involves combat, how long should fights go on? In Sagas of the Icelanders, a fight is usually just one dice roll, which is just how quickly it would be resolved in the sagas:
"A great sheet of ice had been thrown up by the flood on the other side of the river as smooth and slippery as glass, and there Thrain and his men stood in the midst of the sheet.
Skarphedinn took a spring into the air, and leapt over the stream between the ice banks, and did not check his course, but rushed onwards with a slide. The sheet of ice was very slippery, and so he went as fast as a bird flies. Thrain was just about to put his helm on his head. Skarphedinn bore down on him and hewed at Thrain with his axe Rimmugýgur, the 'battle-witch', and smote him on the head, and clove him down to the teeth, so that his jaw-teeth fell out on the ice. This feat was done with such a quick sleight that no one could get a blow at him; he glided away from them at once at full speed. Tjorvi, indeed, threw his shield before him on the ice, but he leapt over it, and still kept his feet, and slid quite to the end of the sheet of ice."
Contrast that with games of Runequest (I'm talking about v2 here; more recent editions may have fixed it) where battles between two reasonably skilled fighters became a case of slash, parry, slash, parry, and rinse and repeat until eventually somebody fumbled. And in GURPS a combat is like a slow game of county cricket. (Imagine replicating Skarpedinn's feat at the frozen river using GURPS 4e -- we'd still be here next Christmas.)
How long should fights go on? As long as suits the setting and the players. Sagas of the Icelanders is true to the literary reality of the original stories. For all I know, the presumably saga-length combats in RQ Vikings are nearer to how they played out in reality. If you're playing a game that's trying to recreate the feel of a kung fu movie, you'd feel cheated if every fight was over in a single strike. And even when it is, the manoeuvring beforehand tells a story in its own right:
A combat should be a little story, with a beginning, middle and end. But it's only worth playing out the beats of those mini-stories if they're going to be interestingly different each time. We'll tolerate combat mechanics that take longer to resolve if they generate dramatic outcomes. I've found Tirikelu hits the sweet spot, being both quick and cinematic, but after all it would be pretty surprising if I wasn't satisfied by a system I devised. You'll have to judge it for yourself.
Tekumel is a good place to look for the emergent story possibilities of combat. One-on-one fights are often formal duels held under the terms of the Manifesto of Nobel Deliverance. The beginning of the story is the quarrel or insult that instigates the duel. The middle is the negotiation between the seconds as to the form of the duel. And, as in any good story, the decisions made at that stage almost always set up the denouement which is the fight itself.
Duels make for interesting fights because the stakes are clear (honour, sometimes life too) and there are all kinds of ways it can turn out. Somebody might win by resorting to inelegant or even dirty tactics (use of Warrior skill rather than just Weapon skill, in Tirikelu). In pistol duels, one of the combatants might choose to fire in the air, or otherwise pull something unexpected; look at the duels in Scaramouche or The Duellists for inspiration.
If combat is frequent in your games and simply functions as an obstacle you throw in front of the players to prevent them from smoothly achieving their goals -- hordes of orcs in a dungeon, say -- then a single roll to decide the fight is probably enough. If the characters are samurai, Spartans, musketeers, or kuruthūniyal, then it's quite likely that the minutiae of each battle comprise a significant part of their story. Gun battles in a noir setting will be decisively shorter than in special ops adventure. The rules should put the focus on whatever matters in the campaign, and generate just enough blow-by-blow detail to fuel the kind of stories you want to emerge.
Still searching for the perfect online roleplaying game? The lighter the better, I say. You can roll dice and move figurines on Roll20, but a conversational style of game is a lot easier and for my money more fun. That's one of the reasons I enjoyed running Gregor Vuga's Sagas of the Icelanders, which quite honestly is a work of genius. If you've read the sagas you'll know how perfectly it captures the spirit of them, and right now it's Pay What You Want on DriveThruRPG. Oh, and Gregor is giving half of the profits to the Red Cross while the pandemic continues.
Two other games with a similarly light touch when it comes to rules mechanics are, unsurprisingly, both Powered by the Apocalypse. First up I give you Tremulus, which spins Lovecraftian horror in an improv storytelling style. I have a conflicted relationship with HPL-based games in that, if you play them true to the spirit of the Cthulhu Mythos, the heroes can't win. Having said that, going mad, giving in to despair, and suffering inevitable defeat can also make for a cathartic experience.
Then there's Alas For The Awful Sea, which appears to be inspired by Melville, Conrad, Poe, and probably HPL again. You play a ship’s crew navigating the remote British Isles in the 19th century. There they face a world consumed with suspicion, sadness, and desperation. Hard to sum it up, but the designers Vee Hendro and Hayley Gordon say this:
"Struggles for power have deadly consequences; mysterious disappearances plague the region; and those who seem human may not all be so. Amidst all this, the sea sends forth strange messages. Will you be the one to listen?"
If you liked The Lighthouse, that one's definitely for you.
I've been making some discoveries about playing online. Simple rules work best, but that was pretty obvious from the git-go. I'm also finding games run better when they're audio only. We have one game on Discord with eight players, and one on Zoom with five players. There's much more cross-chat in the latter, because any appearance in any player's room of a child, spouse, pet, pizza or whatever risks distracting several of the players into launching off on a separate conversation where they talk over everyone else. Lacking video, the Discord game is much more focussed. Players stay in character more and wait for each other to speak, so it's less of a hubbub as well as encouraging a more vivid mental picture of the adventure. There's a good reason they call this improvised radio theatre with dice.
Pop back tomorrow when we'll be jumping on the magic carpet for a trip back to the land of the Arabian Nights. Not just an adventure, oh no. Open sesame indeed, this is a full campaign complete with detailed maps of 8th century Baghdad. And whatever you're playing in these difficult days, and whether it's with voices only or facetime too -- stay safe.
"Where is the horse gone, where the young rider? Where now the giver of gifts? Where are the seats at the feasting gone? Where are the merry sounds in the hall? Alas, the bright goblet! Alas, the knight and his hauberk! Alas, the glory of the king! How that hour has departed, dark under the shadow of night, as had it never been."
If you're running the adventure as the lead-in to a campaign then the characters are young (15-19 years) and begin with two relationships instead of the usual four.
Overview
Thorkill
Whalerider lives at Kolbeinsvik up in the Strands in north-west
Iceland. In his youth he was a renowned trader and raider, now he owns much of
the land from Arness to Kaldbak and is the big man in the district. The characters are sent by their family in the far south to trade goods with Thorkill, but a complication requires them to spend the winter with him.
Daylight
At this time of year the sun rises at 10:00 and sets
at 14:00, with three hours of twilight either side. So it’s full dark from 5pm
till 7am.
Arrival
The characters are bringing spices and furs, which
their father is trading with his old shipmate Thorkill for
wood (mostly driftwood that fetches up along the coast). Thorkill has agreed to send them back with men and mules to
carry the wood, which takes more space than the goods they’ve brought.
It's sunset and the characters have been travelling all day in freezing fog. They're cold, they're tired. Coming down off the Thorskafjord Moor, they see a big
man who seems to have a bloody burden on each shoulder. He lumbers up and tells
them he’s Ulkar No-Name, “so now you
can tell everyone you met nobody on the road.” He doesn’t smile. “I’m bringing
these two sheep for the feast.” Wouldn’t it have been easier to herd them back
and slaughter them at the house? “I didn’t think of it.”
But there’s a snag
Thorkill hasn’t yet got the wood together to send back, and
so he says the characters must stay for the frost festival Þorrablót”) when a sacrifice is made in honour of Frost and Snow, the
sons of Jokul the Giant in mythology.
The characters can sit about the house as
guests, or they can join in chores if they choose to. If they volunteer to do
that, it’s an opportunity to meet Audun Haldorson the foreman who
says that the wall needs mending on his farm. It’s not actually for Thorkill,
but it would help indirectly as it would free up Audun’s time.
If so they might meet Audun’s headstrong son Bakki,
who is their age and will surely propose a swimming contest (in the sea,
freezing) or a wrestling or drinking match, or a dice game (use wyrd). Bakki
usually tries to get them to do this instead of work, and is likely to be
derisive if they refuse, so there’s opportunity for Honour to be questioned.
About half the wood has so far been made ready,
including a pine tree trunk that would make a magnificent mast for a ship.
Thorkill’s brothers pause each day to look at it and say what a hardship it
would be to part with that, maybe the characters can make do with some
driftwood roots instead, etc, etc. It’s just a wind-up.
The household
Thorkill (38)
Asdis (wife, 26)
Ongul (brother, 35)
Skeggi (brother, 34)
Ulkar (illegitimate
brother, very strong, 39)
Senuna (a beautiful
Irish thrall, 19)
Rumours include:
“Ulkar is Thorkill’s half-brother, but he’ll never
acknowledge him. He gets seated at meals like a labourer and never gets
included in family decisions.”
“When will Thorkill have your goods packed to send
back? In his own good time, like everything else.”
“Thorkill went raiding in his youth to prove himself
as bold as his father, but Kar Drangson was as fierce a man as any of us will
meet in this life, and with his sword given him by the Danish king he was a
match for any three warriors of these days.”
“The bandit called Thorn has worried his way into
Thorkill’s side since last winter. He preys on those crossing the moors and he’s
been tracked as far as Ymir’s Tooth Mountain, but nobody knows where he has his
lair.”
“You’ve been invited to the frost festival?” Sucks his
teeth. “You know it involves a sacrifice, don’t you?” (This is just locals
winding up some young outsiders.)
Characters could use Look into someone’s heart to
figure out if a rumour is true or just the locals getting a rise out of them.
Audun the foreman
Thorkill’s foreman is Audun Haldorson (35) a free man with his own farm at Kaldbakvik. Thorkill
has bought up every other farm in the district that his family didn’t already
own because of the haunting of Kar the
Old, who died twelve years ago and whose ghost is said to walk the shores.
The bandit
Thorn and
his four men are outlaws who hide out in the mountain and watch
for traders they can rob. Their lair is in a tunnel that runs right through the
mountain.
Towards sunset it’s as though the day peels back, so
that already you can see stars while there is still a glimmer of pale blue, orange
and red along the horizon. At such a time character might, looking up at the
mountain, see the blood-red light of the dying day somehow mirrored in a
pinprick gleam in the middle of the black cliff.
Unless you know the way up, it is a hard climb to the
caves where the bandits live. For the last twenty feet it’s likely their
lookout will have spotted you, too, so there’ll be a barrage of rocks raining
down on you before you reach them. [When you tempt fate for the climb; ideally Berserker
or Fight
with many against many for the fight at the top.]
The barrow
At night you can see a pale green light billowing
around the headland. This comes from Kar the Old’s barrow. (When would they see that? Probably when going outside to empty their bladders.)
Audun: “That’s
why people are in a hurry to get home before sunset at this time of year. No
one wants to meet Kar walking on the shore. When Kar was buried, Thorkill was in Norway. He took
it hard, not for love but because Kar had much of his wealth buried beside him
in the barrow. But Kar’s ghost has enriched Thorkill anyway, by terrorizing
people into selling him their farms.”
If they enter the barrow: it takes most of the day to
dig down to the rafters. Then if they enter (a drop of twelve feet) their torch
goes out because of the foul air. They won't be able to get a torch or candle to stay alight, and that's -1 ongoing for darkness. The interior chamber is narrow, only room for one at a time. They
feel around until they find horse bones, then their feet slither on silver
coins and they blunder into the back of a carved chair. It’s heavy, though. It doesn’t
give when they push it. Wait – there’s somebody sitting in it…
In fact: Ulkar
is prone to narcolepsy and wanders off in a daze by night, either wandering the
shore or entering the barrow by
means of a tunnel that emerges a hundred yards along the beach. So they will have quite a fight with him – that’s
Accept a
physical challenge at -1ongoing
for darkness; in the cramped conditions it’s not possible for another character
to assist by spending bonds. It will go better for them later if they don’t
kill Ulkar.
The treasure includes the short sword Kar used to wield, which is the finest weapon any of
them have ever seen. Its blade looks blue in daylight and in torchlight almost
seems to reflect the blood it’s thirsty to spill. Thorkill will not part with
this: “You must do something worthy of fame before I give you the sword, for I myself
could never get it from my father as long as he lived.”
The festival
At the feast they are given strong drink, then the
youngest is bound with silk ribbons and carried out to the bonfire. [A character could Consider an
uneasy situation if concerned.] He is shown to the flames and the
men say, “Now this one will sacrifice to you, sons of the ice.” He’s then
carried to a hut to lie with Senuna, the thrall; the only sacrifice, his virginity.
If somebody wants to essay a poem or song, so much the
better. Our Icelanders campaign is historical, so there's no magic, but you'll want a numinous moment to evoke the solstice spirit, so how about giving the characters a spectacular view of the northern lights "like the hem of Odin's cloak brushing middle-earth".
* * *
The opening quotation is from J.R.R. Tolkien's translation of "The Wanderer". The pictures are by the acclaimed illustrator John Vernon Lord, whose grandson happens to be one of our players. John coincidentally grew up in the same Derbyshire town as my dad. Much of the story has been swiped from Grettir's Saga, and I urge you to read that before running it. May the High One grant you peat for your fire, mead for your cup, and boon companions to share the long evenings of storytelling and merrymaking with.
Our Christmas freebie is a little different this year. It's a scenario and it's not for Christmas, it's for the winter solstice. It's coming up on Thursday so be ready to hit the shore with axe and shield unlimbered if you want to run it on or around midwinter's day.
The adventure uses Gregor Vuga's Sagas of the Icelanders rules, insofar as it uses anything, so if you want to run it with those you can get the book here. Your quick intro to the Icelandic stories is here. And how about a bit of music to set the mood?
Games designer, critic and journalist James Desborough put up this video in response to a furore at UK Games Expo back in June. James's points are pretty much what I think myself about all the fuss, but that's not why I'm linking to it here. What I am particularly interested in is his succinct definition of "indie" vs "traditional" roleplaying from 9m 55s on.
In the former, the players get together to tell a story (if you've worked in a writers' room or collaborated on a novel you'll know how that goes) whereas in the traditional form of roleplaying it's not authorial. You play a character. The umpire (or GM, or referee, or MC, or whatever) creates situations. Your characters do things in response to those situations. In retrospect, that can be seen as a story (or a plot, as in, "The king died, and then the queen died of grief") but nobody knew what was going to happen in advance. There was no author. The story emerged from what the player-characters said and did.
Personally I prefer that because my day job (one of my day jobs) is being a writer. I don't want to repeat that in my downtime. Also, I play RPGs to discover and be surprised. The stories that are generated spontaneously from players' in-character words and deeds are more unexpected and more interesting than the ones we'd get if we sat around applying the cookie-cutter of Campbellian story paradigms to the pastry of a story set-up.
That's a personal preference, of course. I bristle if I hear players talking about their story arc and whether it's time for another player to move their relationship on in order to incite a plot point. But then, I'm not much of a fan of genre drama or fiction, and much of that "indie" take seems to derive from genre shapes for stories. As Roger Bell-West says here (at 1:26:20) in such games the goal is not to simulate any physical reality, but to simulate a genre.
In any case, every gaming group is entitled to play in whatever way they most enjoy. There's no One True Roleplaying religion. It gets interesting (and matters) when proponents of one style run up against and misunderstand the playing style and intentions of the other -- as seems to have happened in the Things From The Flood game at UKGE. But if you want to know more about that, continue watching James's video from 12m 12s onwards. I have to say, though, that I ran a Powered by the Apocalypse game (Gregor Vuga's Sagas of the Icelanders) and my players enjoyed it in a thoroughly traditional, in-the-moment, inhabit-the-character style, with absolutely no authorial discussion or narrative analysis. Maybe we were getting PbtA "wrong", but it worked, and I might post some of the scenarios now that the nights are drawing in.
"Night followed day like the flapping of a black wing. I saw the sun hopping swiftly across the sky, leaping it every minute, and every minute marking a day. The twinkling succession of darkness and light was excessively painful to the eye. Then, in the intermittent darknesses, I saw the moon spinning swiftly through her quarters from new to full, and had a faint glimpse of the circling stars. Presently, as I went on, still gaining velocity, the palpitation of night and day merged into one continuous greyness; the sky took on a wonderful deepness of blue, a splendid luminous colour like that of early twilight; the jerking sun became a streak of fire, a brilliant arch, in space; the moon a fainter fluctuating band; and I could see nothing of the stars, save now and then a brighter circle flickering in the blue."
Like H G Wells's time traveller, we've careened through another year. There should be a lever to slow this thing down, shouldn't there? But as "minute by minute the white snow flashed across the world, and vanished, and was followed by the bright, brief green of spring" I've had the chance to glimpse a few standout moments of 2016.
My best roleplaying experience was getting to sit in on a session of Dom Camus' Earth Force campaign. This is a modern take on superheroes, with a dash of existential threat and a background swirl of geopolitics. I played a scientist and got through without actively needing to use my powers, but nonetheless getting multinational backing for my open source research program, which made me feel quite Tony Stark. The whole thing was helped along by an elegant, streamlined system that did everything you need of rules and kept out of the way of the roleplaying. I hope Dom will publish it.
Talking of sweetly simple rules, my favourite new game system has been Gregor Vuga's Sagas of the Icelanders. If you're familiar with the sagas, this captures them perfectly. I ran it straight -- no fantasy, no 21st century mores, just bleak neighborhood struggles against the unsentimental elements and your fellow man. It's quick, easy, atmospheric, and the perfect antidote to decades of GURPS.
Proudest achievement of the year was publishing Can You Brexit Without Breaking Britain? This is my and Jamie's first gamebook in more than twenty years. I have no idea what will happen to the UK in 2019 (good luck -- by then I should have regenerated as an Irishman) but I am sure that the book will give you a better understand of the Brexit process than any of the government ministers charged with negotiating it. And Britain's godfather of gamebooks, Ian Livingstone himself, has taken a look at Can You Brexit? and pronounced it "very clever". He may be partial, of course.
Around the time I was finalizing Can You Brexit?, Ashton MacSaylor was getting ready to deliver on his Kickstarter for The Good, the Bad and the Undead. If you've hung around the saloon for a while, you'll remember that was the Wild West gamebook that Jamie was going to write but couldn't get beyond the outline. Ashton took it over, roped and threw and branded it, and now it's riding in out of the desert with a mean eye and a belt full of bullets.
Talking of gamebooks, I wrote two audio adventures for the Amazon Echo, one an all-new interactive drama, the other a reskin of my first ever gamebook Crypt of the Vampire. With very tight deadlines those were hard work, but luckily I like hard work, as long as it's work on something that interests me.
The highlight of the summer was travelling to Germany for Manticon. Good beer, nice people, an open society, fabulous landscapes, and the best trains I've ever been on. I might move there. (See Brexit, above.)
Earlier in the year, I got a call from Lawrence Whitaker at The Design Mechanism, publishers of the Mythras RPG. (Yes, I know; apologies for the spelling. I have to grit my teeth every time I type it, but it's the Runequest system with Glorantha stripped out, so it actually is rather brilliant.) TDM have acquired the licence to do a roleplaying game based on Jack Vance's fantasy trilogy Lyonesse, and having heard me talk about it on the Fictoplasm podcast they thought I might like to contribute a section to the book. You bet. I owe Jack Vance a huge creative debt and it's an honour to pay a little of that back.
Then there was Daniel Fox of Grim & Perilous Studios getting in touch to bring Tetsubo back from the Land of Roots. Nothing's forgotten, as we Robin of Sherwood fans know. Watch for that in 2019, if you still have money left after food and medicine rationing.
I also got roped in by Ian Turnbull, one of the Black Cactus co-founders, to do some work on a Virtual Reality game. Don't reach for your Oculus headset just yet. The developers originally hoped to get the game ready by October this year, but Ian's and my combined half-century in game development told us that was never going to happen. Maybe next October. My role was, as it often is these days, to clarify, simplify and focus the design and creative goals of the game. (And to chuck out all the bloody cutscenes on the principle of "discover, don't tell".)
In October my time machine lurched off into a pocket universe of misery for a few weeks when I came down with a nasty virus followed by a racking cough. It stopped me from going to TekUKon, which was a blow, but every cold has a silver lining. Unable to get on with any of my new projects, I whiled away the time for the fluid link to repair itself by editing the fifth Blood Sword book, The Walls of Spyte. It's still a slapstick dungeon bash but at least the flowchart now makes sense and the pieces of the key you find are properly numbered, so for the first time ever you can actually complete the adventure.
Surprising creative experience of the year was discovering I still have a copy of the Lord of Light boardgame that Nick Henfrey (creator of Spacefarers) and I pitched to Ian Livingstone (yes, 'im again) and Steve Jackson back around 1980. We didn't have the rights, which might or might not have been a problem. Nowadays there's always Kickstarter, so who knows?
And entertainment highlight of 2018 was discovering Guy Sclanders' hilarious Fabled Lands playthroughs on YouTube. Many of the comments focus on how nasty things used to happen in games in the old days. Well, nasty things are more fun. Whatever doesn't kill you helps you level up.
And on that note, best wishes for the year ahead. See you on the other side.
Every year at this time, Jamie and I get together for a marathon gaming session at his computer, which is nicknamed "the Beast" either because it's the real McCoy or because it's heavy enough to use in a smash-&-grab raid on a cash machine. This is our opportunity to catch up on some computer games we've missed, so we download a bunch and work our way through until we find one worth sticking with. It has to be said that usually the best games are the indies: Inside, Papers Please, This War of Mine, Pathologic -- though we have been known to binge on hours and hours of The Witcher too.
This year our serendipitous find was What Remains of Edith Finch. We thought we were getting a horror game, but it's much more intriguing than that. There are elements of horror, but also black comedy, tragedy, innocence, loss, grief, identity, madness, pastiche, and the awareness of the precious fragility of life. It's superbly written and voice-acted and you can play the whole thing in a few hours. We really enjoyed it.
Also on the theme of madness was Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice. We gave that an hour and then lost interest. Unaccountably it was about a 1st century BC Celt wandering around an 8th century AD Norse underworld -- called in the game not Niflhel, Hel or even Niflheim, but "Helheim", suggesting that historical research went no further than leafing through a heavy metal magazine. Still, you might like it if your paradigm of a game is a twenty-hour, one-note cutscene interspersed with occasional fights and arcade-style match-the-symbol tasks. Almost the opposite of Edith Finch in every respect, that.
And we finished off with Kingdom Come: Deliverance, a monumental CRPG set in the Holy Roman Empire during the reign of Wenceslas IV (most definitely not the one in the carol). It's so thoroughly researched that you could use the source material text to run a tabletop campaign, and in fact the absence of magic/fantasy reminded me of a purist Legend campaign. The writing and acting are excellent, and if I had a spare one hundred hours I'd throw myself into it with gusto.
Other recommendations if you're looking for last-minute Christmas presents are Gregor's Vuga's gem of a roleplaying game Sagas of the Icelanders, David Nicholls' miniseries Patrick Melrose (the best thing on TV this year), and Posy Simmonds' long-awaited new graphic novel Cassandra Darke(surely soon to be "a major motion picture" with Gemma Arterton).
And if it didn't have a price tag in the stratosphere I'd have treated myself to the White Album, my old vinyl copy being scratched to acoustic fuzz by too much use over the years. If you've never listened to it, don't dip in track by track like some pill-popping Megacity juve perp with ADHD. Put on each side in turn and just sit back. People say it's not a concept album, but ninety minutes later you'll think differently. Good night, good night, everybody.
