Interview on The Creative Penn podcast

It was an honour and a pleasure to be invited recently onto Joanna Penn's podcast The Creative Penn. We talked about games, comics, books, publishing, story worlds, and how writers can use AI tools in their work. One word of warning: Jo has 810 episodes in the back catalogue, and with her justifiable reputation as a visionary who is often years ahead of her time, you might feel compelled to listen to the whole lot. And as well as being a podcaster, entrepreneur and commentator on the publishing industry, Jo is an award-winning author with several successful series to her name, so be sure to check out her books too.

Heart of AI

Worldbuilding matters if you're creating any sort of ongoing series, but especially if it's fantasy or SF. Think of the problems that have bedevilled writers of Doctor Who or Star Trek when they try to remember what's been established in the show's canon. Or even if you're just writing a novel and you introduced a minor character a dozen chapters back and now you have to go searching for what you said about them.

Thankfully it's not as hard as it used to be in the days of typewriters or even fountain pens -- I still have no idea how Anthony Trollope kept track of everything that was going on in the Barchester books while also holding down an important job in the UK postal service. But now we're on the cusp of AI making it much easier. Google's NotebookLM takes your books and can generate a timeline, story outline, FAQs, contents list, and can answer questions about the text with references so you can find the relevant section.

Here's what it had to say about my book Heart of Ice:

Power Corrupts in a Frozen World

Players choose a character with unique skills and navigate through a perilous post-apocalyptic world. The story centres on the search for the Heart of Volent, a powerful artefact believed to hold the key to ultimate power. Players must make choices and engage in combat with other characters and dangerous creatures, navigating through a frozen wasteland to reach a ruined city full of buried secrets. The game's mechanics are detailed, including skills, weapons, and items, allowing for a diverse range of play styles. The text provides a narrative experience with specific instructions and outcomes based on player decisions, culminating in a final confrontation for the Heart of Volent.

The narrative of Heart of Ice explores the themes of power, ambition, and the nature of humanity by placing characters with diverse motivations in a race for an artifact of immense power, the Heart of Volent. The story portrays a bleak future where humanity is on the brink of extinction due to a new ice age and the legacy of past conflicts. 

• The Heart of Volent, a meteorite resembling a violet gemstone, possesses the power to reshape the universe. This power attracts individuals driven by various desires, highlighting the multifaceted nature of ambition. 
• Some, like Kyle Boche, seek ultimate power for personal gain. Boche's treachery and self-preservation instincts are noted by other characters who have dealt with him previously. 
• Others, like Chaim Golgoth, a USI agent, are motivated by duty and the pursuit of national interest. Golgoth's pragmatism is evident in his willingness to secure the Heart for the United States, claim its power for himself, or destroy it to prevent it from falling into "hostile hands". 
• The story also presents characters like Janus Gaunt, who initially seeks the Heart to "set things right" but ultimately succumbs to the corrupting influence of power, plotting to eliminate those he perceives as weak. This descent into ruthlessness exemplifies the seductive and transformative nature of ambition.

The narrative suggests that the pursuit of power can warp even the most well-intentioned individuals, leading them down a path of destruction. This is evident in Baron Siriasis's transformation from a seemingly rational individual to a power-hungry schemer willing to sacrifice the universe for his own rejuvenation and immortality.

The story's focus on a dying Earth further emphasizes the dangers of unchecked ambition. As characters fight for control of the Heart, the fate of humanity hangs in the balance, suggesting that the pursuit of individual power can blind individuals to the collective good.

Finally, the narrative uses the concept of a "heart of ice" to symbolize the ruthlessness and lack of empathy that often accompany the pursuit of power. This recurring motif underscores the story's cautionary message about the potential for power to corrupt even the most humane instincts.

I then asked it a specific question: "Who is the 'gene genie'?" NotebookLM said:

"There is a character named Malengin who is referred to as a 'Gene Genie'. Here's what the text says about him: 

• Malengin is specifically sought out by Thadra Bey, who is described as a 'veritable Amazon' enhanced to be 'more than human'. This suggests that Malengin possesses knowledge or abilities related to enhancing humans beyond their normal capabilities. 
• Thadra Bey seeks Malengin out because the science of genetic engineering cannot be practised where she is from, on al-Lat, due to the risk of infecting the colony with a deadly plague. This further suggests that Malengin is skilled in genetic engineering, and that his practices might be considered dangerous by some. 
• Malengin is described as someone who is said to trade in genetic enhancements through the use of retroviruses. This confirms that Malengin is involved in the world of genetic engineering and uses retroviruses to alter the DNA of his clients, resulting in permanent changes."

What I liked most of all was that NotebookLM can (in mere minutes) generate a podcast-style discussion about the book(s). It's not exactly In Our Time but it's a sign of great things to come. As long as you have a Google account you can listen to the Heart of Ice discussion here.

I've just heard from Fox that their online version of Heart of Ice is now updated, so you can play the adventure for free right now.

It's called irony

I’ve been listening to a lot of podcasts over the last couple of years, to go with the long country walks of the covid era. One of my favourites (podcasts, not walks) looks at the books and authors Gary Gygax cited as influences on D&D. But, oh my, it can be wearing to hear genre fans blunder their way through an interpretation of what an author is saying. You'd think that reading fantasy and SF would open you up to ambiguity and nuance, but instead those readers are often the most insistently literal.

Take this episode about Lin Carter’s The Warrior of World’s End. Xarda the knightrix (sic) says: “Knighthood promises a colourful and exciting life of action, such as every red-blooded woman normally craves.” (26m 23s in.) But, the presenters solemnly go on to say, Lin Carter then undercuts this with a further passage: 

“Many folks would doubtless say that a lady knight is a strange thing, or an intelligent metal bird that flies, or an old geezer who covers his face with lavender smoke.” 

Oh no, the sexist hound. One of the presenters grumbles that “it’s putting a warrior woman in the same category as a flying bird and an illusionist with purple haze over his face as though it’s just as wacky and weird!” Oh yes, agrees another earnestly, those were the deplorable attitudes of the time.

Does anyone think that when Jane Austen writes, “It is a truth universally acknowledged…” that she is expressing her own personal view of the matter? Or that Hilary Mantel’s description of the Duchess of Cambridge as "a shop-window mannequin, with no personality of her own, entirely defined by what she wore” was intended as Mantel’s unfiltered opinion? Mantel should not have had to explain that she was employing irony; that is, using a variety of free indirect speech to convey and expose the attitudes she was criticizing.

I found the same thing in some reviews of my political gamebook Can You Brexit that complained about the snobbish and dismissive attitudes of the central character. Well, duh. That character was modelled on the senior Tory politicians of the day. If you disagreed with the tone of their inner voice, so too did I.

Authors do this all the time. Carter in that excerpt from The Warrior of World’s End is not telling us the attitudes of the 1970s – at least, that wasn’t his purpose. He is using a form of generalized free indirect speech to express the general astonishment at a female knight in terms that place us in the mindset of the people who inhabit his fantasy setting. The mechanical bird and the smoke-wrapped sorcerer are other characters in the adventuring “party”, incidentally, so it’s also self-aware irony on their part. But even when a sentiment like that is expressed in the narrator’s voice, it’s a technique writers use a lot, and usually to express precisely the opposite of their personal opinions. Unfortunately it seems like it’s wasted in genre fiction if the readers insist on taking every word literally.

Why it matters: you are missing nine-tenths of the value of fiction if you think that authors write simply to express personal points of view. The presenters of another podcast were vexed by how Arthur Conan Doyle could have believed in fairies having created the arch-rationalist Sherlock Holmes. "Doyle would regard seances and fairies as unknown science," theorized one. "He wasn't Holmes, he was Watson," countered the other. No, no, no. Authors aren't that careless. They don't typically just drop themselves into any one character but into all of them. I've written religiously devout characters, for example, and indeed stories that have a Christian message, despite being in real life an agnostic. Neither Jack Ember nor Estelle Meadowvane are me, though naturally they must have something of me in them.

(Incidentally, it seems like I'm really whaling on those two podcasts, but in fact they're both firm favourites of mine. They just happened to end up in the firing line when I was looking around for examples. But give them both a chance, do.)

I once wrote a vampire novel for a YA horror series. An editor at the publisher's office said, "There is a bookshop called Horniman's and the school is called Urnfield. I don't think the writer is aware of the connotations." What, I wasn't aware that those names might evoke themes of sex and death? In a vampire novel? What do publishers think authors do all day? We don't just slap this stuff down without any thought.

So, next time you're reading a book -- even a trashy fantasy adventure novel -- it might pay off to park your own assumptions and attitudes outside and dive in with the faith that the author is not simply some dope who unthinkingly uses his or her characters as mere mouthpieces for the -- shock horror! -- discredited views of the unsafe bygone era when the novel was written. Here is the finest literary podcast I know of, and one that will dispel any notion that "literature" has to mean difficult, or sombre, or even highbrow. Open your mind and even the humblest book might change your life.

Adventuring on a shoestring

I have a friend who keeps telling me I should do podcasts. It’s flattering because he does a fair few himself and he’s very good at it, but the field is so crowded already. Mike and Roger on Improvised Radio Theatre With Dice, Ralph on Fictoplasm, Jeff and Hoi on Appendix N Book Club – and not forgetting Dirk the Dice on the Grognard Files.

I’m on the latest of those, mostly chatting about Dragon Warriors and Jewelspider but with a bit about the early days of roleplaying. After the discussion, an interesting point was raised about whether DW would have worked better as a single rulebook, the way games like Runequest and Champions were released at the time, rather than as six standard-format paperbacks. (We’d hoped for twelve, but that’s a detail.)

What happened in the early ‘80s was Ian Livingstone and Steve Jackson had a epiphany. They could see that fantasy games potentially had a huge market but had so far failed to escape the niche of sweaty hobby shops. How to get them out of the shadows and into the mass market bookstores? The lightbulb moment must have come while playing a Fantasy Trip solo adventure. ‘Know what, lad?’ I can imagine Steve saying – or maybe it was Ian. ‘Do something like this for kids and we could have a breakout hit.’

The red-braced MBAs among you will have noticed that Ian and Steve didn’t publish Fighting Fantasy themselves, despite owning White Dwarf magazine and a chain of game stores. They pitched it to Penguin Books and lions were shook into civil streets.

Me, I just rode their coat-tails. I figured that all those tweens and teens who’d now discovered gamebooks might also be waiting for roleplaying. So Oliver Johnson and I took ourselves out to Ealing, where Transworld had their offices, and the game that was to be known as Dragon Warriors was born.

What if we had done DW as a single rulebook? I’d been working on an RPG for Games Workshop that they planned to call Adventure (yeah, not my idea) and that would have sold about 2000-5000 copies. The value to GW was mostly that they could sell figurines on the back of it. Adventure never happened because GW picked up the UK Runequest licence, but it had penetrated even my business-blind consciousness that we could sell ten times as many copies if we got a paperback RPG into high street bookshops.

And where would a chain like W H Smith have put a single-volume rulebook anyway? Not alongside the FF books that all the 10-13 year-olds were snapping up. There might have been a corner of the shop where Jane’s Fighting Ships and Formula One books were stocked. You’d never have seen it. We wouldn’t be talking about it today.

And how much would it have cost? The DW books were £1.75 each – in the mid-80s, a little less than $5. If we’d lumped the content of the six paperbacks into one durable hobby-style RPG hardback, call it £15. About fifty quid in modern money. Not a pocket money purchase, for sure.

And would Transworld have been interested? Probably not. The adult division wouldn’t believe there was a market for fantasy role-playing, the kids’ editors wouldn’t commission a £15 hardback. And if they had, Oliver and I would have got an advance of about £2000 each (that's maybe £7000 in today’s money) to keep us going for a year or more while we wrote the whole game and all the scenarios. Passion project though DW was, just to pay the bills we'd have been tempted away by gamebook contracts instead.

Would I rather have released DW as one book? Well, that’s what I was working on in Adventure. It wouldn’t have been entry-level like DW. It would have been set in the world of Medra rather than Legend. The skill system would have been more complete because it was designed as an entire system rather than piecemeal and episodic the way DW came out. There'd have been no elves or goblins.

Would that game have been as good? Apples and oranges. Single-volume RPGs back then were for the hobby market. Paperbacks like DW and FF and Maelstrom were for the mass market. I'm heartily glad that James Wallis eventually reorganized DW into a single book, and it's far easier to find the rule you want that way, but we had to follow the winding road to get to that point twenty years on.

If I'd really understood the business side of gaming at the time, though, I’d have made the rules d6-based. How many schoolkids even knew where to buy icosahedral dice, still less have the pocket money to spare? It was Britain in the ‘80s, a tatty and corruption-riddled backwater off the coast of Europe. The streets were paved with stale chewing gum and flattened fag butts. Off licences had metal grilles to stop people pinching Watneys Party Sevens. The height of dining out was a gristly steak and chips at the Berni Inn. Kids didn’t have the cash to fling at mobile phones and X-Boxes like they do today. Or did, that is, pre-Brexit.

That dice bit I’ll be fixing with Jewelspider. All you’ll need are a couple of six-siders. It’ll be a small-format book, too, though maybe I should do a hardback as well as a paperback edition if only because that will be more resistant to spilled wine and red-hot fragments of dope. Tell you what, though. It’ll be a bit more than £1.75.

Don't listen to Hydra

It'd be a reckless gamer who'd dive back into face to face roleplaying right now. Whatever the Red Skull says, the coronavirus is not going to magically disappear. Fortunately there are plenty of online alternatives, and taking the glass-half-full view I quite like not having to travel to a game during London's rush hour or faff around cooking supper for a room full of hungry gamers.

Here are Scott Dorwood of The Good Friends of Jackson Elias and Joe Trier of How We Roll with a smorgasbord of suggestions for gaming over the internet. (I'll append my obligatory quibble, which is that HPL probably pronounced the "dh" in dhole as an eth. So, not like the Asian canid. But I realize it spoils a perfectly good pun, so I won't press the point.)

In our games we've stripped it all back to Discord with the Dice Maiden bot installed for the rolls. Discord supports video now, but we stick to audio because it stimulates the imagination. After a session's over my mental impression of the game-world lingers as vividly as real memories. If your games involve a lot of tactics and combat, though, you might be better off with one of the other options Scott and Joe discuss there.

One of their recommendations is ViewScream:

"Three to five players assume the roles of desperate people trapped in a world of high-tech horror. A typical game session lasts 60-90 minutes." 

We haven't had any problem with seven or more players at a time (audio-only seems to help) for games of three to four hours, but I've heard several people say that online gaming works better with shorter sessions and smaller groups, so I plan to try it out and report back here.

In the meantime, don't go drinking any bleach, will ya? Take vitamin D if you like (it won't hurt) but there's no evidence it has any effect against covid-19. As for hydroxychloroquine -- no, just no. Though if you buy into that stuff and you have a few hundred dollars to spare, why not pick up a USB stick (sic) which, as any fule kno, uses authentic quantum woo to "re-harmonize" 5G radio waves. Between Trump's twitterings and barmy internet medical myths, the coronavirus has some pretty stiff competition in its quest to wipe out humanity. Your best defences are reason and evidence. So stay alert -- to nonsense.

That's been our public health information broadcast for this week. Come back tomorrow when we're plunging into a time of superstition, plague, violence and apocalyptic fear. No, it's not another current affairs post -- I'm talking about Legend, the world of Dragon Warriors.

Quick -- before they make it a crime

"At home" used to be what people wrote on a card if they were inviting you round for drinks. Now it means the very opposite of conviviality, and politicians have been using it as a mantra to ward away the plague du jour.

There is no law of reason, though, that demands you stay locked up in your room. SARS-Cov-2 is a droplet-borne infection, like its cousin the common cold, not an airborne pathogen like chickenpox or measles. As long as you stay at a reasonable distance from other people (at least two metres) and wash your hands frequently, the virus has no chance.

So if you're out for a walk or a run or a drive and there's nobody to talk to -- or the only people to talk to are the ones you've been cooped up with for weeks on end already -- here are some podcasts to ensure your imagination can soar even if the authorities think you ought to be under house arrest.

Top of my must-tune-in list is Improvised Radio Theatre With Dice, in which Michael Cule and Roger Bell-West discuss all things game-nerdy. To dip in a toe, try this episode, "Unmutated, More or Less", about Powered by the Apocalypse games.

Talking of things apocalyptic, and with an added pinch of matters macabre & eldritch and a smidgen of the generally unnameable, spin the dial to The Good Friends of Jackson Elias, which our genial hosts describe as "a podcast about Call of Cthulhu, horror films, weird fiction, and roleplaying in general." There are over a hundred and fifty episodes just waiting to slither into your ears and decorticate your brain. Here's a good one on "Folk Horror" that I'm sure will give me some ideas for Legend games.

Meanwhile there's wall-to-wall HPL at the H P Lovecraft Historical Society, run by Sean Branney, Andrew Leman, and Kevin Stidham. You can wander their virtual halls in a state of aporetic ecstasy, discovering treasure upon treasure until time has no meaning, but if you're disturbed by the encroaching shadows and the things that scuttle just beyond the range of vision, grab a few of the Voluminous Podcasts in which your hosts read and discuss one of Lovecraft's many, many, many letters. Here's a good one: "A Comedy of Vain Desire", addressed to his lifelong friend Rheinhart Kleiner.

Jeff and Hoi host the Appendix N Book Club to discuss the literary roots of Dungeons & Dragons, specifically the novels that Gary Gygax recommended in the eponymous appendix. I don't play D&D, but I like hanging out with these guys and they always have plenty to say that you'll find inspiring. Frequently I'll start out an episode thinking, okay, I read this book years ago, or I started it and gave up, but I'll hear their thoughts on it anyhow -- and then by the end I'm raring to read it again. You could start anywhere. How about this one on Roger Zelazny's Jack of Shadows?

If literary is your thing, you'll already know about Ralph Lovegrove's Fictoplasm podcast, in which he takes a novel and talks about both the story itself and the potential for mining roleplaying ideas from it. In this Lyonesse episode, Ralph is joined by me and Tim Harford.

Oh, and mentioning Tim brings me to his Cautionary Tales, which blend storytelling and drama to draw vital lessons from some of the great calamities of history, from shipping disasters to a mix-up at the Academy Awards. Why not start where I did, with the story of the ill-fated R101, in "The Deadly Airship Race"? (And for added insights listen to Slide Rule, Nevil Shute Norway's account of the building and test flights of R101's sister ship.)

Not where it's at, but how it feels

Roger Bell-West: [A lot of rules recently are] “replicating the sort of story that you’ll find in another medium. A book or a film or whatever.”

Michael Cule: “I’m not convinced that we’re doing the same sort of storytelling. I’m not sure that story is actually the product we’re trying to produce in roleplaying games. It’s the experience. Not what we say happens afterwards, but what we feel at the time.”

I couldn't agree more. But you already know that if you’ve read earlier posts like this one and this. In that same podcast, Roger and Michael talk about a sniper character. You don’t just want the sniper to hit the target when it suits the story. The story is whatever happens.

That Hollywood baby formula of turning points and themes and act breaks – that’s the little learning that’s a dangerous thing in game designers' hands. It’s a join-the-dots narrative construction model designed to help Hollywood churn out the product they want to make. It bears as much relation to good (= interesting, unusual, surprising) stories as fast food does to a good meal. Like in life, it's how you react to the random events that's often the most memorable stuff.

Funnily enough, Roger and Michael talk about Save the Cat in that particular episode of Improvised Radio Theatre – With Dice. Download their fascinating salmagundis of roleplaying gaming and genre criticism here. And talking of Save the Cat...


The point here, though, is not that all that Blake Snyder BS will only render up repetitive story structures. Nor is it even that codifying rules for creating stories is less effective than just winging it. (Though that's true too; the only rule you need is to keep throwing surprises at the players and be ready to run with the ones they throw back.) Stories might be a by-product when the dust settles -- we're human beings, everything looks like a story after we've done it. But going in with the intention of shaping a story requires distance. The very opposite of emotional engagement.

Players will often recount their in-game stories; you've seen our write-ups. But what's really fun is that those are utterly unreliable accounts. Ask another player, you'll hear a very different tale. And, as with life, we impose the form of a story after the event. At the time it happens we're right in the thick of things, living an imaginary life not authoring a yarn, and if what you're aiming for is how it feels then stepping back for a bit of chin-stroking analysis is not only going to etoliate the experience, it's likely to bend what might have been a surprising and unique sequence of events into something more like a prosaic formula.

And after all it wouldn’t matter a jot if nobody ever did a game write-up or recounted the adventure later. The write-up is like photographing a sand mandala. The point of a mandala isn’t to end up with a work of art, it’s to be there for the creation of it. That goal of how it feels is a point expressed very well in this video (9:00 minutes in) so I'll wait while you have a look at that.

Why are games written nowadays to reproduce, as Mr Bell-West says, the stories that you'll find in other media? Partly it may be that for a published game to make money it has to have a gimmick, and there's quicker surface appeal in a system that promises you it has rules for ensuring a great story. Or is it that many games lack a deeper cultural underpinning, which means that abstract story forms are easier to impose? If players in a Tekumel campaign are at loggerheads, they have law courts and clan-councils and shamtla and the duelling code to fall back on -- and all of those have their own in-game rules that yield rich stories. In the absence of those social structures, meta-rules for fictionalization may seem more necessary to keep the game going.

And there's the rub. Keeping the game going. That's easy when you're in your twenties with no spouse or kids. Your game persona can take over and initiate events in your parallel life. But not every gaming group has that luxury. Some reviewers of Fabled Lands have complained that without a quest assigned to them they don't know what to do. Jamie joined in our Victorian Investigators game recently and noticed that the players don't tend to drive the story in-character; they discuss and analyze, but then they wait to be told what the story is, and react. Under those circumstances, I can appreciate why people would reach for rules that encourage you to step away from the persona and think instead as an author.

Finding a way to work in your character’s catchphrase, or analyzing the character’s story arc to decide what ought to happen to them next, are signs that the actual playing of the character, the participation in the moment, are no longer fun. But that doesn't mean you can't enjoy the dramatically ironic style of game for other reasons. I'm eager to play James Wallis's Alas Vegas (admittedly light-years ahead of the usual "storytelling" systems) even though I'd chafe at so self-consciously narrative-shaping a game on a weekly basis. So, you know, none of this is the One True Way. We're just talking.

Videogames killed the radio star?

Crossing Tom Quad, deserted and sparkling in the December night, gave me the visual inspiration for the roleplaying scenario that eventually became Heart of Ice. The germ of the idea had already come from the briefest of references in Empire of the Petal Throne to “hex 6029: the walled ruins of the Mad City of Du’un”. And the story itself, as I’ve described elsewhere, was an adaptation of It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World, in the sense that only one person could have the ultimate prize but to reach it meant cooperating with others along the way.

The original Du’un adventure was pretty old school, as you’d expect for something written in the mid-70s, and in fact the first time I ran it really was at my old school, in the Eastgate block at the RGS, where the Guildford War Studies group used to meet. But I digress…At the end of an embrangling underworld filled with interdimensional pathways, the characters had to fight past an avatar of the god Hrsh to win through to the Chamber of the Heart. Alliances died at the door. Beyond that point it became a cathartic free-for-all.

Primitive though the scenario was, it became the one players talked about. I was persuaded to run it two or three times more for different gaming groups. Probably it was the theme of the scenario that made it really memorable. That heart of ice isn’t really the magic crystal McGuffin buried down deep in the catacombs, it’s the cold ruthlessness needed by the winner.

In the original 1976 scenario that gem of ultimate power was the Heart of Durritlamish, the Black Angel, Opener of Catacombs. In the gamebook it became the Heart of Volent, a cult god of the 22nd century. And in the 1990s radio play “The Heart of Hark’un” it transmogrified into this:

“The god Hark'un once ruled the heavens, but the young gods were jealous of his power and plotted to overthrow him. Defeated in a celestial war, Hark'un fell from the heavens, down through the black sky, until he struck the barren lifeless lands. But as he died, Hark'un’s blood brought the world to life. His spine formed the mountains of the world. His veins became the roots of living things. The body of Hark'un became the world of Harkuna. Every part of the slain god became the seed for new life – except for the heart of Hark'un. That remained whole. Untouched by decay, it still beats on. To touch the heart of the god Hark'un would be to destroy the world. But also to take on the power of a god.”

The play, by Jamie and his brother Peter Thomson, featured some characters based on (or at least named after) player-characters in our Tekumel campaign. Kadar was an older, more embittered version of Jamie’s character Qadarnai, while my own character Shazir became the villain – of course! Arcos I’m not sure about, but he may have been one of the PCs in Mark Smith’s Orb campaign.

The point of all this is to say that you can now listen to all six episodes of “The Heart of Harkun” (let’s leave the grocer's apostrophes out of it, eh?) over on the Spark Furnace website. And if you don’t have the patience for podcasts, the comic book version is still available: issue #1 and issue #2. Or there’s the Heart of Ice gamebook, of course. At some point I might even run the original Du’un scenario that started it all, if I can lay my hands on the underworld maps.

The gods of the earth

I've been recording an episode of Fictoplasm with Tim Harford and host Ralph Lovegrove. If you've never caught one of these podcasts, Ralph and his guests take a story and consider both its literary qualities and how it could be used in a roleplaying game. I recommend them all (my own favourites are the Gene Wolfe and Mike Moorcock episodes) and if you want to hear ours, in which we talk about the Lyonesse novels by Jack Vance, it's right here.

One of the aspects of Lyonesse that we talked about was Vance's use of faerie creatures. They are, in a nutshell, droll, capricious and dangerous, just like fairies in Legend. And that in turn reminded me (there's an end point to this segue, believe me) of John Hagan's comment recently about W B Yeats's take on fairies as angels not good enough to be saved, nor yet bad enough to be damned. So I thought let's get a guest post from Yeats, him being dead and hence entirely biddable. So here it is:

 The Trooping Fairies

 The Irish word for fairy is sheehogue [sidheog], a diminuitive of "shee" in banshee. Fairies are deenee shee [daoine sidhe] (Fairy People).
     Who are they? "Fallen angels who were not good enough to be saved nor bad enough to be lost," say the peasantry. "The gods of the earth," says The Book of Armagh. " The gods of pagan Ireland," say the antiquarians, "the Tuatha De Danan, who, when no longer worshipped and fed with offerings, dwindled away in the popular imagination, and now are only a few spans high."
     And they will tell you, in proof, that the names of the fairy chiefs are the names of the old Danan heroes, and the places where they especially gather together, Danan burying places, and that the Tuatha de Danan used also to be called the slooa-shee [sheagh sidhe] (the fairy host), or Marcra shee (the fairy cavalcade).
     On the other hand, there is much evidence to prove them fallen angels. Witness the nature of the creatures, their caprice, their way of being good to the good and evil to the evil, having every charm but conscience-consistency. Beings so quickly offended that you must not speak much about them at all, and never call them anything but the "gentry", or else daoine maithe, which in English means good people, yet so easily pleased that they will do their best to keep misfortune away from you, if you leave a little milk for them on the window-sill over night. On the whole, the popular belief tells us most about them, telling us how they fell, and yet were not lost, because their evil was wholly without malice.
     Are they "the gods of the earth?" Perhaps! Many poets, and all mystic and occult writers, in all ages and countries, have declared that behind the visible are chains on chains of conscious beings, who are not of heaven but of the earth, who have no inherent form but change according to their whim, or the mind that sees them. You cannot lift your hand without influencing and being influenced by hoards. The visible world is merely their skin. In dreams we go among them, and play with them, and combat with them. They are, perhaps, human souls in the crucible—these creatures of whim.
     Do not think the faeries are always little. Everything is capricious about them, even their size. They seem to take what size or shape pleases them. Their chief occupations are feasting, fighting, and making love, and playing the most beautiful music. They have only one industrious person among them, the lepra-caun --the shoemaker. Perhaps they wear their shoes out with dancing. Near the village of Ballisodare is a little woman who lived among them seven years. When she came home she had no toes; she had danced them off.
     They have three great festivals in the year--May Eve, Midsummer Eve, November Eve. On May Eve, every seventh year, they fight all round, but mostly on the "Plain-A-Bawn" (wherever that is), for the  harvest, for the best ears of grain belong to them. An old man told me he saw them fight once; they tore the thatch off a house in the midst of it all. Had anyone else been near they would merely have seen a great wind whirling everything into the air as it passed. When the wind makes the straws and leaves whirl as it passes, that is the fairies, and the peasantry take their hats off and say, "God bless them".
     On Midsummer Eve, when the bonfires are lighted on every hill in honour of St. John, the faeries are at their gayest, and sometimes steal away beautiful mortals to be their brides.
     On November Eve they are at their gloomiest, for according to the old Gaelic reckoning, this is the first night of winter. This night they dance with the ghosts, and the pooka is abroad, and witches make their spells, and girls set a table with food in the name of the devil, that the fetch of their future lover may come through the window and eat of the food. After November Eve the blackberries are no longer wholesome, for the pooka has spoiled them.
     When they are angry they paralyse men and cattle with their fairy darts.
     When they are gay they sing. Many a poor girl has heard them, and pined away and died, for love of that singing. Plenty of the old beautiful tunes of Ireland are only their music, caught up by eavesdroppers. No wise peasant would hum "The Pretty Girl milking the Cow" near a fairy rath, for they are jealous, and do not like to hear their songs on clumsy mortal lips. Carolan, the last of the Irish bards, slept on a rath, and ever after the fairy tunes ran in his head, and made him the great man he was.
     Do they die? Blake saw a fairy's funeral; but in Ireland we say they are immortal.

Last year (Dave here again now, not W.B.) I started writing a comic set in and around the faerie-haunted Jewelspider Wood. It was to be illustrated by Gary Chalk, but he didn't like the story so that collaboration never came off. Kind of a shame, as it had changelings, undead, faerie curses, forest monsters, and murder, all mixed up with the misadventures of a travelling theatre troupe. If I can find an artist maybe I should get back to it - though really I need to find a way to finish my Mirabilis epic first.