Good versus the other thing

‘Can anybody play characters in service to Napoleon and think of themselves as the good guys?’

A gobsmacking comment (55 minutes in) from Mr Cule there, I thought -- not complaining; it’s for those comments that I especially love the show -- but presumably millions of people did follow Napoleon and definitely they thought of themselves as good guys. This interested me because a few days earlier I’d come across a note I made a few years ago:

‘Has anybody ever written a novel like Lord of the Rings but instead of being “good” vs “evil” in a generic sense, we actually get to hear the ideologies on each side? It is in effect left vs right, Dems vs GOP, or whatever.’

The thing is, that’s a very modern take on how people justify themselves. We expect to be presented with a manifesto and then pick a side. Or at any rate we think that’s how we pick a side, but other than William MacAskill and a few monks most of us really only pay lip service to these high ideals of ours, don’t we? ‘I’ve given up meat,’ we plead in our defence, while enjoying a comfortable life that three quarters of the world are denied.

As hypocrites we’re no worse than our ancestors. They would say they fought for God, but it’s funny how often God just happened to support their own country. Throughout the 18th century, most Christian groups other than Quakers were in favour of slavery. Freethinkers too; Tom Paine argued against slavery, but few of the Founding Fathers listened to him. In the French Revolution, most of the left-wing firebrands (if calling them left-wing means anything*) entirely overlooked equality for women. And "Kill them all; God will know His Own" and "Slay the pagans" show that total war and the butchering of civilians began with people who claimed to be fighting on the side of the angels.

The best we can say of most human beings is that they are basically good with a lot of blind spots. (And, yes, in that we must include ourselves.)

To return to the Napoleonic period, if we asked Marshal Ney why he considered himself a good guy I’m sure he’d talk about patriotism (admittedly a bit of a grey area for him), honour, and loyalty to the Emperor. I don’t suppose he’d cite the specific revolutionary aims he felt the Emperor stood for, though many at the time (even in England) did find that a reason to praise Napoleon, whereas nobody in the world would have declared support for the Houses of Hanover or Bourbon on the basis of their professed ideology.

So we can see a new era dawning at the start of the 19th century, one in which some men wouldn’t simply fight for tribal symbols like king, country or religion, but instead expected those to be backed up by specific principles chosen of their own free will.

Yeah, but did they, though? Was the USSR really a free federation of states based on egalitarian principles? Or was it the Russian Empire under a cloak of socialism? Did Mao whip up the Cultural Revolution to bring about a utopian society, or simply to shore up his own power? Did the average Wehrmacht soldier charge into battle to bring about a thousand-year Nazi reich or because he believed he was doing his duty for his country? Did any major world power ever march into Afghanistan in the interests of the Afghan people themselves? Or just because of their own geopolitical or economic needs?

Do people today decide disinterestedly which side to take in a dispute, or do they see which side their tribe takes and then find reasons to justify it?

The British used to be under no illusions about that. In the First Gulf War, US troops were given leaflets that explained why their cause was just. ‘Saddam has invaded a sovereign state and that is against international law,’ one GI explained on TV. The same camera crew interviewed a British squaddie, who had not been given any leaflet. ‘I got nothing against this Saddam bloke personally,’ he said, ‘but he’s in Kuwait and we been told to kick him out.’

So would it make sense to tell the story of a fantasy world, or any period in history, as if ideology actually made a difference? I don’t think so. This revisits an earlier post in which we discussed whether any non-modern society could usefully be described in modern terms. For example, SF writer Damien Walter posted a tirade about how the Spartans were fascists (he also calls them cowards and pederasts) but to try to squeeze them into a modern box like that is not only cultural chauvinism, it's plain dumb.

There was a bit of a pram fight a while back about "evil races" in D&D. Before the movies came out I assumed orcs were in fact supposed to be people just like the Gondorians (if that's the right word) and that Tolkien only described them as monstrous and evil because that's how "our" side saw them. I don't have any problem with utterly inimical species in fantasy. #NotAllDaleks? Gimme a break. But I think that's a less interesting way of looking at Lord of the Rings than my misconception.

Perhaps what we're seeing now is D&D moving beyond its simplistic good vs evil origins towards a more realistic kind of world. Characters (whether human or nonhuman) are not motivated by alignment in Tekumel or Glorantha, or even in Legend come to that (apart from the actual devils, that is). Instead they have desires, foibles, personalities, political alliances, and so forth that all contribute to how they behave. Where it gets messy with D&D is the game inherited its elves and orcs and whatnot from Tolkien, for whom good and evil meant something. If you want to create a more believable and nuanced world then great, but maybe better to start from scratch in that case.

In one sense, of course, simplistically framing a struggle as Good vs Evil might be the most honest way to describe any human conflict. You just have to remember that both sides think that they’re the good guys.

* Roger from Improvised Radio Theatre With Dice has pointed out that there's almost no better use of left- and right-wing, seeing as the terms came from the seating plan of the Estates General and later the National Convention. Touché, citoyen!

Face it

When I'm writing a scenario for publication (such as this one) I'll sometimes cast the incidental NPC roles by saying which actor might play them. It's a shorthand way of conveying the idea of the character without having to describe their personality in the scenario.

My wife goes one further. When writing her novels she picks real faces that she can visualize as the characters. That could work when designing roleplaying scenarios too.

And a further evolution: Unreal Person lets you generate faces that don't exist. (The one above on the right really shouldn't.) Or you can use something like Nightcafe for non-modern images like this medieval apothecary:

You do have to let the art lead you where it will, though. There's not yet much hope of getting the AI to draw exactly what you want, as my experiments on the Mirabilis blog show. Still, the field of generative AI has reached escape velocity now. It's only a matter of time.

A Thunder of Dragons

Tension and excitement fill the room as A Thunder of Dragons begins! Players take on the role of these mighty flying reptiles, soaring above a sprawling 15 by 15 playing board filled with raging rivers, perilous mountain ranges, treacherous swamps and dark forests. Castles, villages, towns, and abbeys are dotted about the game board. Such settlements offer rich pickings for the dragons. But beware! These havens of prosperity are guarded by garrisons of bowmen, knights, foot soldiers and wizards alongside powerful heroes. Bigger and richer settlements are even more fiercely defended. Players swoop in to pillage these strongholds for their treasure and relics: coins, jewels and magical artifacts of great power. They will need crafty tactics to bypass or obliterate the defensive units that stand in their way or else they risk being driven off into the wilderness to lick their wounds. As dragons claim victory they return to their lair triumphant and laden with booty, growing ever richer and stronger. But other players won’t just sit back and watch; they can unleash potent spells from afar in an effort to thwart dragon attacks and aid NPC defenders.

A Thunder of Dragons is a board game I've been designing with Nick Henfrey, co-creator of Conquerors and Spacefarers. (To be honest, all the heavy lifting has been done by Nick while I chip in with suggestions about game balance.) The prototype is a lot of fun to play, and I'm not saying that just because I won our first full game.

You start by shuffling and laying out terrain and settlement cards. This ensures the game board is different every time. Players establish their lairs and can either walk (slow but easy) or fly (fast but uses up power), picking on settlements which they can plunder for treasure, captives (princesses and princes too; no gender bias from us), and spells. You can hold cards to add to your hoard or hand them in to increase power. 

It's really rare for an early prototype of a game to play as smoothly as this. Normally what happens is you start fitting pieces into the rules jigsaw and it's all going well till you hit some part of the design that just refuses to fit with the rest. I've been struggling with something like that in my Jewelspider RPG design (nearly cracked it, though) and I thought Nick and I would have similar problems as we had with finessing the Zombomba boardgame. But no -- we laid out the map tiles and got playing and it all came together like Smaug swallowing a hobbit. One gulp.

My victory in the first game was a bit of a fluke. I began by attacking an abbey. Little did I realize that abbeys are really well-defended and when you're starting out there's a high risk of being driven off and/or being badly injured -- and if you use up all your power in the attack you'll have to try and get back to your lair on foot while pursued by the settlement's defenders and reinforcements. Luckily I survived and carried off a major relic, putting me way out in front. But even that didn't secure a sure victory, because the other players can see who is ahead and will team up to harass them with spells.

As you can see in the picture above, the dragon playing pieces are 3D printed models, making the game as visually appealing and tactile as it is fun to play. But the frustrating thing is we just don't know what to do with it. Patreon and Kickstarter would never raise enough for us to be able to sell physical sets of the game, and nobody is willing to shell out for PDFs of a boardgame. These days, the successful crowdfunded games are all by established games publishers. But if anyone out there can suggest a company we can team up with to turn A Thunder of Dragons from fantasy into reality, please shout it out in the comments.

You can follow A Thunder of Dragons on Facebook and Twitter.

A place of bones

In its third installment, the Vulcanverse gazetteer reaches Notus, the blisteringly hot realm of drifting dunes, shimmering oases, and ruined temples buried in the sand. Here and here you can read hints about how to survive and find the big quests.

Players have asked about the connection between the Vulcanverse gamebooks (an open world series in the tradition of Fabled Lands) and the Vulcan Forged MMO (an NFT-based world). Well, you don't need to know anything about one to enjoy the other. Seen from an online gamer's perspective, the gamebooks add background lore to the online setting. Ask a gamebook player and they'll likely tell you they haven't tried the online game; after all, there's continuing new content for the Fabled Lands CRPG to play first.

One of my personal favourite locations in The Hammer of the Sun (the book set in Notus) is the strange city of Ostopolis (depicted above). I could have set a whole gamebook there. In fact, seeing as The Hammer of the Sun is over 1700 sections long, the quests in and around Ostopolis probably do make up nearly the whole of one ordinary gamebook.

The city of the Spartoi is a brooding, half-ruined metropolis of black basalt rising from the white desert sand. Did living beings once walk those cracked streets, barter in the now dust-choked marketplace, and cheer their sportsmen in the arena that looms like a giant broken pot against the sky? Now it swarms with the fleshless grinning hordes of the Spartoi. The streets are wide avenues of cracked paving where sand sifts in endlessly shifting threads and lies banked in the gaping doorways. A skeletal dog stirs listlessly in the heat and gazes blankly as you pass.

Drop in for a visit, why don't you?

US: Vulcanverse on Amazon

UK: Vulcanverse

(Full disclosure: those are paid links to Amazon; as an Amazon Associate, we earn from qualifying purchases. You can bypass the paid links by using our US or UK bookstores, which also give alternatives to shopping at Amazon.)

Character sketch

On the rare occasions when I've played D&D I usually haven't taken it very seriously. In my defence, that was mostly back in the mid-'70s and the way the early books were written I don't think you were meant to take it seriously. I don't mean the rules; we used the latest iteration of those for the Blood Sword RPG and they work brilliantly. But the default fantasy setting of D&D is a bit sub-sub-sub-Tolkien by way of Monty Python, or so it usually seemed to me.

There were exceptions. I ran a Victorian-era investigative campaign (this was years before Call of Cthulhu, never mind Cthulhu by Gaslight) in which the only magic was 1st and 2nd level. That wasn't played for laughs. Also, when I joined in a game of Blood Sword 5e I not only thought it was brilliantly atmospheric, I actually liked the game system, which was several quantum leaps beyond the D&D of fifty years ago.

Anyway, back to 1976. Invited to join a D&D game by Steve Foster, creator of the Mortal Combat rules, I rolled up a Cugel-like knave called Necromageus Knoll, who soon had a reputation for greed, deceit and treachery. Come to think about it, he was three parts Cugel, two parts Zachary Smith, and one part Tricky Dicky.

The other players seemed to find Necromageus Knoll jolly enough that I put him in a comic strip (inexplicably relocated to the Tekumel underworld, hence the reference to 'Eyes') that lasted a week or two until we moved on to other campaigns. I did something similar but more serious a few years later with this authentic Tekumel write-up.

Having come across that Necromageus Knoll strip just recently, and intrigued to see how my visual storytelling had developed between 1976 and 2008 when I came to write Mirabilis: Year of Wonders (long story short: a lot!) I thought I'd share a bit of it here. Don't worry, I won't quit the day job.

Did Stan Lee steal ideas?

It’s the time of year for me to weigh in on a claim that’s causing controversy – not to deny that the claim if true would be outrageous, but to say that I remain unconvinced that it is true. And, in line with recent tradition, the outrage again involves a professor.

This time round it’s the turn of The X-Men, first published by Marvel in July 1963, though with a cover date of September because comics. The Doom Patrol debuted in the June issue (that is, April) of My Greatest Adventure, published by Marvel’s rival DC. The bone of contention is whether Stan Lee was influenced by (ie swiped from) Arnold Drake, the writer of Doom Patrol, in putting Professor Charles Xavier in a wheelchair like the Doom Patrol’s leader.

Drake shrugged it off for years as a coincidence, but after brooding on it for forty years he became convinced it was dirty pool on Stan’s part:

"I didn’t believe so in the beginning because the lead time was so short. Over the years I learned that an awful lot of writers and artists were working surreptitiously between [Marvel and DC]. Therefore from when I first brought the idea into [the DC editor’s] office, it would’ve been easy for someone to walk over and hear that this guy Drake is working on a story about a bunch of reluctant superheroes who are led by a man in a wheelchair. So over the years I began to feel that Stan had more lead time than I realized. He may well have had four, five or even six months."

Now, I’ll put my hand up to being a fan of Marvel from way back. I grew up on those stories. So you might want to take what I have to say with that in mind, but – was Drake completely nuts? First of all, Stan Lee was having to get out more than ten books a month, and he was doing almost all the writing single-handed. Sure, he had “the Marvel method” to help (plot first, then art, then write the script) but even so it’s unlikely he had much time to look through DC’s output, at that time upwards of thirty books a month. And even if Stan had been told about Doom Patrol in January 1963, he wouldn’t have had long to single out that one idea and work it into the new book he was planning with Jack Kirby.

OK, it is just possible an artist came across from DC (it was a 13 minute walk) and mentioned that DC was doing a try-out book with a super-team whose mentor was in a wheelchair. But was that really the standout detail worth swiping? Far more likely that Stan got the inspiration for Professor X from any number of brainy invalid scientists in 1950s sci-fi movies. And in any case there’s a strong story reason for Professor X being in a wheelchair. Stan loved irony, and this character is all about the power of the mind. He’s Nero Wolfe turned up to 11.

In the same year as the quote above, Drake also said:

"Stan Lee and I were working in the same vineyards, and if you do enough of that stuff, sooner or later, you will kind of look like you are imitating each other."

Well, that change of heart is interesting. Maybe Drake had taken a step back to think about where his own ideas came from. If there was any creative borrowing going on, more likely it was in the other direction. Why was Drake creating the Doom Patrol in the first place? Because he understood the appeal of the Fantastic Four. The FF’s first issue was November 1961 – only, you know the score, that means September, so it had been running for thirteen issues by the time Drake sat down and scratched his head about what could be done to counter this new and coming force in comics.

Drake saw that the FF frequently squabbled. And they got their powers from an accident – not mutants like the X-Men, notice. And the coolest members of the team were sort of freaks, the Thing especially. So it’s not much of a stretch (I’m not planning these puns, honest) to think of Robotman as the Thing, Negative Man as the Torch, Elasti-Girl (wait, what?) as Susan Storm and the Chief as Reed.

By 2000, Drake had convinced himself he originated all this:

“That was the thing that made Doom Patrol different, these people hated being superheroes. And they were a little bit self-pitying, just a little bit, and the chief was constantly telling them, ‘Stop crying in your beer.’ That made them something that wasn't around at the time.”

It wasn't around at the time? Really? What about Peter Parker? Ben Grimm? Bruce Banner? Tony Stark? So it’s a little bit rich that a few years later Drake was saying of Stan Lee, ‘He’d take credit for the King James Bible.’

All that said, it’s interesting that these days it’s hard to make a convincing movie about the Fantastic Four, and yet there were four seasons of a Doom Patrol TV show. I didn’t stick with it even for four episodes myself, but it actually feels more modern than the FF -- who were, after all, Stan Lee’s first attempt at making superheroes real and relatable and flawed. As the prototype, perhaps it’s not surprising that the FF have dated – and they were my own least favourite Marvel comic back in the Silver Age, their adventures being too cosmic and out there to appeal alongside the convincing contemporary lives of Tony Stark, Peter Parker, Matt Murdock, et al.

If you're interested in the full fascinating story of how Marvel overtook DC and revolutionized comic book storytelling, try Reed Tucker's book Slugfest and/or Adrian Mackinder's Stan Lee: How Marvel Changed The World.

The neutron operation

As a coda to the previous post, I came across an idea for a Doctor Who special that I jotted in my notebook a couple of years ago. I must have still been thinking of the core concept of the Dalek City game, only now as a story:

A later incarnation of the Doctor goes back in time to the original Skaro encounter with the Daleks, figuring that now he’s forewarned as to how significant a threat they are he can destroy them for good. 

The action integrates with the footage from the 1960s version, The Mutants. Instead of achieving his objective, the new Doctor’s “total war” attitude to the Daleks (who incidentally seem unable to distinguish him from the First Doctor who appears in the 1960s scenes) causes them to become fearful and thus pushes them from being warily curious to genocidally paranoid. 

The Daleks prepare a contingency plan. It's solely because of this plan that the Doctor's destruction of their power source at the end of the story doesn’t kill them all – and the surviving Daleks, the really out-there extremists, now know to study the background radiation signal and pick up the Tardis’s dematerialization signature. That leads them from being bound to one planet to being galactic conquerors who eventually challenge the Time Lords.

So in the end the reason that the Daleks are so dangerous is entirely because of the Doctor's actions in trying to wipe them out.