Eightfold: The Church Octaval

So, why is this game called 'Eightfold'? I hear you ask, and I'm glad you did, as it plays into today's topic.

The title refers to the principle political force in the Sacred Republic: the Eternal Union of the Church of the Eightfold Way, known colloquially as the Church Octaval. This is the coalition of religious cults that formed to overthrow the previous regime - that of the Mage Sovereigns - in the War of Hubris. As well as defeating the Sovereigns of six of the seven dominions of Talahaea, the Church was able, after the war, to unite those dominions - less a chunk of the south coast that was conquered by the Drow while everyone was distracted with the internal conflict - and forge something very roughly approximating a single, centralised government.

Each of the seven provinces - the six dominions that were taken in the War, plus a section of the south coast reconquered sometime after, possibly because it was the former domain of a necromancer and the Drow just got fed up of dealing with the zombies - has its own civic government dominated by the estates - the non-magical survivors of the old aristocratic structures, who own most of the land - and the guilds - the rising merchant class who have most of the money - and there is a shared civil state structure, but all civil authorities are at the very least strongly influenced, if not openly dominated by, the Church.

The High Regent - supreme priest of the Church Octaval - is also the head of state, in which position they use the title Octarch, but the head of government is the Supreme Consul, leader of the executive branch, the Supreme Consulate. The Consulate and the Assembly of the Republic (the legislature) are elected by and from the estates and guilds of the provinces, while the Court Absolute is a collection of mutually acknowledged jurists who act as a judicial branch. Any and all of these civil positions can be, and often are, filled by priests of the Church Octaval.

The Church Hierarchy is complicated (although probably not as complicated as it ought to be.) First, there are the eight cults, each of which is actually a collection of similar cults originally worshiping many similar gods who have now been given a collective name. 

The greater cults are the ones who formed the original alliance: The Cult of Magic, the Cult of Knowledge, the Cult of War and the Cult of Crafts. The lesser cults are those who were brought into the alliance later and considered important enough not to just absorb into the greater cults, usually because they fulfilled a vital role in maintaining social order: The Cult of Agriculture, the Cult of Love, the Cult of Joy and the Cult of Death. 

Each of the greater cults is headed by one of the four Regents of the Church, whose roles are largely symbolic, but who are seen as the candidates to become the next High Regent. The lesser cults have no singular head, but all of the cults have Regents-in-Ordinary who form a governing convocation, and a number of Regents with provincial or smaller geographical remits, priests attached to great temples, smaller shrines, seminaries or to civil bodies as spiritual advisers. There are also mendicants, paladins and templars (non-paladin soldiers in service of the church,) and notably not all of the priests are clerics in the character class sense.

And then there are the Congregations. Notionally committees formed to address specific issues, some of these have become the permanent organisations known as Cardinal Congregations, which wield considerable authority within the bounds of their particular remit. Some of these are inquisitorial in nature, enforcing orthodoxy or hunting down arcane practitioners, others oversee public health initiatives; one of the congregations of the Cult of Love maintains bonds of community and has links to organised crime.

Honestly, I think that the thing I'm most proud of about this whole set up is how difficult it is to briefly explain it. As I say, it's still way too simple to simulate a real international religious organisation, but it's got much more complexity than I would usually include - the war cult is also involved with healing and dance, and while there is no simplistic 'god of love', three cults oversee sexuality as a performative, relational and expressive activity, respectively - for which I blame the influence of the Patron Deities podcast.

We're Not Using the Z Word - Vocabulary and Expectation

Image from Shaun of the Dead, (c) probably Universal Pictures 2004

You know what you're getting when someone says 'zombie', right? It's a word with years, decades even, of accumulated pop-cultural and literary antecedents to inform our expectations. The cultural front-loading of words like zombie, vampire, werewolf or witch are useful shorthand for the writer. 'Zombie' conveys a wealth of information in an incredibly succinct way because the word is laden with cultural coding. That same coding allows a clever writer to subvert expectations in an interesting way, but it has a downside. In fact, it has several.

Familiarity breeds contempt, it is said, and certainly one of the first things to be called at the screen during any zombie feature is usually 'aim for the head, numbnuts!' We the viewers are so steeped in this lore that genre blindness and obedience to years of best-practice training which teaches shooters to aim for centre of mass looks like sheer folly. They're zombies, right? They move slowly and eat brains. Shoot them in the head. Job done. Not only does this create animosity towards the characters in a work of fiction, it is also part and parcel of a process by which an antagonist loses their sense of threat.

This was the oft-maligned genius of 28 Days Later. Say what you like about the rage monkeys and all, the film's trump card was the fast zombie. We were keyed up to expect zombies and when they came barreling along at a rate of knots, we were totally unprepared. Since then, the fast zombie has lost that shock power and it occupies a similar place to the slow zombie. By the same token, I guess Stephanie Meyer deserves some credit for bucking expectations of the term 'vampire', but I really struggle to give it, and I know exactly why. 28 Days Later gave us fast moving monsters that nonetheless filled the same horror role as slow zombies, of being mindless, hunger-driven beasts that look like us, but aren't. Meyer's vampires have next to nothing of horror left in them, just melancholy and glitter.

But I digress.

It is desperately important to some people that Stormfly is not a dragon.
Astrid doesn't seem bothered. Image (c) Dreamworks, 2014

The problem with a jack move like the fast zombie is that some people will always consider it to be 'cheating', or that the film is getting it wrong. 28 Days Later was assailed by cries of zombie fail (although fast zombies have since come to be considered an acceptable, if slightly weaksauce alternative.) Internet commenters rail against dragons that are actually wyverns, the tetrapodal losers. That same cultural coding that creates the sense of expectation creates a sort of entitlement. We have a right to expect dragons to love gold, vampires to fear the sun and zombies to moan 'brains', and if a story throws us by having them do something different, we can end up feeling aggrieved that they got it wrong, or worse, used fake zombies to get a cheap scare. It's like the rage felt over cultural appropriation, only the culture involved is that of the populist, mass-media majority(1).

But this isn't my media blog, it's my writing blog, so what does this mean for writers? Well, basically it means that what you choose to call something is a major decision, especially if you're leaning towards one of the popular terms. If you call something a zombie, you're loading it with expectations. If you call something a dragon you'd better be prepared for people to count the feet and sniff disdainfully (although this one is less of a big deal.) If you call something a witch, be ready for potential Wiccan backlash(2), and if you call a race of travelers you-know-what... Well, you deserve whatever's coming to you, really. So, before you decide on a name you should:

a) Make sure it's not a racial, ethnic or cultural slur, especially if you're white(3).

b) Be aware of the intrinsic cultural coding and whether it fits with what you're writing.

c) Decide if you're happy to follow expectations, or if you want to subvert them.

Point c is important. There's nothing wrong with breaking expectations if you're doing it as a subversion (as with the original fast zombies or the vampires of the Dresden Files, none of which exactly work like trad vamps and that's the point,) but if you're trying to shoehorn something else into a conventional term, you're making a rod for your own back.

From the other side, if you are going with that conventional term, be sure that if you have changes, there are reasons for them, either relating to the narrative or 'in-universe.'  Fast zombies result less from mutation of the zombie virus than from a desire to shake up the genre, but faeries who are vulnerable to silver and not iron or vampires who aren't burned in the sun should probably have a reason for that and the question ought to be addressed.

Aurochs? Load of bull if you ask me. Image by Heinrich Harder.

Now, mostly I'm writing this as a reminder for myself rather than a guide for anyone else. I'm writing an epic fantasy novel and I'm getting to a point where I really need to start constructing some language and making sure my terminology is sound. Part of that is avoiding words that have encoded meanings; not just things like 'zombie' or 'dragon', but anthropological terms like clan, tribe or state. Is it apt to call any religious leader a priest? And for every time I've thought about this in advance I catch myself using another phrase that I just haven't thought about at all. New words are safer, but then you have to a) construct that language, so you don't just have words in isolation, and b) make sure that they are clear and memorable. Even if you have a glossary you don't want the reader flipping back and forth every couple of pages to remember whether a tsepec'manai is the leader of a village or the senior herder of aurochs.

(1) Not that there isn't an element of appropriation in zombies, but that ship sailed a long time ago and is, if anything, a lost irony to those who argue the toss on zombie speed.
(2) Dating a Wiccan has seriously sensitised me to this; it's easy to be a jerk just by not thinking.
(3) See (2) above.

GUMSHOE One Sheet!

Pech Merle caves - horror of the natural world!

I have an entry in the RPG Geek GUMSHOE One Sheet contest! It's a little thing about alien squid beasts in French caves, and troglodytes playing the role of landlocked Deep Ones.

I'm quite pleased with myself, not necessarily because I think it's a winner, but for getting it done and posted.

Dominance and Submission

So, a thing I've learned from submission guidelines for online speculative fiction zines and podcasts is that people don't want me; or more accurately, I suspect, that people want people who aren't me, rather than specifically not wanting me (or people like me.)

To explain in terms that are less self-consciously and deliberately inscrutable, what is commonly and unhelpfully referred to as 'genre fiction' is clearly aware of being something of a bastion of white, male privilege and is keen to change its image. Check out pretty much any set of submission guidelines and they will include a note that the collection is keen to promote increased diversity within the SF/fantasy/horror community, and that they either welcome with especial favour works by female, queer, trans, disabled, coloured (or rather colored, since most of them are in the US) and non-North American authors (I guess from my perspective one out of six - being somewhere between 1/8 and 1/16 Indian really doesn't count as coloured - isn't the worst thing in the world,) or positively encourage works with female, queer, trans, disabled or coloured protagonists and non-North American settings (which ties in to some stuff I've talked about before.)

I find it an interesting privilege check, since my natural first reaction is 'hey!' I mean, it doesn't seem entirely fair that I have to pay for centuries of cultural dominance which never did me any good. Of course, on any kind of consideration, it has done me good. I may be barely able to make my mortgage, but I live in a country which still (just) has top-notch social healthcare and I've only been stopped at customs once, probably because I'd been working on a dig and my skin had browned to the tone referred to in the law enforcement handbook as 'dodgy foreigner tan'. Anyway, it also reinforces my determination to write more stuff set in less exclusively Euro-inspired cultures.

Rather more encouragingly, I'm glad to say that sexy vampires seem to be being calved off into their own little niche and are invited not to apply for the kind of magazines I'm looking at.

On the downside, the best paid periodical I've found actively discourages puns. Oh well.

East of the Sun and West of the Moon, or Fifty Shades of White

Today is National Tell a Fairy Tale Day, so despite technically being in the wrong nation I am in the mood to be telling a fairy tale.

--

Once there was a poor man, who lived with his wife and three daughters in a state of perpetual penury. The eldest daughter was hard-working, the second daughter was clever and the youngest was the looker, which should in no way be taken to imply that any of them were defined by a single character trait. That would be pretty shallow.

Husband material?

One day, a great White Bear appeared at the man's front door and told him that he would make him rich, if the man would give him his youngest daughter, which is the kind of entitlement that one doesn't usually expect from the larger carnivores, but they do say that money changes you.

The daughter was naturally reluctant to be sold off like a side of meat to a wealthy apex predator, but her parents sat her down and reminded her that her eldest sister needed treatment for her crook knees and they were hoping to get the middle daughter into University, and that there were much worse fates for a girl like her than being a WAG, and the White Bear seemed to have much better manners than a Premier League footballer at least.

Eventually, the daughter was persuaded, and before Philip Larkin could say 'I told you!' she had climbed onto the White Bear's back and was whisked away into the night, because in case we'd forgotten, fairy tales are creepy, yo.

The White Bear took the girl to a fabulous castle in the mountains, where she was waited on by dancing tableware and given all that she could possibly desire (aside from her freedom, of course, because what would she do with that?) At this point in the cultural milieu we should probably just be glad that the Bear didn't show her the playroom and ask her to sign a D&S agreement. He does come to her bed every night, in the dark, and when he does so he turns into a man, although she can't see what he looks like.

Romance!

So, assuming a degree of consensuality for the sake of my own sanity - maybe before they start sleeping together there are some touching getting to know you scenes; maybe they dance while a teapot sings to them - this goes on for some time, with the Bride - which is a crappy name, but slightly snappier at least than 'youngest daughter' - never once asking to see her husband, or even ask in any way what gives with this whole deal. You know what, I may have to retract that disclaimer; I'm not sure this girl does have much going for her besides looks.

Eventually, however, she got a little homesick, and asked if she could visit her family. The bear agreed, but on the condition that she never talked to her mother alone. She agreed to this readily enough, which is understandable since her parents did pimp her out across the taxonomic orders, and the White Bear dropped her off at the gate, apparently having no interest in taking tea with the in-laws.

The family were delighted to see the Bride, and told her how well they were all doing with the money they got for her. After several attempts, the mother managed to get the Bride on her own - promise notwithstanding, although I'm not going to be too critical of the Bride for not keeping a promise to the bear who bought her like a chattel without so much as a by-your-leave - and persuaded her to tell her whole story.

The whole story. Including how the bear comes to bed every night and turns into a man. Who talks to their mother about this sort of thing? Is it really that different for girls?

What?

Well, the mother listened to the whole story and said to her daughter: "My poor child; I fear that your husband is a troll." Because it's okay to sell your youngest daughter to a bear, but heaven forefend that that bear turn out to be a troll.

Okay, so this isn't just fairy tale racism; trolls are bad. They get inside people's heads, control their thoughts and actions and eventually eat away at everything that makes them human. They're like the Goblin King from Labyrinth and by their big eighties hair and makeup shall ye know them, so the mother gave the Bride a candle and told her to light it when her husband was asleep and make sure that she wasn't sharing her bed with a troll. Just a bear. Which is way safer.

The White Bear swung by in the evening to pick up the Bride and he asked her if she spoke with her mother on her own. The Bride swore that she didn't and the Bear whisked them back to his castle.

Joshua Reynolds' Cupid and Psyche, with a creepily young-
looking Cupid and the apparently obligatory Psyche side-
boob. The Bride could have learned from this story, and not
just an important lesson about covering up around Rococo
artists.

That night, when the White Bear was asleep, the Bride lit the candle and held it up, and saw that her husband was in fact the most handsome man she had ever seen, dark and beautiful, without a trace of big hair or glittery guyliner. Unfortunately, having never heard the story of Eros and Psyche, she leaned forward and dropped three drops of tallow onto his chest, which woke him with a start.

Angrily he explained that he was the prince of the land East of the Sun and West of the Moon. He was enchanted by his wicked stepmother into the shape of a bear, and could only be free if he found a woman who could be constant for a year without giving in to curiosity, which is a bit like the whole Pandora's Box bit, but even more unfair since she didn't have any kind of warning to ignore. Now, however, the second part of the curse would fall and he would be forced go back to his own land and marry his stepsister, which would be creepy enough if she wasn't also a monstrous trollop (by which we mean here a female troll, rather than her just being a bit of a slapper,) which she was.

In the morning, the prince and the castle were gone and the Bride set out to search for them, Stockholm Syndrome having set in irrevocably by now.

After walking for a whole day, she came to the slope of a mountain. At the foot of the mountain was a cave and in front of the cave there sat an old woman, passing a golden apple from hand to hand.

"Good mother," said the Bride, "please help me. I have lost my husband and must find him before he is wed to another. Do you know the way to the land East of the Sun and West of the Moon?"

Beware of Greeks bearing apples. Fortunately, this old
woman is Norwegian. Norse golden apples are the good shit.
Just ask Idun.

"I do not," the old woman replied, "but my neighbour might. She lives many leagues hence, but I will lend you a horse, and for fortune take this golden apple, which might serve you in your hour of need."

The Bride thanked the old woman and rode off, the horse running hard and sure to another mountain, and another cave, where an even older woman sat carding wool with a golden comb.

"Good grandmother," said the Bride, "please help me. My husband is enchanted and I must find him. Do you know the way to the land East of the Sun and West of the Moon?"

"I do not," the old woman replied, "but my neighbour might. She lives many leagues hence, but I will lend you a horse, and for fortune take this golden comb, which might serve you in your hour of need."

The Bride thanked the old woman and rode off, the horse running hard and sure to a third and even taller mountain, and another even darker cave, where an even older woman sat spinning with a golden wheel.

"Good great-grandmother," said the Bride, "please help me. My husband has been taken from me by a trollop and I must find him. Do you know the way to the land East of the Sun and West of the Moon?"

"I do not," the old woman replied, "but the East Wind might know, if ever he has blown there. He lives many leagues hence, but I will lend you a horse, and for fortune take this golden wheel, which might serve you in your hour of need."

So, loaded down with golden treasures, the Bride rode off to visit the East Wind, because by now she just wasn't questioning anything anymore. She'd married a bear who turned out to be a prince enchanted by a trollop and now forced to marry another trollop, so talking to the Wind didn't seem that odd.

Unfortunately the East Wind proved no more able to help than the old women, and was apparently all out of golden plot devices as well, but he did carry her to visit his sister the West Wind. "Because she is stronger than I am, and blows in more places."

Alas, the West Wind didn't know the land East of the Sun and West of the Moon, so she carried the Bride to visit the South Wind, who in turn took her to visit the North Wind, where finally the Bride was able to ask her question and be told: "Yes; I blew there once. I blew a leaf there, and it almost killed me, but I'll take you there as a favour to someone in love." Because the Winds at least are romantics.

And so the North Wind blew his best and carried the Bride to the edge of the land East of the Sun and West of the Moon. She thanked him and left him to recover his strength, while she walked on into the eerily still land until she came to a dark castle with closed gates. There she sat to think. As she did so, she took out the golden apple and began passing it from hand to hand.

A Trollope

Suddenly, a harsh voice rang out above her: "What's that! I want it, I wantit, IWANTIT!" In the window over the gate was a hideous figure, whom the Bride knew must be the trollop daughter. She smiled and called up:

"What would you give me for it?"

"What do you want?"

"How about your Prince?" the Bride asked, because turn about is fair play and since she'd been bought and sold why couldn't he.

"No! He's mine!"

"Then how about just one night with him?" the Bride suggested, playing with the apple a little more ostentatiously.

"Sold!" the trollop snapped. She disappeared from the window and appeared at a doorway below, ushering the Bride in and snatching the apple from her hand. "One night!" she insisted. "Wait in here until nightfall."

So the Bride waited, and at nightfall a servant showed her into the prince's bedchamber. She ran to his side, but he was fast asleep and would not wake, not even when she dripped candle tallow on him. All she could do was sit by him all night, crying and shaking him and hoping against hope that he wasn't as Stockholmy as she was, especially with the trollop getting inside his head and all.

The next morning she left the room, but before the trollop could throw her out she took out the golden comb and began to draw it through the air, carding wool out of nothing.

"IWANTIT!" the Trollop cried, and again they agreed to trade, the comb for a night with the prince. Again the Bride waited and again she was taken in to find the price practically comatose. She wailed in despair and drained the last of a cup of wine beside the prince's bed to try to numb the pain, and boy howdy did it ever work. She was out like a light and the next thing she knew the servant was all-but carrying her out of the room.

"Oh, that cheat!" the Bride cried out. "She drugged his drink."

The trollop came to throw her out again, but again the Bride whipped out another golden gift from... wherever a largely unprepared girl travelling alone and, for all we've been told, in her nightshirt, carries her golden spinning wheel, and began spinning thread out of the air.

Naturally, the trollop wanted the wheel and again she agreed to the deal, and the Bride set about thinking how she could possibly wake her drugged husband. Luckily, while he cries had not roused the prince, they had touched the heart of the servant. That day, while the prince was walking in the gardens, the servant sidled up to him and whispered: "Let your drink go untouched tonight, sire; you won't regret it."

So it was that when the Bride went in that night, she found her husband awake, and at the sight of her he knew her and embraced her.

"But what can we do now?" the Bride asked. "I only have you for the night and then you have to go back to the trollop."

The prince shivered, for as soon as he had seen his Bride the spells that the trollop had cast on him melted away and he saw her as she was and felt the emptiness in his soul where she had already begun to gnaw at his humanity.

"I will set her a challenge," he declared. "Wait outside the castle; you will know what to do when the time comes."

In the morning, the Bride left, wailing and weeping, and the trollop cast her out of the castle. Then the trollop went to her husband-to-be, who pretended to still be under her spell.

"Did you sleep well?" she asked.

My Bowie/Labyrinth bit means that the trollop and her
mother look more like this. The third one is probably an aunt
visiting for the wedding.

"I did not," the prince replied. "I had a nightmare. I dreamed that at our wedding my shirt burst into flames from the three drops of tallow that stain it, and I heard a voice saying 'woe and thrice woe should you wed she who can not wash this stain away.' I can not marry anyone but the woman who can wash these three stains off my shirt, which I wear in bed and must also get married in, being a prince and therefore only having the one shirt."

Amazingly, the trollop fell for this and she took the shirt away. But trolls can not abide water, and so the trollop had no luck cleaning the shirt. Finally, in desperation, she called out to the girl outside the walls: "You! I'll trade you another night with my prince if you'll wash his shirt clean for me."

The Bride agreed, and she washed the shirt until the tallow was gone, because another of the dodgy morals of this story is that girls who can do housework deserve husbands.

The trollop took the shirt to the prince and told him she'd cleaned it, and he called her a liar and demanded that the woman who had actually cleaned the shirt be brought in. This the trollop and her mother reluctantly did, and the prince declared that this was his bride who had shown true and unquestioning constancy, and with that his stepmother's curse was broken and the two trollops exploded. As they do.

And the prince and his Bride lived happily ever after.

--

For those of a less cynical bent, I highly recommend North Child (or East, in the US) by Edith Pattou for a retelling of the same tale with a much more modern sensibility. Many of the same elements are also used in the Storyteller episodes 'The True Bride' and 'Hans My Hedgehog'.

2014 in Games and Writing

2014 was a bit of an off year for me in terms of writing. I've not been as active as I like to be, and putting together a working collection of short stories is proving almost as difficult as editing up a finished novel. It doesn't help that Dropbox keeps screwing with my versions so I don't know which is the most recent and I end up having to do over, but there is an element of procrastination and another of creative exhaustion.

In part, I think I need to focus more on my writing, rather than running RPGs. I've got one on at the moment, but it's a fortnightly Fate Core game run via G+, which makes it pretty low maintenance. since quitting my STing duties with the IoD I've found the creative flow much easier and I have a number of things on the go, including that short story collection. I'll drop a note here (and probably there and everywhere) if and when I put anything up for sale.

I've been running Agents of CROSSBOW for a year now, although we had a longish break and I effectively rebooted halfway through the year, once I'd got a better handle on the system.  In playing terms I've drifted out of most of my regular LARPS, although I still play a fortnightly skype game and I have something new on the horizon in the form of No Rest for the Wicked.

I did RPG a day, which was pretty cool really, and helped me to think seriously and critically about a lot of my gaming habits. I've also been surprisingly active in writing game criticism (positive and negative) and I took part in Secret Santicore; not that I ever got my Secret Santicore 'present.'

In computer gaming, I have revisited a lot of old 40K games and also started Dishonoured, although I'm rather hung up on that at the moment. My current target is one of three sisters in different-coloured versions of the same masquerade ball suit, all of whom come and cower pitifully in a single room when alarmed. Consequently, I feel like a right git murdering them. I think I'm going to have to go for the non-lethal option and tell myself that it's fine; she'll be out of the way a few weeks while we sort out the country, then I can go and kill her stalker... if she hasn't already.

I don't think it's the right thing to do, but it's probably the least distasteful of the options which will move the game forward.

NaNo'14

November rolls around again, and I am intending to write another batch of short stories. After this, I'm going to bundle up what I've got and ask people to read and comment, find the best set and epublish; see how it does.

Now, that's mostly just fishing. The real money in epublishing (and when I say 'real money' I'm probably talking tens, even twenties of pounds a year) is in novel series, so I am also looking for the short that will expand into that. If I find it early in the month, I may focus on that instead.

Either way, it's going to be a writing intensive month, as always.

I'm a privileged middle class white European male; ask me how

Both of these men are too damned pretty to be cast as the
'everyman', but that's not why one of them would be
overlooked by a Hollywood producer.

So, I was reading an article by a successful author, as I sometimes do, and also as I sometimes do, I recognised a close analogue to something in my own experience; something that suddenly felt worth talking about.

This is the article, by Kameron Hurley: It's called Why I Stopped Writing About White People; which is an attention getter if nothing else. I won't summarise it, because it's short enough that I should just let you read it yourself.

Okay? I'll try not to just repeat what she said.

If I had any serious money, I would belong to the single most privileged chunk of modern, global society. I'm middle class (I shop in Waitrose and buy their Essential range parmesan cheese), white (well, somewhere between a quarter and an eighth Indian, but barely enough to get stopped at airports), European (English, God help me) straight male (not very macho, but definitely Y-carrying, hetero/cis and happy that way). Okay, I'm a polyamorous gamer, but that's small potatoes.

I say this not as an excuse, but as background for the fact that as a matter of habit, I used to, as Hurley describes, write about white people all the time. It was the natural thing for me to do; I was surrounded by white people. It might have been different if I'd lived in London, but I didn't want to live or go to university in London; I don't like cities. Instead I went to Cambridge (I know, I know; hateful aren't I), which is not exactly a hotbed of racial integration (less from deliberate racism than from the inherent racism which derives from the continuing entanglement of race with the British class system.)

There was a UFO church guy - I forget his name just at the moment; 1960s or 70s era, big hair and porn 'stache - who claimed to have been taken on a spaceship where the aliens created beautiful women of all types for him to make love to. Now, that's creepy as fuck, but also inherently racist, because the types he described were blonde, red-head, brunette, black and Asian; because black and Asian have no subdivisions. Now, I reckon that guy was always going to be a creepy bastard, but it's a fact that you define and discriminate the world based on experience. If there's only one black kid in the class, then that's a defining physical characteristic.

Greater integration at the school stage would not only lead to greater understanding between different cultures and races, it would also do wonders for our creative writing skills, because when your inner and proximal friendship groups include a spectrum of humanity, the rather lazy descriptor 'black' ceases to be of use. For me, that level of awareness only really came when I was teaching in a school which had pupils from Zimbabwe, Pakistan and Mongolia, to name but a few, as well as a housed Romany family whose daughter was the palest thing I had ever seen.

This is probably why it was during my teaching career that I looked back over one of my old science fiction projects - an epic bit of world-building that I have yet to set a satisfactory story in - and realised that almost all of the historical figures I'd written up were white. I was kind of horrified by what I written. There was a multinational Mars mission with two non-Europeans, and one of them was a white American.

So, I changed it, and at first it felt pretty token, and I was more or less sure I'd be discarding the project in shame in the very near future. But then I started thinking about the wider effect. Without planning it, I'd changed one of the pivotal families in the setting to half-black, half-white, made French the dominant language of the Martian working class and begun to derive entirely new categories of class and race based on origin rather than ethnicity. I even took a good long look at the aliens and started to move them away from planets of hats towards more rounded and fully-realised cultures. I'm a trained archaeologist, for fuck's sake; I have no excuse for sloppy culture-building.

At about the same time, I started revising some other stuff, addressing the sexism inherent in just about any mythic base (there are precious few major queens in myth and legend, and most of them don't end well). It was a time of much reflection and consideration.

These days, I'm a lot more careful. I confess, I get jittery about writing other cultures if I don't have the time to research them thoroughly, but I'm also aware that playing it safe (by sticking to 'what I know') is both creatively limiting and intrinsically racist.

Besides, if I wanted to 'write what I know', I wouldn't write fantasy and science fiction in the first place.

#RPGaDAY - Day 10: Favourite Tie-in Novel/Gaming fiction

This cover is, like all of the covers in the series,
entirely inaccurate and misleading as to the
nature of the character, and I love that.

In preparation for today's topic, James Holloway defined two types of game fiction: terrible fiction relating to the game, or good fiction only tangentially relating to the setting. I'm not sure he isn't missing fiction which is neither any good nor relevant to the game, but he also defines a single positive intersection and I'm keen to find out what that is.

I'm a fan of Sandy Mitchell's Ciaphas Cain series, but I accept that it probably falls into the second category somewhat, in particular in its depiction of a co-ed regiment in the Imperial Guard, a force with barely a female model to its ranks.

Ciaphas Cain is a commissar in the Imperial Guard, one of the grim-faced elite who enforce discipline with a las-blast to the back of the head of a fleeing officer. Only... he isn't. He is by his own admission a quick-witted slacker who would rather not give officers thinking of fleeing a reason to shoot him first, and by all the evidence an endlessly resourceful officer with a considerable understanding of morale and motivation He and his fellow officers and soldiers are, if not complex and three-dimensional, at least interesting and two-dimensional characters, which invests his adventures with a degree of involvement, but what really sells the series to me is the humour.

Loosely based on George Macdonald Fraser's Flashman series, Ciaphas Cain's self-narrated stories (footnoted for historical references by his inquisition biographer and sometime SO) are told with a dry, self-deprecating wit which offsets the overblown machismo of the Warhammer 40K setting. Perhaps this inhibits the story as 40K fiction, but it makes it readable in a way that other offerings, with their astonishingly po-faced approach to the almighty grimdark, are not; to me at least. I know a lot of people go for the 40K full Monty, but it doesn't work for me where Cain does.

Critically, however, Mitchell tells the story with humour, but even when Cain criticises aspects of the setting, he doesn't parody them. The tower of Gothic imagery and testosterone that is 40K is so close to self-parody that it simply can't weather the slightest attempt at external parody. It's not made to bear that sort of criticism; it would just fall down, and Mitchell doesn't succumb to the temptation to mine that vein for cheap laughs.

So, yeah; Ciaphas Cain. Despite some deviation from implicit canon, it doesn't turn the universe on its head (score over most White Wolf fiction), it doesn't wallow in the grimness of the setting, nor mock it. It's fun adventure fiction with decent characters, pacey plots and a song in its heart.

What's your game fic of choice? If you'd like to know what other people have gone for, look out the hashtag for more RPG a Day.

Check back tomorrow when I assay to discuss the weirdest RPG I own.

#RPGaDAY - Day 7: Most Intellectual RPG Owned

I'm not much of a collector of RPGs and I've never been a big part of the Indie RPG scene. Most of the games that I own are pretty straightforward, or where they want to be intellectual are aspirational old World of Darkness supplements which drop the ball so astoundingly that they don't really count. I was, therefore, at a loss what to write about for this day, until James reminded me that De Profundis exists.

Now, I only own De Profundis in a slightly nebulous sense, in that I bought a copy and may have the PDF somewhere, but I can't download it again if I don't because it's attached to a DriveThruRPG profile connected to an email I don't use anymore, with a password I've forgotten, which is a level of abstraction that kind of suits De Profundis, although I think it also applies to the PDF of Mummy: The Curse, all my Fiasco materials, Diana: Warrior Princess and a game about warrior squirrels.

(ETA: Having gained access to that account - one of three that I seem to have wound up with - I can confirm that I never bought a copy of De Profundis from DriveThruRPG, so where did I get the one I read, I wonder?)

De Profundis was originally presented as one of Hogshead Publishing's New Style games, a line which included Puppetland - a narrativist, but almost normal game in which you played puppets rebelling against the vicious rule of Mr Punch - The Extraordinary Adventures of Baron Munchausen - a pub storytelling game in which players take on the roles of Prussian aristocratic adventures and make up outrageous exploits and use a system of challenges to force other players to get even more outrageous - Violence - a self-loathing dungeon crawl where you kill the occupants of a complex and take their stuff, but set in a modern apartment block - and Power Kill - a metagame attached to a normal RPG in which players take on the role of delusional schizophrenics who think that they are the characters in the regular game.

As you can see, New Style is a rich ground for today's topic.

De Profundis is an epistolary game, in which the players write letters to each other about their lives. Not the lives of imaginary characters, but the actual lives of their actual selves, embroidering the details to cast a Lovecraftian interpretation on everyday events.

It's pretty much named after Oscar Wilde's cathartic breakdown letter, written from prison to Lord Alfred Douglas, in which he describes their relationship and then compares himself to fellow romantic artist Jesus Christ, so I don't think anyone could argue that it isn't intellectual, in aspiration if not in attainment.

In his video for today, James asks: What can you put in 100 pages of a De Profundis core book (I won't say rule book, since as James points out, there are no rules). As I recall the entire book is written in the character of the games designer unlocking his own realm of horrors through writing the book and warning prospective players of the potentially disastrous mental effects of actually playing the damned thing. Which is different, although I confess I am undecided whether it is brilliant or just hopelessly up itself. I tend towards the latter, but as I am something of a pretentious git at times, it's hard to say.

(ETA: Apparently there are also sections on playing as other characters and even a diceless tabletop version of the game, but I clearly never read those bits.)

If nothing else, De Profundis is the game I 'own' which has the most aggressively intellectual aspirations. It's not just the influence, it's the determination to explore perception in a way that challenges the ontological foundations of the everyday, or at least aims to make semi-traumatic IC bleed a feature rather than a bug. If Rona Jaffe had ever got hold of a copy of De Profundis it would have literally blown her mind. Pat Pulling would have spontaneously combusted.

Either of those two outcomes, by the way, would be a reasonable interpretation in a game of De Profundis, if... (checks Wikipedia) Ah, hell; that was... I had no idea, really.

Come back tomorrow when we'll be talking about favourite characters, and hopefully avoiding accidental tangents of extreme bad taste.

31 Short Stories - A post in which I try to briefly describe my current projects, largely to see if they make sense

31 Short Stories is my NaNo project from last year and for this year, its goal to produce a body of short fiction that I can try to polish, compile and sell as a Kindle or other ebook format. Currently, I am considering the possibility of running out a couple of stories as a free preview, and if that goes well pitching the full collection at the 70% price threshold, but honestly the tiny amount of money I'm likely to make is a secondary consideration to putting myself out there.

Of last year's 27 stories (I ran short), I have nine that I think are strong enough and five that are maybes, as well as two that I am going to rewrite completely this year. I have the stories out with three friends for reviewing, so we'll see if their expectations match up with mine.

For this year, I have 43 concepts to work on, although in all honesty I know already that some of them won't work out; that's why I've gone for 43 concepts for 31 stories. They range from fairytale retellings to time travel comedy, and a couple of shots at satire within the SF, fantasy and horror genres.

As ever, with NaNo, the initial target is 50,000 words in the month of November. After that, we shall see if I have something I can run with.

Another 31 Short Stories

For this year's NaNoWriMo, I've decided to revisit last year's 31 short stories idea. I will aim to write (on average) 1 short story a day, +1 for luck, totaling over 50,000 words.

I am then going to ask some people to look over what I've written - this year and last - and give me constructive feedback, and aim to whittle my various outputs down to somewhere between a dozen and twenty prime picks, polish them up, and publish the results in some kind of ebook format in the first half of 2014.

So, obviously I am posting this partly because naming a goal makes it harder to wimp out and partly because I am asking my friends to help me by:

1) Suggesting titles or themes for this year's 31 short stories. I have a few ideas, some part of larger pieces I'm trying to get my head around, but I am aiming for range, in part to get to grips with what I'm good at and what turns out as self-indulgent waffle.

2) Reading what I've written and providing me with honest, constructive feedback. I'm not fishing for compliments, but I'm not looking to get kicked to the curb either. Suggestions on how to improve are more useful than just noting flaws, but more than that, I'm very aware that I lack emotional resilience, so I'm looking for people who are confident in their ability to constructively criticise.

3) Offering sound advice on e-publishing and promotion of e-publishing, based on experience, or introductions to people or web sources who can provide the same either on an informal basis or for a modest sum, since I can't afford more than modest.

Camp NaNoWriMo - Musings on an SF Setting

The event: Camp NaNoWriMo, July 2013.
The target: 25,000 words, since I've got other stuff I'm doing.
The real goal: To see if the SF setting I've been percolating for nigh-on two decades has legs.

So, yeah, this is me using my eighteen-and-change years old SF setting and trying to write a story in it. It's a setting that has undergone a lot of changes in various phases, most recently in the past few months.

It started out beyond generic, I'll own to that, and the idea was an enlightened, alien-led Federation bordering a prejudiced, neo-feudal human Coalition, with the focus on the Federation. Then I got interested in the history of it and, in creating that I began to feel that the super-sophisticated Federation was actually less interesting than the Coalition, and my focus began to shift.

Then the alien antagonists got a bit of their own culture as I began to wonder why they were as aggressive as they were, and realised that they didn't make a lot of sense, culturally or economically. I treated the first as a bug and the second as a feature, and that's where gods, of a sort, came into the picture.

More recently, the neo-feudal structure of the Coalition, largely informed by all that Star Wars I watched as a kid, has been replaced with a more varied set of political systems. I've proactively gone through and tried to balance out my tendency to 'go with what I know' in terms of names, since that inevitably and unintentionally leads to a very white universe, and usually one overfull of Jameses and Marks. On the other hand, I didn't want tokens, so I am trying to make it all make sense and a part of that has been to develop the history from a 10 page timeline to something nearer 70. I also want to do at least one more run through and try to introduce more of a shift towards toponyms and patri- and matronymics in the aftermath of my 'this is why no transhuman evolution' reset Apocalypse, replacing to an extent modern racial distinctions with a sense of a very different cultural base.

The last run-through also saw a move away from direct SF cliche. I've known for a while that I wanted to maintain a mysterious genetic link between humans and what used to be the dog- and cat-people; something ancient and conspiratorial. On the other hand, dog- and cat- and snake-people was increasingly out of place and just kind of there 'cause it's how you do. My brainstorm was to ditch the non-mammalian examples - they'll become something else in the final pass - and say that the three races all evolved from a common, possibly engineered, primate base, but by different routes, so that whereas on Earth the dominant hominid species descended from valley-dwelling apes, on the other worlds a baboon-like primate and something more like a forest monkey took the lead.

This also tends towards losing the tails, which just works better in space suits.

I've also removed any use of actual extant religions, albeit a little bit by filing the serial numbers off. The big theocratic power is still a weird mix of Catholic and Anglican administration (I want my interplanetary church to have a curia and big hats, but also deans and chapters, and a Barchester-esque touch to its ecumenical politics) with an expansionist slant. I think I do tend to bias towards (mis)representing the Abrahamic faiths, and maybe some touches of Hinduism, perhaps because I feel that they are big enough and old enough to look out for themselves.

So, that's a rough account of the evolution of this setting. Later posts will probably expand on some details.

Oh, and at some point I got Cthulhu on it; as you do.