Familiarity and Contempt

Map of Clichéa by Sarithus. You can view the full-size version here.

It's odd how quickly we get used to things. How the fantastical becomes mundane: how the strange and exotic becomes something we take for granted. Think of the tapestry of wonders which make up a generic fantasy world: beautiful forest-dwelling immortals inhabiting hidden cities of living wood and crystal, clans of industrious craftsmen carving out underground kingdoms beneath the earth, blood-crazed tribes of monstrous green-skinned savages who eat the corpses of their enemies, and so on. These figures are the stuff of dreams and nightmares... and yet if the first line of someone's setting write-up starts talking about how the elves are wise and graceful and the eldest of all peoples, I'll drop it in a heartbeat. It's boring. I've seen it a thousand times before.

The trouble is that this applies to everything. I catch myself sometimes talking about 'generic fantasy gods' or 'generic elder evils' or 'generic horror monsters', and I think: how does something designed to be shocking, or numinous, or horrific end up becoming generic? And yet it does: if I open an adventure module and read about a band of insane sorcerers sacrificing victims to the primordial tentacle-covered slime monster who lives beneath their prehuman temple of black basalt, I don't think 'gosh, how awe-inspiringly terrible!' I just think: 'OK, so they're generic fantasy Cthulhu cultists. What else have you got?'

I distinctly remember the moment I fell out of love with World of Warcraft. My quest required me to obtain some bottles of ice water, and the only way to get them was to kill ice elementals, who sometimes dropped them when they died. So there was my gnome assassin, leaping about with her enchanted daggers, hacking her way through gigantic, roaring monsters of living ice in the depths of a frozen chasm beneath a twilight-purple sky, and it was... boring. The game had taken something fantastical and turned it, through sheer force of repetition, into an interaction with a glorified vending machine. All I cared about was whether or not each murdered ice-beast was going to give me a bottle of cold water. I stopped playing the game shortly afterwards.

It's sometimes suggested that the solution to this problem is simply to be more original: to replace your orcs with walrus-men and your dwarves with miniature robot dinosaurs and so on. But as soon as something like this catches on, it can go from being excitingly new to feeling played-out and predictable within just a handful of years. Look what happened to steampunk: it started to really take off around 2005, and by 2012-ish it had already hardened into an almost completely predictable list of visual clichés. (Goggles! Corsets! Top hats and bowlers! Clockwork robots! Airship pirates! Gears on everything! Why aren't you excited yet?) Hell, look at what happened to D&D itself: many of the monsters that people now complain about as 'boring' and 'generic', such as gnolls or drow, were completely new and original back in the 1970s. 'Originality' is a treadmill. Yesterday's shocking new idea is today's mainstream default and tomorrow's tired cliché.

In his 1821 Defence of Poetry, Shelley wrote:

[The language of poets] is vitally metaphorical; that is, it marks the before unapprehended relations of things and perpetuates their apprehension, until the words which represent them, become, through time, signs for portions or classes of thoughts instead of pictures of integral thoughts; and then if no new poets should arise to create afresh the associations which have been thus disorganized, language will be dead to all the nobler purposes of human intercourse.

This, I think, is more or less what tends to happen to fantasy elements. They start off as fresh and vivid symbols for urgent realities, or what Shelley calls 'pictures of integral thoughts': orcs were Tolkien's way of articulating the brutalising effects of industrial capitalism, Cthulhu was Lovecraft's symbol for the way in which the cosmos fundamentally doesn't give a fuck about humanity, and so on. Then they get popular, and become 'signs for portions or classes of thought': so Cthulhu gets used as a kind of shorthand for 'A BIG SCARY THING THAT MAKES YOU GO CRAZY', because thanks to Lovecraft we've all somehow come to accept that a giant dragon-man with a squid for a face is an appropriate symbol for that, without it necessarily being connected to any of the things which originally provided the reasons for it to mean that. Soon they become almost entirely symbolic: so a game which features zombies and werewolves and vampires instead of orcs and ogres and dragons will get labelled as 'Gothic horror' instead of 'high fantasy', even if the horror-monsters never actually do anything horrific, because werewolves and vampires are understood to be symbolic of horror in general. And then we play the game and stab all the vampires and wonder why it doesn't actually make us feel afraid.

(You can see these loops playing out with almost comical literalness in games like Pathfinder. You start with a unique monster, like Grendel, and turn it into a type of monster: in this case, the D&D troll. But then the troll gets so overused that it's not scary any more, and no longer conveys the kind of threat communicated by the original. So you go back and you create a new monster, called a Grendel: a mega-troll so strong and powerful that it can terrorise even characters who have become blasé about normal trolls. The diminishing returns involved in such a strategy should be obvious. See also what happens to Dracula in just about every vampire fiction franchise.)

When fantasy fails to feel fantastic, I think it's often because its creators use these fantastical elements as shortcuts or placeholders, relying on their inherited symbolic associations to do all the imaginative heavy lifting. They rely on an audience which is going to find the very idea of dragons so awesome that they'll love your story just for having dragons in it, even if your dragons never actually do anything very impressive, or very dragon-like, or even very interesting. But the more familiar your audience is with the genre, the less credit they're going to give your work just for including orcs and elves and whatnot, because for them those figures will be part of a symbolic system which has been drained of all its inherent power by overuse.

So don't do that. Don't just rely on the fact that something is a troll to convey the fear and the power of it: maybe that would have worked a hundred years ago, but now they've been so drained of significance that your players are just going to see them as big bags of hit points with annoying regenerative abilities. Instead, you have to reconnect them with whatever it was that gave them force and meaning in the first place. 'A goblin' is a three hit point irritation. A giggling thing with too-long arms and a too-wide mouth and far too many teeth that comes squirming out from under your bed at night to cut you up with knives is fucking terrifying. 'An ogre' is a big dumb lump for your PCs to kite around a battlefield. An eight-foot giant who comes clambering from her cannibal larder, her hot breath reeking of carrion, her long hair matted with human gore, still retains some level of nightmarish power. At this point, the names have probably become active liabilities: the howling abhuman beast that roams the wastelands, larger and more savage than any man, becomes much less threatening once it has been identified as 'an orc' or 'a bugbear' or 'a troll'. You don't need to wear yourself out trying to come up with totally original, never-before-seen ideas in every damn adventure: after all, the classics are classics for a reason. You just need to make sure that, when you use the classics, you go right back to the source. 

Because the stories never truly lost their power. Not really. There's still something magical about the glimpse of the path through the woods at twilight, or the huge figure unfolding itself from the cavern in the hillside, or the whispering and scurrying of swift and unseen creatures in the dark. The shining city on the distant hilltop. The sound of something slow and heavy moving through the forest by night. It would be a shame if we let the overuse of our shared shorthand of fantasy iconography stand between us and the very real wellsprings of awe and terror which are, at base, still represented by those symbolic figures with which we have become so painfully over-familiar.

Orcs. Elves. Ogres. Giants.

eotenas ond ylfe      ond orcnéäs

swylce gígantas      þá wið gode wunnon

lange þráge·      hé him ðæs léan forgeald.

Glimpses of the Wicked City: the art of the Silk Road

Art plays a major role in how we visualise other cultures. Our view of ancient Greece is heavily shaped by all those white marble statues: we'd probably think of it very differently if their paintings had survived as well. Ancient Egypt is monumental sculptures and paintings in tombs. Medieval Europe is stained glass, illuminated manuscripts, and woodcuts. Victorian Britain is pre-Raphaelite paintings and sepia-tint photographs. And so on.

For most of us, if the Silk Road looks like anything at all, it's probably a nineteenth-century Orientalist painting: something by Rosati, perhaps, or Delacroix. But while some Orientalist paintings depict their subjects with skill and sympathy, an awful lot of them are just excuses for tiresomely repetitive 'naked slave-girl' scenes, and even the ones that aren't usually emphasise the qualities of the 'Orient' that their painters went out looking for: sex, passion, luxury, exoticism, and violence. They give little sense of how these people understood their own world, as people with their own lives to lead, rather than as part of the backdrop to someone else's adventure tourism - and besides, for my purposes, their period is out by roughly two hundred years.

Rosati, 'A Game of Backgammon'. If you want the slave-girl paintings you can google them yourself.

Probably the greatest representative art tradition to emerge from late medieval / early modern Central Asia was Timurid painting, especially in the form developed by the miniaturists of Herat in Afghanistan. It's a style which combined Persian and Chinese elements to depict blue-and-gold worlds of staggering beauty, which really have to be seen to be believed. (Online reproductions do them no justice at all.) Here are some examples from the reigns of the Timurid and Safavid shahs:

Now, Timurid art is wonderful - but it's very much a product of the earlier part of the early modern period, and its fascination with the sages and heroes of the past means that it tends to look back earlier still. For a sense of what Asiatic Islamic civilisation looked and felt like once modernity started to take hold - and of what life in the Silk Road kingdoms might have looked like if they hadn't been in terminal decline by the late 1600s - I look instead to seventeenth-century Ottoman and Safavid miniature paintings, especially the Rålamb Costume Book (1650s) and the works of Reza Abbasi (1565 - 1635) and Abdulcelil Levni (?-1732). Here are some figures from the Rålamb Costume Book:

These last two are executioners. The first one carries an impaling stake. The second carries a garotting cord.

Here are some by Abbasi:

And here are some by Levni:

Janissaries at a banquet. There's always one guy who can't keep his hat on...

I love the expression on this one. 'It says olive prices are down again. Fuck.'

The other visual source I keep coming back to is the sixteenth-century Tyrkervaerk of Melchior Lorck. Like the nineteenth-century Orientalists, Lorck's engravings show the Ottoman dominions through European eyes, but his perspective is completely different from theirs. The Orientalists painted from a position of assumed cultural superiority, safe in the knowledge that while the Islamic world might be excitingly dangerous to the individual traveller, it no longer posed any meaningful threat to European dominance. But Lorck's drawings of the armies of Suleiman the Magnificent reflect the strength and terror of the Ottoman Empire at its height, when it was an aggressively expansionistic imperial power which had demonstrated itself to be entirely capable of kicking the shit out of the forces of European Christendom. Here are some examples:

Lorck's Tyrkervaerk engravings are an important part of the way in which I imagine the Wicked City itself: a world dominated by strong, cruel, violent men and the weary, hollow-eyed despots who command them, full of militaristic pomp and spectacle, strong lines, sharp angles, and plumed soldiers marching through the streets in splendid uniforms while veiled figures with downcast eyes scurry into corners to avoid them.

The world of the Rålamb Costume Book is the world of the oasis kingdoms beyond, all bright colours and gorgeous fabrics and matter-of-fact violence. The world of Levni and Abbasi is the world of the rich and powerful, the merchant princes of the Great Road: a world of strong coffee and extravagant fashions, elegant youths in perfumed gardens, falconers and dancing girls, and people who really, really don't want to talk to you about exactly where all their custom-made guns and fancy clockwork machinery is coming from.

And outside that, in the steppes and the deserts and the mountains, is the blue-and-gold world of the miniaturists of Herat: a world of flowers and water, rocks and monsters, vast and strange and old and dangerous and very, very beautiful.

The taiga looks like Evenki folk art and Gennady Pavlishin illustrations.

I guess the gods and spirits of the steppe look like figures from Mongolian thangkas?

Fuck, this post is long enough already. I'm just going to hit 'publish' and have done with it.

Wheels within wheels: clockworkers and scrap mechanics of the Wicked City

Compared to its state a century ago, when it stood at the zenith of its prosperity, the Wicked City is a shadow of its former glory. Its streets lie in ruins. Its population has fallen dramatically. Its farmlands are turning to desert. Its state religion has become a hollow farce. But one segment of the city's economy which has not declined are its clockworking industries: and in this area, at least, the city retains its world-leading status, just as surely as it did before it lost its name.

Before the rise of the Wicked King, the city became preeminent in clockworking because its coal mines made it cheap to build and power metal automata, and because its position at the hub of the Great Road made it easy for its merchant dynasties to attract the most talented mechanics from both the eastern and western empires, sure that they would be able to find markets for their wares. Since then, the city has retained its edge largely because of the enthusiasm with which its government has invested in clockwork technology, ensuring that the clockworking guilds have never lacked for patronage. The government's willingness to tolerate the excesses of the Steel Aspirants has made the city a major centre for the cult of the Cogwheel Sage, and the low price of coal means that it still has a substantial community of Brass Folk: after all, they can 'eat' there more cheaply than they can anywhere else.

The innumerable automata upon which the city's economy depends are manufactured partly by the Brass Folk, and partly by the old clockworking guilds, many of whose constituent families pride themselves upon having been clockworkers for three or four generations. Their guildsmen are a fussy and elitist bunch, much preoccupied with family trees and certificates of mastery, and deeply disdainful of interlopers and outsiders. It is their workshops which produce the heavy, ornate, slightly oppressive-looking clockwork machinery for which the Wicked City is famous the world over: it is their sons and daughters who maintain the gyrocopters of the Air Corps, and serve as mechanics in the King's Own Armoured Brigade. Their business practises are slow and obfuscatory, and the Ministry of Technology would like to dispense with them entirely; but no matter how much the minister might dream of uniformity and standardisation, clockworking remains iredeemably artisanal in nature. It is precise, fiddly, and technically demanding work, of a kind that favours obsessives and virtuosos: every workshop has its own house style, and every master teaches their own distinctive tricks and methods to their apprentices. Attempts by the Ministry to train whole regiments of slave-mechanics to a uniform standard have met with very limited success.

In most parts of the world, the expensive tools, materials, and training required to create clockwork automata ensures the craft is practised only by licensed masters and their apprentices: but modern clockworking has been practised in the Wicked City for over a century, now, on a scale which has made the maintenance of true monopolies impossible. Tools get stolen. Supposedly 'secret' methods get taught to curious friends or lovers. Mistreated apprentices run away and take their knowledge with them. Knowledge-hungry slum-kids catch stray clockwork songbirds in nets, and spend endless hours painstakingly taking them apart to see what makes them tick. As a result, alongside its official clockworking schools, the Wicked City has become home to a vigorous 'street clockwork' tradition characterised by ingenious use of improvised materials. For every 'legitimate' clockworker family operating out of a licensed workshop, there is at least one unlicensed scrap mechanic working in a hidden basement, cobbling together devices out of whatever salvaged fragments come to hand: and the asymmetrical kitbashed products of their labours can be often be glimpsed scurrying over the rooftops of the Wicked City, catching the evening sunlight with a dull glint of tarnished brass.

The unofficial symbol of the scrap mechanics is the cogworm. Little more than an adjustable tube of gears with a crank at each end, the cogworm allows power to be leeched from one machine to another: the user simply attaches the worm to moving machinery in such a way that the machinery turn the crank at one end of the tube, and then attaches the crank at the other end to the machine which requires winding, thus turning its key and winding its mainspring. Most scrap mechanics have, by dint of long practise, become extraordinarily dexterous in the use of cogworms: leave them alone with a large automaton for even a couple of minutes and it will end up with cogworms dangling off every part of it, like a horse that's just emerged from a leech-infested bog, each of them feeding power to some whirring contraption hanging from the other end. Many street automata actually incorporate cogworms into their bodies, which emerge like lashing metal tentacles to opportunistically siphon energy from any exposed machinery that may happen to be nearby. When draining power from other people's machines isn't an option, the scrap mechanics use homemade windmills or waterwheels, instead. Actually paying for coal is a last resort.

The scrap mechanics have found all kinds of niches for themselves within the city's grey economy, cobbling together everything from primitive washing machines for laundresses to clockwork messenger birds for gangsters. They employ gangs of street kids to gather scrap metal for them from the city's dumps, and make occasional excursions out into the countryside to loot rusted machinery from the city's old pumping stations - a practise which often brings them into conflict with the pig-men who now infest the abandoned irrigation tunnels. They are fiercely proud of their inventiveness and originality, and delight in competition, constantly facing off against one another in various contests of clockworking skill - everything from simple races in which the fastest automaton wins, to tournaments between chess-playing clockwork robots, to grand events in which whole teams of clockworkers will labour for months to assemble clockwork war machines which are then pitted against one another in battle. The city's gangsters often come to bet on these events, and the drink and drugs flow freely - a quality which has given them a near-legendary reputation among the apprentices of the legitimate clockworkers, many of whom secretly dream of sneaking away from their masters and becoming champion scrap mechanics in the slums, instead. In most cases these dreams lead them no further than occasionally creeping out to spend a night illicitly watching a clockwork street race, but every veteran guildsman can tell stories of promising but unruly apprentices who sneaked out one night and simply never returned, choosing lives of precarious outlaw glamour over the security of wealth and status that might otherwise have been theirs.

To find out what the local clockworker's guild is up to, roll 1d10:

1. Working on a big order of clockwork machinery for the mines or irrigation works.
2. Working on a big order of clockwork wargear for the military.
3. Working on a big order of yagas for one of the merchant houses.
4. Working on a small but highly-demanding order of clockwork toys and animals for one of the Cobweb families.
5. Manufacturing clockwork luxuries (pocket watches, wind-up songbirds, etc) for export by the merchant houses. 
6. Manufacturing a unit of clockwork soldiers for export to some far-off warzone.
7. Carrying out arcane debates about their guild's rules, degrees, traditions, and regulations.
8. Brainstorming how to best edit their family trees to make their collective pedigree look more impressive without the forgery being spotted by their rivals.
9. Moaning about how no-one has any respect for real tradition and craftsmanship any more, and how apprentices these days would all rather sneak off to watch pit fights between robot gladiators than put in a good, honest day's labour polishing their master's brasswork.
10. Planning elaborate security measures to prevent power from being siphoned from their machines by the cogworms of those damn scrap mechanics.

To find out what the local scrap mechanics are up to, roll 1d10:

1. Carrying out small-scale clockworking jobs for local businesses and residents, using scavenged tools and materials. 
2. Carrying out a large-scale clockworking job for a merchant house that's too cheap (or in too much of a hurry) to get one of the legitimate clockworker's guilds to do it instead.
3. Building clockwork traps, alarm systems, and kitbashed guardian automata to sell to local businesses. (50% chance these have built-in flaws that the scrap mechanics will subsequently sell to a local gang.)
4. Building clockwork traps for a local gang, to help them fortify a section of the streets to which they have laid claim.
5. Planning an expedition out into the farmlands to loot an abandoned pumping station for parts. Everyone is discussing what kind of clockwork devices they should bring with them to deal with the pig-men they are likely to find there, and how best to avoid the Man With Stones For Eyes on their way out of the city.
6. Discussing the pros and cons of throwing in their lot with the Steel Aspirants, and whether or not the unquestionable coolness of having guns for arms is really worth having to take orders from a disembodied brain inside a battle tank.
7. Building automata for an upcoming street race. (Roll 1d4 to determine type: 1 = automata with feet, 2 = automata with wheels, 3 = automata with wings, 4 = automata with human drivers.) All the competitors are hidden away in their respective workshops, tinkering away on their latest secret projects, each convinced that this time they've got a great idea which is certain to win the race. Bets are being taken, and the local gangsters will pay for inside information about who's building what.
8. Practising for a nocturnal wingride (an aerial race in which all competitors use clockwork wings). Most competitors build their own wings, less because it's an actual rule than because otherwise pilot and mechanic just blame each other every time anything goes wrong. The tendency of the Wicked City's streets to rearrange themselves by night makes the sport a dangerous one, and the most successful wingriders are fearless daredevils adored by the children of the streets.  
9. Working on clockwork brains for their chess-automata, in preparation for an upcoming tournament. Advice from human chessmasters is suddenly in high demand. The automata themselves can look like anything provided they wear a metal fez, and fanciful designs abound: chess-playing dragons, insects, cats, etc. Absolutely no hidden dwarves permitted. 
10. Gathered in teams, building freakish robot gladiators for an upcoming arena fight. There are only a few of these events each year, and they are widely attended by locals, gangsters, and even members of the Cobweb Families. As the event approaches, excitement reaches fever pitch, and rival teams becoming increasingly willing to pay over the odds for that one weapon or component which might allow them to secure a surprise victory...

(EDIT: The Scrap Mechanics and the Clockworker Guilds have now been added to my post on liberating the Wicked City.)

The value of raggedness

Despite the tribalism of their respective fans, OSR games and modern storygames have a lot in common. They both arose as responses to the same problem: the bloated, railroaded, rules-heavy, metaplot-infested RPGs of the later 1990s and early 2000s, which promised such vistas of wonder through their rules and settings, but delivered such disappointing experiences in actual play. As a result, they share an emphasis on clawing back genuine agency for their players, and on ensuring that 'story' is something that gets generated live at the table, instead of being written down in advance by some frustrated novelist turned GM. But they approach this objective in different ways: and while most storygames aim to simulate fictional genres, OSR games aim to simulate fictional worlds.

For as long as D&D has existed, there have always been players who have pushed back against its world-simulating tendencies. 'A game of D&D is supposed to be like a fantasy epic, right?', they say. 'So how come my heroic paladin can get killed by a stray arrow fired by some random goblin? Isn't it awfully anti-climactic to get all the way down to the big boss and then lose because of some bad dice rolls? And why do the rules punish me for fighting fair and charging bravely into battle, even though that's exactly the kind of thing that epic fantasy heroes do all the time?' In the early days, such players either played D&D with lots of house rules and fudged dice rolls, or else wrote their own fantasy heartbreakers which did a better job of reflecting how they felt the game 'should' work. These days, many have gravitated instead to games which are built from the ground up on the premise of emulating genres rather than settings: games in which the fact that heroic protagonists will never be killed by nameless henchmen, and that epic confrontations will always ultimately save the day (although often not without cost), are actually written into the rules.

There's a lot of clever design floating around in contemporary storygames. The crude ones simply mandate that this is the way things will work; the more subtle ones provide notional freedom, but weight their rules in such a way that, over time, genre-appropriate outcomes become increasingly unavoidable. If you want a game in which a heist is more-or-less guaranteed to play out like an actual heist movie, or one in which a magical quest is almost certain to play out like a fantasy epic, or whatever, then they're great. Even the later editions of D&D work towards this to some extent by giving PCs 'death saves', 'healing surges', and so on, thus reducing the likelihood of 'undramatic' events such as major characters dying at the hands of random minions. Fans of such games sometimes express confusion as to why anyone would prefer to use systems, such as B/X D&D, which do so little to guarantee genre-appropriate story outcomes. Why not use a game which ensures that every campaign will actually resemble the kind of fantasy narratives on which D&D is notionally based?

Now, there are a bunch of potential answers to this question. The three most common ones are probably a preference for games which test the skill of the players rather than those of the characters, an interest in exploring settings as if they were just as real as the PCs rather than mere backdrops for their adventures, and a commitment to truly open and emergent play within which any attempt to determine the direction of a story in advance would be viewed as tantamount to cheating. I have a lot of sympathy for all three, but recently I've been wondering whether the 'raggedness' of OSR play - by which I mean the way that it often maps very imperfectly onto the conventions of the genres it supposedly models - might also be potentially valuable in and of itself.

A genre is, by necessity, a system of simplifications. There's only so many pages in a book, only so many minutes in a movie, so foregrounding one kind of material inevitably means leaving out others: and one of the key reasons for using the trappings of genre is to advertise to potential audiences which kinds of content are likely to get foregrounded, and which ones are likely to get left out. But the constraints of RPGs are very different: an RPG campaign can easily run for dozens or hundreds of hours, and while films and genre novels usually have to hold themselves to a very tight narrative schedule, RPGs can (and often have to) incorporate substantial ebbs and flows as people arrive, leave, get tired, get inspired, get bored of things, have new ideas, and so on. If you view the objective of RPGs as genre emulation, then you probably view all that as a problem to be managed, in the name of keeping the game on-track and in-genre: this is one reason why storygames often lend themselves to very short campaigns. But if you see the objective as world-emulation, then you can embrace them. You can take advantage of the fact that RPGs make it not just possible but easy to tell the kind of weird, rich, ragged, unconventional stories that are normally found only in the realms of self-consciously experimental fiction.

An OSR D&D game will sometimes be one in which brave heroes slay wicked monsters in dark places and retrieve fantastical treasures. But it will often also be one in which whole expeditions grind to a halt because no-one remembered to bring enough iron spikes, or where the fighter ends up spending the whole evening gambling with bored watchmen in the local pub because he's a few coins short of being able to afford a new suit of armour, or where the Dark Lord of Disaster can leap out of his tomb, trip over a rope trap left by the party, and promptly fall to his doom down a bottomless pit. I love that. It's real. It's human. It's kind of sad and kind of funny and quite a lot like real life. It's less about 'realism' in the sense of modelling physics or biology, and more about just conveying a sense that the world is strange and complicated and unpredictable and often slightly absurd. I can never really believe in Mighty Heroes Slaying Evil, but I can totally believe in a wicked high priest getting randomly crushed to death after a couple of wily villagers dropped a boat on him.

Now, maybe the limitless complexity of human life is the last thing you want to model when you sit down for an RPG session. Maybe, for you, the whole point is to create a shared fictional universe in which the genre-appropriate thing always happens at the genre-appropriate time, precisely because it almost never happens that way in reality. But what I hope I've articulated here is that it's entirely possible to view the free-flowing randomness of the average RPG session, and the 'raggedness' of the narrative outcomes generated by 'old-school' RPG systems, as a feature rather than as a bug. If I just want to experience a story about epic fantasy heroics, I can watch a film, or read a novel, or play a computer game, or even play one of those D&D board games I wrote about a couple of weeks ago. But stories in which the vivid strangeness of fantasy is used to highlight the oddness and resilience of ordinary life, rather than just to heighten yet another operatic grand narrative, are very much rarer: and for those purposes, for me at least, there's still nothing quite like OSR D&D.